Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [22]
Elois Bedford was proud of him all the same. But later that year, another girl captured Elvis’s attention, and now he had to break the news. “I was just about to get on the school bus and go home that afternoon,” Elois remembered, “and Elvis handed me a note.”
It was short but not sweet, saying only: I have found another girl.
“Her name was Magdalene Morgan,” Elois continued. “I lost him that day.”
The event was meaningful in the larger scheme of things—moving from Elois to Magdalene was perhaps the last time Elvis limited himself to sequential girlfriends. In years to come, and especially once his recording career caught fire, his love interests would be both many and concurrent. This was behavior he learned from both his grandfather, J.D., and to some extent Vernon.
Maggie Morgan was a far more important figure in Elvis’s life than Elois Bedford, as their interest in each other spanned several years and ran deeper on every level. And although neither of them could have known it at the time, Maggie was an archetype for so many women to come: She was a stand-in for Gladys.
With dark hair and eyes, and standing a good three inches taller than her new beau, Maggie had known Elvis since the third grade at Lawhon Elementary. But it was at the Assembly of God church that her infatuation simmered. Already the church pianist by eight or nine, she played behind the budding singer as he performed the old hymns—“Amazing Grace,” “The Old Rugged Cross.” Vernon and Gladys did not attend church regularly, Aaron Kennedy said years later, and no one could depend on them to take a lead there. But Elvis and Maggie rode the church bus together as Christ Ambassadors—a youth group that traveled the nearby towns of Saltillo, Corinth, and Priceville. And the two were paired off together in the Christmas pageants, Elvis playing Joseph to her Mary.
Gladys and Maggie’s mother were friends as well, and the women visited in each other’s homes. During such times, Elvis and Maggie would sneak out of the house together to be alone.
“We would walk in the woods and hold hands and talk, dream aloud about the future and what we wanted to be. Elvis always wanted to be a singer. That was his dream even then. And he always said [the girl] he would marry would have to be a lot like his mother.”
On one visit, Elvis and Maggie ventured out into the woods behind his house, and Elvis carved a heart into the side of a tree, carefully cutting out their initials and the words LOVE FOREVER beneath them. Later, he did the same thing on a stack of lumber. The two had an understanding—they were sweethearts and belonged to each other, and as Maggie remembers, “We were so close at that time I just thought we would always be together.”
Elvis didn’t precisely say the same, since he wasn’t much of a talker. At school, in fact, he stood out only for being an especially giving child who wanted to please. His grades weren’t remarkable—arithmetic and geography, especially, proved nearly fatal. And his features had not yet formed into a handsome face, his high cheekbones, part of his Indian ancestry, just barely discernible, and his hooded eyelids looking more droopy than dreamy. It was only when he turned to music that he seemed to shine. In Maggie’s view, he was just a nice polite boy, her “ideal guy.”
With boys, Elvis wasn’t as restrained. On Berry Street, he played with the son of Lether Gable, Vernon’s partner in crime in the check-forging caper, who was now the Presleys’ next-door neighbor. The boys were wrestling one day, getting rougher than they intended, when Elvis somehow snapped his playmate’s hip. He felt terrible about it and, according to Annie Presley, “went and sat with him every day and visited while he was laid up.” And while he didn’t play hooky, sass his parents, or talk back to his teachers, “Elvis