Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [127]
Elvis spent his birthday at home with his parents. He didn’t feel much like celebrating, and he was leaving in two days to start work on the soundtrack for Loving You. One afternoon, he dropped by to see Dixie Locke, who’d recently married. Her last name was Emmons now. He and Dixie had so much history together that they could finish each other’s sentences. But now that she seemed so settled and happy, he sometimes felt worse after he saw her. Emptiness was a terrible thing, a big blue ball that just swelled up inside you.
He made a joke about his relationships years later. “I did Love Me Tender, and Loving You . . . Loving Her, loving anybody I could get my hands on at the time.” But the trouble with love was that the cards were just so stacked against you. How did married couples stay together for most of their lives? Better to just stick with girls who were so much younger that they didn’t really expect anything of you.
In fall 1956, Vernon went over to the local Oldsmobile dealership where the family often had their cars repaired and serviced. As he was leaving, the owner, a man named Mowel, asked if his fourteen-year-old daughter, Gloria, could meet Elvis. Vernon said that was fine, and for Gloria to come on over anytime.
On October 11, Gloria showed up on Audubon Drive and nervously rang the doorbell. She was shocked to see Elvis answer the door himself. Gloria was cute, sweet, and personable, and she knew music—she’d identified “Ruby, Baby,” a recent hit by the Drifters, who Elvis loved, playing on the phonograph in the den. After her visit, Elvis invited her back another day. Soon, she was taking her friends Heidi Heissen and Frances Forbes, who were also fourteen, and Elvis began asking them over for evening swims at the house, or just to sit around and watch TV.
Frances, a petite dark-haired beauty, had been hanging out by the gate since she was thirteen. “He didn’t pay any attention to me then, but when I was fourteen, he noticed me. Fourteen was a magical age with Elvis. It really was.”
Fanatical in their devotion, the three girls followed him everywhere he went in Memphis. Elvis had an easy rapport with the trio and felt as if he could ask them what the other kids were saying about him and his music. They were his local contacts with the larger fan base, but it went deeper than that. “He was fascinated with them,” in the view of Lamar Fike, who was starting to integrate himself into Elvis’s entourage.
In no time, Elvis was inviting the girls to go to the Rainbow Rollerdrome, and by 1957, they became his constant companions, part of the group that went to the Fairgrounds to crash into one another in the dodgem cars and eat endless Pronto Pups. They also participated in other outings around town, all of which seemed designed to make up for the friendships and good times Elvis missed out on in high school. “They were just as nutty as fruitcakes, but they were fun,” Lamar remembers. “He got irritated with them sometimes, but very seldom. All three of them were pretty cute girls.”
As Elvis’s attraction to them grew, they started staying for private pajama parties—just fourteen-year-old Heidi, Gloria, Frances, and their twenty-two-year-old host, holed up in his bedroom. “When you were in that room, you wanted to shut out the whole world for the rest of your life,” Gloria says.
In an odd suspension of time and gender, Elvis became not only their age but also a teenage girl. After their swims, he’d wash and dry their hair, and they’d blow his hair dry, too. He’d tease them, say to Gloria, “Frances was jealous tonight because I was throwing you in the pool!” Then they’d all giggle, and he’d show them how to put makeup on their eyes the way he liked it, heavy on the shadow and mascara. It was sexy, he said, and sometimes he’d apply the eyeliner himself. Then they’d lie on the beds and roughhouse and have pillow fights, Elvis tickling and kissing them until they couldn’t take it anymore.
The girls