Although there are now more books published on Elvis Presley than on any other public figure from the past 50 years, strangely few focus on his sexuality. Even fewer are shag n tell tomes, which is pretty incredible when you consider that Johnny Cash and Elvis, legend has it, once had a race to see who would be the first to bed 1,000 women a race Elvis supposedly won.
One of the earliest was June Juanico, Presley s steady date from 1955-1956 who, with the publication of In The Twilight Of Memory, becomes one of the first women to break the code of silence surrounding the act of sex with Presley, albeit that, while she did go to bed with him, they did not, in fact, consummate their relationship. Nevertheless, Juanico s book is a welcome addition to the modest library on the Secret Sexual History of EAP, as are the explosive Revelations From The Memphis Mafia by Alanna Nash, which draws on the recollections of Mafia members Billy Smith, Marty Lacker and Lamar Fike (inexplicably ignored upon its first publication last year, it is now available in paperback) and Child Bride, Suzanne Finstad s controversial new book about Presley and his teenage wife, Priscilla Beaulieu.
The first woman in Elvis Presley s life was, of course, his mother Gladys. But the bombshell claim five years ago, by his stepmother Dee, that Gladys may also have been his first lover, is given short shrift by the Memphis Mafia.
That can t be true, says Marty Lacker. Many young boys sleep with their mother, especially when they re scared. Elvis father was in prison for a long time and I m sure that was a frightening situation. To say that Elvis got off on sleeping with his mother, or that she molested Elvis, is a lie.
Lamar Fike does concede, however, that from an early age, nearly all the people The King was close to were female. Cousin Billy Smith also suggests that what he terms as The King s biggest turn-on watching girls wrestle in white cotton panties may have had its origins in Presley s childhood, when he was just four or five!
Well, my mama and Aunt Clettes were dancing together to some music, Smith recalls. They were up on a trunk, waving their skirts round so they were flying up. Elvis was in the room. And the more they danced, the more excited he got. He grabbed my mama by the leg. And he said Oh my peter! Well, Gladys went wild. She yanked him up and yelled out: You all quit that damn dancing! She pointed to Elvis and said Look what you re doing to him .
So perhaps that, folks, is the true story of the birth of rock n roll its roots traced all the way back to the first time Elvis got a hard-on and saw music as synonymous with sexual pleasure!
Fast forward the years: Elvis is 14 and fumbling with a few young girls on a lawn in Memphis, seeing pubic hair edging its way out of their panties. Later he tells lover Barbara Leigh that s why he d always been turned on by such a sight.
Whatever the inspiration, within a few years of arriving in Memphis, The Hillbilly Cat would be prowling down Beale Street and creeping into the Lanskey Brothers clothing shop, where, until then, only black dudes dared to buy their duds. As such, the teenage Elvis was already beginning to define the cocksure, hey-man-I m-as-hot-and-hard-as-any-black-guy attitude that would be embodied in rock n roll.
Whispered rumours that the teenage Presley may even have lost his virginity to a black woman in Memphis remain unsubstantiated, but whatever the source of his sexual precociousness, by the mid- 50s Elvis old roadsmobile was clearly being used for more than just riding to the next gig with fellow musicians Scotty Moore, Bill Black and DJ Fontana.
They d outfitted the back of the Cadillac with pillows from floor up to seat level, recalls musician Jimmy Denson. One time, in the summer of 1955, I saw Elvis knock off two pieces (of ass) there after one show. Elvis would pop a handful of Benzedrine and drive all night.
Despite his growing sexual awareness, the Sun-King was still pretty ignorant when it came to giving head. He may have cruised through Lubbock, Texas, in 1955, looking for chicks, as one of the Crickets recently told me, but Elvis seems not to have shared Buddy Holly s eating habits, as highlighted by Holly s oft-repeated but never-before-published line, Show me a man who don t eat pussy and I ll take his woman away! At least, not at first.
Talk about eatin pussy, me and Sam Phillips used to make old Elvis sick with that stuff, DJ Dewey Phillips said circa 1967, accdording to Stanley Booth in Rhythm Oil. We d sit around the studio, down at Sun Records, and talk about how good it was, and he d get so sick he d go out back and puke. Then he went to Hollywood, made all them movies and came back, and one night we re all in the studio, Elvis and Sam and me, and Jerry Lee Lewis. And Elvis says, Mister Sam, you remember when y all used to make me sick talkin about eatin pussy? Sam says, What about it? Well, Elvis says, I eat me some the other night. But, man, now I m in trouble. So, Sam asks him, Who was it you eat? because we thought right off that Elvis had been at somebody s wife and got caught. But he says, Natalie Wood and Sam says, Well, hellfire, boy, what s your trouble? And Elvis says, Damn if I didn t fall in love with it .
