Elvis and Ginger: Elvis Presley's Fiancée and Last Love Finally Tells Her Story (20 page)

When the jeweler arrived, he displayed various pieces of jewelry in front of Elvis on the bed. Dr. Shapiro and Susan chose some rings. Like a kid in a candy store, Elvis began pulling the price tags from a few rings, picking out rings for me, Rosemary, himself, and a couple of other people, with seemingly no regard for the cost.

This whole time, Elvis and I were still in our sleepwear. When Larry arrived, Elvis didn’t bother to change, so I didn’t either. Dressed in our pajamas and robes, Elvis and I went into Charlie’s room for the ceremony.

Rosemary, Charlie, and David joined us there. With Elvis acting as best man and me as maid of honor, the wedding got under way with Larry officiating. Elvis was beaming as Dr. Shapiro and Susan began reciting vows they had previously written for one another.

During the ceremony, I noticed some movement from David. As he stood beside Rosemary, he turned and looked at her suddenly with a big grin on his face, trying to hold in laughter. I could see that the marriage ceremony was affecting David slightly differently from the rest of us.

Unable to contain himself any longer, David got down on all fours and began slowly crawling out of the room. Lucky for David, Elvis was so happy and excited about being able to make this wedding happen that he didn’t notice. I would have hated to have anything spoil the moment for Elvis.

Dr. Shapiro and Susan thanked everyone when the ceremony was over. This was such a kindhearted thing for Elvis to do and it was wonderful to be a witness. I was also impressed and amazed he’d been able to pull everything together so quickly and easily.

Surprisingly, the groom wanted to finish working on my teeth a little more afterward, so I returned to the bedroom with Dr. Shapiro and resumed my position in the chair.

After he and Susan left, Elvis asked Larry and Rosemary to come into the bedroom.

Clearly still energized by the wedding, Elvis discussed the ceremony. He loved the idea of saying verses to one another. He picked up
The Prophet
, and read again from its passages on marriage.

At one point, he stopped reading to look over at me. “Ginger, if you and I were to get married, would you consider having Larry marry us?” he asked.

I was blown away. Wow, I thought, he’s bringing up marriage again! This was the first time he’d mentioned it since Las Vegas. I knew he and Larry were friends and Larry looked happy about the idea. “Sure,” I said. I was excited.

Elated, Elvis continued going over his spiritual books. The four of us talked well into the early morning hours. That night, all of the excitement about the wedding and our feelings about marriage continued to swirl around us. Elvis had once again reconfirmed wanting to marry me. Hearing him talk like this made me feel the two of us drawing ever closer to creating a future together.

After spending a little over a week in Palm Springs, Elvis decided it was time to return to Memphis. We all packed up and headed for the airport.

As we entered the
Lisa Marie
, the pilot was having a problem with the engine and the interior lights weren’t working. Rosemary and I followed Elvis toward the back of the darkened plane, where the three of us sat down at the conference table.

The lights suddenly came on and Elvis looked at Rosemary, shocked. He had mistakenly taken hold of her hand in the dark. Quickly letting go of it, he said, “Good God, Ginger, where are you?” He grabbed my hand and the three of us laughed.

Elvis, Rosemary, and I moved into the bedroom, and after a little while, the plane took off safely. Once in the air, Elvis said to me, “You need your own room and a private phone line.”

Surprised, I realized I must have mentioned to him at some point that I shared a room with Terry. I was amazed that he remembered this.

Elvis wasn’t done pondering my living situation, apparently, because then he said, “I don’t like it that you have to drive so far to see me. I’d like you to have a home closer to Graceland.”

I stared at him in disbelief, touched that he wanted me to live closer to him, but stunned by what I thought he might be proposing. Was Elvis really thinking what I
thought
he was thinking? Elvis knew that I lived with my family, so I didn’t think he was suggesting that I leave them to buy a home closer to Graceland for me to live in alone. This must mean that he was talking about a new home for my entire family!

This idea was so over the top that I found it difficult to digest. My parents had just purchased our home. It was modest, certainly compared to Graceland, but we didn’t really need a new house, and I didn’t think of the one we had as being too far away from Graceland. However, I was extremely flattered that he was thinking about how to make my life more comfortable.

Luckily, Elvis quickly moved on to another topic, so I didn’t have time to protest or give him any sort of answer immediately. He did that sometimes, I noticed, enthusiastically flitting from one idea to the next as he bared his thoughts to me. Sometimes it almost seemed like he just wanted me to share what was going through his mind, minute by minute, as a way of letting me know him.

