Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [70]
Five months passed before Kay actually saw what he looked like, on a poster at the Melody Record Shop. He was leaning back with his pelvis tilted forward and his mouth wide open. Was he in pain? It was hard to tell. A lock of greasy hair fell on his forehead, and that cinched it. She had to have it. Kay felt her cheeks burn, but she was a tiny thing, size four, so who would notice? She quickly removed the poster from the wall, put it in her bag, and walked out the door. At home, she and Linda shrieked with delight. God, he was a dream! “I’m going to meet him,” Kay announced, and that was that.
Her opportunity came a few days later, though it was indirect, unplanned, and would take some time. She was visiting her Aunt Billie, secretary to the president of KLIF, the popular Top Forty radio station in Dallas. They were in Billie’s office when deejay Bruce Hayes stopped by with a record in his hand.
“Listen to this name, ‘Elvis Presley,’ ” he said. “Have you ever heard anything so corny in your life?”
Kay couldn’t stand it.
“It was like making fun of him. I’d just gotten the poster, and we were flipping out over him, so I just blurted out in my antagonistic teenage way, ‘Well, he’s going to be big! I’ve already got a fan club for him.’ ”
It wasn’t true, of course, but when Hayes asked her for her address on that Saturday afternoon, she gave it to him without thinking. And she never heard him announce, “If you want to join the Elvis Presley Fan Club, write to Kay Wheeler. . . .”
The following Tuesday, she wasn’t feeling well (“I was good at playing hooky—if I had the least bit of cramps I wouldn’t go to school”), and she was in the den lazing around in her robe when her mother called her.
“Kay! There are all these letters on the front porch in stacks, and they’re all to you!”
“What?”
There were hundreds of them, bundled together and tied with string, all of them asking about how to join the fan club, or wanting a card or a photo.
“I laid these letters on the floor all across the room, and I just couldn’t believe it. I was flabbergasted. It was a crazy moment. A crazy moment, especially since I didn’t have a fan club.”
But soon she would, sanctioned by Colonel Parker’s office in Tennessee. (“It was like they courted me.”) Bob and Helen Neal had started the first regional fan club, but they didn’t have the pink-and-black passion of a teenage girl with a poster of a prominent pelvis. Within weeks, Kay Wheeler would be the president of the first national Elvis Presley fan club. And no one could have guessed at the power of a sixteen-year-old Texas girl to muster the troops, which would soon be growing by the thousands every day.
Elvis joins June Juanico on horseback, Gulf Hills Dude Ranch, July 1956. Gladys considered her part of the family. “I still love Elvis,” June says today. “He’s never been replaced.” (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
Chapter Seven
Biloxi Bliss
On June 26, 1955, Elvis and the Blue Moon Boys played the Slavonian Lodge in Biloxi, Mississippi. The previous February, Elvis had appeared in two shows at the Jesuit High School Auditorium in New Orleans, on a bill with fifteen-year-old Martha Ann Barhanovich, who briefly recorded for Decca under the name of Ann Raye. Her father, Frank “Yankie” Barhanovich, a district manager for the American National Insurance Company, moonlighted as a talent booker, mostly because Martha hoped to make a career out of singing.
After the Jesuit shows, for which both performers were paid $150, the teenaged Martha begged her father to bring Elvis to Biloxi, where the Barhanoviches lived. “Daddy was booking all these people not as young as Elvis, and well, I just knew he needed to book him for people my age.” And so the elder Barhanovich brought Elvis to the area for three nights that summer, the first at the Slavonian Lodge, named for the people of South Slavic origin, the Croatians who populated the region and dominated the oyster and shrimp trade.
The local newspaper, running a story in advance of the show, reported that it was expected to be a sellout,