Hellfire, indeed. Elvis, as with Jerry Lee Lewis, also apparently preferred young girls. Very young. He may have been fond of joking about how, 14 or 16 will get you 20 meaning that having sex with fourteen or 16-year-old girls will get you 20 years in jail but according to Lamar Fike, Elvis still had three or four young girls in his room at once, back in his days at the Louiseana Hayride radio show in 1955.
Billy Smith: Elvis knew durn well he could get away with having sex with a minor. Jerry Lee Lewis stepped in a pretty deep pile when it came out in 58 that he d married his 13-year-old cousin. It ruined his career for ten years. But that didn t faze Elvis. He believed in getting them young. How did he put it? He said, You get em young, and you can mould em and raise them the way you want em to be .
He also had peculiar sexual fetishes , according to Smith. He got a big kick when he cut loose in a girl s hair, according to the Memphis Mafia man. They d masturbate him, and he d ejaculate in their hair! He loved it!
Such claims would seem to support similar accounts in Albert Goldman s controversial biography, Elvis.
One of the familiar tales of the Presley circle concerns the night Elvis went to bed with a famous Hollywood sex-kitten, Goldman relates. When this aggressive young woman who had slept with half the men in the movie industry in an effort to advance her career and who had learned as much about men through that ordeal as any hooker divined where Elvis was at, she not only jerked him off with great skill but, when he ejaculated, she caught the semen in her hand and rubbed it all over her face like cold cream. These two moves put Elvis completely in her hands.
When Elvis first went to Los Angeles in 1956 to film his first movie, Love Me Tender, he set up a pattern he d follow for the rest of his cinematic career either falling in love with, or simply trying to fuck, his co-stars. The first was Debra Paget, who was dating Howard Hughes at the time. However, she was one woman who didn t fall for The King s charms, nor was she alone in that, according to Billy Smith.
Before he got real famous and went to Hollywood, he d pull all kinds of tricks to get a woman he was interested in to pay attention to him, he claims. He even faked a fainting spell with Anita Carter (of the Carter family) when they were on the road in 55. He went as far as to go to hospital on that deal. Elvis was totally captivated by her singing and by her looks. And now he had this desire to be with Debra Paget. But to her, Elvis was just another actor. He thought she was beautiful and he searched for that look in almost every woman after that. Even Priscilla was a variation on Debra Paget. I heard that he even proposed to Debra Paget, and she turned him down.
Elaborating on the latter tactic, Lamar Fike remarks: Elvis proposed to a lot of girls in the early years, but I think he thought that s what he was supposed to do. We were taught as kids that you grow up, smoke cigarettes and get married. But he didn t really want to get married. He chased everything in skirts. Especially in California.
In Growing Up With The Memphis Flash, on the other hand, Kay Wheeler offers us an insight into Elvis Presley s sexual technique from that all-to-rare female perspective. Kay was 18 and President of a local Presley Fan Club, when she was summoned into The King s presence after a gig. Co-author W.A. Harbinson narrates:
Elvis walked up to her and stood right behind her, practically breathing into the back of her neck. Attracted to him as always, but uneasy, Kay kept staring down at the street below. She was burning up and her heart was racing and, because Elvis was so quiet, she just kept getting worried. Eventually, when the silence got to her, she turned around to face him, blurting out the first words that came into her head. Elvis, what do you think life is all about? What does it mean? He didn t answer. Instead, he just stared at her as if she was mad. Then, grinning knowingly, he took her in his arms, pressed himself into her, mashed his mouth on her lips, and started grinding his hips. This filled her with more panic. She instinctively pushed him away. No, she said. Sorry . She d always imagined that being kissed by Elvis would make her faint. Instead, feeling disappointed and angry, she stepped back out of his embrace. I m sorry, Elvis. I can t . Not saying a word, he just stared at her, still grinning ambiguously.
Minutes later, Kay Wheeler left Presley s room. Or, rather, one of the rooms he d rented in that particular hotel. On her way down the hallway she saw a hot-looking brunette, dressed in a fuchsia, skin-tight, red sheath dress go into the room she d originally been sent to, by mistake, for what she assumes was for the pleasure of either Elvis or one of his guys. And there is no doubt that the guys took their pleasure wherever they could.
