Baby, Let's Play House Part 19

She hesitated. She'd never seen a dead person before.

"No, I don't think I want to go in there."

But he insisted. "Yes, Little, she loved you, and I want you to see her."

Anita hung back, but she loved Gladys, too. She was such a sweet lady. Elvis saw her weakening, so he grabbed her and brought her inside.

"We went in there where the coffin was, and he just talked like a baby. He called her Satnin', and he showed me her feet. She was barefooted, and her toes were painted. He talked about her feet, her 'little sooties,' he called them. The corpse was so swollen, and he made me stand there forever, just looking at her and talking to her. I broke down. It was just really sad. Very hard to get through."

Dixie Locke came, too, and while she was sad for Elvis, "He reacted as I would have expected him to act. He was devastated, of course, and I think he wondered how he would even be able to get along without her, really."

More and more people showed up as the night wore on, Barbara Pittman remembered, but as the mourners tried to console father and son, Colonel Parker burst in and tried to run everybody off.

"Get all of these people out of here!" he barked to no one in particular. "I want them out of here now!"

Elvis, in a rare moment of confrontation, rose from his seat on the couch. "Look, these are my friends. Don't you come in my house and tell me to run my friends out of here!"

But Parker worried he couldn't handle security at Graceland and urged Elvis to move the next day's services to the Memphis Funeral Home. Elvis thought about it for a minute and nodded in agreement.

The attendants came to get Gladys early the next day, and Elvis, who had again stayed up all night, followed the casket all the way out to the hea.r.s.e, crying, "Please don't take my baby away! Bring her back! She's not dead. She's just sleeping. Oh, G.o.d, please don't take her away!" Harold Loyd nearly broke down himself, seeing his cousin suffer so. "He said, 'Everything I have is gone-everything I've ever worked for. I got all this for her and now she's gone. I don't want any of it now.' "

But Vernon was in a more practical frame of mind, according to Elvis's music publisher Freddy Bienstock, who was staying at the house. In Freddy's view, Vernon was not as broken up as he seemed.

"When the funeral director came to Graceland, Vernon was crying and carrying on, and it was pure bunk, because he was cheating all over the place, and everybody knew it. But he was saying, through these not very convincing tears, 'The best of everything! Give her the best of everything!' The fellow marked it all down and left very quickly, and the moment he walked out the door, all the tears and crying stopped. Vernon turned to Colonel Parker and said, 'Don't let them take advantage of me in my hour of grief.' "

Three thousand fans ringed the area around the Spanish-styled Memphis Funeral Home on Union Avenue, many of them there to show their support, most of them hoping for a glance at Elvis. Memphis Police Captain W. W. Woodward, a friend of Elvis who had posed for a photo with Nick Adams the year before, stationed 150 policemen to keep order along the route to Forest Hill Cemetery, where Gladys would be buried. Home on Union Avenue, many of them there to show their support, most of them hoping for a glance at Elvis. Memphis Police Captain W. W. Woodward, a friend of Elvis who had posed for a photo with Nick Adams the year before, stationed 150 policemen to keep order along the route to Forest Hill Cemetery, where Gladys would be buried.

Reverend Hamill officiated at the funeral, and as Dixie knew he would, Elvis asked the Blackwood Brothers to sing, since the revered gospel quartet was Gladys's favorite group. They arrived early for the three-thirty services to go over the songs and meet with the family.

J. D. Sumner, the Blackwoods' ba.s.s singer since 1954, was astonished at Elvis's level of grief. "I've never seen a man that loved his mother as much as Elvis loved Gladys. He laid on that gla.s.s over the coffin, and I've never heard a kid scream and holler so much as Elvis did at his mother."

The Blackwoods had planned on singing three or four numbers, including "Take My Hand, Precious Lord," and "Precious Memories." But Elvis kept scribbling down song t.i.tles and sending notes up until the quartet, worried about making their concert in South Carolina that night, performed a dozen numbers.

