by Alanna Nash
Chapter Fifteen
Private Presley
On January 1, 1958, Jimmie Rodgers Snow, who had been Elvis’s roommate on some of the early tours, arrived at Graceland for an extended visit. Elvis had run into Hank’s son backstage at the Grand Ole Opry eleven days earlier, when he’d gone to Nashville to deliver the Colonel’s Isetta sports car. Elvis invited him over to take part in his last big hurrah—a man-child marathon of roller-rink bashing, motorcycle riding, and all-night movies—before leaving to make King Creole and then going off to the service.
They’d had a long talk one night. Jimmie laughed about opening for Elvis in Texas in 1955, saying how the “Memphis Flash” came out in “a chartreuse jacket and black pants with a white stripe down the side, and the kids were just going wild.” And he remembered “how cool he was in my mind. I wanted to sing like him. I wanted to dress like him, and do things that I never cared about till I met him.”
Elvis was studying his script for King Creole, and tossed it to Jimmie. “Hey, man. Why don’t you just go out to California with me? I’ll get you a bit part in the picture.” But Jimmie declined.
“I told him how much it meant for me to be there, but I said, ‘I’m getting married in March, and I’m going into the ministry.’ Elvis thought that was great. As a matter of fact, he was probably the only one who commended me for it. Everybody else thought I was crazy.”
Two months earlier, Jimmie realized he’d been living a perpetual dark night of the soul. He’d been drinking and doing pills since his days on the road.
“I was just a miserable, unhappy man. But the call of God was on my life. I had sensed it for years, but I didn’t know what it was.” Just prior to going over to Graceland, Jimmie had turned his life over to Jesus. “I quit drinking and pills cold turkey. I was changing my life.”
Jimmie thanked Elvis for his offer of a part in the movie, but the only way he knew to break with the entertainment business was just to cut all ties.
When Jimmie left Graceland in early 1958, his heart was heavy for two reasons. He feared for Elvis’s soul, for the way he was conducting his personal life. And he worried about Gladys. “My memory of his mother is coming downstairs and seeing her sitting in the kitchen drinking beer, always in the same chair. I don’t know if she was a lush, but I would see it all the time.”
Alan Fortas was also concerned about Gladys. She hardly ever left the house, and Alan didn’t know what she did with her time. Elvis talked about what a great cook she was, but since they got Alberta (Elvis called her “VO5”), Alan had never seen Gladys fix a meal. In 1954, when Elvis made his first records, he’d walked into Harry Levitch’s jewelry store and bought his mother an electric mixer for Christmas. A few days later, he came back and bought another one, also for Gladys. When Harry asked why, Elvis said he wanted one for each end of the kitchen so she wouldn’t have to walk so much. Now, as both Jimmie and Alan noted, she hardly ever got out of the chair.
“I just remember passing through the kitchen on my way out to the pool or into the den, and she’d always be there.
“ ‘Hello, Miz Presley, how you doin’?’
“ ‘Fine, Alan.’ ”
She was a nice, simple woman who never pretended to be more than she was, in Alan’s view. “She dipped her snuff, she watched TV in her room, and she worried about her boy.”
That was her life.
She sat by the window in the kitchen, daydreaming or looking out in the backyard. Sometimes she sat out front, away from the fans, sequestered from the neighbors who had tormented her on Audubon Drive. Other times, Vernon would take her for a drive in her pink Cadillac, since she’d never learned to drive. That summer, he would carry her down to Tupelo to see Annie Presley.
“We was sittin’ there talkin’,” Annie remembered, “and she said, ‘Annie, I’d give the world if I lived next door where I could just get out and feed my chickens and do things, but Elvis won’t let me do nothin’. You know me. I want to do.’ ”
She killed her pain with the multitude of beer bottles she hid in the refrigerator behind the milk and the Pepsis, and she sipped on them all day long from a brown paper sack, washing down diet pills—Dexedrine, or other forms of amphetamine—that the doctor gave her. She wanted so to lose weight, to shine in the pictures the magazines took of her family. Normally, she wouldn’t drink in front of others, Billy Smith says. She’d stay in her room.
“The biggest majority of the time she would go without it, but it seemed like when she got worried, she clung to that real quick.”
