Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [102]
“She would just dig into him,” June noticed. “You could see tears well up in her eyes anytime she left him. His daddy came around the door where his mama was getting in, and he was shaking his daddy’s hand. But Vernon was not really that affectionate, not like she was.”
Elvis was back in Memphis by July 20, but apparently lovesick, he returned to Biloxi nine days later. He’d talked it over with his mother, and contrary to what he’d told WNOE Radio only ten days earlier, he was serious enough about June to think about marriage. But he wanted her to wait three years. “He said, ‘I can’t get married right away. I promised the Colonel I wouldn’t do anything that would affect my career. Will you wait for me?’ ”
June hated the “nuisance” of his fame—it was getting so that if they wanted to do anything, they had to wait until the middle of the night to go out so he wouldn’t be mobbed. But she was “crazy insane about Elvis,” so she said yes, she would wait. Elvis’s parents came back down to Biloxi to celebrate.
Now he wanted June to go with him on his nine-day tour of Florida, ending with a tenth day in New Orleans. It was due to start in Miami in just a few days, on August 3. June’s mother, May, pitched a fit—it wasn’t decent—and said no: Really, what were they thinking?
Only four months earlier, Elvis had spoken with Gladys about asking Barbara Hearn to go with him on his tour of Texas. But it never got any further than that. “It was very embarrassing to stand there and listen to Mrs. Presley,” Barbara remembers, “but I loved her for it. She said, ‘Her mother will never let her go off like that, and even if she did, I wouldn’t let her go. Barbara is a lady, and I want you to treat her like one.’ ”
But now Gladys spoke with June’s mother and promised that Elvis would take “great care” of her daughter. “You can trust him,” Gladys said. May weakened, and June packed her bag.
That left the Colonel as the only person not in favor of the arrangement. Elvis knew how he would react, so he didn’t even tell him he was bringing June along. But trouble erupted the first night, when Elvis played the Olympic Theatre in Miami. June tried to dodge the Colonel backstage, but the press spotted her, and finding out her last name, called her mother for comment.
“They said, ‘How do you feel about your daughter being on tour with Elvis?’ Because they made it sound like something nasty. Mother said, ‘My daughter has a very level head, and his parents assured me she couldn’t be in better hands.’ And then she made the fatal mistake of saying, ‘Elvis has asked June to marry him.’ That’s when it really hit the fan.’ ”
Parker took Elvis aside and sputtered about his “morals,” so June told the Miami News, “Right now, he’s married to his career.” And Elvis was instructed to say, “Well, I have about twenty-five girls that I date.”
It wasn’t much of a lie. And one more old girlfriend hoped to speak with him again. Seventeen-year-old Regis Wilson, his prom date from Humes, the one who had moved to Florida without telling him, was in the audience. Now she wanted to explain that she’d been too ashamed to share her family circumstances with him, and she hoped he forgave her for leaving like that.
She also had some news for him: She was married now, and she wanted to introduce her husband, Herb Vaughn. After the concert, she went to the backstage door, but security wouldn’t let her in.
“But I know Elvis,” she told the guard. “Sure you do,” he said. She was disappointed and somehow knew it was her last chance. But at least a decade later, her brother, Jim Wilson, who was Elvis’s age and had known him from Humes and Lauderdale Courts, saw him at the Memphian Theatre. The theater manager, Dickie Tucker, who had also grown up in the Courts, let Jim into one of the singer’s private gatherings. Elvis was watching Marlon Brando’s The Wild One, and Jim made his way over and introduced