Saturday, January 09, 2010

The Women Who Loved Elvis
from The (always wonderful) Daily Beast

This week, Hollywood is abuzz with the news that Warren Beatty has bedded nearly 13,000 women (at least according to author Peter Biskind’s unauthorized biography, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America.

But while the rest of America is left scratching heads and doing the math, there’s also the tale of another pop culture Casanova—Baby, Let's Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him, a new biography by Alanna Nash. Chronicling every major (and minor) relationship in Elvis’ life, from Ann-Margret and Cybill Shepherd, to even (gasp!) Johnny Cash’s gal, June Carter, Nash also notes the ladies who dared to turn Elvis down, even in his glory years—Cher, Karen Carpenter, and Petula Clark were among those who had the physical fortitude to refuse the King.

And in the end, reading about his women does more to cast light on Elvis’ career than many other biographies that proceeded this one—as New Republic critic David Hajdu writes, “Baby, Let's Play House is a masterwork of psycho-sexual history neatly disguised as celebrity journalism."
Read an excerpt from Alanna Nash’s Baby, Let’s Play House.

No comments: