“That was the last time I saw him. Well, not the last time, because I went back the next night, all dressed up, but, you know, the next night the house was all full of people. You know, it was like, this is the way it will always be. That was his lifestyle. That was his life. It just reinforced to me that what I was seeing that night was really it. We both realized that. He was in it, and there was no way out. He couldn’t come back to my lifestyle any more than I could have gone on to his.”
He was grieving almost constantly, the papers wrote. “He’d cry all day,” said George, “and we’d get him calmed down, and the next day it would start all over again.” On Saturday he returned once again to the Memphis Funeral Home, this time for the funeral of Red West’s father. Red, who was still in the Marine Corps and stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, had requested emergency leave as soon as he heard of Gladys’ death. It was denied, but then he heard of his father’s illness that same morning. He was on his way home when he got word of his father’s death. He was forced to miss Gladys’ funeral because he had to attend to the details of his father’s the next day, and he was flabbergasted when Elvis showed up at the funeral home. “Man, he had gone through a trial the day before…. He was out of it. But just before the service started Elvis appeared at the doorway. He was with Alan Fortas and Gene Smith and Lamar Fike. They were all very respectfully dressed. Elvis almost had to be carried over to me…. He came over to me and sort of half fell into my arms. ‘My mama was here yesterday just where your daddy is, Red,’ Elvis told me. He couldn’t say too much more.”
That afternoon they went out to the cemetery to visit Elvis’ mother’s grave, which couldn’t have seemed like much of an idea to any of his friends but which none of them could talk him out of. “After a near emotional breakdown,” reported the Press-Scimitar, “Elvis had a fever of ‘near 102,’ his doctor reported. ‘I went down and checked him over and gave him some cold drugs,’ the doctor said. ‘I called again Sunday and he was feeling better and eating a little, so I didn’t go down.’ ”
His leave was extended by five days, and his friends tried to cheer him up. He bought a new van, and the whole gang traveled with him around the countryside—they went to the movies and the Rainbow Rollerdrome—but it wasn’t the same. Even the Tennessee Highway Patrol got into the act, as they took him on morning helicopter rides over Memphis and taught him how to operate the controls. All of Memphis, the whole world, in fact, grieved with him, as more than a hundred thousand cards, letters, and telegrams came into the Colonel’s headquarters in Madison. None of it made any difference. One day he ran into an old schoolmate and neighbor from the Courts, George Blancet, driving down Bellevue. “He rolled his window down, and his eyes were teary and he called me by name. I told him I was sorry his mother had died. He just said, ‘I don’t know how I’m gonna make it.’ Something like that. It was a statement of desperation.”
Toward the end of the week his dentist, Lester Hofman, came by with his wife, Sterling, to pay their respects. “This was the first time we had been there. I was racking my brain about what to do—should I send flowers? I really didn’t know—when I got a call saying, ‘Dr. Hofman, can you come out to the house? Elvis would like to see you.’ When we got there, the room was full of all his buddies. We looked around and we didn’t see a face we knew. I sat next to this young fellow, and he said, ‘Who are you here to see?’ I said, ‘We’re here to see Elvis.’ He said, ‘Well, you’re not going to see him. He hasn’t been out of his room.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s his privilege. It’s up to him whether he wants to see us.’ Then we were talking with Vernon, and Vernon said, ‘Just a minute, I’ll get Elvis.’ Five minutes later Elvis walked in, and he went like this and the room cleared. We told him how sorry we were, and he said to Sterling, ‘Mrs. Hofman, I don’t know if this is the right time, but the newspapers have made my house so laughable’—that was the word. He said, ‘They have made it sound so laughable, I would love to have your opinion of my home.’ She said, ‘Elvis, I really didn’t come here to go through your home. We came here to be with you.’ He said, ‘But I want your opinion.’ He took us all through the house, my taste is not so marvelous, but it was very attractive, it all fit—there was a modern sculpture on the chimney over the fireplace, and I had the same sculpture in my office, it was called ‘Rhythm.’ Anyway, when we got back to the living room, he said, ‘What do you think?’ and Sterling said, ‘If you give me the key, I’ll swap you. And I won’t even move a dish!’ Then Sterling said to him, ‘Did you ever think one day, you might have all of this, it’s just so beautiful.’ He said, ‘Mrs. Hofman, I never thought I’d get out of Humes High.’ ”
On Sunday he returned to Fort Hood. He left instructions that nothing was to be changed, nothing was to be the least bit disturbed in his mother’s room, all was to be kept exactly as it had been. The simple inscription on his mother’s grave was to read: “She was the sunshine of our home.”
