Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [161]
Anita saw the pills, too, but they seemed warranted at the time. He would rally, as when the Memphis Highway Patrol, trying to cheer him, took him for helicopter rides all over Memphis. Then something would happen, and he’d break down again.
One day Elvis was sitting on the floor talking with some of the fans, telling stories about his army experiences, when Vernon came in the room carrying a stainless steel saucepan. Inside were three baseball-size snowballs.
Back in the winter, sitting at her seat at the breakfast bar, a melancholy Gladys had watched the snow fall and pile up in deep drifts by the back fence. Elvis was out of town, and more and more lately, she’d missed her son as if he were dead.
“How Elvis loves the snow!” she’d said, turning to Vernon. “Do you think he will be home for Christmas?” Without a word, she went to the cupboard and took out a small pan. Then she headed for the back door to make snowballs. “I’m going to put these in the freezer and keep ’em ’til Elvis comes home,” she’d explained. Vernon had forgotten all about them.
The discovery set Elvis off again, and he was awash with regret, tormented by how tender she was, how she’d thought of him every minute, and how he’d disappointed her at times.
They’d fought as hard as they’d loved, and their fights were commonplace, Gladys smacking him so hard on the back of the head sometimes (“Mama!”) that she nearly knocked him down. One day at Graceland, she’d started on him the minute he got up—about women, about staying out all hours.
He wasn’t living according to Jesus’ plan, she said, and she was angry, as mad as when she’d ripped a plowshare off in her youth. Elvis took it until lunch, but then his anger bubbled over, and he picked up a plate of tomatoes and threw it hard against the wall, the china shattering and fleshy red specks flying everywhere. Gladys set her jaw. “You do that again,” she warned, “and your life will be miserable from here on out!”
At the time, he worried about breaking her dishes and ruining her walls. But now he saw she didn’t care about that. All she wanted was him, the way they used to be, before he belonged to everyone.
“Funny,” he told a reporter four years later, “she never really wanted anything fancy. She just stayed the same, all the way through the whole thing. There’s a lot of things happened since she passed away that I wish she could have been around to see. It would have made her very happy and very proud. But that’s life, and I can’t have her.”
Gladys Love Presley had been an ordinary country woman, but she had brought greatness into this world. She had shaped a man who made a difference, who helped create a musical art form. Through that, he had united disparate people, changed sexual mores, and harnessed a burgeoning youth culture. No one would ever forget him, or her.
On August 24, ten days after his mother’s passing, Elvis went back to Fort Hood to rejoin his unit. Just before he left the house, he went to Gladys’s door. “I got to go, Mama,” he said, and broke down once more. Then he told his father and Alberta that nothing was to be moved in Gladys’s room while he was away. He wanted it to remain exactly as she had left it, preserved as if she were still alive, as if he might find her there when he returned from overseas. In a month, he would be in Germany, assigned to the Third Armored Division, and stationed in Friedberg.
But Elvis was not ready to go back to Killeen, let alone go to Europe. It was all too soon for a trauma of such magnitude. Gladys’s death had not just been the passing of his mother and his best friend, but psychologically, Elvis had experienced a double death. The forfeiture of his twin and the immediate loss of his mother were inextricable, compressing