Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [348]
“Sam,” Elvis said, “I love your sister, but I am not in love with her, and I’ve found someone else. I just want you to know that it’s not going to affect your job. I respect what you do, and if you want to work for me, you have a position.” Sam elected to stay.
Ginger, meanwhile, was learning what every other woman in Elvis’s life already knew, that being on the road and staying cooped up in Vegas was not the heady trip that it appeared. Once the glamour wore off, Ginger was homesick for her mother and her sisters. And, Elvis learned, she missed a young man she had been seeing in Memphis.
Shirley and Joe were in their bedroom in the Imperial Suite one day when Elvis and Ginger appeared at the door. Shirley could see that Elvis was upset, that he seemed frustrated and adrift. She rarely saw him like that, and asked what was the matter.
“Elvis found out that Ginger had a boyfriend, so he told her to call him and tell him that it was over, and she wouldn’t do it. She kept saying no.”
He and Ginger exchanged heated words, and then in anger, Elvis picked up a glass of orange juice and threw it across the room. Shirley had just taken the plastic off her dry cleaning, and now it was covered with sticky pulp.
“Oh, I was so mad! But he felt bad about it, I could tell. It was sad. Linda had taken off with David Briggs, and he wanted to show her that he could get someone who was prettier and younger.”
Shirley thought Elvis seemed all too desperate to make the romance bloom, while others in the group accused him of keeping Ginger a virtual hostage. On December 10, because she had complained she needed to go home to see her family, Elvis flew Ginger’s parents, sisters, and her brother and his wife to Vegas. That same day, the Memphis Commercial Appeal quoted Jo Alden as saying that Elvis had given Ginger a Lincoln Continental, though “she doesn’t think it was an engagement gift.”
The strain of the relationship only added to Elvis’s lackluster performance and ill health. Two days later, Bill E. Burk of the Memphis Press-Scimitar boldly wrote, “One walks away wondering how much longer it can be before the end comes.” That night, Elvis met with evangelist Rex Humbard in his dressing room, and in telling the preacher he felt his life lacked all meaning, Elvis wept.
After a two-week rest, however, he was more like himself, and gave a well-received ninety-minute concert on New Year’s Eve in Pittsburgh. He seemed to be in high spirits, in part because he had both his girls there, Ginger and Lisa. Ginger sat in a chair near the stage and held up the squirmy eight-year-old so she could have a better view of the performance.
Clearly Ginger’s family encouraged the relationship. When her parents’ often-troubled marriage appeared to be over, Elvis met with them to see if they could reconcile, but then offered to pay for their divorce and buy Jo a new house.
More and more, there seemed to be nothing Elvis wouldn’t do to win Ginger’s affections. He went to her grandfather’s funeral in Arkansas on January 3, 1977, flying her family to Harrison, Arkansas, and then accompanying Ginger on the twenty-mile drive to Jasper for services in a tiny rural church. Afterward, he, Ginger, and Rosemary flew to Palm Springs for Elvis’s forty-second birthday on January 8.
He was more impetuous in all matters of love now. On January 9, he spurred his dentist, Max Shapiro to marry his young fiancée, Suzanne, in Palm Springs that very day, waking Larry in the middle of the night to come perform the ceremony. Larry, who was licensed to marry couples in the state of California but had never actually