Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  When they visited the set, they appeared as extras in the scene in which Elvis sings “Loving You” and “Got a Lot o’ Livin’ to Do” in front of an audience. Elvis’s parents can be plainly seen sitting on the aisle, Gladys, still as full of rhythm as she’d been in her youth, clapping gaily to the beat. After her death, Elvis would never be able to watch the film again.

  Lizabeth Scott met the Presleys on the set, and she was struck by Elvis and Gladys’s passionate bond. “It was so obvious. You could not just see it, but feel it. Their synergy was nonverbal, but that tenderness went to full bloom when they looked at each other.”

  Shortly after they returned to Memphis, Gladys and Vernon went searching for a new house, someplace bigger and more secluded. Their Audubon Drive neighbors, many of them society people, old money southerners, considered the family an embarrassment and had worried them to death about the hordes of noisy fans who gathered at all hours and trampled the lawns. Elvis, hoping to make amends, accepted an invitation for cocktails from Frank and Betty Pidgeon, who lived up the street. Frank had underwritten the insurance on the house, and the uncommonly beautiful Betty—a mix of southern belle and femme fatale—was the daughter of E. H. “Boss” Crump, who ran the town from his election as mayor in 1910 until he died in 1954.

  At the last minute, Elvis, feeling awkward among the country club set, tried to back out. But Gladys insisted he go, and so he took Cliff with him and asked for Coke instead of bourbon. He was nervous until the Pidgeons’ eight-year-old daughter, Pallas, invited them to her bedroom to see her teddy bear collection. Elvis and Cliff went to meet the menagerie, and Elvis, who received hundreds of stuffed animals from his fans almost daily, promised to send the little girl a new teddy bear for her birthday, even though she never actually got it.

  However, one afternoon of pleasantry could not make up for the fact that the Presleys did not fit in on Audubon Drive. Soon, the neighbors bonded in a public discussion, offering to buy them out, and Elvis politely offered to buy them out. A nuisance suit was threatened. It was clear that the Presleys would be more comfortable elsewhere, and a chance meeting between Gladys and a young real estate agent named Virginia Grant outside of Lowenstein’s department store led to the ideal place.

  In early March 1957, Elvis wrapped filming on Loving You, and on March 17, the day he was to leave Hollywood by train, Virginia drove Gladys and Vernon to see a large home she thought might be suitable. But when the Presleys said they needed a bigger lot, the agent remembered an estate in the Whitehaven area, just before Highway 51 south eased into Mississippi. Called Graceland, and built in 1939 for Dr. and Mrs. Thomas D. Moore, the property comprised about fourteen acres of towering oaks and farmland, with the undulating grounds buffering the house from unwanted visitors.

  To the Presleys, who had never forgotten their sharecropping days in Mississippi, it must have seemed like Tara from Gone With the Wind. Vernon and Gladys called their son and excitedly told him about it, and Elvis was so eager to please them that without even seeing it, he told them they would have it. The Presleys gave Virginia a $1,000 deposit, and the deal, with an asking price of $90,000, was as good as done.

  On March 18, en route home, Elvis sent a telegram to June Juanico, asking her to meet him in New Orleans during his brief layover there. They had barely kept in touch since Christmas, but in January, he’d recorded Faron Young’s “Is It So Strange” just for her. All the craziness of Hollywood had gotten him thinking about what was real and what wasn’t, and he wanted to start over with her again, at Graceland.

  But June had a surprise for Elvis, too. She’d been dating a man named Fabian Taranto. His cousin, Salvadore, played in the band Elvis replaced at the Slavonian Lodge the first time he played Biloxi. Fabian was a good man, and he needed her—unlike Elvis, she thought—and she’d convinced herself that he was the one. Earlier that month, Fabian had asked her to marry him, and June had said yes. Elvis had a big selection of women. Let him take his showgirls and shove ’em.

  Yet when she saw him, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him right away. Now Elvis was standing in front of her and smiling so brightly that he almost glowed. He scooped her up and kissed her and then put her down, and he took her to a second train that had been waiting for his arrival. He climbed the steep steps, and then pulled her up into his arms and carried her to his private car. There, he kissed her again.