Barbara Hearn had been on vacation in Pensacola, Florida, with her friend Anita Burns and family when her mother called with the news. Anita's father insisted they return immediately so Barbara could attend the funeral. Anita went with her.

They managed to get seats despite the crowd, and Barbara could see Elvis in the family section off to the left. But after a short time the curtain was drawn, blocking him from view. Afterward, a policeman held up the procession so Barbara could join it, and she went to Forest Hill Cemetery as part of the front end of the cortege.

When everyone had left the chapel, Elvis promised James Blackwood he would charter a plane for the group that evening, and thanked him for what he had done. "He put his arms around me and said, 'James, you know what I am going through,' " referring to the airplane crash that had taken James's brother, R. W. Then he leaned over his mother's body and kissed her. "Mama," he said, "I would give every dime I have and even dig ditches just to have you back."

At the cemetery, Elvis got through the brief service without incident. But then as the mourners retreated to their hot summer cars, Elvis lost control again. As they lowered the coffin, he threw a small shovel of dirt on top, and cried out inconsolably.

"Good-bye, darling, good-bye. I love you so much. You know I lived my whole life just for you." Then as everyone watched in horror, Elvis tried to jump in the ground with his mother. "They were holding him back and he was screaming," Barbara Pittman said. "It was horrible. It was really just the worst thing I had ever seen."

Barbara and Anita stayed until the end of the ceremony, and then drove to Graceland, where Elvis and Vernon were receiving guests. Barbara was surprised to be denied entry and left her card. Later, someone called and asked her to come back out. Elvis hugged her and apologized for her experience earlier. "Of everyone," he said, "she would have wanted you here."

"He was in a trance. I don't think he himself could describe how he acted. Everyone was so sad. It happened so fast, it was difficult to comprehend."

Reverend Hamill would meet with Elvis one on one in the next days and weeks, but Elvis's grief was so deep that he was almost beyond reaching. Nothing, not the 200 floral arrangements, the 100,000 cards and letters, or the 500 telegrams, seemed to help.

Then the Colonel spoke with Mae Axton, who had been like a second mother to Elvis when he was starting out. Mae had just gotten out of the hospital and was unable to travel. Now she wrote Elvis a letter ("I just wrote my heart"), and put it on a plane. Tom Diskin took the missive directly to Elvis, who holed up in his room to read it over and over.

For a little while, then, Elvis seemed calmer. Then he was just as shattered as before. Guests noticed that he couldn't sit still. He ambled from person to person, as if pleading with them to bring her back. And he wandered through the house, always stopping outside one door. "I can't go into my mother's room," he said. "I can't bear for anyone to go in there yet."

Arlene Cogan, a tagalong fan who had met him at fourteen at his Chicago press conference in 1957, couldn't believe how hard he took it. "He walked around carrying Gladys's nightgown for days. He wouldn't put it down. It went with him everywhere he went."

"People were screaming, 'Somebody, please help him!' " Barbara Pittman remembered. Finally Vernon called for a doctor, who disappeared with Elvis upstairs and gave him a shot to settle his nerves. He also left a bottle of pills.

"I saw Elvis come down from his bedroom so stoned out of his mind he didn't know where he was," Barbara said. "He had a line of mirrors that ran along the stairs in the hallway. Elvis came down and said, 'Hey, look at all them little Elvises! A thousand little Elvises here!' The doctor was giving him tranquilizers, and he liked 'em."

Anita saw the pills, too, but they seemed warranted at the time. He would rally, as when the Memphis Highway Patrol, trying to cheer him, took him for helicopter rides all over Memphis. Then something would happen, and he'd break down again.

One day Elvis was sitting on the floor talking with some of the fans, telling stories about his army experiences, when Vernon came in the room carrying a stainless steel saucepan. Inside were three baseball-size s...o...b..a.l.l.s.

