Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [340]
It was just a ruse, of course—he’d ordered a new Grand Prix for her, just as he had Melissa, and it was pulling up in the driveway. “Elvis walked out in front of me and he turned around and said, ‘Honey, I hope this one’s okay. It was the best I could do at four o’clock in the morning.’ ”
She didn’t quite know what to say—she’d just made her last payment on her Ford Grand Torino—and though she knew how funny it sounded, she asked if she could give her old car to her mother, unless Elvis needed it for the trade-in.
He had a laugh at that—she could do anything she wanted with her old car—and then told her to hop in. He wanted to drive out to the airport to show her the plane he was in the process of buying, a $900,000 Lockheed JetStar. She was behind the wheel and he was sitting beside her, still in his pajamas, when he asked if she had the lights on. Sure, sure, she told him. Farther down the road, he said, “J. C., are you sure you have your lights on?”
“Oh, yeah, my lights are on.”
Finally, he reached across her lap and pulled the knob, and the highway lit up like daylight. That’s when she really felt stupid, but then it wasn’t every night she got a car from Elvis.
When they got back to the house, they kissed a few times, but he was never too forward with her, and then he laid his heart on the line. “J. C., I can tell that you’re committed to somebody, and I have to protect my feelings. But if anything changes in your relationship, let me know because I want to see you again.” She told him okay, and then she walked out front and climbed behind the wheel of her new car. The sun was coming up as she crawled down the winding drive, and the first thing she thought was, “How am I going to explain this to my mother?”
Elvis was not about to give a girl a new car and just let her leave him in it, so two nights later, he showed up at the Grizzlies game and asked if JoCathy could sit with him. Near the end of the evening, he asked her to go to Fort Worth to see his other new plane, The Lisa Marie, a $250,000 Convair 880 jet, originally part of the Delta fleet, which was being customized and refurbished at an additional $800,000 as his show plane. From there, they’d probably go on to Las Vegas or Palm Springs, he told her. While it sure sounded good, she said, she couldn’t: She had a date.
Only a week had passed since she made the remark about the scarf and he’d kissed her, and she had a lot to process. He then took another girl from the game instead, but when he came back to town, he saw JoCathy every night until he left for his Vegas engagement. There, JoCathy and her mother were his guests in one of the round booths, and when Linda saw her there, “She put two and two together.” For the next three months, he would find a way to see JoCathy every time Linda was away.
Soon, they were spotted around town more and more, particularly at the Crosstown Theatre, and at the Colonial or Chickasaw country clubs, where they played racquetball with Billy and Jo Smith, George and Barbara Klein, and Billy and Angie Stanley. Elvis had taken up the sport at Dr. Nick’s urging and was building his own court at home. “He was truly trying to get his act together,” she says, though his eating habits—six small yogurts at a time from his little refrigerator off the bedroom—were still too poor for him to lose much weight.
One day, one of JoCathy’s pupils asked, “Miss Brownlee, are you dating Elvis Presley?” JoCathy told her she didn’t discuss her personal life with students, and the child said, “Well, I went home and told my mama that you were dating Elvis Presley, and my mama said, ‘There’s no way Elvis is dating a P.E. teacher. He only dates beauty queens and movie stars.’ ”
JoCathy did seem an unusual choice for him, given his history and the fact that they really had little in common. However, they were playful together—at one point he jokingly told her she could use a nose job, and they both laughed when she said he needed to get his entire body retreaded. But when he brought out The Impersonal Life and asked