Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  “He pretty much groped me,” she says, remembering. “I didn’t know what to think. My heart was beating a thousand miles an hour. I was overwhelmed. He came on like Godzilla.”

  She stepped back until his hands dropped away, and then they were both embarrassed. “Well,” he said, and then seemed at a loss for words. “Gee,” she murmured. But she loved this “Memphis Flash.”

  “I was on the same page with him. We were both young and riding the rock-and-roll wave.”

  Just about then, the door opened, and in came a gaggle of reporters to ask him questions. Kay stood back and watched, thinking what a chameleon Elvis was, “slipping casually out of one skin and into another, depending on the nature of the question asked or who was doing the asking.” Then one reporter asked Elvis if he planned to marry.

  “Why buy a cow when you can milk it through the fence?” he said, a comment that would be picked up by the national press and spark outrage, even as it was toned down to, “Why buy a cow when you can get milk under the fence?” But he was so charming, breaking into a boyish laugh, that he won over whoever happened to be around. Kay had to admit that his appeal, while intoxicating, was complex. He was so pretty, so androgynous, and he seemed both angelic and thuggish at the same time. Later, she read what a fan told one of the reporters that night—that she liked him “because he looks so mean.” She knew what the girl meant. He was just so many emotions wrapped up in one big gorgeous cover.

  Suddenly, Elvis saw Kay standing in the corner and motioned for her to come over. Then before she knew what was happening, he grabbed her, turned her around, and pulled her toward him until her back was pressed up against him. He folded her into his arms and held her in a suggestive embrace, kissing the side of her face as photographers snapped away.

  Kay didn’t know anything about a girlfriend named Barbara Hearn waiting for him in Memphis. Nor did she know one of the pictures would wind up on the cover of a national magazine. She just couldn’t believe what was happening. Now, she says, “He should have been under freaking arrest. He’s feeling me up in that one picture. Those are some of the most blatantly, sensual poses that I’ve ever seen him in with a girl.”

  He kissed her passionately just before he went onstage, pushing against her in a way no boy had ever done before. Then he launched into the first of two shows before six thousand deafening fans, following, among other performers, Wanda Jackson, to whom Elvis had only recently given his man’s diamond ring. Afterward, before the second show, he asked Kay if she would come to his performance in Fort Worth later that week. She said she would and asked him to sign some photos for the fans. Then he introduced her to Scotty, Bill, and D. J. and motioned for her to stand beside the backstage curtain so she could get an intimate view of the show.

  In her brief exchange with Scotty, the guitarist had asked if she planned her own career in show business. Kay laughed and said that she was no singer, but she could dance. And then, caught up in the moment, she announced that she’d be moving to their music in just a few minutes.

  Elvis had no idea that she was an accomplished dancer, and that listening to Hank Ballard and “Sexy Ways,” she’d improvised on the current dance steps, melding together the white from rock and the black from bop for a routine uniquely her own. She was so good at it, in fact, that within two years, she would earn a starring role in a Hollywood B picture, Rock, Baby, Rock It, doing the dance she called the “Rock & Bop.”

  Now, during Elvis’s performance of “Money, Honey,” Kay began dancing her bop in the wings. She was lost in her own moment for a while, but then in the instrumental break, she noticed Elvis, Scotty, Bill, and even D. J. watching her. When Elvis came offstage, he had just one question for her: “Where did you learn how to do that?”

  Afterward, he kept her close, and while waiting for the crowd to thin (“He couldn’t get out of the auditorium for the throng of fans outside”), he asked for the house organ in the auditorium to be turned on. Then he took off his coat, lit a small cigar, and in a poignant moment, began playing “Harbor Lights,” singing just to Kay. Like most teenagers in the thrill of early love, she was transported, feeling a connection to him that seemed to come from some unearthly place. “It was almost like we knew each other from somewhere else, you know?”

  Perhaps there was destiny involved after all. Before Kay left that night, sleeping at her friend Teena’s house, Elvis asked her more about her “Rock & Bop.”

