Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Phillip had been to see Barbara one night that fall, leaving a little after 1 A.M., and then driving over by Elvis’s house on Audubon Drive. There was always something going on there when Elvis was in town, but on this night, he was surprised to see Elvis standing out front with a guy he eventually figured out was Nick Adams.

  It looked like a loose enough gathering, so Phillip parked his car and walked over and stood on the edge of the “guy contingency,” where Elvis was talking to five teenage girls who worked at a Krystal hamburger stand. They were all hanging around the iron gate that closed off the driveway, the girls tittering and laughing and asking Elvis questions.

  It was easy for Phillip to join in because “they were very congenial to me,” but then the talk turned “really rough, considering the day and time. One of the girls said to Elvis, ‘We came by here Monday night. Were you here?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ And she said, ‘Well, what were you doing?’ He said, ‘Oh, I was sitting in there, watching you all drive by and jacking off.’ ”

  Phillip was shocked that Elvis would use that kind of language (“I came from a small rural town, and boy, you didn’t ever say that, not even to men, much less in front of women”), but he wrote it off to the fact that Elvis was now “an urbane, sophisticated, uptown man, an actor in the movies.”

  Then one of the girls wanted to know about Natalie. “Is she here now?” she asked. “Yeah,” Elvis said. “She’s in the house asleep.”

  “We read about you going together,” she purred.

  “Aw, naw,” Elvis told her. “She’s just a kid.”

  By now, the crowd had grown larger, but it was still made up mostly of females and married couples. Then about 2:30 A.M., Phillip noticed a car pull up. “This girl got out, and squealed and ran over and grabbed Elvis, and just kissed him a big wet kiss.” Phillip recognized her immediately. She was Barbara Pittman, the singer he’d just been to see. “She just glued herself to him, and then he was pretty much occupied with her for the rest of the night.” Later, Barbara would tell Phillip that Elvis called her his “Little Vibrator,” because when she got around him, “I’d just get so giddy and wiggly.”

  When Phillip got ready to leave that night, Elvis said, “Come back tomorrow. We’ll be out here.” The next afternoon, when Phillip returned, Natalie was in the yard, inside the low fence, signing autographs. Elvis introduced them, and she shook Phillip’s hand and smiled, and went on back to signing. But Natalie didn’t like such familiarity with fans and was astonished that Elvis permitted them to be so intrusive, even letting them look in the windows. She hadn’t known anybody like him, and he mystified her sometimes. They were just so different.

  “I hadn’t been around anyone who was religious,” she said later. “He felt he had been given this gift, this talent, by God. He didn’t take it for granted. He thought it was something that he had to protect. He had to be nice to people, otherwise, God would take it all away.”

  On the whole, her visit hadn’t gone well. Elvis tooled the petite star around town in the white Lincoln, stopping for ice cream at the Fairgrounds. But he didn’t really know what to do with her, so he drove her down to Tupelo to show her where he started out, took her over to meet Dewey Phillips, and rode her around on his huge new Harley-Davidson motorcycle. But nobody seemed to be having a good time. Not really. She watched him play touch football in Guthrie Park, where Nick tentatively joined in, but she was bored.

  The most exciting part was the inventive way Elvis escaped the fans who’d gathered by game’s end: He casually drew a comb from his pocket, waved it through his hair, and then nonchalantly threw it out on the field. When the girls sprang to get it, he and Natalie dashed off the other way for the Harley, speeding off on Chelsea Avenue.

  Once during Natalie’s visit, he stopped by to see Barbara Hearn. They talked and visited a little while, and then Barbara’s aunt went to the window. “Elvis,” she said, “who’s that out there on your motorcycle?”

  “Well, that’s Natalie Wood.”

  “He’d just left her out there in front, waiting for him,” as Barbara tells it. “My aunt said, ‘Why don’t you tell her to come inside?’ And he said, ‘No, I’m leaving,’ and off he went. By then, he wasn’t as much in tune with people’s feelings. He was a caring, feeling person by nature, but I think that was being taken away from him. He was losing it.”

