Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [78]
Gladys had no knowledge of any such chicanery: She just wasn’t sure which she feared most—what Parker was going to turn the boy into, or what might happen to him on his own. Her fears were not unjustified. Already, the floor had collapsed at a show in Bono, Arkansas, and more than one man had been overheard saying things like, “I’d better not see any girlfriend of mine going up after an autograph from that singer.”
Things had gotten much rougher at Elvis’s appearance at the Reo Palm Isle Club in Longview, Texas, in August 1955, when a trucker went to the parking lot to look for his wife, who had somehow disappeared after Elvis’s performance. They’d been there with another couple, and Elvis had flirted with the women throughout his songs, giving them “that sizzling, sultry look from the stage,” as Stanley Oberst and Lori Torrance wrote in Elvis in Texas: The Undiscovered King 1954–1958. They giggled like teenagers, their husbands just rolling their eyes.
The trucker thought that perhaps his wife had gotten sick afterward, but she wasn’t in the women’s room, so in Oberst and Torrance’s account, he decided to check the car, his friend following him for a breath of air and a smoke. “As they approached the car, they noticed a stranger glancing out the window and then disappearing. The two increased their speed and ripped open the door. His wife screamed from the passenger side and dove for the petticoats in the floorboard. Elvis fell onto the dirt parking lot, struggling to zip up. The trucker reached down with huge, burly arms and grabbed the skinny frame, shaking the stuffing out of it and driving in a couple of well-placed right hooks.
“ ‘Not my face, not my face!’ the singer yelled, covering the aforementioned location. ‘I’ve gotta go back and play.’ The truck driver got in a few more gut busters, then let his quarry flee back to the club.”
Grover Lewis, the late master of New Journalism, witnessed a similar, if not the same, situation that year. He was in college at North Texas State and knew Elvis from the Big D Jamboree. As one of “the only serious writers at North Texas at the time” (the other was Larry McMurtry), he was “always looking for guys like [Marlon] Brando and [James] Dean, who spoke uniquely to people our age, our generation, and Elvis qualified. He had that dangerous sense.” As such, Lewis became acutely attuned to Elvis’s sensual, raw, and bluish music, having grown up with strict segregation in small towns around Dallas and Fort Worth. In 1955, then, he went to a number of Elvis’s shows around the region.
Lewis could not precisely remember where he saw Elvis take a beating, though it might have been the M-B Corral in Wichita Falls in April 1955. Nearly forty years later, in 1994, Lewis described it as “a country place somewhere near Wichita Falls—it was one of those places that had . . . a barn dance ambiance, but it was an old World War II hangar that somebody had dragged out into a wet part of the county. If there was a headliner that night, it would have been him. He was dressed like a cowboy country singer, and already driving a Cadillac, [though] old and rusted-out.”
The budding reporter was fascinated both by Elvis and by the phenomenon he represented, “because he virtually epitomized the southern high school hood. On this night, and I believe it was a weeknight, he got up and was doing his act, singing country songs, and he began to make eyes at a young woman who was sitting close to the front with her boyfriend. The boyfriend was a big, tough oilfield worker, a roughneck type. One of the guys seated at the table went to the restroom, and Elvis made goo-goo eyes at this girl, and then made signals, which I could follow, to meet him in the parking lot. I suspect he was feeling magically charmed around that time, and there was a recklessness about it.