by Alanna Nash
Elvis, trying to overcome his shyness, pulled out his guitar and sang—he was working on Hank Williams’s “Kaw-liga”—and initially, he brought a girl from the third floor named Betty Ann McMahan, also fourteen. She was his first love in the Courts. Gladys had met her even before Elvis, through her mother. The two women struck up a conversation outside one warm evening and continued it most nights in the McMahans’ lawn chairs, Betty soon sitting in. Elvis, though, was too shy to join them. “Finally one night, I guess, she just forced him to come outside and sit with us and talk,” as Betty remembered it.
One day, their neighbor Margaret Cranfill took a photograph of Elvis and Betty sitting on the curb on Winchester, both of them in dungarees with the hems rolled up into neat cuffs: twins. In it, the dark-haired Betty, her arm propped up and her chin in her hand, offers a closed smile for the camera. But a melancholy Elvis looks as if Betty has just told him good-bye. And perhaps she had. Their romance ended when a boy from Arkansas stole her affections, though Elvis’s attraction to women whose appearance was remarkably similar to his was to be a nearly constant feature in his future choice of companions.
In the early days of his career, Elvis told a reporter he’d gotten his heart broken in high school—a gal he thought a lot of suddenly quit seeing him. For that reason, he said, he’d had trouble allowing himself to be fond of just one girl.
Whether that was Betty McMahan or her successors, Elvis began seeing Billie Wardlaw before Betty broke up with him. Billie, Betty’s next-door neighbor, moved in with her mother, Thelma, in 1950, the year she turned fourteen. She was already so tall and pretty, with her long dark hair, that before she moved from her native Sardis, Mississippi, her grandmother had warned, “Now, Billie, you better not go up there to Memphis and get pregnant and embarrass your mother!”
Billie had never even heard the word pregnant before and didn’t know what it meant, but when she immediately turned the heads of all the boys in the Courts, she took heed.
“All the kids kept trying to get me to leave our third-floor apartment and come down and play with them, but I would just hang out the window and talk to them. I told them the reason I couldn’t come down was because I didn’t have any clothes to wear. I would just keep hanging out the window and talking.”
Elvis, by now fifteen, was smitten with the mysterious girl peering down from above, especially since she’d teased that she had no clothes. He’d told her his name and exchanged pleasantries (“I’m from Mississippi, too”), and after a few weeks, while the other boys waited her out, treating her like a princess in some fairy-tale tower, Elvis took matters in hand. One day Billie heard a knock on the door and opened it to find him standing there, holding something behind his back. They giggled a bit the way teenagers do, nervous in the first throes of courtship, and then Elvis shifted the package in his hands and held it out to her. “Here,” he said. “I brought you something.”
“I opened the package, and it was a pair of blue jeans, the first pair of blue jeans I ever had. Elvis said, ‘Now you can come down and play with us.’ ”
Elvis’s idea of “play” was the old kissing game of spin the bottle, and as the kids of the Courts numbered about thirteen, and always hung out together, the game was almost evenly split between boys and girls. Farley’s little sister, the tomboy Doris, joined in, as did Luther Nall’s kid sis, Jerry. She was always photographing Elvis with her little camera and had a mad crush on him, even though he thought of Jerry as his little sister, popping her with a wet towel at the pool one day and accidentally scarring her leg. When dark came and somebody suggested spin the bottle, all the girls got excited, including Billie: “Elvis was a great kisser. We always hoped the bottle would land on him!”
From the start of their relationship, Elvis was possessive. He’d had other flirtations with Jo Ann Lawhorn, and another Jo Ann over at Bickford Park, who came to some of the group parties at the Courts with him. He’d tried to get something started with Carolyn Poole at school. And he tried with Georgia Avgeris, too, throwing wadded-up gum wrappers at her in class to get her attention, but she was Greek Orthodox and not allowed to date outside her religion. Besides, his feelings for Billie were different. One day they had a spat, and she began flirting with Farley, who found himself in a tough spot: “Elvis didn’t like that at all, and we had a ‘discussion’ over it.” But it all blew over quickly.
