Baby, Let's Play House Part 3

Pooling their resources-Travis had sold two cows and killed a hog to get just over a hundred dollars-the families found lodging in a cheap wooden rooming house at 370 Was.h.i.+ngton Street in north Memphis in the Pinchgut district, a haven to newcomers since the Irish settled there in the 1820s, the Jews joining them in the early 1900s. The Smiths took the upstairs apartment and the Presleys the downstairs, and they shared the communal bath. Rent for each family: eleven dollars a week.

Tough and slummy, with prost.i.tutes mixing with flatboat traders along the streets lined with delicatessens, five-and-dime stores, and brawl-house bars, the neighborhood derived its funny name from the saying that the Irish were so starved, their stomachs so taut from hunger, that you couldn't pinch any loose skin on their middles. Later, the name got shortened to "Pinch."

Billy Smith, eight years younger than Elvis, remembers that the situation was nearly as dire for the Presleys and the Smiths when the families settled in. "Daddy and Vernon spent weeks looking for work. They had to put cardboard in their shoes to cover the holes." For months, it seemed, they survived on turnip greens, seasoned with part of the salt pork from the slaughtered hog. Then five-year-old Billy discovered that the produce stand next door threw rotting fruit and vegetables into the trash cans each night.

"I remember going through there and finding bruised bananas to eat. When you're that poor, you scavenge for what you can get. Elvis loved to tell about the time I fell into one of the fifty-five-gallon trash cans. I was so little that he had to pick me up by my legs and pull me out. But I wasn't turnin' a-loose of them d.a.m.n bananas."

For a while, the families pondered moving back to Mississippi. But then both Vernon and Travis found employment at the Precision Tool Company on Kansas Street in south Memphis. (Soon Elvis's uncle Johnny Smith moved up from Tupelo and was hired there, too.) And Gladys, calling on her seamstress skills, took a part-time job in a drapery factory, Lorraine finding work at a laundry.

Precisely when Elvis started going to school in Memphis is open to question. Gladys's sister, Lillian, said he attended the Christine School for a short while, though there is no evidence to support it. What is known is that on November 8, 1948, Elvis Aaron Presley enrolled in the eighth grade at L. C. Humes High School, a traditionally white inst.i.tution in a rough neighborhood in a mostly segregated city. It already had a bad reputation. Vernon walked him to school that first day and was astonished to see his son back home shortly after, "so nervous he was bug-eyed," as Vernon put it. But he soon adjusted. Records show he was present 165 days that year, and absent 15, but never tardy. His grades improved from Tupelo, Elvis bringing home an A in language; a B in spelling, history, and physical education; and a C in arithmetic, science, and music.

The C in music would have pierced his ego. Elvis seemed more reticent about performing in public once the family moved to Memphis, perhaps because the town was full of music, a Mississippi blues man on every corner, a tip jar at his feet. Even at home, he insisted that the lights be off so n.o.body could see him when he practiced his guitar. "I was ashamed to sing in front of anybody except my mother and daddy," Elvis would say in 1956. He never did learn much more than a few major chords and a couple of easy runs, but they did the trick, and he could beat on the guitar with the meat of his palm for a percussive sound.

He was trying different songs now, Kay Starr's pop ballad "Harbor Lights" and "Molly, Darling," a hillbilly number made popular by Eddy Arnold, whose career was taking flight under the guidance of his new manager, a former carny who went by the name of Colonel Tom Parker. Sometimes at night, Elvis would take his guitar outside to see how it all sounded in the evening air, and Vernon and Gladys would spread an old quilt down on the ground so they could sit and listen, even though Elvis's voice, quavering slightly, seldom rose above a whisper.

In spring 1949 both the Presley and Smith families were still struggling financially. Vernon applied for public housing and left Precision Tool for a job at United Paint Company, which was closer to home. "He stayed there longer than anywhere," says Billy Smith. "Usually, he'd get a couple of paychecks, and that would be about it." At the time, with everybody working, the two families made a combined total of about $120 a week, Vernon bringing home $40.38 at 85 cents per hour. The Presleys and the Smiths soon split up for nearby rooming houses, one on Adams and the other on Poplar. But with no one else to depend on, the family held tight. Soon they would welcome Gladys's sister Levalle and her husband, Edward Smith, and their children, Junior and Gene, up from Mississippi.

In June 1949 Jane Richardson, a home service adviser for the Memphis Housing Authority, followed up on Vernon's application and visited the Presleys' rented room, for which they paid $9.50 a week. With Vernon at work, Miss Richardson met with Gladys and Elvis, noting that the family shared a bathroom with other residents and cooked on a hot plate. Miss Richardson went back to her office and wrote her report, indicating that the Presleys' application had merit. She added that Mrs. Presley and her son seemed "very nice and deserving." That November, they moved into Lauderdale Courts, right around the corner from where they were living, and paid thirty-five dollars a month for a two-bedroom, first-floor unit at 185 Winchester Street. With 689 square feet, apartment 328 had a living room, bathroom, and walk-in kitchen.

