Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [35]
Elvis noticed her hanging out with other guys, particularly a sailor she’d met there, and he was furious. For a boy who’d gotten his first erection watching his aunts dancing to fast music, it was all too intimate, a betrayal of the most treacherous sort, even if there was no actual sex involved. His head swirled with emotions, and he could hardly get his words out. They tumbled all over one another in a cascade of pain. Billie couldn’t take it another second.
“I finally had to tell him, ‘Elvis, I am going to begin seeing other boys.’ ” His reaction surprised her.
“He started crying. Until that night, I had never seen a man, or a boy, cry. He told me, ‘Billie, I was going to ask you to marry me!’ ”
Billie was stunned. Marriage certainly wasn’t on her mind, and she had no idea it was on his. But now there was nothing to do but break up, even as Elvis kept tabs on her—just happening to show up at the cafeteria, for instance, and at the Cotton Carnival the same night she went. “Look, there’s Elvis!” her girlfriend said. The way he looked, he was impossible not to notice. But Billie acted as if she didn’t see him, though there was no escaping him at the Courts.
The trauma of losing Billie triggered his sleepwalking again. One night he woke up on the stairs outside his apartment, wearing only his underwear. Suddenly, he heard Billie come in with her date, and he ran and hid, crouching, afraid to move while she kissed the boy good night.
For a while they tried to be friends, but Elvis’s heart was broken, and there was no fixing it, not even after Billie moved back to Mississippi.
Though she is a minor name in the Elvis saga, Billie Wardlaw was a progenitor for many of the women to follow. Her coloring, particularly her dark hair, would have made her seem like his twin, a female version of himself. It’s one reason he spent money well beyond his reach for a pair of blue jeans for her, as they matched his own, as Betty’s had. And her size—she was big boned, though not overweight—would have reminded Elvis of the young Gladys, which is why he had intended to propose marriage, to complete his psychological circle.
“At an unconscious level, we are always seeking resolutions to childhood dilemmas,” writes psychologist Charlotte Davis Kasl in her groundbreaking book, Women, Sex, and Addiction: A Search for Love and Power. “On some level, we’re looking for a second chance, to get what we missed the first time around. By attracting people similar to those in our families, we are given a chance to heal ourselves, to learn the lesson inherent to our childhood situations.”
In courting Billie, Elvis was attempting to separate himself from his mother and the pain of having lost his twin, even as Billie represented both. A happy relationship with her would have allowed him the chance to obliterate the guilt of surviving when Jessie did not, as well as quell the eternal loneliness of losing his twin, and the pain Jessie’s death had caused their mother. It also would have blunted the sexual shame of covert incest. The fact that Billie spurned him only added to his core belief that he wasn’t lovable. He would have felt terribly empty and rejected, not just as a boyfriend, but also as a person.
Finally, his violent outbursts at finding another boy’s picture in Billie’s purse and his tears at learning she was dating a sailor were predictable escapes. As an adult, still dealing with the seeds of destruction planted in childhood, Elvis would turn that violence inward, deflecting his loneliness and fear with prescription drugs and overeating.
At the start of his senior year, in the fall of 1952, Elvis was being stretched in all directions, practicing his music, trying to keep up a C average, and working long hours, first for the Upholsterers Specialties Company, and then for MARL Metal Products, a furniture manufacturer, on the 3 P.M. to 11 P.M. shift, using hand tools and an electric screw drill to make plastic tables. The strain