Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Jessie’s desertion meant that Minnie Mae had nowhere to go but to her children. By 1946 she was living with Vernon, Gladys, and Elvis, whom she adored. The feeling was mutual. With her dry wit, laconic manner, and elongated body, she resembled, if not a James Agee character, then certainly a Walker Evans Depression-era photograph come to life. Gladys was glad to have her help (“She did all the work,” in Lillian Smith’s view), and Elvis found her a comical figure.

  One day he was playing ball and overthrew his pitch, missing her face by a fraction of an inch. He promptly nicknamed her “Dodger,” a term of endearment that stuck throughout her life. The living arrangement also took hold. Vernon counted her a dependent on his 1947 tax return, and she never left the Presley household again. Minnie Mae would reside under the same roof as Elvis all her life and outlive her famous grandson by three years.

  By the time Elvis entered seventh grade in 1947, his mind was seldom on his studies. His grade point average was about 70, making him a C− student. But the twelve-year-old felt confident enough about his musicianship to take his guitar to school with him almost every day, practicing chords and working on new songs during lunch. Classmate Roland Tindall remembered that he announced to the class more than once that he was going to sing at the Grand Ole Opry. If the majority of his fellow students ignored him or smirked at his bid for attention—a group of bullies, intolerant of another rendition of “Old Shep,” would cut the strings off his guitar at some point—others knew he had a shot at stardom.

  “Most people wouldn’t believe this,” a classmate said years later, “but I went up to him and I told him, ‘Elvis, one of these days you’re gonna be famous.’ And he smiled at me and said, ‘I sure hope so.’ ”

  Maggie Morgan also supported his ambition. She’d gone with him to perform on WELO, where he still gazed motionless at hillbilly singer Mississippi Slim, and as far as she was concerned, theirs was a serious relationship. He’d told her he loved her, and she’d whispered back, “I love you, too.” And they’d shared three kisses—one during the carving of the heart on the tree, another on the swing on his parents’ front porch, and the third in the car en route to a church rally.

  “I didn’t expect my life to end or go anywhere without Elvis. He was my love. He was my man.”

  But if things were going well for the young couple, Vernon Presley was just about at the end of his rope. Living in a “colored” neighborhood on Tupelo’s North Green Street, where Elvis heard early R & B, jump blues, and swing tunes throbbing through the walls at the nearby juke joints, the family was deeply in debt. Vernon was still driving a grocery truck and scraping to make a living (“There’s a story that he pretty much got kicked out of Tupelo for moonshining,” says Billy Smith), and Gladys brought in a little money as a seamstress. But the bank was threatening to foreclose on a loan, and the Presleys were buying everything on time and borrowing money where they could. Gladys remembered her son’s concern.

  “Elvis would hear us worrying about our debts, and he’d say, ‘Don’t you worry none, baby. When I grow up, I’m going to buy you a fine house, and pay everything you owe at the grocery store, and get two Cadillacs—one for you and Daddy, and one for me.’ ”

  Vernon and Travis Smith had already gone to Memphis scouting for work, returning after three weeks with no prospects. Now they decided to try again, Vernon saying, “There has to be more than this.”

  In the fall of 1948, when Elvis was thirteen, the Presley and the Smith families packed everything they owned into Travis’s eleven-year-old green Plymouth and left overnight for Memphis to start life anew.

  Maggie hadn’t seen Elvis since he moved to Green Street, but she was shattered at the news.

  “It broke my heart when the Presleys announced they were moving to Memphis. For a long time after that, I cried. I missed [Elvis] so much. I even kept missing him after I got married and had children. I know in my heart we would have gotten married. We were very young, but we were very much in love.”

  Secretly Elvis, too, fantasized about their future. In 1994 his estate auctioned Vernon and Gladys’s marriage license, and on the back, in a child’s hand, was a testimony to a mock marriage between Elvis Presley and “Magdline” Morgan. Elvis’s signature, in pencil, was authentic, though Maggie’s was not. Elvis, who had never learned to correctly spell his beloved’s name, had scrawled it all out in a grand romantic gesture on September 11, 1948, just as the family was preparing to leave Mississippi. Before he signed his next marriage license, nearly twenty years later, Elvis would become far more callous about romance.

