NOT ALRIGHT mama

She has a body that would make a bishop stamp his foot through a stained-glass window! quipped Elvis Presley as he embarked upon a torrid affair with co-star Juliet Prowse during the filming of G.I Blues in 1960. Naturally enough, this was not the kind of comment the 25-year-old King made to the girl-he-left-behind-in-Germany, the 15-year-old Priscilla Bealieu. Instead, when she asked if he was involved with the dancer, he d simply say: Oh Cilla, just look at Juliet Prowse with those long legs and big shoulders. You know I hate big women! In truth, at the same time, Elvis was also doing a little two-step with Judy Rawlins, who had a small part in G.I. Blues and with Anita Wood, his steady girl back in Memphis.
Later, there would be affairs with many more, including Barbara Eden, Tuesday Wile, Hope Lange, Joan Blackman and Anne Helm.
All of which adds weight to Memphis Mafia claims that following the death of his mother, Elvis Presley just cut loose, sexually. Authors Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske agree. In the newly-published Down At The End of Lonely Street they suggest that the death of his mother freed him from the guilt and psychological frigidity imposed by Gladys, who had wanted her boy to seek chaste candidates for marriage rather than the beautiful itty-bitty things Elvis lusted after.
But that s only half the story. The real point is that while the King had been fucking all those beautiful itty-bitty things his mother was pining away for him in Graceland, drinking lethal amounts of alcohol and even taking diet pills to try to look good for Elvis and thus compete with the starlets who were keeping her son away from home. As such, if Elvis was set free in one sense he was further enslaved in another. The realisation that he d chosen beautiful women, and his career, above the needs of Gladys Presley during her final years, sharpened Elvis s sense of guilt when his mother died and set in place a form of psychological frigidity that ran much deeper than this apparent new-found freedom to fuck whoever he wanted to. And so it would remain for the rest of his life.
Nevertheless, when his mother died, Elvis certainly did turn to sex, with a vengeance. Eddie Fadal claims that in the weeks after the funeral, the King sometimes had up to three girls a night and remarks: it was sad to see him trying to shake off his heartbreak with sexual prowess which could only give a few moments relief.
But that s an observer s view what was it really like to date The King?
In Lonely Street both Joan Blackman and Anne Helm relate their experiences.
He was so very sweet, Helm, who starred in Follow That Dream says. I think a lot of women reached out to him because they felt he was so lonely. I actually wrote some poetry about him. It was that kind of romance. He really liked sex. A lot of nights I didn t go back to my own bungalow. I felt a little ashamed about it the next morning because I knew that the people on the set realised what was going on.
What, perhaps, they didn t know is that Presley and Helm also kept busy popping pills. The official line on the King s pill habit is that he began doing Benzedrine while he was in the army, although some trace the tendency further back to 1955 when he either developed a taste for his mother s diet pills or the uppers DJ Dewey Phillips offered to help him come out of himself and which Presley believed would increase his sex drive. Certainly, by 1962, Elvis had become increasingly dependent on Dexamil, Placidyl, Percodan, Seconal and a whole family of tranquillisers. He also persuaded Anne Helm to take probably valium to help her sleep after they made love and, the next day, gave her Dexedrine to stay awake on the set of Follow That Dream.
In Suzanne Finstad s Child Bride it s also claimed that the 17-year-old Priscilla spent her second and third days at Graceland in Elvis s bed, in a coma, overdosed on Placidyl, which he d given her so she could keep up with his night-time schedule.
Priscilla was also learning the meaning of sexual frustration at the hands of the King, who, when they met in Germany, told her according to Finstad, that his reputation as an international sex symbol created performance anxiety when he had intercourse with a woman.
With delicious understatement, Finstad also notes that Elvis had an inferiority complex about the size of his penis, which according to his female partners, was on the slight side of normal. Either way, Priscilla apparently concluded that Elvis didn t derive much pleasure from penetration and had other preferences, such as extended foreplay.
In Lonely Street she also says Elvis began teaching me other means of pleasing him , which the authors go on to detail.
