Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [90]
She became the first “sister” he’d had since Betty Amos, and their friendship lasted until the day he died. “Girls come and go, but sisters stay forever. . . . He told me secrets that I never told and will never tell.”
At twenty-three, Judy was the divorced sixth wife of sugar magnate Adolph Spreckels II. She had a ranch in Las Vegas but was living at the hotel then, and she offered to be Elvis’s “secretary” and aide-de-camp. Soon, she would also come to Memphis. But both of them knew she was too worldly for him, and so they tamped down the obvious sexual spark.
“We were like kids,” she says. In the afternoons, they’d ride the bumper cars at an amusement park and then go anywhere to escape the fans.
“He loved the fact that I had a light blue Cadillac, and he bought the same car for his mother in pink. One day we drove my car out into the desert, and his cousin Gene came with us. Elvis drove that car as fast as it could go, and I was in the front seat whooping and screaming and laughing. His cousin was on the floor in the back, he was so scared. But I’d been a stunt player in the movies, and Elvis couldn’t go fast enough to scare me.”
Now Elvis was learning to love Las Vegas, especially as he could take in a plethora of other shows. He particularly liked Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, whose novelty performance of Big Mama Thornton’s rhythm-and-blues hit, “Hound Dog,” resonated with him down deep. He also loved meeting other entertainers, including those with whom he had something in common—singer Johnnie Ray, who was so emotive that he seemed to cry all the time, and piano legend Liberace, Gladys’s favorite, who also had a twin who died at birth, and whose flamboyance with clothes and rings had long intrigued him. Soon Elvis would start reading a paperback book, The Loves of Liberace, picturing the closeted homosexual and a woman on the cover.
However, Elvis was more interested in the showgirls.
One night backstage, he met a bosomy blonde named Gloria Pall, who’d come with her friends, actor Rory Calhoun and his wife, Lita Baron, to see comedian Shecky Greene, who was also on the bill with Elvis and Freddy Martin. She was visiting with Greene and another showgirl she’d worked with previously, her friends teasing her because her 1954 Los Angeles television show, which she’d developed around the character of “Voluptua,” had been canceled after seven weeks, viewers citing it as too torrid. Elvis overheard the conversation and looked her up and down in her slinky black halter dress.
He introduced himself (“Hi, ma’am, my name is Elvis”), and then with the same on-the-prowl look he once gave Betty Amos, he proceeded to take Gloria’s right hand to his mouth and suck each of her fingers, rotating his tongue around them one by one.
Gloria, who called herself a “love goddess,” had been around, but she was surprised a twenty-one-year-old kid like Elvis would try such a thing.
“Where did you learn to shake hands like that?” she asked him. “You don’t provide towels by any chance, do you?”
“I’m from Tennessee, ma’am,” he said. “That’s how we do things there. No, I don’t provide towels because other girls don’t try to wipe it off.”
“You’re something else,” she told him, though his brashness turned her off. “You’re a corny, horny little hick.”
Gloria went back to the Calhouns at the table and told them what had happened. “I tell you,” she said. “He’s original. I’ve never had that done to me before. He must have read it in a book somewhere.” Finger sucking was a sexually stimulating turn-on, she said, “but not with that kid.”
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