Baby, Let's Play House Part 2

"When he was four or five," Billy Smith reports, "my mama and Aunt Clettes were dancing together to some music. They were up on a trunk, waving their skirts around, so they were flying up. Elvis was in the room. And the more they danced, the more excited he got. He grabbed my mama by the leg. And he said, 'Oh, my peter!' Well, Gladys went wild. She yanked him up and yelled out, 'You all quit that d.a.m.n dancing!' She pointed at Elvis and said, 'Look what you're doing to him!' When my mama told me that, I liked to died."

That formative memory would lead to one of Elvis's strongest s.e.xual charges as an adult, that of two women together. And as he grew older, he would have a new name for his p.e.n.i.s: Little Elvis.

In the fall of 1941, Elvis entered first grade, attending Lawhon Elementary School on Lake Street, where he would spend the first years of his education. Starting school is a huge and often traumatic step for any child, and for Elvis, it was doubly hard being separated from Gladys for most of the day, especially since Vernon had lost his Federal Works Project job and traveled throughout Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee on construction jobs, working mostly as a carpenter. on Lake Street, where he would spend the first years of his education. Starting school is a huge and often traumatic step for any child, and for Elvis, it was doubly hard being separated from Gladys for most of the day, especially since Vernon had lost his Federal Works Project job and traveled throughout Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee on construction jobs, working mostly as a carpenter.

Elvis never really knew when his father would be home-the family was now living in a rental house on Maple Street in East Tupelo-and Vernon's absence, along with the experience of leaving his mother during school hours, bound mother and son anew. They often visited Jessie's grave together. Relatives would recall that Gladys urged and joined her young son in talking with the lost twin, a practice that originated from her daily prayer to Jessie for guidance. He became her mental embodiment of perfection, first in her mind alone, and then in Elvis's.

After such sad outings, Gladys, wanting to cheer Elvis up, often bought little treats for him and made him cakes with b.u.t.ter frosting. He had his special cup, gla.s.s, and eating utensils, too, and sometimes refused to use any other.

Part of it had to do with a phobia about germs, particularly about eating food that anyone else had touched. Even as an adult, Elvis would drink from the side of a coffee cup, near the handle, thinking it was cleaner, since most people drank from the middle. He routinely refused to eat if someone else reached over and got something off his plate, even if it was an immediate member of his family, as Billy Smith noted.

"Elvis used to carry a knife and fork in his back pocket because he didn't like to eat with anybody else's. He'd eat from your dishes, but not with your silverware. He didn't break that habit until he went into the army. Used to take that knife and fork to school with him. He didn't eat or drink after anybody and he didn't want you to drink after him."

Attending school and meeting new children opened Elvis up to a new world-something he desperately needed, given his insular family situation and the fact that he was a shy, dreamy child. Yet being with so many boys his age would have naturally underscored his grief in not having Jessie by his side. Sometime after Elvis started school, but before he was old enough to know the facts of life, Gladys inadvertently pulled a cruel trick on him, perhaps not realizing how it would affect him.

Barbara Hearn, who dated Elvis during his early fame, first became a family friend when the Presleys lived on Alabama Street in Memphis. She and Gladys found an easy friendship, sitting and talking. "If you were sh.e.l.ling peas or something, you'd get into some pretty deep conversation," she relates. One day Gladys told her about the time in Tupelo when she was sick and the doctor paid a house call.

"Elvis saw the doctor leaving, and he came running into her bedroom, saying, 'What's the matter? What's the matter?' Gladys had doubled a pillow up and put a blanket around it, and she said, 'Oh, Elvis, come and look what the doctor's left!' It looked just like a baby lying there, and he was so happy. He broke out in a big smile and ran over there, but when he saw that she was playing a joke on him, he was so disappointed and angry. It made him furious, because he really thought there had been a baby. She probably wouldn't have done it if she had thought about it a while, particularly after she saw how upset he got. I'm sure she was sorry afterward."

By 1943, Vernon was working hard to stabilize his family's finances and to establish himself as a worthy citizen after his incarceration at Parchman. He continued to travel to find work-moving the whole family to the Mississippi Gulf Coast town of Pascagoula that May, where he and his cousin Sales Presley, Annie's husband, signed on at the Moss Point Shipyard. But by the end of June, all the Presleys were homesick and returned to Tupelo. Vernon found a job as a driver for L. P. McCarty and Sons, a wholesale grocer, and the family continued to enjoy what must have seemed like prosperity, compared to so many other stressful periods of their lives. himself as a worthy citizen after his incarceration at Parchman. He continued to travel to find work-moving the whole family to the Mississippi Gulf Coast town of Pascagoula that May, where he and his cousin Sales Presley, Annie's husband, signed on at the Moss Point Shipyard. But by the end of June, all the Presleys were homesick and returned to Tupelo. Vernon found a job as a driver for L. P. McCarty and Sons, a wholesale grocer, and the family continued to enjoy what must have seemed like prosperity, compared to so many other stressful periods of their lives.

