Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [119]
It was easy for Phillip to join in because “they were very congenial to me,” but then the talk turned “really rough, considering the day and time. One of the girls said to Elvis, ‘We came by here Monday night. Were you here?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ And she said, ‘Well, what were you doing?’ He said, ‘Oh, I was sitting in there, watching you all drive by and jacking off.’ ”
Phillip was shocked that Elvis would use that kind of language (“I came from a small rural town, and boy, you didn’t ever say that, not even to men, much less in front of women”), but he wrote it off to the fact that Elvis was now “an urbane, sophisticated, uptown man, an actor in the movies.”
Then one of the girls wanted to know about Natalie. “Is she here now?” she asked. “Yeah,” Elvis said. “She’s in the house asleep.”
“We read about you going together,” she purred.
“Aw, naw,” Elvis told her. “She’s just a kid.”
By now, the crowd had grown larger, but it was still made up mostly of females and married couples. Then about 2:30 A.M., Phillip noticed a car pull up. “This girl got out, and squealed and ran over and grabbed Elvis, and just kissed him a big wet kiss.” Phillip recognized her immediately. She was Barbara Pittman, the singer he’d just been to see. “She just glued herself to him, and then he was pretty much occupied with her for the rest of the night.” Later, Barbara would tell Phillip that Elvis called her his “Little Vibrator,” because when she got around him, “I’d just get so giddy and wiggly.”
When Phillip got ready to leave that night, Elvis said, “Come back tomorrow. We’ll be out here.” The next afternoon, when Phillip returned, Natalie was in the yard, inside the low fence, signing autographs. Elvis introduced them, and she shook Phillip’s hand and smiled, and went on back to signing. But Natalie didn’t like such familiarity with fans and was astonished that Elvis permitted them to be so intrusive, even letting them look in the windows. She hadn’t known anybody like him, and he mystified her sometimes. They were just so different.
“I hadn’t been around anyone who was religious,” she said later. “He felt he had been given this gift, this talent, by God. He didn’t take it for granted. He thought it was something that he had to protect. He had to be nice to people, otherwise, God would take it all away.”
On the whole, her visit hadn’t gone well. Elvis tooled the petite star around town in the white Lincoln, stopping for ice cream at the Fairgrounds. But he didn’t really know what to do with her, so he drove her down to Tupelo to show her where he started out, took her over to meet Dewey Phillips, and rode her around on his huge new Harley-Davidson motorcycle. But nobody seemed to be having a good time. Not really. She watched him play touch football in Guthrie Park, where Nick tentatively joined in, but she was bored.
The most exciting part was the inventive way Elvis escaped the fans who’d gathered by game’s end: He casually drew a comb from his pocket, waved it through his hair, and then nonchalantly threw it out on the field. When the girls sprang to get it, he and Natalie dashed off the other way for the Harley, speeding off on Chelsea Avenue.
Once during Natalie’s visit, he stopped by to see Barbara Hearn. They talked and visited a little while, and then Barbara’s aunt went to the window. “Elvis,” she said, “who’s that out there on your motorcycle?”
“Well, that’s Natalie Wood.”
“He’d just left her out there in front, waiting for him,” as Barbara tells it. “My aunt said, ‘Why don’t you tell her to come inside?’ And he said, ‘No, I’m leaving,’ and off he went. By then, he wasn’t as much in tune with people’s feelings. He was a caring, feeling person by nature, but I think that was being taken away from him. He was losing it.”
Gladys was also losing it,