Elvis had known about her “medication” for a long time, because as Lamar remembers, he pilfered her “speed” to stay awake on the long drives on tour, even though it made him more hyper than usual. But he had been mystified by her wrenching mood swings. She would be bubbly one minute and at the ends of despair the next. She seemed to be weepy all the time, and pale and withdrawn. She almost never came out of her robe anymore, and she walked so slowly. Somebody put it to early menopause, because she’d be hot one minute and cold the next. But the dark circles under her eyes, the color of old blood, were getting so deep they threatened to one day swallow her up. She was almost forty-six years old now, but everything about her seemed so much older.
Why did she look so unnaturally bloated, as if she might burst if pricked with a pin? Elvis asked about it, but Gladys didn’t want him to find out how sick she was—said she didn’t know just exactly what her tests had shown. Their bond was so strong that when the wheel bearing went out on his Cadillac that time in Arkansas and caught fire, she bolted upright in her sleep and screamed, “Elvis!” But he was so busy now, so preoccupied with getting things ready for the army, that he wasn’t in tune with her the way he had been. That, too, was a source of grief.
She was losing him. First it was Jessie, and now Elvis. The first weeks of basic training, they wouldn’t even let her come see him. And then they were sending him overseas. To Germany, enemy territory. Elvis had already said he’d take his family with him, but she couldn’t imagine such a thing. She told Lamar, “I can’t see myself away from Sonny Boy that long. But I just can’t go with him.” How would she cope without her baby? How would she live?
The night before his induction, Elvis, Anita, and the gang went to the drive-in movie to see Sing, Boy, Sing, starring Colonel Parker’s onetime protégé Tommy Sands. The picture was an adaptation of a television drama, “The Singing Idol,” loosely based on Elvis’s own story. Everybody got a kick out of it, especially since Nick Adams played Elvis’s buddy, standing in for the whole inner circle. Afterward, the group went to the roller rink one last time and played Crack the Whip, Elvis handing out “happy pills” he got from the dentist to ease everyone’s pain. That night, Alan pulled sleepwalking duty and stayed in his room. But Elvis was too keyed up for sleep, worrying what the next two years would bring, so they just stayed up all night and talked.
At 6:30 A.M. on March 24, 1958, the twenty-three-year-old recruit, modeling black trousers, pink-and-black socks, and a blue striped shirt under a gray-and-white-checked sport coat, reported to the Memphis Draft Board in the M & M Building at 198 S. Main Street. There, he and twelve others would be inducted into the U.S. Army, and Elvis would be assigned army serial number 53 310 761.
With him were his parents, Anita, Lamar, Alan, and Judy Spreckels, who had taken over some of his national fan club duties. His double first cousin, the teenaged Patsy Presley, showed up, along with a smattering of fans and quasiromantic interests, including an attractive blonde named Bonnie Mosby Underwood, the wife of songwriter and future Sun Records engineer Charles Underwood, and the girl some people thought secretly owned Elvis’s heart. He carried a small leather bag containing exactly what the induction notice said to bring—a razor, a toothbrush, a comb, and enough money to last for two weeks. Among the officers there that day was Walter Alden, whose one-year-old daughter, Ginger, would grow up to have her own unique place in Elvis history.
At Kennedy Veterans Hos
pital, the most famous man in America was reduced to being just another U.S. male, undergoing processing, enduring the rigors of a physical, and weighing in (185 pounds). Photographers caught him with the rest of the recruits, stripped down to his underwear.
Later that afternoon, he raised his right hand before Major Elbert Turner and swore the words that made him a soldier. “Congratulations!” Major Turner told the group. “You are all privates. That’s the way you’ll be addressed from now on.” Private Presley was put in charge of the unit.
As Colonel Parker worked the room, cheerfully handing out balloons stamped KING CREOLE, Elvis hugged and kissed his mother. Her big face was puffy, and her brown eyes swollen with tears. They hung on each other until even Elvis felt self-conscious, and then he kissed Anita. “Little,” he said, “I love you, and I will return, and don’t forget me.” Anita didn’t want him to see how upset she was (“My heart was being torn away because he was my first love”), but they were all crying now—his mother, his father, Anita. It was time for him to board the army bus for Fort Chaffee, Arkansas.
He looked at Lamar and the Cadillac limousine that had brought him there that day, and suddenly it was a symbol of everything he had worked so hard to get. Now it was all about to be gone. It was like a dream.
