Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [351]
But then he ran into Sherry Williams, and when she asked about all the old group, he let his guard down.
“Baby,” he said, “they wrote a book,” and his voice cracked on the words.
“I know,” she answered.
Then he looked out over the ocean, and he had such a faraway gaze that nothing more needed to be said.
When they returned to Memphis the third week of March, Ginger refused to accompany Elvis on tour. She had also begged off going to Nashville with him to record in January, when he mostly sat in his hotel room, dialing her number and leaving town without recording a note. Now Billy could barely rouse him from bed. Dr. Nick put Elvis on an IV, and recognized that Ginger was an emotional factor in his malaise.
But again, he rallied. As he stepped out on stage in Tempe, Arizona, on March 23, his first night of the tour, he whispered to Billy, “You didn’t think I’d make it, did you?” Billy couldn’t believe what a “hell of a show” he put on, and marveled at where he found the energy. Yet when the group reached Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on March 31, Elvis was unable to go on, and canceled the performance, as well as the last three sold-out shows of the tour, in Mobile, Alabama, Macon, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida.
Back home in Memphis, Elvis checked into Baptist Memorial Hospital on April 1. When Dr. Nick discharged him four days later, Priscilla and Lisa Marie flew in to be with him. Bill Hance of the Nashville Banner had written, “The singer’s new girlfriend is absolutely running him ragged.” Elvis’s ex-wife could see it was true.
“For the last six months, he was really preoccupied with trying to make a go with this relationship,” Dr. Nick says. “He was very protective of her, and would really treat her like a child. I felt if we could work [things out with Ginger] that we’d be 70 to 80 percent ahead of the game in getting other things accomplished.”
But Ginger didn’t seem all that keen on moving ahead with any of Elvis’s plans. She wouldn’t move into Graceland, claiming it was immoral, she didn’t like to spend the night, and she certainly didn’t appear to be overly fond of making love with her fiancé. Elvis complained to Shirley that Ginger was always in her menses. “He said, ‘That damn girl’s going to bleed to death.’ ”
“Why the hell do you put up with her?” Billy Smith asked his cousin. “Because,” Elvis answered wearily, “I’m just getting too old and tired to train another one.”
Billy was almost as frustrated with the situation as Elvis. He and the guys had to chase her down half the time, and they’d even followed her once. “If Elvis had ever known that, God, he’d have fired all of us. But she was in a nightclub dancing with a guy.”
Elvis’s pet name for Ginger was “Gingerbread,” but Billy was so ticked off at her that he began referring to her as “Gingersnatch.”
“Sometimes she wouldn’t come up for a few days, and Elvis would get all agitated and sullen and say, ‘Where is she, man? Why don’t she stay here?’ And when she did come, she’d get up and go home after Elvis went to sleep.” The night she refused to go to Nashville for Elvis’s recording session, he followed her out of Graceland and fired a pistol over her head several times, but still it didn’t stop her. Eventually, Elvis resorted to more childish methods, letting the air out of her tires, and once, instructing Billy, “Keep the gate closed! Don’t let her out!”
“I said, ‘Goddamn, Elvis! Open the gate and let the girl go home, man. This is not a prison!’ I was mad and fed up with it. One night, God, they were into it. She hadn’t been up there in two or three days, and he was trying to keep her from leaving. Finally, she got to go home, and Elvis asked me, ‘What do you think about Ginger? Do you think I should find somebody else?’ I said, ‘I think she’s everything in a woman that you always hated.’ He stayed