Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [164]
Initially assigned as a jeep driver to Company D, Elvis would soon be transferred to Company C, a scout platoon often sent out on maneuvers. His primary duty would be to drive a jeep for Reconnaissance Platoon Sergeant Ira Jones, the military hoping the assignment would keep him out of the public eye. Three days after his press conference on October 2 (“Classical music is just great to go to sleep by”), the army closed the base to the media.
Just as Elvis was settling into the spartan Ray Barracks, with its steel-framed beds and cold linoleum floors, Lamar, Red, Vernon, and Minnie Mae (following through on a promise she made to Gladys on her deathbed) arrived in Germany.
For a few days after Elvis left Fort Hood, it looked as though there might be a delay in getting the family matriarch overseas. Vernon had relied upon his attorney to verify Minnie Mae’s date of birth, which was necessary for her to secure her passport. But no record of her birth was readily available.
It took seventy-five cents’ worth of gasoline to drive through the backwoods of Arkansas to find a cousin who could supply the information, recalled Frank Glankler, a senior partner in the Memphis firm that represented the Presleys. “When we finally found the house, there was a goat on the front porch. The cousin didn’t want to sign the affidavit because he couldn’t read. He was afraid he might be signing away the deed to his house. In the end, he gave us his X.”
Now, on October 4, after an eighteen-hour flight from New York to Frankfurt, the Presley party drove to Bad Homburg and checked into the Ritters Park Hotel, a resort spa that offered thermal baths as palliative care for patients with bad hearts and respiratory ailments. Elvis joined his family for dinner at the hotel as a crowd collected outside.
Within days, Elvis got permission to live off base with his dependents, i.e., Vernon and Minnie Mae, and moved the entire group to the Hilberts Park Hotel in Bad Nauheim, an Old World, cobblestoned spa town of fourteen thousand people. There, they occupied four rooms on the third floor.
On weekends, Charlie Hodge came up from his post ten miles away. The two were close now, having bonded during the crossing. Charlie had been a regular on the Ozark Jubilee TV show, so he and Elvis knew the same country stars (Elvis asked a lot about Wanda Jackson), the same gospel stars, and the same songs.
They’d put on a talent show on the ship, Elvis playing piano but not singing. And after he was assigned to sergeant’s quarters—his fellow G.I.s wouldn’t leave him alone—he requested that Charlie be allowed to bunk with him. It helped stave off his loneliness and the pain of losing his mother. Despite his father, grandmother, and Anita, he felt totally alone in the world. Just before he left, another G.I. had given him a little book, an anthology, Poems That Touch the Heart. He read the pieces about motherhood and death over and over until he finally drifted off to sleep.
“I could hear Elvis dreaming sometimes at night, and I’d get out of my bunk and sit down and start talking to him, maybe joke with him a little bit, get him in a little better mood. He said years later, ‘Charlie, if it hadn’t been for you,’ he said, ‘You kept me sane all the way across the ocean.’ ”
Each morning, Elvis left early for the base, traveling by taxi or hitching a ride from Sergeant Jones. He was back by 6 P.M., except on Fridays, when he helped clean the barracks (his was number 3707, on the ground floor) and latrines for Saturday’s inspection.
But three weeks later, the group moved again. Someone more famous than Elvis now occupied the hotel, oil sheik Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia, who arrived with his harem of wives, a dozen children, and an assorted entourage, all in Bedouin gear. The king handed out gold watches instead of autographs, and Elvis felt upstaged, as Lamar saw it. “He didn’t like it that the king attracted all that attention.”
And so the Presley camp rented the top floor of Bad Nauheim’s elegant and luxurious Hotel Grunewald, a small three-story