Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [144]
At first Anita wasn’t sure if she was in love with him or not, mostly because they’d been alone only a few times, and even then not for very long. It gave her serious reservations about their future. They’d go off together on his motorcycle and sit at the big white piano in the music room and sing together for hours. But some of the guys, like Lamar, lived at Graceland, and Lamar even spent the night in Elvis’s room sometimes to keep him from sleepwalking. The cousins were always around, too. Elvis and Gene had that weird little language that only they seemed to be able to decipher (they said “ep skep, skep, skep” a lot), and little Billy was now fourteen, old enough to tag along places.
When they’d go to the Fairgrounds for crazed nights riding the Pippin, the rickety wooden roller coaster, or rent out the Rainbow Rollerdrome or the Memphian Theatre across town on South Cooper Street, he invited everybody who was at his home, and even the strangers standing around at the gate. “He always invited his fans to go. They would all go to the Fairgrounds—friends, family, and fans.”
Sometimes the group numbered as many as two hundred. And now Elvis had added another guy to the circle, Alan Fortas, a friend of George’s through the local Jewish organizations. Alan, a big, overfed boy, was a year younger than Elvis, but Elvis already knew who he was—Alan had been an all-Memphis football star at Central High. Given his own mediocre showing on the field in high school, Elvis liked having Alan around. But most of all, he liked Alan because he was full of the devil. Soon, he’d give him a nickname, “Hog Ears.”
Around the same time, Marty Lacker started coming out to Graceland. A New Yorker who’d moved to Memphis at fifteen in 1952, he’d attended both Central and Humes, so he already knew Alan and George and Red, and to some extent, Elvis. The first time he went out to visit, Elvis and Anita were just coming out of the barn. He, too, would eventually become a part of the group, as would fifteen-year-old Jerry Schilling, who Elvis first met in 1954 through Red West, playing football in Guthrie Park.
Elvis would brag about Anita to the guys, and everything about her seemed to enchant him. He told his friends he was pretty sure she was a virgin, and he loved it when she showed off her figure. One day it was hot, and Anita suggested they go swimming. Lamar was there, and Elvis turned to Anita in her swimsuit. “Lamar, look at her. Just look at her. That hip is just a little bit bigger than the other hip. But other than that, she’s just perfect. Turn around, Little.”
Elvis was not alone in appreciating Anita’s attributes. That summer, the Memphis Press-Scimitar ran a photograph of half a dozen girls who would compete on August 22 in the Mid-South finals of the “Hollywood Star Hunt,” a beauty-talent contest that the newspaper sponsored with the Strand Theatre. Of the six, Elvis had dated three—Barbara Hearn, Anita, and Barbara Pittman. Both Anita and Barbara Pittman sang, two of the other women danced, and Barbara Hearn did a dramatic interpretation of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, the climactic burning at the stake scene.
Anita won and went on to the finals in New Orleans, where she captured the grand prize—a seven-year contract with ABPT, American Broadcasting Paramount Theatres, which also entailed work with Paramount’s movies, television shows, and record label. Elvis told Anita “the things that went on in California were the things that went on in hell.” But Elvis was happy for her and pleased to see that Little was still her unaffected self.
One morning about six, they were coming home from the roller rink with Lamar and Alan. It had been a ferocious night—they’d played tag and roller derby and the rough game of “knock down,” skating toward each other with all their might with only the winners left standing—and everybody was bruised and battered. Elvis whispered something to Anita in the backseat, but Alan, sitting next