Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [258]
Chapter Twenty-Six
Hitched!
By early 1967, Elvis owned at least a dozen horses, which meant that he could now play cowboy for real. In 1953, he and Gene Smith had gone to the Mid-South Fair and posed in western hats and holsters for an iconic image of the era, and he’d never gotten over the way it made him feel—tough, brooding, ready to take on the world, even as he felt apart from it.
Every day he went out in his chaps, boots, Stetson, and rancher coat to check on his growing herd. Lamar called it dressing the part. On the rare occasions when he traveled by air, “he’d put a scarf around his neck and fly the plane. At Graceland, I’d say, ‘Alan, where’s Elvis?’ He’d say, ‘He’s upstairs. He’s in the middle of the bed with his helmet and shoulder pads on, watching Monday Night Football.’ ”
In late 1966 he went on a horse-buying expedition to find a Tennessee Walker for Vernon. On the drive, he happened upon Twinkletown Farm, a 160-acre cattle ranch near Walls, Mississippi, about ten miles south of Whitehaven. It was daybreak, and before him, a white, sixty-five-foot lighted cross stood in the middle of rolling green hills near a rippling lake. Nearby was a small farmhouse.
At first glance, Elvis felt as though he’d had the breath knocked out of him: It was a vision nearly as powerful as seeing Christ in the cloud in the desert. Alan was driving Elvis’s double-cab pickup truck, and he had him pull over. The property was for sale, and Elvis took it as a sign that he was meant to have it. He sent Alan to investigate, and almost immediately, Elvis made a $5,000 down payment toward the $437,000 purchase price, which included prize Santa Gertrudis cattle. He would rename the farm the Circle G Ranch, for Graceland, and appoint Alan as foreman to nominally oversee the maintenance and livestock.
The ranch became Elvis’s new obsession, and at first, he was like a man reborn. He dove in, making extensive renovations and improvements, putting up a fence, building a barn, grading roads, and installing a gas tank. Then he went shopping for farm equipment, breaking out of his self-seclusion long enough to load up the car with the guys and drive to the Sears store at the Southland Mall. He gathered up hammers and nails and hinges for the pasture gates, and even the display model of a twelve-horsepower lawn tractor, taking everybody for a ride when he got home.
Ray Walker, the tall bass singer of the Jordanaires, couldn’t believe the difference in him. Instead of the apathetic and lethargic Elvis he’d last seen, he now saw a man with a renewed energy for life: “The happiest we ever saw him was when he had that ranch. I think those were the only peaceful, relaxed moments he had in the last ten years of his life. He walked in one day, and we just stood there and stared at him. Finally, he broke into a smile and said, ‘Shall we dance?’ ”
To Elvis, the Circle G Ranch was not just a place to relax but also a breeding ground for communal dreams. He was thirty-two years old now, and he thought the ranch would allow him the chance to replicate a family, to feel complete in a way he never had with the death of his sibling, and then the loss of Gladys. When he was on maneuvers in Germany, he wrote a letter to Patsy Presley and her parents in which he reminisced about the last Christmas Gladys was alive, when they were all together at Graceland. “You couldn’t read the letter without crying,” Patsy Presley later said. “For Elvis, family was everything.”
That was one reason he had just allowed his forty-three-year-old aunt, Delta Mae Biggs, to move into Graceland on the death of her husband, Pat, a riverboat gambler and nightclub owner. Pat had instilled the desire in Elvis to make something of himself, and to own a nice house and car, even though Pat himself could never hold on to money. “Family talk was that