In June Juanico s book, she tells of the time she too, went into the wrong room and saw what she rather puritanically calls a disgusting sight that of one of Presley s bodyguards, Red West, screwing, while his charge, The King, was performing on stage.
Red and this girl were on top of a long table against the wall, and they were doing it, she later told Elvis. Red didn t have his shirt on, his pants were around his ankles, and he was sweating like a hog. Sweat was dripping from Red s face onto the girl s face. It was awful!
And how did The King respond to this tale? Sitting in a cafi, he slammed his coffee cup on the table and shouted: Damn it, Red! I ve told you about that kind of shit. You re gonna get my ass in trouble just because you can t keep your fuckin pants zipped.
Presley s own characteristically indiscriminate adnances to women also occasionally led to him getting into serious trouble with jealous males, according to a book recently published in the States, The Inner Elvis, by Peter Whitmer, PhD. The setting is a small club in Texas, the eye-witness, Grover Lewis.
As Elvis sang, the man at the table left for the restroom, Elvis finished his set, then made eyes at the girl and motioned for her to follow him into the parking lot, Whitmer writes, before letting Lewis take up the tale.
The roughneck came back to the table, discovered his girlfriend was gone, found her in Elvis car in the parking lot. The guy hauled Elvis out of the car, literally beat him bloody. Elvis was befuddled and full of his own sexual charisma and thought he could get away with it all. I suspect around that time he was feeling magically charmed. There was a kind of devilish who gives a damn to what Presley did. But he got tromped by this guy.
DJ Bill Randle puts it in far more simple terms, when he says that, at the time, Elvis was just a randy rooster or so horny , as The King once referred to himself in an out-take of Love Me .
Elvis certainly seemed not to give a damn about danger. Diana Dors claimed that her husband, Dennis Hamilton, at one point, threatened to shoot Elvis , suspecting they were having an affair. He was right. According to Dors, she and the 21-year-old rocker, who was at the top of the charts with Heartbreak Hotel , spent more than one weekend together, locked away in a body-stretching-rather-than-heart-breaking motel in Mexico where, apart from having endless sex with The King, the quintessential 50s female sex icon also saw him smoke pot.
Jayne Mansfield also later claimed to have bedded Elvis around the same time, apparently accepting sex as a consolation prize for the fact that Colonel Tom Parker wouldn t allow his boy to appear in her movie The Girl Can t Help It, alongside lesser rock stars like Little Richard and Fats Domino.
While playing Las Vegas in the same year, 1956, Elvis also dated showgirl Marilyn Evans and Amazon-esque stripper Tempest Storm, who later claimed in her book, Tempest Storm: The Lady Is A Vamp, that in 1970, while still married to Priscilla, Presley climbed into her Vegas bedroom where he stayed until 3am.
But back in 1956, as well as all this screwing around, Elvis also had his regular girlfriends in Memphis, like Barbara Hearn. Elvis preferred the girls back home to be virginal, the kind of would-be-wives you could take home to meet your mama. And he did take them home, and in the case of June Juanico, even to his bed, while Gladys Presley hovered around outside the door, keeping an eye, and ear, on what was happening in her son s bedroom. Juanico describes one such mind-boggling incident, which took place in Elvis Presley s bedroom in his family home on Audobon Drive, Memphis, Tennessee in 1956. It s early morning, Elvis and his date have just opened their eyes to greet a new day.
It s too early to get up, baby; everybody s sleeping , he said, pulling me back to bed, writes Juanico in her book. He started tickling me, and put his hand over my mouth several times because I was making too much noise. We started kissing and, all of a sudden, the laughing stopped. I had, without realising, let all my defences down; but, after all, I was going to be his wife someday. I raised my hips, making it easy for him to remove my briefs. Evidently he was feeling the same way as me. All the other times when we d been in his situation I had stopped him, or he had stopped himself, saying he wanted it to be special.
He said he wanted to wait until we were married. So did I, but this time our passion for each other had taken us too far; pushed us both out of control. We had made love, in our own special way, every time we were together, but this was the first time we actually came close to physically having sex. Elvis was slowly and gently beginning to enter me when we heard a tap tap tap at the door.
This was Gladys Presley, or, as June calls her, Lovie . Judging by her reaction quoted in this account, Elvis mother was well practised in the art of coitus interruptus. I heard all the laughing in there, and then I didn t hear anything, she reportedly said. I just wanted to tell you that maybe we should get June something to keep her from having too many babies. This apparently prompted her son to reply, as he frantically pulled up the bedclothes to cover the exposed flesh of his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Don t worry about June, Mama, she s a virgin and gonna stay that way till we get married.
