Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  When Elvis returned to Fort Hood, he applied for permission to live off base with his family. All soldiers who completed basic training could request permission to live with their dependents, though for most soldiers, that meant wife and children. On June 20, he worked a deal with Stylemaster Mobile Homes for use of a three-bedroom trailer in exchange for photographs of himself and his parents and grandmother in the unit. They parked it near Fort Hood, and that weekend, Elvis, Vernon, Gladys, Minnie Mae, and Lamar moved in. And when Anita came down on weekends, flying in from New York where she was doing a summer television series with singer Andy Williams, she’d stay there, too.

  At first Gladys was elated, even in a trailer. She was taking care of her son again, and they were together. But then it got so cramped, and the air-conditioning didn’t work right, and the toilet stopped up, and Gladys couldn’t get any rest, fans knocking on the door night and day. Her mood soured, Anita remembered. Even the scrub trees bothered her. “It was in the hot summertime and in the middle of a field way back in the woods, because that’s where you had to be if you wanted any privacy at all. It was a difficult time.”

  On July 1, Vernon moved them all to a large three-bedroom brick ranch on Killeen’s elite Oak Hill Drive, paying the owner, Judge Chester Crawford, an exorbitant $1,400 for two months. Elvis obligingly stood outside in the big yard and signed autographs, and everybody was happy again. They all went to the Fadals for the Fourth of July, where Gladys ate hamburgers and talked with LaNelle, and soon Gene and Junior came down.

  Elvis had everything he needed now. Minnie Mae fixed his beloved purple hull peas and sauerkraut and wieners, and he’d hug and kiss on the skinny ol’ firecracker of a woman, Minnie slapping the devil out of him when he’d play tricks on her.

  On the base, he was doing well in his ten weeks of advanced tank training. He liked the sixty-ton M48 Patton Tanks, liked being in Patton’s division, liked being a gunner, liked it all. He was a good soldier, winning sharpshooting medals and placing third in tank gunnery, even as the big shells damaged his hearing. When Sergeant Matthews put Elvis in command of a tank, the other soldiers begged for someone else. “He’s working us to death,” they griped.

  Anita thought he had finally found himself, and Rex Mansfield wondered the same. “He loved the army,” said Rex. “It was a way to express himself and find out who he really was.”

  But the last happy chapter of his life was coming to an end. Suddenly Gladys’s health began to spiral. She lost her appetite, and she seemed so listless in the Texas heat, found it hard to breathe. Lamar saw what was happening. “One day I looked at her, and she had a yellow tinge to her eyes. I went to Elvis and I said, ‘You need to call a doctor. Something’s wrong, and I mean it.’ But he didn’t want to hear about it.”

  Her liver was giving out. Gladys was jaundiced, suffering from acute hepatitis.

  Within days, her skin took on an ocher hue. Lamar again pleaded with Elvis. They fought about it (“If you don’t let her go to the hospital, buddy, she’s going to die right here on you”), but Elvis didn’t want it to be true, insisting she’d get better. Then Red came down, and the two of them forced Elvis to act. A local doctor came to the house and recommended that Gladys return immediately to her own physician, Dr. Charles Clarke, in Memphis. On Friday, August 8, Elvis drove his parents to Temple, Texas, and put them on the train.

  “She didn’t want to go,” Lamar says. “She knew she was dying.”

  Vernon and Elvis, Methodist Hospital, Memphis, August 12, 1958. After threatening to go AWOL, Elvis had just received emergency leave to visit his stricken mother. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Wake up, Mama, Wake up”

  As Elvis completed his advanced tank training the next day, August 9, 1958, Gladys was being put into an ambulance and taken to Methodist Hospital, where she’d once been a nurse’s aide. Her condition was listed as grave.

  Vernon called Lamar.

  “You need to tell Elvis to get up here as quick as possible—tomorrow if he can!”