  Elvis and Betty Ann McMahan, Lauderdale Courts, circa 1949. Gladys introduced them through her mother. She broke his heart in choosing an Arkansas boy over him. (Margaret Cranfill/from the author’s collection)

  Chapter Three

  Blue Heartache

  With a population of 237,000, Memphis was the largest city in the mid-South, and a serendipitous destination for the Presley family. King Cotton had built this town from the lazy banks of the Mississippi River, but in the post–World War II years, Memphis looked like a country boy in his first zoot suit, as urban and rural cultures came together to bolster the city as a regional hub of commerce and culture, and to move it from an agricultural to an industrial mecca.

  Though middle-class jobs were not yet plentiful, opportunity crackled in the air, as if change itself were a seed in the fertile Mississippi Delta. And the mere size of the city meant that an ex-con like Vernon could reinvent himself with new friends and employers, and perhaps even with his wife. Gladys was so energized by the move that she seemed to enjoy her husband’s advances, an early friend of Elvis remembering that Vernon “was always hugging her and kissing her and showing her affection. He could never keep his hands off her.”

  For Elvis, thirteen and just coming into puberty, everything was exciting and new. Still burning with the fire to be a singer, he was exhilarated to find himself smack in the home of the blues, historically a woeful or triumphal form of musical salvation, summoned in the cries and the catharsis of the worried and the worn-down. Before long, he would be poking around on Beale Street, staring at the photographs in the window of the Blue Light Studio, his ears tuned to the music—solo guitarists, wailing vocalists, harmonica players, or maybe just guitar and drum groups—pouring out of the smoky clubs. Music was everywhere on Beale Street. Men even played saxophone in the park.

  Sometimes he’d meander over to North Main, every now and then summoning the courage to walk into the Green Owl, a black beer joint, where people spilled out onto the sidewalk on weekend nights. Elvis was wide-eyed at the city slickers and the pimped-up dandies in their bright Lansky Brothers clothes, and even more so at the women whose illegal turns helped buy them. He was also enthralled by the musicians, slack-jawed blacks who played with their eyes closed, a cigarette or something stronger tugging at the corners of their lips. And he especially got a kick out of the guy who made a bass out of a five-gallon bucket and a broom handle. Though he was too young to be in there, it was worth a rough little reprimand to hear the wild, wanton sounds of the blue notes, and to feel his own libido ripple down below.

  When they first arrived in the Bluff City, the Presleys (Vernon, Gladys, Elvis, Minnie Mae) and the Smiths (Travis, Lorraine, Bobby, Billy) stuck together like immigrants in a new land, clutching their few belongings, fearful of the loud sounds of the city, and straining their ears at the oddity of the new language. Elvis had been there before on Noah Presley’s bus trips to the zoo and for picnics and concerts at the Overton Park Shell. But in a sense they were all just that, strangers in a strange land. Memphis was only ninety miles northwest of Tupelo, but it might as well have been a thousand.

  Pooling their resources—Travis had sold two cows and killed a hog to get just over a hundred dollars—the families found lodging in a cheap wooden rooming house at 370 Washington Street in north Memphis in the Pinchgut district, a haven to newcomers since the Irish settled there in the 1820s, the Jew
s joining them in the early 1900s. The Smiths took the upstairs apartment and the Presleys the downstairs, and they shared the communal bath. Rent for each family: eleven dollars a week.

  Tough and slummy, with prostitutes mixing with flatboat traders along the streets lined with delicatessens, five-and-dime stores, and brawl-house bars, the neighborhood derived its funny name from the saying that the Irish were so starved, their stomachs so taut from hunger, that you couldn’t pinch any loose skin on their middles. Later, the name got shortened to “Pinch.”

  Billy Smith, eight years younger than Elvis, remembers that the situation was nearly as dire for the Presleys and the Smiths when the families settled in. “Daddy and Vernon spent weeks looking for work. They had to put cardboard in their shoes to cover the holes.” For months, it seemed, they survived on turnip greens, seasoned with part of the salt pork from the slaughtered hog. Then five-year-old Billy discovered that the produce stand next door threw rotting fruit and vegetables into the trash cans each night.

