Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Elvis was too in demand to have to give up the majority of his Saturday nights for the Hayride now, so the Colonel sent Horace Logan a cashier’s check for $10,000 to buy out his contract, with the promise to appear on a special Hayride charity show in December. Logan was getting a bargain, the Colonel told him. By then, Elvis would be so big they’d have to hold that show someplace other than KWKH—the girls would tear the place down.

  The swirl of it all “appears to be a dream to me,” Elvis told reporters in Lexington, Kentucky. He was sounding more optimistic now, in part because he had a new ally. Joe Hazen, Hal Wallis’s business partner, was excited about Elvis’s potential as an actor. He sent a memo to Wallis saying Elvis’s “meteoric rise is unquestionably a freak situation, but that still does not detract from the fact that as a straight actor the guy has great potentialities.” Elvis, who hoped he wouldn’t have to sing in his movies, was beside himself with joy. The former movie theater usher told Wallis, “My ambition has always been to become a motion picture actor—a good one, sir.”

  In March Elvis, buoyed by a future in films and the Colonel’s promise of turning a million dollars’ worth of talent into a million dollars, paid $40,000 for a single-story, ranch-style house for himself and his parents at 1034 Audubon Drive, located in a fashionable, upscale neighborhood of doctors and lawyers east of downtown Memphis near Memphis State University. A typical American dream home with pastel green board-and-batten siding, slate gray tiled roof, red brick trim, and black shutters framing white windows, it was the first house the Presleys had owned since leaving Tupelo. Elvis was proud that he could provide it, and he particularly liked the double carport: he and Vernon were constantly jockeying automobiles in the driveway.

  The home had three bedrooms, and Elvis used one for his huge collection of stuffed animals, many of them gifts from fans. For his primary bedroom, Gladys chose a remarkably girlish motif, decorating twin beds with pink taffeta dust ruffles and white quilted bedspreads with pink-and-blue flowers. From there, she hung pale yellow wallpaper flecked with blue and orange—white ceramic figures, caught in midleap on black oval plaques, dotted the walls—and installed a dark pink telephone that matched a selection of his pink stuffed animals. In truth, his room looked like something his fans would have wanted themselves, but Elvis seemed not to mind.

  That spring, he began seeing Barbara Hearn, a friend of Dixie Locke he had known casually for several years. A dark-haired beauty who bore more than a passing resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara exuded sophistication and intelligence. Soon, she would be first runner-up in the Miss Memphis contest, the other contestants voting her “Miss Personality” for her charm and wit.

  But Barbara also had a quiet, serious side. Like Elvis, she was an only child and found herself in the same role reversal that Elvis had with his mother, in that sometimes she was the parent. Her mother and father divorced when she was still quite young, and she lived with her grandparents until she was twelve. “My mom was sort of a party animal, and I worried about her a lot, because I would mostly get in before she did.”

  She had seen Elvis perform once at the Odd Fellows Hall. A friend had called and asked if she wanted to go see the new hillbilly singer. Barbara asked his name. “Elvis,” her friend replied. Barbara said, “What’s an Elvis?”

  The next time she saw him, he was dating Dixie, with whom she went to school at South Side High. At Christmas 1954 they’d both gotten jobs at Goldsmith’s department store, Dixie assigned to the basement and Barbara to the main floor bakery, which proved to be a bit beyond her.

  “The first person who came up wanted a loaf of French bread, and she said she wanted it sliced. So I put the French loaf in the slicer, and I was supposed to pull the lever and then put the bread in and push the button. But I didn’t, and I pulled the handle, and it shot that loaf of French bread all the way across Goldsmith’s main floor. Quickly, I found myself in the basement with Dixie, in the ‘seconds,’ in men’s underwear and socks.”

  Barbara and Dixie rode the bus to work, but one day Dixie said her boyfriend was coming to pick her up. She’d see if he would give Barbara a ride, too, since she didn’t live far out of the way. When the big Lincoln pulled up (“It was so huge we could have gotten everybody who worked in the basement in there”), Barbara was surprised to see it was Elvis.

