BABY, LET'S PLAY HOUSE
Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him
By Alanna Nash
Harper Collins, 684 pages, $32.99
The saddest thing about Elvis Presley is how his decline and fall have obscured the wonder of his talent. He was a riveting, abandoned performer who created a fusion of country, crooning and rhythm and blues that was groundbreaking. He became the world's most famous entertainer. Leonard Bernstein once called him "the greatest cultural force in the 20th century."
And yet what he became at the end overwhelmed what he was. The widely seen images linger: a bloated, stoned, mush-mouthed Elvis in his last years, stuffed into gaudy jump suits, dispensing sweaty scarves to adoring fans, slurring his repertoire. At his sad end in August, 1977, the one-time wild and wonderful "Hillbilly Cat" had morphed into a lost being - drug-addled, near-incontinent - dead on his bathroom floor at 42, his famous jet-black hair snow-white at its roots.
For many, then, Elvis Presley is an oddball icon or a near-forgotten legend. Still, there were plenty of loyal fans celebrating what would have been his 75th birthday yesterday. For those fans - and for any reader curious about rock 'n' roll's greatest star and the arc of his fame - there is a major new contribution to Presley lore: Baby Let's Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him.
The book takes its title from the first of Presley's classic Sun Records singles to be a national hit. (The Arthur Gunter song peaked at No. 5 on Billboard's country chart in July, 1955, and contains the scary line that John Lennon later appropriated - "I'd rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man.")
Don't let the title fool you. This is no cheesy photo book showing big-haired women staring adoringly at the handsome star. This is a lengthy, scholarly work by Nashville author/journalist Alanna Nash, who has written widely on Elvis. Her focus on Presley's relationships with women takes us on a long and often fascinating journey from the first and greatest love of his life - his mother, Gladys - through the "good girls" he wooed, the "road girls" he took to the back seat of his Cadillac, through the movie stars, the teenager he found in Germany and moulded, married, then ignored (Priscilla Beaulieu), the soulmate he found too late (the dazzling Ann-Margret), the starlets, the flight attendants, the burlesque stars and the Las Vegas hostesses all the way to the end - where a 21-year-old bank teller dumps him and an alleged gold-digging fiancée sleeps in his tomb-like Graceland bedroom as he dies.
"Elvis loved women," says one of the many voices here. That appears so. But it's complicated. Presley's fame and vanity forbade the mature adult relationship. Instead, he constantly pursued women and juggled girlfriends. "Elvis got a crush on whoever was handy," said country star June Carter. "It was just his thing." It took many forms. He took schooling in sex from exotic dancer Tura Satana, star of Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. Well into his 30s, he continued near-chaste relationships with 15-year-old girls. He also, Nash says, had an "obsession with virgins, beauty queens and tiny brunettes with china doll faces."
Women loved him, too - for his charisma, his energy and his dark, sensual good looks. He was "absolutely the best-looking man I've ever seen," says one-time fiancée Anita Wood. He was "a nice, well-spoken, well-mannered southern guy who was just so hot," says Raquel Welch, then a background dancer in one of Presley's lamentable low-budget movies.
In Nash's account, he is tender, courtly and shy, preferring kissing and cuddling to "doing the wild thing." He's also the "randy rooster" who would follow his throbbing early-years stage shows with sex with a fan - a habit that led to several parking-lot beatings at the hands of aggrieved boyfriends.
Nash's Elvis is generous and solicitous; also needy, domineering and a compulsive deceiver. He's hot-tempered and hurtful. ("Hey, you don't like it? Here's the door.") The star also pines for lost loves throughout his life, surprising ex-girlfriends with late-night phone calls in the baby talk he'd use for closeness.
Somehow, he never found the will to make things right - with his love life or his performing career. Hollywood's Natalie Wood, whom Presley spurned, summed him up as "complex and lonely." Nash attempts to explain that complexity by citing a psychiatric analysis of "prolonged grief disorder," suggesting Presley grieved throughout his lifetime for the twin brother, Jesse, he lost at birth. It resulted, she says, in his storied closeness with his mother and an endless longing for close human contact.
Eventually he added spirituality to his search and fought his sadness with large daily doses of heavy prescription drugs. In the end, a discovered note shared his feelings. "I feel so alone," he wrote. "Help me, Lord."
Nash draws from the vast storehouse of Presley lore, from her previous research for books on "Colonel" Tom Parker (the Netherlands-born carny who became Presley's ruthless manager) and on the "Memphis Mafia" (the gaggle of guys who abetted Presley's superannuated adolescence), plus original interviews. Hers is a novel approach and an engaging one. It's tempting, in 2010, to look at Elvis's womanizing and compare him to the famous philandering golfer or to look at his sad addiction and see him as a fellow boy/man of the just-departed "King of Pop," another victim of "polypharmacy."
But Elvis Presley was unique, a creature of his destitute background, his explosive talent and the times he helped to change. The definitive portrait of him remains Peter Guralnick's two-volume biography ( Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love.) The most revealing pictures are in photographer Al Wertheimer's Elvis 1956, showing the 21-year-old "Memphis Flash" offstage and on as his fame surges. But for those who care about Elvis Presley, this book will matter too. It's a welcome and well-crafted addition to our understanding of his strange, triumphant and tragic life.
Peter Feniak is a Toronto-based writer and consultant. He remembers what John Lennon once said: "Before Elvis, there was nothing."