by Alanna Nash
Now, in Shreveport, where she was setting up a new branch of the fan club, Kay attended Elvis’s hour-long press conference at the Youth Center. “I wanted to impress him—I knew I had the jet black hair and ‘good behind’ that Elvis liked,” so she wore her tight white sheath dress with silver sparkles and white fur at the cuffs. Even though she stood in the back, Elvis, modeling the famous green coat, spotted Kay right off and stared at her hungrily as she answered a question about the fan club. A few minutes later, Cliff Gleaves approached her.
“Elvis wants you to come back to the hotel.”
At the Captain Shreve, Cliff escorted her to what was obviously Elvis’s bedroom. “Wait here,” he said and then shut the door. She stared at the bed for a while, but after fifteen minutes, when Elvis still wasn’t there, she lost her nerve. “I thought, ‘I can’t go through with this. I’m not this kind of girl. I’m a virgin. This is like something in a bad movie.’ ”
She got up and walked out into the hall, where Elvis’s guys were hanging out in front of another room. Kay stuck her head in to see Elvis on the phone. There was a flurry of activity—someone was taking orders for sandwiches, and everybody was high on something or another, maybe just the excitement of the concert—but Elvis, unbuttoning his shirtsleeves, beckoned her in (“Come here, come here, come here”). She was the only woman in the room, so she walked over and picked up his green coat and put it on, almost for protection. It was all sweaty, but she liked feeling him against her skin, even though the coat was so big that it dwarfed her. Elvis grinned at the sight of her in it.
“You look good in that,” he said. “Do you want a sandwich?”
“No, thanks.”
“Okay,” he said, looking around the room. “Are we going to order?”
Somebody spoke up. “Elvis, what do you want on your sandwich?”
“Mustard, mayonnaise, pickles, and cat shit,” he said, laughing at his own joke. All the guys laughed in unison, but the bad language turned Kay off. And as the time wore on and Elvis kept fooling around, she became more disenchanted. Finally, she just eased out the door.
That got his attention, and he chased her down the hall and into the stairwell. She was a little disgusted with him, and with herself, and now they paused by the window at the end of the stairwell and looked down at the street. “I thought, ‘Well, I have him right here. Just me and him.’ ” But she wanted to say something profound, because she didn’t want to be just another of the girls.
“Elvis,” she said quietly. “What do you think life is all about, really?”
He was standing behind her, very close, his breath warm on the back of her neck. Now he turned her around, and she thought he was going to make a stab at answering her question, or maybe kiss her in that soft, romantic way. But Elvis was not in the mood for subtlety.
To Kay’s astonishment, “He got really rough with me. He grabbed me and kissed me so long and hard I thought I was going to suffocate. He wouldn’t get off my lips. Then he threw me against the wall and started grinding his pelvis, pushing on me really heavy. It was exactly what he did onstage, his whole performance.”
Except that Elvis was genuinely aroused and meant business, keeping Kay in such a hold she couldn’t move. She wasn’t just turned off now—she was frightened. It was too raw for a seventeen-year-old virgin. “I was not old enough for what he had in mind. And it really disappointed me, because I wanted moonlight and roses. It was one of the biggest letdowns of my life.”
She didn’t push him away, though, and soon someone started screaming, “Where’s Elvis? Where’s Elvis?”
Whenever Elvis’s guys got separated from him, she thought, “It was like they lost their dancing bear or something. They all went nuts.” But the emergency was only that the sandwiches had arrived, and Elvis coaxed Kay back to the room. She stayed for a few minutes, but her stomach hurt, and her head was swimming, and then she just slipped out and went downstairs and got a cab.
“I felt a little bit powerful as I walked out of that hotel. I’d passed some girls, floozy little things, in the hall, and I presumed they’d been set up like I was. I thought, ‘I’m not one of you. He’ll remember me for not doing it.’ Because they were flinging their bodies at him en masse. It was just crazy, a mob scene.”