  “He wanted me to come to Memphis with him. He said, ‘Mama can’t wait to see you, and I got a surprise for you. You’re not gonna believe what I bought for you! Wait until you see what it is!’ ”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you. I’ll have to show you. You’ve gotta come home with me.”

  June stammered and tried to clear the cotton from her throat. “But I didn’t bring any clothes with me.”

  “You don’t need any clothes. You don’t need anything. I’ll buy you all new clothes when we get home.”

  He was still holding her, but she shook her head and pulled away from him. “I can’t go with you, Elvis. I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m engaged to be married.”

  His face fell, and he stared at her in disbelief. Then he slumped down on the couch and held his head in his hands, not wanting to believe it was true.

  “You’re kidding me, June. This is just to get even with me, right?”

  “No, Elvis. I’m not kidding. I’m serious.”

  “Is that why you’ve been so cool to me on the phone?”

  “No, I haven’t been cool to you. You’ve been busy doing your thing, and I’ve been busy doing my thing. Your thing just gets in the paper. Mine doesn’t.”

  They sat there, both feeling sick, not saying anything. Finally, the conductor yelled, “All aboard!” and the train jerked to signal its departure.

  June was crying now, and she stood up and kissed him on the forehead. “I love you, Elvis Presley, and I always will.” Then she was gone, running from the car, and jumping down to the platform.

  She turned back to watch as the train began to move. She saw him leaning out the door, as if he wanted to hold her gaze before the train picked up steam and carried him out of her life for good.

  “I can still see him hanging on to that train and waving good-bye. The train rounded the corner, and all I could see was his hand, still waving.”

  A few days later the papers announced, “Elvis Buys Graceland,” and June realized what her surprise was to be.

  She married on June 1, 1957, and two weeks later, Elvis phoned her mother to see if she were home. “No, Elvis, she’s not here. Married life seems to be agreeing with her.” And so he finally let it go.

  But June never did. More than fifty years later, “No one has ever taken Elvis’s place in my heart. I’ve just never been able to stop loving Elvis.”

  When Hollywood starlet Yvonne Lime visited Elvis in Memphis in April 1957, he took her out to see Graceland, which he’d bought the month before. “To think that we Presleys will live here,” he told her. “We’ve been poor so long, I can’t believe it yet.” (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

  Chapter Thirteen

  “The Most Miserable Young Man”

  At 10 A.M. on Monday, March 19, the day after Elvis arrived home, he drove out to Graceland with his parents, where they met with real estate agent Virginia Grant. Elvis looked around the house and grounds for a few minutes, and then baptized the home by playing some rock and roll at the piano. In high school, as Regis’s prom date, all he had dreamed of was becoming successful enough to buy his mother a big brick home with a landscaped yard. Now the twenty-two-year-old had secured so grand a property as to befit a governor. All three Presleys signed the sales contract as purchasers, Vernon first in bold deep blue fountain pen, Elvis next in a different ink, and Gladys below in black ballpoint.

  By March 26, the closing date, it was officially theirs, with a final price of $102,500, inflated by additional offers on the property as news of the d
eal leaked out. Elvis had sold the Audubon Drive house to a realty company for $55,000, paid $10,000 in cash, and taken out a twenty-five-year mortgage for the balance of the six-figure purchase price.

  Vernon just prayed that Elvis’s career lasted another couple of years. When the family got a new bedroom suite, and Elvis gave the old one to his aunt and uncle, his father furrowed his brow. “Son, I wish you wouldn’t be giving all of our things away. We may have to put them on our back and walk out of here with them one day.”

  Gladys had no idea how to update or furnish the eighteen-room colonial, and so on the recommendation of Sam Phillips, who had just turned his ranch house into a modern “space age” showcase, the Presleys asked interior decorator George Golden to give them a bid. The enterprising Golden advertised his services with flatbed trucks that drove around Memphis showing off miniature rooms with the decorator’s flamboyant touches. He knew that “every decorator in town wanted that job so bad they could taste it.”

