Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [85]
“She was serious and concerned,” says Barbara. “She had to be. Goodness knows she was the captain of that little ship, with all the responsibility that entailed.”
Vernon, as usual, was virtually no help. He was still nearly a nonparticipant in the household, and besides, he was preoccupied with the idea of Elvis buying him a used car lot (“Presley’s Used Cars”). He thought he could make a go of it, and it would get him out of the house.
For the time being, he helped Barbara answer Elvis’s fan mail, which arrived in big, bulging canvas sacks, even though much of it had been funneled to Kay Wheeler, the fan club president in Texas, or Colonel Parker’s office in Madison. “I wrote most of Elvis’s fan letters,” Barbara remembers, “and Mr. Presley and I signed his name.”
As Dixie had before her, Barbara was becoming like one of the family now, and Gladys sometimes visited her mother, Pearl, a strong, determined, charming woman, at her home on Marjorie Street. For the longest time, Vernon parked on the street, and Gladys huffed and puffed up the long steps to the big Victorian house. Finally, one day Barbara’s aunt came out and said, “Mrs. Presley, why don’t you just drive up to the back door? There are no steps back there.”
Just as Elvis had a way of making every girl feel as if she were the one, Barbara saw that Gladys did the same. “I know she liked me and enjoyed my company. We would go for the proverbial Sunday afternoon drive when Elvis wasn’t home, and we sat and talked together a lot. But I think she made all of the girls feel special. I understand why so many say that Mrs. Presley wanted Elvis to marry them. She wanted him to get married, and she wanted lots of grandchildren.”
And so Barbara wasn’t surprised when Elvis gave her a ring, even though she had mixed emotions about it. They were at Jim’s Steak House in Memphis, having dinner with some other people, when suddenly, “He just reached in his pocket and put this little ring box in front of me. My first thought was ‘Oh, no! He’s going to ruin everything!’ Because I truly thought for a second that it was an engagement ring, and getting married at nineteen was way down on my list. When I saw that it was a black onyx with a couple of diamonds around it, I was so happy. I did not want to get married. I wanted him to care for me, and I cared for him a great deal, but I would have been happy to have gone on as we were practically forever.”
In retrospect, she and Elvis weren’t a great match, because they both came from “a family of worriers—I could give lessons, really, in worrying.” While Gladys perseverated about one thing, Vernon stewed about another, usually money. “We were having a meal at their house, and Mr. Presley was going through the bills. He picked one up and looked at it, and he said, ‘A hundred and twenty-six dollars!’ And then he named a jewelry store. He said, ‘What in the world is this for, son?’ And Elvis said, ‘Oh, Daddy, don’t spoil everything for me!’ It was my ring, a hundred and twenty-six dollars.”
Barbara saw the humor in such a situation, but she was far more troubled by Elvis’s jealous streak. One night, they went up to talk to Dewey Phillips, and they came out of the radio studio to find a large crowd had gathered for Elvis. He stopped to talk to people, and Barbara stepped back out of the way. In a moment or two, a young man came up and started making conversation with her.
“Elvis broke away from that crowd, came over, got me by the arm, and marched me like a naughty child down to his car. I thought, ‘What in the world is happening here?’ I said, ‘What’s the matter? Are you angry with me?’ And he said, ‘I don’t want you standing around talking to men on the sidewalk.’ He went on and