But, of course, Elvis Presley and June Juanico never did marry. Probably much to the delight of Gladys who was extremely possessive of her boy. In her book, The Ultimate Elvis, Patricia Jobe Pierce claims that, at one point, when Elvis had decided to take a 12-day vacation in Biloxi, with his girlfriend, June, Gladys drank herself into oblivion and did not take the medication proscribed for her, by Dr. Evans, the family doctor.
Indeed, it s a little-known fact of Elvis Presley s family life that during her final years, in particular, his mother drank to excess and neither her son nor husband told the family doctor, fearful that he might speak to the press.
Domestic violence was also a hidden factor in the Presley household and many of those phone calls Elvis made back home to his mama while he was on tour in the 1950s stemmed not just from the fact that he missed Gladys but because he was checking to see if Vernon had beaten her when both were in a drunken stupor.
This might explain why The King never really wanted to get married, as Fike claims. It might also explain why Elvis avoided alcohol abuse for much of his life, saying he d seen too many drunks in his family. Elvis also believed that his father was fucking around behind his mother s back, exploiting the fans who called to their house on Audobon Drive hoping to see The King himself. Indeed, PJ Proby once claimed that, a decade later, when Elvis was in Hollywood, his father was screwing Priscilla.
Nevertheless, back in 1957, sup- pressing all such family secrets , Elvis Presley s parents were welcoming into their happy new home, Graceland, their son s latest steady girl, Anita Wood, who was introduced to The King by Memphis DJ George Klein.
He was always kind of a glorified pimp when it came to Elvis meeting girls, Lamar Fike comments about Klein. According to Fike, Anita s relationship with The King was chaste though he clearly feels compelled to define the latter concept as it related to Elvis Presley.
The term chaste is sort of nebulous with Elvis and a lot of girls, Fike explains. His sexual appetites were very, very strange. It wasn t a case of just jumping a girl. Really, the touching and the feeling and the patting and everything else meant more to Elvis than the actual act. Intercourse was never a big thrill to him. I guess Elvis was The King of Foreplay. This was all from the patting he exchanged with his mother growing up.
The mother connection becomes even more Freudian, if not Shakespearean, when Fike focuses on the testimony of Kim Tracey, who claims she dated Elvis from 1958-1959, while he was just another GI in Germany. Making matters even more gothic, the incident she decribes is supposed to have happened around the same time that Gladys Presley died, allegedly as a result of a heart attack, although it is now clear that Gladys misuse of alcohol and barbiturates definitely contributed to her early death.
She said Elvis called out Gladys name during lovemaking and would climax and say Mama, Mama , and then Sorry, Mama, sorry , Lamar Fike reports though he, for one, isn t buying a word of this particular story.
Christ. She should hope! he adds scornfully. I was in Germany the whole time and never heard of this woman. If Elvis had jumped as many girls as it was rumoured, he wouldn t have weighed thirty pounds, he d have been nothing but hair, teeth and eyes. But actually, he damn near was at one time. I watched it change from 57 on. In 57, he was after everything he could get. And in Germany, he was fascinated with the idea of real young teenage girls, which scared the crap out of us. After his mother died, he just let loose sexually.
According to Fike, Elvis Presley s favourite sexual playground was that sybarite s paradise, Paris, which he visited while stationed in Germany, juiced up to the gills on amphetamines which he would purchase by the jar load from the army phramacy. More often than not, he d go to night-spots like the Folies Berghre and the Lido, and clearly had the hots for the English-speaking Blue Bell Girls who often came back to his hotel, up to 30 at a time to party with the guys. Not surprisingly, several would manoeuvre their way towards Elvis Presley s bedroom.
Sergeant Presley s Wandering Hard-On Band also manoeuvred their way to the Moulin Rouge, in Munich, where all those wonderfully seedy pictures were taken that fill the book, Private Elvis. In these, Elvis looks like a guy who s been having non-stop sex for six months, says Lamar Fike.
All of which, if true, begs one salient question: did The King ever contract a sexually transmitted disease?
It s amazing that nobody ever got a social disease from those little escapades, but nobody did, says Lamar Fike. Elvis had no compunction about that kind of stuff. To him it was just banging. He had absolutely no guilt and no trouble balancing his behaviour with his religious beliefs.
Nor, it seems, did Elvis have any compunction about balancing his endless fornication with the fact that, in Germany, he met and supposedly fell in love with the 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu. However, the Memphis Mafia take different views on her claim in the book, Elvis and Me, that she and The King never had sex until they were married even though she admits that while they were in Germany she d begged him to consummate our relationship.