Residents were expected to keep the apartments clean, and inspectors came around once a month to make sure of that, and to see that no one had acc.u.mulated too many material goods, as any sign of affluence would put them at risk for eviction. Lauderdale Courts, consisting of sixty-six red brick buildings on twenty-two acres, was one of the first U.S. housing projects, and most occupants felt fortunate to be there, even as they hoped not to stay. Its motto: "From slums to public housing to private owners.h.i.+p."

Billy Smith saw how thrilled Gladys was with the place. "I have this vivid memory of going over to Lauderdale Courts one summer when Elvis was at Humes. They were playing music, and Gladys was dancing and they were having a ball. She was always jolly then, always laughing and carrying on."

The Presleys were one of seventeen new families who moved into the Courts around that time, though they differed in that most were single-parent households. Elvis, at fourteen, began quietly making new contacts, playing guitar with a group of older boys under the trees at Market Mall, the path that bisected the housing development. For the most part, he stayed in the background, watching and listening to see what he could pick up from the more experienced musicians, and then went home and sat on his bedroom windowsill and practiced, sometimes going down to the bas.e.m.e.nt laundry room so no one would hear him.

He was making personal friends, too, especially with three other boys from the Courts about his age-Buzzy Forbess, Paul Dougher, and Farley Guy. The trio became so close that they were seemingly inseparable, but it was Buzzy, and not George Klein or Red West, who become Elvis's best friend during his years at Humes. They banded together to do odd jobs, cutting gra.s.s with a push mower and a hand sickle for two dollars a yard, and walked up on Main Street to the movies at the Suzore No. 2 or the Rialto out on Jackson. ("Man, we really liked Victor Mature in Samson and Delilah, Samson and Delilah," Buzzy remembered.) Sometimes they played pool at the Odd Fellows Hall, Elvis liking eight ball and rotation. Mostly, they played corkball with a cut-off broom or mop handle, adhesive tape wrapped around a simple cork to serve as a ball. One day, Farley spit on the corkball stick, trying to emulate Buzzy's habit of spitting through his teeth. Elvis didn't see him-didn't realize what he was doing-though when he picked up the stick he instantly realized what was on it. By his teen years, Elvis had developed a hair-trigger temper, and in a second, he had Farley in the air.

"I grabbed a peach soda bottle on the way up," says Farley. "I told him, 'Elvis, if you don't put me down, I'm going to crown you with this bottle!' "

Suddenly, all h.e.l.l broke loose, Gladys shouting out of her window, and Farley's mother, too. Elvis hauled off and hit Farley hard, and as his little sister, Doris, remembers it, "Farley said, 'Okay, you've hit me. Now it's my time to hit you.' And Mrs. Presley came running out there yelling, 'Don't hit my boy!' Later that day, she told my mother, 'We can't have Farley going around hitting my boy,' but my mother told Mrs. Presley that boys would be boys and it was best if grown-ups did not get involved. She was one domineering woman."

Elvis and Farley shook hands and were friends again, but Elvis was gaining a reputation as a boy who could take care of himself. When one of his uncles got in trouble in a bar, it was Elvis he called. And once when Humes played a rival school, Treadwell, Elvis coldc.o.c.ked a Treadwell player who cursed the Humes coach, "knocking him all the way back into the bus," as Buzzy recalls.

It was a way for him to work off steam and deal with the hormonal pull of p.u.b.erty, if not to distance himself from Gladys. Now that they lived in the big city, she wanted to walk Elvis to school again, fearing for him when he crossed the street by himself. For a little while, she simply followed him, darting behind bushes so Elvis wouldn't see her.

Sometimes at night, in foreshadowing how the adult Elvis would interact with his entourage, the boys played tag on their bikes, Buzzy remembering that they raced at one another full force. ("It's a wonder we didn't get killed.") If they could sc.r.a.pe together ten cents, they went swimming at Malone Pool. But Elvis liked to save his money for pinball at a beer joint up at Third and Jackson, or for special occasions like the Cotton Carnival. Once they saw burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee there, Elvis frozen in his tracks, watching as if transfixed.

Often they made their own entertainment. When his parents were out for the evening, Elvis sometimes held dances in the Presleys' apartment with a phonograph and the few records the kids had between them. Each boy pitched in twenty-five cents for himself and his date, just enough for popcorn and c.o.kes. "None of us was rich enough then to just have a quarter," Buzzy remembered, "so we would save all week-a nickel a day-to get up enough money to go to the dance in Elvis's apartment."

Elvis, trying to overcome his shyness, pulled out his guitar and sang-he was working on Hank Williams's "Kaw-liga"-and initially, he brought a girl from the third floor named Betty Ann McMahan, also fourteen. She was his first love in the Courts. Gladys had met her even before Elvis, through her mother. The two women struck up a conversation outside one warm evening and continued it most nights in the McMahans' lawn chairs, Betty soon sitting in. Elvis, though, was too shy to join them. "Finally one night, I guess, she just forced him to come outside and sit with us and talk," as Betty remembered it.