  From then on, Elvis gave Barbara a ride home many times, and often she would go with Dixie to visit his parents on Alabama Street. Elvis was already appearing on the Louisiana Hayride and doing road shows, so Barbara got to know his family before she really knew him. She liked them all, including Elvis’s grandmother. (“She was a great old lady.”) Barbara even liked Vernon, who was more standoffish than Gladys, “certainly not outward and friendly like she was.” But once when Barbara and Dixie were visiting, Vernon overrode his own frugality and went out and bought a bag of hamburgers for everyone. As far as Barbara was concerned, the Presleys may have had very little, but they were a nice, hospitable family, and she felt comfortable in their modest home.

  At the time, Barbara was dating Ronald Smith, the musician who had suggested that Elvis try out for the ill-fated job with Eddie Bond’s band. But when she next saw Elvis, in early 1956, much had happened—he and Dixie had broken up, and she and Ronald, too. She was now working as an advertising copywriter for a local jewelry store, Perel & Lowenstein, and since she was so photogenic, her boss sometimes asked the nineteen-year-old to do the store’s live TV commercials (“standing up and showing off their stuff”), broadcast during the weather and the news.

  She was at WMC-TV one night, on the job, when Elvis dropped by the station to visit his friend George Klein, who worked in radio out of the same building.

  “Elvis came to the window of the TV studio and poked his head in and watched what was going on. When I came out, the first thing he said was, ‘How’s Dixie?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since we got out of school.’ ”

  Barbara was moved that Elvis still cared enough about Dixie to ask. But Elvis interpreted her comment to mean that Barbara no longer had any special allegiance to Dixie, and that she was free to date whomever she pleased. She had a girlfriend waiting with her at the studio that night, and Elvis suggested the four of them go to the Variety Club. When they got there, they were surprised to find themselves the only people in the place. They had a Coke and sat and talked, and Barbara could tell he was interested in her.

  “He said he was going on a tour, and he would call me from there. I said, ‘Okay,’ and gave him my telephone number. And sure enough, he did.” Barbara would become Elvis’s first publicly acknowledged girlfriend as he hit the national spotlight, and they would be much photographed together.

  Unlike most of the girls Elvis dated, Barbara wasn’t mesmerized by his stage movements. She liked the way he kissed, and certainly theirs was a boy-meets-girl attraction, even though “I wasn’t carried away by his looks or anything.” She didn’t think he was strange, as so many did, because she was attracted to unusual people. But she found him surprisingly insecure—that’s what all the hair primping and clothes were about, she thought, not vanity. But she also thought he was “very personable,” and fun and funny, and he made her laugh. She never knew just what he was going to do.

  “Often, Elvis would drive up alongside the bus that I was riding home. He would get the attention of the bus driver and have him stop so I could hop off and continue my journey home with him, sometimes on his motorcycle. Of course, all the other passengers were thrilled to see him.”

  Their dates included many of the typical activities Elvis had shared with Dixie—going to the Fairgrounds, taking in a movie, riding around and stopping for burgers and Cokes, and driving over to Poplar Tunes and looking through records. They talked by the hour about music, listening to the radio and discussing the songs and the singers. They would often sit at the organ, and Elvis would play their favorite song, Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel’s “Make Believe,” and try to get B
arbara to sing with him, teasing her because she couldn’t carry a tune.

  When Elvis was away, Gladys would often call Barbara and ask her to come out to the house and visit with her, and Gladys sometimes sat at that same organ. “She couldn’t actually play, but she would touch the keys, and it seemed to produce the most mournful sounds. A lot of people say she was funny and witty, but I never saw that side. She was interesting and amusing at times, but after Colonel Parker and the fame came into play, I think she was more sad than anything, wishing she could awaken and find life as it was before, knowing it would never be, and just not wanting to accept the definite change.”

  Things seemed to be closing in around Gladys. The Audubon Drive neighbors wanted a word with her about everything—they didn’t like it that she hung out her wash (“This is not that kind of neighborhood”), and they hated the fans who trampled through the grass and clogged the traffic on their quiet street. It all just made her nervous, like the trees she’d had cut down around the property in Tupelo. She started taking diet pills to help with her weight, and like so many in her family, she began to drink heavily, eating onions to disguise her breath.

