Everywhere Elvis and Dixie went, girls vied shamelessly for his attention. She was outraged, but he seemed not to mind at all such loose, unladylike behavior. She was sure that there was no other girl for him, but she was aware of how only months before they had wondered if they would have the strength to wait until they married for the consummation of their love.
On the road, Elvis did not wait at all for sexual consummation. Out here were other girls for Elvis, and many of them. In particular, he was reinventing himself in and about Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was appearing on the Louisiana Hayride every Saturday night. He, Bill, and Scotty would hardly check into a motel or a hotel before the girls would begin to swarm around. Elvis loved the attention.
Scotty and Bill witnessed his behavior after one sexual event. Scotty thought that it was probably his first. They had checked into a Shreveport hotel, renting one room with two beds because that was all they could afford. In the wee hours of the night, Scotty and Bill sat in the lobby waiting for Elvis to finish whatever he was doing up in the room with a girl he had met earlier in the day. Finally Scotty looked up and saw Elvis and the girl coming down the stairs. After an awkward moment, Elvis took the girl over to a corner of the lobby, left her, and came back to them. He was very agitated.
“The rubber busted,” he exclaimed. “What do I do now?”
They had cautioned Elvis about venereal diseases and possible pregnancies with girls on the road, but they had no advice to give him in this particular crisis and went on up to bed. The next day they asked Elvis what he had done. Nonchalantly he declared that he had taken the girl to the hospital emergency room.
“The emergency room!” Scotty and Bill were aghast.
“I got them to give her a douche,” Elvis explained.
Scotty looked at Bill.
“I didn’t know they did that” was all he could say.
Through all of this, Elvis telephoned home almost every night, often talking to Dixie, who would be visiting with Gladys. Sometimes he called Dixie separately, using her neighbor’s phone. Again and again he expressed his great love for her. On one occasion when Elvis returned from touring in Texas, he brought her a sleeveless blouse and a pair of shorts in pale pink. He could hardly wait until she tried the outfit on. For Christmas, he gave her a suit. She put it on, and again his excitement ran high. Elvis dressed Dixie with an enthusiasm that few young men could have mustered in dressing their girlfriends, if indeed they dared attempt to dress them at all.
In January 1955, Elvis was gone for three weeks running. When he returned he and Dixie went to another all-night sing at Ellis Auditorium. Thereafter, for months, he was on the road almost constantly. The girls had claimed him as their own, a claim that came to a crescendo in the Jacksonville “riot” in May 1955.
Even as Elvis was busily involved with other girls on the road, he continued to call home nightly and check up on Dixie through his parents. He liked hearing that she was actually with them. When she was not, he questioned Gladys closely. “Has she been over?” he would ask. “Did she spend the night?” He was exceedingly possessive. “He didn’t want to relinquish that control,” Dixie thought, “regardless of how long he was gone or what he was doing.” She was true to Elvis, and in his absences she got closer still to Gladys. They cooked and ate at Gladys’s house. They took walks and shopped together. “When Elvis was out of town, I would go over and stay with them,” she said. “I spent the nights lots of times and slept in his bed while he was gone.”
Elvis escorted Dixie to her junior prom in the spring of 1955. He was marvelously attired in a white dress coat and shirt with a black bow tie, and she was so proud of him. By then, Elvis was renting a whole four-room house for his family on Lamar Avenue, a main thoroughfare on the south side of town. Neighboring kids would see Elvis and Dixie sitting on the front porch, talking and holding hands. Dixie saw that Elvis was changing, not only on the road but also in Memphis. He was developing a whole new set of friends, young men who were nothing at all like the friends he had had before. “They used horrible language, they all smoked, everybody had a drink,” Dixie said. More and more he was with them, guys like George Klein and Red West. He flourished only when he was the center of attention, and they gave him a lot of attention.
