Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [341]
“I cared a lot about him, and I knew he cared about me, but it wasn’t going anywhere. He did tell me a few times that he loved me, but it would be right before he dozed off to sleep. I’m not going to say that it was something that it wasn’t, but I wouldn’t take anything for it.”
One of the problems was that JoCathy was exhausted from trying to balance Elvis’s schedule with her own. In addition to her teaching and Mid-South Coliseum commitments, she logged two other part-time jobs. He tried to get her to quit working so she could be with him more, but she had better sense than that, even though it irritated him that she was so tired all the time. (“If you yawn one more time, we are out of here,” he said at the movies one night.)
She couldn’t help it. She left Graceland at 6:30 A.M. to teach school, and by the time she went home and then got back to Whitehaven about 4:30 or 5:00, Elvis would just be getting up. They’d have supper together, read, watch TV, or make the usual outings, and then she’d get only about two hours’ sleep before the day started all over again. After a while, she started moving some of her wardrobe there (“my nightgowns, and my teaching clothes, and things that I wore when we would go out”) to make things easier. But it wasn’t enough for a man who wanted a woman at his beck and call all the time.
Then one Saturday in late October 1975, they got their wires crossed. She arrived at Graceland after one of her part-time jobs, selling tickets at the coliseum, and Elvis “kind of acted like he was surprised to see me. I had gone into the dressing area, and he walked in and he said, ‘Uh, J. C., I have plans for tonight. Just grab a few of your things, and I’ll call you tomorrow.’ Well, I was just worn out, and it rubbed me the wrong way. I thought, ‘I am not believing this!’ I got a clothesbasket and just started throwing everything in there. Elvis said, ‘Look, I just said to grab a few things. You don’t have to be such a bitch about it.’ And I stormed out of there, and that was the last time I saw him.”
A couple of weeks later, JoCathy heard he was dating Dawn Bonner, whose father, Alex, was an Emmy-winning executive at WHBQ.
When nothing came of that, Elvis tested the waters with seventeen-year-old Tanya Tucker during his two-week engagement in Vegas that December. The singer, a child who sounded like a woman, had become a national sensation at thirteen for her grown-up songs of desolate love, including “Delta Dawn” and Would You Lay with Me (In a Field of Stone).” The latter song, especially, had marked her with something of a racy image, but her father-manager, Beau Tucker, a pipeline worker who fancied himself an eccentric sharpie along the lines of Colonel Parker, hardly ever let her out of his sight.
Beau Tucker had moved his family from Arizona to the Las Vegas area to spur his daughter’s career, and Tanya had dreamed of meeting Elvis, with whom she was personally and professionally obsessed, long before she landed a recording contract. (“He would come into town and I wanted to see him so bad, but we couldn’t afford the thirty bucks.”) She knew he was part of her destiny, though, and their eventual introduction came through Glen D. Hardin, who played piano in both stars’ bands. Glen arranged for Elvis to acknowledge Tanya from the stage. But when a security guard came to take her back after the first show, she remembered her father’s advice: “Now Tanya, that boy can have anybody he wants. Let him know he can’t have you.”
“Hey,” she told the guard. “Tell Mr. Presley to just wait. I’m signing autographs out here!”
When she finally went back, Elvis gave her the same treatment, stalling her for more than thirty minutes. She sat down