Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [115]
But clearly the Presley family, nearly run out of town in the late 1940s, had returned in triumph. Eleven years earlier, Elvis had lost the talent contest with “Old Shep” on practically this very spot. And now his first motion picture was due out in November, and his double-sided single, “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog,” was number one and two on the charts.
“I’ve been looking forward to this homecoming very much,” he said in a press conference before the afternoon show. “I’ve been escorted out of these fairgrounds when I was a kid and snuck over the fence. But this is the first time I’ve been escorted in.” A voice called out: “How about Natalie?” “I worry about her when I’m not there where she is,” he said, casually. “I don’t think about her when I’m not.” The newspaper reported that Mrs. Presley appeared “a little bewildered by all the commotion . . . but smiled pleasantly for photographers.”
For Gladys, “Elvis Presley Day” was the validation that her son was just as special as she always knew he’d be. And for Vernon, the ex-con forced to leave town to find work, the moment was sweet revenge. He was standing outside the big tent in back of the stage when he saw Ernest Bowen, his old boss at L. P. McCarty and Sons, the wholesale grocer. Vernon had a delivery route when he worked for Bowen, and it was his last job before leaving Tupelo. Now Bowen was general manager of the radio station WELO and trying in vain to get into the tent to see about an interview for his announcer, Jack Cristil.
“All of a sudden this guy hollers at me—I didn’t even recognize him, but it was Vernon, all cleaned up and greeting me like a long-lost friend,” Bowen remembered. “He wanted to know if he could do anything, and I said, ‘Yeah, get me in the tent.’ He said, ‘Just follow me,’ and he just parted the waves. I asked Vernon, ‘How are y’all doing?’ He said, ‘Oh, we doing just great.’ Said, ‘The boy is really taking care of us.’ ”
When Cristil approached the Presleys that night, an exuberant Vernon, blond and handsome in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie, grabbed the microphone and hardly let it go, saying how proud he was, and how much they appreciated “all the good people who’ve knocked themselves out being so nice to us.” He went on to thank the police department and the Highway Patrol, and he got on such a roll that Cristil finally just talked over him.
But for once Vernon had overshadowed his wife, who barely had room to answer the man’s question about her favorite Elvis record. “ ‘Baby, Play House,’ ” she announced cheerfully, picking the sexiest of all Elvis’s songs, though mangling the title. “That’s a good one,” Vernon said, but Gladys kept going: “And ‘Don’t Be Cruel.’ That’s my two favorites.”
Cristil also took time to talk to Nick Adams, who had flown to Memphis with Elvis and Gene Smith after the completion of Love Me Tender and would stay for a week. The reporter didn’t really know who he was. (“And you’re a star, I understand, a motion picture star, right?”) But Nick was self-effacing and respectful, demurring to talk about his own career, and calling Elvis “the nicest person I’ve ever met in show business . . . I can’t speak too highly about him.” Then he bragged on Gladys’s fried chicken and started to mention her okra, but he couldn’t remember what it was. “Elvis?” he yelled across the way. “What’s the name of those things your mother fixed me up? Oker?”
Nick said he had come to Tupelo to support his friend. But he needed some propping up of his own. After a promising start in films, he could barely find work, and he’d spent the funds from his early successes, including Mister Roberts and Rebel Without a