Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [201]
Patti (Elvis called her “Patricia”) would become the only female member of the Memphis Mafia. “He didn’t have a mom or a sister, and I told him the truth. He needed someone to commiserate with him. I became his Jewish mother.” He talked baby talk to her, and she nurtured him, did his hair, cut his toenails, rubbed his back, gave him a shoulder to cry on. She never went on the payroll, because she had her hairdressing work four days a week in Beverly Hills, “and I couldn’t give up my complete life to work for him.”
But she ended up traveling with him part of the week, and “practically lived at his L.A. homes,” going over every day after work and having dinner with the gang, and staying until about 1 A.M. When she’d announce she had to go home, Elvis would say, “Don’t go home, don’t go home.” Then he’d send someone to follow her, make sure she got in okay. “He was a good, good man.”
Later she accompanied him to Memphis, where he took her to Humes High, and Sun Records, and Lauderdale Courts, and to Gladys’s grave, “which was the greatest honor he could give me. He teased me. He said, ‘You’re standing on my mother.’ He had a very, very funny sense of humor.”
Despite her Jewish background, she ate his deep-dish southern food—red-eye gravy and grits—and even sang gospel songs with him. She loved that music, loved being around him, loved having all those “brothers” to take care of her.
Her parents weren’t crazy about the idea. She wasn’t dating anyone and just wanted to hang out with Elvis. But they eventually came around to it, seeing that he loved her platonically, and that he wasn’t a threat. Any other girl who came to the house had to accept her, too, even as some tried to muscle her out: “On Perugia, girls would come up to the house, and I’d sit next to Elvis on the couch. And as soon as I’d get up to go to the bathroom, some other girl would run over to sit next to him.” But there was no displacing her. She was a lifer.
“Elvis was like my family. We grew up together. He brought me up, and he liked bringing up his women. He adopted me and protected me and wouldn’t let anybody hit on me. Even when I was in my thirties, Elvis used to say, ‘Patti is family. She doesn’t fool around.’ I’d say, ‘Hey, I can fool around.’ ”
But living with Elvis was “really difficult. You had to be mother, sister, and confidante.” Patti was a lucky girl, she says. “But you know what? He was really lucky to have me, too.”
All around him now, there were new beginnings and sudden endings, and they wasted no time as 1961 rolled in.
On February 4, Junior Smith, Elvis’s frequently frightening cousin, died. (“The way he would look at you. God! It would make your bladder weak,” says Lamar.) Elvis kept him going by adding him to the entourage, like his brother Gene. But then when Elvis went away to the army, Junior just stayed drunk, trying to wash away his flashbacks of shooting civilians in Korea with a Browning automatic rifle. He’d get that stare. “Oh, oh,” everybody would say, “he’s remembering stuff again.” Then he started mixing alcohol and drugs, popping sleeping pills and amphetamines that Elvis gave him. The combo did him in.
The night he died, he went on a bender with his uncle Travis Smith. Travis went on to his bedroom and passed out, and Junior went to Billy’s room and lay down on the bed.
When Billy came home around eleven-thirty, he realized Junior was there and started to crawl over him when he saw something on the bed. “Well, he’s done thrown up,” Billy thought and went into the living room to sleep on the couch. The next morning, Billy awoke with a start. It was eerie, the way he felt. He just knew something was wrong. He went in and looked at Junior,