Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [94]
Then the mood lifted, and Gladys was saying, “You’ve got to pick a name for me other than ‘Mrs. Presley,’ because you’re going to be part of the family one day.” June thought for a minute and decided on “Lovey,” an affectionate form of Gladys’s middle name, Love. Gladys was wild about it, and about this girl.
“She thought I was a good catch for Elvis because I could do all these things, and I was from Mississippi, and I was crazy about her son. I was healthy-looking, too, so she thought I was perfect breeding stock, as we used to say. I was five foot six and a half inches, about 128 pounds. She’d hug me and tell me I was pretty. And she would stroke my face. She was always telling me that Elvis needed someone to take care of him.”
And so Gladys didn’t balk when Elvis said he was taking June to Houston with him to pick up his car, and that they would be gone overnight. Vernon drove them to the airport, where Elvis bought her ticket under the name of June Prichard, choosing it to protect her identity, and also as a kind of joke—he’d tried to call her from Prichard, Alabama, soon after they met.
When they got to the hotel, they both signed in at the front desk, and he said, “Let’s go see your room first, and then we’ll go see mine.”
He opened the door to her room, “and we hugged and kissed a little bit, and then we left. I don’t think I even put my overnight bag down, because he said, ‘Take that with you. Come on.’ ”
She didn’t know what to think, or even what to do, and he saw it on her face.
“June,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I respect you and love you. I want you to stay with me. I promise I will not touch you. I just want to hold you.”
And, she says, “That’s what happened. We slept like spoons in the bed the entire night.” Then they flew back to Memphis.
That’s when she fell in love with him, on the way home.
“We’d spent so much time together, and I’d get lost in his eyes. He was just so very sincere. From then on, I knew I could trust him.”
Jackie Rowland in a playful moment with Elvis at the Florida Theatre, Jacksonville, August 1956. During his two-day engagement, he signed an earlier photograph to Jackie and her mother: “My best to you, a bunch of real nice folks, Elvis Presley.” (Copyright Jackie Rowland 1978. All rights reserved.)
Chapter Nine
Love Times Three
Elvis was scheduled to appear on The Steve Allen Show on July 1, 1956, but two weeks before, the variety show host announced that the pressure to cancel the hip-wiggling sensation had been so strong that if Elvis did appear, he “will not be allowed any of his offensive tactics.”
Allen, a savvy show business veteran, considered the controversy “a piece of good luck,” he said later. All the media hype and attention “worked to our advantage,” and Elvis was never really in danger of being canceled.
The host, who was also a comedian, jazz musician, writer, actor, poet, and television pioneer, had tuned in Stage Show one night, where he saw “this tall, gangly, kind of goofy-looking but cute, offbeat kid.” He only caught two minutes of him, but “I could see he had something, [and] made a note to our people to ‘book that kid.’ I didn’t even know his name.”
Partly to capitalize on the outrage over Elvis’s movements on The Milton Berle Show, Allen scratched his head for a different way to spotlight him and also keep his movements contained. As he recalled nearly forty years later, “I personally came up with the two ideas that made Elvis look so good that night—the singing ‘Hound Dog’ to an actual dog, and the Range Roundup sketch with Andy Griffith and Imogene Coca,” the latter of which was a spoof on the Ozark Jubilee, the Grand Ole Opry, and Elvis’s barn dance home, the Louisiana Hayride.
Some of Elvis’s fans were offended at the notion of their idol singing to a live basset hound. But Elvis took it all in stride, even agreeing to be fitted for a