Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  They chatted for a few minutes—he was on his way to Radio Recorders to do the title track for Flaming Star—and he invited her up to the Perugia Way house later on. He liked her sass and wit. But after the tour of the bedroom, when she told him, “I’m a nice little Jewish girl,” Elvis thought of her only as a little sister. “I got on well with all the guys, so they just adopted me, and from that time on that was it! I was around until he died. Amazing, isn’t it?”

  Patti (Elvis called her “Patricia”) would become the only female member of the Memphis Mafia. “He didn’t have a mom or a sister, and I told him the truth. He needed someone to commiserate with him. I became his Jewish mother.” He talked baby talk to her, and she nurtured him, did his hair, cut his toenails, rubbed his back, gave him a shoulder to cry on. She never went on the payroll, because she had her hairdressing work four days a week in Beverly Hills, “and I couldn’t give up my complete life to work for him.”

  But she ended up traveling with him part of the week, and “practically lived at his L.A. homes,” going over every day after work and having dinner with the gang, and staying until about 1 A.M. When she’d announce she had to go home, Elvis would say, “Don’t go home, don’t go home.” Then he’d send someone to follow her, make sure she got in okay. “He was a good, good man.”

  Later she accompanied him to Memphis, where he took her to Humes High, and Sun Records, and Lauderdale Courts, and to Gladys’s grave, “which was the greatest honor he could give me. He teased me. He said, ‘You’re standing on my mother.’ He had a very, very funny sense of humor.”

  Despite her Jewish background, she ate his deep-dish southern food—red-eye gravy and grits—and even sang gospel songs with him. She loved that music, loved being around him, loved having all those “brothers” to take care of her.

  Her parents weren’t crazy about the idea. She wasn’t dating anyone and just wanted to hang out with Elvis. But they eventually came around to it, seeing that he loved her platonically, and that he wasn’t a threat. Any other girl who came to the house had to accept her, too, even as some tried to muscle her out: “On Perugia, girls would come up to the house, and I’d sit next to Elvis on the couch. And as soon as I’d get up to go to the bathroom, some other girl would run over to sit next to him.” But there was no displacing her. She was a lifer.

  “Elvis was like my family. We grew up together. He brought me up, and he liked bringing up his women. He adopted me and protected me and wouldn’t let anybody hit on me. Even when I was in my thirties, Elvis used to say, ‘Patti is family. She doesn’t fool around.’ I’d say, ‘Hey, I can fool around.’ ”

  But living with Elvis was “really difficult. You had to be mother, sister, and confidante.” Patti was a lucky girl, she says. “But you know what? He was really lucky to have me, too.”

  All around him now, there were new beginnings and sudden endings, and they wasted no time as 1961 rolled in.

  On February 4, Junior Smith, Elvis’s frequently frightening cousin, died. (“The way he would look at you. God! It would make your bladder weak,” says Lamar.) Elvis kept him going by adding him to the entourage, like his brother Gene. But then when Elvis went away to the army, Junior just stayed drunk, trying to wash away his flashbacks of shooting civilians in Korea with a Browning automatic rifle. He’d get that stare. “Oh, oh,” everybody would say, “he’s remembering stuff again.” Then he started mixing alcohol and drugs, popping sleeping pills and amphetamines that Elvis gave him. The combo did him in.

  The night he died, he went on a bender with his uncle Travis Smith. Travis went on to his bedroom and passed out, and Junior went to Billy’s room and lay down on the bed.

  When Billy came home around eleven-thirty, he realized Junior was there and started to crawl over him when he saw something on the bed. “Well, he’s done thrown up,” Billy thought and went into the living room to sleep on the couch. The next morning, Billy awoke with a start. It was eerie, the way he felt. He just knew something was wrong. He went in and looked at Junior, “and my heart liked to stop. He had thrown up, but the stuff on the bed had some blood mixed with it, and it seemed like it had come out of his nose.”

  Billy went over and touched him.

  “God, Almighty! He’s dead!”

  Now Billy ran in to his parents.

