Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [123]
In town to see the performance was Kay Wheeler, Elvis’s fan club president. Several months before, she’d organized a write-in campaign to bring Elvis to Dallas, Texas. “It was so successful—26,500 kids showed up—that we had to get the huge Cotton Bowl, the largest venue for an Elvis show.” She was the only teenager, and the only woman, allowed on the field. The next day, she went to Waco to see Elvis’s show at the Heart O’ Texas Coliseum and got in trouble with Colonel Parker for telling the Associated Press that Waco was “the squarest town in America,” since the sparse crowd “sat on their hands and nobody screamed.”
And in November, she’d traveled to Memphis, where she visited with Barbara Hearn at her house, the two of them lying on the floor and leafing through scrapbooks, to Kay’s delight. She also spent a day with Gladys, who told Kay she reminded her of herself as a young girl. (“You favor me a little, don’t you, hon?”) Kay thought Gladys seemed sad, but she didn’t dwell on it long, because she was too excited—Elvis had Kay’s framed picture by his bed. And Gladys had even offered to give her Elvis’s white buck shoes, but Kay turned them down (“I didn’t want his ol’ stinky shoes in my suitcase”). She wanted the kelly green sport coat he had on in Dallas. “You’ll probably have it before the night is over,” he promised her suggestively, but that hadn’t happened, and then Gladys couldn’t find it.
Now, in Shreveport, where she was setting up a new branch of the fan club, Kay attended Elvis’s hour-long press conference at the Youth Center. “I wanted to impress him—I knew I had the jet black hair and ‘good behind’ that Elvis liked,” so she wore her tight white sheath dress with silver sparkles and white fur at the cuffs. Even though she stood in the back, Elvis, modeling the famous green coat, spotted Kay right off and stared at her hungrily as she answered a question about the fan club. A few minutes later, Cliff Gleaves approached her.
“Elvis wants you to come back to the hotel.”
At the Captain Shreve, Cliff escorted her to what was obviously Elvis’s bedroom. “Wait here,” he said and then shut the door. She stared at the bed for a while, but after fifteen minutes, when Elvis still wasn’t there, she lost her nerve. “I thought, ‘I can’t go through with this. I’m not this kind of girl. I’m a virgin. This is like something in a bad movie.’ ”
She got up and walked out into the hall, where Elvis’s guys were hanging out in front of another room. Kay stuck her head in to see Elvis on the phone. There was a flurry of activity—someone was taking orders for sandwiches, and everybody was high on something or another, maybe just the excitement of the concert—but Elvis, unbuttoning his shirtsleeves, beckoned her in (“Come here, come here, come here”). She was the only woman in the room, so she walked over and picked up his green coat and put it on, almost for protection. It was all sweaty, but she liked feeling him against her skin, even though the coat was so big that it dwarfed her. Elvis grinned at the sight of her in it.
“You look good in that,” he said. “Do you want a sandwich?”
“No, thanks.”
“Okay,” he said, looking around the room. “Are we going to order?”
Somebody spoke up. “Elvis, what do you want on your sandwich?”
“Mustard, mayonnaise, pickles, and cat shit,” he said, laughing at his own joke. All the guys laughed in unison, but the bad language turned Kay off. And as the time wore on and Elvis kept fooling around, she became more disenchanted. Finally, she just eased out the door.
That got his attention, and he chased her down the hall and into the stairwell. She was a little