Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [154]
But Elvis was not precisely as alone in Killeen as he appeared. Lamar, who had tried to enlist with him, but at 260 pounds flunked the physical (“They tried to get me clearance through the surgeon general”), just drove on down in Elvis’s Lincoln Mark II and checked into a motel. Elvis was glad to see him, but the truth was that he wanted Gladys. He fell into a deep malaise.
As his depression worsened, Master Sergeant William Norwood saw the misery on Elvis’s face and took him home to place a phone call. After that, Elvis was a frequent visitor to the Norwood residence, where the sergeant became a confidant, offering hot coffee, home-cooked meals, and fatherly advice. “When you come in my house, you can let it all out,” Norwood told him in a rural drawl. “But when you walk out of my front door, you are now Elvis Presley. You’re an actor. You’re a soldier. So, by God, I want you to act! Don’t let anybody know how you feel on the inside.”
During basic training—reveille before 5 A.M., sharpshooter practice, crawling over barbed wire—Elvis found another soft shoulder in Eddie Fadal, a theater owner who had been a deejay in Dallas in 1956 when the young singer made the rounds at radio stations. Eddie wasn’t in the army but lived in Waco, forty-five minutes away, with his wife, LaNelle, daughter, Janice, and son, Dana.
At the base, the Lebanese-American talked his way through security with a picture of himself with the singer. He found Elvis in the dayroom, shining his boots. Would Elvis like to come out to the house at 2807 Lasker Avenue and visit on weekends? The Fadals were a warm and welcoming family, he said, and Elvis could relax and listen to the latest 45s. Elvis said he had to stay on base for two weeks, but then sure, thanks, he’d be there. He showed up not long after, but the first thing he did after meeting Eddie’s family was phone his mother.
Eddie remembered the call. “When he got her on the line, all he said was, ‘Mama . . .’ And apparently, she said, ‘Elvis . . .’ And from then on, for a whole hour, they were crying and moaning on the telephone. Hardly a word was spoken.”
Now Anita started coming down for weekends, though she’d slipped into town before, staying at the Norwood house, Elvis sneaking out of the barracks to be with her. She was surprised at what a regular guy he’d turned into, without his hair dye and the lifts in his shoes. His skin was so beautifully tanned, and for the first time since she’d known him, he was just as normal as anybody else.
“He would come over and then we would go in the backyard and look up at the sky. We’d talk about all the things we were planning on doing, like getting married, all the things in the future.”
And he meant it. Being in the army had changed his thinking. One time when they drove to Dallas with Eddie, Anita went to the restroom, and Elvis called Eddie over to the car. “He put his foot on the bumper and said, ‘Eddie, when ol’ E here gets ready to get married, it’s gonna be to that girl, Anita Wood, and no one else. She’s the one.’ ”
He took her to the Fadals’ house, where LaNelle cooked a pound of bacon for him—burned crisp, like he liked it—and Eddie got him banana and chocolate cream pies from the Toddle House. In fact, Eddie built a room onto the house just for Elvis, decorating it in pink and black, and outfitting it with a piano and the latest hi-fi equipment. There wasn’t anything Eddie wouldn’t get for Elvis. And that included prescription drugs, both uppers and downers.
“My father knew all the doctors in town,” says Janice. “It was easy to get a prescription filled. He’d say, ‘Elvis needs to sleep.