  “He’s out in the field, Vernon,” Lamar said. He borrowed a jeep and went out and got him. The next day, Elvis, now frantic with the realization that Gladys could die, tried to get home. But he was set to begin basic unit training, and his captain denied emergency leave. Gladys’s doctor called military personnel in Washington and stressed the urgency of the situation, but only when Elvis threatened to go AWOL did the army grant his leave. On August 12, Lamar flew with him from Fort Worth to Memphis, where Elvis got a cab to the house, and then drove up to the hospital on his own.

  When he went over again the next morning, August 13, Gladys told Elvis she was feeling better, that the doctors were saying she could go home the next day if she kept improving. He breathed a sigh of relief, kissed his mother, and went home for a few hours before returning in the afternoon.

  In the interim, Gladys had another visitor, Dotty Ayers, a fan who had met the family after writing Gladys a letter of support at the height of Elvis’s negative press.

  “We were in the room talking, and they brought in some flowers and asked Gladys to sign for them. Her hands were swelled. She was swelled all over, and she asked me to sign for her. I signed, ‘Mrs. Presley,’ and laughed and said, ‘I didn’t think I would ever be signing this name.’ She said, ‘Don’t ever give up hope, honey.’

  “Gladys looked at me, and she must have had a premonition or something. She said, ‘Dotty, I don’t think I’ll ever see Graceland again.’ I said, ‘Gladys, you know the doctors said that you’re better.’ She said, ‘I know, but I just got this awful feeling.’ She said, ‘Will you promise me something? Will you watch after my boy, ’cause there’s just so many people that don’t care about him.’ ”

  Billy Smith went back with Elvis to the hospital later that day. They stayed until nearly midnight, Elvis patting her, asking if he could do anything for her.

  “Mama,” he asked. “Do you want me to stay the night?”

  “No, son, everything’s okay.”

  “Well, I might go to the movie, and then I’ll come back by here.”

  “No,” Gladys said. “Just go on to the movie now, and come back up here tomorrow. If I need anything, Daddy will call you.”

  He kissed her, and then he left and picked up Frances, Gloria, and Heidi to go to the Crosstown Theatre.

  “I don’t think Elvis had any idea she would die,” Billy says. “He really thought she’d get better.”

  But Gladys knew the truth. “Son,” she said, “when you come back tomorrow, make sure the other patients have these flowers.”

  When Elvis got home, he asked Lamar to drop off the girls and told him Gladys had asked about him two or three times. But Lamar had been running back and forth, taking Minnie Mae up to the hospital and talking to the doctor. “They drained something like a gallon and a half of fluid off of Gladys two days before she died. But Elvis said, ‘Come with me in the morning and we’ll go see her, ’cause she’s going to be all right.’ I said to Billy, ‘She’s not going to make it through the night.’ ”

  Billy went up to Elvis’s room, and they watched TV a little while before drifting off. Suddenly Elvis raised himself on the bed. “Something’s wrong,” he said. Billy asked what he meant. “I don’t know. I got an eerie feeling.” Then he laid back down.

  It was a little after 3 A.M. on August 14, and Vernon, sleeping in a chair at the hospital, woke up to the sound of Gladys struggling for breath. Her face was a yellow mask of fear. Gladys Love Presley, age forty-six, was in full cardiac arrest and would die within minutes.

  Shortly after, the phone rang downstairs at Graceland. Lamar was still out, and at first, Elvis just let it ring.

  “It’s late, Billy,” he finally said. “Maybe you should go down and get it.”

  When Billy answered, “I heard Vernon say, ‘Oh, God—’ He was just sobbing. He said, ‘Tell Elvis . . .’ Then he really broke up. I don’t know if the nurse took the phone fr
om him, or if he handed it to her, but she got on, and I could hear him crying in the background.”

  “Tell Elvis he needs to get up here quick as he can,” she said. “His mother has taken a turn for the worse.”

  Billy ran upstairs. “That was the nurse. She said to tell you that you might ought to get up there, that your mom is starting to slip.”

