Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Three thousand fans ringed the area around the Spanish-styled Memphis Funeral Home on Union Avenue, many of them there to show their support, most of them hoping for a glance at Elvis. Memphis Police Captain W. W. Woodward, a friend of Elvis who had posed for a photo with Nick Adams the year before, stationed 150 policemen to keep order along the route to Forest Hill Cemetery, where Gladys would be buried.

  Reverend Hamill officiated at the funeral, and as Dixie knew he would, Elvis asked the Blackwood Brothers to sing, since the revered gospel quartet was Gladys’s favorite group. They arrived early for the three-thirty services to go over the songs and meet with the family.

  J. D. Sumner, the Blackwoods’ bass singer since 1954, was astonished at Elvis’s level of grief. “I’ve never seen a man that loved his mother as much as Elvis loved Gladys. He laid on that glass over the coffin, and I’ve never heard a kid scream and holler so much as Elvis did at his mother.”

  The Blackwoods had planned on singing three or four numbers, including “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” and “Precious Memories.” But Elvis kept scribbling down song titles and sending notes up until the quartet, worried about making their concert in South Carolina that night, performed a dozen numbers.

  Barbara Hearn had been on vacation in Pensacola, Florida, with her friend Anita Burns and family when her mother called with the news. Anita’s father insisted they return immediately so Barbara could attend the funeral. Anita went with her.

  They managed to get seats despite the crowd, and Barbara could see Elvis in the family section off to the left. But after a short time the curtain was drawn, blocking him from view. Afterward, a policeman held up the procession so Barbara could join it, and she went to Forest Hill Cemetery as part of the front end of the cortege.

  When everyone had left the chapel, Elvis promised James Blackwood he would charter a plane for the group that evening, and thanked him for what he had done. “He put his arms around me and said, ‘James, you know what I am going through,’ ” referring to the airplane crash that had taken James’s brother, R. W. Then he leaned over his mother’s body and kissed her. “Mama,” he said, “I would give every dime I have and even dig ditches just to have you back.”

  At the cemetery, Elvis got through the brief service without incident. But then as the mourners retreated to their hot summer cars, Elvis lost control again. As they lowered the coffin, he threw a small shovel of dirt on top, and cried out inconsolably.

  “Good-bye, darling, good-bye. I love you so much. You know I lived my whole life just for you.” Then as everyone watched in horror, Elvis tried to jump in the ground with his mother. “They were holding him back and he was screaming,” Barbara Pittman said. “It was horrible. It was really just the worst thing I had ever seen.”

  Barbara and Anita stayed until the end of the ceremony, and then drove to Graceland, where Elvis and Vernon were receiving guests. Barbara was surprised to be denied entry and left her card. Later, someone called and asked her to come back out. Elvis hugged her and apologized for her experience earlier. “Of everyone,” he said, “she would have wanted you here.”

  “He was in a trance. I don’t think he himself could describe how he acted. Everyone was so sad. It happened so fast, it was difficult to comprehend.”

  Reverend Hamill would meet with Elvis one on one in the next days and weeks, but Elvis’s grief was so deep that he was almost beyond reaching. Nothing, not the 200 floral arrangements, the 100,000 cards and letters, or the 500 telegrams, seemed to help.

  Then the Colonel spoke with Mae Axton, who had been like a second mother to Elvis when he was starting out. Mae had just gotten out of the hospital and was unable to travel. Now she wrote Elvis a letter (“I just wrote my heart”), and put it on a plane. Tom Diskin took the missive directly to Elvis, who holed up in his room to read it over and over.

  For a little while, then, Elvis seemed calmer. Then he was just as shattered as before. Guests noticed that he couldn’t sit still. He ambled from person to person, as if pleading with them to bring her back. And he wandered through the house, always stopping outside one door. “I can’t go into my mother’s room,” he said. “I can’t bear for anyone to go in there yet.”

  Arlene Cogan, a tagalong fan who had met him at fourteen at his Chicago press conference in 1957, couldn’t believe how hard he took it. “He walked around carrying Gladys’s nightgown for days. He wouldn’t put it down. It went with him everywhere he went.”