THE LAST FEW WEEKS at Fort Hood went by in a haze. Vernon, Elvis’ grandmother Minnie, Lamar, Junior, and Gene were all living at the house in Killeen, and Red joined them when he got out of the Marines in the first week of September. It was, as Red described it, a kind of “open house” atmosphere in which everyone tried almost desperately to cheer up Elvis. They’d stay up all night occasionally; “sometimes a whole team of us would sit around with a guitar and sing ourselves hoarse.” Things were never again the same, wrote Rex Mansfield in his memoir of army days. “We all suffered (his whole outfit) with and for Elvis’ great loss… and there remained a certain sadness with all of us throughout the rest of our training.”
The Colonel came down a couple of times to huddle with Elvis over embarkation plans and future RCA releases. Anita, who was constantly fending off rumors of impending marriage (“Heavenly days, I just can’t imagine it”), visited frequently in between performance dates and television appearances. Elvis’ grandmother, she noted, was doing her best to take Gladys’ place. She fixed all his favorite foods: sauerkraut and crowder peas, sliced tomatoes and brown gravy, and bacon cooked till it was burnt. Whatever he liked she would fix for him, and there was still an extraordinary sense of closeness among Elvis, his father, and his grandmother, but now it was a closeness tied to grief. Sometimes he and Anita talked about her coming to see him when he was in Germany, but the thought existed more in the realm of fantasy than reality.
Once in a while they would go to the drive-in in Waco with Eddie Fadal, and Elvis and Eddie attended an r&b revue in Fort Worth (“I don’t remember who they all were, but we parked by the stage door, and they all came out to the car and greeted him”) and almost caused a riot at a Johnny Horton show in Temple. “It was at the auditorium in downtown Temple,” said Shreveport native Jerry Kennedy, still in his teens but playing guitar for Horton at the time. “I was sitting on those big doors that used to come up at the back of auditoriums, where you can back a truck into, and this car pulled up, and all these guys bailed out of it with Elvis in uniform, and they said, ‘Hey, can you let us in the back door?’ I said, ‘I guess. Since it’s you.’ So I went down and opened the back door, and he came in, and then we went onstage. Johnny did four or five songs, and then he said, ‘I want to extend a warm welcome to somebody who is visiting me backstage.’ He said something about his mother, and so forth, and I remember, I was standing there thinking, ‘Don’t do this. Oh God, he’s not going to do that.’ And he did, and then he said, ‘I’d like for him to step out and take a bow. Elvis…’ And the people got up and just rushed the stage, and I grabbed my guitar and got away!”
The last weekend that he was at Fort Hood, Kitty Dolan, the young singer whom he had met in Las Vegas the previous fall, came for a visit. When she arrived, she found the living room full of girls. “I Was One Girl Among Many” read the headline over her article in TV and Movie Screen. She fully appreciated the sincerity of the others, though, and their genuine desire to try to alleviate his grief. One fan told of visiting Graceland and how Gladys ha
d proudly shown her the home and the pink Cadillac that her son had given her. “What other boy would love his parents so much?” Gladys had said to her, the girl reported, as tears came to Elvis’ eyes. After dinner they sat around singing songs, ending with a gospel session with a bunch of the guys. “At two A.M. we said good night,” Kitty told columnist May Mann. “When he kissed me, I said with a little laugh, ‘What is this with you and Anita Wood? I’ve been reading all the stories.’ Elvis smiled and said, ‘She has a good press agent.’ And then he kissed me again.”
There is a group picture from Elvis’ last night in Killeen taken with Vernon, Lamar, Eddie, Junior, and Red, along with two or three of the fan club presidents. Elvis has his arms around Eddie’s and his father’s shoulders. He is wearing his marksman and sharpshooter medals, and he is surrounded by friends, but he looks alone and lost, his eyes blank, his mouth downturned, as if he were about to cry. After the picture was taken, he asked Eddie if he would lead the group in prayer, and then they left to take him to the troop train in the drizzling rain. “He shipped out that very night,” said Eddie. “I rode with Elvis and Anita in his new Lincoln Continental, with Elvis driving. Then Anita and I drove home and we sat there with Vernon for a while. We were really in mourning, he’d never been out like that before, and we were [worrying]: how are they going to treat him, are they going to resent or embrace him, you know, how is he going to take it?”