They indulged in sex games and fantasies that sometimes lasted for hours and involved costumes and fanciful scenarios. They were clever and inventive. In a favourite game, Priscilla would don the virginal-looking uniform she wore to the Immaculate Conception. Elvis would pretend to be the stern schoolteacher; Priscilla was his naughty, tardy, or sassy student. In a twist, he sometimes played the student and she was the seductive schoolteacher. His favourite fetish was to take Polaroid photos of her in plain white cotton panties. He took shots from all angles as she tumbled and cavorted on the super-plush carpet of the bedroom suite.
Back in Hollywood, Elvis also gave vent to his fetish for photographing nearly-rather-than-fully-naked women. With their full consent, one presumes, given that at the time everybody wanted to fuck Elvis according to Lamar Fike, who also recalls the excesses in Presley s home on Perugia Way when even the guys would have four or five girls a night.
We had girls all over. We d meet them at the studio and invite them up there. It was like owning a candy store he says.
But who got the pick of the candy ? The King, of course.
Elvis liked the mystique about courting, claims Billy Smith. If women came after him, he wasn t interested. Always, unless Elvis had a date, the guys pretty much let him have the pick of the girls before they made a move on anybody. One time there was five girls came up together. Elvis took all five into his bedroom.
Smith also recalls the time one of these guests was Christina Crawford, the adopted daughter of Joan Crawford. She was dating Memphis Mafia mainman Joe Esposito and, understandably, got pissed off at the fact that one of Joe s jobs was to light Presley s cigars. Eventually, everytime Joe would try to light a cigar, Christina would reach across and break it in two.
Elvis said, Don t do that. That s not funny , claims Smith. She said, Well, he shouldn t have to light your cigars. And Elvis said, Look, he works for me, goddamit. And he knows when I get a cigar to light it for me . But she did it a third time and, boy, Elvis got mad. They got into just a barrage of words. Elvis said, Look, you bitch and Christina threw a drink in his face. He got up and stepped on top of this five-by-six marble coffee table and grabbed her by the pony-tail and dragged her across the damn table, out of the room. Then he kicked her in the rear as she was going out the door.
A similarly repulsive incident occurred at Presley s house in Bellagio, Smith recalls, after an unnamed woman demanded E s attention.
He finally had to say, Look, I m shooting pool, and I m going to finish this game before I do anything else . She took the cue ball off the table. Elvis said, If you do that again, they ll have to surgically remove it . And she said, You re a smartass son of a bitch, aren t you? That s all it took. He harpooned the hell out of her launched that cue stick before he even knew what he had done. He hit her on the collarbone and he went right over to see about her. Of course, he wasn t going to apologise. But he felt bad about it. He told one of the guys, Take her to the doctor and make sure she s all right but get her away from me . Later, he broke down and cried because he done it.
One year later, however, the King met a woman who might just as quickly have hurled a cue in his direction. For unspecified reasons she was called Thumper by the Memphis Mafia, though the media simply referred to her as The Female Elvis. Ann-Margret certainly was more than Presley s match sexually and the Memphis Mafia aren t alone in believing that if he d married her instead of Priscilla the story might have ended differently.
There is no doubt that Elvis loved Ann-Margret. At least, as much as he could love any woman other than his mother. And the feeling was reciprocated, as is obvious from Viva Las Vegas, particularly when she and Presley exchange lascivious looks during What d I Say? But then why wouldn t they? Elvis and Ann-Margret were at it night and day, even before filming began.
They went to Vegas for location shots, Elvis stayed in Milton Prell s suite at the Sahara, and he and Ann holed up in there for the whole weekend, recalls Marty Lacker. They tried to get them to come out, but Elvis wouldn t even answer the door for room service.
More tellingly, Presley even froze out the entire Memphis Mafia when it came to his meetings with Ann-Margret. In one of her rare public statements about the relationship, Ann-Margret reveals that Elvis often spoke with her about sorrows such as the death of his mother.
I knew I had crossed into a certain uncharted territory when he began trusting me with his secrets, she remembers. He didn t reveal his vulnerable side until those moments when we were alone. There was a void in Elvis s heart because of his mother s death. He talked of how he missed her in the most heartfelt manner. People think of him as having everything, but that wasn t true at all. He had a great capacity to love, and he wanted to be loved in return. But he knew the people who surrounded him, who wanted something from him, made it virtually impossible for him to ever feel that affection; and if he did, he didn t know whether to trust it.
