Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [76]
“It’s dangerous for a beautiful lady like you to walk out here alone,” he said.
“Oh, it is?” she flirted back.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “You shouldn’t do this alone. Somebody might hassle you.”
“Well,” she countered. “What about you?”
They were both into it now, though she’d never been called “ma’am” before.
“Nobody will hassle me,” he insisted.
“Really?”
“No, nobody will hassle me.”
They walked for a long time, and eventually he made his move, some light kissing and touching, but it never got out of hand. Mostly, they sat on the beach and talked until long after the sun came up. He told her about his mother, and said he’d been traveling a lot the last year, meeting a lot of different people. He could hardly believe where a song and a guitar had taken him. Then he asked her about her life, and she told him about all of it, even the nightmare parts. He wanted to know about Hollywood, too, and what it was like out there. And then he asked about her work, about dancing.
She told him she’d been doing it only about a year, working out of New Orleans, but she’d seen some things, too, that was for sure. If the owners of the clubs knew she was underage, they’d have a heart attack. He asked about the men who came to see her, and how she felt about that. She told him she made them part of her routine, that she joked with them, saying, “Okay, where have you got your hands right now?” Of course, there was always one who yelled out, “I wish you were my mother!” And she’d predictably say, “Yeah, and you’d still be a breast baby, wouldn’t you?” It always drew a laugh.
Finally she told him, “I have to go. I’ve got shows tonight.” And he said, “I do, too.” Then he told her he was in Shreveport most Saturday nights appearing on the Hayride. He asked how to get in touch with her and said he’d invite her to one of the shows. His mom came down sometimes, and he wanted them to meet, though already he was thinking he didn’t want Gladys to see Tura as some little tramp. Tura said that she played in Shreveport, too, and it would be great to meet his mother. She sounded like a lovely lady. And he was such a good-looking guy, she thought, and so nice. So, yeah, maybe they would get together. Maybe they would.
The fall of 1955 brought so many big changes that Elvis seemed to be in a daze half the time. The Presleys had moved to another rental house, this one at 1414 Getwell, where they paid eighty-five dollars a month. It was right around the corner from where they’d been on Lamar, but Elvis was on the road so much that Vernon and Gladys had to pack the boxes and wrestle with the furniture without him.
The biggest shifts were in his professional life, and Elvis was torn about some of them. His Hayride contract was renewed at $200 an appearance, a jump of more than 1,000 percent. The Colonel didn’t want him in that deal and advised against it. But Vernon insisted—who knew how long this gravy train would run? And Scotty and Bill had convinced him to add drummer D. J. Fontana full-time, and Elvis wasn’t sure that was the right thing to do, either, especially since the Colonel hammered him to drop Scotty and Bill altogether.
Even more troubling, Parker had steamrollered everybody in moving Elvis’s career forward. The cigar-chomping impresario had pretty much squeezed Bob Neal out of the picture now, though Bob and Helen loved Elvis so much they continued to cosign for what was becoming Elvis’s fleet of Cadillacs—some pink, some yellow. And Sam Phillips, too, was about to be left in the dust, the Colonel finalizing his deal to get Elvis off of Sun Records and on to RCA.
Sam was philosophical about it. With a buyout of $35,000—an astronomical and unheard of price at the time—he could sign and promote a number of new artists. He already had several in the wings. Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” was about to be released, and Sam was also giving more attention to