Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [139]
“It didn’t look like it, but he was white as a sheet. I called Dr. Henry Moskowitz, my doctor, and I said, ‘Henry, Elvis is over here, and he’s got a big ol’ risen on his stomach. Could you come and take a look at it?’ And he said no, but he called down to Baptist [Memorial Hospital], and he said, ‘You all run down there, and they’ll take a look at it and let me know what they see.’
“We went down to Baptist about seven o’clock. When we first went in, there were three or four nurses there. I don’t know what those sick folks did, because before we left, there were fifty nurses down there from every floor.
“Anyway, this thing was so red that when they lanced it, it shot two feet in the air. And you know how much pain he had to have been in for so long, but he was scared to find out what it really was. He hardly said a word on the way down there, and it was about a ten-mile trip. But on the way back, we couldn’t shut him up, he was so happy.”
When they got back to the house, Elvis told Yvonne they’d given him some penicillin to help clear the infection, and he was feeling well enough to stay at the party. But by 2 A.M., he’d lapsed into a somber mood, and began singing hymns and spirituals. It was raining by then, and Sam put some wood in the fireplace to cut the chill. It thrilled Yvonne to hear that famous voice in the darkened room, with just the light from the fireplace, and she saw he had more passion for religious music than any other.
By daybreak, everybody was out by the swimming pool, laughing again and eating breakfast. Yvonne cooked Elvis’s eggs for him—hard as a rock, the way he liked them.
On Easter night, Elvis, with Yvonne and the entourage, went to services at the First Assembly of God. It was the first time he had been to church in a long time, and he felt both awkward and relieved. He passed a note to one of the ushers for Reverend Hamill, asking if the pastor would see him in his office afterward.
He was sitting, waiting, when Reverend Hamill walked in. Elvis quickly rose. As the clergyman remembered, “He said, ‘Pastor, I am the most miserable young man you’ve ever seen. I’m doing the things you taught me not to, and I’m not doing the things you said I should.’ He cried and asked me to pray for him.”
For more than an hour, the two prayed together, and Elvis continued to weep, asking the minister to forgive him for his sins. “He didn’t say what they were, and I didn’t know what they were.” But clearly Elvis “was constantly in conflict with what he wanted to do and what he was doing.” Reverend Hamill told him to call the next day, and he would give him the address of a pastor friend in Hollywood, M. O. Balliet. Elvis phoned Reverend Hamill’s secretary on Tuesday morning, but he never followed through with the contact.
The last time Kay Wheeler saw him, at the press premiere for Jailhouse Rock, she, too, could tell that Elvis was not himself. “The change had set him. He seemed lonely and isolated, not the ‘Memphis Flash’ of the Texas tours of 1956. He walked in the room of probably a hundred reporters, and yelled loudly at me across the room, ‘Is that you, Kay?’ Everybody turned to look at me, and I answered, ‘Yes, Elvis, it’s me.’ Those were our last spoken words. But he remembered me. I was the one who got away.”
The plot of Jailhouse Rock, in which Elvis’s character, Vince Everett, goes to prison for accidentally killing a man in a barroom fight, drew on two aspects of Elvis’s life—his father’s time at Parchman, and his own fears of violence at the hands of others, as Elvis alluded to so fervently in his telegram to Private Nixon. The story (by Nedrick Young, who won an Academy Award for The Defiant Ones) follows Vince as he learns the guitar from a fellow prisoner (Mickey Shaughnessy), and becomes a hot new singing star with the help of record promoter Peggy van Alden, played by Judy Tyler.
Jailhouse Rock, shot in black and white, is memorable as the movie in which Elvis first hints