Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [57]
Often, on the road, girls would sit in the front row where the stage lights fell, and lift their skirts to expose their naked parts. Gladys was there in Arkansas one night when girls stormed the stage and threw their panties at him, and Elvis had to pay for it. Gladys was appalled that young teens would do this to her son. And Elvis was embarrassed because they did it in front of his mother.
“I’m not sure that she handled that real well,” Dixie says of Gladys’s emotional reaction to Elvis’s becoming a sex star. “Of course, she wanted him to be loved and to achieve the fame and the notoriety that he wanted. But at the same time, there was a side of her that wanted to think that her son was still remaining pure and innocent through the whole thing. Kind of a two-sided coin there.”
Gladys always asked Maxine to take good care of Elvis, and Maxine tried her best, paying for his dry cleaning and doing his washing, though he went shy on her when she asked for his undershorts. He didn’t have but a couple of pairs, and he purposely didn’t wear any when he performed. The rumor circulated that he wore a toilet paper roll or a sock in his pants to make himself look bigger, but it wasn’t true. Sometimes Elvis, who was uncircumcised, got aroused, particularly when his pants rubbed him just so.
One night when Elvis’s parents came to the Hayride, he walked offstage after taking a number of encores and just about brought the house down. Gladys grabbed him up by the arm and pulled him over to the side of the stage where no one could hear them. “Elvis,” she said sternly, “don’t you have any drawers?” He thought fast, and said, “No, ma’am, the only pair I own was dirty, and Maxine wouldn’t wash ’em.”
“Honey, God, he was huge!” Maxine says. “And it showed. And then when he’d shake his leg, my God! You could tell he had a hard-on. It looked like it. Hell, he knew what he was doing. Bill Black went out and said, ‘I’m going to buy Elvis some shorts.’ And he thought, ‘I’ll play a trick on him.’ He bought him some silk ones, polka dots. He thought Elvis wouldn’t wear them, but Elvis fell in love with them and wouldn’t even take ’em off. He didn’t want me to wash them. He was afraid somebody would steal them. I guarantee you, he wore silk underwear for the rest of his life, when he wore any at all. He loved them.”
Betty Amos also looked out for Elvis, dispensing advice and offering to iron his shirts. “I said to him one time, ‘Give me your shirt, and I’ll take it over to my room and iron it.’ He said, ‘That’s all right.’ I said, ‘My God, you’re a sex symbol. You’re going out onstage with a wrinkled shirt? Give me that thing!’ ”
In the mornings, after the road shows, she’d see Elvis in the restaurant having breakfast, and he was never alone. “He’d have some little ol’ girl over there, his latest. I think a lot of times he didn’t care about any of these women he was with. It was just for show. When you’re with a different one every day, there’s nothing there. But he’d look over at me and I’d look over at him, and I’d raise my eyebrows or shake my head, like, ‘That’s good,’ or ‘That’s bad,’ like a sister is supposed to do. They all looked pretty much the same to me. There were no raving beauties, and there were no ugly girls, nobody who really stood out.”
Gladys, frightened by the changes in her son, “wanted him to stay at home and be a gospel singer,” Maxine remembers. “She was afraid for him to be out in the world the way he was.” But she also thought Betty was the perfect girl for Elvis to pal around with, “because I talked about Jesus and God all the time. And Elvis was completely fascinated by that, and wanted me to talk more about it. I think he wanted to believe really bad.”
Betty was a good influence on Elvis, but he was far more interested in Maxine and Jim Ed’s comely sister.
Seventeen-year-old Bonnie Brown was a sweet, quiet girl with fair skin, raven hair, and an ample bosom. She, too, was soon