Elvis pressured Dixie to have no one else in her life, especially boys and young men, no matter how innocent the relationship. He quizzed her relentlessly about who she was seeing when he was gone, where she was when he called and she wasn’t there, and so on. Dixie, however, was not willing simply to sit at home while Elvis was away. She continued to go out with her friends—not dating anyone, but being with boys and girls from church and school. They would go to the Busy Betty on Lamar, to listen to the jukebox and dance. She told Elvis what she did, but he could not accept even these ordinary teenage pursuits. “That was the basis of every argument we ever had,” she recalled. “He was very possessive and very jealous.” Several times she gave him back his class ring. He would leave and within minutes be back again. They would sit on her front porch, cry together, and reconcile. Even though he would “run the women” through his hotel and motel rooms at a great rate while on the road, Elvis would not let Dixie go.
Finally, in October 1955, both Elvis and Dixie realized that it was over. Elvis never confessed that he had been unfaithful. Dixie, not Elvis, broke the news of her decision to end it to Gladys. The two women cried together and vowed to remain friends. Dixie’s own mother was reluctant to accept the ending. She would say, “Well, what are you going to do if you meet somebody else and get married, and after you get married, Elvis comes back.” Suppose Elvis said, “Hey, I made a mistake, and I want you to come and be my wife.” Dixie was quick to respond. “Well, I’ll just divorce whoever I’m married to and go live with him,” she declared.
Soon Dixie did marry and begin her family. So, too, did the Elvis girls. Those hundreds of thousands of young women in his audiences in 1954, 1955, 1956, and 1957 matured, married, and had children. Even so, they maintained their affairs with Elvis at full strength and never felt the need to divorce their husbands and leave their families. One described neatly how she managed her ongoing and passionate love affair with Elvis. In her thirties, married and with a son, she said she had three men in her life: her husband, her son, and Elvis Presley. Every so often she would just have to be with Elvis. She would go off to attend a performance or visit Graceland or whatever. Her husband and son understood this and were not jealous. After her meeting with Elvis, she always returned to the other males in her life—a better wife and mother, and a happier woman.
Paradox
Tightly woven into the Dixie story is the grand paradox in Elvis’s life: he never found the woman who made his life whole. Millions of women loved him with their hearts, and they never deserted him. Several hundred loved him with their bodies, many for a few hours, some for months, and some for years. But it was not within him to be true to one woman alone, and like Dixie they all left him. It was always Elvis who was left alone, the one thing in the world he most feared. His sometime bedmates went on to more satisfying and lasting relationships while Elvis continued his fruitless search. It was he, not they, who suffered from unrequited love. It was he whom everybody knew and nobody understood. It was he who was doomed to loneliness, a loneliness that he fought, strangely and futilely, by striving always to have a girl in his bed when he went to sleep and when he awoke.
The Death of Gladys
Gladys’s health had begun to decline in the Courts. Perhaps her illnesses were fated by her genes. The Smiths were not very healthy people. Her father had died suddenly at about fifty, having no clearly visible previous illness. Her mother, Octavia, had tuberculosis and was an invalid virtually all of her adult life. Some of the Smith children and grandchildren seemed to be born physically and perhaps psychologically impaired. Several drank to excess. So had Gladys around her fortieth birthday, and the drinking was accompanied by wild mood swings.
As the mo
ney began to pour in during the spring of 1955, Elvis rented a brick house for the family at 2414 Lamar and “retired” (to use the word he jokingly used) his father from the workforce. Their next-door neighbors, the Bakers, remembered Vernon spending time working on cars in his yard when he felt like it and not much else. He hardly spoke and was not very responsive when spoken to. The Presleys did not at first have a phone and used the Bakers’. Vernon would walk into the house without asking or even knocking to use the phone or borrow things, forcing Mr. Baker to put a hook on the door. Mrs. Presley, on the other hand, had the nicest manners but was a “nervous creature.” She had passed out on her bed on the night they moved in, and the Bakers had had to call their doctor to come help her. They never understood clearly why Gladys had collapsed.
Elvis was on tour when the Presleys moved into the house on Lamar, but when he came home the Bakers found him to be the soul of good manners and modesty. “He certainly didn’t want any of us to treat him like he was more important than any of us were,” Sarah Baker, the fourteen-year-old daughter, later recalled.