  “I said, ‘Daddy! I think Junior’s dead!’ He said, ‘No, he’s all right.’ Then he went in and I heard him say, ‘Oh, my God, he is!’ ” Junior had choked on his own vomit.

  Travis called Elvis, who hurried over with Anita. “We were the first there,” she says. “A terrible sight, but that was just the first tragedy that happened in that family.”

  Within the next few years, there would be more, some macabre. Billy’s brother, Bobby, who had gotten a Section 8 in the National Guard for swallowing safety pins and puncturing his intestines, would be unable to handle Elvis’s fame, and take rat poison and die. And Junior and Gene’s brother, Robert, who worked for a chrome-plating company, fell up to his waist in a vat of hot liquid chrome. It cooked him.

  Billy would remember that Elvis was “extremely hurt” by Junior’s death. It was too soon to be having another funeral in the family, and Elvis thought he should have done more for him. Still, he was glad Junior was finally out of his private hell. At the house, Eddie Fadal remembered, “He just kept saying, ‘It’s all over, Junior. It’s all over.’ ”

  “It affected Elvis,” says Joe. “He started to stay away from booze.” Pills were one thing, because the doctor approved them. But drinking had killed his mother and now Junior, and other relatives on the Smith side.

  Junior’s death had a ripple effect with Elvis: a fascination with cadavers, and a thirst for knowledge about death. When Junior was still at the Memphis Funeral Home, being embalmed, Elvis and Billy made a nocturnal visit.

  “We went up about 3 or 4 A.M. The door was locked, but a guy let us in the back way. We viewed the body, and then Elvis said, ‘Let’s ease on back and see how they do this.’ ”

  They went on down a dim hallway, passing through a casket display room, and followed a noise through the dark. Billy became frightened, but Elvis led him on, and finally they happened on two morticians. One was working—he had rock-and-roll music playing—and the other was lying in a casket, snoring.

  “May I help you?” asked the one.

  “I’m Elvis Presley. You’ve got my cousin up there, and I was just fascinated by all this.”

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said. But because it was Elvis, he and Billy got a tour and a brief education on the fine points of embalming.

  After that, Elvis would sometimes take new girlfriends to the funeral home in the middle of the night. It was a test, of sorts. He’d whip back the sheets covering the corpses, and if they could handle that, they could handle anything.

  Joe puts it down to Elvis’s interest in the unknown, part of his exploration of God and heaven and the afterworld. But, he also admits, “He would do things to shock people, anything out of the ordinary.” Bottom line, says Joe, “Elvis was not a normal human being. He was just bizarre.”

  Elvis’s romance with Anne Helm on Follow That Dream, shot in Florida in the summer of 1961, wouldn’t survive once they returned to California. But she remained impressed with how he treated his fans, calling his kindness “One more thing to love Elvis for.” (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Going Under

  While Elvis was busy with his twin obsessions—music and movies, pills and women—the Colonel worked feverishly to polish his client’s image as a patriot. When Elvis was first discharged from the army, Parker had wrangled Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver into reading a tribute to the new sergeant into the congressional record. “To his great credit this young American became just another G.I. Joe,” the senator said in puffed-up prose. “I for one would like to say to him yours was a job well done, soldier.”

  Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington and Memphis mayo
r Henry Loeb now joined forces to declare February 25, 1961, “Elvis Presley Day.” It was historic in more ways than one: At a special luncheon at the Hotel Claridge, RCA presented the singer with a diamond watch to honor record sales of more than seventy-five million. And later on, at Ellis Auditorium, he played two Memphis charity shows, his first live performances in three years.

  The hometown paper raved that Elvis successfully blended “Negro cotton field harmony, camp meeting fervor, Hollywood showmanship, beatnik nonchalance, and some of the manipulations of mass psychology.” Of the $51,612 raised, $47,823 would go to thirty-eight foundations and funds in the Bluff City, the remaining money to the Elvis Presley Youth Center in Tupelo. The contribution built on Elvis’s yearly donation to a long list of Memphis-area charities, with input from the governor.

