Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [153]
He looked at Lamar and the Cadillac limousine that had brought him there that day, and suddenly it was a symbol of everything he had worked so hard to get. Now it was all about to be gone. It was like a dream.
“Good-bye, you long black son of a bitch,” he said to the Caddy, and everybody laughed. Then he climbed on the bus to begin life anew as Private Presley. Five hundred screaming girls saw him off.
At Fort Chaffee, the new inductees got their shots, and then predictably had their hair sheared off. Elvis, whose pompadour once swam with “sweat and goose grease,” as Time magazine noted, listened to the whirring of the electric clippers and blew the flying fuzz off his hand. “Hair today, gone tomorrow,” he said in a studied line, and the news media—fifty-five photographers and reporters—dutifully wrote it down. By the end of the day, the army confirmed what he already knew: He would be stationed at Fort Hood, near Killeen, Texas, the largest army post in the United States, and assigned to the Second Armored Division, General Patton’s “Hell on Wheels” outfit.
On March 28, en route to Killeen, the army transport bus made a stop for lunch at a diner in Hillsboro, Texas. For a full twenty-five minutes, Elvis blended in with all the other new privates in their fatigues. But a caravan of fans also made the trek to Texas. Suddenly, a young voice squealed, “There’s Elvis!” and a small riot broke out. After he left, girls wrestled over his chair.
When the bus arrived at Fort Hood about four-thirty in the afternoon, a clutch of thirty newsmen stood waiting in summer clothing, holding notebooks to their eyes to shield them from the Texas sun. Private Presley was the second soldier off the bus. Sure, he’d salute for the cameras, he said, flashing his Hollywood smile, and then he held a press conference before going off to his first army meal of fish and French fries. A dozen teenage girls hovered outside the mess hall. “Let us see him, and we’ll go away!” they cried, but the military police shooed them off. Soon, Elvis’s fan mail would number fifteen thousand letters a week, all of it redirected to the Colonel’s office in Tennessee.
On March 29, Elvis woke up not to Lamar or Alan at the foot of his bed, but to five dozen other men all around him. Some of them wanted their pound of flesh from the millionaire singer, now earning seventy-eight dollars a month. Fellow soldier Rex Mansfield, who was on the bus with Elvis coming out of Memphis, remembered how they teased him: “Where’s your hound dog?” And “Aren’t y’all lonesome for your teddy bear?” They were all watching him, waiting for him to screw up.
But Elvis was determined to fit in. Each arriving recruit received twenty dollars in cash for toothpaste and other basic necessities, and a sergeant immediately seized his moment.
“Presley, give me that twenty dollars—you don’t need it.”
“Naw, Sergeant, I’m broke.”
The teasing would stop when they saw he didn’t want any special privileges, that he did his KP and guard duty and marched with a seventy-five-pound pack in the irrepressible heat, eating the Texas dust like everyone else. Elvis was an okay guy, they decided, and who’d have thought that? And Elvis was even more surprised to find out that he liked the army—the organization, the respect of men, the routine, and predictably with twinless twins, the uniform, the infinite replication. It served a psychological need.
Besides, the fans had no intention of going away. Fort Hood was an open base, meaning soldiers could receive civilian guests when they were off duty, and “the girls seemed to know where he was, as if they were sending secret messages to each other, fired by hormones,” wrote one reporter.
It was true. Jane Levy Christie, then a high school junior, thought it was too gauche to scream and carry