Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [151]
“I told him how much it meant for me to be there, but I said, ‘I’m getting married in March, and I’m going into the ministry.’ Elvis thought that was great. As a matter of fact, he was probably the only one who commended me for it. Everybody else thought I was crazy.”
Two months earlier, Jimmie realized he’d been living a perpetual dark night of the soul. He’d been drinking and doing pills since his days on the road.
“I was just a miserable, unhappy man. But the call of God was on my life. I had sensed it for years, but I didn’t know what it was.” Just prior to going over to Graceland, Jimmie had turned his life over to Jesus. “I quit drinking and pills cold turkey. I was changing my life.”
Jimmie thanked Elvis for his offer of a part in the movie, but the only way he knew to break with the entertainment business was just to cut all ties.
When Jimmie left Graceland in early 1958, his heart was heavy for two reasons. He feared for Elvis’s soul, for the way he was conducting his personal life. And he worried about Gladys. “My memory of his mother is coming downstairs and seeing her sitting in the kitchen drinking beer, always in the same chair. I don’t know if she was a lush, but I would see it all the time.”
Alan Fortas was also concerned about Gladys. She hardly ever left the house, and Alan didn’t know what she did with her time. Elvis talked about what a great cook she was, but since they got Alberta (Elvis called her “VO5”), Alan had never seen Gladys fix a meal. In 1954, when Elvis made his first records, he’d walked into Harry Levitch’s jewelry store and bought his mother an electric mixer for Christmas. A few days later, he came back and bought another one, also for Gladys. When Harry asked why, Elvis said he wanted one for each end of the kitchen so she wouldn’t have to walk so much. Now, as both Jimmie and Alan noted, she hardly ever got out of the chair.
“I just remember passing through the kitchen on my way out to the pool or into the den, and she’d always be there.
“ ‘Hello, Miz Presley, how you doin’?’
“ ‘Fine, Alan.’ ”
She was a nice, simple woman who never pretended to be more than she was, in Alan’s view. “She dipped her snuff, she watched TV in her room, and she worried about her boy.”
That was her life.
She sat by the window in the kitchen, daydreaming or looking out in the backyard. Sometimes she sat out front, away from the fans, sequestered from the neighbors who had tormented her on Audubon Drive. Other times, Vernon would take her for a drive in her pink Cadillac, since she’d never learned to drive. That summer, he would carry her down to Tupelo to see Annie Presley.
“We was sittin’ there talkin’,” Annie remembered, “and she said, ‘Annie, I’d give the world if I lived next door where I could just get out and feed my chickens and do things, but Elvis won’t let me do nothin’. You know me. I want to do.’ ”
She killed her pain with the multitude of beer bottles she hid in the refrigerator behind the milk and the Pepsis, and she sipped on them all day long from a brown paper sack, washing down diet pills—Dexedrine, or other forms of amphetamine—that the doctor gave her. She wanted so to lose weight, to shine in the pictures the magazines took of her family. Normally, she wouldn’t drink in front of others, Billy Smith says. She’d stay in her room.
“The biggest majority of the time she would go without it, but it seemed like when she got worried, she clung to that real quick.”
Elvis had known about her “medication” for a long time, because as Lamar remembers, he pilfered her “speed” to stay awake on the long drives on tour, even though it made him more hyper than usual. But he had been mystified by her wrenching mood swings. She would be bubbly one minute and at the ends of despair the next. She seemed to be weepy all the time, and pale and withdrawn. She almost never came out of her robe anymore, and she walked so slowly. Somebody