“Good-bye, you long black son of a bitch,” he said to the Caddy, and everybody laughed. Then he climbed on the bus to begin life anew as Private Presley. Five hundred screaming girls saw him off.
At Fort Chaffee, the new inductees got their shots, and then predictably had their hair sheared off. Elvis, whose pompadour once swam with “sweat and goose grease,” as Time magazine noted, listened to the whirring of the electric clippers and blew the flying fuzz off his hand. “Hair today, gone tomorrow,” he said in a studied line, and the news media—fifty-five photographers and reporters—dutifully wrote it down. By the end of the day, the army confirmed what he already knew: He would be stationed at Fort Hood, near Killeen, Texas, the largest army post in the United States, and assigned to the Second Armored Division, General Patton’s “Hell on Wheels” outfit.
On March 28, en route to Killeen, the army transport bus made a stop for lunch at a diner in Hillsboro, Texas. For a full twenty-five minutes, Elvis blended in with all the other new privates in their fatigues. But a caravan of fans also made the trek to Texas. Suddenly, a young voice squealed, “There’s Elvis!” and a small riot broke out. After he left, girls wrestled over his chair.
When the bus arrived at Fort Hood about four-thirty in the afternoon, a clutch of thirty newsmen stood waiting in summer clothing, holding notebooks to their eyes to shield them from the Texas sun. Private Presley was the second soldier off the bus. Sure, he’d salute for the cameras, he said, flashing his Hollywood smile, and then he held a press conference before going off to his first army meal of fish and French fries. A dozen teenage girls hovered outside the mess hall. “Let us see him, and we’ll go away!” they cried, but the military police shooed them off. Soon, Elvis’s fan mail would number fifteen thousand letters a week, all of it redirected to the Colonel’s office in Tennessee.
On March 29, Elvis woke up not to Lamar or Alan at the foot of his bed, but to five dozen other men all around him. Some of them wanted their pound of flesh from the millionaire singer, now earning seventy-eight dollars a month. Fellow soldier Rex Mansfield, who was on the bus with Elvis coming out of Memphis, remembered how they teased him: “Where’s your hound dog?” And “Aren’t y’all lonesome for your teddy bear?” They were all watching him, waiting for him to screw up.
But Elvis was determined to fit in. Each arriving recruit received twenty dollars in cash for toothpaste and other basic necessities, and a sergeant immediately seized his moment.
“Presley, give me that twenty dollars—you don’t need it.”
“Naw, Sergeant, I’m broke.”
The teasing would stop when they saw he didn’t want any special privileges, that he did his KP and guard duty and marched with a seventy-five-pound pack in the irrepressible heat, eating the Texas dust like everyone else. Elvis was an okay guy, they decided, and who’d have thought that? And Elvis was even more surprised to find out that he liked the army—the organization, the respect of men, the routine, and predictably with twinless twins, the uniform, the infinite replication. It served a psychological need.
Besides, the fans had no intention of going away. Fort Hood was an open base, meaning soldiers could receive civilian guests when they were off duty, and “the girls seemed to know where he was, as if they were sending secret messages to each other, fired by hormones,” wrote one reporter.
It was true. Jane Levy Christie, then a high school junior, thought it was too gauche to scream and carry on over Elvis, but she and her friends went searching for him anyway. (“We found him and took him for a ride to the Dairy Queen, which our boyfriends didn’t like very much.”) Only once did things get problematic. Dorton Matthews, a sergeant, heard a commotion one night around midnight. There were fifteen or twenty women in the barracks, giggling and looking for Elvis. The army couldn’t put up with such sorority pranks. “We had to have guards after that.”
But Elvis was not precisely as alone in Killeen as he appeared. Lamar, who had tried to enlist with him, but at 260 pounds flunked the physical (“They tried to get me clearance through the surgeon general”), just drove on down in Elvis’s Lincoln Mark II and checked into a motel. Elvis was glad to see him, but the truth was that he wanted Gladys. He fell into a deep malaise.
As his depression worsened, Master Sergeant William Norwood saw the misery on Elvis’s face and took him home to place a phone call. After that, Elvis was a frequent visitor to the Norwood residence, where the sergeant became a confidant, offering hot coffee, home-cooked meals, and fatherly advice. “When you come in my house, you can let it all out,” Norwood told him in a rural drawl. “But when you walk out of my front door, you are now Elvis Presley. You’re an actor. You’re a soldier. So, by God, I want you to act! Don’t let anybody know how you feel on the inside.”
