Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [79]
Lewis trailed Elvis and the girl out to the parking lot just to see what would happen. “I knew very likely that there would be a fight, and, in fact, a fight is what happened. The roughneck came back to the table, discovered that his girlfriend was gone, waited around for her, and then went looking for her.” He discovered them out in Elvis’s Cadillac, smooching.
“I don’t know if it went any further than that, because I didn’t get close enough to see. But the guy hauled Elvis out of the car and just literally beat the hell out of him. Just beat him bloody. In fact, he didn’t play anymore for the rest of the evening. He got his butt tromped.”
Even without jealous husbands and boyfriends, Elvis was getting so big now that anything could happen at any time, even a repeat of the Jacksonville, Florida, riots. Without meaning to, the crowds could tear him apart like jackals on a rabbit. The fan reaction was so intense, so out of control, it was frightening to just be seen with him, even in Memphis. Marion had witnessed it herself.
WHER had a broadcast booth at the Mid-South Fair that fall, and Marion was on her way one day, walking from her home.
“All of a sudden this car pulls over to the curb, and there’s Elvis, all shining and resplendent. Since he never passed up a gal walking down the street without some kind of greeting, he said, ‘Hop in, Marion.’ So I did. What girl could resist a ‘Hop in’ invitation from Elvis?
“We decided to go to the fair together, and we parked out in the back and started walking. Suddenly, I realized we weren’t alone, and I began to hear these cries of ‘It’s him!’ ‘No, it’s not him.’ ‘Oh, it is him! I tell you it’s him!’ Well, the crowd started to swell up like sugar candy on a cone. And this one strange little girl was clinging to him. I don’t know what she was asking him, but she kept on, ‘Will you please, Elvis? Will you please?’ And she wouldn’t let go. Finally I took her hands and said, ‘Okay, he promised.’ Someone said, ‘Who’s she?’ And Elvis said, ‘This is my wife.’ It was the wildest thing, and you never heard such a to-do and carrying on.
“As we moved through the Fairgrounds, we picked up a constantly growing entourage. We finally got to a booth where Elvis said he was going to win me a teddy bear. He started pitching balls, and he won me a teddy bear the very first throw. The lady who was operating the stand handed it to me, and before my arms could close around it, the bear went whish! All of a sudden it was gone. That little girl snatched it. So Elvis said, ‘Okay, I’ll win you another bear,’ and he did, and the same thing happened. I promptly lost three teddy bears.
“By this time the crowd had closed in, and they were pressing me so hard against the booth that my shinbones were about to crack on the planks that ran across the front. We were in such peril that the owners helped us leap across the counter. We went under the canvas in the back and raced madly for the front gate, and got in a police car. They whisked us around the corner to where Elvis’s car was parked, but the whole thing left me bruised and battered, and without any of the teddy bears.”
It was certainly a horrible example of what can happen if you’re out with a personality like Elvis and get caught up in a fan mob, Marion thought.
“After that, I never wanted to be seen with him in public again.”
Elvis and Barbara Hearn, backstage at the Tupelo Fairgrounds, September 26, 1956. She had left his shirt, a gift from Natalie Wood, back in Memphis. Later, she gave him the gold vest he wore with it on The Ed Sullivan Show. (Courtesy of Barbara Hearn Smith)
Chapter Eight
“An Earthquake in Progress”
As history would see it, 1956 would be year one, ground zero in the phenomenon known as Elvis Presley. So much metamorphosis would occur in both his personal and professional lives that 1956 could be seen as a reference point, a time when Elvis would go from being a regional performer