It had been even wilder at the show, Frank Page remembering they’d tried to protect Elvis by erecting a fence in front of the stage and setting the chairs back forty feet. But the girls, “nearly 10,000 of them, picked up the chairs and ran to the edge of the stage, so they defeated our purpose of trying to keep them back.” Afterward, to get him out of the Coliseum unharmed, the Colonel sent a decoy out one door while Elvis escaped through another, the swarm following the wrong boy. Page, thoroughly shaken, had never witnessed pandemonium like that and hoped he wouldn’t again. Ten thousand girls, screaming at the tops of their lungs, made “noise enough to peel paint,” as Horace Logan put it. Nobody could tell if Elvis was really singing or not, or even if the band was playing. But nobody seemed to care. The waves of screams washed through the Coliseum like an angry ocean. At the end, “Hoss” Logan, standing there in his sheriff’s gear, a pair of real six-guns in his big western holster, would utter the now-famous phrase: “Elvis has left the building.”
Barbara Hearn would sometimes stand inside the Audubon Drive house, looking out the window at all the fans. “I’d wonder, ‘Why am I on this side of the glass?’ It was a bit daunting at times.” And it was becoming more so, and not just because of the fame. Sometimes she thought she didn’t really know Elvis.
He’d called her one night, saying he’d been over to one of the West Memphis clubs to listen to music, and somehow met some boy she’d dated in high school. She hadn’t seen the guy since graduation day, but Elvis went off about what all he was going to do to him if he ever saw him again. He treated Barbara like she’d committed a crime for ever having known the kid. Where did he get off thinking like that, when he had so many girlfriends that the newspaper ran rows of pictures?
She tried not to think about it, though, because Christmas was almost on them, and she wanted them to have a nice holiday. No, an extra nice holiday. And she wanted her gifts to be special, too, even though she didn’t have much money. One day they were out riding on his motorcycle and he pulled into a used-car lot and bought her a yellow Buick convertible to get back and forth to Memphis State. She didn’t have the nerve to tell him, but it broke down all the time (“I never knew whether I was going to get where I was going”), and it just nickel-and-dimed her to death.
She thought a gold lamé vest would be an appropriate Christmas gift, and she knew that he could wear it onstage. So she went down to the seconds department at Goldsmith’s, where they sold remnants of material, and she bought the gold lamé and three gold initials and some black taffeta for the lining, and asked her girlfriend’s mother to make it for her. She wasn’t sure what to get Gladys and Vernon, but she finally settled on a large, ornate gold Bible with color illustrations. It was out of her price range, really, but she’d splurged because Elvis had had such a remarkable year, and it was truly a Christmas to celebrate.
June Juanico had been thinking about Christmas, too, though she hadn’t actually seen Elvis since her strained visit in October. It was getting late in the year now, and neither of them had said anything about whether they would spend the holiday in Memphis or Biloxi, but surely he would call about it any day now, because they were practically engaged, even though she’d never accepted that ring he’d tried to give her. The only thing that worried her was that he was so jealous of all of her friends, wanting to “keep me right next to him, with his arm around me and show people that I belonged to him, and all this kind of crap.” It had a smothering effect.
But on Christmas Day, neither Barbara nor June sat at Gladys’s holiday table. For the most glorious day of his most magnificent year, Elvis chose Dottie Harmony to be at his side. He hadn’t even known her two months.
When June found out, sh
e hit the ceiling. Elvis tried to calm her. “It was the Colonel’s idea, baby! Honest! For the publicity. He said it was good for my career!”
She knew that Parker did want him linked with actresses and dancers, and Elvis did like legs that went on for days. “But you don’t invite a showgirl to spend Christmas at your house!” That was it for her. “If he cared for me, how could he expect me to swallow all these other women in his life? I was going to be his one and only, or I wasn’t going to be anything.” And now Elvis was saying he couldn’t get married, not even after three years. He wouldn’t dare do that to the Colonel. He had too much invested in him.
June felt something break inside of her.
And now Barbara would, too. She just kept saying it over and over: Dottie Harmony. A chorus girl. And for Christmas. That was a time for family and special friends, not a newly acquired Las Vegas showgirl.
“If it had been Elizabeth Taylor or somebody, I wouldn’t have minded. But this really hurt me.”
