Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  They rode down together in Elvis’s new white Lincoln Mark II, and when they arrived at the dressing tent, Elvis suddenly turned to Barbara.

  “Where’s my shirt? Do you have my shirt?”

  “What shirt?”

  “The shirt I gave you to hold this morning.”

  Oh, gosh! She didn’t know he meant to bring that shirt! Barbara felt really bad, but Elvis “was very sweet about it. They just quickly called somebody in Memphis who hadn’t left yet, and they brought it on down.”

  Elvis came to Tupelo at the invitation of James Savery, the fair association president. It was a day right out of Horatio Alger, a button-busting, local-boy-makes-good story, with a jubilant parade (the city feared a riot, so Elvis wasn’t actually in it), a banner across Main Street (TUPELO WELCOMES ELVIS PRESLEY HOME), and the Rex Plaza, the nicest restaurant in town, serving up “Love Me Tender” steak and “Reddy Teddy” pork chops. Governor J. P. Coleman read accolades from a scroll, calling Elvis “America’s Number One Entertainer,” and Mayor James Ballard even presented him with a guitar-shaped key to the city. Elvis returned the favor and then some—he signed his $10,000 check back over to Tupelo. “The last time I was here,” he mentioned, “I didn’t have a nickel to get in.”

  Some fifty thousand folks came to town for the festivities, the biggest turnout anyone could remember since Franklin Roosevelt visited during the Depression. Twenty thousand attended the evening show, twelve thousand more than the entire population of Tupelo. (Fourteen-year-old Virginia Wynette Pugh, later to gain fame in country music as Tammy Wynette, was in the front row for the afternoon performance.)

  At one point in the matinee, it all became too much for sixteen-year-old Judy Hopper, who’d traveled from Alamo, Tennessee, and jumped the five-foot stage. (“What did I want? I wanted Elvis!”) Later, she got to go back and hug and kiss him. She giggled until she almost hyperventilated, and the two had their picture made together. She already had some leaves out of his yard, and now she had his autograph, too. “It was a thrill, it really was,” she gushed to the press in a drawl as wide as the Mississippi. “I’d like to go to Hollywood now!” The Tupelo Daily Journal captured the mayhem in full. “ ‘Elvis,’ the girls shrieked, tearing their hair and sobbing hysterically, ‘Please, Elvis.’ ”

  Local police, county sheriffs, Highway Patrolmen, and even the National Guard stood ready in case there was trouble, but there wasn’t any, not really, which was surprising, given the size of the crowd, the intensity of their love for Elvis, and the heat. Though it was late fall, the temperature had risen to such a ghastly degree that Barbara and Gladys melted in their folding chairs, Gladys sweltering in a brocade dress and stockings, a locket with a picture of Elvis around her neck. “It made me feel bad,” she later told a friend, “to go back there like that and remember how poor we was.”

  But clearly the Presley family, nearly run out of town in the late 1940s, had returned in triumph. Eleven years earlier, Elvis had lost the talent contest with “Old Shep” on practically this very spot. And now his first motion picture was due out in November, and his double-sided single, “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog,” was number one and two on the charts.

  “I’ve been looking forward to this homecoming very much,” he said in a press conference before the afternoon show. “I’ve been escorted out of these fairgrounds when I was a kid and snuck over the fence. But this is the first time I’ve been escorted in.” A voice called out: “How about Natalie?” “I worry about her when I’m not there where she is,” he said, casually. “I don’t think about her when I’m not.” The newspaper reported that Mrs. Presley appeared “a little bewildered by all the commotion . . . but smiled pleasantly for photographers.”

  For Gladys, “Elvis Presley Day” was the validation that her son was just as special as she always knew he’d be. And for Vernon, the ex-con forced to leave town to find work, the moment was sweet revenge. He was standing outside the big tent in back of the stage when he saw Ernest Bowen, his old boss at L. P. McCarty and Sons, the wholesale grocer. Vernon had a delivery route when he worked for Bowen, and it was his last job before leaving Tupelo. Now Bowen was general manager of the radio station WELO and trying in vain to get into the tent to see about an interview for his announcer, Jack Cristil.

