In July ’63, Elvis began filming Viva Las Vegas with a Swedish-born actress-singer-dancer the press dubbed “the female Elvis.” Discovered by comedian George Burns in Las Vegas in 1960, twenty-two-year-old Ann-Margret [Olsson] had made only three other films, State Fair, A Pocketful of Miracles, and Bye, Bye Birdie, the latter loosely based on the Elvis saga. But her combination of personal magnetism, hyperfemininity, flirtatious sensuality, and wholesome reserve had already made her the quintessential Hollywood sex kitten. Men would have died for her.
One night before principal photography began, Elvis invited the red-haired actress to the Perugia Way house to get acquainted. The night before, he informed the guys that he wanted no one to accompany him when he went to pick her up. Furthermore, he expected the house to be empty when he returned.
Yet this was different from Elvis’s usual trysts with Hollywood starlets. In a photograph taken of the two of them at a birthday party for Ann-Margret’s landlady, Elvis looks more emotionally vulnerable than in any other picture with a woman since those taken with his mother. Whether Elvis was intrigued with Ann-Margret simply because she was his female counterpart, their obvious chemistry made Viva Las Vegas, another formulaic musical with a simple-minded plot, one of Presley’s most memorable vehicles.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis’s affair with Ann-Margret was not just an affair. He was really in love with her. It got hot and heavy. Phew!
MARTY LACKER: They started shooting the picture in Hollywood first, and then 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. No one ever saw them.
That drove Red and Lamar absolutely crazy. They tried to get them to come out, but nothing doing. Elvis wouldn’t even answer the door for room service. They had to leave the food tray outside. Then when Elvis made sure everybody was away, he’d pull it in. So to play a trick on them, Red and Lamar stuffed newspaper under the door and lit it. They just aggravated the shit out of them. This is pretty childlike, but they even shined butter knives ’til they looked like mirrors. And then they slipped ’em under the door to see if they could see Ann without her clothes on. They tried everything. But Elvis and Ann would not come out of that suite.
I think their episodes were a lot different from the kind Elvis had with other girls. And so what? Neither one of them was married, and they really cared a lot about each other. She was a pretty strong person, and she was the first girl in a good while that he felt really connected with. Ann’s as smart as a whip. And she adored him. And Priscilla was back at Graceland.
BILLY SMITH: Once you met Ann, you didn’t forget her. She had the same effect on men that Elvis did on women.
LAMAR FIKE: Everybody was in love with Ann. Even the director of the picture, George Sidney. Ann didn’t want his attention, and she started telling Elvis, “He won’t leave me alone.” So Elvis got pissed off at Sidney, and one thing led to the other. Colonel went to see the dailies, and he sat there with his mouth open—Sidney had the cameraman shoot four minutes of Ann’s butt moving. In close-up. And even in their two-shots, there was more of Ann than there was of the two of them. Colonel went bananas. He said, “I’m not going to put up with this!” There was a lot of shit flying around during the editing of that picture.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis and Ann had a lot in common. For example, she could ride a motorcycle, and she enjoyed being out on one. She was in the music business to a certain degree, and she was an actor with a hot career. She also had an ego like he did.
MARTY LACKER: I think the fact that they were so similar is why they understood each other. They were also very sensual people.
LAMAR FIKE: Very seldom would Elvis ever go anywhere by himself, but he’d go out alone with Ann. It used to rattle all of us. We would give him a bunch of money, and he’d jump in that Rolls-Royce and stay gone. Nobody knew where he was, except that he was with her. It blew our minds.
MARTY LACKER: Ann genuinely liked people, and she liked every one of us. She wasn’t intimidated or threatened by us. I think she also respected us. We used to have a lot of fun with her. She had a terrific sense of humor. We called her “Rusty” because that was her name in the movie and because of her red hair.
A couple of years after Viva Las Vegas, she was doing The Cincinnati Kid on the same lot where we were doing a movie. Alan and I went over to her dressing-room trailer one day. The door was open, and the director was there. But when she saw us, she asked the director to give us some time together. In other words, Ann was a very gracious person, and she was like that with everyone.
BILLY SMITH: Alan was in love with her, plain and simple. One time, Elvis and Ann and Alan and I went to Vegas in the Rolls. Alan and I were in the back. And it got a little cool back there. Ann had this white fur coat, and she threw it in the back for us to cover up with. And, boy, Alan just had a fit. He was intoxicated by that perfume in her coat and by her smell. He just went wild. Ann practically had to wrestle him to get it back.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis tolerated us saying things to Ann because she took it in the right spirit. One night, Elvis and Ann and Alan and I were outside in the courtyard at Perugia Way. She was going on location the next day, and we’d all walked out to her car. She’d just bought a pink Cadillac.
