Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [40]
The fourteen-year-old hurried to Lerner’s to pick out a strapless pink taffeta dress for $14.98, and then, her budget blown, accessorized it with the pink shoes she’d gotten at Easter. Someone suggested she could get her hair done free at the beauty college right across the street from the Peabody, and she quickly made an appointment. She’d never even been in the Peabody before, and as she sat in the beauty chair, looking at the hotel through the window, she said to herself, “Just think, in a few hours from now I will be back here all dressed up.”
Elvis was also grooming his hair—his sideburns were now extra long—and choosing his outfit. Regis wondered what he would wear, since “he would show up in outfits that were so flashy I would open the door and blink my eyes.” But he passed on the idea of a white jacket like the other boys wore and decided on a conservative dark blue suit and blue suede shoes. He showed up at her door in a shiny rented Chevy, also dark blue, paid for by money he had saved from ushering. Shyly, as Regis blushed, he pinned a pink carnation corsage on her dress.
As they entered the Continental Ballroom at the Peabody, the band was playing, and couples were already out on the floor. But Elvis steered Regis to a seat and offered to get her a Coke.
Given Billie’s rejection and his embarrassment at not knowing how to dance, Elvis would have been enormously uncomfortable at his prom, and tortured at the idea of getting out on the floor in front of his peers. Finally, in case Regis was wondering, he told her.
“I can’t dance,” he said, cracking a self-conscious grin and perspiring under his jacket.
Regis took it that he didn’t dance because of religion, and simply said, “That’s all right.” And so they sat out the entire night, talking and sipping on soda pop and watching all the other dancers, Elvis’s dark blue suit, the color of heartache, further setting them apart. Finally, they lined up with all the other couples for the grand march, stepping through a mammoth heart as their names were called, and had their picture taken. In it, Regis manages a half-smile, but Elvis looks as stiff as a soldier, peering solemnly into the camera. Regis saw it as part of his humor, like the way he curled his lip into a sneer.
He made no attempts to socialize, and no one, not Buzzy, or George, or Red, approached them. But Elvis promised Regis they’d have more fun afterward at Leonard’s Barbeque, where they were to meet some of his friends and go on to a party. They drove out and waited, but nobody ever showed. Regis could tell it bothered him, and finally, chagrined, Elvis took her home.
A few weeks after the prom, Elvis dropped by her house and found the family had simply vanished. Regis’s mother, financially strapped, had decided to move in with a relative. And Regis had gone to Florida to help her older sister, who was expecting a baby.
“I jumped at the chance, because going to Florida and living in a stable home was a lot more inviting than staying in Memphis with this fractured family life.” Yet she couldn’t bring herself to tell Elvis how bad her situation was. They’d moved so many times, and she was embarrassed. Besides, “girls didn’t call boys in those days,” so she never said good-bye. Like Billie, she just moved off and left. To Elvis, it must have felt as if he’d been spurned three times in a row—by Betty, Billie, and now Regis. He never learned any different.
“I’ve always regretted that. I just figured he’d find out I had left by driving by the house. I’ve often wondered if he knocked on the door and saw all these strangers, the other people who rented rooms, and wondered who they were.”
In the move, Regis lost her photo of her prom date. But Elvis kept his, and a few years later, Gladys gave a copy to a fan magazine. By then Elvis was a teen heartthrob and a national sensation, with very specific dance moves all his own.
Dixie Locke and Elvis at her junior prom, May 6, 1955. Gladys bought her dress. “I was waiting for her to get out of school so we could get married,” Elvis said years later. (Courtesy