Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [162]
“Psychologists call this the premorbid personality, or the underlying structure that, given something apocalyptic, triggers all the pathology and pushes it to the surface,” says Dr. Peter O. Whitmer, an expert on the twinless twin phenomenon. “When Gladys died, so, too, did Elvis’s ability to bond with a woman. He may have gotten close at times, but he was already taken, as so many twinless twins are.”
In Killeen, Elvis tried to pick up where he had left off. Eddie Fadal invited him out every weekend, but nothing was really right—Colonel Parker told him to stay away from Eddie, that he was a homosexual with designs on him. LaNelle, too, was tired of all the commotion, weary of having to cook for Elvis and his gang. Later, Janice Fadal, who would grow up to marry Lamar Fike in a short-lived union, would realize that her mother had resented Elvis.
“Once I saw a bunch of limos pull up and I ran screaming through the house, ‘Elvis is here!’ Dad was excited, but Mom freaked out. . . . He became my father’s focus instead of us—the family.”
Still, everybody tried to put on a bright face when they got together and told funny stories about Elvis’s early touring days in Texas, when Elvis signed women’s breasts in Lubbock, and the girls put Band-Aids over the signatures to protect them in the shower.
At some point that summer, Elvis and Rex and a few of the guys drove to Dallas to girl-watch at the Sheraton and the Quality Inn. Then they learned about the American Airlines Stewardess College in Fort Worth. When they showed up, the house mother, Ronnie Anagnostis, got on the P.A. “Girls, guess what? Elvis Presley is coming through the front door!” The only thing they didn’t do was fly over the balcony, she said.
But “things were never quite the same again at Fort Hood,” according to Rex Mansfield. “We all suffered with and for Elvis’s great loss.”
Soon, the whole gang began to visit, because Elvis seemed to need them. Arlene Cogan went down, and Frances Forbes, and fan club presidents from Chicago and elsewhere. They all stayed with Elvis, joining Lamar, Vernon, Minnie Mae, Red, and Elvis’s cousins Gene, Junior, and Earl Greenwood. Sometimes there were twelve in all sleeping at the house while outside, a crowd of a hundred kept vigil.
When Anita arrived on the weekends, she was distraught to find so many people in the house, especially women. It was bedlam. “I could not believe it. They were all over the place. Every time I went down, there were different people there. Strangers. I’d never seen those people. Elvis didn’t act like himself. He would play the piano and look around. ‘Little, where are you?’ ”
She thought he was too intimate with them, that they were taking advantage of him. “I don’t like to sit alone too much and think,” he said by way of explanation. But Anita felt uneasy and wondered how it boded for their future.
On September 19, 1958, Elvis packed his things and put on his military attire to leave Fort Hood. At 7 P.M., a troop train would take him and 1,360 other soldiers to the Brooklyn Army Terminal in New York, where they would sail to Germany on the U.S.S. Randall.
Before he left the house, he asked Eddie to lead the group in a word of prayer. They all got down on their knees and held hands in a circle, and after Eddie spoke, each one took his turn. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the group,” Eddie recalled. Afterward, he rode with Elvis and Anita in the Lincoln. “Eddie,” Elvis said softly, “I really feel this is the end of my career. Everybody is going to forget about me.”
A light rain was falling, and a reporter approached him as he waved good-bye to Anita, Eddie, and the fan club presidents. Everybody had tears in their eyes, including Elvis. How do you feel? the reporter asked. “I just feel sad,” Elvis said.
There were people to catch his attention along the way, though—in Memphis, during a refueling