Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [33]
Billie confirmed it years later: “We really liked each other, but I think he liked me just a little more than I liked him.” Her mother worked nights some, and Elvis would come up to Billie’s apartment, but she never let him in while she was alone—everybody knew who did what and when and how at the Courts. So the two just sat on the steps and talked. One night, she asked him to teach her how to play the guitar, and he brought it up and showed her where to put her fingers on the fretboard to make the chords.
Elvis tried to deepen her affection, proffering a box of cherries, and then a necklace and bracelet that Billie always suspected he’d bought for Betty and took back when they broke up. He went to great lengths. One day, Billie’s little sister peered out the window and couldn’t believe her eyes: “Look at that. Elvis is climbing up that sign across the street!” Billie shook her head. Why was Elvis being so silly? Her sister thought she was cruel, but Billie refused to acknowledge him. “I wanted him to grow up.”
They walked to school together to save a dime, and sometimes went to the movies at the Suzores. Elvis loved the dreamy escapism of the movies, his interests maturing from watching cowboy pictures to studying Tony Curtis, with his shiny black hair and knack for winning the girls. In the fall of 1950 Elvis applied for his Social Security card, and shortly after, he and Luther Nall got night jobs as ushers at Loew’s State movie theater on South Main, where they wore uniforms to work. The job promised the delicious perk of letting them see the movies free. But like all twinless twins, Elvis had a fascination with uniforms and loved wearing his usher suit. It not only gave him an air of authority, but also made him look like Luther and all the other male employees, making him feel as if he belonged to a special group.
That’s one reason he joined ROTC at Humes that year, in the tenth grade. Fannie Mae Crowder, who saw him in the halls a lot, noticed, “About every time I saw him, he was wearing his ROTC uniform, as if that was all he had to wear.” And Doris Guy remembered how proud he was of it, all dressed up, and how he needed to show it off, organizing all the younger kids in the Courts as his soldiers, making them march back and forth, back and forth, all around in the courtyard when he got home in the afternoons. The only drawback was that his ROTC duties sometimes cut into the time he hoped to spend with Billie.
But Billie, too, had responsibilities, working after school and on weekends at Britlings’s Cafeteria, where both her mother and Gladys had also been employed, Gladys eventually leaving that job to become a nurse’s aide at St. Joseph’s Hospital. Working around everybody’s schedule curtailed the young couple’s outings, so most of what they did was right around the Courts.
Their romance was chaste (“We were never doing anything we shouldn’t have been doing,” she said), even after sixteen-year-old Elvis took his driver’s test in 1951 in his uncle Travis’s 1940 Buick. Now that he had his license, he borrowed cars for double-dates with his cousin, Gene, or Luther, or the other guys around the Courts. He was growing up fast, getting handsome, and gaining confidence in himself. That summer, he took a job operating a spindle drill press and making rocket shells at Precision Tool, where Travis still worked. Each Friday, he came home and gave his paycheck to his father, taking out only a little for dating.
If he had any money left over, he would go to Lansky Brothers on Beale Street and buy flamboyant clothing. Gladys had always made sure that his clothes were neat and clean (“He may not have had many clothes, but what he had was nice,