THE TRAIN RIDE to New York was uneventful for the most part. One of four special troop trains moving approximately 1,360 soldiers to the Brooklyn Army Terminal to ship out for Germany as replacements for Third Armored Division troops, it was, ironically, routed through Memphis, and word got out. When the train pulled in, there was a crowd of fans already waiting, along with George Klein, Alan Fortas, and several other of Elvis’ friends. The train took about an hour to refuel, “and this gorgeous brunette came up to me,” said Klein, “I don’t know if she went to Ole Miss at the time, but she was a typical Ole Miss beautiful girl, and she said her name was Janie Wilbanks, and she asked if I would introduce her. I did, and about two weeks later I get this call from Germany saying, ‘Who in the hell was that girl? Man, she was good-looking! Tell her to send me some pictures and write to me.’ That was when I first got the indication that it might not be all that serious with Anita.”
One of his fellow soldiers gave Elvis a book called Poems That Touch the Heart, compiled by A. L. Alexander (“Creator of Radio’s GOOD WILL COURT”), and he leafed through it, reading several of the poems, including “Mother” (“Again your kindly, smiling face I see”), “Friendship,” and “One of Us Two” (“The day will dawn, when one of us shall harken / In vain to hear a voice that has grown dumb”), but one in particular really hit home. It was called “Should You Go First,” and he stared at it for some time, until he practically knew it by heart: “I’ll hear your voice, I’ll see your smile / Though blindly I may grope / The memory of your helping hand / Will buoy me on with hope….”
Mostly, though, he didn’t like to be alone with his thoughts, and the other boys wanted to hear about Hollywood and Hollywood starlets and the movies. The train was delayed several times as it ran into commuter traffic, and somewhere in Delaware or New Jersey a brash, pint-size young soldier named Charlie Hodge, who had done everything he could to get together with Elvis at Fort Hood but had never really gotten the chance, showed up in the train car that Elvis and Rex and Nervous Norvell were riding in. Charlie had sung with the Foggy River Boys on Red Foley’s Ozark Jubilee and had even met Elvis once backstage at Ellis Auditorium in 1955. He was not at all shy about drawing on mutual show biz connections, and before long they were talking about Wanda Jackson and country comedian Uncle Cyp and the passion that they shared for quartet music. Charlie was “bound and determined to meet Elvis,” observed Rex, but he “really was one of the funniest guys you could meet; the type you could not help but like and Elvis liked him instantly.” They spent the rest of the train ride trading stories and separated only when the train finally got into the Brooklyn Army Terminal at Fifty-eighth and First Avenue, a little after 9:00 A.M. There Elvis Presley, the public figure, became the center of attention once again.
It was a scene worthy of P.T. Barnum, Cecil B. DeMille, or the Colonel at his most extravagant. There were 125 newsmen waiting impatiently, all of RCA’s top brass, Elvis’ father, his grandmother, Anita, Red and Lamar, the Aberbachs and Freddy Bienstock, plus the Colonel with his full entourage. Elvis would be out shortly, army spokesman Irving Moss explained, but in the meantime he wanted to go over protocol: for the first ten or fifteen minutes still photographers would be permitted to take pictures; then there would be a press conference proper; following that, the newsreel and TV cameras would have their chance; then Pfc. Presley would board the ship’s gangplank for photographers, with eight buddies selected at random from off the train; finally, there would be a small group of newsmen permitted on board. Would he be carrying a duffel bag? someone asked. No, said Moss, his duffel bag had already been loaded on board, but when that answer didn’t satisfy the press, the army spokesman proposed that a duffel bag could be borrowed. “I want to say one more thing, ladies and gentlemen. Since this terminal has been established, [during] World War I and through World War II and to date, there have been millions of troops going through here and among them have been thousands of celebrities in the various fields of the arts, sciences, sports, and the entertainment field. It has not been, nor is it, the policy of the army to single out any of these people for press conferences. However, in this particular instance…” “What are we waiting for?” called out one reporter as it became evident that Elvis Presley had arrived. “All right, bring him out.” “Let’s go, for heaven’s sake,” came the “angered squawks from photographers, desperately shoving each other to get a clear shot at Presley.”