  “People were screaming, ‘Somebody, please help him!’ ” Barbara Pittman remembered. Finally Vernon called for a doctor, who disappeared with Elvis upstairs and gave him a shot to settle his nerves. He also left a bottle of pills.

  “I saw Elvis come down from his bedroom so stoned out of his mind he didn’t know where he was,” Barbara said. “He had a line of mirrors that ran along the stairs in the hallway. Elvis came down and said, ‘Hey, look at all them little Elvises! A thousand little Elvises here!’ The doctor was giving him tranquilizers, and he liked ’em.”

  Anita saw the pills, too, but they seemed warranted at the time. He would rally, as when the Memphis Highway Patrol, trying to cheer him, took him for helicopter rides all over Memphis. Then something would happen, and he’d break down again.

  One day Elvis was sitting on the floor talking with some of the fans, telling stories about his army experiences, when Vernon came in the room carrying a stainless steel saucepan. Inside were three baseball-size snowballs.

  Back in the winter, sitting at her seat at the breakfast bar, a melancholy Gladys had watched the snow fall and pile up in deep drifts by the back fence. Elvis was out of town, and more and more lately, she’d missed her son as if he were dead.

  “How Elvis loves the snow!” she’d said, turning to Vernon. “Do you think he will be home for Christmas?” Without a word, she went to the cupboard and took out a small pan. Then she headed for the back door to make snowballs. “I’m going to put these in the freezer and keep ’em ’til Elvis comes home,” she’d explained. Vernon had forgotten all about them.

  The discovery set Elvis off again, and he was awash with regret, tormented by how tender she was, how she’d thought of him every minute, and how he’d disappointed her at times.

  They’d fought as hard as they’d loved, and their fights were commonplace, Gladys smacking him so hard on the back of the head sometimes (“Mama!”) that she nearly knocked him down. One day at Graceland, she’d started on him the minute he got up—about women, about staying out all hours.

  He wasn’t living according to Jesus’ plan, she said, and she was angry, as mad as when she’d ripped a plowshare off in her youth. Elvis took it until lunch, but then his anger bubbled over, and he picked up a plate of tomatoes and threw it hard against the wall, the china shattering and fleshy red specks flying everywhere. Gladys set her jaw. “You do that again,” she warned, “and your life will be miserable from here on out!”

  At the time, he worried about breaking her dishes and ruining her walls. But now he saw she didn’t care about that. All she wanted was him, the way they used to be, before he belonged to everyone.

  “Funny,” he told a reporter four years later, “she never really wanted anything fancy. She just stayed the same, all the way through the whole thing. There’s a lot of things happened since she passed away that I wish she could have been around to see. It would have made her very happy and very proud. But that’s life, and I can’t have her.”

  Gladys Love Presley had been an ordinary country woman, but she had brought greatness into this world. She had shaped a man who made a difference, who helped create a musical art form. Through that, he had united disparate people, changed sexual mores, and harnessed a burgeoning youth culture. No one would ever forget him, or her.

  On August 24, ten days after his mother’s passing, Elvis went back to Fort Hood to rejoin his unit. Just before he left the house, he went to Gladys’s door. “I got to go, Mama,” he said, and broke down once more. Then he told his father
and Alberta that nothing was to be moved in Gladys’s room while he was away. He wanted it to remain exactly as she had left it, preserved as if she were still alive, as if he might find her there when he returned from overseas. In a month, he would be in Germany, assigned to the Third Armored Division, and stationed in Friedberg.

  But Elvis was not ready to go back to Killeen, let alone go to Europe. It was all too soon for a trauma of such magnitude. Gladys’s death had not just been the passing of his mother and his best friend, but psychologically, Elvis had experienced a double death. The forfeiture of his twin and the immediate loss of his mother were inextricable, compressing twenty-three years of shock and emptiness into a single moment. His extraordinary keening had been a manifestation of stuck grief for Jessie, and now new anguish for Gladys that he would never surmount.

  “Psychologists call this the premorbid personality, or the underlying structure that, given something apocalyptic, triggers all the pathology and pushes it to the surface,” says Dr. Peter O. Whitmer, an expert on the twinless twin phenomenon. “When Gladys died, so, too, did Elvis’s ability to bond with a woman. He may have gotten close at times, but he was already taken, as so many twinless twins are.”

