Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [62]
“At the time, all I wanted to do was sing,” she says. But then, after her professional and personal disappointments, she just wanted out. In late 1955, at the age of eighteen, she left the show and her recording career, and moved to Memphis, working at first for Bob Neal.
In recent years, an amateur singer who uses the surname Presley has said that he is one of twin sons of Carolyn Bradshaw and Elvis Presley. But his birth date suggests otherwise, and he has provided no proof of his parentage. Carolyn dismisses his claims in two words: “He’s crazy.”
According to Shirley Dieu, a friend of Priscilla Presley since the 1970s, “Anybody who’s ever claimed that Elvis fathered her child has been tested, and they’ve all come out negative.” Shirley was surprised, and told Priscilla so. “She laughed and she said, ‘Can you believe it? I’m just as shocked as you are. You would think there’s got to be more children out there. But nope. Never. Not a one.’ ”
However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a child who hasn’t come forward. Horace Logan wrote in his book that he knew of at least one woman in Houston who had a daughter by Elvis during the Hayride days. Houston was one of the first big cities to embrace Elvis, and he appeared around the area frequently on package shows with other of the Hayride stars during that time.
“You’re bound to remember me, Mr. Logan,” the woman said when she called him twenty years later for help with concert tickets. “Elvis and I were always together when he was playing in Houston in ’55.” Logan didn’t remember the woman, but he didn’t doubt her story. And when she told him that her daughter was unaware that Elvis was her father (“I thought maybe if she could see him I might be able to get up my nerve”), he advised her to let sleeping dogs lie.
“I could hear her crying softly,” he wrote, “as I hung up the phone.”
Ann Raye (left), Elvis, and Mae Axton, at the third annual Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Celebration, Meridian, Mississippi, May 25, 1955. Ann, who turned sixteen the following day, tried to get her father to manage Elvis. “I knew just his looks were going to get him somewhere.” (Courtesy of James V. Roy)
Chapter Six
“A Great, Big, Beautiful Hunk of Forbidden Fruit”
On a mild October night in 1954, Bob Neal invited country music promoter Oscar Davis to the Eagle’s Nest in Memphis to see his new act. Davis, a short, silver-haired man who dressed to the nines, was in town promoting an Eddy Arnold show at Ellis Auditorium on behalf of Colonel Tom Parker, Eddy’s former manager, who still did some of Arnold’s booking. Like Parker, Davis was an old carny who’d seen everything. As a vaudeville promoter, he once even toured a girl “frozen alive” in ice. But the faded impresario hadn’t seen anything like Elvis, and he told Neal, “Bob, this guy is incredible. I’d like to meet him.” Two nights later, Bob brought Elvis backstage, where Davis told the young singer how impressed he’d been, and that he hoped they could work together.
The next day, Davis returned to Nashville and drove straight out to Madison, Tennessee, to see the Colonel, who was in the middle of lunch with yet another carny, Charlie Lamb, who’d gone legit as a country music journalist.
“It was really Oscar who found Elvis,” Lamb says. “He came over and said, ‘I saw the darndest act you ever imagined, this kid who does this twisting around and so forth.’ The Colonel’s eyes popped open, and he said, ‘Where was he? Who is he?’ And the Colonel got up from the table and pulled his car out and left. He still wasn’t back when I went out there the next day.”
D. J. Fontana, the staff drummer