  “I remember going through there and finding bruised bananas to eat. When you’re that poor, you scavenge for what you can get. Elvis loved to tell about the time I fell into one of the fifty-five-gallon trash cans. I was so little that he had to pick me up by my legs and pull me out. But I wasn’t turnin’ a-loose of them damn bananas.”

  For a while, the families pondered moving back to Mississippi. But then both Vernon and Travis found employment at the Precision Tool Company on Kansas Street in south Memphis. (Soon Elvis’s uncle Johnny Smith moved up from Tupelo and was hired there, too.) And Gladys, calling on her seamstress skills, took a part-time job in a drapery factory, Lorraine finding work at a laundry.

  Precisely when Elvis started going to school in Memphis is open to question. Gladys’s sister, Lillian, said he attended the Christine School for a short while, though there is no evidence to support it. What is known is that on November 8, 1948, Elvis Aaron Presley enrolled in the eighth grade at L. C. Humes High School, a traditionally white institution in a rough neighborhood in a mostly segregated city. It already had a bad reputation. Vernon walked him to school that first day and was astonished to see his son back home shortly after, “so nervous he was bug-eyed,” as Vernon put it. But he soon adjusted. Records show he was present 165 days that year, and absent 15, but never tardy. His grades improved from Tupelo, Elvis bringing home an A in language; a B in spelling, history, and physical education; and a C in arithmetic, science, and music.

  The C in music would have pierced his ego. Elvis seemed more reticent about performing in public once the family moved to Memphis, perhaps because the town was full of music, a Mississippi blues man on every corner, a tip jar at his feet. Even at home, he insisted that the lights be off so nobody could see him when he practiced his guitar. “I was ashamed to sing in front of anybody except my mother and daddy,” Elvis would say in 1956. He never did learn much more than a few major chords and a couple of easy runs, but they did the trick, and he could beat on the guitar with the meat of his palm for a percussive sound.

  He was trying different songs now, Kay Starr’s pop ballad “Harbor Lights” and “Molly, Darling,” a hillbilly number made popular by Eddy Arnold, whose career was taking flight under the guidance of his new manager, a former carny who went by the name of Colonel Tom Parker. Sometimes at night, Elvis would take his guitar outside to see how it all sounded in the evening air, and Vernon and Gladys would spread an old quilt down on the ground so they could sit and listen, even though Elvis’s voice, quavering slightly, seldom rose above a whisper.

  In spring 1949 both the Presley and Smith families were still struggling financially. Vernon applied for public housing and left Precision Tool for a job at United Paint Company, which was closer to home. “He stayed there longer than anywhere,” says Billy Smith. “Usually, he’d get a couple of paychecks, and that would be about it.” At the time, with everybody working, the two families made a combined total of about $120 a week, Vernon bringing home $40.38 at 85 cents per hour. The Presleys and the Smiths soon split up for nearby rooming houses, one on Adams and the other on Poplar. But with no one else to depend on, the family held tight. Soon they would welcome Gladys’s sister Levalle and her husband, Edward Smith, and their children, Junior and Gene, up from Mississippi.

  In June 1949 Jane Richardson, a home service adviser for the Memphis Housing Authority, followed up on Vernon’s application and visited the Presleys’ rented room, for which they paid $9.50 a week. With Vernon at work, Miss Richardson met with Gladys and Elvis, noting that the family shared a bathroom with other residents and cooked on a hot plate. Miss Richardson went back to her office and wrote her report, indicating that the Presleys’ application had merit. She added that Mrs. Presley and her son seemed “very nice and deserving.” That November, they moved into Lauderdale Courts, right around the corner from where they were living, and paid thirty-five dollars a month for a two-bedroom, first-floor unit at 185 Winchester Street. With 689 square feet, apartment 328 had a living room, bathroom, and walk-in kitchen.

  Residents were expected to keep the apartments clean, and inspectors came around once a month to make sure of that, and to see that no one had accumulated too many material goods, as any sign of affluence would put them at risk for eviction. Lauderdale Courts, consisting of sixty-six red brick buildings on twenty-two acres, was one of the first U.S. housing projects, and most occupants felt fortunate to be there, even as they hoped not to stay. Its motto: “From slums to public housing to private ownership.”