Sadly, the King dumped Ann-Margret, claiming it was because she spoke about him to the Press. In truth, the split was probably rooted more in his own failure to deal with a strong, independent woman, who had a movie career of her own. And, maybe even more threateningly to Elvis Presley, a mind of her own.
All this time, Priscilla was living back in Memphis so scared Elvis would marry Ann-Margret that she began watching Ann s movies and attempting to dress like her in order to hold onto the King who, unknown to her, was actually wrapping his arms around Gail Ganley, a bit part player from Kissin Cousins, only nights after ditching Ann-Margret. But of all Elvis women, the one who worried Priscilla the most was Ann-Margret. In one of their many arguments about the Swedish sex symbol Elvis slapped Priscilla, who stumbled and cut her eye against a television set.
Enter into this happy domestic scene Larry Geller, Elvis spiritual adviser. Or, if you prefer Lamar Fike s point-of-view, a hippie from the sixties, a phoney son of a bitch.
In 1964, under the guidance of Geller, Elvis set out on what would become a life-long study of esoteric religions, philosophies and arts which set an ever-expanding distance between The King and most of his minions who regarded such metaphysical explorations as bullshit. Likewise, Priscilla who got sick-to-her-infant-soul of Elvis reading and reciting passages from his favourite books such as The Impersonal Life by Joseph Benner, Autobiography Of A Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Particularly when the reading of such books, in bed, took the place of sex. But it got even worse when, as part of his spiritual cleansing in the sixties, Elvis determined to abstain from sex altogether, to demonstrate he had control over the weakness of the flesh, like Christ and other great religious teachers according to Geller.
This scarcely impressed Priscilla, who, according to Child Bride author, Suzanne Finstad, had been driven by her sexual impulses since childhood; she was a ripe twenty to Elvis s world weary thirty-one. She had no interest in his spiritual journey or the books he pleaded with her to read. She wanted to have sex with him; he wanted to see inside her soul. During his moratorium on sex, Priscilla literally dropped to her knees one night as Elvis was reading to her from one of his philosophy books, begging him to make love to her. He fell asleep holding his book. The moment encapsulated the problems and basic incompatibilities in their relationship.
Elvis Presley s new-found interest in the spiritual realm also led to experimentation with consciousness-expanding drugs such as LSD, long before either the Beatles or Dylan. In fact, the King once joked, I tried everything before John Lennon even knew what a stimulant was!
Likewise, long before Timothy Leary got his hands on acid, Elvis split a tab with Priscilla who responded by running out of the upstairs office in Graceland, curling up in a closet and, when Elvis found her, screaming, You don t love me. You never loved me! Presley, meanwhile, wandered out into the garden marvelling at the shapes and sizes of the greenery. There were further acid trips and Elvis would occasionally smoke marijuana and snort cocaine according to Lonely Street.
Ironically, despite the King claiming that he had no interest in anything of this world it was at precisely this point that he began to turn to increasingly hard-core pornography to get his kicks.
Elvis liked Danish porno films about women having sex with animals, says Billy Smith. He liked to watch two girls wrestle. And two women making love. He had certain sexual fantasies. He didn t like to see women totally nude. He preferred they wear white cotton panties and a white bra.
Lamar Fike: Sometimes, he d masturbate to movies.
Lacker: After a while of watching movies like that Elvis transferred his interest from 8mm films to real people. He wanted live girls to do it in front of him.
Lamar: And he taught Priscilla to do all that stuff with other women.
Marty Lacker: Priscilla befriended this girl. She used to come to Graceland a lot. Actually, this girl used to screw a lot of the guys. But I saw a Polaroid picture of Priscilla sitting on top of her. Now the story goes I never saw the other pictures that Elvis had pictures of Priscilla giving the other girl oral sex. Maybe that was Elvis s turn-on, but, God, the woman who s probably going to be your wife.
It was around the same time, 1966, that Elvis bought one of the earliest domestic video recorders and began filming Priscilla and his other girlfriends in similar situations. Albert Goldman has claimed that in one such video Elvis stepped in front of the camera, with a full erection and masturbated. Marty Lacker admits he has seen many of these videos and verifies that except for the tapes of Priscilla and this other girl, all were of girls he dated and that few feature Elvis himself. But he made one mistake he walked through the frame in one of them, while the girl was in bed, playing with herself.