Back in the winter, sitting at her seat at the breakfast bar, a melancholy Gladys had watched the snow fall and pile up in deep drifts by the back fence. Elvis was out of town, and more and more lately, she'd missed her son as if he were dead.

"How Elvis loves the snow!" she'd said, turning to Vernon. "Do you think he will be home for Christmas?" Without a word, she went to the cupboard and took out a small pan. Then she headed for the back door to make s...o...b..a.l.l.s. "I'm going to put these in the freezer and keep 'em 'til Elvis comes home," she'd explained. Vernon had forgotten all about them.

The discovery set Elvis off again, and he was awash with regret, tormented by how tender she was, how she'd thought of him every minute, and how he'd disappointed her at times.

They'd fought as hard as they'd loved, and their fights were commonplace, Gladys smacking him so hard on the back of the head sometimes ("Mama!") that she nearly knocked him down. One day at Graceland, she'd started on him the minute he got up-about women, about staying out all hours.

He wasn't living according to Jesus' plan, she said, and she was angry, as mad as when she'd ripped a plowshare off in her youth. Elvis took it until lunch, but then his anger bubbled over, and he picked up a plate of tomatoes and threw it hard against the wall, the china shattering and fleshy red specks flying everywhere. Gladys set her jaw. "You do that again," she warned, "and your life will be miserable from here on out!"

At the time, he worried about breaking her dishes and ruining her walls. But now he saw she didn't care about that. All she wanted was him, the way they used to be, before he belonged to everyone.

"Funny," he told a reporter four years later, "she never really wanted anything fancy. She just stayed the same, all the way through the whole thing. There's a lot of things happened since she pa.s.sed away that I wish she could have been around to see. It would have made her very happy and very proud. But that's life, and I can't have her."

Gladys Love Presley had been an ordinary country woman, but she had brought greatness into this world. She had shaped a man who made a difference, who helped create a musical art form. Through that, he had united disparate people, changed s.e.xual mores, and harnessed a burgeoning youth culture. No one would ever forget him, or her.

On August 24, ten days after his mother's pa.s.sing, Elvis went back to Fort Hood to rejoin his unit. Just before he left the house, he went to Gladys's door. "I got to go, Mama," he said, and broke down once more. Then he told his father and Alberta that nothing was to be moved in Gladys's room while he was away. He wanted it to remain exactly as she had left it, preserved as if she were still alive, as if he might find her there when he returned from overseas. In a month, he would be in Germany, a.s.signed to the Third Armored Division, and stationed in Friedberg.

But Elvis was not ready to go back to Killeen, let alone go to Europe. It was all too soon for a trauma of such magnitude. Gladys's death had not just been the pa.s.sing of his mother and his best friend, but psychologically, Elvis had experienced a double death. The forfeiture of his twin and the immediate loss of his mother were inextricable, compressing twenty-three years of shock and emptiness into a single moment. His extraordinary keening had been a manifestation of stuck grief for Jessie, and now new anguish for Gladys that he would never surmount.

"Psychologists call this the premorbid personality, or the underlying structure that, given something apocalyptic, triggers all the pathology and pushes it to the surface," says Dr. Peter O. Whitmer, an expert on the twinless twin phenomenon. "When Gladys died, so, too, did Elvis's ability to bond with a woman. He may have gotten close at times, but he was already taken, as so many twinless twins are."

In Killeen, Elvis tried to pick up where he had left off. Eddie Fadal invited him out every weekend, but nothing was really right-Colonel Parker told him to stay away from Eddie, that he was a h.o.m.os.e.xual with designs on him. LaNelle, too, was tired of all the commotion, weary of having to cook for Elvis and his gang. Later, Janice Fadal, who would grow up to marry Lamar Fike in a short-lived union, would realize that her mother had resented Elvis. every weekend, but nothing was really right-Colonel Parker told him to stay away from Eddie, that he was a h.o.m.os.e.xual with designs on him. LaNelle, too, was tired of all the commotion, weary of having to cook for Elvis and his gang. Later, Janice Fadal, who would grow up to marry Lamar Fike in a short-lived union, would realize that her mother had resented Elvis.

