Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [350]
However, Elvis didn’t seem like a man who was planning a future with a new bride, angel or not. Ginger was a witness to the signing of his Last Will and Testament in early March 1977, and yet the document excluded her.
Shirley believes she knows how the confusion arose, because Ginger sought her advice at the time.
“Ginger and I were sitting next to each other on the bus, and she said, ‘Elvis asked me to marry him, but I think he changed his mind, because he hasn’t mentioned it anymore. It’s like he never said it.’ ”
“Listen, if he talked about marriage, you better jump on it,” Shirley told her. “If he hasn’t talked about it, he’s probably already forgotten it.”
Ginger pressed her for more. “Do you think he really meant it?”
“I don’t know, Ginger.”
Rosemary Alden shares her mother’s gauzy view, and insists that Elvis made his intentions clear to all the Aldens. “My most treasured moment with Elvis occurred when he told our family that he was going to marry Ginger, how happy she made him, and how much he loved us as a family while he placed our TLC necklaces around each of our necks.”
Yet Joe Esposito has a more studied opinion. “Elvis liked Ginger very much, but . . . I don’t think he was going to marry her. He may have told her that he wanted to marry her, so she would stay around, but after awhile, he started to date other women, too.”
Billy Smith echoes Joe’s observation, saying Elvis kept buying Ginger jewelry and cars—three in all—to keep her there. And he shares the belief that Elvis was not going to marry her, no matter what he said to Ginger or her family.
“We even took her out window shopping for wedding dresses once, about midnight. We’d drive by a store, and Elvis would say, ‘Hey, there’s one.’ And he would describe what he wanted Ginger to wear on her head—that thing that stands up that Spanish women wear—and he wanted a long train on her dress. And Ginger believed all this. But he’d also say, ‘Yeah, and when we get married . . .’ and then turn to Jo and me and say, real low, ‘Whenever that is.’ ”
Today, Shirley’s opinion is that Elvis was on sleeping pills when he gave Ginger the ring, and probably meant the proposal at the time. As to whether they were actually engaged, “It depends on how you look at it. But there definitely wouldn’t have been a wedding. There’s no way there would have been a wedding. It was just naiveté on Ginger’s part.” Besides, Shirley says, since Ginger refused to call things off with her old boyfriend, “It sounds to me like she didn’t exactly plan on getting married to EP either, you know?”
Eventually, Elvis would come to call the Aldens “leeches,” according to David Stanley, Elvis’s stepbrother. “He felt that [Ginger] was just using him. She didn’t love him, that was obvious.” But Shirley is more sympathetic: “She was just a young, stupid girl who didn’t want to be there. It wasn’t even her fault. Her Mom had her claws into Elvis and her hand in his back pocket. Everybody knows that. Ginger was her little pawn.”
Sometime that spring 1977, Elvis put in a call to Ann Pennington. He had often told her that he thought he would die before he reached his mother’s age, and perhaps because he was about to sign his will, he seemed to have the end on his mind.
“I want you to know I had the most fun with you than I did with anybody,” he told her. “You really liked me for who I am, and you never took anything from me.”
Right after the signing of the will, Elvis took a gang of thirty to Hawaii, first checking into the Hilton Rainbow Tower, and then after two days, moving with the Alden sisters and others to a beach house at Kailua. In the many pictures that Joe and Shirley took of him there, he looks happy—laughing, playing football, and teasing Shirley, putting his tongue in her ear. “Elvis made dreams come true for so many people, and I do think he had a nice time,” she says. “He was so much fun to play with, and it was wonderful.”
However, one day he got sand in his eye, and scratched his cornea. After that, he cut the trip short, but not before