Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [160]
The Blackwoods had planned on singing three or four numbers, including “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” and “Precious Memories.” But Elvis kept scribbling down song titles and sending notes up until the quartet, worried about making their concert in South Carolina that night, performed a dozen numbers.
Barbara Hearn had been on vacation in Pensacola, Florida, with her friend Anita Burns and family when her mother called with the news. Anita’s father insisted they return immediately so Barbara could attend the funeral. Anita went with her.
They managed to get seats despite the crowd, and Barbara could see Elvis in the family section off to the left. But after a short time the curtain was drawn, blocking him from view. Afterward, a policeman held up the procession so Barbara could join it, and she went to Forest Hill Cemetery as part of the front end of the cortege.
When everyone had left the chapel, Elvis promised James Blackwood he would charter a plane for the group that evening, and thanked him for what he had done. “He put his arms around me and said, ‘James, you know what I am going through,’ ” referring to the airplane crash that had taken James’s brother, R. W. Then he leaned over his mother’s body and kissed her. “Mama,” he said, “I would give every dime I have and even dig ditches just to have you back.”
At the cemetery, Elvis got through the brief service without incident. But then as the mourners retreated to their hot summer cars, Elvis lost control again. As they lowered the coffin, he threw a small shovel of dirt on top, and cried out inconsolably.
“Good-bye, darling, good-bye. I love you so much. You know I lived my whole life just for you.” Then as everyone watched in horror, Elvis tried to jump in the ground with his mother. “They were holding him back and he was screaming,” Barbara Pittman said. “It was horrible. It was really just the worst thing I had ever seen.”
Barbara and Anita stayed until the end of the ceremony, and then drove to Graceland, where Elvis and Vernon were receiving guests. Barbara was surprised to be denied entry and left her card. Later, someone called and asked her to come back out. Elvis hugged her and apologized for her experience earlier. “Of everyone,” he said, “she would have wanted you here.”
“He was in a trance. I don’t think he himself could describe how he acted. Everyone was so sad. It happened so fast, it was difficult to comprehend.”
Reverend Hamill would meet with Elvis one on one in the next days and weeks, but Elvis’s grief was so deep that he was almost beyond reaching. Nothing, not the 200 floral arrangements, the 100,000 cards and letters, or the 500 telegrams, seemed to help.
Then the Colonel spoke with Mae Axton, who had been like a second mother to Elvis when he was starting out. Mae had just gotten out of the hospital and was unable to travel. Now she wrote Elvis a letter (“I just wrote my heart”), and put it on a plane. Tom Diskin took the missive directly to Elvis, who holed up in his room to read it over and over.
For a little while, then, Elvis seemed calmer. Then he was just as shattered as before. Guests noticed that he couldn’t sit still. He ambled from person to person, as if pleading with them to bring her back. And he wandered through the house, always stopping outside one door. “I can’t go into my mother’s room,” he said. “I can’t bear for anyone to go in there yet.”
Arlene Cogan, a tagalong fan who had met him at fourteen at his Chicago press conference in 1957, couldn’t believe how hard he took it. “He walked around carrying Gladys’s nightgown for days. He wouldn’t put it down. It went with him everywhere he went.”
“People were screaming, ‘Somebody, please help him!’ ” Barbara Pittman remembered. Finally Vernon called for a doctor, who disappeared with Elvis upstairs and gave him a shot to settle his nerves. He also left a bottle of pills.
“I saw