  “All of a sudden this guy hollers at me—I didn’t even recognize him, but it was Vernon, all cleaned up and greeting me like a long-lost friend,” Bowen remembered. “He wanted to know if he could do anything, and I said, ‘Yeah, get me in the tent.’ He said, ‘Just follow me,’ and he just parted the waves. I asked Vernon, ‘How are y’all doing?’ He said, ‘Oh, we doing just great.’ Said, ‘The boy is really taking care of us.’ ”

  When Cristil approached the Presleys that night, an exuberant Vernon, blond and handsome in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie, grabbed the microphone and hardly let it go, saying how proud he was, and how much they appreciated “all the good people who’ve knocked themselves out being so nice to us.” He went on to thank the police department and the Highway Patrol, and he got on such a roll that Cristil finally just talked over him.

  But for once Vernon had overshadowed his wife, who barely had room to answer the man’s question about her favorite Elvis record. “ ‘Baby, Play House,’ ” she announced cheerfully, picking the sexiest of all Elvis’s songs, though mangling the title. “That’s a good one,” Vernon said, but Gladys kept going: “And ‘Don’t Be Cruel.’ That’s my two favorites.”

  Cristil also took time to talk to Nick Adams, who had flown to Memphis with Elvis and Gene Smith after the completion of Love Me Tender and would stay for a week. The reporter didn’t really know who he was. (“And you’re a star, I understand, a motion picture star, right?”) But Nick was self-effacing and respectful, demurring to talk about his own career, and calling Elvis “the nicest person I’ve ever met in show business . . . I can’t speak too highly about him.” Then he bragged on Gladys’s fried chicken and started to mention her okra, but he couldn’t remember what it was. “Elvis?” he yelled across the way. “What’s the name of those things your mother fixed me up? Oker?”

  Nick said he had come to Tupelo to support his friend. But he needed some propping up of his own. After a promising start in films, he could barely find work, and he’d spent the funds from his early successes, including Mister Roberts and Rebel Without a Cause, on houses for himself and his parents. Naturally, in Memphis, he stayed with the Presleys.

  “He was just about broke,” Barbara understood, “and he came in the house, and honest to goodness, his shoes were falling apart. They were horrible-looking. Mrs. Presley looked at them and said, ‘Son, I don’t want you coming in my house with those shoes. You’re going to have to take them off and leave them outside.’ Then she told Elvis to take him out and buy him some new ones.”

  Nick was in the car on the ride home from Tupelo, sitting in the backseat, with Barbara in the front between Elvis and Red West. Elvis was driving faster than he should have been, Barbara thought, when suddenly the hood on the big white Lincoln flew up and totally obscured his vision. Someone had lifted it out of curiosity while the unattended car was in the parking lot—automobiles of that quality were rare in Tupelo—and they hadn’t closed it properly.

  “The road was single lane, as I remember, with a narrow shoulder. Elvis managed to ease the car to the right and pull over. But what impressed me was that both Elvis and Red, ignoring their own safety, threw their arms around me, as if to prevent me from hitting the windshield.” When the car came to a stop (“Son of a bitch!” “Damn, what was that?”), the boys again turned to Barbara. “Are you all right?” they asked. “It wasn’t a general ‘Is anybody hurt?’ but a sweet and gentle concern just for me.”

  Barbara visited Audubon Drive “all of the time when Elvis was home,” and he called her every night from California, both to say hello and to check up on her, the way he had called Dixie, even though he was cheating on her. “I didn’t mind him seeing mov
ie stars like Natalie Wood and Debra Paget, because I knew he was starstruck. He couldn’t believe he was actually in the same world with them, and probably in his mind, he was in love with everyone he met.”

  But she had to think that in some ways she just didn’t fit in with the whole group. She didn’t have musical talent like Red, and while most of the boys cut up all the time, she and Elvis talked about more serious things. She could tell that Hollywood was changing him some, though he insisted it never would. During the making of Love Me Tender, Elvis told her on the phone that he had run into Jerry Lewis. It was still a thrill for him to see another star, but Lewis had disappointed him. Elvis told Barbara the comedian “was disgusting, the way he behaved with all of these people around him, his ‘yes’ men, doing everything for him and hanging on him.”