  Her older sister Lillian had spoken to her about it, though Barbara never knew her to be the slightest bit intoxicated. “She was always neat, clean, and meticulously dressed, even in a duster housecoat, and never appeared in hairpins or curlers. She carried herself as a woman who still felt she was the attractive girl she once was.”

  However, deep down, Gladys was gripped with fear that someone would hurt Elvis. She was gracious to the girls who came to the front door, and handed out face tissues so they could wipe the dust off of Elvis’s cars and keep it. But she was obsessed that they would accidentally tear him apart in their love for him, or, after the Texas incident with the roughneck, that their jealous boyfriends would kill him. Young men, angry that their girls had made fools of themselves in charging the stage, were already saying rude things like they wanted a piece of his ass, or they wanted to knock the shit out of this pretty boy, change his face. It made Gladys tremble all over. When Elvis and Barbara went to the movies, “I would telephone her a couple of times during the evening to let her know that we were all right, and that there was nobody threatening around.”

  Gladys worried so much that she kept herself in a perpetual state of gloom, and her health began to fail. She was often run-down, and her feet swelled from kidney trouble. Her eyes, dark shiners now, took on a frightened look. Overall, she was proud, anxious, and lost. Elvis thought maybe she needed a pet and got her a tiny lapdog named Sweetpea, after the adopted son of Popeye, the cartoon sailor, but Gladys didn’t really like animals all that much, and little seemed to cheer her.

  “She was serious and concerned,” says Barbara. “She had to be. Goodness knows she was the captain of that little ship, with all the responsibility that entailed.”

  Vernon, as usual, was virtually no help. He was still nearly a nonparticipant in the household, and besides, he was preoccupied with the idea of Elvis buying him a used car lot (“Presley’s Used Cars”). He thought he could make a go of it, and it would get him out of the house.

  For the time being, he helped Barbara answer Elvis’s fan mail, which arrived in big, bulging canvas sacks, even though much of it had been funneled to Kay Wheeler, the fan club president in Texas, or Colonel Parker’s office in Madison. “I wrote most of Elvis’s fan letters,” Barbara remembers, “and Mr. Presley and I signed his name.”

  As Dixie had before her, Barbara was becoming like one of the family now, and Gladys sometimes visited her mother, Pearl, a strong, determined, charming woman, at her home on Marjorie Street. For the longest time, Vernon parked on the street, and Gladys huffed and puffed up the long steps to the big Victorian house. Finally, one day Barbara’s aunt came out and said, “Mrs. Presley, why don’t you just drive up to the back door? There are no steps back there.”

  Just as Elvis had a way of making every girl feel as if she were the one, Barbara saw that Gladys did the same. “I know she liked me and enjoyed my company. We would go for the proverbial Sunday afternoon drive when Elvis wasn’t home, and we sat and talked together a lot. But I think she made all of the girls feel special. I understand why so many say that Mrs. Presley wanted Elvis to marry them. She wanted him to get married, and she wanted lots of grandchildren.”

  And so Barbara wasn’t surprised when Elvis gave her a ring, even though she had mixed emotions about it. They were at Jim’s Steak House in Memphis, having dinner with some other people, when suddenly, “He just reached in his pocket and put this little ring box in front of me. My first thought was ‘Oh, no! He’s going to ruin everything!’ Because I truly thought for a second that it was an engagement ring, and getting married at nineteen was way down on my list. When I saw that it was a black onyx with a couple of diamonds around it, I was so happy. I did not want to get married. I wanted him to care for me, and I cared for him a great deal, but I would have been happy to have gone on as we were practically forever.”

  In retrospect, she and Elvis weren’t a great match, because they both came from “a family of worriers—I could give lessons, really, in worrying.” While Gladys perseverated about one thing, Vernon stewed about another, usually money. “We were having a meal at their house, and Mr. Presley was going through the bills. He picked one up and looked at it, and he said, ‘A hundred and twenty-six dollars!’ And then he named a jewelry store. He said, ‘What in the world is this for, son?’ And Elvis said, ‘Oh, Daddy, don’t spoil everything for me!’ It was my ring, a hundred and twenty-six dollars.”

  Barbara saw the humor in such a situation, but she was far more troubled by Elvis’s jealous streak. One night, they went up to talk to Dewey Phillips, and they came out of the radio studio to find a large crowd had gathered for Elvis. He stopped to talk to people, and Barbara stepped back out of the way. In a moment or two, a young man came up and started making conversation with her.

