Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [159]
Anita was in New York when Gladys died, and after taping her Andy Williams program that night, she got on a plane. Lamar met her at the airport.
When they pulled up at the house, Elvis and Vernon were sitting on the front porch, weeping.
“Little! Little! Little!” Elvis cried. “I’ve lost her! I’ve lost her!”
Anita put her arms around him, and then he pulled away and said, “Come on in. I want you to see her.”
She hesitated. She’d never seen a dead person before.
“No, I don’t think I want to go in there.”
But he insisted. “Yes, Little, she loved you, and I want you to see her.”
Anita hung back, but she loved Gladys, too. She was such a sweet lady. Elvis saw her weakening, so he grabbed her and brought her inside.
“We went in there where the coffin was, and he just talked like a baby. He called her Satnin’, and he showed me her feet. She was barefooted, and her toes were painted. He talked about her feet, her ‘little sooties,’ he called them. The corpse was so swollen, and he made me stand there forever, just looking at her and talking to her. I broke down. It was just really sad. Very hard to get through.”
Dixie Locke came, too, and while she was sad for Elvis, “He reacted as I would have expected him to act. He was devastated, of course, and I think he wondered how he would even be able to get along without her, really.”
More and more people showed up as the night wore on, Barbara Pittman remembered, but as the mourners tried to console father and son, Colonel Parker burst in and tried to run everybody off.
“Get all of these people out of here!” he barked to no one in particular. “I want them out of here now!”
Elvis, in a rare moment of confrontation, rose from his seat on the couch. “Look, these are my friends. Don’t you come in my house and tell me to run my friends out of here!”
But Parker worried he couldn’t handle security at Graceland and urged Elvis to move the next day’s services to the Memphis Funeral Home. Elvis thought about it for a minute and nodded in agreement.
The attendants came to get Gladys early the next day, and Elvis, who had again stayed up all night, followed the casket all the way out to the hearse, crying, “Please don’t take my baby away! Bring her back! She’s not dead. She’s just sleeping. Oh, God, please don’t take her away!” Harold Loyd nearly broke down himself, seeing his cousin suffer so. “He said, ‘Everything I have is gone—everything I’ve ever worked for. I got all this for her and now she’s gone. I don’t want any of it now.’ ”
But Vernon was in a more practical frame of mind, according to Elvis’s music publisher Freddy Bienstock, who was staying at the house. In Freddy’s view, Vernon was not as broken up as he seemed.
“When the funeral director came to Graceland, Vernon was crying and carrying on, and it was pure bunk, because he was cheating all over the place, and everybody knew it. But he was saying, through these not very convincing tears, ‘The best of everything! Give her the best of everything!’ The fellow marked it all down and left very quickly, and the moment he walked out the door, all the tears and crying stopped. Vernon turned to Colonel Parker and said, ‘Don’t let them take advantage of me in my hour of grief.’ ”
Three thousand fans ringed the area around the Spanish-styled Memphis Funeral Home on Union Avenue, many of them there to show their support, most of them hoping for a glance at Elvis. Memphis Police Captain W. W. Woodward, a friend of Elvis who had posed for a photo with Nick Adams the year before, stationed 150 policemen to keep order along the route to Forest Hill Cemetery, where Gladys would be buried.
Reverend Hamill officiated at the funeral, and as Dixie knew he would, Elvis asked the Blackwood Brothers to sing, since the revered gospel quartet was Gladys’s favorite group. They arrived early for the three-thirty services to go over the songs and meet with the family.
J. D. Sumner, the Blackwoods’ bass singer since 1954, was astonished at Elvis’s level of grief. “I’ve