I saw signs that Elvis had a growing concern about my safety. This was part of his protective nature with me. He knew I usually drove around alone so upon our return to Memphis he gave me a Smith & Wesson .22/.32 Kit Gun. He told me to keep it in my car when traveling back and forth to Graceland. This “gift” didn’t surprise me as I had learned that Elvis loved to collect guns, and he owned a great many of them. He enjoyed showing them to me on occasion. Among the guns he brought out were a Derringer with a mother-of-pearl handle, various Magnums, an ivory-handled revolver, and even a machine gun. I thought the guns were really amazing, and especially liked the small pearl-handled Derringer.

I readily agreed to keep the gun in my car. My father kept a revolver and a rifle in our home for protection, but I had never been taught how to use a gun. I wasn’t afraid to have one, though, and it did make me feel more secure. What Elvis was appreciating, and I was not yet aware of, was that my world had changed. I was now in his world where you needed bodyguards, as people could come at you in unexpected ways.

A perfect example of Elvis’s protective instinct would happen months later when I noticed a strange car parked in front of our house with a man inside. He sat there for a long time and I wondered if it was a reporter or photographer. Elvis happened to call at the time and I innocently mentioned that a reporter might be outside my home. “I’m coming over and I will smash his Goddamn lens out,” Elvis fumed. Before I could say another word, the phone went silent and I became worried about a possible confrontation. Luckily the car left, but not long before Elvis’s Ferrari came flying around the corner of our street. All was okay that day, and Elvis simply ended up visiting and taking my sister Terry for an exhilarating ride in his Ferrari.

•   •   •

Now that I was home, I was able to go shopping for Elvis’s birthday present. Elvis had once told me he used to own a monkey named Scatter, so I bought something fun to remind him of that favorite pet: a statue of a monkey holding a candle. I also purchased a large mirror with the outline of Elvis’s face etched on the front. In honor of his love for the way Peter Sellers, as Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films, said the famous line from
Casablanca
, I wrote, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” on a card and taped it to the front of the mirror.

Elvis was tickled by the gifts. He placed the monkey on a shelf in his bedroom and propped the mirror against the wall. They would remain in those places throughout the rest of his life.

•   •   •

Elvis continued to keep to his custom of mainly living upstairs at Graceland, but I was glad to see that he seemed mostly free of stress. We continued enjoying our evenings reading and watching television together. We happened to see an episode of
Saturday Night Live
in which the comic Andy Kaufman appeared as a guest and did his impression of Elvis.

Peering over the top of his reading glasses, Elvis addressed Andy on the television screen. “You better get it right, son,” he said.

We laughed and had fun rooting for him. In the end, Elvis thought Andy did an “all right job,” and told me, “You know impression is the highest form of flattery.”

If I wasn’t at Graceland, Elvis and I usually spoke on the phone twice a day, usually right before falling asleep and again upon waking. I had grown more comfortable with calling him, but most of the time I still waited for his call, not wanting to wake him.

Shyly, I also began to say “I love you” to Elvis on the phone. My family and I loved one another, of course, but we rarely expressed that verbally, so this was a big step for me. However, if I didn’t tell Elvis I loved him first, he usually asked me if I did.

During my visits to Graceland, I was finally becoming a little better acquainted with Elvis’s extended family and friends. Some of their roles still confused me though. I didn’t sense that his cousin Billy Smith was on the payroll or had a particular line of work. He just seemed to be on hand to do things for and with Elvis whenever Elvis wanted him to. Billy was the son of Travis, the guard at Graceland who my father once had been friendly with many years back. Travis had since passed away.

On one of Billy’s visits upstairs, he told me that before Elvis had met me, he and Elvis had been out riding motorcycles once, and after returning home, Elvis laid across his bed and said, “There must be someone out there for me.”

This made me feel good, thinking that maybe I was this person Elvis had been waiting for. I had certainly come to feel we were meant to be together.

On occasion, Billy’s wife, Jo, came to Graceland with him. She had dark eyes, pale skin, and pitch-black hair. She was usually dressed in black and Elvis teased her by calling Jo his “assassin.” Sometimes the two of them would kid around and cut sharp glances at one another, as if each knew what the other one was thinking. As Billy’s wife, Jo had been a part of Elvis’s life for a long time. She and I were always friendly with one another but we didn’t have any time alone together to become good friends.

George Klein visited every once in a while, and he was always nice. On occasion, Vernon made appearances. He maintained an office in a building behind Graceland, along with Patsy Gambill. If he and Elvis needed to go over business or some private matter, sometimes they’d ask me to leave the room, then summon me back afterward. I respected their privacy and never minded this.

During one of these visits, Elvis asked his dad, “Doesn’t Ginger look a little like Mama when she was young?”