  Billy Smith saw how thrilled Gladys was with the place. “I have this vivid memory of going over to Lauderdale Courts one summer when Elvis was at Humes. They were playing music, and Gladys was dancing and they were having a ball. She was always jolly then, always laughing and carrying on.”

  The Presleys were one of seventeen new families who moved into the Courts around that time, though they differed in that most were single-parent households. Elvis, at fourteen, began quietly making new contacts, playing guitar with a group of older boys under the trees at Market Mall, the path that bisected the housing development. For the most part, he stayed in the background, watching and listening to see what he could pick up from the more experienced musicians, and then went home and sat on his bedroom windowsill and practiced, sometimes going down to the basement laundry room so no one would hear him.

  He was making personal friends, too, especially with three other boys from the Courts about his age—Buzzy Forbess, Paul Dougher, and Farley Guy. The trio became so close that they were seemingly inseparable, but it was Buzzy, and not George Klein or Red West, who become Elvis’s best friend during his years at Humes. They banded together to do odd jobs, cutting grass with a push mower and a hand sickle for two dollars a yard, and walked up on Main Street to the movies at the Suzore No. 2 or the Rialto out on Jackson. (“Man, we really liked Victor Mature in Samson and Delilah,” Buzzy remembered.)

  Sometimes they played pool at the Odd Fellows Hall, Elvis liking eight ball and rotation. Mostly, they played corkball with a cut-off broom or mop handle, adhesive tape wrapped around a simple cork to serve as a ball. One day, Farley spit on the corkball stick, trying to emulate Buzzy’s habit of spitting through his teeth. Elvis didn’t see him—didn’t realize what he was doing—though when he picked up the stick he instantly realized what was on it. By his teen years, Elvis had developed a hair-trigger temper, and in a second, he had Farley in the air.

  “I grabbed a peach soda bottle on the way up,” says Farley. “I told him, ‘Elvis, if you don’t put me down, I’m going to crown you with this bottle!’ ”

  Suddenly, all hell broke loose, Gladys shouting out of her window, and Farley’s mother, too. Elvis hauled off and hit Farley hard, and as his little sister, Doris, remembers it, “Farley said, ‘Okay, you’ve hit me. Now it’s my time to hit you.’ And Mrs. Presley came running out there yelling, ‘Don’t hit my boy!’ Later that day, she told my mother, ‘We can’t have Farley going around hitting my
boy,’ but my mother told Mrs. Presley that boys would be boys and it was best if grown-ups did not get involved. She was one domineering woman.”

  Elvis and Farley shook hands and were friends again, but Elvis was gaining a reputation as a boy who could take care of himself. When one of his uncles got in trouble in a bar, it was Elvis he called. And once when Humes played a rival school, Treadwell, Elvis coldcocked a Treadwell player who cursed the Humes coach, “knocking him all the way back into the bus,” as Buzzy recalls.

  It was a way for him to work off steam and deal with the hormonal pull of puberty, if not to distance himself from Gladys. Now that they lived in the big city, she wanted to walk Elvis to school again, fearing for him when he crossed the street by himself. For a little while, she simply followed him, darting behind bushes so Elvis wouldn’t see her.

  Sometimes at night, in foreshadowing how the adult Elvis would interact with his entourage, the boys played tag on their bikes, Buzzy remembering that they raced at one another full force. (“It’s a wonder we didn’t get killed.”) If they could scrape together ten cents, they went swimming at Malone Pool. But Elvis liked to save his money for pinball at a beer joint up at Third and Jackson, or for special occasions like the Cotton Carnival. Once they saw burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee there, Elvis frozen in his tracks, watching as if transfixed.

  Often they made their own entertainment. When his parents were out for the evening, Elvis sometimes held dances in the Presleys’ apartment with a phonograph and the few records the kids had between them. Each boy pitched in twenty-five cents for himself and his date, just enough for popcorn and Cokes. “None of us was rich enough then to just have a quarter,” Buzzy remembered, “so we would save all week—a nickel a day—to get up enough money to go to the dance in Elvis’s apartment.”