“I think she just thought of him as a friend,” Farley’s sister, Doris, said. And since Elvis had a deathly crush on Billie, he enlisted Doris’s help. “He was all the time getting me to go up and knock on her door and ask her to come down. Sometimes he would take his guitar into the courtyard and sing to her under her window, sort of like a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. He was crazy about her.”
Billie confirmed it years later: “We really liked each other, but I think he liked me just a little more than I liked him.” Her mother worked nights some, and Elvis would come up to Billie’s apartment, but she never let him in while she was alone—everybody knew who did what and when and how at the Courts. So the two just sat on the steps and talked. One night, she asked him to teach her how to play the guitar, and he brought it up and showed her where to put her fingers on the fretboard to make the chords.
Elvis tried to deepen her affection, proffering a box of cherries, and then a necklace and bracelet that Billie always suspected he’d bought for Betty and took back when they broke up. He went to great lengths. One day, Billie’s little sister peered out the window and couldn’t believe her eyes: “Look at that. Elvis is climbing up that sign across the street!” Billie shook her head. Why was Elvis being so silly? Her sister thought she was cruel, but Billie refused to acknowledge him. “I wanted him to grow up.”
They walked to school together to save a dime, and sometimes went to the movies at the Suzores. Elvis loved the dreamy escapism of the movies, his interests maturing from watching cowboy pictures to studying Tony Curtis, with his shiny black hair and knack for winning the girls. In the fall of 1950 Elvis applied for his Social Security card, and shortly after, he and Luther Nall got night jobs as ushers at Loew’s State movie theater on South Main, where they wore uniforms to work. The job promised the delicious perk of letting them see the movies free. But like all twinless twins, Elvis had a fascination with uniforms and loved wearing his usher suit. It not only gave him an air of authority, but also made him look like Luther and all the other male employees, making him feel as if he belonged to a special group.
That’s one reason he joined ROTC at Humes that year, in the tenth grade. Fannie Mae Crowder, who saw him in the halls a lot, noticed, “About every time I saw him, he was wearing his ROTC uniform, as if that was all he had to wear.” And Doris Guy remembered how proud he was of it, all dressed up, and how he needed to show it off, organizing all the younger kids in the Courts as his soldiers, making them march back and forth, back and forth, all around in the courtyard when he got home in the afternoons. The only drawback was that his ROTC duties sometimes cut into the time he hoped to spend with Billie.
But Billie, too, had responsibilities, working after school and on weekends at Britlings’s Cafeteria, where both her mother and Gladys had also been employed, Gladys eventually leaving that job to become a nurse’s aide at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Working around everybody’s schedule curtailed the young couple’s outings, so most of what they did was right around the Courts.
Their romance was chaste (“We were never doing anything we shouldn’t have been doing,” she said), even after sixteen-year-old Elvis took his driver’s test in 1951 in his uncle Travis’s 1940 Buick. Now that he had his license, he borrowed cars for double-dates with his cousin, Gene, or Luther, or the other guys around the Courts. He was growing up fast, getting handsome, and gaining confidence in himself. That summer, he took a job operating a spindle drill press and making rocket shells at Precision Tool, where Travis still worked. Each Friday, he came home and gave his paycheck to his father, taking out only a little for dating.
In an era of crew cuts, he also attempted to grow sideburns and paid obsessive attention to his hair, which had darkened to a dull, pale blond in puberty. The girls at the Courts teased him about looking in the mirror all the time, and they said his hair was so long and straight that it hung down to his chin when he combed it forward. Elvis would grin and explain that’s why he was combing it, to keep it from falling down on his face. He finally styled it into a goopy wall of rose oil tonic, Vaseline, or Royal Crown pomade, which made it all look darker. In time, building on the Tony Curtis look and the hero of his comic books, Captain Marvel, Jr., he would sculpt a perfect pompadour, which curled into a greasy ducktail at the nape of his neck.
