Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [155]
If Elvis’s relationship with the older man seemed vaguely odd and unhealthy, no one said anything about it at the time. Everybody just concentrated on having fun. In May, Anita celebrated her twentieth birthday, and the Fadals got a cake for her. Elvis, too, made a special effort, slow dancing with Anita in a circle, and softly singing, “Happy, happy, birthday baby . . .”
Eddie turned on the tape recorder, and Elvis and Anita sat for their first home recordings, Elvis playing piano, and the two of them singing Hank Williams’s “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You.” Anita, who had her professional recording debut coming up in June, was nervous about her first record.
“I wish they’d let me pick it,” Elvis is heard saying on the tapes. He worried that Anita’s producers would try to turn her into Julie London. “They gotta give her somethin’ like Connie Francis’s songs. Somethin’ with some guts to it.”
Looking back, “It was the greatest time that I ever spent with him,” Anita says. “He was a soldier boy, and I was his girlfriend from back home, and we were in love and we were together with friends. We just had a wonderful time.”
On May 31, Elvis got a two-week leave before his next phase of training, a concentration in tank warfare. After a week in Memphis, where he had an oddly somber family portrait made with his parents, he drove to Nashville for an all-night recording session at RCA’s Studio B. On the surface, nothing seemed right. He was wearing his uniform (“Simple, I’m kinda proud of it”), and it was his first session without Scotty and Bill, who had quit in a money dispute, leaving only D. J. and the Jordanaires from the old lineup. But musically, Elvis was in fine form. By the time they wrapped things up, he had several hits in the can (“I Need Your Love Tonight,” “A Big Hunk O’ Love”) to keep him on the charts while he was away. It would be his last recording session for almost two years.
When Elvis returned to Fort Hood, he applied for permission to live off base with his family. All soldiers who completed basic training could request permission to live with their dependents, though for most soldiers, that meant wife and children. On June 20, he worked a deal with Stylemaster Mobile Homes for use of a three-bedroom trailer in exchange for photographs of himself and his parents and grandmother in the unit. They parked it near Fort Hood, and that weekend, Elvis, Vernon, Gladys, Minnie Mae, and Lamar moved in. And when Anita came down on weekends, flying in from New York where she was doing a summer television series with singer Andy Williams, she’d stay there, too.
At first Gladys was elated, even in a trailer. She was taking care of her son again, and they were together. But then it got so cramped, and the air-conditioning didn’t work right, and the toilet stopped up, and Gladys couldn’t get any rest, fans knocking on the door night and day. Her mood soured, Anita remembered. Even the scrub trees bothered her. “It was in the hot summertime and in the middle of a field way back in the woods, because that’s where you had to be if you wanted any privacy at all. It was a difficult time.”
On July 1, Vernon moved them all to a large three-bedroom brick ranch on Killeen’s elite Oak Hill Drive, paying the owner, Judge Chester Crawford, an exorbitant $1,400 for two months. Elvis obligingly stood outside in the big yard and signed autographs, and everybody was happy again. They all went to the Fadals for the Fourth of July, where Gladys ate hamburgers and talked with LaNelle, and soon Gene and Junior came down.
Elvis had everything he needed now. Minnie Mae fixed his beloved purple hull peas and sauerkraut and wieners, and he’d hug and kiss on the skinny ol’ firecracker of a woman, Minnie slapping the devil out of him when he’d play tricks on her.
On the base, he was doing well in his ten weeks of advanced tank training. He liked the sixty-ton M48 Patton Tanks, liked being in Patton’s division, liked being a gunner, liked it all. He was a good soldier, winning sharpshooting medals and placing third in tank