  Gladys was also losing it, but in a different way. “Man, Gladys was stoned ’til Sunday morning,” said Barbara Pittman. “She couldn’t even get up to go to church. I shouldn’t say that about Gladys. I loved her very much. But Vernon was a pretty heavy drinker, too. He just enjoyed having all that free booze and free life because he never worked anyway. He always had a ‘bad back.’ ”

  Natalie’s visit exacerbated everything with Gladys, and it was obvious even to people who didn’t know her well. When Wink Martindale and his TV cohost, Susie Bancroft, went out to the house during Nick and Natalie’s visit, “We just sang and stood around a lot. . . . I remember his mother being there and seeming so out of place.”

  It just made Gladys wild. She complained to her sister Lillian that Natalie was “too fond of the men—didn’t even finish her meal when Nick Adams and the boys came over.” She was so upset that she vented to Barbara, too.

  “She didn’t like provocative women, and she called me and said Natalie was walking around the house in a flimsy nightgown in front of the men who were working on the house. She thought that was thoroughly bad behavior, and said she would be glad when Natalie left.”

  Natalie felt the same way. Three days into what was supposed to be a weeklong stay, she aborted her visit, flying back to L.A. in tight toreador pants with Nick at her side. Robert Vaughn met her at the airport, and photographers snapped pictures of Elvis’s “new girlfriend.” Her William Morris agent, Michael Zimring, said, “She looked like a rat that [had] died. I don’t think she’d been to sleep for a week.”

  In her book, Natalie, a Memoir by Her Sister, Lana Wood recounts that the family helped Natalie cook up the sudden departure. She’d called home moaning that Elvis’s mother was domineering and jealous. “Gladys has wrecked everything,” Natalie said. “I don’t have a chance. Get me out of this, and fast.” It was agreed that Maria would call Natalie back and ask her to come home because of an emergency.

  The romance was over.

  “God, it was awful,” Natalie told Lana later. “He can sing, but he can’t do much else.”

  After that, whenever Natalie’s name came up, Elvis laughed. “Heaven help us!” he said. “That girl is crazy!”

  However, Elvis would have no shortage of entertaining friends, as two days after Natalie’s departure, he asked Cliff Gleaves to move into the house as a “gofer” to make things easier for himself and his parents. Gladys accepted him but wished her son would be more selective of his companions. A ne’er-do-well, Gleaves was a flunky deejay from Jackson, Tennessee, and a pal of Dewey Phillips. He looked as if he slept in his clothes. But he had an offbeat and riotous sense of humor, and he wasn’t beyond trying any sort of con—gypping restaurateurs out of a huge steak dinner, for example—which amused Elvis no end. In the future, Elvis would suspend him from the group for outrageous grifting and unspeakable hooliganisms, only to take him back. But for now, he had his place.

  Through Cliff, Elvis became reaquainted with Lamar Fike, a three-hundred-pound Memphian who’d tried to break into radio through George Klein. Fike, who lived at the YMCA, was comical-looking—he’d soon start wearing yellow cowboy boots—but he had a first-rate mind, and in time Elvis would invite him into the entourage.

  For now, Elvis was still traveling with his cousin Gene Smith, though Bitsy Mott, the Colonel’s brother-in-law and a former professional baseball player, had joined him as head of security. On November 8, 1956, the three of them boarded a train for Las Vegas. Elvis needed to shake off all the voodoo from Nick and Natalie, as well as his jitters about Love Me Tender, which would open in New York on November 15.


  He stayed at the New Frontier, where he had played earlier in the year, and immediately began seeing nineteen-year-old Marilyn Evans, a showgirl at the hotel. He’d walked into the employees-only coffee shop at the casino and sat at her table. “Wow,” she thought. “He’s beautiful—really, truly.”

  Within an hour, he had slipped her a scrawled note on the back of a napkin: “Can I have a date with you tomorrow night or before I leave?”

  “Elvis told Marilyn he likes her because she doesn’t act like a showgirl, because he’s real,” her mother bragged to her hometown paper, The Fresno Bee, at the time. He invited Marilyn to come visit him in Memphis the following month.

  But then he met Dottie Harmony, a blond, eighteen-year-old dancer at the Thunderbird who had a friend who worked at the New Frontier. Elvis kept trying to get her attention, sending requests to her table for her to join him, but she ignored him. Then all of a sudden she looked over, “and there was Elvis on his knee, saying, ‘Ma’am, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. Would you have a drink with me?”

