CHAPTER 17
LAMAR FIKE: One thing people always ask me is, “What did you think of Priscilla?” And I say, “I think she was a very lucky fourteen-year-old.” Very ambitious. Very aggressive. Typical young teenage girl, looking around for some trouble to get into. She loved the idea of being with Elvis, being away from her mother and stepfather.
I was there the day they brought her over from Wiesbaden. In fact, when Elvis came down to the living room, I introduced them. Joe Esposito was the only other person there, I think. One thing led to the other. Elvis was smitten with her from the start.
BILLY SMITH: In the beginning, Priscilla was like every other woman—Elvis thought she was pretty, and her coloring was a lot like his mother’s. And he realized she looked like Debra Paget.
MARTY LACKER: Everybody thinks that Elvis’s meeting Priscilla was the main event of his going to Germany. That’s not true. There were several main events. Vernon’s romance with Dee Stanley, for instance.
LAMAR FIKE: One day, Elvis got this phone call from an American serviceman’s wife, inviting him to come to their home for dinner. She was an older woman, with three little boys. She said she was from Tennessee, and she wanted to welcome a fellow Southerner to Germany. Elvis didn’t want to go, so he told her to call back, that he’d have to talk with his father. When she did, he countered with an offer for coffee at the Hotel Gruenwald. Then he sent his father to meet Devada Elliott—Dee Stanley.
I remember the day. It was the winter of ’58–’59. Vernon and I were having breakfast in the restaurant, and this blonde came up in a white coat. Vernon introduced himself and said Elvis had been called away. So she made her moves on Vernon. Boy, she stalked him like prize game.
It got so bad that I called Elvis in Grafenwöhr. I said, “You’ve got a bad problem here. Your dad is involved with a first sergeant’s wife.” I said, “Her husband is a big bad guy. He’s a heavily decorated lifer—George Patton’s personal bodyguard. I don’t know if we can take him [in a fight].”
At first, Vernon and Bill and Dee were all great friends. Bill was even glad to have somebody to keep her company while he went out on maneuvers. But pretty soon, Red and I started carrying Vernon out of Bill and Dee’s apartment on a semiregular basis because he’d get drunk and pass out. We’d get him in the car and bring him back. One night, we were walking through the parking lot of the hotel, carrying him. I had his legs, and Red had his head. And the MPs came up and put all three of us in the jeep, and we talked them out of arresting us. Next day, Vernon swore up and down it never happened.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis didn’t like Dee from the start. He questioned her sincerity, you might say. Dee was real hyper, nervous.
BILLY SMITH: The “Dee thing” turned Elvis away from his daddy. Vernon had been seeing younger women, and it was too damn quick after Gladys’s death. Elvis resented the hell out of it.
LAMAR FIKE: Vernon started jumping everything that moved the day after Gladys died. We went back to Fort Hood, and I was doing something in the bedroom, and Elvis came in and said, “Where’s Daddy?” I knew where he was. Vernon had picked up this blonde who came over to the house, and he was banging the hell out of her. I said, “He went somewhere with somebody.” Elvis said, “What do you mean ‘with somebody’? Who’s ‘somebody’?” I said, “Just somebody.”
Well, it hadn’t been out of my mouth twenty minutes when Vernon drove in the driveway. It was night, and he got out of the car with her and started walking towards the house. Elvis said, “Who is that?” I said, “I don’t know. It’s just somebody that Vernon said he knew.” Well, Elvis started questioning me and accused me of protecting his daddy.
I said, “I’m not protecting your daddy. She came up here, and he picked her up, and he probably got laid. What the hell?” Elvis said, “You son of a bitch!” And I said, “You asked me, didn’t you?”
Vernon came in, and Elvis said, “Daddy, I want to talk to you.” They got back in the bedroom, and you never heard such hemming and hawing in your life. Elvis said, “Now look! Mama ain’t been in the ground a week! We’re going to have some changes here!”
Then Vernon got over to Europe, and it got worse. When he first started dating Dee, Elvis fought with him about it. Then he thought, “Daddy’s lonely. He needs somebody.” So he finally said, “Okay, bring her over to the house.”
