Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Now Joe was telling her to “get out of this mess,” and Ann Pennington, who had become her friend through another girl in L.A., was trying to introduce her to new people. That July after Elvis had recuperated from a cosmetic eye procedure he’d had in mid-June, Sheila was supposed to meet him in Uniondale, New York. But she didn’t want to go. In fact, she’d met actor James Caan through Ann, and had already committed to marry him. Nobody wanted to tell Elvis just yet, so they made up a story that she couldn’t fly due to an ear infection.

  Determined to have Sheila with him, Elvis told her he’d send a low-flying plane for her. But when she begged off again, he angrily said he would call when he got home. After that, he could barely contain his rage, even onstage. In Uniondale, on July 19, he threw a guitar into the crowd and yelled, “Whoever got the guitar can keep the damned thing—I don’t need it anyway.”

  The following night, in Norfolk, Virginia, he was still out of control, repeating crude sexual remarks about Kathy Westmoreland that he had made in other cities. (“She will take affection from anybody, any place, any time. In fact, she gets it from the whole band.”) After that, he raised eyebrows saying he smelled green peppers and onions, and that the Sweet Inspirations “had probably been eating catfish.” Finally, a few days later, he accidentally shot Dr. Nick in an Asheville, North Carolina, hotel room, though the bullet, which ricocheted off a chair and hit the physician in the chest, did no real damage.

  Taking Sheila’s place that tour was Diana Goodman, the reigning Miss Georgia USA, who Elvis picked out of a tour group at the Graceland gates. In some of their photographs, the curvaceous blonde appears dazed, as if the routine of plane, limo, hotel, show—and dealing with a highly unpredictable host—was a nightmare of unimaginable proportions. Their relationship would disintegrate at tour’s end.

  Elvis’s weight had ballooned well over two hundred pounds again, but more disturbing was his bloat. He looked as if he might pop and spiral heavenward. More disturbing, his roundness made him appear as if he were morphing into Gladys. It was as if she had begun to reclaim him.

  On the way to play his Vegas dates that August, he again had trouble breathing on the plane. It made a forced landing in Dallas, and after recuperating in a motel for several hours, he continued on.

  Joyce Bova slipped into Vegas with Janice, to see if the rumors about his appearance were true. “I thought he must be sick. That show was such a sad sight. He even had trouble trying to straddle a chair.”

  Joan Blackman had also heard reports, and went to Vegas to see if she could make a connection. “I was just so taken aback. I had changed, too, but when I first saw him, I was stunned. It wasn’t just the weight. I saw something that made me very sad. I felt like something had been taken away.”

  Three days later, the Colonel canceled the rest of the engagement, and Elvis went home to be hospitalized again, this time for multiple ailments: his colon, a fatty liver, a high cholesterol count, general fatigue, and depression. Once again, Linda stayed with him in the hospital. Marian Cocke, the motherly supervisor of nursing services, came by to see him, and when Dr. Nick suggested that Elvis continue his twenty-four-hour home care, Elvis asked for Mrs. Cocke, whom he had previously met during his January stay, to supplement Tish Henley.

  However, watching over Elvis, Vernon, and Minnie Mae seemed taxing for even two women, so Marian, who never accepted a salary for it, suggested alternating shifts with yet another nurse from the hospital, Kathy Seamon. The night before Elvis’s discharge, he signed a picture of himself “To Mrs. Cocke, the sex symbol of the Babtist [sic],” and when Jerry cracked a joke about “Cocke and Seamon,” Marian picked up an entire pitcher of ice water and poured it down Jerry’s shirt. Elvis, who had already surprised the nurse with a white 1976 Pontiac Grand Prix, laughed until he got tears in his eyes, and told Marian she was going to fit in just fine at Graceland.

  Near the end of that summer, 1975, he was melancholy again and called Sheila at 4 A.M. “I want you to come home,” he said. What did he mean? She was home. “No, I mean Memphis. I want you at Graceland.” There was a great long silence, and then Sheila said she needed some time to think about it. She never really knew if he loved her or if she were just one of the girls, and now she was with Jimmy, and that seemed like the place to stay. She didn’t really tell him that, though, just asked about Linda Thompson to shift the focus, and said she was confused. Elvis’s voice was so sad she could hardly stand it. She was his last real chance, and he knew it. “Okay, baby,” he finally said. They never talked again.