Soon the Presleys began to talk to the landlord about buying the house. They thought about adding on a room for Minnie Mae, who often visited. Vernon, however, felt that the owner was jacking up the price on them. In a huff, the Presleys rented a much more attractive and comfortable house around the corner at 1414 Getwell for $85 a month.
As Elvis traveled more, Gladys drank more. Elvis worried about her. In March 1956, he bought her a very comfortable three-bedroom ranch house on upscale Audubon Drive near White Station, the very white suburb on the east side of town. But Gladys was increasingly frightened for his safety. Attending one of his performances in Florida, she was horrified by what she saw as a physical attack by the girls in the audience upon her son. She grabbed one of the girls.
“Why are you trying to kill my boy?” she demanded.
“I am not trying to kill him,” the girl answered. “I just love him so. I want to touch him.”
Gladys begged Elvis to give up his career and stay home. It was the one thing in the world that he could give her that he would not give her. He was very blunt in telling his mother that she would have to get used to his new life. “I told her,” Elvis said to an interviewer in 1956, “ ‘Mama, if you’re going to feel that way, you’d better not come along to my shows because that stuff is going to keep right on happening.’ ” Then he added, “I hope.”
As Elvis continued with his career, Gladys grew ever more anxious, and with good reason. There was a car wreck, another car that caught fire, two narrowly averted airplane crashes, the famous Jacksonville “riot” in May 1955, and riotous girls in general. Again and again, Gladys begged Elvis’s bodyguards to take care of her “exhausted son” as Elvis left for another tour. Behind all her troubles, she felt, was the evil genius of the Colonel, manipulating and dominating everything. She hated the Colonel, and she hated what he was doing to her son. But she had virtually no control, and she drank more and more.
Elvis bought Graceland in 1957, and the move there in the spring did not help, even though the primary motive was to shield Gladys from the public that was always pressing around, some of them even threatening her and Vernon for having produced a son who was a monster and a menace to morality. The high, thick stone wall that stands across the front and up the sides of Graceland today—finished off for total enclosure all around the estate with a high, solid wooden fence—was built to protect Gladys, not Elvis. Moreover, he established a round-the-clock guard at the wide thick-iron double gates at the front. Within the bastion, he installed Gladys and Vernon in an upstairs bedroom just down the hall from his own.
Elvis also brought a raft-full of relatives to Graceland in the late 1950s and settled them in the house and in mobile homes and outbuildings behind it. He provided a neat, small, comfortable wooden house for Travis Smith, Gladys’s brother, his wife, Lorene, and their two young sons, Billy and Bobby, in the northeast area on the back side of the estate. Everyone had a job of some sort and was on Elvis’s payroll. Travis headed up the guards who worked out of a gatehouse at the main entrance to Graceland. Vernon’s brother, Vester, married to Gladys’s sister Clettes, was also a guard. Their daughter, Patsy, became Vernon’s secretary, working in a small house behind the big house that Vernon had turned into his office. Patsy’s husband, Gee Gee Gambill, helped Earl Pritchett, who was the head groundskeeper and maintenance man at Graceland. Earl had married Elvis’s aunt Nash. Delta, Vernon’s sister, stayed with their mother, Minnie Mae, eventually living in quarters next to the kitchen on the first floor. Delta managed domestic services in the household, which were supplied by black cooks and maids.
Gladys brought her beloved bevy of chickens from Audubon Drive and turned them loose in the yard, where they clucked and strutted about stiff-legged, scratching and pecking at the grounds of Graceland. She derived great pleasure from feeding them every evening wherever they happened to be, in back, beside, or in front of the elegant Georgian mansion with a portico, two large stone lions crouched on either side of the entrance, and four two-story-high white Corinthian columns. Finally, even this simple, nurturing joy was taken away from her. It was decided—probably by Colonel Parker—that it was unseemly for the mother of Elvis Presley to feed chickens, especially in the front yard where the fans at the gate could easily see her. “They won’t let me see Elvis,” Gladys would complain to Annie Presley, the wife of Sales Presley, Vernon’s cousin. “And now I can’t even feed my chickens. It’s supposed to be bad for his image.”
