Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [23]
“One night one of his uncles was visiting, and he was telling us never to mess with women, that women would eat you up like blue cheese, or something like that. When he said that, Elvis fell on the floor laughing. He got a big kick out of that.”
Still, most of his friends were females, like Becky Martin or Barbara Spencer, and he didn’t mind babysitting for his relatives’ children, toting them on his hip the way a girl might do. Gladys remained his whole world, as his role model, friend, companion, and protector. “I could wake her up any hour of the night,” Elvis said in 1958, “and if I was worried or troubled by something, well, she’d get up and try to help me.”
For too many years, she walked him to school every day, and legend has it she continued such hovering behavior long after Elvis was old enough to walk on his own, or with other children his age. Annie Presley dispelled that, insisting, “She didn’t walk him to school. She’d walk him to the highway and see him across, and then she’d come back home. Lots of evenings, we’d just sit on our porch and watch for ’em and see ’em get close to the highway. Then one of us would go and see ’em across the road.”
Oleta Grimes, Elvis’s fifth grade teacher and a neighbor to the Presleys, also refuted the myth that Gladys accompanied Elvis to school, both at Lawhon Elementary, and later at Milam Junior High.
“Being a neighbor,” she told author Bill Burk in 1991, “I walked with the children, and I don’t remember Mrs. Presley walking Elvis to or from school, particularly during the fifth grade. He and the others walked with me most days.”
However, Gladys still watched her son like a hawk, even when he was playing with other children. Many of them, like first cousin Harold Loyd, who lived with the Presleys for a while in East Tupelo, feared her and nearly prayed that nothing would happen to Elvis while they were together.
“I always played with Elvis real gentle when he was a kid, ’cause I knew how Gladys was. Many times I heard him say, ‘Mama, can I go out and play?’ And she would say, ‘Yeah, you can go out and play in the yard, but don’t you get too far away that you can’t hear me if I call you.’ The rest of us would wander off, go down in the bottom, and go swimming in the channel, all except Elvis. He couldn’t do that. He had to stay right there close to the house.”
“My mama never let me out of her sight,” Elvis confirmed in 1965. “I couldn’t go down to the creek with the other kids. Sometimes when I was little, I used to run off. Mama would whip me, and I thought she didn’t love me.”
Eventually Gladys loosened the reins enough that Elvis and his friend James Ausborn could go to Tulip Creek to fish and swim.
For the most part, Elvis chose devotion to Gladys over popularity with his peers. But occasionally he would challenge her in larger ways, either because the pull of joining in with the others got the best of him, or because he desperately needed to find and prove his own identity. His cousin Bobby Roberts recalled Gladys would tell Bobby not to let Elvis climb a tree, “But he’d climb the tree anyhow, just like all boys do. He would climb right to the top of the tallest tree. She was always worried about him falling and hurting himself.”
Elvis also held his own in fistfights as he grew older, knowing the other kids would run over him if he didn’t risk the occasional black eye or a bloody nose. Even that proved problematic with a mother like Gladys, reported playmate Odell Clark.
“I remember some folks next door jumped on Elvis one day, and Gladys wore two or three of them out with her brush broom—parents and all.”
It was not an isolated incident. Another time, remembered Christine Roberts Presley, Elvis’s great-aunt and the wife of J.D.’s brother Noah Presley, Gladys got a stick after a child who came to play. “He said something about Elvis, and boy, Gladys picked up a broomstick.