Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [34]
In an era of crew cuts, he also attempted to grow sideburns and paid obsessive attention to his hair, which had darkened to a dull, pale blond in puberty. The girls at the Courts teased him about looking in the mirror all the time, and they said his hair was so long and straight that it hung down to his chin when he combed it forward. Elvis would grin and explain that’s why he was combing it, to keep it from falling down on his face. He finally styled it into a goopy wall of rose oil tonic, Vaseline, or Royal Crown pomade, which made it all look darker. In time, building on the Tony Curtis look and the hero of his comic books, Captain Marvel, Jr., he would sculpt a perfect pompadour, which curled into a greasy ducktail at the nape of his neck.
The family was now paying forty-three dollars a month for housing at the Courts, but Vernon was out of work, claiming a bad back. He used the excuse to let Gladys and Elvis support him much of the time, and that led to strained relations between father and son, Elvis sometimes talking back to his father, but never his mother. He acted out in other ways, too, getting in trouble for skipping school to go swimming in Wolf River with Luther, and earning a paddling from school principal T. C. Brindley.
Still, in the summer of 1952, just before Elvis’s senior year at Humes, Vernon staked him to a 1941 green, two-door Lincoln that Elvis and Luther found in a junk car lot. The cost: thirty-five dollars.
“My daddy was something wonderful to me,” Elvis would say about the car, since it was a rarity for a high school boy to have his own wheels, especially one whose family lived in government housing. Buzzy remembers Elvis driving him to Tupelo to show him where he’d grown up, just to have something to do. He took Luther one time, too, even though the tires were so thin on the old Lincoln that Luther didn’t think they’d make it down and back.
One night, Elvis drove the whole gang down to Mississippi, this time to Water Valley, where Billie’s relatives lived. She “was having some kind of party down there,” as Farley remembered it. But try as he did, Elvis couldn’t seem to impress any of Billie’s family except her mother, who told him he sang well enough to be on the radio. Elvis blushed and stammered and finally said, “Mrs. Rooker, I can’t sing.”
Once, the couple rode the bus to the end of the line to have dinner with Billie’s older sister. Billie was embarrassed at Elvis’s table manners, since he ate everything with a spoon and never touched his fork, “not then and not at any meal I had with him later.” It was bizarre, she thought, and she noted that when they ate with his parents, he had a special platter, “and he wouldn’t eat from anything but that platter.”
The boy was odd, yes, but so many of the silly things he did seemed like kid stuff. Even though she was younger, she thought she had simply matured faster, and it bothered her. Then she began to see his temper, as on the day he spotted another boy’s picture in her purse and just went wild. “He grabbed it out, and without saying anything, he threw that picture on the ground and began stomping it and grinding it into the ground with the heel of his shoe.”
Billie had never seen Elvis like that, and it shocked and frightened her.
They’d been going together for a year and a half by now, and more and more, Billie found things about Elvis she didn’t like, including the fact that he didn’t dance. He and his friends may have held parties in the Presleys’ apartment, but the truth was he couldn’t dance, not really. He could slow dance—everybody could do that, drape yourself onto a partner and inch around in a circle—but he couldn’t fast dance with a girl, and he didn’t know the sophisticated dance steps for big-band music. And dancing, it turned out, was something Billie really wanted to do. After work, she and her mother walked by the USO club on Third Street on their