"Once I saw a bunch of limos pull up and I ran screaming through the house, 'Elvis is here!' Dad was excited, but Mom freaked out. . . . He became my father's focus instead of us-the family."

Still, everybody tried to put on a bright face when they got together and told funny stories about Elvis's early touring days in Texas, when Elvis signed women's b.r.e.a.s.t.s in Lubbock, and the girls put Band-Aids over the signatures to protect them in the shower.

At some point that summer, Elvis and Rex and a few of the guys drove to Dallas to girl-watch at the Sheraton and the Quality Inn. Then they learned about the American Airlines Stewardess College in Fort Worth. When they showed up, the house mother, Ronnie Anagnostis, got on the P.A. "Girls, guess what? Elvis Presley is coming through the front door!" The only thing they didn't do was fly over the balcony, she said.

But "things were never quite the same again at Fort Hood," according to Rex Mansfield. "We all suffered with and for Elvis's great loss."

Soon, the whole gang began to visit, because Elvis seemed to need them. Arlene Cogan went down, and Frances Forbes, and fan club presidents from Chicago and elsewhere. They all stayed with Elvis, joining Lamar, Vernon, Minnie Mae, Red, and Elvis's cousins Gene, Junior, and Earl Greenwood. Sometimes there were twelve in all sleeping at the house while outside, a crowd of a hundred kept vigil.

When Anita arrived on the weekends, she was distraught to find so many people in the house, especially women. It was bedlam. "I could not believe it. They were all over the place. Every time I went down, there were different people there. Strangers. I'd never seen those people. Elvis didn't act like himself. He would play the piano and look around. 'Little, where are you?' "

She thought he was too intimate with them, that they were taking advantage of him. "I don't like to sit alone too much and think," he said by way of explanation. But Anita felt uneasy and wondered how it boded for their future.

On September 19, 1958, Elvis packed his things and put on his military attire to leave Fort Hood. At 7 P.M. P.M., a troop train would take him and 1,360 other soldiers to the Brooklyn Army Terminal in New York, where they would sail to Germany on the U.S.S. Randall Randall.

Before he left the house, he asked Eddie to lead the group in a word of prayer. They all got down on their knees and held hands in a circle, and after Eddie spoke, each one took his turn. "There wasn't a dry eye in the group," Eddie recalled. Afterward, he rode with Elvis and Anita in the Lincoln. "Eddie," Elvis said softly, "I really feel this is the end of my career. Everybody is going to forget about me."

A light rain was falling, and a reporter approached him as he waved good-bye to Anita, Eddie, and the fan club presidents. Everybody had tears in their eyes, including Elvis. How do you feel? the reporter asked. "I just feel sad," Elvis said.

There were people to catch his attention along the way, though-in Memphis, during a refueling stop, Alan and George came to see him, and while Elvis wasn't allowed to get off the train, George introduced him to a pretty Mississippi girl named Janie Wilbanks, who climbed up the steps in her white leather coat as Elvis leaned down for a kiss. And somewhere as the train wound through New England, Elvis became reacquainted with the five-foot-three Charlie Hodge, who hailed from Alabama and played country-gospel with an outfit called the Foggy River Boys. Elvis had once met him briefly backstage at a Red Foley show in Memphis just before they were both drafted.

When the train pulled into Brooklyn at 9 A.M. A.M., a band was playing Elvis songs. The RCA execs were there, including Anne Fulchino, the national publicity director who'd taught Elvis how to eat pork chops. Immediately, Private Presley, stunningly handsome in his uniform, and ten pounds lighter than he'd been before basic training, disappeared into a conference with the Colonel and a much-decorated wedge of army officials. He emerged to a firestorm of flashbulbs, then kissed a WAC for the cameras, and sat down to a large bank of microphones and an eager throng of press.

What if rock and roll should die out while he was in the service?

