Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [99]
That night Elvis, dressed entirely in black, rode in a police car to nearby Russwood Stadium. Barbara sat with Vernon and Gladys, Minnie Mae, and Elvis’s aunt and uncle in a VIP section near the stage. The hometown fans, so proud to have seen him on The Steve Allen Show, were already on their feet in the dilapidated old baseball park, and the noise was deafening as Elvis took the stage. “You know those people in New York aren’t going to change me none,” Elvis told them. “I’m gonna show you what the real Elvis is like tonight.”
It was a sentimental and emotional evening all around. Elvis saluted his family from the edge of the stage. And Bob and Helen Neal had come back afterward, bringing their new employee, Carolyn Bradshaw, Elvis’s little sweetheart from the Hayride. She and Elvis had never really said good-bye, and now he spotted her. They waved and started toward each other, but it was not to be.
“We didn’t get to say anything, because all of a sudden, he was just inundated with people. I don’t know where all these people came from, but it looked like he’d never get away, so I just gave up and went on home. That was the last time I ever saw him.”
Sitting just a few rows from the stage that night was another young girl with stars in her eyes, this one just at the beginning of her relationship with Elvis. Jackie Rowland, the 190-pound “blueberry” from the Jacksonville, Florida, show, had made good on her promise to lose weight, and even though “my mother kept me almost in a bubble,” Marguerite had held up her end of the bargain, too, bringing Jackie, now fourteen years old and eighty pounds lighter, to Memphis.
They arrived at the Audubon Drive house on July 3 while Elvis was still in New York. Vernon saw them standing on the sidewalk, watching all the fans milling about, and came out and struck up a conversation. Marguerite explained how they happened to be there, and that Jackie had worked so hard to lose her weight, and just wanted to see Elvis so much. Vernon listened sympathetically.
“He said if Mrs. Presley would let us in, he would come to the side door, and that’s what happened,” Jackie vividly recalls.
Gladys, whose own weight continued to balloon, liked the personable mother-daughter, even inviting them to spend the night. They politely declined—they had a motel already—but said they would like to come back the next day, when Elvis was home. So on the Fourth of July, in the afternoon, before the Russwood show, the Rowlands returned to the house to visit.
The five of them—Elvis, his parents, and the Rowlands—sat in the living room, Gladys already in her dress for the concert. While Elvis sat between his parents on the couch, intently reading a story about himself in the newspaper, Jackie snapped his picture. Then Vernon scooted over, seeming even more the outsider, and Jackie sat down beside her idol, who draped his arm around her and held her close, his mouth so near her ear.
Jackie’s mother captured the moment in a snapshot. But Elvis does not appear to be a pop star greeting a fan he had met only briefly once before. Instead, both Jackie and Elvis look as natural and relaxed as if they were longtime sweethearts. Though Jackie was an only child “and I had never had a boyfriend and the only males that came near me were my family,” neither she nor Elvis seem self-conscious at being so physically affectionate in the presence of their parents. Elvis had a way of putting people at ease, but this was extraordinary.
Yet Jackie says it was not precisely as it seemed.
“I think one of the reasons Elvis and his mother liked me was due to my reaction to his first attempt to kiss me. I was totally innocent and naïve. I told him to stop it and pushed him away. You can see by my expression in the photo.”
Though Elvis was told no, it didn’t faze or deter him. “He didn’t care, he just put his arm around me again and started nibbling my ears.” In a lighthearted tone, “He told my mother she needed to take me to a doctor because I wasn’t normal. I’m sure he had never met a girl who