  From then on, he spent the rest of his vacation with her. They talked a lot—he made her call her mother, like he did every night—but mainly they just hung out, driving to the airport and watching the planes take off, going to the Vegas shows, even helping an old man change a tire one night. She was a little frightened at how jealous Elvis got when other men looked her up and down, and when they fought, he’d get so angry he’d rip the phone out of the wall. “But next thing I knew it was always fixed again.”

  Even though it was Dottie he liked, on December 4, Elvis made good on his promise to bring Marilyn Evans to Audubon Drive, where “that phone just rang and nobody answered, which was odd.” Elvis made no moves on her (“He was extremely honorable”), and treated her to the usual motorcycle rides and eating out. But they quickly realized there was nothing between them. “I always preferred classical music,” for starters. “We were just into different things, not that one is better than the other.”

  Evans would have been a totally forgettable presence in Elvis’s life except for one stop they made during her visit. It was at the Sun Studio, where Carl Perkins was recording, with Jerry Lee Lewis playing piano on the session. Johnny Cash also dropped by, and Sam Phillips called the newspaper, which sent over a photographer as the tape rolled. The recordings would become famous as the “Million Dollar Quartet” session (though Cash doesn’t really sing). And though Marilyn is often cropped out of the iconic photograph, in the full shot, she’s clearly on the right, seated atop the piano. Her voice can be heard on the recordings, requesting a song, “End of the Road.” Hearing it now, she says, is “otherworldly . . . out of body.”

  Just over a week later, Elvis had another guest, Hollywood director Hal Kanter, who was set to helm Elvis’s next picture Loving You, his first for Paramount and Hal Wallis. Kanter, writing with Herbert Baker, would loosely base his screenplay on Elvis’s own story—a truck driver with a knack for a song catches the eye of a manipulative press agent, who propels him to fame.

  Kanter, a southerner himself, born in Savannah, Georgia, had come to the project after running into Wallis, who said, as the director remembers, “I want you to come see a test of a young man. I want you to see if you can do a picture with him.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Elvis Presley.”

  “You must be kidding.”

  “Just look at the test, will you?”

  Kanter agreed but surely in vain. “Foolishly, I subscribed to the generation that said, ‘He’s just a passing fancy, a nasty little boy.’ ” But he walked out of the screening room with a different attitude. He thought Elvis was “dynamite.”

  Wallis had a first-draft screenplay, Lonesome Cowboy, which Kanter completely rewrote with the title Stranger in Town. Then the director went to Memphis to meet Elvis. There, he sampled Gladys’s chicken and okra on Audubon Drive, “a modest home . . . decorated in a style that displayed more financial success than taste,” he would write in his autobiography, So Far, So Funny: My Life in Show Business. He didn’t like the meal very much, either.

  Afterward, Elvis had a question for him. Was his character, Deke Rivers, required to smile much in the movie?

  “What do you mean, do you have to smile?”

  “Well, I’ve been watching a lot of movies. People like Jimmy Dean and Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando. Good actors. They hardly ever smile. And the women love ’em, because they don’t smile.”

  Elvis brought the director up short. That had never occurred to him, but Elvis was right.

  “He said, ‘When I smile, I want it to be an event.’ And I said, ‘Very well put.’ ”

  Then Elvis told him he didn’t think he was much of an actor, but he was working on being true to the words. “I figure if I make people believe the words, that’s all that counts.” Kanter again told Elvis he was astute, and then Gene Smith goaded Elvis into doing what he called “the piece.”

  Elvis said, “No, no, no, I don’t want to.”

  “Go ahead, go ahead, Elvis, do the piece for the man! Do the piece!”

  Elvis stood up, and Kanter expected him to start, “The boy stood on the burning deck . . .” Instead, he was amazed as Elvis recited Douglas MacArthur’s “Farewell Address to Congress.”

  “I’m not a fan of Douglas MacArthur, but it was pretty good.”

  The next evening, they all left Memphis in a two-car caravan, Kanter riding with Elvis to Shreveport to witness his last appearance on the Louisiana Hayride on December 15. This was the benefit show that Parker had promised as part of Elvis’s contract buyout (the Shreveport YMCA would get a new swimming pool out of the deal), and attendance was expected to be so large that the organizers moved it to the largest facility in town, the Hirsch Coliseum, also known as the Youth Center, at the Louisiana Fairgrounds. Every ticket had been sold.