The following year, Elvis started fourth grade at Lawhon Elementary. It was a significant time in the young boy's life, as it was probably this year that he "courted" his first real girlfriend, Elois Bedford. (Caroline Ballard had earlier won his heart, but the "relationship" was short-lived.) After Elvis became famous, Elois would forget precisely when their "romance" started, but she never forgot his smile, more a perpetual silly grin than anything else. "I can close my eyes now and still see him walking toward me," she said in the early 1990s. "I picked him out of all the boys. He picked me out of all the other girls. As far as dating, we didn't. We were too young."

Theirs was a typical interaction for children of their age-they wrote notes to each other in cla.s.s, called each other "boyfriend" and "girlfriend," and spent time together at various events, particularly the Halloween carnival, where they entered the cakewalk. Elois remembered him as a loner-quiet and well mannered, wearing "very common clothes," either overalls or khaki pants and shirt, but always clean. Elvis was already starting to distinguish himself with his singing.

"What I remember most about him was his singing in chapel [at school]. I can still see him singing 'Old Shep.' It was so pretty. He had such a beautiful voice back then. I remember our fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Dillard, saying, 'One of these days he is going to be on the radio.' "

"Old Shep," Red Foley's mournful story of a boy and his dog, was the kind of tearjerker that made up the backbone of country music of the era. But the tragic saga would have strongly resonated with a child who had experienced his own painful loss, and Elvis's friend Becky Martin recalled that he imbued it with such emotion that some of his schoolmates cried when he sang it.

Elvis was still stuck on the song the following year, impressing his fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Oleta Grimes, the daughter of Orville Bean, who was once more doing business with Vernon, having just sold him a new four-room house on East Tupelo's Berry Street. Mrs. Grimes found Elvis to be such a promising singer ("He sang so sweetly") that she took him to the school princ.i.p.al, J. D. Cole, who agreed with her-the boy had talent. Mrs. Grimes spoke with Gladys, and they agreed to enter Elvis in the talent contest on Children's Day at the annual MississippiAlabama Fair and Dairy Show at the Fairgrounds. The first-place winner would receive a trophy and a $25 war bond, and even the runners-up could go home with a smaller trophy, or at least $2.50 worth of fair rides. Ten-year-old Elvis, wearing eyegla.s.ses, a necktie, and suspenders to hold up his pants, climbed up on a chair for yet another a cappella rendition of "Old Shep."

For decades, the story circulated that Elvis won second place, but in fact, he did not. Nor did he win third or fourth, but rather fifth. Shirley Gillentine, who belted out "My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time," secured first place. And Nubin Payne, who wrote her own song, "Someday," and accompanied herself on guitar, came in second. A rare photograph shows Shirley holding the largest trophy, Nubin the second largest trophy, and Hugh Jeffries, an East Tupelo boy who played the Hawaiian guitar, the third-place prize. Elvis, a defeated look on his brow, stands empty-handed.

Elois Bedford was proud of him all the same. But later that year, another girl captured Elvis's attention, and now he had to break the news. "I was just about to get on the school bus and go home that afternoon," Elois remembered, "and Elvis handed me a note."

It was short but not sweet, saying only: I have found another girl. I have found another girl.

"Her name was Magdalene Morgan," Elois continued. "I lost him that day."

The event was meaningful in the larger scheme of things-moving from Elois to Magdalene was perhaps the last time Elvis limited himself to sequential girlfriends. In years to come, and especially once his recording career caught fire, his love interests would be both many and concurrent. This was behavior he learned from both his grandfather, J.D., and to some extent Vernon.

Maggie Morgan was a far more important figure in Elvis's life than Elois Bedford, as their interest in each other spanned several years and ran deeper on every level. And although neither of them could have known it at the time, Maggie was an archetype for so many women to come: She was a stand-in for Gladys.

