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“He felt like there were too many people depending on him, and he couldn’t do what he wanted to do. He was told to go here, and go there, and these people can come, and these can’t. . . . I knew that it was not ever going to go into anything.”

She and Gladys cried about it together, but they would always be friends. They were family almost. And that would never change. Whenever he was back in Memphis, they would see each other, and the respect and love would always be there. Even if Dixie married someone else and Elvis decided to quit the business and stay home and have children with her, well, she would just get a divorce. That’s how much he meant to her.

Less than a week after Dixie’s junior prom, Elvis continued his pursuit of Anita Carter. On May 12 they were at the Gator Bowl Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida. Elvis went on first, and when he came offstage, the Carter Sisters were ready to follow. As usual, Elvis had worked up a sweat—he could literally lose several pounds in one performance—and as he passed by the Carters, he started stumbling and tottering around, finally collapsing in Anita’s arms.

A shout went up, and somebody laid Elvis out and said he was unconscious. Anita held his head in her lap and stroked his forehead, and the Colonel ordered an ambulance to take him to the hospital. Red was worried as hell, as were Scotty and Bill and D. J., who was now working the road with them. They sat around in Red’s hotel room, scared to death, wondering if he were dying from some mysterious disease, and awaiting word from the hospital.

About 1 A.M., Red heard a knock on the door, and there stood Elvis, “healthier than a herd of cattle, grinning from ear to ear.” They pumped him full of questions, and he told them he was fine. Only when Scotty, Bill, and D. J. went on to their rooms did Elvis say he’d faked the collapse just to get his head on Anita’s lap.

It wasn’t true. He really was ill, and running a fever from exhaustion. The emergency room doctor gave him a shot and suggested he take some time off. Instead, Elvis asked for a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich, and concocted the story about faking the collapse out of embarrassment. But clearly he was infatuated with Anita, who faked her own collapse with Elvis sometime later. However, their relationship never really moved beyond flirtation.

Elvis then turned his attention to Anita’s older sister, June, whose marriage to country singer Carl Smith was in trouble. But June dismissed him out of hand. “Elvis got a crush on whoever was handy. It was just his thing. He liked women. I decided I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. Lord only knows where he’d been. He was a sexy man who really thought he could have any woman that he saw. But he couldn’t, and I think that was a big shock to his ego.”

Elvis wasn’t one to give up, though, and on a trip to Nashville with Red, he decided to look her up. As Red recounted the story in Elvis: What Happened?, June was off at a gig, and so Elvis and Red simply forced a window in her Madison, Tennessee, house, and broke in to wait for her. They made themselves at home—fixing a meal in her copper pans and skillets (and ruining them in the process), and going to sleep, fully dressed and dirty, in the master bedroom.

Carl came home the next morning, found the forced window and the messy kitchen, and like a scene from some hillbilly rendition of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” wondered, “Who’s been breaking into my house? Who’s been eating my food?” And finally, “Who the hell is that sleeping in my bed?”

Elvis woke up and casually said, “Oh, hi, Carl.”

“You would have thought he would have chewed us out,” Red wrote. “But he gave us a big hello and laughed. He showed us all around the big house.”

Smith had seen far crazier behavior from Nashville’s honky-tonk crowd, and he took it all in stride. That night when June and her sisters came home, they had a big southern dinner and stayed up half the night talking and singing.

“I kept