Contradicting this story, Billy Smith claims he saw one video which shows Elvis and the girl on the bed, not really doing anything other than going through the motions. It was a side view, when he had the camera on a tripod.
In Child Bride, Priscilla claims she consented to have sex with teenage girls while Elvis watched and says he d often video these sessions and later even preferred to watch with her the videotapes of her lesbian encounters, instead of having sex with her.
With mind-boggling timing, it was at this point that Elvis Presley finally decided to make Priscilla his wife. Some say he simply felt the time was right; others suggest he was put under pressure from Priscilla s father who, when he heard what really was going on in their bedroom, apparently told Elvis he would put him in damn jail if he didn t.
Whichever, marriage didn t stop Presley fooling round say the guys. He was dry-humping Nancy Sinatra on the set of Speedway when the news came through that Priscilla was pregnant. And three months before Lisa Marie was born, Elvis was having a romantic fling with Quentin Dean, the teenage object of lust in Stay Away Joe.
Even so, the Presleys themselves had a relatively active sex life during the pregnancy, albeit a sex-life Elvis style through foreplay, video-enhanced masturbation, role playing and, less often, intercourse. However, soon after the birth Priscilla discovered that, apart from his performance anxieties, her husband had a second sexual secret. He refused to make love with a woman who d had a baby.
He told me that it was difficult because you are a mother and it turned the relationship into something else, changed the dynamics, she recalls in Child Bride. Not that I wasn t sexy to him, not that he didn t desire it because, believe me, that wasn t the case at all but as far as actual intercourse, it changed the dynamic.
Priscilla s fumbled reticence in relation to this subject is understandable. At one point in 1968 she had even confronted her husband, telling him she couldn t survive without sex. Elvis , she recalls, tried to make love to me. And I do mean tried but was uncomfortable with the act. And so, the Presley s sex life all but ended when their daughter was born, though they occasionally had intercourse in the years that followed.
Once the kid got there, Elvis didn t want anymore to do with Priscilla, suggests Fike. He didn t even want to sleep in the same bed with her. Elvis slept with his mama when she was sick, but didn t want to lie with his wife once she became a mother. You figure it out.
Lacker: Elvis told everybody he never wanted to have sex with a woman who d had a child. He never said why. Everybody theorises because of his mother. I don t buy that shit. It was just one of his quirks.
Some quirk. Nevertheless, many commentators do now draw a direct cause-and-effect link between tabloid claims that Elvis and his mother had sex during his teens and the fact that for the remainder of his adult life the King refused to sleep with women who had children. Priscilla dismisses the mother-lover story as sensationalist but admits that the sexual freeze-out by Elvis after she herself became a mother led to the her writing in her diary, I am beginning to doubt my own sexuality.
This feeling that must have been accentuated by the fact that, around the same time, her husband was in Hollywood fucking around with Susan Henning who had a small part in Live A Little, Love A Little but later turned up as the primary sex-interest in the brothel sequence of the 68 Comeback Special. In out-takes, Henning can be seen quite openly nibbling on Presley s ear, scraping her fingernails down his cheek and teasing him to such a degree that he finally slides her off the sofa and onto the floor, making it obvious that once the rehearsal ends fun will begin back on the bed he d placed in his dressing room, and on which he was sleeping each night rather than travel home to his wife and daughter.
During the taping of the Comeback Special Elvis bolstered his ego and calmed his nerves with lots of sex, according to Alan Fortas, who recalls that Joe (Esposito) and I would run girls in and out of the NBC dressing rooms as if the place were equipped with conveyors.
Once Presley began to appear in concert again, from 1969 onwards, the conveyor obviously went into top gear. As is clear from that scene in Elvis On Tour, where he turns to the Memphis Mafia and says, That chick last night gave the best head I ever got! At another point, when asked if he watched a space launch on television the previous night he boasts, I was buried in a beaver, I had my own launch! But don t look for these scenes in the officially released video; both have been censored. Nor is there any reference to the fact that in advance of his gigs in Vegas, Elvis would occasionally call upon the services of prostitutes, according to Joe Esposito s book, Good Rockin Tonight.