With dark hair and eyes, and standing a good three inches taller than her new beau, Maggie had known Elvis since the third grade at Lawhon Elementary. But it was at the a.s.sembly of G.o.d church that her infatuation simmered. Already the church pianist by eight or nine, she played behind the budding singer as he performed the old hymns-"Amazing Grace," "The Old Rugged Cross." Vernon and Gladys did not attend church regularly, Aaron Kennedy said years later, and no one could depend on them to take a lead there. But Elvis and Maggie rode the church bus together as Christ Amba.s.sadors-a youth group that traveled the nearby towns of Saltillo, Corinth, and Priceville. And the two were paired off together in the Christmas pageants, Elvis playing Joseph to her Mary.

Gladys and Maggie's mother were friends as well, and the women visited in each other's homes. During such times, Elvis and Maggie would sneak out of the house together to be alone.

"We would walk in the woods and hold hands and talk, dream aloud about the future and what we wanted to be. Elvis always wanted to be a singer. That was his dream even then. And he always said [the girl] he would marry would have to be a lot like his mother."

On one visit, Elvis and Maggie ventured out into the woods behind his house, and Elvis carved a heart into the side of a tree, carefully cutting out their initials and the words LOVE FOREVER LOVE FOREVER beneath them. Later, he did the same thing on a stack of lumber. The two had an understanding-they were sweethearts and belonged to each other, and as Maggie remembers, "We were so close at that time I just thought we would always be together." beneath them. Later, he did the same thing on a stack of lumber. The two had an understanding-they were sweethearts and belonged to each other, and as Maggie remembers, "We were so close at that time I just thought we would always be together."

Elvis didn't precisely say the same, since he wasn't much of a talker. At school, in fact, he stood out only for being an especially giving child who wanted to please. His grades weren't remarkable-arithmetic and geography, especially, proved nearly fatal. And his features had not yet formed into a handsome face, his high cheekbones, part of his Indian ancestry, just barely discernible, and his hooded eyelids looking more droopy than dreamy. It was only when he turned to music that he seemed to shine. In Maggie's view, he was just a nice polite boy, her "ideal guy."

With boys, Elvis wasn't as restrained. On Berry Street, he played with the son of Lether Gable, Vernon's partner in crime in the check-forging caper, who was now the Presleys' next-door neighbor. The boys were wrestling one day, getting rougher than they intended, when Elvis somehow snapped his playmate's hip. He felt terrible about it and, according to Annie Presley, "went and sat with him every day and visited while he was laid up." And while he didn't play hooky, sa.s.s his parents, or talk back to his teachers, "Elvis was a lot like his daddy in one respect," his cousin Bobby Roberts offered. "Both of them were always joking." The company of men and boys, sitting around and telling stories, relaxed him.

"One night one of his uncles was visiting, and he was telling us never to mess with women, that women would eat you up like blue cheese, or something like that. When he said that, Elvis fell on the floor laughing. He got a big kick out of that."

Still, most of his friends were females, like Becky Martin or Barbara Spencer, and he didn't mind babysitting for his relatives' children, toting them on his hip the way a girl might do. Gladys remained his whole world, as his role model, friend, companion, and protector. "I could wake her up any hour of the night," Elvis said in 1958, "and if I was worried or troubled by something, well, she'd get up and try to help me."

For too many years, she walked him to school every day, and legend has it she continued such hovering behavior long after Elvis was old enough to walk on his own, or with other children his age. Annie Presley dispelled that, insisting, "She didn't walk him to school. She'd walk him to the highway and see him across, and then she'd come back home. Lots of evenings, we'd just sit on our porch and watch for 'em and see 'em get close to the highway. Then one of us would go and see 'em across the road."

Oleta Grimes, Elvis's fifth grade teacher and a neighbor to the Presleys, also refuted the myth that Gladys accompanied Elvis to school, both at Lawhon Elementary, and later at Milam Junior High.

"Being a neighbor," she told author Bill Burk in 1991, "I walked with the children, and I don't remember Mrs. Presley walking Elvis to or from school, particularly during the fifth grade. He and the others walked with me most days."

However, Gladys still watched her son like a hawk, even when he was playing with other children. Many of them, like first cousin Harold Loyd, who lived with the Presleys for a while in East Tupelo, feared her and nearly prayed that nothing would happen to Elvis while they were together.

"I always played with Elvis real gentle when he was a kid, 'cause I knew how Gladys was. Many times I heard him say, 'Mama, can I go out and play?' And she would say, 'Yeah, you can go out and play in the yard, but don't you get too far away that you can't hear me if I call you.' The rest of us would wander off, go down in the bottom, and go swimming in the channel, all except Elvis. He couldn't do that. He had to stay right there close to the house."

"My mama never let me out of her sight," Elvis confirmed in 1965. "I couldn't go down to the creek with the other kids. Sometimes when I was little, I used to run off. Mama would whip me, and I thought she didn't love me."

