Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [158]
He stood petting her, talking to her in their little language, until Vernon and the nurse pulled him away and took him down the hall to the waiting room.
About 4 A.M., Lamar arrived back at the house in the black Cadillac. The wind was blowing, and the front door open. Minnie Mae came out on the porch and said, “Gladys is dead. We need to go to the hospital.”
“We shot over there,” he remembers, “and that elevator opened, and I’ve never heard such crying, and screaming, and hollering in my life. It was unbelievable. This wailing, almost like wolves. It made me shudder. I came around the corner and Elvis was walking toward me, and he said, ‘Lamar, Satnin’ isn’t here.’ And I said, ‘I know, Elvis. I know.’ ”
Lamar sat with him for a long time. He wanted his mother to have an old-fashioned southern visitation and service at home, he said, and Lamar offered to help with the arrangements. As they were on their way to the car, leaving through the loading area at the back of the hospital, the attendants brought Gladys’s body down to be transported to the funeral home. “He wouldn’t let her go for the longest time. He was sobbing, saying, ‘She’s all I ever lived for! She was my best girl.’ ”
They sat in the car in the parking lot, both of them crying, and then they went back to Graceland so Elvis could make a few calls. One was to the base, requesting extended leave. Another was to Eddie Fadal.
“Eddie,” he said, his voice cracking, “she’s gone! I’ve lost the only person I ever really loved!” Eddie tried to console him, and finally Elvis choked out, “Can you come?” Eddie said yes, of course, and Elvis told him he’d send Junior to the airport to get him.
The Memphis Funeral Home took care of the body, and then they brought Gladys back to Graceland, the house she had lived in barely a year, the mansion that had never felt like home.
Elvis saw them coming up the drive. “Daddy, Mama’s comin’ home,” he called to his father. Elvis asked the attendants to put the copper-and-silver casket between the music room and living room, and they placed her there. Elvis walked over to where she lay in her blue dress, a glass top covering most of the body. He then asked that the lower half of the casket be opened, so that he might see her feet, which were clothed in little slippers. Elvis removed them, and massaged her feet and hands, and then, taking a comb from his pocket, rearranged her hair. Lamar couldn’t stand it.
“He got nearly hysterical. Started that wailing again. It made my skin crawl.”
Elvis’s first cousin Harold Loyd heard about Gladys’s death on the radio and came right up from Mississippi. Now he wondered if Elvis had lost his mind. “He was in pitiful shape. His eyes were all swollen and red. He would walk over to the casket and say, ‘Wake up, Mama. Wake up, Mama. Wake up, baby, and talk to Elvis.’ ”
He kept it up, parading from the couch to the casket, pleading with her, fondling her, lapsing into baby talk. At one point, he went out on the porch and sat on the steps near one of the stone lions that guarded the entrance. Billy went to the door and watched him, saw him put his arm on his knee and bury his face. “He just cried something awful. I followed him out there, but I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just let him be.” Afterward, he sat up almost all night and stared at her.
When Eddie got there the next day, Elvis and Vernon were standing at the casket. Both of them touched the body “like they wanted to pick her up and kiss her,” Eddie thought, so he walked in quietly. Vernon was wailing, and Elvis was chanting and smoothing his mother’s forehead, comforting her, comforting himself, almost going back into the womb.
“Mama,” he said, “you never would dress up for me, and now here you are dressed up in the most beautiful gown. I never saw you dressed up like this.”
Eddie felt as if he had intruded on a private moment, but then Elvis saw him and brought him up to the casket. “Mama, here’s Eddie. You know Eddie. You met him in Killeen.” Eddie got chills, and then Elvis took her hand.
“Look, Eddie, at those