Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [38]
Regis had a crush on Elvis, who she considered “a gentle soul, but all boy—he kind of had this swagger to him.” She used to see him playing football in the Triangle, the grassy open field at the complex. But she’d never spoken to him, and never thought he’d paid any attention to her—he seemed too interested in Betty or Billie. Of course, he was a weird dresser, in his yellow sport coat with brown trim, and he had a case of teenage acne. But from day one, she remembers, “I thought he was cute.”
She lived in a rooming house on Merriweather Street, a bus ride away, and hadn’t expected to see Elvis again. But there he was, and he was talking to her. And he still had those sideburns she’d always liked. “He was a loner, a looker. Very sexy, with slicked-back hair.”
They played spin the bottle that night, and Regis’s girlfriends, miffed that she had kissed a boy they liked, went off and left her by herself when their ride came. Regis was stranded. “I didn’t have anybody I could call to come pick me up, because by then my four older siblings had left home and my mother didn’t have a car.” Elvis offered to drive her, and she nervously agreed. She’d never been alone in a car with a boy before, and in fact, she’d never dated—she was a ninth grader at the all-girl Holy Names, “the poorest Catholic school in Memphis.” But when they got to her front porch and Elvis asked for her phone number, “I knew I wanted to see him.”
Though he was eighteen, the four-year age gap didn’t bother either one of them. “Growing up in housing projects with a single mom, five [other] kids, and a very dysfunctional family background, I pretty much raised myself,” says Regis. “So I was fourteen, but I was a very mature fourteen.” And Elvis, still stinging from Billie’s cruel rebuff, found the relationship with Regis finally put him in a position of control and made him feel like something of an older brother.
Psychologically, his attraction to her was more complex. Because his stunted emotional growth left him unable to move much past fourteen, Regis wasn’t just a little buddy but a replication of himself. Unconsciously, fourteen would now be the magic age for so many of his future romantic interests.
When they first began dating, Elvis worked at night part-time, ushering at Loew’s. (At some point, he was fired after an altercation with another usher, who complained that a concession stand girl gave him free candy.) His usual habit would be to drop by Regis’s place in the afternoon, sometimes waiting for her when she got home from school. But she never knew exactly when he was coming, and she never invited him in: “My mother had had another child—and still no husband—and I was left at home with this two-year-old. My family life was so chaotic that I just couldn’t talk about it to him.”
Regis was also embarrassed that her family didn’t actually own the house, an immaculate, large brick home with flowers in the yard, but simply lived in one rented room. Pretty soon she couldn’t tell him, because Elvis thought otherwise, and his imagination had run away with him. “He used to say, ‘One of these days, I’m going to buy my mama a house like this.’ ” And he told her about his twin.
Often they simply sat in the glider on the screened-in porch and talked (“His humor was the type that he could just come out with funny remarks”), and sometimes he sang to her with his guitar, just strumming and humming. He was working on a new ballad, “My Happiness,” and he sang that to her, too, his baritone, melancholy and soft, floating on the humid air. She was amazed that someone as shy as he was could put his heart on the line like that. “He sang it so tenderly. It seemed like it held a lot of emotion for him.”
Evening shadows make me blue,
When each weary day is through,
How I long to be with you,
My happiness . . .
Soon he began courting her in the evening, too. His worn-out Lincoln had a little seat in