Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [114]
Natalie’s mother encouraged the relationship, even as Natalie herself was still dissatisfied with him in bed. Elvis didn’t feel it was any big romance and continued to see as many women as he wanted. Around the same time, he and Nick spent a Sunday afternoon with Judy Spreckels, and later, the trio went horseback riding at Judy’s ranch. Among her many pictures of Elvis is a photograph that freeze-frames the day. “He was laughing. It was just such a fun time.” She and Elvis loved each other, all right. “But it was just a really terrific friendship.”
Still, no matter what Elvis was doing with anyone else, Natalie was thinking about him. As proof, she had her seamstress make two big, blousy velvet shirts for him, one in romance red and another in heartbreak blue.
The shirts would become iconic as the ones Elvis wore on September 26, 1956, at his homecoming appearances at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show, the blue for the afternoon performance, and the red for the evening. However, the blue one almost didn’t make it to Tupelo.
Barbara Hearn was Elvis’s date, and early that morning on Audubon Drive, where the Presleys were having remodeling work done, “Elvis handed me something on a clothes hanger with a laundry cover on it. He said, ‘Hold this.’ There was a bit of confusion, and lots of people around, and I stood there holding it until I thought, ‘Gosh, I’m not a closet rod here,’ and I laid it on the sofa.”
They rode down together in Elvis’s new white Lincoln Mark II, and when they arrived at the dressing tent, Elvis suddenly turned to Barbara.
“Where’s my shirt? Do you have my shirt?”
“What shirt?”
“The shirt I gave you to hold this morning.”
Oh, gosh! She didn’t know he meant to bring that shirt! Barbara felt really bad, but Elvis “was very sweet about it. They just quickly called somebody in Memphis who hadn’t left yet, and they brought it on down.”
Elvis came to Tupelo at the invitation of James Savery, the fair association president. It was a day right out of Horatio Alger, a button-busting, local-boy-makes-good story, with a jubilant parade (the city feared a riot, so Elvis wasn’t actually in it), a banner across Main Street (TUPELO WELCOMES ELVIS PRESLEY HOME), and the Rex Plaza, the nicest restaurant in town, serving up “Love Me Tender” steak and “Reddy Teddy” pork chops. Governor J. P. Coleman read accolades from a scroll, calling Elvis “America’s Number One Entertainer,” and Mayor James Ballard even presented him with a guitar-shaped key to the city. Elvis returned the favor and then some—he signed his $10,000 check back over to Tupelo. “The last time I was here,” he mentioned, “I didn’t have a nickel to get in.”
Some fifty thousand folks came to town for the festivities, the biggest turnout anyone could remember since Franklin Roosevelt visited during the Depression. Twenty thousand attended the evening show, twelve thousand more than the entire population of Tupelo. (Fourteen-year-old Virginia Wynette Pugh, later to gain fame in country music as Tammy Wynette, was in the front row for the afternoon performance.)
At one point in the matinee, it all became too much for sixteen-year-old Judy Hopper, who’d traveled from Alamo, Tennessee, and jumped the five-foot stage. (“What did I want? I wanted Elvis!”) Later, she got to go back and hug and kiss him. She giggled until she almost hyperventilated, and the two had their picture made together. She already had some leaves out of his yard, and now she had his autograph, too. “It was a thrill, it really was,” she gushed to the press in a drawl as wide as the Mississippi. “I’d like to go to Hollywood now!” The Tupelo Daily Journal captured the mayhem in full. “ ‘Elvis,’ the girls shrieked, tearing their hair and sobbing hysterically, ‘Please, Elvis.’ ”
Local police, county sheriffs, Highway Patrolmen, and even the National Guard stood ready in case there was trouble, but there wasn’t any, not really, which was surprising,