Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [352]
In April, after another fight with Ginger, Elvis had a new girl at the house, twenty-year-old bank teller Alicia Kerwin, who received her introduction through George Klein. Alicia, ebony-haired, vibrant, and fresh-faced, had never been a fan, and knew nothing about Elvis other than the fact that he had a daughter. Their first meeting, about 10 P.M. upstairs at Graceland, lasted about two hours. The room was full of people, though the only one she recognized was Charlie Hodge.
“They were fixin’ to go on tour, so it was hectic, very hectic. And we just talked.”
When she and Elvis next met, in Lisa Marie’s bedroom while stylist Arelia Dumont was cutting Elvis’s hair, Rosemary Alden walked in. “She was real inquisitive and very rude, and she wanted to know who I was and what I was doing there.”
Rosemary was just “bein’ a female,” as Alicia put it, but it made her feel strange, and the following day, Elvis called and invited her back. “I said no. I had a date. He thought I should break it.” When she refused, he hung up on her, and then “two seconds later he calls back and he says, ‘Well, what about tomorrow?’ ” He also asked her if she could get a few days off from work.
On April 13, Alicia accompanied Elvis and Billy and Jo to Las Vegas on a drug run to Dr. Ghanem. Afterward, they went on to Palm Springs. Elvis was in good spirits and bought Alicia a Cadillac, but then, as she remembered, he got a reprimand from his father on the telephone because he’d told neither Vernon nor the Colonel where he was going. “They had been looking for him for three days and couldn’t find him. So everybody was upset, and in turn, he got them upset. He was being scolded.”
Elvis’s way of dealing with it was to load up on Placidyls and muscle relaxers, and when Alicia woke up and thought he wasn’t breathing, she quickly summoned the Smiths. Even Billy was alarmed: “It scared me real bad, ’cause you couldn’t have stirred him with a stick.” For the second time, Dr. Kaplan came and revived him, and Elias Ghanem flew in to take care of him.
Alicia was shaken, and when she later thought Elvis had hemorrhaged—he only fell asleep with red Jell-O in his mouth—she couldn’t take it anymore, and began to distance herself from him.
Still, he would call her from the road. On one of her final visits to Graceland, she dropped by after attending a family dinner party for her sister’s birthday, and found him in a gloomy mood. “He wished he could go out on Saturday night like everyone else, and he couldn’t. He was just depressed about it. He liked you to tell him about places that you’d been, a club you’d go to. He liked you to describe in detail what it’s like to walk in there and have nobody really know you. We just talked, and then I went home about three o’clock in the morning.”
That June, she cut it off. “It was just too much for a young kid,” she said, “just the idea of Elvis Presley. Too much, too fast. Way too much to handle.” The last time she saw him, she went over about 4 A.M. and stayed until she went to work. “He looked sad . . . I read to him for a long time till he went to sleep.”
The pretty young bank teller would later sob in saying that she and Elvis had never been intimate, especially as he was enmeshed in his troubles with Ginger.
“She came over once, and he wouldn’t see her, so she left. She called a lot when . . . she’d know I was there. She would ring the phone off the hook.” Alicia could tell that Elvis cared about Ginger, but he told her “he felt like she was more or less after his money than anything else.”
Alicia, who had attended Memphis State, was a sweet and unsophisticated young woman with a set of impish dimples. From her high school picture, she seemed destined for little more than a future as a suburban wife and mother. But she had found her first trip to Vegas exhilarating, and after that, west Tennessee proved too dull for her. The pull of the neon soon claimed her, as she would move to the desert, become a blackjack dealer, and get caught up in a lifestyle she could never have imagined, eventually