Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [98]
When the coach arrived in Memphis, it slowed just long enough for Elvis to disembark at a small signal stop called White Station. From there, the star of Sunday night’s Steve Allen Show and Hy Gardner Calling! walked home to Audubon Drive with his alcoholic and perpetually shell-shocked cousin Junior. Everybody wondered how he’d do with the fireworks that night, since Junior, a wild and unpredictable personality, had gone berserk and shot a group of civilians in a Korean village.
As usual, the yard was abuzz with fans, who normally contained themselves to the carport, except when Gladys or Vernon invited them inside, which the Presleys did quite frequently, accepting them with calm resolve. The house was especially active on this day, however, and not just for the holiday. A number of fans had traveled to Memphis for Elvis’s Russwood Stadium show that night, some of them getting up the nerve to come see where he lived.
Vernon was already in something of a state when Elvis walked in. The family had just had a swimming pool installed in the backyard, but the pool wouldn’t fill. Now Vernon was running a hose from the kitchen sink. Elvis hurried to put on his trunks, and then jumped into all of three feet of water, horseplaying with his cousins for Al’s camera.
Inside, Barbara, dressed for the evening event, sat in a taffeta, scoop-neck black-on-white polka-dot dress. Like the girl in Richmond, she, too, wore cluster pearl earrings, with a smart pair of black pumps setting it all off. She waited for Elvis to take his shower, and then half-naked, clad only in his pants and socks, his hair still tousled, he beckoned her into the living room to hear his acetates.
Minnie Mae sat on the couch, craning her neck forward, trying to make out the words to “Don’t Be Cruel.” But Elvis wanted to know what Barbara thought of all the songs, wanted her compliments and reassurance that he would have a hit. In the end, he needn’t have worried. The double-sided single, “Hound Dog/Don’t Be Cruel,” sat at the top of the charts for three months and became the most-played jukebox record of the year.
They made an odd pair, Elvis and Barbara. Al Wertheimer, taking note, found her to be “a model of gentility . . . pert, prim, and polite” as a schoolmistress, while Elvis, shirtless, with boils on his back, “looked like the unruly student who spent most of his time leering at the teacher.” She sat next to Minnie Mae for a while, just on the edge of the couch, holding her purse on her knees.
“Let’s dance,” Elvis said. But Barbara didn’t want to dance. “No, not now,” she answered. She was concentrating hard on the music. But Elvis persisted, pulling her to her feet and then hugging her, moving in for a kiss. Barbara complied, but “I didn’t want him to be kissing me in front of his grandmother.”
Minnie Mae took the hint, saying she had to get ready for the concert that night. Elvis took Barbara’s hand again, and they began dancing in the narrow space between the coffee table and the couch. Her heart wasn’t in it, though, and Elvis could tell. Finally she said she just wanted to listen.
“He shrugged, plopped down on the plush chair and sulked,” Wertheimer wrote in his book, Elvis ’56: In the Beginning. “She sat on the edge of the ottoman next to the hi-fi, picked at her pearl-clustered earrings and stared at the carpet. Elvis stared at her, clamped his lips in a pout and glared at a different patch of the carpet. His record filled the room, ‘Don’t make me feel this way / Come on over here and love me . . .’
“ ‘How do you like it?’ ” he asked.
“ ‘I think it’s very good,’ she said. She liked all of his music except for ‘Old Shep.’ ”
Then he asked if she wanted to hear the new ballad, “Any Way You Want Me.” She stood, and Elvis folded his arms around her and pulled her to his bare chest. It was an awkward embrace—she was shy with Al there—and Wertheimer knew it was time