Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [69]
“He had a quick, sensual smile that [made him seem] shy and vulnerable at the same time. And he was so sweet and polite and nice that you couldn’t help but love the kid. I wanted to make things easy for him.”
They visited for awhile, and then she had to do a radio interview, she said, but she told him to wait, that she wouldn’t be gone long.
“When I came back, the other guys were down at the beach, looking for the cute girls. But Elvis was leaning over the grillwork on the balcony, staring at the ocean. I said, ‘Hi, honey, are you okay?’ He said, ‘Mae, I can’t get over this ocean.’ Now, he grew up on the mighty Mississippi, but he said, ‘It’s so vast, just no end to it. I’d give anything in the world if I had enough money to bring my mama and daddy to Florida and let them see the ocean.’ ”
It touched her that his priority was his parents, when most twenty-year-olds would think about having fun. Later that year, she and Tommy Durden would write Elvis’s breakthrough hit, “Heartbreak Hotel,” and she would let the Colonel cut Elvis in for a third of the writers’ credit. He hadn’t written one word, but just maybe Elvis would see enough royalties to make that Florida dream come true.
More and more, Elvis relied on women behind the scenes such as Mae Boren Axton and Marion Keisker to create or advance some fundamental aspect of his career. Both Mae and Marion were mother figures, but not every woman who aided him would fall into that age group.
On May 28, 1955, sixteen-year-old Kay Wheeler and her sister Linda huddled together in the darkness of their bedroom in Dallas, Texas. With their parents asleep, they turned their radio up as loud as they dared, hoping to pick up a rhythm-and-blues station that would let them hear something along the lines of Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love,” or the Penguins’ languid “Earth Angel.”
The Wheeler girls were white and lived in a typical 1950s brick tract house in a respectable middle-class neighborhood. But after their cousin, Diana, played them “Little Mama” by the Clovers, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ more risqué “Work with Me, Annie,” they demanded more of their music than the vanilla hits of the day. And so they began making pilgrimages to buy rhythm-and-blues records at the “colored” record store, riding the bus downtown and “walking self-consciously along a street lined with pawnshops, run-down stores, and hip Negro bucks who examined [them] with frank stares and amused grins,” as Kay described in her book, Growing Up with the Memphis Flash.
Fifty-five years later, she still remembers the thrill. “Here we were, these nice little suburb kids, smuggling these 78 rpm records into our room the way people would do drugs or something. And I guess we were—we were doing rock and roll.”
On that late spring night, glued to the radio, the Wheeler girls stumbled on a broadcast of the Big D Jamboree, a country radio hoedown show much like the Louisiana Hayride and the Grand Ole Opry. There, they heard an unknown song from an unknown singer, who delivered a stuttering, hiccuping vocal of sexual threat: “I’d rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man.”
The Wheelers caught their breath. That knifepoint guitar! That doghouse bass! It wasn’t quite blues, and it wasn’t entirely hillbilly, but it sure got them way down deep. Kay turned up the volume to find out who and what it was: “Elvis Presley,” with “Baby, Let’s Play House.”
Kay looked at her sister.
“I think I’m going to faint.”
She didn’t, but she and Linda talked about him all night, wondering about his name. Had they heard it right? Was he colored, or was he white? Then two weeks later, a girl at school started telling Kay all about how a guy named Elvis played in Gladewater, Texas, and nobody could hear a word he said. He was so good-looking and sexy the girls screamed every single