One day, their neighbor Margaret Cranfill took a photograph of Elvis and Betty sitting on the curb on Winchester, both of them in dungarees with the hems rolled up into neat cuffs: twins. In it, the dark-haired Betty, her arm propped up and her chin in her hand, offers a closed smile for the camera. But a melancholy Elvis looks as if Betty has just told him good-bye. And perhaps she had. Their romance ended when a boy from Arkansas stole her affections, though Elvis's attraction to women whose appearance was remarkably similar to his was to be a nearly constant feature in his future choice of companions.

In the early days of his career, Elvis told a reporter he'd gotten his heart broken in high school-a gal he thought a lot of suddenly quit seeing him. For that reason, he said, he'd had trouble allowing himself to be fond of just one girl.

Whether that was Betty McMahan or her successors, Elvis began seeing Billie Wardlaw before Betty broke up with him. Billie, Betty's next-door neighbor, moved in with her mother, Thelma, in 1950, the year she turned fourteen. She was already so tall and pretty, with her long dark hair, that before she moved from her native Sardis, Mississippi, her grandmother had warned, "Now, Billie, you better not go up there to Memphis and get pregnant and embarra.s.s your mother!"

Billie had never even heard the word pregnant pregnant before and didn't know what it meant, but when she immediately turned the heads of all the boys in the Courts, she took heed. before and didn't know what it meant, but when she immediately turned the heads of all the boys in the Courts, she took heed.

"All the kids kept trying to get me to leave our third-floor apartment and come down and play with them, but I would just hang out the window and talk to them. I told them the reason I couldn't come down was because I didn't have any clothes to wear. I would just keep hanging out the window and talking."

Elvis, by now fifteen, was smitten with the mysterious girl peering down from above, especially since she'd teased that she had no clothes. He'd told her his name and exchanged pleasantries ("I'm from Mississippi, too"), and after a few weeks, while the other boys waited her out, treating her like a princess in some fairy-tale tower, Elvis took matters in hand. One day Billie heard a knock on the door and opened it to find him standing there, holding something behind his back. They giggled a bit the way teenagers do, nervous in the first throes of courts.h.i.+p, and then Elvis s.h.i.+fted the package in his hands and held it out to her. "Here," he said. "I brought you something."

"I opened the package, and it was a pair of blue jeans, the first pair of blue jeans I ever had. Elvis said, 'Now you can come down and play with us.' "

Elvis's idea of "play" was the old kissing game of spin the bottle, and as the kids of the Courts numbered about thirteen, and always hung out together, the game was almost evenly split between boys and girls. Farley's little sister, the tomboy Doris, joined in, as did Luther Nall's kid sis, Jerry. She was always photographing Elvis with her little camera and had a mad crush on him, even though he thought of Jerry as his little sister, popping her with a wet towel at the pool one day and accidentally scarring her leg. When dark came and somebody suggested spin the bottle, all the girls got excited, including Billie: "Elvis was a great kisser. We always hoped the bottle would land on him!"

From the start of their relations.h.i.+p, Elvis was possessive. He'd had other flirtations with Jo Ann Lawhorn, and another Jo Ann over at Bickford Park, who came to some of the group parties at the Courts with him. He'd tried to get something started with Carolyn Poole at school. And he tried with Georgia Avgeris, too, throwing wadded-up gum wrappers at her in cla.s.s to get her attention, but she was Greek Orthodox and not allowed to date outside her religion. Besides, his feelings for Billie were different. One day they had a spat, and she began flirting with Farley, who found himself in a tough spot: "Elvis didn't like that at all, and we had a 'discussion' over it." But it all blew over quickly.

"I think she just thought of him as a friend," Farley's sister, Doris, said. And since Elvis had a deathly crush on Billie, he enlisted Doris's help. "He was all the time getting me to go up and knock on her door and ask her to come down. Sometimes he would take his guitar into the courtyard and sing to her under her window, sort of like a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. He was crazy about her."

Billie confirmed it years later: "We really liked each other, but I think he liked me just a little more than I liked him." Her mother worked nights some, and Elvis would come up to Billie's apartment, but she never let him in while she was alone-everybody knew who did what and when and how at the Courts. So the two just sat on the steps and talked. One night, she asked him to teach her how to play the guitar, and he brought it up and showed her where to put her fingers on the fretboard to make the chords.

Elvis tried to deepen her affection, proffering a box of cherries, and then a necklace and bracelet that Billie always suspected he'd bought for Betty and took back when they broke up. He went to great lengths. One day, Billie's little sister peered out the window and couldn't believe her eyes: "Look at that. Elvis is climbing up that sign across the street!" Billie shook her head. Why was Elvis being so silly? Her sister thought she was cruel, but Billie refused to acknowledge him. "I wanted him to grow up."

They walked to school together to save a dime, and sometimes went to the movies at the Suzores. Elvis loved the dreamy escapism of the movies, his interests maturing from watching cowboy pictures to studying Tony Curtis, with his s.h.i.+ny black hair and knack for winning the girls. In the fall of 1950 Elvis applied for his Social Security card, and shortly after, he and Luther Nall got night jobs as ushers at Loew's State movie theater on South Main, where they wore uniforms to work. The job promised the delicious perk of letting them see the movies free. But like all twinless twins, Elvis had a fascination with uniforms and loved wearing his usher suit. It not only gave him an air of authority, but also made him look like Luther and all the other male employees, making him feel as if he belonged to a special group.