  Next he tried nineteen-year-old Melissa Blackwood, who he’d met earlier in August at a World Football League game. She was just about to give up her crown as queen of the Memphis Southmen, now renamed the Grizzlies, but beauty queen or not, she wasn’t used to getting calls at dawn at her parents’ house. Elvis sent one of the guys to pick her up at 7 A.M., and when she was ushered into his bedroom and found him sitting up in bed in his pajamas, she didn’t know what to think. He patted the massive mattress for her to sit down beside him, and he could tell it made her nervous, even though he promised her nothing would happen.

  “He kind of held my hand, and we just sat and talked, and he called me ‘Brown Eyes.’ There was a little piece of hair on my forehead that grew down like a cowlick, and he played with that and said, ‘Look at this hair,’ just like I was a little child.”

  Soon, he asked her to change into pajamas, too, which made her think he was out of his mind. But she did it, the big sleeves falling miles off her hands. He talked about his childhood for a while, told her how sick his daddy had been, and how trapped he felt by his fame. Then as they sat out on the front porch, he watched her face as a new Grand Prix snaked its way up the drive. “Why?” she asked him. “What did I do to deserve this?” His voice was small and sad. “You came,” he said simply.

  But Melissa could not stay, not after she fed him yogurt and hot cereal and he started shaking and “got so sick he could barely hold his head up.” She watched as he took his pills, and when he struggled to swallow, it scared her so her heart fired like a jackhammer in her chest. She asked him not to take any more, saying he didn’t need them, that she’d sing him to sleep, do anything to see him feeling better. “All right,” he agreed. “Will you just stay and hold my hand?” Every time she thought he was asleep, he’d wake up and grab her arm and say, “Don’t go.”

  She saw him a few more times, but it was all just too unnerving, especially when he asked her to move in. “Elvis, I’m sorry. I care, but I can’t just move in here,” she said. “I care, too, babe,” he answered. “That’s the problem.” He was nearly in tears when she left the last time, and though she returned to take him a thank-you card, he wasn’t there.

  At the same time he saw Melissa, he began romancing JoCathy Brownlee, a bubbly, outgoing junior high health and physical education teacher. They met on August 2, 1975, when Elvis attended a Grizzlies game at the Mid-South Coliseum, where JoCathy worked part-time as a hostess in the press box. She spent the evening getting him whatever he wanted—pizza, Coke—and he picked up on her nickname, J. C., frequently calling her over where he sat with Linda, with whom JoCathy had gone to Memphis State.

  Her friend Barbara Klein told her that night that Elvis had been watching her reflection in the glass, and in a way it all made sense. Like Mindi, JoCathy had a strong feeling Elvis would be in her life somehow, dating back to when she was a child in Indianola, Mississippi, and her father would drive her past Graceland on their trips to Memphis.

  When she first moved to town, she lived in Whitehaven, where a family whose property backed up to Graceland would let her stand on their fence to see him when he was out riding his horse. Then she briefly met him at the Memphian in 1974, and had even dated Charlie for a spell, visiting him in his basement digs at Graceland. In fact, she was so into Elvis that she was taking her mother to see him in Vegas in just a few weeks.

  When Elvis got up to leave the game on that summer night, Jo
Cathy was not shy about telling him good-bye. She took a look at the scarf he wore with his blue leisure suit, thought of the signature scarves he draped around the necks of his fans, and joked, “Is that a real Elvis scarf?”

  “Well, honey,” he said, “not really.” And with that, he took it off, put it around her neck, pulled her close, and kissed her. “It was right in front of Linda, and I was just like, ‘Oh, my God!’ ”

  That was a Saturday, and on Monday, Sonny called Barbara and asked how to get in touch with her friend—Elvis wanted to give her a hundred dollars for being so nice in the press box. He also wanted a date.

