I felt Elvis needed some fun and some distraction, so I suggested we go to the Monday-night wrestling matches at Ellis Auditorium. A guy from our neighborhood who had gone to Humes was the stage manager on those nights, and he brought us in the back door and sat us in a VIP section on the stage side of the wrestling ring. Elvis really enjoyed watching the lady wrestlers take each other on, and we saw quite a few good female matches that night. Elvis was particularly impressed by an attractive wrestler named Penny Banner, and was happily surprised when, after her match, she came over to where we were sitting to tell Elvis what a big fan of his she was.
“Well, I like the way you wrestle, honey,” was his response.
Anita Wood was about as serious a girlfriend as Elvis wanted at the time—she’d come on the road with him, she’d stayed at the Beverly Wilshire with him as the Christmas album was being finished, and she was with him for the trip to Tupelo. Elvis always spoke fondly of her and wanted her with him constantly. She was always a part of group outings and parties at Graceland. But Anita was also busy pursuing her own show-business career, and while I think she knew that Elvis was devoted to her when he was with her, she must have also known Elvis Presley was not going to be a typical steady boyfriend.
So, Elvis being Elvis, he wasn’t going to let the opportunity to get closer to a lady wrestler slip away. Penny Banner ended up coming back to Graceland with us, and this wasn’t one of those communal, let’s-go-get-hamburgers dates. Elvis and Penny went straight upstairs to work on their own wrestling moves, and I was left alone.
The lady wrestler may have put Elvis in the mood to have some more fun, because a few days later I was at home in North Memphis when I got a call from Lamar.
“Pack,” he said.
“What do you mean, ‘pack’?” I asked.
“We’re going to Las Vegas.”
That was the way Elvis liked to do things, and within a few hours Elvis, Cliff, Gene, Lamar, and I were on a train out of Memphis, heading for a ten-day vacation in Vegas. The train took us through Kansas City, where we had a ten-hour layover and checked into the city’s famed Mulebach Hotel. When we got up to our rooms we saw that the management had sent up gift baskets of food and some very fine bottles of whiskey. Elvis didn’t drink, and I didn’t drink, and Lamar didn’t drink much, but Cliff and Gene liked to get at the hard stuff, and sometimes that led to them getting into trouble. So one of the first things Elvis did was open those bottles of fine whiskey and pour them down the bathroom sink. I swear, Gene and Cliff were almost crying, “Elvis, please don’t do that.” But he shut them up with a firm response: “Nobody’s getting drunk tonight.”….. to be continued