That's one reason he joined ROTC at Humes that year, in the tenth grade. Fannie Mae Crowder, who saw him in the halls a lot, noticed, "About every time I saw him, he was wearing his ROTC uniform, as if that was all he had to wear." And Doris Guy remembered how proud he was of it, all dressed up, and how he needed to show it off, organizing all the younger kids in the Courts as his soldiers, making them march back and forth, back and forth, all around in the courtyard when he got home in the afternoons. The only drawback was that his ROTC duties sometimes cut into the time he hoped to spend with Billie.

But Billie, too, had responsibilities, working after school and on weekends at Britlings's Cafeteria, where both her mother and Gladys had also been employed, Gladys eventually leaving that job to become a nurse's aide at St. Joseph's Hospital. Working around everybody's schedule curtailed the young couple's outings, so most of what they did was right around the Courts.

Their romance was chaste ("We were never doing anything we shouldn't have been doing," she said), even after sixteen-year-old Elvis took his driver's test in 1951 in his uncle Travis's 1940 Buick. Now that he had his license, he borrowed cars for double-dates with his cousin, Gene, or Luther, or the other guys around the Courts. He was growing up fast, getting handsome, and gaining confidence in himself. That summer, he took a job operating a spindle drill press and making rocket sh.e.l.ls at Precision Tool, where Travis still worked. Each Friday, he came home and gave his paycheck to his father, taking out only a little for dating.

If he had any money left over, he would go to Lansky Brothers on Beale Street and buy flamboyant clothing. Gladys had always made sure that his clothes were neat and clean ("He may not have had many clothes, but what he had was nice, and pretty much up-to-date," says Billy Smith), but his interests now ran along the lines of hepcat threads-two-tone pants and s.h.i.+rts with crazy piping, yellow, or maybe pink.

In an era of crew cuts, he also attempted to grow sideburns and paid obsessive attention to his hair, which had darkened to a dull, pale blond in p.u.b.erty. The girls at the Courts teased him about looking in the mirror all the time, and they said his hair was so long and straight that it hung down to his chin when he combed it forward. Elvis would grin and explain that's why why he was combing it, to keep it from falling down on his face. He finally styled it into a goopy wall of rose oil tonic, Vaseline, or Royal Crown pomade, which made it all look darker. In time, building on the Tony Curtis look and the hero of his comic books, Captain Marvel, Jr., he would sculpt a perfect pompadour, which curled into a greasy ducktail at the nape of his neck. he was combing it, to keep it from falling down on his face. He finally styled it into a goopy wall of rose oil tonic, Vaseline, or Royal Crown pomade, which made it all look darker. In time, building on the Tony Curtis look and the hero of his comic books, Captain Marvel, Jr., he would sculpt a perfect pompadour, which curled into a greasy ducktail at the nape of his neck.

The family was now paying forty-three dollars a month for housing at the Courts, but Vernon was out of work, claiming a bad back. He used the excuse to let Gladys and Elvis support him much of the time, and that led to strained relations between father and son, Elvis sometimes talking back to his father, but never his mother. He acted out in other ways, too, getting in trouble for skipping school to go swimming in Wolf River with Luther, and earning a paddling from school princ.i.p.al T. C. Brindley.

Still, in the summer of 1952, just before Elvis's senior year at Humes, Vernon staked him to a 1941 green, two-door Lincoln that Elvis and Luther found in a junk car lot. The cost: thirty-five dollars.

"My daddy was something wonderful to me," Elvis would say about the car, since it was a rarity for a high school boy to have his own wheels, especially one whose family lived in government housing. Buzzy remembers Elvis driving him to Tupelo to show him where he'd grown up, just to have something to do. He took Luther one time, too, even though the tires were so thin on the old Lincoln that Luther didn't think they'd make it down and back.

One night, Elvis drove the whole gang down to Mississippi, this time to Water Valley, where Billie's relatives lived. She "was having some kind of party down there," as Farley remembered it. But try as he did, Elvis couldn't seem to impress any of Billie's family except her mother, who told him he sang well enough to be on the radio. Elvis blushed and stammered and finally said, "Mrs. Rooker, I can't sing."

Once, the couple rode the bus to the end of the line to have dinner with Billie's older sister. Billie was embarra.s.sed at Elvis's table manners, since he ate everything with a spoon and never touched his fork, "not then and not at any meal I had with him later." It was bizarre, she thought, and she noted that when they ate with his parents, he had a special platter, "and he wouldn't eat from anything but that platter."

The boy was odd, yes, but so many of the silly things he did seemed like kid stuff. Even though she was younger, she thought she had simply matured faster, and it bothered her. Then she began to see his temper, as on the day he spotted another boy's picture in her purse and just went wild. "He grabbed it out, and without saying anything, he threw that picture on the ground and began stomping it and grinding it into the ground with the heel of his shoe."