  Fewer than two weeks later, Elvis stood before the Tennessee State Legislature in Nashville. His appearance, staged by the Memphis delegation, was designed to thank him for his financial contributions, and to raise the city’s profile around the world. Governor Ellington, born in Mississippi and reared on gospel music like Elvis, also hoped the event would draw attention to tourism throughout the state.

  The governor’s teenage daughter, Ann, attended college thirty miles away, at Middle Tennessee State University. She skipped classes that day to go to the capitol building, where her father would first meet Elvis in the governor’s suite of offices. The event had been well publicized, and all of capitol hill was jammed with cars and people standing outside. Everybody hoped to get a glimpse of Elvis.

  As Ann remembered, the governor’s staff had been waiting quite a while, seated around the conference table, when all of a sudden the door opened and, “Here this entity was standing in the doorway [with] this black suit on, and every hair immaculately combed. There was absolutely dead silence in the room. It was just like somebody had sucked all of the air out of it.”

  Elvis shook hands with Governor Ellington and sat down at the end of the table and talked a minute. Then when the sergeant at arms announced it was time to go, Elvis hit on the governor’s daughter.

  “You’re going, aren’t you?” he asked.

  The pretty blonde said no, she wasn’t scheduled to be part of it.

  “I need for you to go,” he said.

  Ann blushed and broke into a smile.

  “I don’t think I am supposed to go. There’s not a seat up there for me.” She knew that seats were at a premium.

  But Elvis didn’t care about any of that. “Yeah,” he said. “You’ve got to go.”

  He grabbed her hand, and when Ann looked at her father, the governor nodded his approval. Then out they went, through the crowd, down the hallway, up the steps, and down into the opening of the legislature. After the governor and the speaker of the house made their remarks, Elvis went up to the podium. “Of course, the people just went bananas—you could hardly hear him because of the screaming,” Ann says. Before he left that day, Elvis became a Tennessee colonel, and he thanked the legislature for “the finest honor [I’ve] ever received.” After that, Elvis went to the state penitentiary to see Johnny Bragg of the Prisonaires, whose long-ago newspaper profile had led him to Sam Phillips.

  Ann went with him, and then Elvis, with Joe and Alan in attendance, took her to the governor’s residence, where they sat awhile and talked. It was “kind of awkward” for both of them, Ann thought, and before long, Elvis turned and said good-bye and headed off to Memphis.

  The next weekend, he was back to record at RCA’s Studio B. He called ahead and asked if she were going to be in town, and she invited him back out to the residence, where a uniformed highway patrolman greeted him at the door. “Elvis thought that was so neat.”

  They talked for the better part of the evening, just the two of them in a small living room downstairs. He reminisced about Mississippi and talked about the movies he had done and hoped to do, telling her each one was a stepping-stone, “and that he wanted to get scripts that would show the talent that he knew he had.”

  The hour grew late, and Ann’s parents were upstairs. “About two o’clock, there was a knock on the door, and the sergeant who was on duty at that time, said, ‘Miss Ann, the governor’s just called down and says he thinks it’s time for the gentleman to go.’

  “Elvis rose then, saying, ‘Well, I’ll see you tomorrow evening,’ ” which was an invitation for her to go to the recording studio with him.

  “After he left, the two patrolmen were absolutely rolling on the floor laughing, and I couldn’t figure out why. And then the sergeant told me, ‘Well, that wasn’t exactly what your father said. What he said was, ‘It was time for the Hound Dog to go.’ ”

  Over the next two days, Elvis recorded the mellow Something for Everybody album, Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana from the old days sitting in with the Nashville “A-Team,” which included Hank Garland (guitar), Bob Moore (bass), Buddy Harman (drums), Floyd Cramer (piano), and Boots Randolph (sax).

  Soprano Millie Kirkham, who often worked with the “A-Team,” came in for backing vocals, and Elvis was glad to see her again. He had loved her distinctive high harmony since they recorded “Blue Christmas” together in 1957, and he was always respectful in her presence. On their first session together, she was six months pregnant, and he asked for a chair for her. When one of the players used foul words, Elvis brought it to his attention, saying, “Please watch your language. There’s a lady present.”