  “Elvis broke away from that crowd, came over, got me by the arm, and marched me like a naughty child down to his car. I thought, ‘What in the world is happening here?’ I said, ‘What’s the matter? Are you angry with me?’ And he said, ‘I don’t want you standing around talking to men on the sidewalk.’ He went on and on and on, and I was just flabbergasted.”

  The irony, of course, was that Elvis felt free to do whatever he wanted with other women. “My husband tells everybody that Elvis and I dated steadily for a year. And I say, ‘No, I dated him steadily for a year. He didn’t date anybody steadily for more than fifteen minutes.’ ”

  Their relationship was thoroughly chaste. “Lots of hugging, kissing, and closeness—perhaps activity a lot of girls would have killed to participate in—but nothing sexually explicit. Reputation was a big deal around my house.”

  Barbara never asked him about it, but she suspected that he divided women into “good girls” and “road girls,” the latter of whom were fair game and didn’t mean anything to him beyond the moment. “He was very, very respectful to women. If you could see how he treated me, my mother, his own mom, his grandmother. We were people he cared about. The ones who went backstage were in a different category. They were fans.”

  On April 15, 1956, Elvis, billed as “the Nation’s Only Atomic-Powered Singer,” played the Municipal Auditorium in San Antonio, Texas. There to meet him was Kay Wheeler, the virginal, seventeen-year-old president of the first national Elvis Presley fan club. Kay was in something of a teenage daze. A year earlier, she hadn’t even been able to find a picture of Elvis. But by early 1956, working from her Dallas home and aided by her two sisters, she had built the club into more than 20,000 members, each of whom received a large autographed photo of Elvis, a “Presley pink” membership card, and a four-page monthly newsletter, “The Presley Press.” Though the Colonel’s office had encouraged her efforts, Kay was as atomic-powered as the object of her affections, and only Colonel Parker matched her devotion and energy in promoting Elvis into a major heartthro
b. Campaigning radio stations to play his records, and instructing the flock to do the same, she hardly had any time for homework, let alone her boyfriend, Pat.

  At the beginning of the month, Kay had received a letter from Parker’s secretary, Carolyn Asmus, telling her that Elvis would be on tour in Texas, and inviting her to attend the kickoff show in San Antonio. Shortly thereafter, she received a telegram from the Colonel himself, authorizing her to go backstage. When the big day came, she chose a clinging, pale beige sheath dress, dangly pearl earrings, and a pair of spike heels. Then she boarded the Greyhound bus for a 270-mile ride that would mark her first trip away from home. “Hell and high water wouldn’t have stopped me. I looked out that Greyhound window thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to see Elvis.’ ”

  When she arrived at the auditorium, an old, dirty structure that seemed too unglamorous for what was about to unfold, she flashed her telegram to a guard, who waved her through. Backstage, Tom Diskin, the Colonel’s second in command, pointed to an unmarked door and nonchalantly said, “Elvis is in his dressing room. Just go on in.”

  Kay took a deep breath, straightened her dress, and turned the tarnished doorknob. She hoped he would like her. She thought he might, because even she could see she looked a little bit like his mother.

  He was sitting in front of a mirror, smoothing down his dark blond ducktail, and turned to look over his shoulder at her.

  Her knees went wobbly. “Hi, Elvis,” she managed. “I’m Kay Wheeler, the president of your fan club.”

  “My fan club president?” he asked. He seemed surprised. Kay thought he knew she was coming, but there wasn’t time to think about that now, because he had on a blue satin shirt that matched his eyes, and his voice was soft and sensuous, and he had a mischievous grin on his face, and he was looking straight at her. “If any man ever stepped out of a dream,” she thought, “it was Elvis Presley.”

  He stood up and walked toward her, staring, she thought, as if he were trying to read her mind. The room began swirling, but she could see he was still smiling, and she thought he was about to say something. Instead, he reached over and put his hands on her shoulders, and then began following her curves. He slid his hands up over her hips, then moved his fingers to her waist, and nearly up to her breasts. Finally, he spoke: “Is all this really you?”