Billie had never seen Elvis like that, and it shocked and frightened her.

They'd been going together for a year and a half by now, and more and more, Billie found things about Elvis she didn't like, including the fact that he didn't dance. He and his friends may have held parties in the Presleys' apartment, but the truth was he couldn't couldn't dance, not really. He could slow dance-everybody could do that, drape yourself onto a partner and inch around in a circle-but he couldn't fast dance with a girl, and he didn't know the sophisticated dance steps for big-band music. And dancing, it turned out, was something Billie really wanted to do. After work, she and her mother walked by the USO club on Third Street on their way home, and now she began asking permission to stay at the club for a few hours and dance with the military men. dance, not really. He could slow dance-everybody could do that, drape yourself onto a partner and inch around in a circle-but he couldn't fast dance with a girl, and he didn't know the sophisticated dance steps for big-band music. And dancing, it turned out, was something Billie really wanted to do. After work, she and her mother walked by the USO club on Third Street on their way home, and now she began asking permission to stay at the club for a few hours and dance with the military men.

Elvis noticed her hanging out with other guys, particularly a sailor she'd met there, and he was furious. For a boy who'd gotten his first erection watching his aunts dancing to fast music, it was all too intimate, a betrayal of the most treacherous sort, even if there was no actual s.e.x involved. His head swirled with emotions, and he could hardly get his words out. They tumbled all over one another in a cascade of pain. Billie couldn't take it another second.

"I finally had to tell him, 'Elvis, I am going to begin seeing other boys.' " His reaction surprised her.

"He started crying. Until that night, I had never seen a man, or a boy, cry. He told me, 'Billie, I was going to ask you to marry me!' "

Billie was stunned. Marriage certainly wasn't on her mind, and she had no idea it was on his. But now there was nothing to do but break up, even as Elvis kept tabs on her-just happening to show up at the cafeteria, for instance, and at the Cotton Carnival the same night she went. "Look, there's Elvis!" her girlfriend said. The way he looked, he was impossible not to notice. But Billie acted as if she didn't see him, though there was no escaping him at the Courts.

The trauma of losing Billie triggered his sleepwalking again. One night he woke up on the stairs outside his apartment, wearing only his underwear. Suddenly, he heard Billie come in with her date, and he ran and hid, crouching, afraid to move while she kissed the boy good night.

For a while they tried to be friends, but Elvis's heart was broken, and there was no fixing it, not even after Billie moved back to Mississippi.

Though she is a minor name in the Elvis saga, Billie Wardlaw was a progenitor for many of the women to follow. Her coloring, particularly her dark hair, would have made her seem like his twin, a female version of himself. It's one reason he spent money well beyond his reach for a pair of blue jeans for her, as they matched his own, as Betty's had. And her size-she was big boned, though not overweight-would have reminded Elvis of the young Gladys, which is why he had intended to propose marriage, to complete his psychological circle.

"At an unconscious level, we are always seeking resolutions to childhood dilemmas," writes psychologist Charlotte Davis Kasl in her groundbreaking book, Women, s.e.x, and Addiction: A Search for Love and Power. Women, s.e.x, and Addiction: A Search for Love and Power. "On some level, we're looking for a second chance, to get what we missed the first time around. By attracting people similar to those in our families, we are given a chance to heal ourselves, to learn the lesson inherent to our childhood situations." "On some level, we're looking for a second chance, to get what we missed the first time around. By attracting people similar to those in our families, we are given a chance to heal ourselves, to learn the lesson inherent to our childhood situations."

In courting Billie, Elvis was attempting to separate himself from his mother and the pain of having lost his twin, even as Billie represented both. A happy relations.h.i.+p with her would have allowed him the chance to obliterate the guilt of surviving when Jessie did not, as well as quell the eternal loneliness of losing his twin, and the pain Jessie's death had caused their mother. It also would have blunted the s.e.xual shame of covert incest. The fact that Billie spurned him only added to his core belief that he wasn't lovable. He would have felt terribly empty and rejected, not just as a boyfriend, but also as a person.

Finally, his violent outbursts at finding another boy's picture in Billie's purse and his tears at learning she was dating a sailor were predictable escapes. As an adult, still dealing with the seeds of destruction planted in childhood, Elvis would turn that violence inward, deflecting his loneliness and fear with prescription drugs and overeating.

At the start of his senior year, in the fall of 1952, Elvis was being stretched in all directions, practicing his music, trying to keep up a C average, and working long hours, first for the Upholsterers Specialties Company, and then for MARL Metal Products, a furniture manufacturer, on the 3 directions, practicing his music, trying to keep up a C average, and working long hours, first for the Upholsterers Specialties Company, and then for MARL Metal Products, a furniture manufacturer, on the 3 P.M. P.M. to 11 to 11 P.M. P.M. s.h.i.+ft, using hand tools and an electric screw drill to make plastic tables. The strain started to show-he was falling asleep in cla.s.s-and so Gladys had him quit. s.h.i.+ft, using hand tools and an electric screw drill to make plastic tables. The strain started to show-he was falling asleep in cla.s.s-and so Gladys had him quit.

