Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Dixie and Gladys came to a number of the Hayride performances and road shows within a 150-mile radius of Memphis, and in Dixie’s view, both of them “were so amazed that the people who came to the concerts were as mesmerized and excited as we had been.” But Dixie also saw she was losing her grip on him. Ever since his show at the Overton Park Shell, “I felt I was not a part of what he was doing. He was doing something so totally him . . . and he loved it.”

  Elvis would call his mother every night, no matter where he was. Sometimes when he was on the road, Dixie would stay with her, sleeping in Elvis’s bed at the Presleys’ new rental house at 2414 Lamar Avenue. Elvis encouraged the sleepovers—he wanted his parents to keep an eye on her to make sure Dixie wasn’t seeing other boys. But he telephoned her at home less and less, particularly as more women became available to him.

  “Before long, girls were swarming around him by the hundreds,” as Horace Logan remembered, “making him forget his homesickness for Dixie.” And also making him push the limit on the Assembly of God’s tenets about premarital sex. His mother taught him all his life that a godly person honored himself and his body. But did that go for Hayride stars, too?

  “After nineteen years of never being far from his mama’s apron strings, he was finally on his own,” Logan noted, “and he relished the freedom.”

  In Shreveport, where he could be a whole new person, the conventional rules of romance and commitment didn’t seem so rigid. Not when he was living a life in which the established stars accepted him as a peer, and especially since he was about to dethrone the Hayride’s Tibby Edwards as the heartthrob, the little dude, the one who made the women swoon. There were so many girls eager to teach him about sex, about life, about himself. It all fed his ego with a big spoon, especially as he had arrived there as an unknown, very much sheltered and unschooled about sexual intimacy.

  “Everything did a hundred-eighty-degree turn,” his cousin Billy Smith says, “when Elvis realized the effect he had on women.”

  In a sense, Elvis grew up on the Hayride, but his experiences with his female fans left him damaged in his social interaction with women. By the end of his Hayride period, all boundaries would disappear. After a certain point, he wouldn’t even have to bother to politely court. He was Elvis.

  Like many of the stars, Elvis stayed at the low-rent Al-Ida Motel in Bossier City when he played the Hayride, and he usually shared a room with Scotty and Bill. From his second appearance, long lines of teenage girls—1950s groupies—formed outside their room each Saturday night after the show. Some just wanted to see him up close, but others wanted more intimate contact. Sometimes he had three or four girls in his room at once, though he later told his father it was six, laughing that “fourteen or sixteen will get you twenty,” meaning having sex with fourteen- or sixteen-year-olds would get you twenty years in jail. As long as the girl had nice legs, a decent face, and a shapely derriere, he was interested. Breasts were secondary, suggesting a touch of androgyny in his libido.

  “I sometimes drove by the motel myself before I went home, and personally saw as many as three hundred girls there,” Horace Logan wrote. “Elvis scored whenever he wanted. He screwed around with so many girls he’d never seen before and never saw again that I’m surprised he didn’t catch something and die.”

  Maxine Brown was also amazed. “Everybody knew that [the guys] screwed everything in sight. Girls were throwing themselves onto Elvis all of the time. Who’s going to resist that? And if Elvis didn’t want them, Scotty, or Bill, or Jim Ed did,” though women had to push themselves on Scotty, who was married.

  Elvis wasn’t always having full-out sex, though, and in fact, he was more interested in titillation than penetration. He was nineteen years old, almost a man, but still a boy emotionally. Sometimes he was content with a pillow fight. Because he feared getting a girl pregnant—and so he could technically stay true to Dixie—he held to dry humping as long as he could, both he and the girl keeping their clothes on but getting the rush all the same.

  When things progressed beyond that point, he usually stuck to intense foreplay, sometimes asking a girl to masturbate him, and then ejaculating in her hair. If his partner found it degrading, a complete act of submission and dominance, it also made sense—her head was the farthest point from potential pregnancy.

  Elvis’s first experience of real intercourse, which came at either age nineteen or twenty, was both traumatic and uninformed. He had met the girl only that day, and before long, he was in the hotel lobby, searching for Scotty and Bill, his face a tangle of confusion.