"I'll starve to death," he quipped.

How did he feel about being sent to Europe?

"I'd like to go to Paris. And look up Brigitte Bardot."

What's his idea of the ideal girl?

"Female, sir."

Everybody laughed.

"I suppose I'll know if I ever find someone that I really fall in love with."

He was handling it all so deftly. The men from RCA beamed and nodded approvingly, and Anne Fulchino felt a wave of pride. He had come so far so fast, and grown from a green amateur to a confident star in two years. It was amazing, really.

Then, carrying a shoe box that Parker had handed him, Elvis waved to the crowd, hoisted a borrowed duffel bag to his shoulders, and climbed the gangplank of the U.S.S. Randall Randall.

By now, the band had played "Tutti Frutti" three times. Elvis stopped at the rail of the s.h.i.+p and lifted the lid on the shoe box. The boat began making its metallic creak and then started its slow pull from the harbor. With that, Elvis emptied the box, and thousands of little Elvis images poured down the side of the boat and onto the pier, disappearing into the frantic hands of female admirers.

Elvis signs autographs in a park in Bad Homburg, Germany, October 5, 1958. He will soon begin dating sixteen-year-old stenographer Margit Buergin (to his right). (to his right). Red West and Vernon stand behind him. Red West and Vernon stand behind him. (Robin Rosaaen Collection) (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

Chapter Seventeen.

Fraulein Fallout.

When the boat docked at Bremerhaven, shortly before 9 A.M. A.M. on October 1, 1958 on October 1, 1958, Elvis, "the rock 'n' roll matador," as the Germans called him, received the same frenzied media attention that had surrounded his send-off in America. But the 1,500 German fans who turned out were greatly subdued in comparison to the screaming throngs in the States, so the media engaged in a bit of manipulation. Photographers from the teen magazine Bravo Bravo stage-managed pictures to show MPs struggling to hold back an eager crowd, and newsreel cameramen encouraged the bravest youngsters to feats of daring. stage-managed pictures to show MPs struggling to hold back an eager crowd, and newsreel cameramen encouraged the bravest youngsters to feats of daring.

Sixteen-year-old Karl Heinz, who didn't even own an Elvis record, was goaded into rus.h.i.+ng up the gangplank to get Elvis's first autograph in Europe. But as Elvis s.h.i.+fted his sixty-five-pound duffel bag to scrawl his name, he nearly lost his balance. Finally, he shook his head, "Sorry," and moved on down to board the troop train, which would take him two hundred miles to Friedberg, population 18,000.

Elvis's permanent army post was the Friedberg Kaserne, better known as Ray Barracks, home to the Thirty-second ("h.e.l.l on Wheels") Battalion of the Third Armored Division. The long, bleak rows of brick buildings had formerly housed Hitler's SS troops and made an unwelcome sight as the train pulled in about seven-thirty that evening, delivering Elvis and his battalion directly to the base. There, Elvis found high fences, well-guarded gates, and another barrage of media. "I'm just a plain soldier like anyone else," he said.

Initially a.s.signed as a jeep driver to Company D, Elvis would soon be transferred to Company C, a scout platoon often sent out on maneuvers. His primary duty would be to drive a jeep for Reconnaissance Platoon Sergeant Ira Jones, the military hoping the a.s.signment would keep him out of the public eye. Three days after his press conference on October 2 ("Cla.s.sical music is just great to go to sleep by"), the army closed the base to the media.

Just as Elvis was settling into the spartan Ray Barracks, with its steel-framed beds and cold linoleum floors, Lamar, Red, Vernon, and Minnie Mae (following through on a promise she made to Gladys on her deathbed) arrived in Germany.

For a few days after Elvis left Fort Hood, it looked as though there might be a delay in getting the family matriarch overseas. Vernon had relied upon his attorney to verify Minnie Mae's date of birth, which was necessary for her to secure her pa.s.sport. But no record of her birth was readily available.