  He arrived to find two female competitors “all over poor Gladys, waving sketches in her face and gabbing away like you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “It was like a circus out there.” Golden introduced himself and then stood back with Vernon. The decorator was married and knew a thing or two about women. He saw that Gladys was a shy, country woman who “had a real fear of being in closed-up spaces.” As his competitors continued their locustlike siege, Golden began talking as country folk do, saying “ain’t” and talking about “deck-core.”

  “Finally, Gladys had had enough. She waved her hands in those women’s faces and hollered, ‘Get away and leave me alone! Mr. Golden’s gonna do our work!’ ”

  The family wouldn’t move in for another six months, and they gave Golden free rein to decorate however he wanted. He livened Graceland’s conservative, run-down state with bright colors and a hodgepodge of styles, from Eisenhower-era suburban ranch to classic elegance. He also added dentil molding to the cornices on the first floor and transformed the dining and living rooms with chandeliers, gold-on-white trim, and swagged draperies. And last, he suggested the Presleys erect a temporary fence and staff the perimeter with guards.

  Elvis picked out the famed music gates, which would be installed in April. But he wasn’t home much for the renovation—he was busy preparing for a major tour and getting ready to shoot Jailhouse Rock, his first picture in a new deal with MGM, the following month.

  When he was home, “you knew it,” Golden said. “Once he borrowed one of my delivery trucks and pulled a hat down real low over his face so he could drive through the gates without getting mobbed. Then, when he got back out of the truck, he took off the hat, bowed to the girls lined up against the fence and said, ‘Thank you, ladies!’ Well, they liked to die.”

  As Golden progressed with the property, Elvis proclaimed it “the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen!” He was so excited he needed to show it to somebody, so he dropped by to see Barbara Hearn. “He said he was going out to look at Graceland, that he wanted me to be the first one to see it. Whether he said that because it sounded good or whether it was really true, I believed it.”

  Barbara, who remembered how sparsely the family had lived on Alabama Street, was overwhelmed at how lovely and tasteful it was, but she found Gladys worn out with it all. “Mr. Golden almost drove her crazy telephoning, asking her questions about every little thing. He just wanted to please her, but whenever I was there, she would have me answer the phone. She’d say, ‘If it’s Mr. Golden, I’m not home.’ She cared, but she just wanted him to get on with it.”

  By now, Barbara’s romance with Elvis was over. They’d gone from friends to sweethearts to friends again. He was hardly ever in town, and when he was, their hours were just so different—he was up all night, and she was working or going to school. At the beginning, there had been only the two of them, and then Red, and then the Colonel. Now there was this entourage, and the guys “would get jealous if anybody got in thick with Elvis. They didn’t want anything to ruin their positions.”

  And so it ended with a whimper. “There wasn’t any great breaking-off. But I probably would have ended up walking away, because I value loyalty and trustworthiness.” In retrospect, she guesses the relationship hadn’t really been a big love affair, or “I would have been brokenhearted when it was over, gnashing my teeth and wanting to slit my throat. And I wasn’t. I just went on with life.”

  Elvis did, too. Some time that year, he stopped in El Paso on a road trip home from Los Angeles. Impulsively, he called Debra Paget and asked her to marry him. She told him it could never happen. “I know it’s your mother and father,” he said. “And if it takes twenty years, I’ll get them to like me.”

  “I knew it was hopeless,” she told biographer Suzanne Finstad years later. “My parents would never relent. It was an impossible situation.”

  The irony was that in a period of months, the most famous boy in America had lost all of his key romantic relationships.

  Gladys’s sister Lillian had once noted that Gladys’s unhappiness made Elvis melancholy, too, even if they weren’t together—so incredible was their communicative bond. But just when Elvis thought his mother should be ecstatic with her new showplace, Gladys complained to Lillian that she was cut off from everybody at Graceland. When Elvis was away, she’d say to Vernon, “I wish you could pray with me.” And Vernon would respond, “I wish Elvis would come home.”