  “The rubber busted,” he said. “What do I do now?”

  Bill chuckled. “I think you had better marry her—or get the hell out of town.”

  They left him on his own to solve the crisis, and the next time they saw him, they asked what he had done.

  “I took her to the emergency room at the hospital.”

  “The emergency room?”

  “Yeah, I got them to give her a douche.”

  Soon he vowed to “never break a virgin,” and to fool around only with experienced girls.

  In truth, he liked everything that led up to intercourse better than the act itself—the kissing, the stroking, the darting fingers, the removal of the blouse. He preferred that a girl keep her panties on, though it drove him wild to see the slightest bit of pubic hair poking around the seams of her underwear. But he respected women, and it was always important that the girl receive more pleasure than he.

  Elvis wasn’t the only male star on the Hayride running wild, of course, but Maxine Brown never thought about him being sexy. Like Betty Amos, she regarded Elvis as a brother—she was four years older—and she couldn’t believe the way the girls hounded him everywhere he went—backstage, at the motel, and on the road once they started touring together.

  Though the girls were crazy about him, “Many of the mamas didn’t want their daughters hanging out and going to the shows because of the way he wiggled,” Maxine remembers. “They thought it was vulgar. But I didn’t. I thought it was great. Never thought of anything like that at all.”

  Elvis still hadn’t really broken in the national press, but around the region and even in Memphis, there was talk that what he was doing was unholy, that he was performing the Devil’s music. Elvis was stung by it—it made him burn right through his skin—and Marion had to console him.

  “I remember very strongly people praying for him in the churches. And I knew what a deeply religious person he was, so I was talking to him one day and something was said about how they felt about him, and his eyes filled up. He said, ‘Well, Marion, the only thing I can say is they don’t know me.’ Then he laughed and said, ‘But it don’t hurt to have a few people praying for you.’ ”

  On the other hand, Elvis was soon making more money than he or his parents had ever seen in their lives. It was modest by most entertainment standards—he got only scale for the Hayride broadcasts, and he split his take with Scotty and Bill on the road. But he couldn’t believe his good fortune, and in his role reversal, it thrilled him to provide for his parents, whom he saw as his dependents. In late 1954 he wired his parents funds from Houston: HI, BABIES, HERE’S THE MONEY TO PAY THE BILLS. DON’T TELL NO ONE HOW MUCH I SENT. I WILL SEND MORE NEXT WEEK. THERE IS A CARD IN THE MAIL. LOVE, ELVIS.

  On December 8, 1954, he went back into the Sun studio with Scotty and Bill, recording the hillbilly blues of “You’re a Heartbreaker” and “Milkcow Blues Boogie.” He had the confidence now to loosen up and let things roll. (“Hold it fellas. That don’t move me. Let’s get real, real gone for a change.”) There was a different crackle in the air, Marion noted. Sometimes Elvis would get so tickled by Bill’s antics in the studio that “he would roll on the floor and kick his heels and laugh.”

  By early 1955 no act could follow him onstage, and shortly he would be headlining. (“When we started working with Elvis,” says Maxine, “we got top billing over him, but that didn’t last long.”) Once that ha
ppened, both Elvis and his fans threw all caution to the wind. On a tour through Texas booked by deejay Tom Perryman, who also managed the Browns, Elvis and Jim Ed’s fellow performers “speculated that J. E. and Elvis must be betting on how many girls they could score with in a single night,” as Maxine noted. “Some of us eavesdropped and counted them. Tom came by, saw what was going on, shook his head, and said, ‘By God, those boys are gonna wear those things out if they don’t slow down.’ ”

  Often, on the road, girls would sit in the front row where the stage lights fell, and lift their skirts to expose their naked parts. Gladys was there in Arkansas one night when girls stormed the stage and threw their panties at him, and Elvis had to pay for it. Gladys was appalled that young teens would do this to her son. And Elvis was embarrassed because they did it in front of his mother.

  “I’m not sure that she handled that real well,” Dixie says of Gladys’s emotional reaction to Elvis’s becoming a sex star. “Of course, she wanted him to be loved and to achieve the fame and the notoriety that he wanted. But at the same time, there was a side of her that wanted to think that her son was still remaining pure and innocent through the whole thing. Kind of a two-sided coin there.”

