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At the Hayride, Elvis wasted no time on a broken heart, and, in fact, from the beginning, he’d set his sights on another girl, an energetic, doe-eyed beauty named Carolyn Bradshaw. With dark hair and eyes, she resembled a glorified Gladys, though she was far smaller, standing only four feet ten inches tall and weighing ninety-five pounds. She took a lot of ribbing about being a shorty. Betty Amos was five foot seven, and when she held her arm out, Carolyn could stand under it. “Cute little thing,” as Betty terms her. “Now, I was a big doll, but Carolyn was a little doll.” And Elvis wanted to meet her.

“One of the first questions Elvis asked me when I met him was, ‘Is Carolyn Bradshaw gonna be on the show tonight?’ ” Horace Logan remembered. And he had another question: “Is she as good-lookin’ in person as she is in her pictures?”

“When he saw her in person,” Logan wrote in his book, Elvis, Hank and Me: Making Musical History on the Louisiana Hayride, “I think he was even more taken by her.”

Carolyn Bradshaw would epitomize three romantic ideals in Elvis’s heart, fueling his obsession with virgins, beauty queens, and tiny brunettes with china doll faces. Physically, she was, in fact, the prototype, the first Priscilla.

She was born in Arkansas as the youngest of eleven children of a cotton farmer who died when she was seven. After the eighth grade, she and her mother, Eugenia, moved to Shreveport, where Carolyn’s older sister, Jo, was already working. The three shared a small apartment, and on Saturday nights, Carolyn started attending the Hayride. Jo, also a beauty, dated Johnny Horton.

Though she studied acting and dance, Carolyn’s real ambition was to be a famous singer. After she belted out Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya” onstage with Jim Reeves at the Reo Palm Isle Club in Longview, Texas, the vivacious fifteen-year-old was hooked on both the applause and the attention. “When you come from a family of eleven . . . well, I don’t think they knew I was there until I was five years old.” Her manager, Fabor Robison, who ran his clients’ careers with a steel hand, signed her to his own Abbott label, recording her one Top Ten hit, “The Marriage of Mexican Joe,” an answer song to Reeves’s “Mexican Joe,” in 1953. That same year, at age sixteen, she joined the Hayride cast and went on to win the 1954 Louisiana state title of “Petite Miss Physical Culture.”

Her hit song, coupled with her good looks, promised a bright future. She did a tour of California with Reeves, trading her white-fringed cowgirl outfits for cocktail dresses and high heels, and landed a three-month stint on Cliffie Stone’s radio and television shows as a fill-in for pregnant girl singer Bucky Tibbs. She was still on Stone’s Hometown Jamboree when Elvis first came to the Hayride.

“When I left that show and came back to Shreveport, nobody knew I was coming, so I just went backstage to visit with all of the group. The girls were telling me about this new guy on the show, Elvis Presley, who’d been there two or three times by then. They were going on and on about him, and I was thinking, ‘Who is this upstart?’ And somebody said, ‘Well, you just wait and see.’ And then the following Saturday night, there he was, and I saw. And boy, did I see. He was magnetic, just awesome, even then.”

Carolyn was only an average talent—she relied on a strong regional twang and a fiery delivery to carry a song. But she tried hard and had a lot of guts, and “I had such fun doing it onstage that I don’t think people cared whether I could sing or not.” Her fresh-faced appeal made her popular with the boys, who greeted her with wolf whistles and queued up for her autograph.

Some of the female cast members were jealous of her, particularly since she’d been dating Tibby Edwards. “He was little, sweet, and cute, and all the girls went gaga over him,” says Nita Lynn, a girl her age and Carolyn’s best friend on the show. Carolyn knew how high-tempered women could be, so she didn’t let it bother her. But even that hadn’t prepared