During basic training—reveille before 5 A.M., sharpshooter practice, crawling over barbed wire—Elvis found another soft shoulder in Eddie Fadal, a theater owner who had been a deejay in Dallas in 1956 when the young singer made the rounds at radio stations. Eddie wasn’t in the army but lived in Waco, forty-five minutes away, with his wife, LaNelle, daughter, Janice, and son, Dana.
At the base, the Lebanese-American talked his way through security with a picture of himself with the singer. He found Elvis in the dayroom, shining his boots. Would Elvis like to come out to the house at 2807 Lasker Avenue and visit on weekends? The Fadals were a warm and welcoming family, he said, and Elvis could relax and listen to the latest 45s. Elvis said he had to stay on base for two weeks, but then sure, thanks, he’d be there. He showed up not long after, but the first thing he did after meeting Eddie’s family was phone his mother.
Eddie remembered the call. “When he got her on the line, all he said was, ‘Mama . . .’ And apparently, she said, ‘Elvis . . .’ And from then on, for a whole hour, they were crying and moaning on the telephone. Hardly a word was spoken.”
Now Anita started coming down for weekends, though she’d slipped into town before, staying at the Norwood house, Elvis sneaking out of the barracks to be with her. She was surprised at what a regular guy he’d turned into, without his hair dye and the lifts in his shoes. His skin was so beautifully tanned, and for the first time since she’d known him, he was just as normal as anybody else.
“He would come over and then we would go in the backyard and look up at the sky. We’d talk about all the things we were planning on doing, like getting married, all the things in the future.”
And he meant it. Being in the army had changed his thinking. One time when they drove to Dallas with Eddie, Anita went to the restroom, and Elvis called Eddie over to the car. “He put his foot on the bumper and said, ‘Eddie, when ol’ E here gets ready to get married, it’s gonna be to that gi
rl, Anita Wood, and no one else. She’s the one.’ ”
He took her to the Fadals’ house, where LaNelle cooked a pound of bacon for him—burned crisp, like he liked it—and Eddie got him banana and chocolate cream pies from the Toddle House. In fact, Eddie built a room onto the house just for Elvis, decorating it in pink and black, and outfitting it with a piano and the latest hi-fi equipment. There wasn’t anything Eddie wouldn’t get for Elvis. And that included prescription drugs, both uppers and downers.
“My father knew all the doctors in town,” says Janice. “It was easy to get a prescription filled. He’d say, ‘Elvis needs to sleep.’ ”
If Elvis’s relationship with the older man seemed vaguely odd and unhealthy, no one said anything about it at the time. Everybody just concentrated on having fun. In May, Anita celebrated her twentieth birthday, and the Fadals got a cake for her. Elvis, too, made a special effort, slow dancing with Anita in a circle, and softly singing, “Happy, happy, birthday baby . . .”
Eddie turned on the tape recorder, and Elvis and Anita sat for their first home recordings, Elvis playing piano, and the two of them singing Hank Williams’s “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You.” Anita, who had her professional recording debut coming up in June, was nervous about her first record.
“I wish they’d let me pick it,” Elvis is heard saying on the tapes. He worried that Anita’s producers would try to turn her into Julie London. “They gotta give her somethin’ like Connie Francis’s songs. Somethin’ with some guts to it.”
Looking back, “It was the greatest time that I ever spent with him,” Anita says. “He was a soldier boy, and I was his girlfriend from back home, and we were in love and we were together with friends. We just had a wonderful time.”
On May 31, Elvis got a two-week leave before his next phase of training, a concentration in tank warfare. After a week in Memphis, where he had an oddly somber family portrait made with his parents, he drove to Nashville for an all-night recording session at RCA’s Studio B. On the surface, nothing seemed right. He was wearing his uniform (“Simple, I’m kinda proud of it”), and it was his first session without Scotty and Bill, who had quit in a money dispute, leaving only D. J. and the Jordanaires from the old lineup. But musically, Elvis was in fine form. By the time they wrapped things up, he had several hits in the can (“I Need Your Love Tonight,” “A Big Hunk O’ Love”) to keep him on the charts while he was away. It would be his last recording session for almost two years.