Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [56]
Elvis’s first experience of real intercourse, which came at either age nineteen or twenty, was both traumatic and uninformed. He had met the girl only that day, and before long, he was in the hotel lobby, searching for Scotty and Bill, his face a tangle of confusion.
“The rubber busted,” he said. “What do I do now?”
Bill chuckled. “I think you had better marry her—or get the hell out of town.”
They left him on his own to solve the crisis, and the next time they saw him, they asked what he had done.
“I took her to the emergency room at the hospital.”
“The emergency room?”
“Yeah, I got them to give her a douche.”
Soon he vowed to “never break a virgin,” and to fool around only with experienced girls.
In truth, he liked everything that led up to intercourse better than the act itself—the kissing, the stroking, the darting fingers, the removal of the blouse. He preferred that a girl keep her panties on, though it drove him wild to see the slightest bit of pubic hair poking around the seams of her underwear. But he respected women, and it was always important that the girl receive more pleasure than he.
Elvis wasn’t the only male star on the Hayride running wild, of course, but Maxine Brown never thought about him being sexy. Like Betty Amos, she regarded Elvis as a brother—she was four years older—and she couldn’t believe the way the girls hounded him everywhere he went—backstage, at the motel, and on the road once they started touring together.
Though the girls were crazy about him, “Many of the mamas didn’t want their daughters hanging out and going to the shows because of the way he wiggled,” Maxine remembers. “They thought it was vulgar. But I didn’t. I thought it was great. Never thought of anything like that at all.”
Elvis still hadn’t really broken in the national press, but around the region and even in Memphis, there was talk that what he was doing was unholy, that he was performing the Devil’s music. Elvis was stung by it—it made him burn right through his skin—and Marion had to console him.
“I remember very strongly people praying for him in the churches. And I knew what a deeply religious person he was, so I was talking to him one day and something was said about how they felt about him, and his eyes filled up. He said, ‘Well, Marion, the only thing I can say is they don’t know me.’ Then he laughed and said, ‘But it don’t hurt to have a few people praying for you.’ ”
On the other hand, Elvis was soon making more money than he or his parents had ever seen in their lives. It was modest by most entertainment standards—he got only scale for the Hayride broadcasts, and he split his take with Scotty and Bill on the road. But he couldn’t believe his good fortune, and in his role reversal, it thrilled him to provide for his parents, whom he saw as his dependents. In late 1954 he wired his parents funds from Houston: HI, BABIES, HERE’S THE MONEY TO PAY THE BILLS. DON’T TELL NO ONE HOW MUCH I SENT. I WILL SEND MORE NEXT WEEK. THERE IS A CARD IN THE MAIL. LOVE, ELVIS.
On December 8, 1954, he went back into the Sun studio with Scotty and Bill, recording the hillbilly blues of “You’re a Heartbreaker” and “Milkcow Blues Boogie.” He had the confidence now to loosen up and let things roll. (“Hold it fellas. That don’t move me. Let’s get real, real gone for a change.”) There was a different crackle in the air, Marion noted. Sometimes Elvis would get so tickled by Bill’s antics in the studio that “he would roll on the floor and kick his heels and laugh.”
By early 1955 no act could follow him onstage, and shortly he would be headlining. (“When we started working with Elvis,” says Maxine, “we got top billing over him, but that didn’t last long.”) Once that happened, both Elvis and his fans threw all caution to the wind. On a tour through Texas booked by deejay Tom Perryman, who also managed the Browns, Elvis and Jim Ed’s fellow performers “speculated that J. E. and Elvis must be betting on how many girls they could score with in a single night,” as Maxine noted. “Some of us eavesdropped and counted them. Tom