However, the family faced a greater dilemma that November, when the Memphis Housing Authority sent the Presleys an eviction notice and ordered them to vacate by the end of February. The reason: With a combined income of $4,133, they had exceeded the limit allowed for residents of subsidized housing.

In January 1953 they left the Courts and moved to 698 Saffarans Street, across from Humes. Three months later, they packed up again, this time landing in an apartment in a large, two-story brick home at 462 Alabama, an integrated street where they would pay $50 a month in rent, plus utilities. Minnie Mae bunked on a cot in the dining room, and Elvis slept on the sofa. The Presleys were now out of government housing, but the move to Alabama Street could not be considered upward mobility for the family in any way, as the apartment consisted of a couple of small rooms and a large kitchen. They still weren't doing all that well financially, and the Courts were located right across the street.

In March, Elvis visited the Tennessee State Employment Security office, saying he would like to work as a machinist. The interviewer took his information, and then noted on his application that his appearance as a "rather flas.h.i.+ly dressed playboy type [is] denied by fact [he] has worked hard past three summers [;] wants a job dealing with people."

Elvis had never really found his place in high school, but now, in his senior year, he was about to have two powerful supporters. The first was George Klein, who he'd met in music cla.s.s the year he started at Humes. They had two things in common: They were both eaten up with music, and they shared a wors.h.i.+pful love of radio, George hoping to make a career in it. Elvis had impressed him that first year by performing "Old Shep" and "Cold, Cold Icy Fingers" for his cla.s.smates. When Elvis raised his hand and asked permission, "There were a few laughs in the cla.s.s because it just wasn't cool in 1948 to do that in front of anyone. I was blown away because I'd never seen a kid get up and sing like that." As they approached their senior year, George became cla.s.s president and thus had some political clout. The two wouldn't really become close until after they graduated, but George paid attention to him, and Elvis never forgot it.

His second ally was Robert Gene West, nicknamed "Red" for his carrot-colored hair, buzzed into a crew cut. An all-Memphis football star, Red was a year behind Elvis, who had quit the team almost immediately after he joined: To start with, at 145 pounds, he was too light, which made him self-conscious about school sports. Besides, he didn't like to wear the helmet-it messed up his hair-and he needed to get an after-school job. Sometimes he didn't have the fifteen cents for lunch, and Coach Rube Boyce would give it to him.

Red West, taut and muscular, had a reputation for being a quick man with his fists, and in the late summerearly fall of 1952, Elvis needed a little protection. While everyone else wore jeans and T-s.h.i.+rts, Elvis favored dress pants, and just to be different, he often wore a scarf fas.h.i.+oned into an ascot, like a movie star. Everything about his appearance made him a natural target.

Red had stopped at his locker to get his football gear one afternoon just after the bell rang and saw Elvis leaning against the wall. They had spoken before, but the hierarchy of high school had prevented them from becoming friends. Now Elvis could use one. Red could tell that something was up, and Elvis spilled it out: "There's three guys outside who are going to beat me up." Red nodded and said, "Let's go check on it." Outside, Red had a persuasive talk with the ringleader and all ended peacefully.

The following day, Elvis caught him after cla.s.s and gave him a bashful smile. "Thanks a lot for yesterday." Red smiled back. "Forget it, man."

Not long after, Red walked into the boys' bathroom and found Elvis in trouble again. Three guys had him pushed up against the wall, taunting him about his hair and threatening to cut it. Red saw a "look of real fear on his face . . . like a frightened little animal." He knew the guys from the football squad, and laid it on the line. Elvis liked his hair like that, and if they cut it, they'd have to cut Red's, too. "They did it just to make themselves feel big, and I intervened and stopped it, and I guess it stuck."

That April Elvis learned that Red had a musical side, when they both performed in Humes's annual Minstrel Show, a variety program featuring the school band and various soloists, from the Arwood Twins, billed as twirlers, to dancer Gloria Trout. A fund-raiser, the show was scheduled for a Thursday evening and was not expected to change anybody's life. Elvis, listed sixteenth on the program, and identified as "Guitarist . . . Elvis Prestly" [sic], told only a couple of friends about it, and even then, they thought he might bow out. He'd sung once at a Christmas party in biology cla.s.s, but that was about it. Now he was ready to go in Buzzy's red flannel s.h.i.+rt. He'd accidentally torn a hole in it when he put it in the closet, and he'd rolled up the sleeves so it wouldn't show.

Red, who played trumpet, had put together a little trio with a guitar and ba.s.s, and he'd just finished his act when he saw Elvis come out with his guitar. "I never thought he would have the guts to get out there in front of those people," Red wrote. "I never even knew he sang."

When Elvis first ambled out onstage, he looked the least prepared of all the performers. He seemed unsure of what to say or even do. He fumbled around with his guitar, and then with the lights bothering him, turned his head sideways, eyeing the audience through slits. He stood there too long for anyone's comfort-at least a full minute, as if he might bolt. Finally, waves of talent and ambition crashed inside him, and he launched into his first number, Teresa Brewer's new chart topper, " 'Til I Waltz Again with You."