  Sometimes Elvis seemed to be living in a movie, and there were times when he appeared to not be able to separate his own identity from that of the Hollywood crowd. On October 18, for example, he pulled into the Gulf station at Second and Gayoso and was quickly mobbed by fans. The attendant, Edd Hopper, asked him to leave, and Elvis challenged him, only to have Hopper pull a knife—shades of Rebel Without a Cause—and a third man join in the fray. Elvis, who stood six feet only with the help of lifts in his shoes, hauled off and punched the six-foot-three Hopper, giving him a black eye. All three men were arrested for assault and battery, and disorderly conduct.

  Barbara was inadvertently at the center of it, as Elvis was supposed to pick her up near her bus stop that afternoon. But he had noticed a gas smell coming through his air-conditioning vents, which prompted the stop at the station. She was still standing waiting for him when a young woman approached her and asked if she were Barbara Hearn. Elvis had sent word about what had happened, and the woman told her that the police had taken him to jail.

  Barbara hardly knew what to say. About then, a policeman drove up to get her, and she was so shy, she could barely climb in the back of the cruiser. But when they got downtown, Elvis was already gone, and the officer rode her on out to Audubon Drive. The ordeal had been nearly as hard on Barbara as it had on Elvis. “I was mortified beyond words to be riding across town in a police car! If Elvis ever doubted my sincere regard for him, that should have clinched it.”

  That night, a newspaper photographer came out and took a picture of Elvis at the organ. Barbara sat near him, holding Gladys’s little dog, Sweetpea. “I look so sad and bedraggled because I had been working hard all day while Elvis was showing off his temper downtown.”

  The next day, the charges against Elvis would be dismissed, while the other two men would be fined. And there was other news: Later that afternoon, June Juanico would arrive from Biloxi for a visit.

  Barbara had learned of June from the newspaper. She’d picked up the Memphis Commercial Appeal one morning to find Elvis’s remarks from the RCA press conference about the two girls he was seeing, along with a big, splashy story about the other women in his life. Once the shock wore off, Barbara took it in stride. “It was really neat that he had named me, but that was the first I’d heard of June.” The paper carried a picture of her “own sweet self,” of course, along with several rows of photos of Elvis’s other dates.

  “One was a stripteaser from Las Vegas, and another was a lady wrestler. My family said, ‘Well, that’s just where you belong, isn’t it, Barbara? Right up there with the stripteasers and the lady wrestlers.’ ”

  Kay Wheeler and Elvis, first meeting, backstage at the Municipal Auditorium, San Antonio, Texas, April 15, 1956. She taught him her original dance, the “Rock & Bop,” and headed his first national fan club. (Courtesy of Kay Wheeler)

  Chapter Eleven

  Showgirls and Shavers

  Just as Elvis had stayed in constant touch with Barbara through the filming of Love Me Tender, he had also heavily romanced June, sending her a lovesick telegram on August 21, 1956: “Hi, wioole [widdle] bitty. I miss you, baby. Haven’t had you out of my mind for a second. I’ll always be yours and yours alone to love. Dreamed about you last night. Love ya. Yea, uh-huh. EP.”

  As if for proof, June had barely arrived on Audubon Drive when Elvis wanted to take her to his room. They’d been in there together countless times, but this one was different. Elvis closed the door. “I told him no, no, no,” June remembers. “I got up and said, ‘Keep the door open. I’m not going to stay in here with the door shut.’ ”

  And so their relationship remained unconsummated.

  June’s visit coordinated with Elvis’s rehearsal for his second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show at the end of October. For days, she sat on the floor, enthralled at being surrounded by Elvis and the Jordanaires, the vocal backing group he used in concert and on records. She and Elvis often harmonized in the car on such songs as “Side by Side” and the old hymn “In the Garden.” Now, in rehearsal with the Jordanaires on “Love Me Tender,” she felt free to jump right in. She’d hang on to Gordon Stoker’s ringing tenor, and if Gordon stopped and she kept on, “Elvis would just look at me and grin.”

  Before leaving for New York, she and Elvis saw a rough cut of the movie with his parents. Elvis found it difficult to watch his performance, but then it was so hard to keep up with all the whirling emotions of fame. Variety, the show business trade paper, had just declared, “Elvis a Millionaire in 1 Year,” based on the projections of his income from the movie contracts, records, song publishing, merchandising, and concerts.

