Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [32]
One day, their neighbor Margaret Cranfill took a photograph of Elvis and Betty sitting on the curb on Winchester, both of them in dungarees with the hems rolled up into neat cuffs: twins. In it, the dark-haired Betty, her arm propped up and her chin in her hand, offers a closed smile for the camera. But a melancholy Elvis looks as if Betty has just told him good-bye. And perhaps she had. Their romance ended when a boy from Arkansas stole her affections, though Elvis’s attraction to women whose appearance was remarkably similar to his was to be a nearly constant feature in his future choice of companions.
In the early days of his career, Elvis told a reporter he’d gotten his heart broken in high school—a gal he thought a lot of suddenly quit seeing him. For that reason, he said, he’d had trouble allowing himself to be fond of just one girl.
Whether that was Betty McMahan or her successors, Elvis began seeing Billie Wardlaw before Betty broke up with him. Billie, Betty’s next-door neighbor, moved in with her mother, Thelma, in 1950, the year she turned fourteen. She was already so tall and pretty, with her long dark hair, that before she moved from her native Sardis, Mississippi, her grandmother had warned, “Now, Billie, you better not go up there to Memphis and get pregnant and embarrass your mother!”
Billie had never even heard the word pregnant before and didn’t know what it meant, but when she immediately turned the heads of all the boys in the Courts, she took heed.
“All the kids kept trying to get me to leave our third-floor apartment and come down and play with them, but I would just hang out the window and talk to them. I told them the reason I couldn’t come down was because I didn’t have any clothes to wear. I would just keep hanging out the window and talking.”
Elvis, by now fifteen, was smitten with the mysterious girl peering down from above, especially since she’d teased that she had no clothes. He’d told her his name and exchanged pleasantries (“I’m from Mississippi, too”), and after a few weeks, while the other boys waited her out, treating her like a princess in some fairy-tale tower, Elvis took matters in hand. One day Billie heard a knock on the door and opened it to find him standing there, holding something behind his back. They giggled a bit the way teenagers do, nervous in the first throes of courtship, and then Elvis shifted the package in his hands and held it out to her. “Here,” he said. “I brought you something.”
“I opened the package, and it was a pair of blue jeans, the first pair of blue jeans I ever had. Elvis said, ‘Now you can come down and play with us.’ ”
Elvis’s idea of “play” was the old kissing game of spin the bottle, and as the kids of the Courts numbered about thirteen, and always hung out together, the game was almost evenly split between boys and girls. Farley’s little sister, the tomboy Doris, joined in, as did Luther Nall’s kid sis, Jerry. She was always photographing Elvis with her little camera and had a mad crush on him, even though he thought of Jerry as his little sister, popping her with a wet towel at the pool one day and accidentally scarring her leg. When dark came and somebody suggested spin the bottle, all the girls got excited, including Billie: “Elvis was a great kisser. We always hoped the bottle would land on him!”
From the start of their relationship, Elvis was possessive. He’d had other flirtations with Jo Ann Lawhorn, and another Jo Ann over at Bickford Park, who came to some of the group parties at the Courts with him. He’d tried to get something started with Carolyn Poole at school. And he tried with Georgia Avgeris, too, throwing wadded-up gum wrappers at her in class to get her attention, but she was Greek Orthodox and not allowed to date outside her religion. Besides, his feelings for Billie were different. One day they had a spat, and she began flirting with Farley, who found himself in a tough spot: “Elvis didn’t like that at all, and we had a ‘discussion’ over it.” But it all blew over quickly.
“I think she