  “He said, ‘Oh, my God! No, Mama, no!’ I think he knew, but he didn’t want to believe it.” Elvis quickly pulled on his white shoes, a pair of white pants, and a white ruffled shirt. “We ran downstairs, and we jumped into the Lincoln Mark II, and we tore out of there like all hell had broke loose. The whole time we were driving, he said, ‘Oh, God, I’m scared! I’m afraid I’ve lost my mama!’ ”

  When they got to the hospital, Elvis, nearly hysterical, slowed the Lincoln and jumped out, leaving the car in drive and letting it run over the breaker. Billy shoved the gearshift in park, and then he took off, too, leaving the car running, the lights blazing, both doors open. Elvis was way ahead of him now, running, running, running to Gladys.

  Upstairs, as Elvis turned the corner, Vernon was just coming out of Gladys’s room. His face hung in folds of grief. Vernon reached out his arms, and Elvis rushed toward him. “God, son, she’s gone!” he cried.

  “All the color just drained out of Elvis’s face,” Billy remembers. “He was white as a sheet. He started to sob this kind of unearthly sound. It just went through me.”

  Father and son, so unable to show affection before, held each other and cried unashamedly in the hallway. Then Elvis broke away. “I want to see her,” he said.

  “No, no, son,” Vernon pleaded. “Don’t go in there.”

  But Elvis wouldn’t be stopped. “No, I’ve got to see my mama!”

  With Billy by his side, Elvis entered the room where Gladys lay, so very still in a pink nightgown. An oxygen tent was pulled back from her face. She had a restful look about her.

  Elvis leaned over and lifted her head, and pressed his cheek to hers. He cried and stroked her head, and then patted her on the stomach the way he had when he was a child, the two of them alone, with nothing but each other, in Tupelo.

  “Oh, God, Satnin’,” he said. “Not when I can give you everything in the world.”

  He stood petting her, talking to her in their little language, until Vernon and the nurse pulled him away and took him down the hall to the waiting room.

  About 4 A.M., Lamar arrived back at the house in the black Cadillac. The wind was blowing, and the front door open. Minnie Mae came out on the porch and said, “Gladys is dead. We need to go to the hospital.”

  “We shot over there,” he remembers, “and that elevator opened, and I’ve never heard such crying, and screaming, and hollering in my life. It was unbelievable. This wailing, almost like wolves. It made me shudder. I came around the corner and Elvis was walking toward me, and he said, ‘Lamar, Satnin’ isn’t here.’ And I said, ‘I know, Elvis. I know.’ ”

  Lamar sat with him for a long time. He wanted his mother to have an old-fashioned southern visitation and service at home, he said, and Lamar offered to help with the arrangements. As they were on their way to the car, leaving through the loading area at the back of the hospital, the attendants brought Gladys’s body down to be transported to the funeral home. “He wouldn’t let her go for the longest time. He was sobbing, saying, ‘She’s all I ever lived for! She was my best girl.’ ”

  They sat in the car in the parking lot, both of them crying, and then they went back to Graceland so Elvis could make a few calls. One was to the base, requesting extended leave. Another was to Eddie Fadal.

  “Eddie,” he said, his voice cracking, “she’s gone! I’ve lost the only person I ever really loved!” Eddie tried to console him, and finally Elvis choked out, “Can you come?” Eddie said yes, of course, and Elvis told him he’d send Junior to the airport to get him.

  The Memphis Funeral Home took care of the body, and then they brought Gladys back to Graceland, the house she had lived in barely a year, the mansion that had never felt like home.

  Elvis saw them coming up the drive. “Daddy, Mama’s comin’ home,” he called to his father. Elvis asked the attendants to put the copper-and-silver casket between the music room and living room, and they placed her there. Elvis walked over to where she lay in her blue dress, a glass top covering most of the body. He then asked that the lower half of the casket be opened, so that he might see her feet, which were clothed in little slippers. Elvis removed them, and massaged her feet and hands, and then, taking a comb from his pocket, rearranged her hair. Lamar couldn’t stand it.

  “He got nearly hysterical. Started that wailing again. It made my skin crawl.”