Quietly, Elvis had been doing more than working on his ballads-he'd been experimenting with fast numbers, jumping around a little, just enough to put some pizzazz into it all. The teens in the Courts danced to a one-two-three bop beat, but Buzzy watched Elvis develop his own "crazy" rhythmic step, adding four-five-six to the one-two-three. He tried it out in front of eight or ten kids at the jukebox in the grocery store that Farley's brother-in-law owned.

He also practiced in front of his family, Billy Smith remembers. "We got a piano that Christmas, and Elvis came over to our house. He started playing something fairly fast, what little he could play piano, and then he got to moving around a lot, and it was a sight to see! I thought, 'Gosh, that's weird to see him jump around like that and sing.' He just done it for a few minutes, and he quit. He was trying to find something that fit him. And when he did, all at once, it just broke loose what was inside him."

Now, onstage at the Minstrel Show, he started his second song. n.o.body seems to remember what it was, but Frannie Mae Crowder swears it was the moment when the real Elvis was born. "He was moving all over that stage. And his movements didn't start with his hips. They started with his knees and worked their way up."

And then in a flash it was over. "At first," Red remembered, "he just stood there, surprised as h.e.l.l." The audience, too, seemed stunned. n.o.body had ever seen a guy move like that. What was he doing? And how did he do it, this dunce with the impossible hair? The place went crazy.

"It was amazing," Elvis said later, "how popular I became after that."

He performed every chance he got, toting his guitar to school. All the same, some of the girls thought he was just too over-the-top, and when he would start to sing, they'd whisper, "Not again!" He still had few real friends at Humes aside from Red and George.

In early 1953 he went to a birthday party a few blocks from the Courts and ran into Regis Wilson, fourteen, who was there with two girlfriends, Carol McCracken and Judy Gessell. Regis, a pet.i.te girl with blond hair and a big smile, had formerly lived at the Courts for six years with her divorced mother and five siblings, including her brother Jim, who was Elvis's age, and hung out with him around the complex.

Regis had a crush on Elvis, who she considered "a gentle soul, but all boy-he kind of had this swagger to him." She used to see him playing football in the Triangle, the gra.s.sy open field at the complex. But she'd never spoken to him, and never thought he'd paid any attention to her-he seemed too interested in Betty or Billie. Of course, he was a weird dresser, in his yellow sport coat with brown trim, and he had a case of teenage acne. But from day one, she remembers, "I thought he was cute."

She lived in a rooming house on Merriweather Street, a bus ride away, and hadn't expected to see Elvis again. But there he was, and he was talking to her. And he still had those sideburns she'd always liked. "He was a loner, a looker. Very s.e.xy, with slicked-back hair."

They played spin the bottle that night, and Regis's girlfriends, miffed that she had kissed a boy they liked, went off and left her by herself when their ride came. Regis was stranded. "I didn't have anybody I could call to come pick me up, because by then my four older siblings had left home and my mother didn't have a car." Elvis offered to drive her, and she nervously agreed. She'd never been alone in a car with a boy before, and in fact, she'd never dated-she was a ninth grader at the all-girl Holy Names, "the poorest Catholic school in Memphis." But when they got to her front porch and Elvis asked for her phone number, "I knew I wanted to see him."

Though he was eighteen, the four-year age gap didn't bother either one of them. "Growing up in housing projects with a single mom, five [other] kids, and a very dysfunctional family background, I pretty much raised myself," says Regis. "So I was fourteen, but I was a very mature fourteen." And Elvis, still stinging from Billie's cruel rebuff, found the relations.h.i.+p with Regis finally put him in a position of control and made him feel like something of an older brother.

Psychologically, his attraction to her was more complex. Because his stunted emotional growth left him unable to move much past fourteen, Regis wasn't just a little buddy but a replication of himself. Unconsciously, fourteen would now be the magic age for so many of his future romantic interests.

When they first began dating, Elvis worked at night part-time, ushering at Loew's. (At some point, he was fired after an altercation with another usher, who complained that a concession stand girl gave him free candy.) His usual habit would be to drop by Regis's place in the afternoon, sometimes waiting for her when she got home from school. But she never knew exactly when he was coming, and she never invited him in: "My mother had had another child-and still no husband-and I was left at home with this two-year-old. My family life was so chaotic that I just couldn't talk about it to him."

Regis was also embarra.s.sed that her family didn't actually own the house, an immaculate, large brick home with flowers in the yard, but simply lived in one rented room. Pretty soon she couldn't tell him, because Elvis thought otherwise, and his imagination had run away with him. "He used to say, 'One of these days, I'm going to buy my mama a house like this.' " And he told her about his twin.

Often they simply sat in the glider on the screened-in porch and talked ("His humor was the type that he could just come out with funny remarks"), and sometimes he sang to her with his guitar, just strumming and humming. He was working on a new ballad, "My Happiness," and he sang that to her, too, his baritone, melancholy and soft, floating on the humid air. She was amazed that someone as shy as he was could put his heart on the line like that. "He sang it so tenderly. It seemed like it held a lot of emotion for him."