Everything about this woman, everything she wore, smelled fantastic. Elvis was standing next to her. And I had my hand hooked into her arm, with my head resting against the sleeve of her coat. Elvis didn’t seem to mind because he knew that she was totally involved with him and that none of us had a snowball’s chance in hell of ever dating her, anyway.
I said, “Ann, what is it you wear that smells so wonderful?” And she started to laugh. She had a funny little laugh, almost like a giggle. Her face would light up. She didn’t really answer me because Alan kept trying to get her to tell him what kind of perfume she wore, too, and she never would.
I remember she had on these tight white pants—really tight against her legs. Alan kept staring at them, staring at her body, and finally he said, “Ann, would you do me a favor?” And she started to giggle because of the way Alan said it. She said, “What is it, Alan?” He got this little impish look on his face, and he said, “Would you run around the block about four times and let me have your pants?” About a second passed, and then both Ann and Elvis just fell on the ground, laughing.
LAMAR FIKE: The only other person Elvis ever costarred with who had that same kind of personality was Shelley Fabares. Both she and Ann were fun people to be around. Ann took everything with a laugh. She didn’t give Elvis any problems. And she was never threatened by another woman.
MARTY LACKER: I don’t think Ann ever questioned Elvis about Priscilla. She was too sure of herself. None of us knows whether she ever brought up the idea of marriage. After a while, Roger Smith came into the picture, but I think she cared so much about Elvis that she put Roger off for a time. Every once in a while, Elvis would say, “Roger Smith calls her, and she goes out to dinner with him, but there ain’t nothing there.” But even though I think Ann and Elvis were really, truly in love, I still don’t think he would have married her. He bought her a round, pink bed. Had somebody make it for her. But that wasn’t a proposal of marriage. That was a proposal of something else. This idea that Ann was the love of his life . . . if you ask me, Elvis didn’t have one. I’m not sure he was capable of it.
LAMAR FIKE: I think Elvis would have married her in a New York second. But he made it clear he’d do it only if Ann quit the business. Elvis believed in the old Southern idea of the wife stays home and cooks dinner and has it on the table when the husband gets home. And Ann was very career-oriented. She wouldn’t do it. She’d worked all her life to get where she was, and she wasn’t going to let anybody stand in her way.
BILLY SMITH: There’s no doubt that Elvis was in love with Ann-Margret. But he would have remembered the advice his mama give him. Which was, “Don’t marry anybody in the business. Your careers will clash.”
MARTY LACKER: There’s a simpler explanation for this. He didn’t want to look up on a movie screen and see her in bed, kissing somebody. He couldn’t have handled it.
BILLY SMITH: Priscilla was so scared that Elvis would marry Ann-Margret that she even tried to be like Ann. Jo spent a lot of time with her, and she says Priscilla watched Ann’s movies and learned some of her dance moves, and tried to dress like her, and had her hair done like hers. She’d stand in front of a full-length mirror just cussing Ann, all the time trying to be as much like her as possible. It was pitiful. How could she compete? She’d just graduated from Catholic school, where she wore those little uniforms, and now she’d enrolled in the Patricia Stevens Finishing School there in Memphis.
MARTY LACKER: Priscilla heard the rumors about Ann-Margret. The fan magazines even said they were going to get married. But Elvis told her that the romance was just publicity generated by the studio.
BILLY SMITH: They had plenty of arguments about Ann. I don’t know to what extent because usually those took place up in his room, away from everybody else.
MARTY LACKER: This story of Elvis and Ann-Margret has an ironic twist. They used to have these gospel shows at what was then Ellis Auditorium, in Memphis. Priscilla got Patsy to go with her once, and Mylon Lefevre, of the Lefevre Family, was on the show. And Priscilla went nuts over him. He’s a wild-looking guy, or he was back then, with long hair flying everywhere. He was the black sheep of the family because he sang more modern music—he eventually became a Southern rocker—and because of the way he looked and lived.
After the show, they went backstage to meet him, and according to Patsy, Priscilla openly flirted with him. And when he came back in town, she wanted to go see him again. She tried to get Patsy, and then Jo, to go with her. But Patsy and Jo had already talked about it, and they said no. So Priscilla went on her own. She went down to the auditorium every time Mylon came to town, and she didn’t always have a companion.
I don’t know if Elvis knew about Priscilla’s flirtation with Mylon or not. I don’t think so. It’s not something you tell a guy like Elvis Presley.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis never knew. He would have beat the shit out of Mylon, or tried to. And he certainly wouldn’t have recorded one of his songs [“Without Him”] a few years later.
The funny thing about this is that Elvis was too good a teacher because real quick-like, Priscilla grew to be just like him. When he said he wanted to get these girls at a young age so he could mold them and bring them up, he didn’t count on Priscilla being just as flirty as he was.