The family was now paying forty-three dollars a month for housing at the Courts, but Vernon was out of work, claiming a bad back. He used the excuse to let Gladys and Elvis support him much of the time, and that led to strained relations between father and son, Elvis sometimes talking back to his father, but never his mother. He acted out in other ways, too, getting in trouble for skipping school to go swimming in Wolf River with Luther, and earning a paddling from school principal T. C. Brindley.
Still, in the summer of 1952, just before Elvis’s senior year at Humes, Vernon staked him to a 1941 green, two-door Lincoln that Elvis and Luther found in a junk car lot. The cost: thirty-five dollars.
“My daddy was something wonderful to me,” Elvis would say about the car, since it was a rarity for a high school boy to have his own wheels, especially one whose family lived in government housing. Buzzy remembers Elvis driving him to Tupelo to show him where he’d grown up, just to have something to do. He took Luther one time, too, even though the tires were so thin on the old Lincoln that Luther didn’t think they’d make it down and back.
One night, Elvis drove the whole gang down to Mississippi, this time to Water Valley, where Billie’s relatives lived. She “was having some kind of party down there,” as Farley remembered it. But try as he did, Elvis couldn’t seem to impress any of Billie’s family except her mother, who told him he sang well enough to be on the radio. Elvis blushed and stammered and finally said, “Mrs. Rooker, I can’t sing.”
Once, the couple rode the bus to the end of the line to have dinner with Billie’s older sister. Billie was embarrassed at Elvis’s table manners, since he ate everything with a spoon and never touched his fork, “not then and not at any meal I had with him later.” It was bizarre, she thought, and she noted that when they ate with his parents, he had a special platter, “and he wouldn’t eat from anything but that platter.”
The boy was odd, yes, but so many of the silly things he did seemed like kid stuff. Even though she was younger, she thought she had simply matured faster, and it bothered her. Then she began to see his temper, as on the day he spotted another boy’s picture in her purse and just went wild. “He grabbed it out, and without saying anything, he threw that picture on the ground and began stomping it and grinding it into the ground with the heel of his shoe.”
Billie had never seen Elvis like that, and it shocked and frightened her.
They’d been going together for a year and a half by now, and more and more, Billie found things about Elvis she didn’t like, including the fact that he didn’t dance. He and his friends may have held parties in the Presleys’ apartment, but the truth was he couldn’t dance, not really. He could slow dance—everybody could do that, drape yourself onto a partner and inch around in a circle—but he couldn’t fast dance with a girl, and he didn’t know the sophisticated dance steps for big-band music. And dancing, it turned out, was something Billie really wanted to do. After work, she and her mother walked by the USO club on Third Street on their way home, and now she began asking permission to stay at the club for a few hours and dance with the military men.
Elvis noticed her hanging out with other guys, particularly a sailor she’d met there, and he was furious. For a boy who’d gotten his first erection watching his aunts dancing to fast music, it was all too intimate, a betrayal of the most treacherous sort, even if there was no actual sex involved. His head swirled with emotions, and he could hardly get his words out. They tumbled all over one another in a cascade of pain. Billie couldn’t take it another second.
“I finally had to tell him, ‘Elvis, I am going to begin seeing other boys.’ ” His reaction surprised her.
“He started crying. Until that night, I had never seen a man, or a boy, cry. He told me, ‘Billie, I was going to ask you to marry me!’ ”
Billie was stunned. Marriage certainly wasn’t on her mind, and she had no idea it was on his. But now there was nothing to do but break up, even as Elvis kept tabs on her—just happening to show up at the cafeteria, for instance, and at the Cotton Carnival the same night she went. “Look, there’s Elvis!” her girlfriend said. The way he looked, he was impossible not to notice. But Billie acted as if she didn’t see him, though there was no escaping him at the Courts.
The trauma of losing Billie triggered his sleepwalking again. One night he woke up on the stairs outside his apartment, wearing only his underwear. Suddenly, he heard Billie come in with her date, and he ran and hid, crouching, afraid to move while she kissed the boy good night.
