Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [124]
“Elvis,” she said quietly. “What do you think life is all about, really?”
He was standing behind her, very close, his breath warm on the back of her neck. Now he turned her around, and she thought he was going to make a stab at answering her question, or maybe kiss her in that soft, romantic way. But Elvis was not in the mood for subtlety.
To Kay’s astonishment, “He got really rough with me. He grabbed me and kissed me so long and hard I thought I was going to suffocate. He wouldn’t get off my lips. Then he threw me against the wall and started grinding his pelvis, pushing on me really heavy. It was exactly what he did onstage, his whole performance.”
Except that Elvis was genuinely aroused and meant business, keeping Kay in such a hold she couldn’t move. She wasn’t just turned off now—she was frightened. It was too raw for a seventeen-year-old virgin. “I was not old enough for what he had in mind. And it really disappointed me, because I wanted moonlight and roses. It was one of the biggest letdowns of my life.”
She didn’t push him away, though, and soon someone started screaming, “Where’s Elvis? Where’s Elvis?”
Whenever Elvis’s guys got separated from him, she thought, “It was like they lost their dancing bear or something. They all went nuts.” But the emergency was only that the sandwiches had arrived, and Elvis coaxed Kay back to the room. She stayed for a few minutes, but her stomach hurt, and her head was swimming, and then she just slipped out and went downstairs and got a cab.
“I felt a little bit powerful as I walked out of that hotel. I’d passed some girls, floozy little things, in the hall, and I presumed they’d been set up like I was. I thought, ‘I’m not one of you. He’ll remember me for not doing it.’ Because they were flinging their bodies at him en masse. It was just crazy, a mob scene.”
It had been even wilder at the show, Frank Page remembering they’d tried to protect Elvis by erecting a fence in front of the stage and setting the chairs back forty feet. But the girls, “nearly 10,000 of them, picked up the chairs and ran to the edge of the stage, so they defeated our purpose of trying to keep them back.” Afterward, to get him out of the Coliseum unharmed, the Colonel sent a decoy out one door while Elvis escaped through another, the swarm following the wrong boy. Page, thoroughly shaken, had never witnessed pandemonium like that and hoped he wouldn’t again. Ten thousand girls, screaming at the tops of their lungs, made “noise enough to peel paint,” as Horace Logan put it. Nobody could tell if Elvis was really singing or not, or even if the band was playing. But nobody seemed to care. The waves of screams washed through the Coliseum like an angry ocean. At the end, “Hoss” Logan, standing there in his sheriff’s gear, a pair of real six-guns in his big western holster, would utter the now-famous phrase: “Elvis has left the building.”
Barbara Hearn would sometimes stand inside the Audubon Drive house, looking out the window at all the fans. “I’d wonder, ‘Why am I on this side of the glass?’ It was a bit daunting at times.” And it was becoming more so, and not just because of the fame. Sometimes she thought she didn’t really know Elvis.
He’d called her one night, saying he’d been over to one of the West Memphis clubs to listen to music, and somehow met some boy she’d dated in high school. She hadn’t seen the guy since graduation day, but Elvis went off about what all he was going to do to him if he ever saw him again. He treated Barbara like she’d committed a crime for ever having known the kid. Where did he get off thinking like that, when he had so many girlfriends that the newspaper ran rows of pictures?
She tried not to think about it, though, because Christmas was almost on them, and she wanted them to have