Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [58]
In the beginning, Elvis and Bonnie didn’t seem interested in each other, but then one day in West Texas, she was relaxing around the motel pool, killing time before a show. Bonnie had her hair in curlers, and Elvis—still so immature he went around handcuffing people to him—came along and pushed her in the pool. She was livid, but after he dived in after her, she joined in the fun, and they were soon together all the time. “He was crazy about her, and she was about him, too,” Maxine says.
Bonnie had never been in love before, and it was serious—she was staying out late with Elvis, and one night, she woke Maxine up to tell her that he had proposed. They wanted to get married, she told her, but they’d both decided to put it off for a while, since they were so young.
The Brown family owned a restaurant and supper club in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, called the Trio Club, where Elvis would sometimes rehearse. Now that he was interested in Bonnie, he made a point to stop by more frequently, especially on his way to the Hayride. All the Browns, including Bonnie’s parents, Floyd and Birdie, came to regard him as family. Mrs. Brown cooked for him, and, “He couldn’t get enough of her banana pudding,” Maxine says. “He loved her because she looked kind of like Gladys, and so she took him under her wing.”
A lot of times, coming back from the shows, he spent the night with the Browns instead of going on to Memphis. Their baby sister, Norma, would give up her bed, which was situated in Floyd and Birdie’s bedroom. The intimacy didn’t bother Elvis—in fact, he found it comforting, as it precisely duplicated the sleeping arrangement he’d had with Vernon and Gladys as a child in Tupelo. Maxine knew he didn’t sleep much, and noticed his “nervous leg,” and how he’d get his toes stuck in the holes of the Browns’ bedsheets. “Before morning, they would be torn into shreds. But Mother didn’t care. She loved him, and it gave her an excuse to go buy some new ones.”
Apart from his pursuit of Bonnie and his professional association with Maxine and Jim Ed, Elvis seemed to relish a stable and secure family atmosphere. He taught little Norma how to play the piano, and a lot of times, when Maxine, Jim Ed, and Bonnie were on the road, he would come and play baseball in the backyard with her after a helping of Birdie’s home cooking.
“On the road,” Jim Ed remembered, “he would eat a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If he ate three times a day, that is. But that’s all he ever ate. His mother was evidently a good cook, and he just waited until he got back home to his mama.”
According to Maxine, Elvis’s love affair with Bonnie ended as quickly as it began. “One night, she went out to dinner and he was in this booth, all loved up with this other girl. He didn’t know Bonnie was there, and she said, ‘That’s the end of that.’ ”
In time, Elvis could be cavalier when relationships ended, but he seemed to romanticize any girl who showed him the door. Three years later, before Elvis went into the army, Vernon would tell Maxine that Elvis was still in love with Bonnie, and wanted her to wait for him to return from the service. But though Bonnie pined for him, she wouldn’t be burned twice.
“Elvis Presley was a highly sexed young guy,” remembered Bill Randle, a top disc jockey in Cleveland, Ohio, who first met Elvis in February 1955 and worked with him several times in the next two years. “He was a randy rooster, actually, in that kind of colloquial terminology. And he was very active sexually. All these very well developed young women and excited groupies would congregate around backstage, and Elvis Presley’s car was used not only to sell the records out of the trunk between the intermissions, but also it was a sexual