  In Killeen, Elvis tried to pick up where he had left off. Eddie Fadal invited him out every weekend, but nothing was really right—Colonel Parker told him to stay away from Eddie, that he was a homosexual with designs on him. LaNelle, too, was tired of all the commotion, weary of having to cook for Elvis and his gang. Later, Janice Fadal, who would grow up to marry Lamar Fike in a short-lived union, would realize that her mother had resented Elvis.

  “Once I saw a bunch of limos pull up and I ran screaming through the house, ‘Elvis is here!’ Dad was excited, but Mom freaked out. . . . He became my father’s focus instead of us—the family.”

  Still, everybody tried to put on a bright face when they got together and told funny stories about Elvis’s early touring days in Texas, when Elvis signed women’s breasts in Lubbock, and the girls put Band-Aids over the signatures to protect them in the shower.

  At some point that summer, Elvis and Rex and a few of the guys drove to Dallas to girl-watch at the Sheraton and the Quality Inn. Then they learned about the American Airlines Stewardess College in Fort Worth. When they showed up, the house mother, Ronnie Anagnostis, got on the P.A. “Girls, guess what? Elvis Presley is coming through the front door!” The only thing they didn’t do was fly over the balcony, she said.

  But “things were never quite the same again at Fort Hood,” according to Rex Mansfield. “We all suffered with and for Elvis’s great loss.”

  Soon, the whole gang began to visit, because Elvis seemed to need them. Arlene Cogan went down, and Frances Forbes, and fan club presidents from Chicago and elsewhere. They all stayed with Elvis, joining Lamar, Vernon, Minnie Mae, Red, and Elvis’s cousins Gene, Junior, and Earl Greenwood. Sometimes there were twelve in all sleeping at the house while outside, a crowd of a hundred kept vigil.

  When Anita arrived on the weekends, she was distraught to find so many people in the house, especially women. It was bedlam. “I could not believe it. They were all over the place. Every time I went down, there were different people there. Strangers. I’d never seen those people. Elvis didn’t act like himself. He would play the piano and look around. ‘Little, where are you?’ ”

  She thought he was too intimate with them, that they were taking advantage of him. “I don’t like to sit alone too much and think,” he said by way of explanation. But Anita felt uneasy and wondered how it boded for their future.

  On September 19, 1958, Elvis packed his things and put on his military attire to leave Fort Hood. At 7 P.M., a troop train would take him and 1,360 other soldiers to the Brooklyn Army Terminal in New York, where they would sail to Germany on the U.S.S. Randall.

  Before he left the house, he asked Eddie to lead the group in a word of prayer. They all got down on their knees and held hands in a circle, and after Eddie spoke, each one took his turn. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the group,” Eddie recalled. Afterward, he rode with Elvis and Anita in the Lincoln. “Eddie,” Elvis said softly, “I really feel this is the end of my career. Everybody is going to forget about me.”

  A light rain was falling, and a reporter approached him as he waved good-bye to Anita, Eddie, and the fan club presidents. Everybody had tears in their eyes, including Elvis. How do you feel? the reporter asked. “I just feel sad,” Elvis said.

  There were people to catch his attention along the way, though—in Memphis, during a refueling stop, Alan and George came to see him, and while Elvis wasn’t allowed to get off the train, George introduced him to a pretty Mississippi girl named Janie Wilbanks, who climbed up the steps in her white leather coat as Elvis leaned down for a kiss. And somewhere as the train wound through New England, Elvis became reacquainted with the five-foot-three Charlie Hodge, who hailed from Alabama and played country-gospel with an outfit called the Foggy River Boys. Elvis had once met him briefly backstage at a Red Foley show in Memphis just before they were both drafted.

  When the train pulled into Brooklyn at 9 A.M., a band was playing Elvis songs. The RCA execs were there, including Anne Fulchino, the national publicity director who’d taught Elvis how to eat pork chops. Immediately, Private Presley, stunningly handsome in his uniform, and ten pounds lighter than he’d been before basic training, disappeared into a conference with the Colonel and a much-decorated wedge of army officials. He emerged to a firestorm of flashbulbs, then kissed a WAC for the cameras, and sat down to a large bank of microphones and an eager throng of press.