Gladys’s distress mounted with Elvis’s success. Vernon, on the other hand, had no difficulty at all with Elvis’s career and rapidly rising income. He once announced loudly in the Sun studio that Sun Records, and hence Sam Phillips, would be nothing without his son. At first he was totally supportive of Elvis signing on with the Colonel, but he soon fretted that the Colonel’s share of Elvis’s earnings was much too large. Elvis’s success went directly to Vernon’s head. Elvis, for his part, sheltered his father from all criticism. He made him his personal business manager, soon paying him some $40,000 a year and eventually $75,000. Vernon did not complain at all about Elvis’s absences. When Elvis was gone, Vernon was the lord of the manor at Graceland, sternly commanding a staff of a dozen or more employees and counting every penny. At last, he was getting the money and power that he had long known he deserved. It was as if everything he had learned about command and control as a convict in Parchman was coming into force within the walled community of the estate and his true value was now recognized—that is, as long as Elvis was away.
Beginning in the fall of 1956, Elvis spent much time in Hollywood, leaving Vernon in charge in Memphis and Gladys bereft. When Elvis bought Graceland, she had imagined that she and he would have a glorious time together remodeling and furnishing the house. It was not to be. He came home from Hollywood between movies just as they were beginning the process. He made some quick choices, left some general instructions, and took off for the Gulf Coast with the guys to enjoy a couple of weeks of beach life and the adoration of the girls. What came out at Graceland was a decor that was some of Elvis, some of Gladys, and a lot of the interior decorator from Goldsmith’s Department Store.
Vernon had little say in furnishing the house, but he must have thought that at last he had finally and fully arrived at his appropriate station in life when a beautiful blond Hollywood star came by for a visit while Elvis was out of town. It fell to Vernon to show her around Graceland first and then the whole city of Memphis. Gladys was upset by Vernon’s giving the blonde too much attention, took him to task, and a row ensued. Gladys screamed while Vernon mumbled.
More and more Gladys felt isolated and powerless. Night after night she insisted that her oldest sister, Lillian, come stay with her after Lillian had worked all day as an inspector at Fashion Curtains downtown. Gladys was drinking more, now vodka instead of beer, since it was said not to leave a smell on your breath. Lillian said that Vernon, who simply
wanted to keep Gladys quiet, supplied the vodka.
When Elvis was around, Gladys would rally and her spirits would rise. But he was seldom around. His induction into the army in March 1958 was the blow that finally broke her. While he was stationed in Texas at Fort Hood, she, Minnie Mae, Vernon, and Lamar Fike, one of Elvis’s bodyguards, settled in a nearby town, Killeen, and maintained a home for him. In August 1958, a multiplicity of ailments brought her back to Memphis and immediate hospitalization. Elvis managed to arrive only hours before her death. The cause of her death was officially announced as “heart failure.” In fact, she died of liver failure brought on by alcoholism. “It seems she drank too much,” her attending physician said privately almost four decades later. She was forty-six years old.
Elvis fans can still detail the scene, Elvis and his father, sitting on the front steps of Graceland crying and consoling one another. They brought up a fond image of Gladys “feeding them chickens” in the yard.
Gladys’s death brought the last meeting between Dixie and Elvis. She was married now and had a child. When she came to the National Funeral Home, he came right up to her. “Look, Dad,” Elvis exclaimed to Vernon, “here’s Dixie.” He made her promise to come by Graceland that evening. He wanted to talk to her, he said. Dixie and her aunt sat near the back during the ceremony. Recurrently he was overcome and “would just cry out,” one friend recalled. At Forest Hill Cemetery, after the service there and as the coffin was about to be sealed in a vault, Elvis surrendered totally to his grief. Crying uncontrollably, he leaned over the casket.
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