Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [55]
Elvis would call his mother every night, no matter where he was. Sometimes when he was on the road, Dixie would stay with her, sleeping in Elvis’s bed at the Presleys’ new rental house at 2414 Lamar Avenue. Elvis encouraged the sleepovers—he wanted his parents to keep an eye on her to make sure Dixie wasn’t seeing other boys. But he telephoned her at home less and less, particularly as more women became available to him.
“Before long, girls were swarming around him by the hundreds,” as Horace Logan remembered, “making him forget his homesickness for Dixie.” And also making him push the limit on the Assembly of God’s tenets about premarital sex. His mother taught him all his life that a godly person honored himself and his body. But did that go for Hayride stars, too?
“After nineteen years of never being far from his mama’s apron strings, he was finally on his own,” Logan noted, “and he relished the freedom.”
In Shreveport, where he could be a whole new person, the conventional rules of romance and commitment didn’t seem so rigid. Not when he was living a life in which the established stars accepted him as a peer, and especially since he was about to dethrone the Hayride’s Tibby Edwards as the heartthrob, the little dude, the one who made the women swoon. There were so many girls eager to teach him about sex, about life, about himself. It all fed his ego with a big spoon, especially as he had arrived there as an unknown, very much sheltered and unschooled about sexual intimacy.
“Everything did a hundred-eighty-degree turn,” his cousin Billy Smith says, “when Elvis realized the effect he had on women.”
In a sense, Elvis grew up on the Hayride, but his experiences with his female fans left him damaged in his social interaction with women. By the end of his Hayride period, all boundaries would disappear. After a certain point, he wouldn’t even have to bother to politely court. He was Elvis.
Like many of the stars, Elvis stayed at the low-rent Al-Ida Motel in Bossier City when he played the Hayride, and he usually shared a room with Scotty and Bill. From his second appearance, long lines of teenage girls—1950s groupies—formed outside their room each Saturday night after the show. Some just wanted to see him up close, but others wanted more intimate contact. Sometimes he had three or four girls in his room at once, though he later told his father it was six, laughing that “fourteen or sixteen will get you twenty,” meaning having sex with fourteen- or sixteen-year-olds would get you twenty years in jail. As long as the girl had nice legs, a decent face, and a shapely derriere, he was interested. Breasts were secondary, suggesting a touch of androgyny in his libido.
“I sometimes drove by the motel myself before I went home, and personally saw as many as three hundred girls there,” Horace Logan wrote. “Elvis scored whenever he wanted. He screwed around with so many girls he’d never seen before and never saw again that I’m surprised he didn’t catch something and die.”
Maxine Brown was also amazed. “Everybody knew that [the guys] screwed everything in sight. Girls were throwing themselves onto Elvis all of the time. Who’s going to resist that? And if Elvis didn’t want them, Scotty, or Bill, or Jim Ed did,” though women had to push themselves on Scotty, who was married.
Elvis wasn’t always having full-out sex, though, and in fact, he was more interested in titillation than penetration. He was nineteen years old, almost a man, but still a boy emotionally. Sometimes he was content with a pillow fight. Because he feared getting a girl pregnant—and so he could technically stay true to Dixie—he held to dry humping as long as he could, both he and the girl keeping their clothes on but getting the rush all the same.
When things progressed beyond that point, he usually stuck to intense foreplay, sometimes asking a girl to masturbate him, and then ejaculating in her hair. If his partner found it degrading, a complete act of submission and dominance, it also made sense—her head was the farthest point from potential