Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [67]
June and Carl Smith divorced in 1956, and June went out on the road doing shows with Elvis on her own. She was always sentimental about the experience—“I’ve got two or three little notes and pictures that Elvis gave me”—but she ended up with more than memories and souvenirs.
“Elvis introduced me to Johnny Cash’s music. We would stop in all of the little restaurants down in the South to get something to eat, and he always played Johnny’s records on the jukebox. He loved to hear him sing. He tried to sing all of his songs right in my ear, and I heard them over and over and over. Then John walked up to me one night [in 1956] when I had come home from New York to do the Opry. He said, ‘I’m Johnny Cash. I know you work with Elvis Presley. He’s a friend of mine and I would like to meet you.’ And I said, ‘Well, I should know you already, and I believe I do. I’ve had to listen to you enough.’ ”
Their son, John Carter Cash, says that his mother would get a mischievous twinkle in her eye whenever she mentioned Elvis and told him, “You know, son, your father was always jealous of Elvis.”
And so was Carl. Underneath his good humor about the break-in, there was tension: June kept a billboard poster of Smith on which Elvis had drawn a silly mustache and goofy glasses. Below it, he scribbled, “Painting by Presley.”
After Carl moved out of the house, June would sometimes let Elvis stay there “to rest” at the end of a tour.
“Like most children,” John Carter wrote in Anchored in Love, a memoir of his mother, “when I was young, I thought my mother was capable of doing no wrong. . . . I know without a doubt that she was a good person of high standards and solid morals. On the other hand, she was being charmed by one of the greatest sex symbols of our time. The temptation to give in to his advances, at least in some small way, would have been tremendous. I have a hard time blaming her.”
On May 13 the Hank Snow–Jamboree tour was back at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville for a second night, with fourteen thousand screaming fans in attendance, nearly all of them there for Elvis. Two nights earlier, in Orlando, headliner Hank Snow found Elvis a hard act to follow, the girls yelling for Elvis to come back out onstage.
Parker always denied that, insisting, “Hank Snow could follow anybody. He was a great artist.” But Charlie Louvin, who with his brother, Ira, played Elvis dates on the Snow shows, remembers it being true. Unlike Bob Neal, who never planted screamers, Parker wasn’t just banking on throngs of hormonal teenagers—he helped orchestrate them.
“The Colonel sent Tom Diskin to Woolworth’s to give kids free tickets to the shows. The only thing they had to do was scream ‘We want Elvis.’ A professional act like Hank Snow or the Louvin Brothers couldn’t work with a hundred kids hollering ‘We want Elvis.’ Hank would sing two or three songs and then just say, ‘Hell, you can have Elvis.’ ”
Faron Young, also on the Orlando bill, remembered that the announcer tried to subdue the crowd, telling the audience that Elvis was out back signing autographs, only to have the auditorium empty out.
Possibly in deference to Snow, whose ego outsized his small frame, Elvis, sporting a pink lace shirt that looked like a woman’s blouse, closed his Jacksonville set with the crack “Girls, I’ll see you all backstage.” Before anyone knew how to stop it, a swath of frenzied teenagers broke through the police barricade and chased Elvis into the dugout locker room. Mae Boren Axton, a forty-year-old