Once we arrived a week early, Esposito recalls. Elvis said: Joe, we re going to have a party tonight. Call down for a bunch of hookers . The guys were elated. We were so jaded by this point that it had become too much trouble to go out and look for women. Once Elvis started there d be no problem. The women would come to us in droves. But we often sent out for prostitutes, and everyone switched girls. Elvis was not as involved as the rest of us. I d rather watch , he d say. They weren t pure enough for him. Elvis romanticised sex, and paying by the hour grounded it all too well. Only on occasion would he disappear into the room with one.
Or indeed two, whom Elvis would pay to fuck each other while he watched, according to Joyce Bova who was his lover from 1969-1972. And if the sex in her book, Don t Ask Forever, is romanticised to a ridiculous degree that has more to do with co-author William Conrad Nowels, even so, here is an example of the kind of fantasy that must surface in the minds of millions of women, and men, who longed to make love with the King.
His hands and mouth had already begun a slow and shameless journey over my entire body. I closed my eyes. His lips began to tease every part of me, exploring and lingering over the most sensitive areas while his hands discovered erogenous zones I didn t know I had, she recalls. I looked down at the fervid length of me, past the perspiration-flecked flesh of my abdomen, seeing and feeling his endless tender touch permeating my body until it reached the core of me. My back arched and my hips thrust without conscious effort. I was overwhelmed, my head falling back onto the bed. I sighed and moaned and purred, until at last I welled up and there was nothing more to give.
True to claims that he preferred non-penetrative sex, Presley then shed his clothes, slid on top of Joyce Bova and whispered kiss me there, honey . Bova obliged, giving head for the first time and claiming his response pleased me more than I could have imagined. On other occasions they did have intercourse, with Bova declaring that the experience of Elvis coming inside her filled me with sublime joy. However, that joy was somewhat tempered when Ms Bova learned about Presley s hang-up in relation to having sex with women who were mothers.
When a woman has a child, it s a gift from God, God s way of telling that woman she s not a little girl anymore, she quotes Elvis as saying to her. I don t think a mama should be trying to be sexy and attracting men. It s not right. A woman s not attractive in that way after she s a mama.
If true, this definitely adds a new dimension to Presley s first hit, That s All Right, Mama , does it not? Particularly when you realise that Joyce Bova, as with many of Presley s lovers, had been virtually redesigned by the King in order to look more like his mama, Gladys Presley. As was Priscilla. Adding a further layer to this paradox is the fact that Bova was actually pregnant with Presley s child at this point, which she soon aborted, fearing if she became a mother he d never make love with her again.
Elvis also had a fling with the 23-year-old Cybill Shepard, who d only recently broken up with the film director Peter Bogdanovich. She was extremely adventurous and aggressive, sexually and otherwise, according to Memphis Mafia member Ricky Stanley, and he clearly remembers Elvis s slightly startled reaction after he left Cybill s place in West Hollywood.
Let s put it this way, Shepard herself later said. Before I met him, he was sexually conservative, trapped in a stupid macho thing. So what did Cybill do? Get Elvis to wear dresses, play a feminine role, sexually? She doesn t say. However, Cybill soon went back to Bogdanovich claiming she couldn t handle the whole thing with the pills.
Not that she left the King without company. Next, he began a six-month highly romantic, physical relationship with starlet Barbara Leigh, which began one night when he gave her a medallion of Jesus and a copy of The Impersonal Life and then took her to bed. She describes Elvis as a good lover claiming he was just a natural, not technical, really free.
Sheila Ryan, on the other hand, claims he did have sexual hang-ups one of which was that preference for dry-humping rather than penetration.
He had a hang-up about having an ejaculation inside of a woman, she says, suggesting this was a residual fear of getting a woman pregnant and being sued for paternity. Plus, he was a southern small-town guy. He kind of never grew up and dry-humping was kind of a thing. Actually, I kind of liked it, because it was high school. He liked the playing part.
That said, Sheila didn t like the playing part when it meant Elvis was playing with himself and ignoring her needs.
I remember the first time we had sex and he masturbated instead of having complete intercourse, she recalls. And I thought, this is going to be like all of Hollywood! And this was only the second man I d been with! So I just thought this is what men were like. Instead of having an orgasm inside, when we were about finished, Elvis finished off the job himself. I was devastated. I thought, Oh my God! I m not enough. What s the matter with me?