  Gladys always asked Maxine to take good care of Elvis, and Maxine tried her best, paying for his dry cleaning and doing his washing, though he went shy on her when she asked for his undershorts. He didn’t have but a couple of pairs, and he purposely didn’t wear any when he performed. The rumor circulated that he wore a toilet paper roll or a sock in his pants to make himself look bigger, but it wasn’t true. Sometimes Elvis, who was uncircumcised, got aroused, particularly when his pants rubbed him just so.

  One night when Elvis’s parents came to the Hayride, he walked offstage after taking a number of encores and just about brought the house down. Gladys grabbed him up by the arm and pulled him over to the side of the stage where no one could hear them. “Elvis,” she said sternly, “don’t you have any drawers?” He thought fast, and said, “No, ma’am, the only pair I own was dirty, and Maxine wouldn’t wash ’em.”

  “Honey, God, he was huge!” Maxine says. “And it showed. And then when he’d shake his leg, my God! You could tell he had a hard-on. It looked like it. Hell, he knew what he was doing. Bill Black went out and said, ‘I’m going to buy Elvis some shorts.’ And he thought, ‘I’ll play a trick on him.’ He bought him some silk ones, polka dots. He thought Elvis wouldn’t wear them, but Elvis fell in love with them and wouldn’t even take ’em off. He didn’t want me to wash them. He was afraid somebody would steal them. I guarantee you, he wore silk underwear for the rest of his life, when he wore any at all. He loved them.”

  Betty Amos also looked out for Elvis, dispensing advice and offering to iron his shirts. “I said to him one time, ‘Give me your shirt, and I’ll take it over to my room and iron it.’ He said, ‘That’s all right.’ I said, ‘My God, you’re a sex symbol. You’re going out onstage with a wrinkled shirt? Give me that thing!’ ”

  In the mornings, after the road shows, she’d see Elvis in the restaurant having breakfast, and he was never alone. “He’d have some little ol’ girl over there, his latest. I think a lot of times he didn’t care about any of these women he was with. It was just for show. When you’re with a different one every day, there’s nothing there. But he’d look over at me and I’d look over at him, and I’d raise my eyebrows or shake my head, like, ‘That’s good,’ or ‘That’s bad,’ like a sister is supposed to do. They all looked pretty much the same to me. There were no raving beauties, and there were no ugly girls, nobody who really stood out.”

  Gladys, frightened by the changes in her son, “wanted him to stay at home and be a gospel singer,” Maxine remembers. “She was afraid for him to be out in the world the way he was.” But she also thought Betty was the perfect girl for Elvis to pal around with, “because I talked about Jesus and God all the time. And Elvis was completely fascinated by that, and wanted me to talk more about it. I think he wanted to believe really bad.”

  Betty was a good influence on Elvis, but he was far more interested in Maxine and Jim Ed’s comely sister.

  Seventeen-year-old Bonnie Brown was a sweet, quiet girl with fair skin, raven hair, and an ample bosom. She, too, was soon performing on the Hayride. The first night, Maxine and Jim Ed introduced her as “our little sister, Bonnie.” But as Maxine wrote in Looking Back to See: A Country Music Memoir, “When she walked out on that stage, dressed in her tight-fitting outfit, we thought the guys in the audience were going to tear the place down.”

  In the beginning, Elvis and Bonnie didn’t seem interested in each other, but then one day in West Texas, she was relaxing around the motel pool, killing time before a show. Bonnie had her hair in curlers, and Elvis—still so immature he went around handcuffing people to him—came along and pushed her in the pool. She was livid, but after he dived in after her, she joined in the fun, and they were soon together all the time. “He was crazy about her, and she was about him, too,” Maxine says.

  Bonnie had never been in love before, and it was serious—she was staying out late with Elvis, and one night, she woke Maxine up to tell her that he had proposed. They wanted to get married, she told her, but they’d both decided to put it off for a while, since they were so young.