  While June was still visiting, Elvis came home with a “big ol’ box of cash from the bank in tens, twenties, and hundreds. He sat on the floor and he said, ‘June, would you like to see a million dollars?’ And he threw it up in the air.” Gladys and Vernon walked in, and Vernon held his head. “Are you crazy, son?” he said, and scrambled to pick it all up.

  June wondered for a minute if she should grab some, but she knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. One reason Elvis liked her, she thought, was because she wouldn’t take anything from him.

  The money had probably been a test, a suggestion from Parker, who often left people alone with large amounts of cash to see if he could trust them. June, who despised Parker and thought he schemed to keep her and Elvis apart, had been thinking a lot about him lately, wondering why the Colonel and Nick Adams seemed to be so chummy. Nick arrived for yet another visit on October 23, four days into her own stay in Memphis, and he planned to go with Elvis to New York for the Sullivan show.

  “He was constantly stuck up Elvis’s butt,” she fumed. In her heart of hearts, she believed that Nick was on the Colonel’s payroll, that he kept an eye out for whatever went on and reported back to him. She also believed the Colonel promoted Elvis’s relationship with Natalie Wood for publicity value.

  Still, June was stunned to learn that Natalie was coming to Memphis during Nick’s extended stay. “Elvis didn’t invite Natalie,” she says. “Nick did, and the Colonel made all the arrangements.” The actor Robert Vaughn, with whom Natalie had just become involved, thought she did it for spite, to make him jealous. Others believe she came because she cared for Elvis and still hoped to spark their romance.

  No matter why Natalie agreed to come to Memphis, it was uncomfortable for everyone, even before she got there. Nick kept asking Elvis when June was going to leave. “There’s not room for Natalie, if June’s going to be here,” he said one day in her presence. It got her hackles up. “I said, ‘No, Nick, you’ve got that backward. There’s not room for me.’ ”

  Elvis stepped in the middle.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “June’s going to stay.”

  Finally, June announced she was going home to Biloxi when Elvis left for New York. Nick seemed relieved. But June disliked him for another reason, too: “Nick tried to put his hands on me. He came on to me. I said, ‘You touch me one more time, you’re in trouble.’ ”

  She never told Elvis about it, because “Elvis felt sorry for him. Nick came across as a basically decent kid, but I really think he was bad for Elvis.”

&n
bsp; She suspected, in fact, that Nick introduced Elvis to prescription drugs, more specifically to speed. She knew that Elvis took No-Doz pills, which contained caffeine, but that was all. “Nick was always up, always wired. Before he got there, Elvis was easy and laid-back. But when Nick got there, Elvis seemed to be wired, too. And you can’t get that wired from cola or coffee, and that’s about all Elvis drank.”

  Certainly Elvis did not seem himself during Natalie’s visit. Or at least Phillip Barber didn’t think so. Phillip was a freshman at Memphis State that fall. A native of Dickson, Tennessee, he had decided to go to school in Memphis partly out of his love for Elvis’s music. He hoped to practice law in the music business, so enthralled was he with rhythm and blues, and rock and roll. Phillip often hung out at the Cotton Club in West Memphis, Arkansas, where he became entranced with Barbara Pittman, who sang with Clyde Leoppard’s Snearly Ranch Boys. A former neighbor of the Presleys from the projects, Barbara was the only female recording artist on Sun Records.

  Like Elvis, she’d sung at the Eagle’s Nest. And she’d been in love with him ever since they met, remembering how silly he’d been to put black shoe polish on his hair to look like Tony Curtis. (“Look, there is no blond-headed idol except James Dean.”) One day, they’d performed together on Jackson Avenue at the Little Flower Catholic Church, and “after the show it started pouring down rain. Black shoe polish was coming out all over Elvis’s face. He could almost do an Al Jolson.”

  They were tight enough that Elvis had taken her Sun publicity picture, and sometimes, if Sam and Marion had to be out, Elvis and Barbara would go down in the afternoons after work and take care of the studio. “A lot of people were talking to Elvis on the phone at that time and never even knew it.”