Elvis and his girls

The pretty teen was reeca Smith, who insists: “He didn’t take advantage of me”, though they dated for six months.

She had an infant’s flawless skin wrapped around a woman’s voluptuous body. trying to please the rock

god almost three times her age, she plastered thick mascara on her long lashes, and painted her full red

lips, just as he had asked so many others to do before her. Squeezed into hip-hugging denim hot pants and a tight tank top accentuating every curve, she was a girl Elvis could not resist. He bought her fancy clothes and vowed to

make her a top model – an empty promise.

She was the last in a long line of under-age girls that the rock legend pursued while indulging a voracious

sexual appetite, according to a shocking new book.

“Elvis loved 14 and 15-year-old girls,” reveals author Alanna Nash. “He was insecure about his sexual prowess and wanted virgins so they wouldn’t have anyone to compare him to as a lover. Adult women scared him. He wanted to

mould them and mentor them and they adored him. He didn’t seem to worry that a fling with a child could land him in jail.”

Reeca, now aged 50, says: “I thought it was crazy because I was so young. I was 14 and he was turning 40. He wanted to take me to Las Vegas and Nashville but my parents refused to let me go.

He said, ‘I know you’re young but when you’re older, maybe in a couple of years, maybe we can go places and have more of a relationship.’  “I couldn’t fathom it.” But reeca Smith was merely an echo of Presley’s most famous

illicit love: the schoolgirl who eventually became his wife and ultimately keeper of his £300million estate: Priscilla Beaulieu, who was only 14 years old when she met 24-year-old Elvis. 

Presley’s perverse passion for schoolgirls was the dark side of  a rampant sexual hunger that saw him bed such international  beauties as Ann-Margret and Cybill Shepherd.

“Today we’d call him a sex addict,” says Nash. “There were years when he had a different woman every night. Some nights he’d have four women in different rooms in the same hotel and he’d visit them all in turn.

“But he felt sexually insecure, and was actually more addicted to affection than sex,” adds Nash.

“He hated to be alone and just wanted to be held. the younger the girl, the more accepting and uncritical they were.

“As the world’s premiere sex symbol Elvis felt pressure to perform between the sheets but what he desperately wanted was  companionship.”

His insecurities stemmed from the smothering affection of his mother, Gladys, who clung to Elvis after his twin brother was stillborn beside him, the book claims. “Elvis’s stunted emotional growth left him unable to move much past the emotional age of 14,” says Nash. “He continued to be attracted to young girls up until his death because for

him it was like talking to equals.

“He was looking for a teenage girl with a huge mothering instinct who’d take care of him and be totally understanding of his sexual adventures elsewhere.

“Elvis was a troubled man, grief-stricken by the death of his beloved mother when he was only 23, and he never really found the woman who could fill that void.”

His penchant for under-age girls first emerged in 1958 when, already a huge star, Elvis hosted frequent pyjama parties in his bedroom – but it escalated the following year in Ger- many where he served his military duty.

Uninhibited overseas, Elvis had at least one affair with a 15-year-old girl and spent lengthy periods with another, while a 23-year- old he met was dismissed as “too old”, the book claims.

Elvis met Priscilla in Germany where her US airman stepfather was also stationed. their infatuation was immediate.

Within minutes of meeting in September 1959, Elvis had Priscilla pressed up against a wall, held in a passionate kiss, according to his friend, Currie Grant, but Priscilla has always insisted Elvis was a perfect gentleman and that her honour was intact when they wed eight years later.

When his military service ended in 1960 Elvis returned to America to star in a string of uninspired

movies and found other under- age girls for his pleasure.

HE became obsessed with Sandy Ferra, the 14-year-old daughter of a Los Angeles nightclub owner. But her

mother joined them on every date, prompting Elvis to ask if Sandy could move with him to Graceland in Memphis.

“I just want to raise her,” he said with a straight face. “I want her there as my wife.” Sandy’s parents rejected the surreal request yet the romance continued for another six years, interspersed with many of Presley’s other conquests, young and old.

But it was Priscilla, still in Germany, for whom he truly pined. Elvis bought her a first-class round trip ticket to Los Angeles, where he had her made over – hair teased into a giant beehive, eyes glued to two pairs of false eyelashes – and bought her a new wardrobe.

It was a pattern he was to repeat with many girls through the years as Reeca Smith later discovered. Priscilla stayed in Memphis while Elvis often fled to Hollywood, partying nightly with his many lovers including Swedish beauty Ann-

Margret, and indulged in wild orgies in Las Vegas and Palm Springs.

“Every night we were out chasing showgirls, partying with them all night, finally going to sleep in the morning,” recalls friend Joe Esposito. By the time Elvis  proposed to Priscilla in 1966 “there was still love there but the intensity was gone”, claims Presley’s pal Sonny West. Elvis was pushed into  marriage by his manager Colonel

Tom Parker and Priscilla’s father, says Nash.

Priscilla thought that marriage would end his philandering and Parker hoped Presley would clean up his life. They were all wrong.

Within a week of their wedding, Elvis was down on one knee telling Ann-Margret that he loved her.

A few months later he was romancing Nancy Sinatra. And when Priscilla fell pregnant with Lisa-Marie, Presley lost his sexual interest in her, the book claims.

Eventually even Priscilla could take no more. “Though it took a long time she finally became Priscilla, her own person,” says Nash. “She didn’t want to be his child or mother  –  she wanted to be his wife and she wanted a normal mate, which he could never be.”

Despite his thousands of con- quests, Elvis was not always a stud in bed, especially in his later years, claims Nash.

“As time went on and he had a number of physical problems he was not always capable  of enjoying sex,” she says.

“Many women spoke of spending the night with him without having sex.”

Elvis remained obsessed with his dead mother and in his final bloated, drug-addled months, Nash reveals:

“Reeca Smith witnessed his attempt to ‘speak’ to Gladys in a sort of séance.” Smith finally broke off their forbidden liaison, upset by his ballooning bulk and deteriorating health which would kill him at the age of 42.

“It breaks my heart, but I don’t think anybody could save him,” she says. Three decades after their  relationship, Smith still has the floor-length coat that Elvis bought her, in gaudy Seventies’ scalloped stripes of blue leather, suede and denim covered in rhinestones.

“Elvis had good taste in clothes,  I must say,” says Smith. “Thirty six years later and it still fits... well, almost,” she laughs, as her ample bosom bursts out of the coat. Elvis would have approved – though at 50 Smith would be far, far too old for the teen-obsessed King of rock.

l To order a copy of the book Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis And His Women by Alanna Nash (Aurum Press) please send a cheque or PO for £25 made payable to Express Bookshop, and send it to: Nash Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth,  TR11 4WJ. Alternatively, telephone  0871 988 8367 or buy online at  www.expressbookshop.com, with free UK delivery. Calls cost 10p per minute from UK landlines.