Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [105]
June was confused. “You told June all about me?”
“Yeah, her name is June, too. Get on down here. She knows you’re here. We’re having a good time.”
She went on down to the bar and found a crowd of young people and reporters. Elvis was playing the piano and motioned for June to sit on the side of the bench with him. Then he excused himself, saying, “Okay, my two baby girls, I’ll be right back.” Andrea June turned to Elvis’s real date. “Do you realize how lucky you are?” she said.
“What do you mean?” June asked.
“Elvis could have any girl in the whole world, and you’re the one. He can’t shut up talking about you.”
June liked her. “Elvis was gone visiting with the guys, so we talked for a good fifteen minutes that night. We got to be good friends and even stayed in touch.”
But Elvis wasn’t just talking with the guys. He was off seeing about fourteen-year-old Jackie Rowland and her mother, his invited guests. The Colonel had admitted them to an afternoon show via the back door of the theater, and now Elvis had achieved the slick trick of getting two of his three dates to entertain each other while he checked about the third.
The next night, at the theater, Elvis would take Jackie off to a little prop room to show her how to kiss in a grown-up way. (“I had never kissed a boy before. . . . Elvis was a very loving and gentle teacher.”) Her mother caught them, but still Elvis had time to say, “You know, when you grow up, you are going to be mine.” It was a solemn moment, as Jackie remembers. “I said, ‘Yes, I know that.’ The moonlight was coming in, and it was so romantic. I still remember his scent and the warmth from his body.”
Then it was time for him to go onstage, and he paused a moment and told Jackie “Don’t Be Cruel” would always be for her. “Don’t be cruel / To a heart that’s true . . .”
He had invited both of the Rowlands back to the hotel after the show, and when they arrived, he was still upset about Judge Gooding. “He came out of the bar, and tears were running down his face. He was hurt very badly by that situation, and he hugged me, and just held on, and cried on my shoulder. And me being fourteen at the time . . . what can you do at fourteen? You’re not a grown woman. You’re still a little girl.
“He told my mother that she could go, that he would take very, very good care of me. And my mother said, ‘Absolutely not.’ He said, ‘I really promise, Mrs. Rowland. I will take good care of her. I won’t let anything happen to her.’ She said, ‘And you’re going to take her in that bar? No, sir, you are not. She is underage, and my little girl is going home with me.’ Being the obedient child that I was, I didn’t open my mouth. But inside I was dying. And so he turned around and went back into the bar and we left. Of course, I was so embarrassed. I thought, ‘I’ll never get to see him again.’ ”
But Jackie would hear from Elvis through the early 1960s. And when she left that night, she had a wonderful souvenir. Her mother had snapped a playful photo of them lost in each other, staring moon-eyed. (“We thought we were alone—we didn’t even know she had taken the photo.”) And Marguerite slyly got Elvis to sign the back of one of the Audubon Drive photos, later comparing the handwriting to that on the letter purportedly from Gladys.
Jackie and her mother continued to attend numerous Elvis concerts around the area until he went into the army in 1958. Years later, when her mother died, Jackie was stunned to find more letters from Elvis in Marguerite’s belongings, one written on pink stationery two weeks after the Florida Theatre shows. Marguerite had kept them from her all those years.
“I really trusted my mother. I thought that either Elvis or Mrs. Presley was calling her and inviting us for the different shows