Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [60]
“We had our fans at personal appearances and at the Hayride, but they didn’t just absolutely lose their mind over any of us, and they did over Elvis. I think I was more in a state of mild shock than anything else. I’ve never seen anybody, man or woman, with that kind of magnetism.”
The first time they spoke, “He looked down at me with this little half-grin and those sleepy eyes, and I just loved it. He had a nervous way of standing, but he was easy to talk to, and he laughed a lot, and I thought, ‘Wow, I see what the ladies are talking about!’ He was just my type, really sexy. There’s just no other word for it.”
He kept company with her from that first night, when a group of the Hayride cast—Ginny Wright, the Rowley Trio, and his rival-to-be, Tibby Edwards—went over to Bossier City for a bite after the show. In the next few days, he’d start taking her to all the usual hangouts—Murrell Stansell’s Bantam Grill, where he played the pinball machine (and where steel guitar great Jimmy Day teased Elvis about how much Carolyn could eat), and Harry’s Barbecue, a favorite of George Jones and Faron Young. Of course, they went to the movies, Elvis, or “El,” as she called him, borrowing the Browns’ car for a date at the Strand Theatre.
“She really liked him,” remembers Shreveport radio personality Louise Alley, who lived across the hall from the Bradshaw family in the apartment house, and bumped into the polite young man (“Excuse me, ma’am”) on the stairs as he came to pick her up for a date.
Carolyn always found Elvis “extremely respectful,” though affectionate.
“He was an ideal date, almost, and the best kisser. The only thing is that he was very, very restless. There was one movie that I really wanted to see, and he kept getting up and going out. He couldn’t even sit still. Finally, I gave up and said, ‘Let’s just go. You’re not enjoying this.’ So we left. I’ve often wondered what created that. I think there was just an emptiness in his life.”
When he first took her out, Carolyn excitedly called her friend Nita Lynn. “You will never guess who I’m dating! Elvis!”
Nita was currently on tour with Johnny Horton and Paul Howard and His Arkansas Cotton Pickers, and she hadn’t kept up with the news. “Who?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of Elvis Presley?”
“I’m afraid not, but the name is enough to choke a horse.”
“He’s a cat!” Carolyn said, meaning he was a cool cat. “He played the kind of music that wasn’t the three-chord Hank Williams songs we played, and he moved on stage,” as Nita later wrote.
Soon, he asked Carolyn to go steady. In her view, “El and I were well-matched. We had a lot of interests in common, and shared things, and talked.” Nita believes Elvis would have married Carolyn, “because he was just madly in love with her. You could tell when he was around her.” But they didn’t have deep conversations, and Carolyn didn’t know anything about Dixie Locke, or even about his romance with Bonnie Brown. Confusion arose at the end of 1954 when Carolyn, a one-man woman, heard from Pappy Covington that Elvis was not honoring his promise to her. “That was the one time I was really upset. Pappy was like my own father, and he said, ‘I don’t want you to get your heart broken, so just understand that Elvis is going to be seeing a lot of women.’ ”
“All of his romances were short,” says Hayride announcer Frank Page. “Carolyn’s name kept coming up as being his girlfriend, and I thought maybe she might be something special to him.”
But he couldn’t seem to change his ways. In fact, once Carolyn’s friend Nita got back to Shreveport, Elvis would discreetly try to put his arm around her shoulders, but she’d have none of it. “After a few times, I threw his arm from around me and told him, ‘Listen, Elvis. You keep your hands to yourself!’ ” That brought guffaws from the musicians, since most girls encouraged Elvis’s affections. But Nita found him cocky, and she didn’t like some of his language, either, especially when he took the Lord’s name in vain. It wouldn’t be long before a high school principal