There was a little bedroom right off the living room where Vernon stayed. Vernon would take Dee in there, and when they started banging, Dee would start screaming [with pleasure]. God Almighty, she’d scream so loud you could hear her all over the house. Elvis would turn sixteen shades of red. We’d be in the living room, and he would look at me and say, “I can’t stand this. It’s driving me crazy!” Sometimes he’d just go upstairs. Or Vernon would come out of the room about twenty minutes later, and he’d be real cocky, and he’d sit there.
One time Elvis said, “Daddy, you need to take her in a car or take her out somewhere. Don’t do it in here.” He said, “Everybody in the house is hearing this.”
But it got worse and worse. One time, they spent over an hour in there, and Elvis had about fifteen people in the house. When Dee started to holler, Elvis got up and started playing the piano so damn loud it made Liberace sound like a paraplegic. He beat that piano to death, man.
BILLY SMITH: Months before Elvis came back to the States, he sent his daddy home, supposedly on business, but he was really just disgusted by all Vernon’s carrying on with Dee. But Dee flew back to the U.S. with Vernon. She took her boys back to Virginia and parked ’em with their Aunt Peggy. She said she was trying to get everything straight in her mind. She couldn’t decide whether she wanted to stay with Bill, who she said drank too much, or go with Vernon.
Well, they hadn’t been back anytime when Vernon invited her to come to Memphis to see Graceland. This was in April of ’59. She come over, and Vernon tried to convince her to leave her husband. Word got back to Elvis, and, boy, he turned [on him]. Vernon went back to Germany the next month, and Bill Stanley went home to Virginia to fight for his marriage. Nobody seemed to be on his side, though. [Their son] Billy Stanley says that even his commanding officer told him, “If you raise any hell about this, you can forget your pension.”
Vernon couldn’t stand being away from her. So he sent Dee a telegram which said, “Will be arriving soon, can’t live without you,” or words to that effect. But it arrived while Dee was gone, and Bill read it.
So Vernon arrived in Virginia, and they had a showdown. That’s when Dee put her kids in a kind of fancy orphanage, a private home-school, called Breezy Point Farms. The boys spent the Christmas of ’59 there, and Vernon and Dee went back to Germany.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis was very comfortable while they were gone. That’s when we started going to Munich and different places. Because Vernon’s affair with Dee really bothered him. And I think he felt a little guilty that he’d sent his daddy to have coffee with Dee instead of going himself.
BILLY SMITH: A couple of years ago, Dee wrote a book about her life with Elvis and Vernon. This was her second book. It was never published as a book, but parts of it run in the National Enquirer. That’s where she said that Elvis and Gladys were lovers. Another thing she said was that Elvis had a “secret gay life.” I don’t see how she could know much about Elvis, because she really wasn’t around him that much.
But let’s give her the benefit of the doubt for a minute. Elvis said some harsh things to his daddy about her, things that made Vernon extremely angry. It wouldn’t surprise me to know that Vernon had said some things to her about him when he was mad.
MARTY LACKER: Dee alleges a lot of things she has no way of knowing. She was kept away from Elvis, on his orders. Whatever she heard, she got from Vernon. Or she heard it from her three wonderful boys, Billy, Ricky, and David, who didn’t know diddly. I tell you again, Elvis Presley was not gay.
LAMAR FIKE: Everybody’s got a story, and the tabloids are always willing to print it. In 1991, there was a story in the Globe about a woman named Kim Tracy who claimed that she dated Elvis for five months in Germany, and that she got pregnant by him, and had a miscarriage. She said Elvis called out Gladys’s name during lovemaking and that he would climax and say, “Mama, Mama,” and then, “Sorry, Mama, sorry.”
She also said that Elvis rented a house for her about an hour’s drive from Hamburg and that he kept her locked away in a suite of rooms because he was so jealous of her seeing other men. In typical tabloid style, they had her saying, “I was a prisoner of love.”