And there was more hurt around the bend. When Barbara gave Elvis his gold lamé vest, he handed her an unexpected gift: a Sunbeam shaver. Her heart landed with such a thud that for a moment it knocked the breath out of her. She had gone to so much trouble with the vest, and she’d had to put his parents’ gift in layaway, since she didn’t have the money to buy it all at once.
“It was a pretty shaver, with rhinestones on the little stand and a quilted cover. But it was still a shaver, and certainly not the kind of thing he would have ordinarily gotten for me. It felt like he realized a day or two before Christmas, ‘Oh, my goodness, I haven’t gotten anything for Barbara,’ and threw a few dollars at someone who went out and got it. I didn’t need it or want it, and I never used it. I truly believe I had rather gotten nothing than that shaver. I still have the miserable thing, but it was an embarrassment then and is still.”
Elvis couldn’t win for losing. All his women were either mad at him or breaking off their relationship. Nothing seemed to work. Just nothing. That Christmas, he was driving around, thinking about things, when he spotted Georgia Avgeris, the Greek girl he’d thrown gum wrappers at in high school. She was window-shopping, and he pulled the big Cadillac up next to the curb and got out to greet her.
He was so glad to see her, and no, he hadn’t heard she’d gotten married last year. But wow, she looked great, and he hoped she was happy. He’d made a few records since he last saw her. Would she like to have some? He had them in the car.
“Gee, Elvis,” she said. “Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t have a record player.”
Dolores Hart (left), Elvis, and Lizabeth Scott enjoy a friendly game at Scott’s home in Hollywood at the completion of Loving You. “If there were one thing that I am most grateful for,” says Hart, now a Benedictine nun, “it’s the privilege of being one of the few persons left to acknowledge his innocence.” (Courtesy of David Troedson/Elvis Australia)
Chapter Twelve
Twin Surprises
At the start of 1957, Elvis found himself in a constant grip of anxiety. The Colonel had lined up a plethora of creative and career opportunities for him—a third Ed Sullivan Show appearance, and two movies scheduled just for that year alone—but Elvis’s personal life lay in shards.
June would barely take his calls, Dottie considered her visit to be a disaster (Elvis was late coming to get her, girls held up banners at the airport that said GO HOME, DOTTIE HARMONY, and the Presleys read this big gold Bible every single night), and Barbara was upset about . . . well, maybe a lot of things. She obviously hadn’t liked her shaver, but then that’s what Dottie got her, going down the list of “female gifts” that Gladys gave them when they went shopping.
Elvis had never meant the gift to be cold. In fact, he had extended himself for her with Hal Kanter on Audubon Drive. Knowing that Barbara had an interest in acting, and building on the conceit that the film was essentially his own story, Elvis had asked the director if Barbara might play his girlfriend. He wanted them to meet, he told Hal, and thought she would be good in the part.
But Kanter thought otherwise, telling Elvis she was lovely to look at but horrible to hear. “He said I had the worst voice he had ever heard,” Barbara reports. “I just assumed the Colonel, who was very rude to me, did not want me around, that the thought of me working with his boy every day curdled his blood. But it was very sweet and naïve of Elvis to see if it could be done.”
To make it up to her, Elvis would wear Barbara’s gold lamé vest with one of Natalie’s shirts on The Ed Sullivan Show on January 6. He hadn’t prepared her for it, so it was a wonderful surprise.
“I said, ‘There he is on Ed Sullivan, coast-to-coast television, and he’s got on my little five-dollar vest.’ I just loved it.”
At the network’s request, Elvis sang a gospel number, “Peace in the Valley,” along with a version of “Don’t Be Cruel” that was heavily influenced by rhythm-and-blues great Jackie Wilson, whose live show Elvis watched obsessively in Las Vegas. On the latter, the cameras cropped Elvis from the waist up—a brilliant tactical move on the part of the Colonel and Hank Saperstein, Elvis’s merchandising king, to capitalize on his image as a sexual terror.
At the end of the program, watched by fifty-four million Americans, the stone-faced Sullivan took time to deliver a character reference: “This is a real decent, fine boy . . . We want to say that we’ve never had a pleasanter experience with a big name than we’ve had with you.”