It took seventy-five cents' worth of gasoline to drive through the backwoods of Arkansas to find a cousin who could supply the information, recalled Frank Glankler, a senior partner in the Memphis firm that represented the Presleys. "When we finally found the house, there was a goat on the front porch. The cousin didn't want to sign the affidavit because he couldn't read. He was afraid he might be signing away the deed to his house. In the end, he gave us his X X."

Now, on October 4, after an eighteen-hour flight from New York to Frankfurt, the Presley party drove to Bad Homburg and checked into the Ritters Park Hotel, a resort spa that offered thermal baths as palliative care for patients with bad hearts and respiratory ailments. Elvis joined his family for dinner at the hotel as a crowd collected outside.

Within days, Elvis got permission to live off base with his dependents, i.e., Vernon and Minnie Mae, and moved the entire group to the Hilberts Park Hotel in Bad Nauheim, an Old World, cobblestoned spa town of fourteen thousand people. There, they occupied four rooms on the third floor.

On weekends, Charlie Hodge came up from his post ten miles away. The two were close now, having bonded during the crossing. Charlie had been a regular on the Ozark Jubilee Ozark Jubilee TV show, so he and Elvis knew the same country stars (Elvis asked a lot about Wanda Jackson), the same gospel stars, and the same songs. TV show, so he and Elvis knew the same country stars (Elvis asked a lot about Wanda Jackson), the same gospel stars, and the same songs.

They'd put on a talent show on the s.h.i.+p, Elvis playing piano but not singing. And after he was a.s.signed to sergeant's quarters-his fellow G.I.s wouldn't leave him alone-he requested that Charlie be allowed to bunk with him. It helped stave off his loneliness and the pain of losing his mother. Despite his father, grandmother, and Anita, he felt totally alone in the world. Just before he left, another G.I. had given him a little book, an anthology, Poems That Touch the Heart. Poems That Touch the Heart. He read the pieces about motherhood and death over and over until he finally drifted off to sleep. He read the pieces about motherhood and death over and over until he finally drifted off to sleep.

"I could hear Elvis dreaming sometimes at night, and I'd get out of my bunk and sit down and start talking to him, maybe joke with him a little bit, get him in a little better mood. He said years later, 'Charlie, if it hadn't been for you,' he said, 'You kept me sane all the way across the ocean.' "

Each morning, Elvis left early for the base, traveling by taxi or hitching a ride from Sergeant Jones. He was back by 6 P.M. P.M., except on Fridays, when he helped clean the barracks (his was number 3707, on the ground floor) and latrines for Sat.u.r.day's inspection.

But three weeks later, the group moved again. Someone more famous than Elvis now occupied the hotel, oil sheik Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia, who arrived with his harem of wives, a dozen children, and an a.s.sorted entourage, all in Bedouin gear. The king handed out gold watches instead of autographs, and Elvis felt upstaged, as Lamar saw it. "He didn't like it that the king attracted all that attention."

And so the Presley camp rented the top floor of Bad Nauheim's elegant and luxurious Hotel Grunewald, a small three-story family establishment festooned with ornamental spires, located at Terra.s.senstra.s.se 10. Everyone but Red and Lamar, who shared a room, had his own quarters, decorated with antique furniture and crystal chandeliers. The wealthy clientele was elderly-Red said they all "looked like they had one foot in the grave and the other one on a roller skate"-but Elvis was happy there. "We put in a kitchen," Lamar recalls, "and Elvis rented a separate room just for the bags of mail." Soon, he would receive between five thousand and ten thousand letters a week.

Among them would be almost daily missives from Colonel Parker. He typed them himself, using the hunt-and-peck method, apprising Elvis and Vernon of all his hard work and bragging about his efforts. Before Elvis sailed for Europe, Parker promised him he would be a bigger star when he came home than he had been when he left. Already, the manager had negotiated new contracts with Twentieth Century-Fox and Paramount for huge increases in fees-$150,000 more than what Elvis would have gotten under the original contract at Paramount, he crowed.