I’ve got the article here. She says, “He used to hide under the bedclothes and play a game in which he would say, ‘The snake is coming to get you, the snake is coming to get you.’” Christ. She should hope. I was in Germany the whole time he was there, and I never heard about this woman.
If Elvis had jumped as many girls as it was rumored, he would have had blood running out of his nose all the time. 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 all of us.
After his mother died, he just let loose sexually. We went to Paris for two weeks in the summer of ’59. Everybody thought Elvis went there on vacation. But he went to study karate. And while we were there, we went through the whole Lido chorus line. Same thing at the 4 O’Clock Club. We were staying at the Hotel Prince de Galles. And it got so bad that the club would have to call us at the hotel to get the girls back over for the show. We’d have as many as thirty or thirty-five girls there. You’d get up in the morning and just step over bodies. There were wall-to-wall women everywhere. But that was part of his thing—several in the bedroom at a time.
Elvis liked Paris, so we went back twice more. He liked the Folies Bergère, and the Lido show and the Blue Bell girls, who spoke English, not French. We had three limousines just picking them up and taking them back to the club. That first time, Elvis flew over and Jean Aberbach and an attorney named Ben Starr came along. And Jean showed us around, took us up to the Louvre and the palace. Going back to Germany, Elvis hired a Cadillac limousine for $800 so he could get back in time for the last night of his leave. Those two weeks cost about $10,000.
There was another reason Elvis liked Paris. He’d get in a funk and worry about whether he was still hot. And when we arrived in Paris that first day—you’ve seen those pictures of Elvis walking down the street there—we didn’t make it a block. The crowd got so bad that the gendarmes had to get us back into the hotel. That made him feel like he was still on top.
BILLY SMITH: When all that was happening, I was back in Memphis going to school. I didn’t know anything about what Elvis was really doing. I’d see Anita Wood sometimes, and I just assumed Elvis would marry her when he got home.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis was still talking to Anita for an hour or two at a time. But he just kind of outgrew her.
Do you know the book Private Elvis by Diego Cortez? It’s got a lot of pictures of Elvis, and some of Red and me, taken at the Moulin Rouge, the nightclub in Munich. He’s with all these German dancers, and maybe some B-girls, call girls. Listen, German girls are not innocent. German girls are extremely aggressive. But they weren’t whores. Somebody said the other day that those photos are horrifying, that the girls look so bad. Hey, they looked good to us at the time.
My hair is solid black in those pictures. But then I saw some movie with the great German actor Peter von Eyck, who had solid white hair. I told Elvis I loved Von Eyck’s hair, and he said, “You ought to have that done.” So I dyed my hair white. Man, my head smoked for three days.
Elvis was dating Vera Tschechowa then. He met her when they gave Elvis that BMW. She was an actress who lived in Munich, and Red, myself, and Elvis would go there to see her. We had a driver named Joseph Wehrheim, who drove our big 300 Mercedes four-door sedan to Munich, where Vera would take us to the clubs.
The Moulin Rouge was owned by a retired army sergeant who married a German girl. We would go up there and fool around with the girls, and then Elvis would stay over with Vera and her mother, who was Olga Tschechowa. She was one of the great German actresses, and a favorite of Adolf Hitler. She always called him “The Führer,” never Adolf. I used to talk to her. Tough lady.
In one of the books, Private Presley by Andreas Schroer, Vera says nothing happened between her and Elvis. She says he was more interested in one of the Moulin Rouge girls. Shit, Elvis was after her, all right. That’s why he stayed at her house.
In some of these pictures, he looks like a guy who’s been having nonstop sex for six months. But it wasn’t easy to bring women to the Hotel Edelweiss, where we were staying. It would close. They’d lock the doors at nine o’clock at night. So we raised the window, and we’d bring women in that way. And we got caught. Man, the proprietors raised holy hell with us and kicked us out. It’s amazing that nobody ever got a social disease from these little escapades. But nobody did.
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 behavior with his religious beliefs.