Eventually Gladys loosened the reins enough that Elvis and his friend James Ausborn could go to Tulip Creek to fish and swim.

For the most part, Elvis chose devotion to Gladys over popularity with his peers. But occasionally he would challenge her in larger ways, either because the pull of joining in with the others got the best of him, or because he desperately needed to find and prove his own ident.i.ty. His cousin Bobby Roberts recalled Gladys would tell Bobby not to let Elvis climb a tree, "But he'd climb the tree anyhow, just like all boys do. He would climb right to the top of the tallest tree. She was always worried about him falling and hurting himself."

Elvis also held his own in fistfights as he grew older, knowing the other kids would run over him if he didn't risk the occasional black eye or a b.l.o.o.d.y nose. Even that proved problematic with a mother like Gladys, reported playmate Odell Clark.

"I remember some folks next door jumped on Elvis one day, and Gladys wore two or three of them out with her brush broom-parents and all."

It was not an isolated incident. Another time, remembered Christine Roberts Presley, Elvis's great-aunt and the wife of J.D.'s brother Noah Presley, Gladys got a stick after a child who came to play. "He said something about Elvis, and boy, Gladys picked up a broomstick. That boy ran and hid. She said, 'You come out of there, or I'll whip you 'til you can't even walk!' "

Yet Gladys would also discipline her son. His friend Guy Harris remembers the day he and Elvis decided to dig up some wild rosebushes, getting sunburned in the process. "We got sun-blistered pretty bad. She fixed our lunch, and Elvis claimed he was too blistered to eat. He was trying to stay outside and away from her as much as he could, 'cause he didn't want the old switch."

"I used to get very angry at her when I was growing up," the adult Elvis admitted. "It's a natural thing when a young person wants to go somewhere or do something and your mother won't let you. You think, 'Why, what's wrong with you?' But then later on in the years you find out that she was right-that she was only doing it to protect you, to keep you from getting in any trouble or getting hurt. And I'm very happy that she was kind of strict on me, very happy that it worked out the way it did."

On January 8, 1946, Elvis's eleventh birthday, Gladys accompanied her son to the Tupelo Hardware Store to buy him a present. Memories conflict as to just what he picked out-some say a bicycle-but evidence points to a .22-caliber rifle, which he wanted more for target practice than for shooting animals. Once when Vernon had offered to take him hunting, a southern rite of father-son bonding, Elvis begged off. "Daddy," he said, "I don't want to kill birds." Tupelo Hardware Store to buy him a present. Memories conflict as to just what he picked out-some say a bicycle-but evidence points to a .22-caliber rifle, which he wanted more for target practice than for shooting animals. Once when Vernon had offered to take him hunting, a southern rite of father-son bonding, Elvis begged off. "Daddy," he said, "I don't want to kill birds."

Now Gladys turned to the salesman, Forrest Bobo, who lived in East Tupelo and knew the Presley family.

"Is this a dangerous thing?" Gladys asked.

"Sure, it's dangerous. It's a twenty-two. You could kill somebody with it, or you could get killed by it."

And so, only a few months after Elvis's compet.i.tion at the Tupelo Fair, Gladys tried a different tack.

"Son," she suggested, "wouldn't you rather have a guitar? It would help you with your singing, and everyone does enjoy hearing you sing."

According to Billy Booth, who owned the store and heard the story directly from Bobo, Elvis threw a temper tantrum-he didn't want a guitar. He wanted a rifle. Gladys threatened a spanking for such a public scene, and then she told him he'd get nothing for his birthday if he didn't straighten up. Bobo, by his account, went back and brought out a midgrade guitar that Elvis would later identify as a Gene Autry model.

"The papers always said it was $12, but it wasn't-you got a real good guitar back in those days for $12-but this was only $7.75, I believe. Of course, we had a two-cent sales tax."

Bobo handed it to him, and then took Elvis behind the counter and sat him down on a sh.e.l.l box. Elvis tried to pick out "Old Shep" and reckoned he would have it after all.

"He got the bike, too, later on," Billy Smith remembers. "Then he wrecked it and broke his arm, so he couldn't play the guitar for a while." He also got a rifle, though it had probably been grandfather Jessie's to start with, as the initials JD JD were carved on the stock. But Elvis took full ownership, carving his own initials, were carved on the stock. But Elvis took full ownership, carving his own initials, EAP EAP, as well as the name of a mysterious young la.s.s: JUDY. JUDY.