  Elvis’s first cousin Harold Loyd heard about Gladys’s death on the radio and came right up from Mississippi. Now he wondered if Elvis had lost his mind. “He was in pitiful shape. His eyes were all swollen and red. He would walk over to the casket and say, ‘Wake up, Mama. Wake up, Mama. Wake up, baby, and talk to Elvis.’ ”

  He kept it up, parading from the couch to the casket, pleading with her, fondling her, lapsing into baby talk. At one point, he went out on the porch and sat on the steps near one of the stone lions that guarded the entrance. Billy went to the door and watched him, saw him put his arm on his knee and bury his face. “He just cried something awful. I followed him out there, but I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just let him be.” Afterward, he sat up almost all night and stared at her.

  When Eddie got there the next day, Elvis and Vernon were standing at the casket. Both of them touched the body “like they wanted to pick her up and kiss her,” Eddie thought, so he walked in quietly. Vernon was wailing, and Elvis was chanting and smoothing his mother’s forehead, comforting her, comforting himself, almost going back into the womb.

  “Mama,” he said, “you never would dress up for me, and now here you are dressed up in the most beautiful gown. I never saw you dressed up like this.”

  Eddie felt as if he had intruded on a private moment, but then Elvis saw him and brought him up to the casket. “Mama, here’s Eddie. You know Eddie. You met him in Killeen.” Eddie got chills, and then Elvis took her hand.

  “Look, Eddie, at those hands,” he said, “those beautiful hands. They worked so hard to raise me.”

  Anita was in New York when Gladys died, and after taping her Andy Williams program that night, she got on a plane. Lamar met her at the airport.

  When they pulled up at the house, Elvis and Vernon were sitting on the front porch, weeping.

  “Little! Little! Little!” Elvis cried. “I’ve lost her! I’ve lost her!”

  Anita put her arms around him, and then he pulled away and said, “Come on in. I want you to see her.”

  She hesitated. She’d never seen a dead person before.

  “No, I don’t think I want to go in there.”

  But he insisted. “Yes, Little, she loved you, and I want you to see her.”

  Anita hung back, but she loved Gladys, too. She was such a sweet lady. Elvis saw her weakening, so he grabbed her and brought her inside.

  “We went in there where the coffin was, and he just talked like a baby. He called her Satnin’, and he showed me her feet. She was barefooted, and her toes were painted. He talked about her feet, her ‘little sooties,’ he called them. The corpse was so swollen, and he made me stand there forever, just looking at her and talking to her. I broke down. It was just really sad. Very hard to get through.”

  Dixie Locke came, too, and while she was sad for Elvis, “He reacted as I would have expected him to act. He was devastated, of course, and I think he wondered how he would even be able to get along without her, really.”

  More and more people showed up as the night wore on, Barbara Pittman remembered, but as the mourners tried to console father and son, Colonel Parker burst in and tried to run everybody off.

  “Get all of these people out of here!” he barked to no one in particular. “I want them out of here no
w!”

  Elvis, in a rare moment of confrontation, rose from his seat on the couch. “Look, these are my friends. Don’t you come in my house and tell me to run my friends out of here!”

  But Parker worried he couldn’t handle security at Graceland and urged Elvis to move the next day’s services to the Memphis Funeral Home. Elvis thought about it for a minute and nodded in agreement.

  The attendants came to get Gladys early the next day, and Elvis, who had again stayed up all night, followed the casket all the way out to the hearse, crying, “Please don’t take my baby away! Bring her back! She’s not dead. She’s just sleeping. Oh, God, please don’t take her away!” Harold Loyd nearly broke down himself, seeing his cousin suffer so. “He said, ‘Everything I have is gone—everything I’ve ever worked for. I got all this for her and now she’s gone. I don’t want any of it now.’ ”

  But Vernon was in a more practical frame of mind, according to Elvis’s music publisher Freddy Bienstock, who was staying at the house. In Freddy’s view, Vernon was not as broken up as he seemed.

  “When the funeral director came to Graceland, Vernon was crying and carrying on, and it was pure bunk, because he was cheating all over the place, and everybody knew it. But he was saying, through these not very convincing tears, ‘The best of everything! Give her the best of everything!’ The fellow marked it all down and left very quickly, and the moment he walked out the door, all the tears and crying stopped. Vernon turned to Colonel Parker and said, ‘Don’t let them take advantage of me in my hour of grief.’ ”