C. E. Chambers

Posted October 7, 2011

ELVIS PRESLEY: SAINT AND SINNER WHO ALMOST MARRIED SANDY FERRA 

Dan Wooding is an award-winning British journalist, author, and well-known radio commentator and host who lives in California.  He recently interviewed a woman who had dated Elvis Presley for six years.  She had met the King of Rock and Roll at her father’s night club in Los Angeles two months after he had returned from serving in the U.S. Military in Germany.  She was just fourteen-years-old.  Over the course of what sounds like a long and delightful relationship, they discussed marriage.

Sandy Ferra later married Wink Martindale, a popular radio and television personality, who had known Elvis in Tennessee years before she met him.  Sandy Ferra:  “And then Elvis told Wink that I was the nicest girl from the nicest family that he ever knew.”  Sandy and Wink were with Elvis in Las Vegas just months before he died in 1977.

Read Dan Wooding’s full bio after the article.  He’s published forty-four books, including his memoirs, From Tabloid to Truth, and a new novel, Red Dagger.

ASSIST News Service 

“Elvis and the G.I. Blues…”

By Dan Wooding   September 30, 2011

BEVERLY HILLS, CA (ANS) — After Elvis Presley returned to the United States from Germany in 1960 following his time as a G.I., he eventually moved to Los Angeles and with his girlfriend Priscilla pining for him in Germany, Elvis Presley began dating Sandy Ferra, the then 14-year-old daughter of a nightclub owner.

This was revealed at the Media Fellowship International (MFI) Thirteenth Annual Praise Brunch held at the historic Beverly Hills Hotel on Saturday, September 17, 2011, when the perennial American radio and television favorite, Wink Martindale, said, during his keynote address, that his wife, Sandy Ferra, who was in the audience, had once dated Elvis Presley.

That news was too much for an old hack like myself to pass by, so I managed to get an interview Sandy after the event, and I discovered that, because of her young age, she was initially chaperoned everywhere by her mother Mary Lou, and that 25-year-old Presley got no further than kissing Sandy, but apparently he had other intentions.

Media reports said that one night Presley asked Mary Lou if she and her daughter would consider moving to his new mansion, the soon-to-be-legendary Graceland, where he would “raise” Sandy as his future wife.

In this exclusive interview, Sandy told me that she first met the King of Rock and Roll when he visited the Cross Bow, her father’s night club in Panorama City, which is located in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles. He was in town to make “G.I. Blues,” his first film after his discharge from the army.

“Elvis had just got out of the army and one day he came into my dad’s club and saw my picture in the office, and said, ‘I’d like to meet your daughter,'” Sandy recalled. “So Elvis called me, and because it was a school night and my mother wouldn’t drive me up to the nightclub, he said he could come back the next week and he asked me if I could come up and meet him there. In the meantime, my dad came home and told me that he [Elvis] was a ‘gorgeous guy’ because I didn’t know who Elvis Presley was.”

Sandy explained that Elvis didn’t visit the club to sing, but just for recreation.

So, the next week my mother said she would drive me to the club,” said Sandy. “Elvis had a date with a beautiful actress and I just sat there with my little ponytail and frilly dress. He kissed me on the cheek and then he called and told my mother he wanted to date me and my mother said, ‘I don’t care if you’re King Farouk; my daughter’s only fourteen and she can’t go out with you.’ So he said to my mother, ‘Well, you can come on the date,’ so she came on our first three dates.”

Where did you go?  [Read more here and see a photo of Sandy Ferra with Elvis]