Ryan, who later married James Caan, claims she never had an orgasm when she was with Elvis. However, Presley himself began to crack when he discovered that another woman he d left sexually frustrated his wife Priscilla had rediscovered passion outside their marriage. Irrespective of whether or not they were being satisfied, sexually, emotionally, or otherwise, Elvis Presley demanded that all his women remain faithful to him, no matter how many other women he was screwing.
Thus, the rage Elvis felt when he heard about Priscilla and her new lover Mike Stone: It wasn t a case of losing her, wasn t jealousy. What bothered him was that she had the effrontery to screw around on him, says Lamar Fike. It s a view that s shared by Billy Smith, who says, It hurt his ego more than anything else. He couldn t understand why any women would leave him for another guy.
And what was Presley s response when his wife told him she wanted a divorce?
She told Red s wife that Elvis forced her to have sex, says Fike. The Red in queston being bodyguard Red West. She writes that in her book, uses the term very forcefully . She said it was uncomfortable and she cried. Now, she never uses the word rape , but she pretty well suggests he raped her. I think that s a crock. Maybe she just thought it was rape. It s just so abhorrent to me that Elvis would resort to that. But maybe he did, out of anger.
This is what Priscilla herself claims happened that night in Vegas after she received a message that her husband wanted to see her.
When I arrived in the suite I found Elvis lying in bed, she writes. He grabbed me and forcefully made love to me. It was uncomfortable and unlike any other time he d made love to me before and he explained, This is how a real man makes love to his woman . This was not the gentle, understanding man that I grew to love. He was under the influence. I wept in silence as Elvis got up to dress for the show.
Early the next afternoon Priscilla finally left her husband. Many of his closest friends still reject the suggestion that Elvis raped Priscilla, claiming this would have been totally out of character for the man. What is irrefutable, however, is the fact that from this point onwards Presley s use of drugs accelerated, hastening his death.
During those final years Elvis dated a parade of girls such as Ann Pennington, who later became a Playboy centrefold model. He also maintained a steady relationship with Memphis State University graduate, Linda Thompson, who lived with him from 1972-1976. Kathy Westmorland, who spent a lot of time with the couple, suggests she was good for him. He laughed a lot with her. She was an intellectual and poetess and enjoyed music. She had an understanding about the artistic side, and was into metaphysical stuff.
I met Elvis on July 6th, 1972, Thompson recalls. From that moment we had a real affinity. We had grown up in the same area and kind of clicked. Life was interesting at Graceland. There were times when it was like living a fairy tale. Elvis was truly Prince Charming. He was the most generous of men. He was the kindest, most sensitive, the funniest, most talented, most gorgeous and sexiest. And yet there were times he was very, very difficult.
This is a euphemistic reference to the fact that Linda had to inject Elvis with Demerol and Dilaudid in his hip three times in one night. Or when Elvis would drift into a chemical-induced sleep, after failing to respond, sexually, to her kisses or caresses. Or the nights she had to reach into his mouth and remove a chunk of food to keep him from choking because he d slipped into a state of unconsciousness while chewing on a cheeseburger.
Linda was the best woman he had ever been with, Lacker says. She cared about him. She wouldn t fall asleep at night until after Elvis. If something happened while he was sleeping, she d be up in a minute. She even cleaned Elvis up when he got nasty. He would get so bad at times that Linda had to take him to the bathroom. But the way Elvis saw it, there was no more challenge with her.
The way others saw it, Presley was still hung-up on Priscilla or couldn t commit to marrying Linda. She broke off their relationship, reluctantly, she claims.
It was incredibly difficult for me to make the decision, but I thought, God forbid, if anything serious should happen to him I have adored Elvis so deeply it would be completely devastating for me to watch him die . So I had to wean myself away from being that bonded to him. It took eight months. When I left I knew it was going to be tough for him.
Others claim that, lacking the balls or good grace to do it himself, Elvis hired private investigator John O Grady to throw Linda out of Graceland and that she retaliated by running up a $25,000 bill on his credit card. Either way, Lionel Hays, a mutual friend of the couple, believes that after Linda Thompson and Elvis broke up he really went downhill. Compounding his problems, for the first time in his adult life, the King apparently found it difficult to attract young women.
