Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [134]
“Is that why you’ve been so cool to me on the phone?”
“No, I haven’t been cool to you. You’ve been busy doing your thing, and I’ve been busy doing my thing. Your thing just gets in the paper. Mine doesn’t.”
They sat there, both feeling sick, not saying anything. Finally, the conductor yelled, “All aboard!” and the train jerked to signal its departure.
June was crying now, and she stood up and kissed him on the forehead. “I love you, Elvis Presley, and I always will.” Then she was gone, running from the car, and jumping down to the platform.
She turned back to watch as the train began to move. She saw him leaning out the door, as if he wanted to hold her gaze before the train picked up steam and carried him out of her life for good.
“I can still see him hanging on to that train and waving good-bye. The train rounded the corner, and all I could see was his hand, still waving.”
A few days later the papers announced, “Elvis Buys Graceland,” and June realized what her surprise was to be.
She married on June 1, 1957, and two weeks later, Elvis phoned her mother to see if she were home. “No, Elvis, she’s not here. Married life seems to be agreeing with her.” And so he finally let it go.
But June never did. More than fifty years later, “No one has ever taken Elvis’s place in my heart. I’ve just never been able to stop loving Elvis.”
When Hollywood starlet Yvonne Lime visited Elvis in Memphis in April 1957, he took her out to see Graceland, which he’d bought the month before. “To think that we Presleys will live here,” he told her. “We’ve been poor so long, I can’t believe it yet.” (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Chapter Thirteen
“The Most Miserable Young Man”
At 10 A.M. on Monday, March 19, the day after Elvis arrived home, he drove out to Graceland with his parents, where they met with real estate agent Virginia Grant. Elvis looked around the house and grounds for a few minutes, and then baptized the home by playing some rock and roll at the piano. In high school, as Regis’s prom date, all he had dreamed of was becoming successful enough to buy his mother a big brick home with a landscaped yard. Now the twenty-two-year-old had secured so grand a property as to befit a governor. All three Presleys signed the sales contract as purchasers, Vernon first in bold deep blue fountain pen, Elvis next in a different ink, and Gladys below in black ballpoint.
By March 26, the closing date, it was officially theirs, with a final price of $102,500, inflated by additional offers on the property as news of the deal leaked out. Elvis had sold the Audubon Drive house to a realty company for $55,000, paid $10,000 in cash, and taken out a twenty-five-year mortgage for the balance of the six-figure purchase price.
Vernon just prayed that Elvis’s career lasted another couple of years. When the family got a new bedroom suite, and Elvis gave the old one to his aunt and uncle, his father furrowed his brow. “Son, I wish you wouldn’t be giving all of our things away. We may have to put them on our back and walk out of here with them one day.”
Gladys had no idea how to update or furnish the eighteen-room colonial, and so on the recommendation of Sam Phillips, who had just turned his ranch house into a modern “space age” showcase, the Presleys asked interior decorator George Golden to give them a bid. The enterprising Golden advertised his services with flatbed trucks that drove around Memphis showing off miniature rooms with the decorator’s flamboyant touches. He knew that “every decorator in town wanted that job so bad they could taste it.”
He arrived to find two female competitors “all over poor Gladys, waving sketches in her face and gabbing away like you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “It was like a circus out there.” Golden introduced himself and then stood back with Vernon. The decorator was married and knew a thing or two about women. He saw that Gladys was a shy, country woman who “had a real fear of being in closed-up spaces.” As his competitors continued their locustlike siege, Golden began talking as country