  “He asked me to show him the steps, and then Scotty picked up his guitar, and we did a little number together there, the three of us, backstage. Up to that point, all he was doing was the Hillbilly Cat stuff—just shaking both of his legs and vibrating, not really doing any footwork. I taught him a few of the bop steps that the black people were doing back then and told him to go crazy with it.”

  Later, she was surprised to see that he had worked it into his stage act. “I don’t know if he saw the bop somewhere else, but I do know that he incorporated some of the heel-toe moves after that, because I went back and looked at what he was doing before and after that time.”

  Teaching him that, being able to give something back to the man who had given her so much enjoyment, was “a nice thing, a nice moment,” she says. “We were like crazy kids, just having a ball.” It was one of the best days of her life.

  And, in retrospect, one of Elvis’s. The boy who couldn’t dance in high school had just picked up a signature stage move, one that would help define his early style. Somehow, the fact that he learned it from a teenage girl seemed fitting.

  Near the end of April, Elvis opened a two-week run in the Venus Room at the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas. The Colonel had booked Eddy Arnold into Vegas on numerous occasions and considered it his playground. He counted many friends there, some of whom were heavy in the underworld. His connections, coupled with his growing love of gambling, made Vegas seem like a perfect showcase for his new client, especially as he commanded $7,500 a week for Elvis, in advance, and in cash. “They got an atom-bomb testing place out there in the desert,” he explained. “What if some feller pressed the wrong button?”

  But Parker miscalculated. Elvis was still too immature and unpolished for Vegas. (He introduced his first number one hit as “Heartburn Motel.”) And the New Frontier audience was not made up of hormonal teenagers, but an older, jaded crowd, most of whom had come to see bandleader Freddy Martin, whose forte was pop arrangements of the classics. Elvis was scared stiff. Everything about the engagement was wrong—it was his first sit-down gig, and no matter what clothes he wore, even loafers and dress pants and a western-cut jacket, he seemed out of place.

  T. W. Richardson, the New Frontier’s vice president and part owner, had heard about the singer in Richardson’s hometown of Biloxi, and called the Colonel about the booking only a month before. The first night, Richardson invited a clutch of friends to gamble and take in the show, and among the guests was a Houston doctor, Tom Van Zant. According to Gabe Tucker, one of Parker’s cronies, when Elvis took the stage, Dr. Van Zant “jumped up from their ringside table and shouted, ‘Goddamn it, shit! What is all this yelling and screaming? I can’t take this. Let’s go to the tables and gamble.’ ”

  It was a rough debut, attended by only a smattering of applause, and Elvis was devastated. “After that first night,” he said in 1959, “I went outside and just walked around in the dark. It was awful . . . I wasn’t getting across to the audience.”

  The Colonel quickly suggested that the hotel add a special matinee on Saturday for teenagers, where, for a dollar, they would see the performance and be served one soft drink. That afternoon, at a reserved table touching the stage, was Nancy Hebenstreit. The thirteen-year-old was in Las Vegas with her parents, Bruce and Ann, who were attending a golf event, the Tournament of Champions. During that time, Nancy would go to seven or eight of Elvis’s shows. “He would sing directly to me,” she recalled. “He was very appreciative of having a bona fide fan.”

  She had prayed he would be th
ere. Just eleven days earlier, on April 12, when he played the Armory with Faron Young and Wanda Jackson in her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Nancy waited outside the stage door after his second show with her friend Carla Singer, a classmate at St. Vincent Academy, a Catholic girls’ school. The two stood there with a swarm of other girls about their age, and when Elvis came out to give autographs, Nancy prided herself on being the first one he kissed. The next day, the Albuquerque Tribune ran a front-page story about Elvis smooching St. Vincent girls, and Carla, who also got a kiss, was immediately expelled for bringing bad publicity to the school.

  It was a life-changing moment for both of them. In time, Nancy began imitating the singer, becoming perhaps the first female Elvis impersonator. (“If anyone did it earlier, they would have to prove it to me.”) She combed her hair into a modified ducktail, thickened her eyebrows and lips, added sideburns, and built up her shoulders, turning one of her father’s jackets into Memphis cat clothes. Then, curling her lip, she strummed a cardboard guitar and lip-synched the words to “Heartbreak Hotel.”