BILLY SMITH: When I got a little older, Elvis told me some of those stories. Right before he left for the army—seems like it was about ’57 or ’58—he wanted to fix me up with a girl for my “initiation to manhood.” That’s what he called it. A much older girl. I was about fifteen. I didn’t go along with it. I was embarrassed to death. I told the girl, “You’re too old for me. I wouldn’t know what to do.” I told Elvis, “I’ll find my own girl in time.”
He was always doing stuff like that, like when he hired a prostitute for Lamar because he thought Lamar was too heavy to get a woman on his own.
When Elvis got back from Germany, he kidded me about still being “untried,” you know. And he told me this other story about Lamar, about how he fell in love in Europe. And he would laugh, boy. That was one of Elvis’s favorite stories on Lamar. He brought it up every chance he got.
LAMAR FIKE: Oh, dear God. I was planning a white wedding.
We used to hang out at a club called Le Bantu, which was behind the Lido arcade in Paris. And we’d stay there ’til six or seven o’clock in the morning because everybody in show business would come there and hang out after they got through. Elvis liked that.
We’d talk to that whole group from the Moulin Rouge. I fell in love with a girl who was in the show. I kept telling Elvis, “I’m in love, I’m in love,” and I went on and on about how pretty she was.
Well, after the show, Elvis went back and talked to some of the girls, including the one I fancied. Elvis asked her to come out and meet me, and next thing you know, I had her out in the car about five o’clock in the morning. We had a sunroof on that car, and it was open. And, boy, I made a move on her and let out a bloodcurdling scream. My “she” was a “he.” In a flash, I was standing up with my head through that sunroof, screaming and laughing. You couldn’t tell a guy from a girl there. Elvis admitted it himself. He said, “Man, if someone hadn’t told me, I never would have known.”
BILLY SMITH: Elvis would say, “Yeah, Lamar fell in love over there. And when it was all said and done, she had one [penis] bigger than he did.”
LAMAR FIKE: It scared the crap out of me. After that, one of the “girls” would sit down by Elvis, and Elvis would look at me, and I would look at him. One time, he said, “What do you think?” I said, “I have no earthly idea [whether it’s a man or a woman]. But I wouldn’t tell you if I knew.” They looked just like women. Their gestures were absolutely perfect.
One night, this girl was sitting two tables over, eating French onion soup. Part of the cheese was in her mouth, and the rest of it dribbled down her chin to the bowl. She sat there sucking that cheese for a lifetime. Elvis said, “Are you looking at that?” I said, “Yeah. Have you ever seen anybody who could suck cheese out of a bowl that good?” And Elvis said, “What do you think it is, a he or a she?” I said, “I don’t know. I’m too nervous to find out.”
We got in there one time, and [the American newspaper columnist] Dorothy Kilgallen was there, trying to get a story on Elvis hanging out with all those girls, or guys, or whatever they were. Elvis sat down, and I looked over to the left, and I saw her. And I turned around and said, “Hey, we got to get out of here. Dorothy Kilgallen’s over there.” And man, we cleared that place so fast.
Finally, we quit going because we got so uneasy. Elvis never got fooled, but he got really anxious about it. He did date a female contortionist one night, at a club in Frankfurt. He stayed in that dressing room five or six hours—came out of there wringing wet.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis never wanted to talk about one of the weirdest things that happened when he was over there in Germany. It gave him the willies.
LAMAR FIKE: In November of ’59, Elvis started taking skin treatments from a guy who called himself Dr. Laurenz Landau. He was a South African, and he said he was a dermatologist. He had this magic formula to keep your face young, and he claimed he was ninety-eight years old, or some ridiculous figure. He bragged about how tight his face was and what a good complexion he had.
At first, he just wrote Elvis letters telling him about his method, which he called Aroma Therapy Treatments. He said he ground up roses, and carnations, and orange blossoms, and all these other flowers, and mixed ’em with yogurt and resins and crap, and put this “elixir” on your face. And he said that after ten weeks of treatments—a “cure” was like twenty treatments a week, two and a half hours a session—his method would reduce your enlarged pores and minimize your acne scares and wrinkles. He told Elvis he advertised in a magazine called Show Biz, and he claimed to have four references. He was pretty upfront about wanting to come to the States and build up a clientele of American movie stars.