Then, at last, Elvis emerged from behind the blue backing where he had been chatting with the Colonel, stood for a moment for photographers, smiled graciously for the cameras, signed autographs, kissed a WAC named Mary Davies whom the army had produced for the occasion, did his best to oblige every shouted request, and finally sat down at the table with Information Officer Moss in front of a cluster of microphones. He was carrying a shiny calfskin attaché case and clutching the book of poems he had on the train. What was the train ride like? he was asked. What were his medals for? What did the a in his name stand for? “A-ron,” he explained, pronouncing the a long. Yes, his father and his grandmother and Lamar were going to accompany him to Germany. Would he ever sell Graceland? “No, sir, because that was my mother’s home.” The guys in his outfit had been great. “If it had been like everybody thought, I mean everybody thought I wouldn’t have to work, and I would be given special treatment and this and that, but when they looked around and saw I was on KP and I was pulling guard and everything, just like they were, well, they figured, he’s just like us, so…”
He’d come in for a lot of criticism in his career. What did he think of the charges that his music had contributed to juvenile delinquency? “I don’t see that. Because if there is anything I have tried to do, I’ve tried to live a straight, clean life, not set any kind of a bad example.” “Elvis—” “I will say this, excuse me, sir, I will say there are people who are going to like you and people who don’t like you, regardless of what business you are in or what you do. You cannot please everyone.” What about his great success? Did he feel that he’d been lucky, or that he had talent? “Well, sir, I’ve been very lucky. I happened to come along at a time in the music business when there was no trend. The people were looking for something different, and I was lucky. I came along just in time.” And did he miss show business? “I miss my singing career very much. And at the same time—the army is a pretty good deal, too.” But surely he didn’t miss the fans grabbing at his clothes, invading his private life, threatening his safety? He did, he said, he missed even that, “because that is my greatest love—like I said, entertaining people. I really miss it.
”
And marriage? Did he think there was an ideal age to get married? “Well, as you’re growing up, a lot of times you think you’re in love with someone, and then later on in your life you find out that you’re wrong. Actually you didn’t love them, you only thought you did. And I was no different. Several times as I was growing up I would have probably married, and my mother and dad talked to me and told me, ‘You better wait and find out that this is just what you want,’ and I’m glad that I did.” When was the last time he thought he was in love? “Oh, many times, ma’am, I don’t know, I suppose the closest that I ever came to getting married was just before I started singing. In fact, my first record saved my neck.” There is general laughter, and then someone asks him if he’d like to say something about his mother.
“Yes, sir, I certainly would. Ahhh, my mother… I suppose since I was an only child we might have been a little closer than—I mean, everyone loves their mother, but I was an only child, and Mother was always right with me all my life. And it wasn’t only like losing a mother, it was like losing a friend, a companion, someone to talk to, I could wake her up any hour of the night if I was worried or troubled about something, well, she’d get up and try to help me. And I used to get very angry at her when I was growing up. It’s a natural thing—a young person wants to go somewhere or do something, and your mother won’t let you, and you think, ‘Why, what’s wrong with you?’ But then, later on in the years you find out, you know, that she was right. That she was only doing it to protect you and keep you from getting into trouble or getting hurt. And I’m very happy that she was kind of strict on me, very happy that it worked out the way it did.”
The press conference went on for nearly an hour, and when it was over, he posed for more pictures and signed more autographs as Information Officer Moss tried to extricate him from the crowd. The people would get mad if they were turned down, Elvis said in an aside to the army information officer. “Come on,” said the Colonel, urging the RCA executives forward. “We all eat off him, let’s get in the picture. The boy is mighty sad.” Then there were more photographs to be taken outside on the dock and activities to be staged for the newsreel cameras. “I think I’m talking for all the guys,” said one of the eight army “buddies” picked at random for the task, “when I say that we learned a lot about people in general when we were lucky enough to have Elvis with us…. He gives so much of himself to all the people around him that you just can’t help but improve a little through the association. He’s a lonely guy in many ways, and a little afraid of what tomorrow will bring for him and his loved ones.”
Last Train to Memphis Page 60