The Colonel couldn't travel to Europe because as an illegal alien, he had no pa.s.sport. But even from afar, he ruled with an iron hand. When Elvis told him Anita Wood was planning to come for an extended visit, Parker insisted she stay home. The press would have them engaged or getting married, and Elvis didn't need that kind of publicity, especially not now.

On October 28, 1958, Elvis wrote Anita a three-page letter on Hotel Grunewald stationery. He called her often ("weird hours . . . very late, because the time change was so different"), but this was his first letter to her from Europe, and his first ever "in a hundred years," he said. But there were so many things he wanted to tell her and couldn't say over the phone, he wrote, his handwriting making big loops of his t ts and y ys.

His words were intensely romantic, Elvis lapsing into predictable lovers' language about how much he missed her, and saying he kept her picture by his bed. But then, after insisting, "I haven't dated a single girl since I have been here," he took on a serious tone.

I want to explain something to you, and you have got to trust me and believe me, because I am very sincere when I say it. I will tell you this much. I have never and never will again love anyone like I love you, sweetheart. Also, I guarantee that when I marry, it will be Miss Little Presley Wood. There is a lot you have to understand, though. Only G.o.d knows when the time will be right. So you have to consider this and love me, trust me and keep yourself clean and wholesome, because that is the big thing that can determine our lives and happiness together.No matter what I'm doing, whether it be the army, making movies, traveling or singing, I will be thinking of the time when we have our first "little Elvis Presley." So keep this in mind and don't get discouraged and lonely. Just remember this is a guy that loves you with all his heart and wants to marry you.

Such demonstrative words must have been a comfort to Anita. Except what Elvis didn't mention was that on October 5, while showing his family around a park in Bad Homburg, twenty-three-year-old Elvis had met sixteen-year-old Margit Buergin, a pretty blond stenographer for an electrical company in Frankfurt. It had happened as soon as they left the Ritters Park Hotel that evening, when a group of shutterbugs from the German tabloids "descended on us like a horde of locusts," in Lamar's words. Robert Lebeck, well known for his photographs of politicians and show business personalities, had asked the pet.i.te beauty to come with him, thinking a pose of the most famous American G.I. with an attractive German girl would make a salable picture. Lebeck asked Elvis to kiss her, and Elvis obliged, and then wanted more. He began seeing her immediately.

Elvis was so smitten with her that he mentioned her in his one letter to Alan Fortas, which he wrote from maneuvers in Grafenwohr, Bavaria, on November 14. "I have been dating this little German 'Chuckaloid' by the name of Margit. She looks a lot like B.B. [Brigitte Bardot]. It's Grind City [a steamy affair]."

The German papers made a big splash of the couple, and soon she was the most-talked-about woman in the country, receiving dozens of letters a day. "She's blond and has blue eyes," Elvis told an Armed Forces Network reporter. "I've seen her about five times already, which is more than any other girl 'round here." He bought her a wrist.w.a.tch, and she showed it off in the press. Elvis called her "Little Puppy."

Back in Memphis, the other "Little" blinked at what she read. She could believe that reporters made up quotes sometimes, as Elvis always told her. But Anita's face flushed when she saw the pictures of him with his arms around another blonde, holding her close and looking deeply into her eyes. She fired off three letters to him about her disappointment.

"Well, I can't blame you," Elvis quickly answered, "especially since that mess was written about 'Little Puppy,' and all that horses.h.i.+t." He then explained how they met, that she was a photographer's model, and a newsman had brought her over the first week he was in Germany.

"I have seen her one time since then," he lied, his letter postmarked on the same day he told Alan about his affair. "I have not been dating her, and . . . I have not tried to keep anything from you. . . . Every night, I lay in my bunk, I see your little eyes and your little nose, and it's almost like you are here, like you are pressed up close to me. I can feel your little hair on the side of my face and sometimes I get so excited and want you so bad I start sweating. WOW!"