  They were lonely, without much to say to each other, or even to Minnie Mae. And so not long after they moved in, Vernon invited his father, Jessie, and his wife, Vera, to come stay for a while, to drive down from Louisville in the new Ford Fairlane Elvis had bought them.

  The visit was awkward for Vera, with Minnie Mae in the house, but they all adjusted. Jessie was “kind of overwhelmed at all of it,” remembered Vera’s granddaughter, Iris Sermon Leftwich. They weren’t used to a king-size bed, and that night, Vera sat on one side and Jessie on the other. He looked around the room and then back at his wife. “How’s the weather over there?” he said.

  On March 27, 1957, Elvis left Memphis for Chicago with his cousin Gene (now Elvis’s man Friday), Arthur Hooton, and George Klein, who was making his first trip with the group. Before starting Jailhouse Rock, he would do a brief tour of several U.S. cities with a quick swing into Canada.

  In a much publicized event, replete with press conference, Elvis would play the International Amphitheater the following night, debuting a $2,500 gold-leaf tuxedo made for him by Nudie Cohen, the Russian-American tailor. Nudie was famous for elaborate and inventive stage costumes—it was Cohen who designed Hank Williams’s famous white cowboy suit with musical notes on the sleeves—though he started out customizing underwear for showgirls and strippers at his first store, Nudie’s for the Ladies, in New York City.

  Elvis had a particular stripper on his mind during his two days in Chicago, as he’d spotted an advertisement for Tura Satana’s show at the Follies Theatre. He was still as fascinated by exotic dancers as he had been in 1955 when he and Tura first met in Biloxi. His interest in them grew stronger during his trips to Las Vegas, and then again when he read the script for Jailhouse Rock.

  Now in Chicago, Elvis went to see Tura’s afternoon performance, going by himself, wearing dark glasses and a hat. He watched her routine and then asked to go backstage. She hadn’t expected him, so she hadn’t made arrangements, and “the girls from the show were just fawning and climbing all over him.” Tura took him into her dressing room, but people wouldn’t leave them alone, so they went to a restaurant down the street at State and Van Buren. The owner sat them in a booth in the back where nobody would see them, and they planned to meet again late that night at the theater. “That’s when we really started really dating.”

  Just as he had with seventeen-year-old Kay Wheeler, Elvis asked Tura to show him her dance steps. She explained that a lot of her performance was based on martial arts, particularly the flips and splits, and the knee slides and backbends.

  “What d
o you mean, martial arts?” he asked.

  “Well, my dad showed me how to protect myself after the rape. I incorporated a lot of it in my routine by just adding it to music.”

  “Oh,” he said. “You’ve got to teach me how to do that!”

  She took him through it and then showed him how to do the shimmy with one leg, both legs, and then switch over. He laughed. It felt good.

  “Can you teach me how to twirl the tassels?”

  “Yes, but I can only teach you how to twirl one.”

  He laughed again, thinking about where she might mean to put it.

  “What if I want to learn to twirl two?”

  “Sorry, honey. You really don’t have enough up there to do that.”

  “Okay, how do you do the knee slides?”

  “Carefully.”

  He saw what she meant, and then she showed him how to do the slide and the splits at the same time. He’d been dropping to his knees onstage already for about a year, though he wouldn’t be able to do it in the gold suit, because the gold was already flaking off. But he wanted something a little more dramatic. The first time he tried the slides, he picked up a splinter, so he didn’t do it again. He said, “That one hurt!”

  Finally, he told her he wanted to learn the bump and grind—the big pelvic thrusts, and the real hip swivel, not just the teases that he’d been doing since The Milton Berle Show. Tura showed him some subtle movements, and he pushed her for more.

  “He liked to do the bumps and grinds as I did them, and that was basically what he used in his routine from then on.” Indeed, his 1957 concerts in support of the release of Jailhouse Rock—particularly his benefit show for the Elvis Presley Youth Center in Tupelo that fall—would be his most sexually blatant.