  “Believe it or not,” she says, “I had this sick, sick, feeling.” As it happened, she had a new boyfriend, and it was love at first sight. She did nothing, then, trying to make up her mind, when Dr. Nick tracked her down on Thursday at Barbara’s house to tell her Elvis was trying to reach her. By coincidence, JoCathy lived in a duplex owned by Miss Patty, Anita Wood’s former landlady. “When I got home, the phone was ringing, and this voice said, ‘J. C.? E. P.’ ”

  He wanted her to come to the house and meet Lisa Marie, and then go to the Crosstown that very night. Then when they returned, he changed into his black Munsingwear pajamas with the red piping that Aunt Delta had bought him at Sears. JoCathy already felt as if she knew him—they were both from Mississippi and close to their mothers—so she didn’t think, “Oh, oh, he’s going to attack me.” But she did think it was odd when he made several phone calls while he was showing her a book on numerology, and then sent her downstairs to look up the word “esoteric” in the dictionary.

  It was just a ruse, of course—he’d ordered a new Grand Prix for her, just as he had Melissa, and it was pulling up in the driveway. “Elvis walked out in front of me and he turned around and said, ‘Honey, I hope this one’s okay. It was the best I could do at four o’clock in the morning.’ ”

  She didn’t quite know what to say—she’d just made her last payment on her Ford Grand Torino—and though she knew how funny it sounded, she asked if she could give her old car to her mother, unless Elvis needed it for the trade-in.

  He had a laugh at that—she could do anything she wanted with her old car—and then told her to hop in. He wanted to drive out to the airport to show her the plane he was in the process of buying, a $900,000 Lockheed JetStar. She was behind the wheel and he was sitting beside her, still in his pajamas, when he asked if she had the lights on. Sure, sure, she told him. Farther down the road, he said, “J. C., are you sure you have your lights on?”

  “Oh, yeah, my lights are on.”

  Finally, he reached across her lap and pulled the knob, and the highway lit up like daylight. That’s when she really felt stupid, but then it wasn’t every night she got a car from Elvis.

  When they got back to the house, they kissed a few times, but he was never too forward with her, and then he laid his heart on the line. “J. C., I can tell that you’re committed to somebody, and I have to protect my feelings. But if anything changes in your relationship, let me know because I want to see you again.” She told him okay, and then she walked out front and climbed behind the wheel of her new car. The sun was coming up as she crawled down the winding drive, and the first thing she thought was, “How am I going to explain this to my mother?”

  Elvis was not about to give a girl a new car and just let her leave him in it, so two nights later, he showed up at the Grizzlies game and asked if JoCathy could sit with him. Near the end of the evening, he asked her to go to Fort Worth to see his other new plane, The Lisa Marie, a $250,000 Convair 880 jet, originally part of the Delta fleet, which was being customized and refurbished at an additional $800,000 as his show plane. From there, they’d probably go on to Las Vegas or Palm Springs, he told her. While it sure sounded good, she said, she couldn’t: She had a date.

  Only a week had passed since she made the remark about the scarf and he’d kissed her, and she had a lot to process. He then took another girl from the game instead, but when he came back to town, he saw JoCathy every night until he left for his Vegas engagement. There, JoCathy and her mother were his guests in one of the round booths, and when Linda saw her there, “She put two and two together.” For the next three months, he would find a way to see JoCathy every time Linda was away.

  Soon, they were spotted around town more and more, particularly at the Crosstown Theatre, and at the Colonial or Chickasaw country clubs, where they played racquetball with Billy and Jo Smith, George and Barbara Klein, and Billy and Angie Stanley. Elvis had taken up the sport at Dr. Nick’s urging and was building his own court at home. “He was truly trying to get his act together,” she says, though his eating habits—six small yogurts at a time from his little refrigerator off the bedroom—were still too poor for him to lose much weight.

  One day, one of JoCathy’s pupils asked, “Miss Brownlee, are you dating Elvis Presley?” JoCathy told her she didn’t discuss her personal life with students, and the child said, “Well, I went home and told my mama that you were dating Elvis Presley, and my mama said, ‘There’s no way Elvis is dating a P.E. teacher. He only dates beauty queens and movie stars.’ ”

  JoCathy did seem an unusual choice for him, given his history and the fact that they really had little in common. However, they were playful together—at one point he jokingly told her she could use a nose job, and they both laughed when she said he needed to get his entire body retreaded. But when he brought out The Impersonal Life and asked her to read it to him, she thought, “This makes no sense. To this day, I have no idea what that book was about.” And while he liked her pretty hands and feet, he couldn’t really perform sexually if he were medicated, though it was obvious to her that he hadn’t lost his desire. When it came right down to it, she wasn’t sure how she would characterize the relationship.

