Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [349]
“When Elvis met Ginger,” Larry observed, “something came over this guy. Part of it was beautiful, because he just so desperately wanted a real relationship. The next morning, he said to me, ‘Man, I can’t believe this girl! I look at that woman’s eyes, and it’s my mother’s eyes.’ So for the first month, he was really just nuts over Ginger. But to me, it was unrealistic.”
It was an improbable pairing to others, too. Ginger was a sweet person, but her personality was monochromatic. Like Debra Paget and Priscilla before her, she hardly ever said a word, which intrigued Elvis all the more. Whether she was petrified or a blank slate, as Shirley believes, the girl was a mystery.
Not only that, but aside from the fact that she already had a boyfriend, she didn’t seem to really care for Elvis. Ginger would later say that wasn’t true, that she loved him deeply, even if others insisted she rarely seemed affectionate toward him. In Vegas, out of the corner of her eye, Shirley had caught him taking Ginger’s hand and putting it between his shoulder and neck. Then he placed his own hand on top of hers, and patted it. “See Shirley,” he said, “she loves me just like you love Joe.”
It broke Shirley’s heart, but it also worried everyone as to how far Elvis might go. Nothing about his involvement with Ginger indicated rational thinking.
In Palm Springs, especially, Elvis seemed to have almost no control over his impulses. After Larry winged the ceremony and pronounced the Shapiros man and wife, Elvis signed the certificate, and then hurriedly turned to his friend.
“Lawrence, come with me right away,” he implored. “Ginger, you, too.”
He took them into his bedroom, where Larry chose a chair and Elvis and Ginger sat on the edge of the bed.
“Ginger,” Elvis began, “I know we haven’t talked about this, but that was the most beautiful ceremony I’ve ever seen in my life. That’s what a real marriage ceremony should be. This is what I want us to have. What do you say?”
Larry couldn’t believe his ears. Ginger, too, seemed astonished.
“She very, very demurely, said, ‘Yeah. Yes.’ Elvis looked at me and said, ‘You can’t tell anyone about this yet. We are going to do this later in the year. We’ll do it at Graceland.’ But in my heart of hearts, I knew there was no way this was going to happen. He was riding a wave of euphoria, and all of the stardust was going to blow away and he was going to realize that she was too young and not for him.”
Ginger was a symbol, Larry thought, someone against whom Elvis could project his dreams in relation to what was going on in his life at the time: his health problems, his waning youth, his father’s second heart attack in December, his conflicts with Colonel Parker, everything.
She had a ring, though, that was true. On January 26, 1977, Elvis came to her and proposed, she said. “It was like old-fashioned times . . . he was on his knees. He asked me to marry him, and I said, ‘Yes.’ ” She was sitting in his black reading chair in the upstairs bathroom at Graceland, and he pulled out a green velvet box and produced a stunning eleven-and-a-half-carat diamond worth $70,000. He was in such a hurry for it, in fact, that jeweler Lowell Hays took the stone from Elvis’s own TCB ring until he could find a replacement. Ginger was now the second woman to whom Elvis had proposed in a bathroom.
Her mother was overjoyed.
“When he flew my family to Las Vegas,” Jo Alden says, her voice full of tulle and lace, “he told me he had loved people, but he had never been in love before. He said that when he found Ginger, he found what he had been searching for, and that he knew God had led him to her.”
In Mrs. Alden’s version of the story, both Elvis and Vernon were so taken with Ginger that they saw her as nearly a celestial being. “His father told him that Ginger was an angel sent from heaven. In fact, Elvis wanted to say that to Ginger, but as he told me, ‘How do you