Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [84]
Unlike most of the girls Elvis dated, Barbara wasn’t mesmerized by his stage movements. She liked the way he kissed, and certainly theirs was a boy-meets-girl attraction, even though “I wasn’t carried away by his looks or anything.” She didn’t think he was strange, as so many did, because she was attracted to unusual people. But she found him surprisingly insecure—that’s what all the hair primping and clothes were about, she thought, not vanity. But she also thought he was “very personable,” and fun and funny, and he made her laugh. She never knew just what he was going to do.
“Often, Elvis would drive up alongside the bus that I was riding home. He would get the attention of the bus driver and have him stop so I could hop off and continue my journey home with him, sometimes on his motorcycle. Of course, all the other passengers were thrilled to see him.”
Their dates included many of the typical activities Elvis had shared with Dixie—going to the Fairgrounds, taking in a movie, riding around and stopping for burgers and Cokes, and driving over to Poplar Tunes and looking through records. They talked by the hour about music, listening to the radio and discussing the songs and the singers. They would often sit at the organ, and Elvis would play their favorite song, Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel’s “Make Believe,” and try to get Barbara to sing with him, teasing her because she couldn’t carry a tune.
When Elvis was away, Gladys would often call Barbara and ask her to come out to the house and visit with her, and Gladys sometimes sat at that same organ. “She couldn’t actually play, but she would touch the keys, and it seemed to produce the most mournful sounds. A lot of people say she was funny and witty, but I never saw that side. She was interesting and amusing at times, but after Colonel Parker and the fame came into play, I think she was more sad than anything, wishing she could awaken and find life as it was before, knowing it would never be, and just not wanting to accept the definite change.”
Things seemed to be closing in around Gladys. The Audubon Drive neighbors wanted a word with her about everything—they didn’t like it that she hung out her wash (“This is not that kind of neighborhood”), and they hated the fans who trampled through the grass and clogged the traffic on their quiet street. It all just made her nervous, like the trees she’d had cut down around the property in Tupelo. She started taking diet pills to help with her weight, and like so many in her family, she began to drink heavily, eating onions to disguise her breath.
Her older sister Lillian had spoken to her about it, though Barbara never knew her to be the slightest bit intoxicated. “She was always neat, clean, and meticulously dressed, even in a duster housecoat, and never appeared in hairpins or curlers. She carried herself as a woman who still felt she was the attractive girl she once was.”
However, deep down, Gladys was gripped with fear that someone would hurt Elvis. She was gracious to the girls who came to the front door, and handed out face tissues so they could wipe the dust off of Elvis’s cars and keep it. But she was obsessed that they would accidentally tear him apart in their love for him, or, after the Texas incident with the roughneck, that their jealous boyfriends would kill him. Young men, angry that their girls had made fools of themselves in charging the stage, were already saying rude things like they wanted a piece of his ass, or they wanted to knock the shit out of this pretty boy, change his face. It made Gladys tremble all over. When Elvis and Barbara went to the movies, “I would telephone her a couple of times during the evening to let her know that we were all right, and that there was nobody threatening around.”
Gladys worried so much that she kept herself in a perpetual state of gloom, and her health began to fail. She was often run-down,