  Known today as Nancy Kozikowski, an internationally acclaimed artist whose paintings, tapestry designs, and weavings can be found in museums, public buildings, and private collections, she was captivated as a child by the idea of what it would feel like to be Elvis onstage. The next year she got kicked out of St. Vincent for “edging on subversive,” and at the talent show at her new school, Washington Junior High, the kids got so caught up in her performance that they forgot she was a girl. She was amazed at how electric the connection felt.

  “Because I had seen him perform so closely, it was like I was him. The girls screamed. It sort of surprised me.” Moreover, she was stunned at the power that even an imitation of Elvis could have over young kids. “It was scary. It didn’t occur to me that an imitation would even begin to do anything more than simply amuse people. But they went wild.”

  However, Nancy had returned from Las Vegas with more than just the inspiration for her act. While checking into the Desert Inn, she saw a friend from Albuquerque, and since her pal had a Brownie camera, Nancy suggested they go looking for Elvis. The New Frontier was right across the street, and they saw him immediately, leaving with Bill Black and Gene Smith. He posed for pictures with them, and Nancy reminded him of that earlier kiss, which earned her another. Elvis was happy to see such a youthful face: “Vegas was where people went to get away from their kids.”

  She ran into him on several occasions (“He was always nice and flirty”), and one morning, at the Last Frontier Village penny arcade, he was all by himself, killing time. They hung out together, just having fun, popping quarters in the arcade booths. In one, they made a sound recording, a talking record (“Hi . . . ummm,” “Hi. Aren’t you going to say my name or anything?” “Ummm, Okay. Hi, Elvis. What are you doing here?”), and then they stuffed themselves into the twenty-five-cent photo booth, taking pictures together and alone.

  Nancy’s enraged boyfriend (“the original Fonz, long hair, leather jacket”) would later burn all but one, but the image that remained was a beauty—a black-and-white portrait of a hollow-jawed Elvis, a creature of the Vegas night who looks as spooky as Dracula himself.

  By the time she left Las Vegas, Nancy had received a bouquet of Elvis kisses, more than a dozen in all. “Very nice and sweet. He was not a letch.” Besides, “I was only thirteen and thought he was too old for me.”

  Elvis was in the lobby of the New Frontier one afternoon when he spotted Judy Spreckels, a comely young woman sitting at a small desk, engrossed in writing a letter. He approached her, struck up a conversation (“How could you not know who he was even then?”), and after a smattering of small talk, Elvis took her to the gift shop to show her a magazine. “He said, ‘This says I’m a hillbilly. I’m not, am I?’ ” Judy looked at him and said, “No, you’re a singer.” After that, “I was with him . . . all the time. There wasn’t a crowd then, just a few guys.”

  She became the first “sister” he’d had since Betty Amos, and their friendship lasted until the day he died. “Girls come and go, but sisters stay forever. . . . He told me secrets that I never told and will never tell.”

  At twenty-three, Judy was the divorced sixth wife of sugar magnate Adolph Spreckels II. She had a ranch in Las Vegas but was living at the hotel then, and she offered to be Elvis’s “secretary” and aide-de-camp. Soon, she would also come to Memphis. But both of them knew she was too worldly for him, and so they tamped down the obvious sexual spark.

  “We were like kids,” she says. In the afternoons, they’d ride the bumper cars at an amusement park and then go anywhere to escape the fans.

  “He loved the fact that I had a light blue Cadillac, and he bought the same car for his mother in pink. One day we drove my car out into the desert, and his cousin Gene came with us. Elvis drove that car as fast as it could go, and I was in the front seat whooping and screaming and laughing. His cousin was on the floor in the back, he was so scared. But I’d been a stunt player in the movies, and Elvis couldn’t go fast enough to scare me.”

