Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [39]
As he had been with Billie, Elvis was a consummate gentleman. His looks completely belied his behavior. (“If you were to see him on the street, you’d probably think he was a hoodlum.”) At fourteen, she didn’t think she could really be in love with someone, but she liked him a lot. She kissed him every night from the second date on, and she had her expectations. Carol and Judy still hung out around the Courts, and reported he was a good kisser, “and I wanted to see for myself.” She had heard he knew how to kiss in that deep way, but that presented a dilemma.
“The nuns at my school told us we shouldn’t allow boys to kiss us with their mouths open. So I’ll just say Elvis gave me long kisses. You could say we made out. But he never tried to go farther. He wasn’t like that.”
Regis knew he was serious about music, but he was so modest he never even mentioned his big success at the Humes Minstrel Show. One of his favorite things to do was to take her to the All-Night Gospel Singings at Ellis Auditorium, where the Statesmen and the Blackwood Brothers would perform.
“About two in the morning, I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, and we’d leave.” But Elvis could have lasted until dawn. “Some of those spirituals had big, heavy rhythm beats like a rock-and-roll song,” he would remember in 1965. “That music didn’t hurt anybody, and it sure made you feel good.” Sitting in the audience, he sang right along with everyone onstage, trying to hit all the high and low notes. Regis scrunched down in her seat. “I would look at him like he was crazy, but that didn’t stop him from going right on singing.”
Regis didn’t know it, but he afforded their dates by working the auditorium’s concessions, particularly on Monday nights when the hall staged professional wrestling. Guy Coffey, the concessions manager, hired him and other Humes students to sell Cokes, and on a good night Elvis earned three or four dollars. He loved the magic of the place, and he fantasized playing there one day, standing on the same stage as all the greats.
“Sometimes after the night’s event had ended and the Humes kids had settled up financially,” Coffey remembered, “Elvis would go up on the stage and play to imaginary crowds, bowing to their applause. I would have to tell him, ‘Come on now, Elvis, we have to close the place up.’ And he would say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and we would walk silently out of the building.”
Regis enjoyed the gospel sings, for which Elvis always got dressed up in his good clothes, as if he were going to church. But Elvis never invited her to services anywhere, perhaps because he only sporadically attended, and his parents had never become members anywhere once they moved to Memphis. He also knew that there was significant prejudice against the Assembly of God church. In fact, Regis’s own family referred to Pentecostal groups as “Holy Rollers,” and as she remembers, “I got the impression that the Presleys were religious, but I would have to say that he didn’t talk about [the Assembly of God] because it was snickered about. It was something he wouldn’t have told many people.”
If Elvis felt like an alien among other teenagers most of the time, he was never so out of place than on the night of his senior prom at the swanky and segregated Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis. Now, at the end of the school year and four months into his courtship of Regis, he asked her to be his date. Precisely why he went is a mystery, but he felt some kind of pressure to go, and to give the evening a special flair. “It was the most exciting thing I had ever done,” Regis says. “I felt like Cinderella getting ready to go to the Royal Ball.