By 1975 Elvis massive drug intake was also leading to inevitable sexual problems. Twenty years earlier he may have started using speed to come out of himself but now, more often than not, he couldn t even get a hard-on, much less come, as a result of chemical abuse. Elvis had often spoken with Linda Thompson about his longing to have a son but she obviously was more realistic in this respect and once commented to a nurse in a Memphis hospital, A baby for us is pretty damned unlikely. Sex once a year isn t so great, and it sure won t do the trick.
In contrast with those long-lost days when Elvis would boast to his buddies about having three girls a night, he also began to try and mask his sexual inadequacies while talking to the Memphis Mafia. But they could see through the rather pathetic deception.
After Linda, his interest in sex went way down, recalls Billy Smith. The drugs were starting to effect his desire. Now, he didn t come right out and say this. He said he didn t try to make love too much when he was getting ready for a tour, or if he was on tour, because he had to preserve his strength. He d say, I need to have my body fluids to heal myself .
Elvis certainly needed healing at this point. Grossly overweight, he was too self-conscious to go into a studio in early 1976 and insisted on recording, in Graceland, what would turn out to be some of his final sessions. In an out-take of one of these songs, Hurt , which will probably never be officially released, Elvis can be heard singing from what can only be described as the storm-centre of some gothic nightmare. At one point he s supposed to recite the verse, I m hurt, much more than you ll ever know/Yes darling, I m so hurt/Because I still love you so but instead goes on a slurred, drug-induced roll, releasing a barrage of obscenities aimed directly at the woman to whom the song is addressed. Or at all women, including his mother. I m so hurt, Goddamn it honey, much more than you ll ever know/Shit, I m so hurt, you cocksucker, because I still love you so/But I told you motherfucker (sings) that even though you hurt me/Like nobody else would ever do/I could never hurt you.
Make no mistake about it, this is Elvis Presley s Blood On The Tracks, primal scream and soul-cry crystallised into a single two-minute recording, the death-defying Mystery Train rolling backwards and turned in on itself. Later the same year, Elvis wrote on hotel stationary, then discarded, a note which pulses along pretty much the same lines.
I feel so alone sometimes. The night is quiet for me. I would love to be able to sleep. I am glad everyone is gone now. I will probably not rest tonight. I have no help for all of this. Help me Lord.
Near the end, the King got stranger, according to Jo Smith, Billy Smith s wife.
We had to cater for him like he was a small child, she recalls. I did things I never thought I d do. Like, when it came time for him to go to sleep, he liked to be put to bed. And to be told good-night the whole send-off. Sometimes, even if he had a girl with him, Billy had to sit in there with them, which I resented. Elvis would be in bed with this girl, and he d have Billy pull up a chair and talk. Like she wasn t there.
Billy: And if you d get up to leave, he d say, Where are you going? Come on back . I d stay until he fell asleep. A lot of times, I talked baby to him.
As in baby-talk , which is the way Elvis and his mother communicated up until the time of her death, and, in Elvis s mind, maybe even beyond death.
Up until the day he himself died, Presley s steady girlfriend was Ginger Alden, a 20-year-old with whom he became obsessed, telling Larry Geller I see my mother when I look into her eyes and with whom it s likely he never had sex.
That relationship was more about companionship, suggests Smith. In the last year I don t think sex mattered. For about the last year and a half I don t think he was capable of it. And he was limited for a couple of years before that. When he first met Ginger he put up a front. But we knew that he wasn t making it with a lot of the women he was with.
Lamar: Dr. Nick was giving Elvis testosterone for impotence. You couldn t dope up that much and get a hard-on if Elizabeth Taylor stuck her ass in your face.
Marty Lacker contends that Ginger Alden added to Elvis downfall.
First of all, she didn t care about him. Second, she was too young for him. And third, she was there for what she could get, he suggests. She forced her whole family on him. He ended up buying them a house with a swimming pool. And cars. Ginger was always disappointing him. She didn t love him she didn t even want to be around him. She wouldn t move into Graceland, didn t like to spend the night. And she certainly didn t watch him until he went to sleep, like Linda, or make sure he didn t choke while he ate. So he started seeing other women. Even a 15-year-old schoolgirl, Rise Smith. But he really wanted Ginger. Billy asked him, Why the hell do you put up with her? And Elvis answered, I m just getting too old and tired to train another one .
