Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [73]
Over and over, lying in bed, she heard what he’d said when she asked him what it felt like to perform like that, to walk out onstage and have the entire place go wild, to shake all over and have all the girls screaming with just a toss of his head. “I can’t explain it,” he said. “Maybe something like sex, but not exactly.” Gosh, she thought. That many orgasms would kill a person!
In July 1955 seventeen-year-old country singer Wanda Jackson had just graduated from high school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and already she’d had her own radio show and enjoyed a national hit, “You Can’t Have My Love,” a duet with Billy Gray, the bandleader for western-swing king Hank Thompson. Her father, Tom, who watched his dreams of becoming a singer crumble during the Depression, managed her, and her mother designed and sewed her stage outfits, which in time went to gold lamé and shimmering sequins. “I was the first one to put some glamour in the country music—fringe dresses, high heels, long earrings,” she says.
With a bewitching beauty and a surplus of sass, she was turning heads all across the Southwest. Bob Neal had had his eye on the dark-haired teen for some time, and that summer, he tapped her for a two-day package show with Elvis. When her father accepted the booking—one night in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and a second in Newport, Arkansas—Wanda had no idea who Elvis Presley was, since Oklahoma City wasn’t playing his records. But Tom Jackson, going by what Bob Neal had reported, told her Elvis was “getting popular real fast.”
She met him at a Cape Girardeau radio station on the afternoon of July 20, and “I was quite impressed—a real handsome guy.” He dressed a little flashier than the guys back home in Oklahoma—yellow coat, for example—and when he left the station, she saw him get into a pink car. “I had never seen a pink car, so I knew that he was different.”
The first night, Wanda and her father were in her dressing room when Elvis went on. “All of a sudden, my dad and I started hearing this screaming. I mean really screaming, just constant. My dad said, ‘Well, gollee, I wonder if there’s a fire or something? Let me go look.’
“I started getting my coat and my purse, and he came back and said, ‘No, relax. But you’ve got to see this for yourself. You’ll never believe it.’ He took me to the wings, and there was Elvis singing and moving and gyrating, and all these girls standing at the foot of the stage, screaming and reaching for him. We had never seen anything like that. It seemed sexy, but I don’t think he was trying to be vulgar, because he was flirty with the girls down front. He’d look at them and they’d scream, and he’d shake at them, and then they’d squeal. He was just having fun.”
They worked together again for four days in August, through Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas, and then went out on a weeklong tour in October, swinging through Texas and Oklahoma with Johnny Cash, now one of Sam’s Sun artists, and newcomer Porter Wagoner. Wanda found Elvis fun to be around. “On those tours, all us artists would keep something going to make each other laugh, and he laughed all the time. He didn’t take himself seriously.” Somewhere along the miles, they started dating, finding they had the same appreciation for simple pleasures.
“If we could get in a town early, and it was large enough to have a movie theater, we’d go to a matinee, and then after a show, we’d go out to eat, usually with Scotty and Bill and my daddy. Then sometimes we’d get a hamburger and just drive around the town and talk.” Then, after the tour, she’d go home to Oklahoma City, and he to Memphis. But they talked on the phone almost every day. “Being able to know him and know his heart made me admire him a lot. And certainly his entertaining and music abilities knocked me out.”
In a sense, they recognized themselves in each other. She had the same sultry eyes and full lips, and “his career was just beginning to blossom, and mine was,