  “I observed that concert, and things I saw there I later used on-screen. I re-created some of it. There were some things that happened there that I couldn’t re-create, because people wouldn’t believe it. It was absolutely unbelievable, the things that I saw.”

  It was true. Horace Logan had the roof of his 1955 Mercury hardtop stomped in by teenage girls. He’d parked it in the back of the Coliseum, in a place that seemed perfectly safe. But the kids had stood on it, dancing to the music, or used it as a trampoline to try to see through the Coliseum’s twelve-foot windows. “It looked like an elephant had danced a jig on it,” Logan lamented. “The top was pushed in so far it was practically touching the backs of the seats.”

  Then there was the child who swallowed her hand, or at least Kanter thought she had. “She appeared to have her hand in her mouth all the way down to her wrist, and I was wondering, ‘How can a little girl like this get her whole hand down her throat?’ And then at one point she pulled her hand out of her mouth, and I found out she didn’t have a hand at all. She was just sucking on the stump. I thought, ‘God, I’ve got to get that in the picture!’ ”

  At first, however, Kanter wondered if he would even survive the trip to Shreveport.

  He sat next to Elvis while Gene, Junior, and Bitsy occupied the backseat. They raced through the chilly night, Elvis singing and cracking jokes until he stopped “for refreshments—a piss, a pop, and some barbequed pork,” as Kanter detailed in his book. The restaurant, of course, was the Trio Club, the Brown family’s roadhouse in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Maxine caught Elvis and Bonnie pining for each other, “not saying a word, but kind of smiling and looking sad at the same time.” Both of them knew that life was about to change forever, as Maxine put it. He wasn’t that big of a star yet, but “the Elvis Presley who left our club that night was not the same as the one the world grew to adore.”

  Back out on the road, Kanter wrote, “a souped-up Chevy pulled up beside us. Four men and three women were packed into the hot rod, and one of the girls yelled, ‘Hey, Elvis!’ Elvis slowed his Cadillac and lowered his window to call, �
��Howdy, honey,’ and Bitsy Mott warned, ‘This ain’t no time to stop for pussy, boy.’

  “The ersatz cowboy driving the Chevy shouted, ‘Drag you for a tank of gas, Presley!’

  “ ‘Is he kiddin’?’

  “Elvis grinned, stomped on his accelerator, and we zoomed from 40 to 90 mph. Elvis loved that. I was terrified, and he loved that, too.”

  They arrived at the Captain Shreve Hotel about five in the morning, and too soon, Kanter was awakened by shouts of “Elvis! Elvis!” coming from the street below. In just a few hours, he would ride to the Louisiana Fairgrounds with the young star to check the equipment for the evening. Bill Black drove the Cadillac, and Kanter sat in the back. When the car came to a stop, the crowd surrounded the Caddy and started rocking it. Kanter was scared stiff, but Bill just laughed. “Shit, this happens wherever we go.”

  In town to see the performance was Kay Wheeler, Elvis’s fan club president. Several months before, she’d organized a write-in campaign to bring Elvis to Dallas, Texas. “It was so successful—26,500 kids showed up—that we had to get the huge Cotton Bowl, the largest venue for an Elvis show.” She was the only teenager, and the only woman, allowed on the field. The next day, she went to Waco to see Elvis’s show at the Heart O’ Texas Coliseum and got in trouble with Colonel Parker for telling the Associated Press that Waco was “the squarest town in America,” since the sparse crowd “sat on their hands and nobody screamed.”

  And in November, she’d traveled to Memphis, where she visited with Barbara Hearn at her house, the two of them lying on the floor and leafing through scrapbooks, to Kay’s delight. She also spent a day with Gladys, who told Kay she reminded her of herself as a young girl. (“You favor me a little, don’t you, hon?”) Kay thought Gladys seemed sad, but she didn’t dwell on it long, because she was too excited—Elvis had Kay’s framed picture by his bed. And Gladys had even offered to give her Elvis’s white buck shoes, but Kay turned them down (“I didn’t want his ol’ stinky shoes in my suitcase”). She wanted the kelly green sport coat he had on in Dallas. “You’ll probably have it before the night is over,” he promised her suggestively, but that hadn’t happened, and then Gladys couldn’t find it.