  What if rock and roll should die out while he was in the service?

  “I’ll starve to death,” he quipped.

  How did he feel about being sent to Europe?

  “I’d like to go to Paris. And look up Brigitte Bardot.”

  What’s his idea of the ideal girl?

  “Female, sir.”

  Everybody laughed.

  “I suppose I’ll know if I ever find someone that I really fall in love with.”

  He was handling it all so deftly. The men from RCA beamed and nodded approvingly, and Anne Fulchino felt a wave of pride. He had come so far so fast, and grown from a green amateur to a confident star in two years. It was amazing, really.

  Then, carrying a shoe box that Parker had handed him, Elvis waved to the crowd, hoisted a borrowed duffel bag to his shoulders, and climbed the gangplank of the U.S.S. Randall.

  By now, the band had played “Tutti Frutti” three times. Elvis stopped at the rail of the ship and lifted the lid on the shoe box. The boat began making its metallic creak and then started its slow pull from the harbor. With that, Elvis emptied the box, and thousands of little Elvis images poured down the side of the boat and onto the pier, disappearing into the frantic hands of female admirers.

  Elvis signs autographs in a park in Bad Homburg, Germany, October 5, 1958. He will soon begin dating sixteen-year-old stenographer Margit Buergin (to his right). Red West and Vernon stand behind him. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

  Chapter Seventeen

  Fräulein Fallout

  When the boat docked at Bremerhaven, shortly before 9 A.M. on October 1, 1958, Elvis, “the rock ’n’ roll matador,” as the Germans called him, received the same frenzied media attention that had surrounded his send-off in America. But the 1,500 German fans who turned out were greatly subdued in comparison to the screaming throngs in the States, so the media engaged in a bit of manipulation. Photographers from the teen magazine Bravo stage-managed pictures to show MPs struggling to hold back an eager crowd, and newsreel cameramen encouraged the bravest youngsters to feats of daring.

  Sixteen-year-old Karl Heinz, who didn’t even own an Elvis record, was goaded into rushing up the gangplank to get Elvis’s first autograph in Europe. But as Elvis shifted his sixty-five-pound duffel bag to scrawl his name, he nearly lost his balance. Finally, he shook his head, “Sorry,” and moved on down to board the troop train, which would
take him two hundred miles to Friedberg, population 18,000.

  Elvis’s permanent army post was the Friedberg Kaserne, better known as Ray Barracks, home to the Thirty-second (“Hell on Wheels”) Battalion of the Third Armored Division. The long, bleak rows of brick buildings had formerly housed Hitler’s SS troops and made an unwelcome sight as the train pulled in about seven-thirty that evening, delivering Elvis and his battalion directly to the base. There, Elvis found high fences, well-guarded gates, and another barrage of media. “I’m just a plain soldier like anyone else,” he said.

  Initially assigned as a jeep driver to Company D, Elvis would soon be transferred to Company C, a scout platoon often sent out on maneuvers. His primary duty would be to drive a jeep for Reconnaissance Platoon Sergeant Ira Jones, the military hoping the assignment would keep him out of the public eye. Three days after his press conference on October 2 (“Classical music is just great to go to sleep by”), the army closed the base to the media.

  Just as Elvis was settling into the spartan Ray Barracks, with its steel-framed beds and cold linoleum floors, Lamar, Red, Vernon, and Minnie Mae (following through on a promise she made to Gladys on her deathbed) arrived in Germany.

  For a few days after Elvis left Fort Hood, it looked as though there might be a delay in getting the family matriarch overseas. Vernon had relied upon his attorney to verify Minnie Mae’s date of birth, which was necessary for her to secure her passport. But no record of her birth was readily available.

  It took seventy-five cents’ worth of gasoline to drive through the backwoods of Arkansas to find a cousin who could supply the information, recalled Frank Glankler, a senior partner in the Memphis firm that represented the Presleys. “When we finally found the house, there was a goat on the front porch. The cousin didn’t want to sign the affidavit because he couldn’t read. He was afraid he might be signing away the deed to his house. In the end, he gave us his X.”