During the final five months Elvis lived in Bad Nauheim, he and Priscilla spent most nights in his bedroom, exploring every form of non-penetrative sexual pleasure possible, with Priscilla being described as the sexual aggressor . Elvis told me that she would even sit on his face to arouse him, his life-long friend Joe Esposito recalls.
This tendency would become even more predominant during the following decade when Elvis allegedly photographed Priscilla giving oral sex to another female and filmed their own sex games, including her dressing up as a schoolgirl, even though, by that time, she was in her early 20s.
He taught her everything about sex, Fike elaborates. Of course they slept together before marriage. He never had intercourse with her, but he did everything else there was to do. He didn t like penetration that much because he was uncircumcised and sometimes intercourse tore his foreskin and he d bleed. But he was a stone freak. He had every fetish there was.
Billy Smith: Oh yeah, he had sex with Priscilla before marriage. Priscilla told my wife Jo, that Elvis entered her one night when they went up to his room in Bad Nauheim. But, see, Elvis thing was virginity. He told her, Around the guys, you re a virgin .
This version of events is further corroborated by Suzanne Finstad s book Child Bride. Finstad spoke to Currie Grant, the man who originally introduced Priscilla to Presley, and who now claims that he himself had sex with the 14-year-old schoolgirl on more than one occasion, as part of the price she agreed to pay for the introduction. He didn t have intercourse with her on the first night or two, Grant says of Presley. He was just feeling her up. He didn t get into the deeper stuff until the third or fourth time. Eventually he had intercourse with her.
So, you may ask, when Elvis made love, how did he avoid getting these women pregnant? It s possible that he didn t. The earliest paternity suit slapped on The Hillbilly Cat came as far back as 1955. It is also claimed, by Albert Goldman, that one of Presley s lovers, from the early years, subsequently married a man who had money and doesn t want any unpleasant memories being stirred up after all these years.
In her book, Are You Lonesome Tonight, Lucy deBarbin says she gave birth to Elvis daughter, Desiree, in 1958, a claim that was later denounced by Jean Barbara Lewis, who insists that three years earlier she gave birth to Presley s daughter, Deborah Delaine Presley. Barbara Young also claimed she had a love affair with Elvis which resulted in the birth of their daughter in 1956. She, as with Jean Barbara Lewis, has filed a lawsuit against the Presley Estate. Country and Western singer Candy Jo Fuller also alleges she is the illegitimate daughter of Elvis and Terry Taylor, and that Elvis sent her money for years.
And what of male children? The son of Dolores Hart, Presley s co-star in Loving You and King Creole, claims he is the son of The King and that his mother became a nun as a result of being unable to deal with the pregnancy. Elvis himself never gave credence to such claims. Joe Esposito says that when asked in 1959 if he d ever gotten anyone pregnant, Elvis replied: Before I went into the army, there were three different girls who claimed I made them pregnant. A couple of them even claimed they d had abortions. But I didn t get them pregnant.
And how could The King be sure he didn t make these women pregnant?
Whenever I m making love, I make sure I don t come in them, said Elvis somewhat lamely. I pull out in plenty of time. If I knew for sure that the girl was having my baby, I would never let her have an abortion. I don t think that I would marry her, if I wasn t in love, but I d make sure the baby got whatever it needed.
And so it continued throughout the 1960s, with Elvis in Memphis, attempting to mould Priscilla to suit his every sexual and romantic fetish while he, as he once admitted, screwed everything in sight in Hollywood. Including, it s rumoured, Juliet Prowse, Tuesday Weld, Joan Blackman, Connie Stevens, Anne Helm, Ursula Andress and Ann-Margret to name but a few. And later again, during the Las Vegas years, unnamed teenage groupies who gave great head , starlets like Cybill Shepherd and steady dates like Sheila Ryan and Ann Pennington, both of whom went on to become Playboy centrefold models.
Obviously, John Lennon was wrong. Elvis didn t die when he went into the army. At least, not sexually. If anything, the opposite applied.
As Marty Lacker says: What s interesting about the pre-army Elvis and the post-army Elvis is that before he went in he looked kinda sexually dangerous . But he wasn t all that wild, really. There was a kind of playfulness about him, After the army, sexually, he was basically a predator. But he started looking like the boy-next-door, and he was practically deemed safe for all America. n
Next Issue: The King cuts loose. Elvis and the tale of the two-way mirrors, sex-tapes, experimentation with drugs, violence to women, Priscilla s ordeal, prostitutes in Las Vegas and, eventually, impotence and death.