Elvis was a sucker for shit like that because he was terrified of getting old and because his skin was pretty rough in places. He had pores big enough to hide a tank in. So he had Elisabeth Stefaniak answer Landau’s letters. Landau gushed over Elvis and acted like a big fan. He said he’d treat Elvis free until they got results if Elvis would send him the money for passage and put him up while he was in Germany.
There were a lot of letters back and forth about this, with Landau asking exactly when he should come. One of the last letters he sent from South Africa said, “Elvis, please don’t disappoint me, as I won’t be able to get over it easily.” And when Elisabeth didn’t answer soon enough for him, he just showed up at the gate.
We brought him in, and every day he would do these yogurt and honey treatments, putting this junk on Elvis’s face and getting him to eat it, too. I remember thinking, “Great God!” Elvis, of course, thought he was getting younger. Here’s a guy twenty-four years old, worrying about his face. I said, “For Christ’s sake! Give yourself a break! Bring this bastard in when you’re about forty.” But he always worried about his skin because he had such a bad complexion when he was a kid.
Little by little, Laurenz got to be part of the regiment. He was an odd duck, very, very different. He was probably about forty, and he had thin, translucent skin. He was extremely aggressive and bossy. And he was snoopy, just watching too much and seeing too much.
As it turned out, Laurenz did himself in. He was always looking at a couple of the guys like he wanted to get ’em alone. And then one day right before Christmas, he was giving Elvis a massage on his face and his shoulders. And all of a sudden, he eased his hand down between Elvis’s legs and gave him a good squeeze. And, boy, Elvis jumped thirty feet up in the air.
Red and I heard all this commotion, and we practically knocked the door down. I grabbed Elvis by the waist and pinned him up against the wall to keep him from killing that guy. And Red got Laurenz out of the house. Elvis beat me in the head, and on my back, and everywhere else, saying, “I’m going to kill the son of a bitch!” And I said, “Look, we don’t need this right now.”
The amazing thing is that on Christmas Eve, Laurenz came over and acted like nothing happened. He wished everybody Merry Christmas and asked Elvis when he wanted his next appointment. Elvis told him to get the hell out, and Laurenz went bananas. He started screaming and picked up a photo album from the table and ripped it right in half. And he said he had all kinds of compromising tape recordings and pictures of Elvis and “a young, young girl” in intimate moments, and he threatened to expose them.
Vernon was practically apoplectic, thinking Laurenz actually had something. I don’t know if that stuff existed or not. I never saw them.
From there, it escalated. Elvis told Laurenz he’d give him a couple hundred dollars for the treatments and enough money for a plane ticket to London. And I think Laurenz agreed to that, but then he called and said he’d given up his entire practice in South Africa for Elvis, and he wanted a bunch more money—serious money—and if he didn’t get it, he’d go to the papers. He was blackmailing Elvis.
It alarmed Vernon because Elvis had told Laurenz that if his treatments worked, he’d help him become a big skin specialist in America. Now Elvis wasn’t following through, and Laurenz was upset. I’m surprised Laurenz didn’t stir up any more than he did because he threatened to tell everybody Elvis had gone back on his word, and that he had a fourteen-year-old girl in his room every night, and that he was a pervert to boot.
Vernon was so worried that he made Elvis go to his commanding officer and tell the army everything that happened. The MPs came over and Elvis sat there and rolled out all the details, except he said that Laurenz had made homosexual advances to several of his friends. He never mentioned he’d copped a feel on him. He probably thought if it got out people would say he’d invited it. Because he knew a little bit about Laurenz’s past in that area—that he was an admitted bisexual and that he’d had his first homosexual experiences growing up in an orphanage. All this made it into the FBI file that J. Edgar Hoover started on Elvis in the fifties.
Later, we found out that Laurenz wasn’t a doctor at all. I don’t know what happened to him. But given Elvis’s later photographic escapades with Priscilla and a couple of other women, I’ve always wondered if Laurenz gave him that idea.