  Now Elvis was learning to love Las Vegas, especially as he could take in a plethora of other shows. He particularly liked Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, whose novelty performance of Big Mama Thornton’s rhythm-and-blues hit, “Hound Dog,” resonated with him down deep. He also loved meeting other entertainers, including those with whom he had something in common—singer Johnnie Ray, who was so emotive that he seemed to cry all the time, and piano legend Liberace, Gladys’s favorite, who also had a twin who died at birth, and whose flamboyance with clothes and rings had long intrigued him. Soon Elvis would start reading a paperback book, The Loves of Liberace, picturing the closeted homosexual and a woman on the cover.

  However, Elvis was more interested in the showgirls.

  One night backstage, he met a bosomy blonde named Gloria Pall, who’d come with her friends, actor Rory Calhoun and his wife, Lita Baron, to see comedian Shecky Greene, who was also on the bill with Elvis and Freddy Martin. She was visiting with Greene and another showgirl she’d worked with previously, her friends teasing her because her 1954 Los Angeles television show, which she’d developed around the character of “Voluptua,” had been canceled after seven weeks, viewers citing it as too torrid. Elvis overheard the conversation and looked her up and down in her slinky black halter dress.

  He introduced himself (“Hi, ma’am, my name is Elvis”), and then with the same on-the-prowl look he once gave Betty Amos, he proceeded to take Gloria’s right hand to his mouth and suck each of her fingers, rotating his tongue around them one by one.

  Gloria, who called herself a “love goddess,” had been around, but she was surprised a twenty-one-year-old kid like Elvis would try such a thing.

  “Where did you learn to shake hands like that?” she asked him. “You don’t provide towels by any chance, do you?”

  “I’m from Tennessee, ma’am,” he said. “That’s how we do things there. No, I don’t provide towels because other girls don’t try to wipe it off.”

  “You’re something else,” she told him, though his brashness turned her off. “You’re a corny, horny little hick.”

  Gloria went back to the Calhouns at the table and told them what had happened. “I tell you,” she said. “He’s original. I’ve never had that done to me before. He must have read it in a book somewhere.” Finger sucking was a sexually stimulating turn-on, she said, “but not with that kid.”

  At least one more pretty girl in Vegas was also immune to his charms. During his engagement, the Colonel took him over to visit his friend Milton Prell, the owner of the Sahara Hotel, known as “the Jewel of the Desert,” with its plaster camels standing guard at the entrance. Elvis immediately set his sights on eighteen-year-old Joan Adams, who had just won the title of Miss Nevada USA 1957. But more significantly, she was Miss Sahara, and her duties included traveling with the governor to woo convention business.

  Elvis made his way over to her, flirted, asked her name
, and said he wanted to take her out. But unlike millions of women who swooned at the very sight of him, Joan didn’t find him attractive and politely demurred. Elvis, his ego wounded, complained to Colonel Parker.

  “He went back like a sick little puppy and told everybody at the hotel that I turned him down. He said, ‘Your Miss Sahara and Miss Nevada USA won’t go out with me.’ ” An hour later, Colonel Parker showed up with Milton Prell, along with Stan Erwin, the entertainment director, and Herb McDonald, the publicity director.

  But as Miss Sahara, Joan was off-limits. “They weren’t allowed to ask me to go out with anyone—not even sit with somebody. But Colonel Parker said, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ And I said, ‘He’s a nice man, but he’s just not my type.’ ”

  The Colonel offered an insincere smile and narrowed his eyes.

  “Elvis is a gentleman. You don’t have to worry about him.”

  “I’m not worried about that,” Joan replied. “And I’m very capable of taking care of myself.”

  Herb McDonald then got on his hands and knees. “Please, Joan. Please go out with Elvis for the publicity we’ll get.”

  Still, she refused, saying she didn’t want to lead him on. Finally, Milton Prell, consort of gangsters and all manner of Vegas power, made his plea.

  “Joannie, we’ve done everything you’ve asked. We haven’t made you sit with anybody, or do anything you didn’t want to do. Please go out with Elvis.”

  At last she relented, but only as a favor. “Okay, okay, all of you. Tell him to ask me again and I’ll do it.”

  Elvis went back with his tail between his legs, and this time he talked about motorcycles—someone told him Joan found them sexy—and he offered to rent one and take her for a ride. But even that fizzled. “We had a flat tire and ended up in a Cadillac.”