Elvis knew he was the luckiest guy in the world. But he couldn’t really enjoy most of the good things that were happening, because there was so much weighing on him now. On January 4, he’d taken his preinduction physical to determine his draft status, and four days later, on his twenty-second birthday, the Memphis Draft Board announced his classification—1A.
As the Colonel explained it to him, it meant he’d probably be drafted within the next eight months. What Elvis didn’t know was that his imminent service was precisely what the wily manager wanted, in part to morph Elvis’s image from dangerous hooligan to all-American boy, hence Ed Sullivan’s ringing endorsement.
Elvis spent his birthday at home with his parents. He didn’t feel much like celebrating, and he was leaving in two days to start work on the soundtrack for Loving You. One afternoon, he dropped by to see Dixie Locke, who’d recently married. Her last name was Emmons now. He and Dixie had so much history together that they could finish each other’s sentences. But now that she seemed so settled and happy, he sometimes felt worse after he saw her. Emptiness was a terrible thing, a big blue ball that just swelled up inside you.
He made a joke about his relationships years later. “I did Love Me Tender, and Loving You . . . Loving Her, loving anybody I could get my hands on at the time.” But the trouble with love was that the cards were just so stacked against you. How did married couples stay together for most of their lives? Better to just stick with girls who were so much younger that they didn’t really expect anything of you.
In fall 1956, Vernon went over to the local Oldsmobile dealership where the family often had their cars repaired and serviced. As he was leaving, the owner, a man named Mowel, asked if his fourteen-year-old daughter, Gloria, could meet Elvis. Vernon said that was fine, and for Gloria to come on over anytime.
On October 11, Gloria showed up on Audubon Drive and nervously rang the doorbell. She was shocked to see Elvis answer the door himself. Gloria was cute, sweet, and personable, and she knew music—she’d identified “Ruby, Baby,” a recent hit by the Drifters, who Elvis loved, playing on the phonograph in the den. After her visit, Elvis invited her back another day. Soon, she was taking her friends Heidi Heissen and Frances Forbes, who were also fourteen, and Elvis began asking them over for evening swims at the house, or just to sit around and watch TV.
Frances, a petite dark-haired beauty, had been hanging out by the gate since she was thirteen. “He didn’t pay any attention to me then, but when I was fourteen, he noticed me. Fourteen was a magical age with Elvis. It really
was.”
Fanatical in their devotion, the three girls followed him everywhere he went in Memphis. Elvis had an easy rapport with the trio and felt as if he could ask them what the other kids were saying about him and his music. They were his local contacts with the larger fan base, but it went deeper than that. “He was fascinated with them,” in the view of Lamar Fike, who was starting to integrate himself into Elvis’s entourage.
In no time, Elvis was inviting the girls to go to the Rainbow Rollerdrome, and by 1957, they became his constant companions, part of the group that went to the Fairgrounds to crash into one another in the dodgem cars and eat endless Pronto Pups. They also participated in other outings around town, all of which seemed designed to make up for the friendships and good times Elvis missed out on in high school. “They were just as nutty as fruitcakes, but they were fun,” Lamar remembers. “He got irritated with them sometimes, but very seldom. All three of them were pretty cute girls.”
As Elvis’s attraction to them grew, they started staying for private pajama parties—just fourteen-year-old Heidi, Gloria, Frances, and their twenty-two-year-old host, holed up in his bedroom. “When you were in that room, you wanted to shut out the whole world for the rest of your life,” Gloria says.
In an odd suspension of time and gender, Elvis became not only their age but also a teenage girl. After their swims, he’d wash and dry their hair, and they’d blow his hair dry, too. He’d tease them, say to Gloria, “Frances was jealous tonight because I was throwing you in the pool!” Then they’d all giggle, and he’d show them how to put makeup on their eyes the way he liked it, heavy on the shadow and mascara. It was sexy, he said, and sometimes he’d apply the eyeliner himself. Then they’d lie on the beds and roughhouse and have pillow fights, Elvis tickling and kissing them until they couldn’t take it anymore.
