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“Finally, Gladys had had enough. She waved her hands in those women’s faces and hollered, ‘Get away and leave me alone! Mr. Golden’s gonna do our work!’ ”

The family wouldn’t move in for another six months, and they gave Golden free rein to decorate however he wanted. He livened Graceland’s conservative, run-down state with bright colors and a hodgepodge of styles, from Eisenhower-era suburban ranch to classic elegance. He also added dentil molding to the cornices on the first floor and transformed the dining and living rooms with chandeliers, gold-on-white trim, and swagged draperies. And last, he suggested the Presleys erect a temporary fence and staff the perimeter with guards.

Elvis picked out the famed music gates, which would be installed in April. But he wasn’t home much for the renovation—he was busy preparing for a major tour and getting ready to shoot Jailhouse Rock, his first picture in a new deal with MGM, the following month.

When he was home, “you knew it,” Golden said. “Once he borrowed one of my delivery trucks and pulled a hat down real low over his face so he could drive through the gates without getting mobbed. Then, when he got back out of the truck, he took off the hat, bowed to the girls lined up against the fence and said, ‘Thank you, ladies!’ Well, they liked to die.”

As Golden progressed with the property, Elvis proclaimed it “the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen!” He was so excited he needed to show it to somebody, so he dropped by to see Barbara Hearn. “He said he was going out to look at Graceland, that he wanted me to be the first one to see it. Whether he said that because it sounded good or whether it was really true, I believed it.”

Barbara, who remembered how sparsely the family had lived on Alabama Street, was overwhelmed at how lovely and tasteful it was, but she found Gladys worn out with it all. “Mr. Golden almost drove her crazy telephoning, asking her questions about every little thing. He just wanted to please her, but whenever I was there, she would have me answer the phone. She’d say, ‘If it’s Mr. Golden, I’m not home.’ She cared, but she just wanted him to get on with it.”

By now, Barbara’s romance with Elvis was over. They’d gone from friends to sweethearts to friends again. He was hardly ever in town, and when he was, their hours were just so different—he was up all night, and she was working or going to school. At the beginning, there had been only the two of them, and then Red, and then the Colonel. Now there was this entourage, and the guys “would get jealous if anybody got in thick with Elvis. They didn’t want anything to ruin their positions.”

And so it ended with a whimper. “There wasn’t any great breaking-off. But I probably would have ended up walking away, because I value loyalty and trustworthiness.” In retrospect, she guesses the relationship hadn’t really been a big love affair, or “I would have been brokenhearted when it was over, gnashing my teeth and wanting to slit my throat. And I wasn’t. I just went on with life.”

Elvis did, too. Some time that year, he stopped in El Paso on a road trip home from Los Angeles. Impulsively, he called Debra Paget and asked her to marry him. She told him it could never happen. “I know it’s your mother and father,” he said. “And if it takes twenty years, I’ll get them to like me.”

“I knew it was hopeless,” she told biographer Suzanne Finstad years later. “My parents would never relent. It was an impossible situation.”

The irony was that in a period of months, the most famous boy in America had lost all of his key romantic relationships.

Gladys’s sister Lillian had once noted that Gladys’s unhappiness made Elvis melancholy, too, even if they weren’t together—so incredible was their communicative bond. But just when Elvis thought his mother should be ecstatic with her new showplace, Gladys complained to Lillian that she was cut off from everybody at Graceland. When Elvis was away, she’d say to Vernon, “I wish you could pray with me.” And Vernon would respond, “I wish