  “I cared a lot about him, and I knew he cared about me, but it wasn’t going anywhere. He did tell me a few times that he loved me, but it would be right before he dozed off to sleep. I’m not going to say that it was something that it wasn’t, but I wouldn’t take anything for it.”

  One of the problems was that JoCathy was exhausted from trying to balance Elvis’s schedule with her own. In addition to her teaching and Mid-South Coliseum commitments, she logged two other part-time jobs. He tried to get her to quit working so she could be with him more, but she had better sense than that, even though it irritated him that she was so tired all the time. (“If you yawn one more time, we are out of here,” he said at the movies one night.)

  She couldn’t help it. She left Graceland at 6:30 A.M. to teach school, and by the time she went home and then got back to Whitehaven about 4:30 or 5:00, Elvis would just be getting up. They’d have supper together, read, watch TV, or make the usual outings, and then she’d get only about two hours’ sleep before the day started all over again. After a while, she started moving some of her wardrobe there (“my nightgowns, and my teaching clothes, and things that I wore when we would go out”) to make things easier. But it wasn’t enough for a man who wanted a woman at his beck and call all the time.

  Then one Saturday in late October 1975, they got their wires crossed. She arrived at Graceland after one of her part-time jobs, selling tickets at the coliseum, and Elvis “kind of acted like he was surprised to see me. I had gone into the dressing area, and he walked in and he said, ‘Uh, J. C., I have plans for tonight. Just grab a few of your things, and I’ll call you tomorrow.’ Well, I was just worn out, and it rubbed me the wrong way. I thought, ‘I am not believing this!’ I got a clothesbasket and just started throwing everything in there. Elvis said, ‘Look, I just said to grab a few things. You don’t have to be such a bitch about it.’ And I stormed out of there, and that was the last time I saw him.”

  A couple of weeks later, JoCathy heard he was dating Dawn Bonner, whose father, Alex, was an Emmy-winning executive at WHBQ.

  When nothing came of that, Elvis tested the waters with seventeen-year-old Tanya Tucker during his two-week engagement
in Vegas that December. The singer, a child who sounded like a woman, had become a national sensation at thirteen for her grown-up songs of desolate love, including “Delta Dawn” and Would You Lay with Me (In a Field of Stone).” The latter song, especially, had marked her with something of a racy image, but her father-manager, Beau Tucker, a pipeline worker who fancied himself an eccentric sharpie along the lines of Colonel Parker, hardly ever let her out of his sight.

  Beau Tucker had moved his family from Arizona to the Las Vegas area to spur his daughter’s career, and Tanya had dreamed of meeting Elvis, with whom she was personally and professionally obsessed, long before she landed a recording contract. (“He would come into town and I wanted to see him so bad, but we couldn’t afford the thirty bucks.”) She knew he was part of her destiny, though, and their eventual introduction came through Glen D. Hardin, who played piano in both stars’ bands. Glen arranged for Elvis to acknowledge Tanya from the stage. But when a security guard came to take her back after the first show, she remembered her father’s advice: “Now Tanya, that boy can have anybody he wants. Let him know he can’t have you.”

  “Hey,” she told the guard. “Tell Mr. Presley to just wait. I’m signing autographs out here!”

  When she finally went back, Elvis gave her the same treatment, stalling her for more than thirty minutes. She sat down next to Lamar, checking her watch while the other guys proffered Cokes and M&Ms. Finally, she turned to her older sister, LaCosta, and announced in a loud voice, “Five more minutes, and we’re out of here. I’m not waitin’ any longer.”

  Suddenly, the door opened, and there he was, all in black, a leather coat with a fake fur collar covering a roomy sweat suit, a damp towel setting it off. At that moment, all of Tanya’s brashness melted like a Dreamsicle in the Vegas sun.

  “It was like the parting of the Red Sea. I was sitting down, of course, and he looked like he was about fourteen or fifteen feet tall. He came right over and said, ‘Lamar, get up,’ and you’ve never seen three hundred pounds move so quick. Elvis just plopped right down in front of me and got about two inches from my face and said, ‘So how you doin’?’ I said, ‘I’m just fine. How are you?’ I didn’t flinch a bit. Inside I was just jumpin’, but I didn’t want him to know that.”