  The Brown family owned a restaurant and supper club in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, called the Trio Club, where Elvis would sometimes rehearse. Now that he was interested in Bonnie, he made a point to stop by more frequently, especially on his way to the Hayride. All the Browns, including Bonnie’s parents, Floyd and Birdie, came to regard him as family. Mrs. Brown cooked for him, and, “He couldn’t get enough of her banana pudding,” Maxine says. “He loved her because she looked kind of like Gladys, and so she took him under her wing.”

  A lot of times, coming back from the shows, he spent the night with the Browns instead of going on to Memphis. Their baby sister, Norma, would give up her bed, which was situated in Floyd and Birdie’s bedroom. The intimacy didn’t bother Elvis—in fact, he found it comforting, as it precisely duplicated the sleeping arrangement he’d had with Vernon and Gladys as a child in Tupelo. Maxine knew he didn’t sleep much, and noticed his “nervous leg,” and how he’d get his toes stuck in the holes of the Browns’ bedsheets. “Before morning, they would be torn into shreds. But Mother didn’t care. She loved him, and it gave her an excuse to go buy some new ones.”

  Apart from his pursuit of Bonnie and his professional association with Maxine and Jim Ed, Elvis seemed to relish a stable and secure family atmosphere. He taught little Norma how to play the piano, and a lot of times, when Maxine, Jim Ed, and Bonnie were on the road, he would come and play baseball in the backyard with her after a helping of Birdie’s home cooking.

  “On the road,” Jim Ed remembered, “he would eat a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If he ate three times a day, that is. But that’s all he ever ate. His mother was evidently a good cook, and he just waited until he got back home to his mama.”

  According to Maxine, Elvis’s love affair with Bonnie ended as quickly as it began. “One night, she went out to dinner and he was in this booth, all loved up with this other girl. He didn’t know Bonnie was there, and she said, ‘That’s the end of that.’ ”

  In time, Elvis could be cavalier when relationships ended, but he seemed to romanticize any girl who showed him the door. Three years later, before Elvis went into the army, Vernon would tell Maxine that Elvis was still in love with Bonnie, and wanted her to wait for him to return from the service. But though Bonnie pined for him, she wouldn’t be burned twice.

  “Elvis Presley was a highly sexed young guy,” remembered Bill Randle, a top disc jockey in Cleveland, Ohio, who first met Elvis in February 1955 and worked with him several times in the next two years. “He was a randy rooster, actually, in that kind of colloquial terminology. And he was very active sexually. All these very well developed young women and excited groupies would congregate
around backstage, and Elvis Presley’s car was used not only to sell the records out of the trunk between the intermissions, but also it was a sexual assignation place. There was a lot of activity in that car.”

  At the Hayride, Elvis wasted no time on a broken heart, and, in fact, from the beginning, he’d set his sights on another girl, an energetic, doe-eyed beauty named Carolyn Bradshaw. With dark hair and eyes, she resembled a glorified Gladys, though she was far smaller, standing only four feet ten inches tall and weighing ninety-five pounds. She took a lot of ribbing about being a shorty. Betty Amos was five foot seven, and when she held her arm out, Carolyn could stand under it. “Cute little thing,” as Betty terms her. “Now, I was a big doll, but Carolyn was a little doll.” And Elvis wanted to meet her.

  “One of the first questions Elvis asked me when I met him was, ‘Is Carolyn Bradshaw gonna be on the show tonight?’ ” Horace Logan remembered. And he had another question: “Is she as good-lookin’ in person as she is in her pictures?”

  “When he saw her in person,” Logan wrote in his book, Elvis, Hank and Me: Making Musical History on the Louisiana Hayride, “I think he was even more taken by her.”

  Carolyn Bradshaw would epitomize three romantic ideals in Elvis’s heart, fueling his obsession with virgins, beauty queens, and tiny brunettes with china doll faces. Physically, she was, in fact, the prototype, the first Priscilla.

  She was born in Arkansas as the youngest of eleven children of a cotton farmer who died when she was seven. After the eighth grade, she and her mother, Eugenia, moved to Shreveport, where Carolyn’s older sister, Jo, was already working. The three shared a small apartment, and on Saturday nights, Carolyn started attending the Hayride. Jo, also a beauty, dated Johnny Horton.