MARTY LACKER: Priscilla says in her book that she and Elvis never had sex until they were married. Personally, I don’t buy it.
BILLY SMITH: When Elvis latched onto Priscilla, it wasn’t much different than being with Heidi, Gloria, and Frances.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis molded Priscilla. And the way she is today is the result of what he did with her when she was fourteen years old. He may not have done a great job, but at one time, she was a lot of fun. The important thing to remember is that Elvis did a great job for himself. That’s all he cared about. He taught her everything about sex, for example. She was what he wanted her to be.
Of course, they slept together before marriage. He never had intercourse with her, but he did everything else there was to do, for Christ’s sake. When it comes to sex, you’ve got to remember that Elvis was more interested in titillation than anything else. 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, and don’t ever think different. He had every fetish there was. He had her going through hoops right from the start.
BILLY SMITH: Oh yeah, he had sex with Priscilla before marriage. Priscilla told my wife, Jo, because they were pretty close when Priscilla first come over from Germany. She told Jo that Elvis entered her one night when they went up to his room in Bad Nauheim. But see, Elvis’s thing was virginity. He told her, “Around the guys, you are a virgin.”
MARTY LACKER: Elvis didn’t think virginity was really all that important. He just wanted everybody to think that the girl he was with was special.
BILLY SMITH: Years after this, in 1966, we all got horses. One day, Priscilla got on her horse, Domino. She was riding it bareback. And Elvis said, “’Cilla, you’d better get off before you lose your virginity.” Perfectly straight-faced, you know. We thought, “Oh, hell.”
LAMAR FIKE: One night in Germany, I had taken Priscilla home to Wiesbaden at three o’clock in the morning, and I came back, and Elvis said, “She’s a virgin.” And I said, “Well, I would hope so. She’s only fourteen years old.”
And he said, “No, I know for sure. I found out tonight.” I said, “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” And he said, “Yeah.” I went, “Okay, that’s interesting. Now, what prison are we going to?” He said, “Nothing will ever happen. I’ve got this whole thing in control.” And I said, “I hope to God you do. Otherwise, they’ll ship us home in a goddamn cage.” And Elvis just laughed.
MARTY LACKER: There was a guy who used to bring Priscilla around to Elvis’s house some, over there in Germany. He would take her home to her parents’ place, and then he’d go back to the barracks. Well, he was a scumbag. He was using cute little girls to get into the house, to be around Elvis. And he tried to put the make on Priscilla one night when he took her home. She says in her book that he tried to rape her. But he didn’t succeed. Elvis told us about it, himself.
BILLY SMITH: This guy—she calls him “Kurt” in her book—definitely had something on Priscilla. Do you think that Elvis Presley would have tolerated somebody who had made a threat on a woman he cared about? Do you think he would have allowed that person to come around? Well, this guy come around several times in California when we got home.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis thought Priscilla was telling the truth. The guy dummied up, probably because somebody paid him or threatened him with death.
MARTY LACKER: Two days before Elvis left Germany, Vernon and Grandma and Lamar flew back to New York. Vernon and Grandma flew on to Memphis, and Lamar and Colonel went to Fort Dix, New Jersey, to meet Elvis when he got off the military transport plane at McGuire Air Force Base. He landed in a blinding snowstorm, and Lamar said Elvis had taken some pills for the flight because he was scared to fly in that kind of weather. A lot of the reporters stayed away, it was so bad.
Elvis had a welcome-home press conference at Fort Dix, and then they drove to New York and got on a private train car and came back to Memphis, stopping in strategic cities for the fans. Somehow, through his friends, Colonel had Senator Estes Kefauver read a tribute to Elvis into the Congressional Record. Elvis had that extra, bogus stripe on his dress uniform, and the whole idea was to make him look like a war hero come home.
LAMAR FIKE: I’m sure Elvis counted every click of that train track, and I’m equally sure he thought about Dee and Priscilla. Both of them would make his life hell, boy. It just took Priscilla a while longer to do it.