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It started with the opposite approach, with flirtation. The first night he was at the Hayride, Amos was backstage, coming up the back steps, when Elvis was standing on the landing. “I was dressed up, and I had a really good figure—big boobies, little teeny waist. And I had my makeup and high heels on, and I guess I sashayed a little. And when we got face-to-face, he said, ‘You’re a little doll.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not. I’m a big doll.’ And I just went on, and I could feel his eyes boring into me as I continued up the steps.”

Not long after, she was in her dressing room when he walked in, gave her a lethal Rudolph Valentino stare, and announced, “You need to be kissed.”

He was totally serious, but it caught her so off guard she didn’t know whether to say “Hop to it,” or to double up her fist and hit him.

“He came over and gave me his best shot, but it just wasn’t there. We looked at each other and I thought, ‘Ick! This ain’t gonna work!’ It was like kissing your brother! We both knew right then that we were better suited for something else. And that’s when we started laughing and carrying on with each other.”

That humorous beginning set the pace for their whole relationship, one based on affectionate teasing, though their childish pushing and shoving sometimes turned bizarre, as when they visited a small-town radio station. While the deejay was interviewing another act, Elvis and Betty went out on the lawn, where their usual banter and smacking (“We more or less sparred with each other”) turned into a wrestling match.

“I was as strong as he was. And we were actually rolling over and over on the grass. I said, ‘Will you quit? If somebody sees us out here, this is not going to look good!’ We were laughing so hard we couldn’t really wrestle. But we just did all kinds of silly things like brothers and sisters do.”

Yet Elvis was also establishing another pattern—that of compartmentalization. At home, he was the churchgoing and devoted boyfriend of Dixie Locke and the obedient son of Gladys and Vernon. But at the Hayride, and soon on its package shows on the road, where he traveled as part of a troupe with Maxine and Jim Ed Brown and other stars, he was Elvis Presley, the charming, charismatic performer and girl-teaser supreme. Sometimes three generations of women—a grandmother, her daughter, and granddaughter—sat in the front row with the same look of anticipation and awakening on their faces. The bolder ones in the crowd pawed at him offstage like hungry animals, sending a clear message that they were only too eager to receive his kisses and more.

The boy who so many girls rebuffed in his youth was flattered beyond belief. He loved the attention, but he also loved the company of women, and when they surrounded him, asking for autographs or hugs, he was courteous enough to give them at least a minute of his time, no matter what hour of the day or night.

There were times, though, when he seemed to exude such an exotic vibe that people seemed either afraid to approach him, or were too in awe to do so. Jim Ed Brown remembers such a date in Gilmer, Texas, before Elvis started incorporating his wilder gyrations or began drawing a lot of people on the road.

After the show, as the boys were breaking down the equipment, “There was a piano over in one of the corners. Elvis went over and sat at it. He could play only a little bit, but he played and sang a few things, and the first thing I knew, people started to go over. But they didn’t get close. They stood back about ten or fifteen feet, because they didn’t know whether to get close or not.”

Dixie and Gladys came to a number of the Hayride performances and road shows within a 150-mile radius of Memphis, and in Dixie’s view, both of them “were so amazed that the people who came to the concerts were as mesmerized and excited as we had been.” But Dixie also saw she was losing her grip on him. Ever since his show at the Overton Park Shell, “I felt I was not a part of what he was doing. He was doing something so totally him . . .