Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [28]
Vernon and Travis Smith had already gone to Memphis scouting for work, returning after three weeks with no prospects. Now they decided to try again, Vernon saying, “There has to be more than this.”
In the fall of 1948, when Elvis was thirteen, the Presley and the Smith families packed everything they owned into Travis’s eleven-year-old green Plymouth and left overnight for Memphis to start life anew.
Maggie hadn’t seen Elvis since he moved to Green Street, but she was shattered at the news.
“It broke my heart when the Presleys announced they were moving to Memphis. For a long time after that, I cried. I missed [Elvis] so much. I even kept missing him after I got married and had children. I know in my heart we would have gotten married. We were very young, but we were very much in love.”
Secretly Elvis, too, fantasized about their future. In 1994 his estate auctioned Vernon and Gladys’s marriage license, and on the back, in a child’s hand, was a testimony to a mock marriage between Elvis Presley and “Magdline” Morgan. Elvis’s signature, in pencil, was authentic, though Maggie’s was not. Elvis, who had never learned to correctly spell his beloved’s name, had scrawled it all out in a grand romantic gesture on September 11, 1948, just as the family was preparing to leave Mississippi. Before he signed his next marriage license, nearly twenty years later, Elvis would become far more callous about romance.
Elvis and Betty Ann McMahan, Lauderdale Courts, circa 1949. Gladys introduced them through her mother. She broke his heart in choosing an Arkansas boy over him. (Margaret Cranfill/from the author’s collection)
Chapter Three
Blue Heartache
With a population of 237,000, Memphis was the largest city in the mid-South, and a serendipitous destination for the Presley family. King Cotton had built this town from the lazy banks of the Mississippi River, but in the post–World War II years, Memphis looked like a country boy in his first zoot suit, as urban and rural cultures came together to bolster the city as a regional hub of commerce and culture, and to move it from an agricultural to an industrial mecca.
Though middle-class jobs were not yet plentiful, opportunity crackled in the air, as if change itself were a seed in the fertile Mississippi Delta. And the mere size of the city meant that an ex-con like Vernon could reinvent himself with new friends and employers, and perhaps even with his wife. Gladys was so energized by the move that she seemed to enjoy her husband’s advances, an early friend of Elvis remembering that Vernon “was always hugging her and kissing her and showing her affection. He could never keep his hands off her.”
For Elvis, thirteen and just coming into puberty, everything was exciting and new. Still burning with the fire to be a singer, he was exhilarated to find himself smack in the home of the blues, historically a woeful or triumphal form of musical salvation, summoned in the cries and the catharsis of the worried and the worn-down. Before long, he would be poking around on Beale Street, staring at the photographs in the window of the Blue Light Studio, his ears tuned to the music—solo guitarists, wailing vocalists, harmonica players, or maybe just guitar and drum groups—pouring out of the smoky clubs. Music was everywhere on Beale Street. Men even played saxophone in the park.
Sometimes he’d meander over to North Main, every now and then summoning the courage to walk into the Green Owl, a black beer joint, where people spilled out onto the sidewalk on weekend nights. Elvis was wide-eyed at the city slickers and the pimped-up dandies in their bright Lansky Brothers clothes, and even more so at the women whose illegal turns helped buy them. He was also enthralled by the musicians, slack-jawed blacks who played with their eyes closed, a cigarette or something stronger tugging