Anecdotes from Baby Let’s Play House
“Vernon thought he was a stud,” remembers Lamar Fike. “Elvis used to say that Vernon knew when Elvis was conceived, because afterwards, he blacked out.”
When things progressed beyond that point, he usually stuck to intense foreplay, sometimes asking a girl to masturbate him, and then ejaculating in her hair. If his partner found it degrading, a complete act of submission and dominance, it also made sense—her head was the farthest point from potential pregnancy. Elvis’s first experience of real intercourse, which came at either age nineteen or twenty, was both traumatic and uninformed. He had met the girl only that day, and before long, he was in the hotel lobby, searching for Scotty and Bill, his face a tangle of confusion. “The rubber busted,” he said. “What do I do now?” Bill chuckled. “I think you had better marry her—or get the hell out of town.” They left him on his own to solve the crisis, and the next time they saw him, they asked what he had done. “I took her to the emergency room at the hospital.” “The emergency room?” “Yeah, I got them to give her a douche.” Soon he vowed to “never break a virgin,” and to fool around only with experienced girls. In truth, he liked everything that led up to intercourse better than the act itself— the kissing, the stroking, the darting fingers, the removal of the blouse. He preferred that a girl keep her panties on, though it drove him wild to see the slightest bit of pubic hair poking around the seams of her underwear. But he respected women, and it was always important that the girl receive more pleasure than he.
One night when Elvis’s parents came to the Hayride, he walked offstage after taking a number of encores and just about brought the house down. Gladys grabbed him up by the arm and pulled him over to the side of the stage where no one could hear them. “Elvis,” she said sternly, “don’t you have any drawers?” He thought fast, and said, “No, ma’am, the only pair I own was dirty, and Maxine wouldn’t wash ’em.” “Honey, God, he was huge!” Maxine says. “And it showed. And then when he’d shake his leg, my God! You could tell he had a hard-on. It looked like it. Hell, he knew what he was doing. Bill Black went out and said, ‘I’m going to buy Elvis some shorts.’ And he thought, ‘I’ll play a trick on him.’ He bought him some silk ones, polka dots. He thought Elvis wouldn’t wear them, but Elvis fell in love with them and wouldn’t even take ’em off. He didn’t want me to wash them. He was afraid somebody would steal them. I guarantee you, he wore silk underwear for the rest of his life, when he wore any at all. He loved them.”
When I came back, the other guys were down at the beach, looking for the cute girls. But Elvis was leaning over the grillwork on the balcony, staring at the ocean. I said, ‘Hi, honey, are you okay?’ He said, ‘Mae, I can’t get over this ocean.’ Now, he grew up on the mighty Mississippi, but he said, ‘It’s so vast, just no end to it. I’d give anything in the world if I had enough money to bring my mama and daddy to Florida and let them see the ocean.’ ” It touched her that his priority was his parents, when most twenty-year-olds would think about having fun.
“As they approached the car, they noticed a stranger glancing out the window and then disappearing. The two increased their speed and ripped open the door. His wife screamed from the passenger side and dove for the petticoats in the floorboard. Elvis fell onto the dirt parking lot, struggling to zip up. The trucker reached down with huge, burly arms and grabbed the skinny frame, shaking the stuffing out of it and driving in a couple of well-placed right hooks. “ ‘Not my face, not my face!’ the singer yelled, covering the aforementioned location. ‘I’ve gotta go back and play.’ The truck driver got in a few more gut busters, then let his quarry flee back to the club.”
Then one reporter asked Elvis if he planned to marry. “Why buy a cow when you can milk it through the fence?” he said, a comment that would be picked up by the national press and spark outrage, even as it was toned down
Then he took the chance, seeing they were so absorbed. He started shooting, keeping his distance at first, and then moved closer, closer, and closer still, until he was up on the railing of the stairway. He snapped a shot from above, looking down just as Elvis nuzzled the girl’s cheek, his arms spread wide, one above her against the wall, the other anchoring him on the railing. It was so sensual, and their bodies so eager, that if the photo were rotated, it would seem as if the two were in bed. The photographer scarcely breathed. He asked to pass them (“May I get by?”) but they were so focused they didn’t even care. Al pivoted so that the window was behind him, illuminating his subjects with front-end sunlight and fill lighting from the dangling bulb. “Betcha can’t kiss me, Elvis,” the girl said, sticking out her tongue. “Betcha I can,” he teased back. And then he made his move, sticking out his own tongue until the two were pressed together, tongues and noses, his waist pushing up against hers. By now, the girl was leaning back on the stair rail, and anything could happen. Al snapped the shutter, capturing the famous image, a distillation of the rock-and-roll road show, and Elvis at his uninhibited best. The whole thing took a tenth of a second, and then all Al heard was, “We want Elvis! We want Elvis!” A minute later, Elvis sprinted onstage to give four thousand people, mostly women and girls, the performance they had paid to see.