Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [83]
But Barbara also had a quiet, serious side. Like Elvis, she was an only child and found herself in the same role reversal that Elvis had with his mother, in that sometimes she was the parent. Her mother and father divorced when she was still quite young, and she lived with her grandparents until she was twelve. “My mom was sort of a party animal, and I worried about her a lot, because I would mostly get in before she did.”
She had seen Elvis perform once at the Odd Fellows Hall. A friend had called and asked if she wanted to go see the new hillbilly singer. Barbara asked his name. “Elvis,” her friend replied. Barbara said, “What’s an Elvis?”
The next time she saw him, he was dating Dixie, with whom she went to school at South Side High. At Christmas 1954 they’d both gotten jobs at Goldsmith’s department store, Dixie assigned to the basement and Barbara to the main floor bakery, which proved to be a bit beyond her.
“The first person who came up wanted a loaf of French bread, and she said she wanted it sliced. So I put the French loaf in the slicer, and I was supposed to pull the lever and then put the bread in and push the button. But I didn’t, and I pulled the handle, and it shot that loaf of French bread all the way across Goldsmith’s main floor. Quickly, I found myself in the basement with Dixie, in the ‘seconds,’ in men’s underwear and socks.”
Barbara and Dixie rode the bus to work, but one day Dixie said her boyfriend was coming to pick her up. She’d see if he would give Barbara a ride, too, since she didn’t live far out of the way. When the big Lincoln pulled up (“It was so huge we could have gotten everybody who worked in the basement in there”), Barbara was surprised to see it was Elvis.
From then on, Elvis gave Barbara a ride home many times, and often she would go with Dixie to visit his parents on Alabama Street. Elvis was already appearing on the Louisiana Hayride and doing road shows, so Barbara got to know his family before she really knew him. She liked them all, including Elvis’s grandmother. (“She was a great old lady.”) Barbara even liked Vernon, who was more standoffish than Gladys, “certainly not outward and friendly like she was.” But once when Barbara and Dixie were visiting, Vernon overrode his own frugality and went out and bought a bag of hamburgers for everyone. As far as Barbara was concerned, the Presleys may have had very little, but they were a nice, hospitable family, and she felt comfortable in their modest home.
At the time, Barbara was dating Ronald Smith, the musician who had suggested that Elvis try out for the ill-fated job with Eddie Bond’s band. But when she next saw Elvis, in early 1956, much had happened—he and Dixie had broken up, and she and Ronald, too. She was now working as an advertising copywriter for a local jewelry store, Perel & Lowenstein, and since she was so photogenic, her boss sometimes asked the nineteen-year-old to do the store’s live TV commercials (“standing up and showing off their stuff”), broadcast during the weather and the news.
She was at WMC-TV one night, on the job, when Elvis dropped by the station to visit his friend George Klein, who worked in radio out of the same building.
“Elvis came to the window of the TV studio and poked his head in and watched what was going on. When I came out, the first thing he said was, ‘How’s Dixie?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since we got out of school.’ ”
Barbara was moved that Elvis still cared enough about Dixie to ask. But Elvis interpreted her comment to mean that Barbara no longer had any special allegiance to Dixie, and that she was free to date whomever she pleased. She had a girlfriend waiting with her at the studio that night, and Elvis suggested the four of them go to the Variety Club. When they got there, they were surprised to find themselves the only people in the place. They had a Coke and sat and talked, and Barbara could tell he was interested in her.
“He said he was going on a tour, and he would call me from there. I said, ‘Okay,’ and gave him my telephone