Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [6]
Dave Irwin, his son Len, and wife, Lily Mae, ran a general store in East Tupelo, and remembered that though the Smiths might be poor, they still found money to buy things—especially after Bob got a loan from the bank and moved the family to an untenanted farm of thirty acres and a house with hedge roses growing around the front door. To Len, “It seemed like the Promised Land to him.” Gladys, particularly, held her head high. She looked nice—showed off her new homemade dresses—kept her clothes clean, and seemed to come into the store sixty times a day, often in the company of her younger sister, Clettes. First it might be a box of snuff to keep hunger at bay, then next trip maybe a rope of licorice or a Nehi soda, and on subsequent visits a bottle of Grove’s Chill Tonic for Doll, and then perhaps some peppermint sticks.
By all accounts, Gladys was a lively, passionate young woman who hoped to make a good impression and be accepted by others. She loved to buck dance for the neighbors on Saturday night and dreamed of being either a singer like Mississippi’s own radio star Jimmie Rodgers, or an actress like Clara Bow, whose new talking pictures Gladys watched on a makeshift movie screen on the back of a flatbed truck. But for all her gaiety, her ire could flare like a firestorm, and no one wanted her wrath. Gladys had inherited not only her father’s deep-set eyes, but also his irritability.
“Everybody in that family was scared of Gladys and her temper,” says Lamar Fike, a member of Elvis’s entourage, the Memphis Mafia, who came to know Gladys well. “She ran all those kids, even her eldest sister Lillian. Everybody knew not to mess with her much. With a couple of exceptions, the Smith family was just wilder than goats. By God, they were tough! Tougher even than the Presleys, and they were violent people.”
Coupled with her muscular build, her big, wide shoulders making her resemble a man at times, Gladys’s temper made her a force to be reckoned with, even as a child working on Burk’s farm, where sharecroppers, “getting a little for themselves and making a whole lot more for someone else,” as Billy Smith puts it, were regarded as little more than animals.
“Aunt Gladys was a strong-willed individual. If you scared her real bad or made her mad, she’d lash out at you. In Tupelo, they still talk about when she was sharecropping with her family. The guy who owned the farm come by on a horse with his high-topped leather boots and a whip. And he jumped on her father and her sisters with it. Gladys was ten or eleven years old, but she ripped a plowshare off and took the point and hit him in the head with it. Damn near killed him.”
Still, Gladys had her vulnerabilities, most of them emotional. Though she attended religious services—worshipping at the Church of God and Prophecy—Gladys held to primitive superstitions, and not even her faith could completely quell the anxiety and impulsivity that plagued her from the time she was a small child. In Lillian’s view, the young Gladys was “very highly strung, very nervous . . . She was frightened by all kinds of things—by thunderstorms and wind. She was always hearing noises outside at night and imagining there was someone in the bushes.”
In time, her uneasiness with life would escalate to full-blown phobias. Once she moved to East Tupelo—which sat across Town Creek from the more prosperous Tupelo proper—she had all the bushes around her house cut down, terrified that “dark things” were moving in them. Her anxieties came and went without warning. She seemed better with the promise of social outlets, when she had something to look forward to, something that would take her mind off the dreariness of existing hand to mouth.
And one of the things that most stirred her imagination was the opposite sex. As a young child, Gladys seemed scared of boys. Her sister Lillian recalled that the first time a boy asked if he could walk her home from school, Gladys took off her shoes and ran. When he caught up with her, he walked way on one side of the road, and she