Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [15]
“They were drinking, and just did it on a whim,” says Billy Smith, Travis’s son. “Vernon got to thinking about it, and the more he thought about it, the madder he got. And they said, ‘Well, we’ll fix him.’ And Daddy was always ready to do any and everything, and he was easily persuaded by people.
“From what my mama told me, they lived high for a time. Daddy and Lether went down to Texas to try to find a job. Mama said Daddy had this idea he was really going to be ‘Mr. It.’ But all they came back with was a new shirt, a new pair of pants, and a big hat. And as soon as he stepped off the train, they were waiting for him, and hauled him right on off. They’d already gotten Vernon by this time. He was in jail.”
Initially, none of the three men could post bail, set surprisingly high at $500 each. Then on January 4, 1938, two bonds were filed, the first for Lether, and the second for Travis. As no record exists for Vernon’s bail, he was apparently left to cool his heels for six months in custody awaiting trial. But the galling news was that Vernon’s own father had gone in on the bail for Travis. Whether he feared angering his landlord Bean, whose land he still sharecropped, isn’t known. Annie Presley believed that Noah Presley eventually posted bond for Vernon, but J.D. first intended to let his son rot in the Lee County jail, later having a change of heart.
“Maybe J.D. thought he was going to teach Vernon a lesson,” muses Billy Smith. “But to be honest, I think he just liked Daddy better than he did Vernon. Vernon was likable, but my daddy, you couldn’t help but like him. He was a whole lot like Aunt Gladys.”
At the trial, emotions still ran high. Bean shouted out at one point, calling Vernon “long hungry,” local slang for a glutton who’d steal from the mouths of his own family to gorge himself. There was no greater insult, and Elvis would hear it the rest of his days.
On May 25, 1938, Vernon and Travis were sentenced to three years in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, the legendarily cruel institution where prisoners were routinely bullwhipped and put on chain gangs as terrifying lessons in the evils of defying authority. Yet surprisingly, Vernon got a reprieve, of sorts. Shortly after he arrived on June 1, the warden made him a trustee, which afforded him a room at the warden’s house for conjugal visits, according to Annie Presley. While Gladys, with Elvis in tow, would make the five-hour trip whenever she could—Noah Presley drove them every third Sunday—Vernon’s time away would be a watershed event.
By the time he returned, all three Presleys would suffer from sleepwalking, or “action nightmares,” as one cousin put it in southern parlance. And Vernon would be but a stick figure in the lives of his wife and child. Elvis and Gladys would be so fatalistically close that anyone else amounted to an intruder. Elvis belonged to her, and Gladys to him. They were one. And no one else would ever make the other feel whole again.
Elvis and Magdalene Morgan, outside her home in Tupelo, after Sunday church, date unknown. The wooden building in the background had once been her playhouse. (Courtesy of David Troedson/Elvis Australia)
Chapter Two
An Ideal Guy
Vernon would be released from Parchman with a six-month suspension of his sentence on February 6, 1939, largely because he demonstrated good behavior and an appropriate degree of remorse for his crime. He had served nine months. Gladys had done her part, too, literally walking door to door in Lee County, gathering signatures on a petition to vouch for his character, and cajoling Orville Bean into writing a letter to Governor Hugh White pleading for leniency: “The money was repaid to me and this man realizes the mistake