Evening shadows make me blue,When each weary day is through,How I long to be with you,My happiness . . .

Soon he began courting her in the evening, too. His worn-out Lincoln had a little seat in the back, and sometimes his cousin Gene Smith and his girl would double-date. They made the usual teenage excursions: riding over to West Memphis, Arkansas, for a drive-in movie and popcorn, or the "Teen Canteen" at McKellar Lake for hamburgers and shakes. Sometimes they just went tooling around. "He was a very simple, sweet person. He thoroughly enjoyed just sitting there watching the Mississippi River roll by, and he loved driving cars."

As he had been with Billie, Elvis was a consummate gentleman. His looks completely belied his behavior. ("If you were to see him on the street, you'd probably think he was a hoodlum.") At fourteen, she didn't think she could really be in love with someone, but she liked him a lot. She kissed him every night from the second date on, and she had her expectations. Carol and Judy still hung out around the Courts, and reported he was a good kisser, "and I wanted to see for myself." She had heard he knew how to kiss in that deep way, but that presented a dilemma.

"The nuns at my school told us we shouldn't allow boys to kiss us with their mouths open. So I'll just say Elvis gave me long kisses. You could say we made out. But he never tried to go farther. He wasn't like that."

Regis knew he was serious about music, but he was so modest he never even mentioned his big success at the Humes Minstrel Show. One of his favorite things to do was to take her to the All-Night Gospel Singings at Ellis Auditorium, where the Statesmen and the Blackwood Brothers would perform.

"About two in the morning, I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer, and we'd leave." But Elvis could have lasted until dawn. "Some of those spirituals had big, heavy rhythm beats like a rock-and-roll song," he would remember in 1965. "That music didn't hurt anybody, and it sure made you feel good." Sitting in the audience, he sang right along with everyone onstage, trying to hit all the high and low notes. Regis scrunched down in her seat. "I would look at him like he was crazy, but that didn't stop him from going right on singing."

Regis didn't know it, but he afforded their dates by working the auditorium's concessions, particularly on Monday nights when the hall staged professional wrestling. Guy Coffey, the concessions manager, hired him and other Humes students to sell c.o.kes, and on a good night Elvis earned three or four dollars. He loved the magic of the place, and he fantasized playing there one day, standing on the same stage as all the greats.

"Sometimes after the night's event had ended and the Humes kids had settled up financially," Coffey remembered, "Elvis would go up on the stage and play to imaginary crowds, bowing to their applause. I would have to tell him, 'Come on now, Elvis, we have to close the place up.' And he would say, 'Yes, sir,' and we would walk silently out of the building."

Regis enjoyed the gospel sings, for which Elvis always got dressed up in his good clothes, as if he were going to church. But Elvis never invited her to services anywhere, perhaps because he only sporadically attended, and his parents had never become members anywhere once they moved to Memphis. He also knew that there was significant prejudice against the a.s.sembly of G.o.d church. In fact, Regis's own family referred to Pentecostal groups as "Holy Rollers," and as she remembers, "I got the impression that the Presleys were religious, but I would have to say that he didn't talk about [the a.s.sembly of G.o.d] because it was snickered about. It was something he wouldn't have told many people."

If Elvis felt like an alien among other teenagers most of the time, he was never so out of place than on the night of his senior prom at the sw.a.n.ky and segregated Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis. Now, at the end of the school year and four months into his courts.h.i.+p of Regis, he asked her to be his date. Precisely why he went is a mystery, but he felt some kind of pressure to go, and to give the evening a special flair. "It was the most exciting thing I had ever done," Regis says. "I felt like Cinderella getting ready to go to the Royal Ball."

The fourteen-year-old hurried to Lerner's to pick out a strapless pink taffeta dress for $14.98, and then, her budget blown, accessorized it with the pink shoes she'd gotten at Easter. Someone suggested she could get her hair done free at the beauty college right across the street from the Peabody, and she quickly made an appointment. She'd never even been in the Peabody before, and as she sat in the beauty chair, looking at the hotel through the window, she said to herself, "Just think, in a few hours from now I will be back here all dressed up."

Elvis was also grooming his hair-his sideburns were now extra long-and choosing his outfit. Regis wondered what he would wear, since "he would show up in outfits that were so flashy I would open the door and blink my eyes." But he pa.s.sed on the idea of a white jacket like the other boys wore and decided on a conservative dark blue suit and blue suede shoes. He showed up at her door in a s.h.i.+ny rented Chevy, also dark blue, paid for by money he had saved from ushering. Shyly, as Regis blushed, he pinned a pink carnation corsage on her dress.

As they entered the Continental Ballroom at the Peabody, the band was playing, and couples were already out on the floor. But Elvis steered Regis to a seat and offered to get her a c.o.ke.

Given Billie's rejection and his embarra.s.sment at not knowing how to dance, Elvis would have been enormously uncomfortable at his prom, and tortured at the idea of getting out on the floor in front of his peers. Finally, in case Regis was wondering, he told her.

"I can't dance," he said, cracking a self-conscious grin and perspiring under his jacket.