Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [116]
“He was just about broke,” Barbara understood, “and he came in the house, and honest to goodness, his shoes were falling apart. They were horrible-looking. Mrs. Presley looked at them and said, ‘Son, I don’t want you coming in my house with those shoes. You’re going to have to take them off and leave them outside.’ Then she told Elvis to take him out and buy him some new ones.”
Nick was in the car on the ride home from Tupelo, sitting in the backseat, with Barbara in the front between Elvis and Red West. Elvis was driving faster than he should have been, Barbara thought, when suddenly the hood on the big white Lincoln flew up and totally obscured his vision. Someone had lifted it out of curiosity while the unattended car was in the parking lot—automobiles of that quality were rare in Tupelo—and they hadn’t closed it properly.
“The road was single lane, as I remember, with a narrow shoulder. Elvis managed to ease the car to the right and pull over. But what impressed me was that both Elvis and Red, ignoring their own safety, threw their arms around me, as if to prevent me from hitting the windshield.” When the car came to a stop (“Son of a bitch!” “Damn, what was that?”), the boys again turned to Barbara. “Are you all right?” they asked. “It wasn’t a general ‘Is anybody hurt?’ but a sweet and gentle concern just for me.”
Barbara visited Audubon Drive “all of the time when Elvis was home,” and he called her every night from California, both to say hello and to check up on her, the way he had called Dixie, even though he was cheating on her. “I didn’t mind him seeing movie stars like Natalie Wood and Debra Paget, because I knew he was starstruck. He couldn’t believe he was actually in the same world with them, and probably in his mind, he was in love with everyone he met.”
But she had to think that in some ways she just didn’t fit in with the whole group. She didn’t have musical talent like Red, and while most of the boys cut up all the time, she and Elvis talked about more serious things. She could tell that Hollywood was changing him some, though he insisted it never would. During the making of Love Me Tender, Elvis told her on the phone that he had run into Jerry Lewis. It was still a thrill for him to see another star, but Lewis had disappointed him. Elvis told Barbara the comedian “was disgusting, the way he behaved with all of these people around him, his ‘yes’ men, doing everything for him and hanging on him.”
Sometimes Elvis seemed to be living in a movie, and there were times when he appeared to not be able to separate his own identity from that of the Hollywood crowd. On October 18, for example, he pulled into the Gulf station at Second and Gayoso and was quickly mobbed by fans. The attendant, Edd Hopper, asked him to leave, and Elvis challenged him, only to have Hopper pull a knife—shades of Rebel Without a Cause—and a third man join in the fray. Elvis, who stood six feet only with the help of lifts in his shoes, hauled off and punched the six-foot-three Hopper, giving him a black eye. All three men were arrested for assault and battery, and disorderly conduct.
Barbara was inadvertently at the center of it, as Elvis was supposed to pick her up near her bus stop that afternoon. But he had noticed a gas smell coming through his air-conditioning vents, which prompted the stop at the station. She was still standing waiting for him when a young woman approached her and asked if she were Barbara Hearn. Elvis had sent word about what had happened, and the woman told her that the police had taken him to jail.
Barbara hardly knew what to say. About then, a policeman drove up to get her, and she was so shy, she could barely climb in the back of the cruiser. But when they got downtown, Elvis was already gone, and the officer rode her on out to Audubon Drive. The ordeal had been nearly as hard on Barbara as it had on Elvis. “I was mortified beyond words to be riding across town in a police car! If Elvis ever doubted my