For a while they tried to be friends, but Elvis’s heart was broken, and there was no fixing it, not even after Billie moved back to Mississippi.
Though she is a minor name in the Elvis saga, Billie Wardlaw was a progenitor for many of the women to follow. Her coloring, particularly her dark hair, would have made her seem like his twin, a female version of himself. It’s one reason he spent money well beyond his reach for a pair of blue jeans for her, as they matched his own, as Betty’s had. And her size—she was big boned, though not overweight—would have reminded Elvis of the young Gladys, which is why he had intended to propose marriage, to complete his psychological circle.
“At an unconscious level, we are always seeking resolutions to childhood dilemmas,” writes psychologist Charlotte Davis Kasl in her groundbreaking book, Women, Sex, and Addiction: A Search for Love and Power. “On some level, we’re looking for a second chance, to get what we missed the first time around. By attracting people similar to those in our families, we are given a chance to heal ourselves, to learn the lesson inherent to our childhood situations.”
In courting Billie, Elvis was attempting to separate himself from his mother and the pain of having lost his twin, even as Billie represented both. A happy relationship with her would have allowed him the chance to obliterate the guilt of surviving when Jessie did not, as well as quell the eternal loneliness of losing his twin, and the pain Jessie’s death had caused their mother. It also would have blunted the sexual shame of covert incest. The fact that Billie spurned him only added to his core belief that he wasn’t lovable. He would have felt terribly empty and rejected, not just as a boyfriend, but also as a person.
Finally, his violent outbursts at finding another boy’s picture in Billie’s purse and his tears at learning she was dating a sailor were predictable escapes. As an adult, still dealing with the seeds of destruction planted in childhood, Elvis would turn that violence inward, deflecting his loneliness and fear with prescription drugs and overeating.
At the start of his senior year, in the fall of 1952, Elvis was being stretched in all directions, practicing his music, trying to keep up a C average, and working long hours, first for the Upholsterers Specialties Company, and then for MARL Metal Products, a furniture manufacturer, on the 3 P.M. to 11 P.M. shift, using hand tools and an electric screw drill to make plastic tables. The strain started to show—he was falling asleep in class—and so G
ladys had him quit.
However, the family faced a greater dilemma that November, when the Memphis Housing Authority sent the Presleys an eviction notice and ordered them to vacate by the end of February. The reason: With a combined income of $4,133, they had exceeded the limit allowed for residents of subsidized housing.
In January 1953 they left the Courts and moved to 698 Saffarans Street, across from Humes. Three months later, they packed up again, this time landing in an apartment in a large, two-story brick home at 462 Alabama, an integrated street where they would pay $50 a month in rent, plus utilities. Minnie Mae bunked on a cot in the dining room, and Elvis slept on the sofa. The Presleys were now out of government housing, but the move to Alabama Street could not be considered upward mobility for the family in any way, as the apartment consisted of a couple of small rooms and a large kitchen. They still weren’t doing all that well financially, and the Courts were located right across the street.
In March, Elvis visited the Tennessee State Employment Security office, saying he would like to work as a machinist. The interviewer took his information, and then noted on his application that his appearance as a “rather flashily dressed playboy type [is] denied by fact [he] has worked hard past three summers [;] wants a job dealing with people.”
Elvis had never really found his place in high school, but now, in his senior year, he was about to have two powerful supporters. The first was George Klein, who he’d met in music class the year he started at Humes. They had two things in common: They were both eaten up with music, and they shared a worshipful love of radio, George hoping to make a career in it. Elvis had impressed him that first year by performing “Old Shep” and “Cold, Cold Icy Fingers” for his classmates. When Elvis raised his hand and asked permission, “There were a few laughs in the class because it just wasn’t cool in 1948 to do that in front of anyone. I was blown away because I’d never seen a kid get up and sing like that.” As they approached their senior year, George became class president and thus had some political clout. The two wouldn’t really become close until after they graduated, but George paid attention to him, and Elvis never forgot it.