At another point, Elvis asked Billy Smith if he thought he should stay with Ginger. Smith replied, There are a lot of nice women your age. Why don t you find somebody like that? Somebody you can talk to and have a real relationship with? Tellingly, and maybe even tragically, Elvis replied: What the hell could a 42-year-old woman do for me?
Four months before he himself died, Elvis began to date the 20-year-old Alica Kirwin, who, on one of the first nights they slept together was scared to death when she couldn t see him breathe because he was totally out of it.
This time, Presley s life was saved by a call to Dr. Kaplan. Kirwin also told Goldman that she and Elvis were never intimate. Kathy Westmorland, on the other hand, claims she did have intercourse with Elvis in the months before he died, though Larry Geller suggests they merely shared a bed because, near the end, Elvis couldn t bear to sleep alone. But Westmorland definitely did befriend the King during his final tour, according to Lonely Street.
She and Presley meditated. They talked about his career. Sitting in his pyjamas, on the side of the bed, he asked, What s it all about Kathy? I m talking about life and what follows. How are people going to remember me? I ve never done a classic film, never sung a lasting song . He went on to weep, and to talk of his hopes that God would heal him of his health problems. We prayed for that , said Kathy, who sombrely added, But when he fell asleep, I could hear the death rattle. Elvis heard it too. As he told Westmorland, I know I look fat, now, but I ll tell you this, I m going to look good in my casket.
Elvis Presley died on August 16th 1977. The Memphis Mafia obviously believe that this was partly because Ginger Alden the woman with whom he was sharing his bed on that final night didn t, in short, sit by his side until he was asleep, didn t wake wondering if he was okay, didn t call Dr. Kaplan, didn t try to save Elvis Presley s life. Instead, making no allowances for the fact that she had her period at the time, they say she simply turned and went to sleep after Elvis told her he was going to the bathroom to read. Either way, when Ginger awoke and knocked on the bathroom door, calling Elvis , she found him face-down on the floor, crouched over that book he d been reading, which was either The Scientific Search For The Face of Jesus or Sex and Psychic Energy, depending on which report of his death you believe.
Even more contentious is the claim made by those members of the Memphis Mafia who believe that instead of immediately calling a doctor to try save Elvis life, the last of the King s women phoned a contact who worked for the National Enquirer and sold him the story.
She may have called her mother first and talked about what to do, suggests Billy Smith. And then at about 12.30 an hour and a half before she called downstairs she hung up and called this Jim Kirk. We guess she called him twice and struck a deal for her story and a page one fee, for $105,000. Now, both Ginger and her mama deny this. But we re pretty sure that s how the Enquirer had people flying in here on August 16th, taking pictures and making phone calls three hours before the hospital announced Elvis was dead. We do know for sure that by the time Ginger called Al up there, she was all dressed and made up to perfection. She sure didn t look like she just rolled out of bed, like she said.
Jim Kirk has since admitted that, yes, it was Ginger Alden who called him that day in Memphis twenty years ago, before even telling Elvis Presley s family and friends that he had died. Some of the Memphis Mafia even believe that Alden took that notorious National Enquirer photograph of Elvis in his coffin, though this is an accusation she vehemently denies.
On the face of it, there were countless women involved in Elvis Presley s life but only a very few, according to Joe Esposito, who really mattered to him. Only Anita Wood, Priscilla, Ann-Margret, Linda Thompson, Sheila Ryan and Barbara Leigh, really meant something to him, he suggests. They were the lifers , as Pat and Myrna Smyth dubbed them, as opposed to the Queens for a Day .
Esposito also sees one defining feature of the King s women. Looking back he claims that while it s true that Elvis always had to have a woman around, part of that need for constant female companionship was his lifelong need for mothering.
In her book, The Ultimate Elvis, Patrica Jobe Pierce pushes this point even further, suggesting that no matter how many women Elvis Presley moved through, he always seemed to be reaching back towards his own mother, if not his mother s womb. As such, one could say that although Elvis may have cut loose, sexually after the death of his mama , he never really cut loose, sexually, from Gladys Presley. Whether or not she was his first lover, she was clearly his first, final and maybe even the only true love of his life.
In the final analysis, Elvis trusted no one after Gladys Presley died, Pierce concludes. She remained his only true confidant, even though he abandoned her for his career at the end of her life. No matter how many friends or lovers he had, no relationship paralleled that of Elvis with his mother. She was truly the only woman in his life. n