Mr. Presley thought a moment. “Yes,” he replied. I smiled back shyly, regarding this again as a compliment. Elvis smiled right back at me, as if satisfied that what he had told me on the plane was confirmed by his father.

•   •   •

We continued to meditate together alone in the bedroom, and sometimes while Elvis read, I would rest my head against his chest, feeling safe, and gently stroke the side of his face with my hand. I loved those peaceful moments. Every once in a while before stepping into his bathroom, Elvis would announce, “I’m going to meditate and clear my mind.” He had also said this in Las Vegas a few times before disappearing into the bathroom and closing the door.

It seemed that Elvis occasionally needed a retreat, to just be on his own. For him, this sanctuary seemed to be his bathroom suite.

One day, we were casually sitting together in Elvis’s room and chatting when, out of the blue, Elvis asked, “Would you like to move in?”

This was completely unexpected and I was more than flattered. I knew this was an offer that many women around the world would jump at, but as much as I had come to love Elvis and think of him as part of my life—and my future—to just move into Graceland without being married first was something I didn’t believe in or feel was appropriate to do at the time. Although this was 1977 and cohabitation was becoming more acceptable, I came from a pretty conservative background. My sisters and I had been brought up to believe that you lived with someone only after you were married. I may have been behind the times in that way, but even being on the road with Elvis was a daring thing to do for me, and I didn’t take these actions casually.

Hoping he would understand, I looked him in the eye and nervously said, “Elvis, it just isn’t my way.”

Fortunately, Elvis seemed okay with that. He smiled and said, “Fine, I respect you for that.”

•   •   •

Late on the afternoon of January 18, just a week or so after returning from Palm Springs, Rosemary and I decided to see a movie near Graceland. I briefly considered asking Elvis to join us, then dismissed the idea as impractical. From my parents’ description of their movie-watching experience with Elvis back in the 1960s, I knew Elvis usually rented a whole theater if he wanted to see a film undisturbed, without drawing the attention of fans. Besides, I hadn’t heard from him yet that day, so I figured he was still asleep.

As Rosemary and I were leaving for the movie, I asked my mother to tell Elvis where I was if he should call. We were getting out of our car at the theater when Steve Smith, one of Elvis’s aides, intercepted us and said Elvis wanted us to skip the movie and go shopping for my family. This was something I didn’t quite understand. For a moment, I wondered if Elvis had done this because he didn’t want me to see a movie on my own. But why would Elvis feel that way?

I looked at Rosemary. I didn’t want to abandon my plan with her. This really put me on the spot and I didn’t know what to do. Elvis had made another of his grand gestures and I appreciated that he was thinking of my family. However, he really didn’t need to buy them anything else. Now Steve was standing in front of me, expecting me to go with him. Do I tell him, “No, thanks, we’re going to the movies?” I had a strong feeling that Elvis would be offended by that.

I turned to my sister. “Do you mind if we see the movie another time?” I asked.

Rosemary shrugged. “It’s okay,” she replied. The two of us then followed Steve to Goldsmith’s Department Store.

Once inside, Steve told us that Elvis wanted us to buy mink coats for our family—and for ourselves. Me, too? Elvis had already given me beautiful coats! However, knowing Elvis as I did by now, I felt certain that if I didn’t select something as he’d requested, he would only bring me back to the store.

I picked out coats for my mother, Terry, and my sister-in-law, then chose a simple black mink for myself. Rosemary found a less expensive fox fur coat she liked, but since it wasn’t a mink, she asked Steve if it would be okay.

Steve called Elvis from a phone inside the store, then relayed to Rosemary that Elvis had said “only minks.” She put the fox coat back and selected a mink.

We followed Steve to Graceland and carried the coats upstairs, where Elvis was in his pajamas and seated on his bed. We laid the coats in front of him.

He looked over our purchases approvingly. As if Elvis hadn’t already been generous enough, though, he said, “There isn’t one for your father or brother.”

I thought he was going to take us back to a store, but Elvis walked over to a closet by his bathroom and began browsing through it. Pulling out a sheepskin coat and a long, brown mink, he laid them among the others. Then he stepped into his loose blue jumpsuit, pulling it up over his pajamas, and secured his black studded belt around his waist. Finally he put on a pair of shiny black boots and tucked his Magnum 57 inside the belt.

“Let’s go to your house,” Elvis said.

I quickly phoned home to tell my parents we were on our way to see them. An aide gathered the coats and piled them into the Stutz. Elvis slid behind the wheel and Rosemary and I climbed inside the car. We left Graceland with bodyguards following in a separate car.

Driving down a two-lane country road near our home, Elvis told us he had noticed another car following ours for quite a while. With no streetlights, it was pitch-black out; I supposed he’d seen the headlights behind the bodyguards’ car.