Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [148]
It helped that her mother, Georgia Holt, a backwoods beauty from Sharp County, Arkansas, not all that far from Memphis, was also into early rock and roll. She thought it was good music, and she wasn’t threatened by it. When Cherilyn’s friends’ mothers saw Elvis, they shrank in revulsion and forbade their children from buying his records. But Georgia watched The Ed Sullivan Show with her daughter, and then when Elvis came to town, she bought tickets for the two of them. Cherilyn was ecstatic, she said in an interview for this book.
“I was so crazy. I got my hair cut for it, because I hoped he would notice it. I was in such heaven. I almost didn’t walk on the ground.”
Inside the auditorium, she saw him in the gold suit that Nudie, her mom’s friend, made. “He’s really shiny,” she thought. Then all of a sudden, “All the girls were on their chairs screaming. I didn’t understand why exactly—I wasn’t completely sure about the sexual part of it—but I was just fascinated with it. I remember saying, ‘Mom, can we stand on our chairs and scream, too?’ And so we did. My mom was yelling and laughing, and I projected myself up there. It didn’t make much difference what sex he was.”
Cherilyn had seen Dumbo as a little kid, and sitting in the dark, watching the big screen, she was so transfixed that she’d peed her pants rather than get up and miss anything. The die had been cast for her future that day. But when she saw Elvis, “It was cemented in stone.”
The Pan Pacific shows, among the greatest Elvis ever played, were meant to be the last of the tour, until promoter Lee Gordon convinced the Colonel to let him book two Hawaiian dates in November, just as Jailhouse Rock opened in theaters. Those concerts, in Honolulu and at Schofield Barracks, Pearl Harbor, would be Elvis’s last public performances before entering the military.
Every branch of the military service made bids for Elvis to join their ranks, offering perks of one kind or another. Elvis and the Colonel decided on the army, which offered a two-year enlistment with a 120-day deferment so he could complete his new movie, Paramount’s King Creole. He’d begin shooting it in January with Hungarian director Michael Curtiz, most famous for Casablanca.
On December 20, 1957, he went down to the Memphis draft board to pick up the dreaded notice in person. The Colonel told him to do it, saying it made him look more patriotic, and that mothers and fathers all across the nation would respect him for it. It was good publicity. When reporters asked how he liked trading his blue suede shoes for army boots, he bit his tongue and followed the drill. “It’s a duty I’ve got to fill, and I’m going to do it,” he said.
In private, it was a different story, according to Barbara Pittman, who Elvis had planned on taking on the road with him. “Elvis cried in my lap because he had to go into the service. Parker had said, ‘Look, son, you play the hero. If you start battling it and try to get out of it to support your mother, it’s going to make you look bad. Just be the all-American kid type.’ ”
Milton Bowers, the draft board chairman, had sent him informal word that his induction notice had been drawn up and was waiting for him.
Anita remembers the day. His parents were devastated. “They could not believe that he was going to have to leave them. He didn’t mind going and serving, but he really didn’t want to leave his family. And his mother was so worried about what would happen to him. She did not see another happy day after they received that notice.”
The newspaper came out and took pictures. Elvis held his draft notice up in one while the others captured the splendor of Graceland and the white nylon Christmas tree festooned with red ornaments. Cliff and Elvis then posed with a huge pile of presents, but neither could resist some attitude—Cliff holding a cigarette, and Elvis, wearing gloves indoors, offering a half-sneer.
Otherwise, he pretended everything was fine. Elvis bought his mother a mink coat, his father a diamond ring, and the Colonel a snazzy Isetta sports car. Even Billy and Bobby