Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [203]
The hometown paper raved that Elvis successfully blended “Negro cotton field harmony, camp meeting fervor, Hollywood showmanship, beatnik nonchalance, and some of the manipulations of mass psychology.” Of the $51,612 raised, $47,823 would go to thirty-eight foundations and funds in the Bluff City, the remaining money to the Elvis Presley Youth Center in Tupelo. The contribution built on Elvis’s yearly donation to a long list of Memphis-area charities, with input from the governor.
Fewer than two weeks later, Elvis stood before the Tennessee State Legislature in Nashville. His appearance, staged by the Memphis delegation, was designed to thank him for his financial contributions, and to raise the city’s profile around the world. Governor Ellington, born in Mississippi and reared on gospel music like Elvis, also hoped the event would draw attention to tourism throughout the state.
The governor’s teenage daughter, Ann, attended college thirty miles away, at Middle Tennessee State University. She skipped classes that day to go to the capitol building, where her father would first meet Elvis in the governor’s suite of offices. The event had been well publicized, and all of capitol hill was jammed with cars and people standing outside. Everybody hoped to get a glimpse of Elvis.
As Ann remembered, the governor’s staff had been waiting quite a while, seated around the conference table, when all of a sudden the door opened and, “Here this entity was standing in the doorway [with] this black suit on, and every hair immaculately combed. There was absolutely dead silence in the room. It was just like somebody had sucked all of the air out of it.”
Elvis shook hands with Governor Ellington and sat down at the end of the table and talked a minute. Then when the sergeant at arms announced it was time to go, Elvis hit on the governor’s daughter.
“You’re going, aren’t you?” he asked.
The pretty blonde said no, she wasn’t scheduled to be part of it.
“I need for you to go,” he said.
Ann blushed and broke into a smile.
“I don’t think I am supposed to go. There’s not a seat up there for me.” She knew that seats were at a premium.
But Elvis didn’t care about any of that. “Yeah,” he said. “You’ve got to go.”
He grabbed her hand, and when Ann looked at her father, the governor nodded his approval. Then out they went, through the crowd, down the hallway, up the steps, and down into the opening of the legislature. After the governor and the speaker of the house made their remarks, Elvis went up to the podium. “Of course, the people just went bananas—you could hardly hear him because of the screaming,” Ann says. Before he left that day, Elvis became a Tennessee colonel, and he thanked the legislature for “the finest honor [I’ve] ever received.” After that, Elvis went to the state penitentiary to see Johnny Bragg of the Prisonaires, whose long-ago newspaper profile had led him to Sam Phillips.
Ann went with him, and then Elvis, with Joe and Alan in attendance, took her to the governor’s residence, where they sat awhile and talked. It was “kind of awkward” for both of them, Ann thought, and before long, Elvis turned and said good-bye and headed off to Memphis.
The next weekend, he was back to record at RCA’s Studio B. He called ahead and asked if she were going to be in town, and she invited him back out to the residence, where a uniformed highway patrolman greeted him at the door. “Elvis thought that was so neat.”
They talked for the better part of the evening, just the two of them in a small living room downstairs. He reminisced about Mississippi and talked about the movies he had done and hoped to do, telling her each one was a stepping-stone, “and that he wanted to get scripts that would show the talent that he knew he had.”
The hour grew late, and Ann’s parents were upstairs. “About two o’clock,