Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies Read Online Free Page A

"When I twirled my tassels I'd say, `Someday I'm gonna fly if I can get enough RPMs!" It must have been quite a salacious spectacle. The sailors blushed and stammered when she twirled their peaked white hats round and round on her creamy globes. "I had so much fun with those navy men. I'd slide up to the end of the stage on my knees and say, 'OK, who's first?"' There were those who looked down their highfalutin noses, believing that Tura was nothing but a plaything for men. "It was the other way around," she insists. "Men were my playthings."

    It was after a wild night of tassel twirling for agog sailors in Biloxi, Mississippi, that Tura made the acquaintance of a certain blossoming rock and roll singer. "I was a big draw that night," she recalls with delight. Oftentimes it took the teenage girl hours to unwind after dishing out damp dreams to horny strangers. On this early morning, she was cooling down by walking along the sand outside the club. "I was unwinding on the beach and this good-looking guy came walking up to me, and I said, `Nice night, isn't it?' `Yes it is, ma'am.' `Ma'am?' I was only sixteen years old and I'd never been called `ma'am' before. I'd been fibbing about my age, everybody thought I was nineteen. He said, `What are you doing out here so late at night?' I told him I was trying to unwind, and he said `You too?" The young couple walked slowly along the beach, then sat on the sand, talking 'til the sun came up. "He said he did a show up the road apiece, but I didn't know who he was. Once I took a look at those eyes of his, aahhh...." Tura has always had a weakness for blue eyes. "I looked at his eyes and thought, `Oh God, this one's a keeper." Later she realized she'd never even asked his name.
    They didn't meet again until nine months later when the twenty-one-year-old arrived backstage at Chicago's Follies Theatre with the owner. "Do you remember me?" Elvis asked. "Biloxi," Tura said, smiling. "I didn't know your name then, but yes, I remember Biloxi." Turned out Elvis did see Tura's show in Biloxi, and he enjoyed her Follies routine as well. When he wondered how she moved the way she did, Tura told him her routine was based on martial arts. "He asked if I could teach him," she recalls with a throaty chuckle. "I told him, `Martial arts is not only a disciplinary art form, it also teaches you control,' and he said, `Well, you sure got control!" He wanted to know how she did the slide and the splits at the same time. How she did the shimmy, how she shook all over. He was quite intrigued. The enamored singer then jokingly asked Miss Japan Beautiful if she could teach him how to twirl the tassels. "I said, `No, honey. I can't teach you how to spin two tassels, but I can teach you how to spin one!" Elvis grinned, "Well, that might be a novelty."

    Elvis may have been shaking up the planet, but even back in '56 he had the Colonel's minders watching his every move. Obviously smitten, he wanted to be alone with Tura. He somehow managed to sidestep his two furtive sidekicks and take her to breakfast at an all-night diner. "He had the aura-you knew he was going to go places. I was drawn to him mostly by his smile," Tura says wistfully. "And that Southern drawl could make your knees melt. Back then he was so down to earth, so natural. He had the magnetism; he drew women right and left. He was a natural attraction."
    Elvis was able to slip away from his protectors two more nights in a row, but the third evening they parked outside Tura's family home, waiting while Elvis enjoyed his first Japanese meal, cooked by Tura's daddy. "The Colonel and those two guys thought that was the last of it, but anytime he could get away and sneak out of his room, I would meet him at a hotel or at my friend's house."
    On the first couple of dates, Elvis gave Tura "wet kisses on the cheek," which she thought was sweet, but when he got to her mouth and gave her a "wet fish" kiss, she felt it was her duty to teach the boy one of life's