  Now he was equally protective of Ann, camouflaging her to bring her into the studio, where she sat off to the side or the back. He would invite her there more than once, and, as if for inspiration, “He always wanted me where he could see me, or at least acknowledge that I was standing behind him.” That first night, he played her “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” which he was about to record in California for the soundtrack of Blue Hawaii.

  In time, he would try to shield their relationship from the press. “When it got time for us to leave the governor’s residence, I always had a highway patrolman with me, who drove me over to the motel where Elvis was staying. And then we switched cars, and I would go to the studio with him. Then when everything in the parking lot was quiet and nobody was there, we would run in. We would be there till early in the morning, and then go get some breakfast, or come back to the residence. Then he’d turn around and head back for Memphis.”

  Rumors flew that Elvis was secretly courting Ann and that the two were a heavy item. “I think any female who had an opportunity to sit down and meet him, even for five minutes, would find a love for him that words cannot describe,” she says. But she didn’t want an affair, or a fling, or any kind of romantic situation, really. “It wasn’t that I was trying to create a spot in his life for me. We enjoyed our friendship.”

  Aside from their physical attraction, Elvis took a parental interest in her and apparently saw her as a twin substitute as well. When he told her, “I need for you to go” into the legislature, he meant it. As he had done with Priscilla, he formed a bond with her based on mutual loss and displacement.

  “He came into my life at a time that was very crucial for me,” Ann says. Her father’s political career had taken “a thirteen-year-old girl from a farm life and put me in a place that I was not accustomed to, was not prepared for. Elvis had the same kind of situation, just in a different world. He helped me adjust more than anybody else . . . I could tell him things that I’d never told anybody.”

  In turn, he gave her advice on how to deal with situations, like “how not to let hurts get to you so bad that you couldn’t deal with them. He had already experienced so much of that, and I was just beginning it.”

  But while they came from similar backgrounds, they both “pretty well knew where life was going to take us,” and that Ann was not meant to be the wife of an itinerant entertainer. And so the romance faltered, even as they continued to care about each other. “I always knew that if I ever needed him at any point in time, all I had to do was pick up the phone and call and he would
be there.”

  A week after the Nashville studio sessions, Elvis was on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles to begin work on Blue Hawaii, which would costar thirty-five-year-old Angela Lansbury as his mother. After the flat response to Elvis’s last two dramas at Twentieth Century-Fox, Hal Wallis had brought in two proven entities for the return to the musical format—Hal Kanter, the writer-director of Loving You, who would pen the story, and director Norman Taurog, who had been at the helm of G.I. Blues and would go on to direct seven more Presley pictures.

  Once again, Kanter drew on a piece of Elvis’s autobiography to shape the framework. As Chad Gates, Elvis is fresh out of the army, but instead of returning to the Mississippi Delta, he goes home to the fiftieth state. Hawaii had been admitted to the union only two years before, and the milieu was wondrous to most moviegoers. It was also a place dear to Colonel Parker’s heart, since Parker had spent his first hitch in the service at Fort Shafter.

  As the plot unfolds, Chad rejects the notion of going into the family business—his father supervised a pineapple company—preferring to work as a tourist guide, along with his Hawaiian girlfriend Maile (Joan Blackman). Romantic diversion comes in the form of Abigail (Nancy Walters), there with her underage charges. “Mr. Gates, do you think you can satisfy a school teacher and four teenage girls?” she asks. “Oh, I’ll sure try, ma’am,” Chad answers.

  On March 25, 1961, the cast and crew flew to Honolulu for location shooting. But the Colonel had also booked Elvis to perform a benefit show that evening to raise money for a memorial to the U.S.S. Arizona, the battleship in which 1,177 seamen were entombed after the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had approved the creation of the memorial in 1958, while Elvis was in the army, and Parker had worked feverishly behind the scenes to attach himself and his client to the cause.