Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [75]
At ten, while walking home from school, she was attacked and gang-raped by five boys in an alley, probably as a hate crime toward the Japanese. One of them, she says, was a cousin of the policeman sent to investigate, and the judge looked the other way. She ended up in reform school “for tempting those boys into raping me” and was classified as a juvenile delinquent.
Afterward, her father taught her martial arts as a way to protect herself, but her anger still festered. She became the leader of a vigilante girl gang (“We had leather motorcycle jackets, jeans, and boots, and we kicked butt”), and patrolled the neighborhood to make sure the streets were safe for women.
At thirteen, and already five foot seven, the geisha beauty married seventeen-year-old John Satana in a union arranged by her parents. Nine months later, she took off for Los Angeles. There, she filled her days modeling bathing suits and posing nude for silent screen comic and 3-D photographer Harold Lloyd, and by night she worked as a cigarette girl at the Trocadero, the famed Sunset Strip celebrity hangout.
Before long, she was back in Chicago, living with her parents and dancing in clubs, first as an interpretive dancer, and then, once she was offered more money to take off her clothes, as a stripper. She quickly perfected her exotic dancing, learning some of her shimmies from her mother, who taught her to fast hula to “The Hawaiian War Chant.” Soon she was traveling the club circuit with her elaborately beaded costumes and hand-painted kimonos, all of which eventually came off to reveal a string and pasties. And things got hotter: She carried a prop Buddha whose hands burst into flames when she brushed against his palms.
“When I was dancing,” she says, “burlesque was an art—classy and elegant and requiring talent.” In time, she would be voted one of the best burlesque dancers of the century and parlay her talents into a film career, most memorably as the leather-clad Varla in Russ Meyer’s 1965 cult classic, Faster Pussycat! Kill Kill!, an homage to female violence. Film critic Richard Corliss described her performance, for which she did all her own stunts and fight scenes, as “the most honest, maybe the one honest portrayal in the Meyer canon, and certainly the scariest.” Not surprising, the butch villain was a character she helped to create.
The night that twenty-year-old Elvis first returned to Biloxi, he was too keyed up after his shows to sleep and wandered into the rough-and-tumble Biloxi Beach Club. There, he watched the young hootchy-kootchy dancer onstage. Remembering the time he saw Gypsy Rose Lee at the Cotton Carnival in Memphis, Elvis was fascinated by the way Tura moved her body, the way she held the lubricated sailors as sexual hostages. He saw how she tantalized them with each suggestion of undress, and how they lost their minds when she rolled her breasts around in her hands, spinning the little twirlers at the nipples.
Sultry, sassy, and exotic, Tura Satana was nothing like any girl Elvis had known. The Hayride girls were either shy virgins who hoped for a kiss, or hungry country girls who’d had plenty of quick sex out behind the barn. But Tura was a mistress of seduction. And she was gorgeous, her dark hair piled high on her head.
He went backstage to see her and introduce himself, saying he was a performer himself just up the road, in town for only a few days. She was smoking and drinking too freely from a paper cup, and my God, her breasts were still pretty much hanging out, and her derriere, too. She looked like a hooker.
“My mama wouldn’t want me in a place like this,” he said later. But she seemed like a lady underneath all that, and he wanted to ask some questions about the way she moved. And so, as he had done with June Juanico, he asked if they could take a walk on the beach. Tura sized him up. She liked his