After Elvis became famous, numerous people around Tupelo took credit for teaching him the guitar, including his uncle Johnny Smith and Hubert Tipton and Hubert's brother, Ernest. Reverend Frank Smith, the new pastor at the a.s.sembly of G.o.d church, recalled that Elvis already had a lesson book to show him where to put his fingers between the frets to form the chords. "From there," the minister said, "I taught him to make his runs." him the guitar, including his uncle Johnny Smith and Hubert Tipton and Hubert's brother, Ernest. Reverend Frank Smith, the new pastor at the a.s.sembly of G.o.d church, recalled that Elvis already had a lesson book to show him where to put his fingers between the frets to form the chords. "From there," the minister said, "I taught him to make his runs."

In contrast to Gaines Mansell, "a real humble type of seller who just tried to lead you to G.o.d, but didn't try to make you do nothing," as Annie Presley put it, Reverend Smith was outspoken in his belief of the twin poles of sin and salvation. And one thing Elvis did not learn from Smith or anyone else connected with the a.s.sembly of G.o.d church, the pastor emphasized, was his s.e.xually suggestive stage moves. "We had some body movements, very outgoing demonstrations, but nothing like what Elvis did. He did all that himself. He never copied anyone."

The statement was not precisely true, though Reverend Smith might not have known it. Elvis would have a number of influences, starting in July 1946, when Vernon, who struggled to make the payments on the Berry Street house, was forced to deed it over to his friend Aaron Kennedy. It was then that the Presleys moved from East Tupelo into Tupelo proper.

At first they settled on Commerce Street but then moved to Mulberry Alley, a tiny lane that ran near the Fairgrounds, the railroad tracks, the city dump, and-of incalculable importance to Elvis's musical development-the black neighborhood of Shake Rag. Just as the whites divided their social strata by Highway 78, there was a similar split in the black section of Tupelo. The prosperous blacks dwelled "on the hill," reports Roy Turner, while the rowdier, less fortunate lived "across the tracks," in Shake Rag.

The sounds that young Elvis heard coming from the black porches-the wails, the bent notes, the low king snake moans of the blues, and the high-pitched gospel hosannas-meshed to form half of the bedrock of his musical education. But the nasal whines of Nashville's Grand Ole Opry and of local country singer Mississippi Slim on radio station WELO also found a place in Elvis's heart, especially as Slim, aka Carvel Lee Ausborn, whose music bridged the blue yodel of Jimmie Rodgers and the honky-tonk of Ernest Tubb, had encouraged Elvis's own singing. He studied him, along with Roy Acuff, Hank Snow, and early crooner Gene Austin.

About that time, Mertice Finley Collins remembered, "Elvis would pick up and sing in front of the Tupelo Hotel, which was almost across from the radio station on South Spring Street. People would give him five cents, ten cents, or sometimes a twenty-five-cent piece. When he got a quarter, he would run down to the laundry where his mother worked and give the quarter to her, then hurry back to the hotel."

The idea of making money from music, particularly so his mother wouldn't have to work, became the engine of his dreams.

"Elvis's biggest fantasy in Tupelo was to one day be big enough to have his own radio show on Sat.u.r.day mornings on WELO, just like his idol Mississippi Slim," said Bill Burk, who covered Elvis's career for the Memphis Press-Scimitar Press-Scimitar and wrote extensively of Elvis's roots in Mississippi. and wrote extensively of Elvis's roots in Mississippi.

But the records of the black Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who took the Lord's songs from the choir and congregation to the nightclubs and cabarets, enchanted Elvis in a different way. It was Tharpe, with her sharp talk about "backsliding," or sinning, and the calculated way she used her guitar that particularly ignited young Elvis.

Whether playing single-note solos as deftly as any male, or wielding the instrument as a prop, she used the guitar both as an extension of herself and as a vehicle for s.e.xual innuendo ("Come on, daddy . . . plug me in," she said once electric guitars became the vogue). Outrageous in every way, a spiritual cousin to Elvis's future manager Colonel Tom Parker, she hawked perfume and stockings as well as records, and charged admission to her wedding. Musically, she also pioneered-crossing the lines from gospel to blues, to jazz to boogie, to big band to country-and she did it all with greasy aplomb.

"She would dye her hair flame-red, giving her the onstage appearance of a constantly exploding corona or a halo from h.e.l.l," Peter O. Whitmer wrote. "She would wear blue jeans and high heels, or wrap herself in fur boas and billowing caravan robes. And whenever she took the stage, she carried her guitar, slung over her shoulder, and perfected a style of bending notes and phrasing words that was inimitable."

This original soul sister was, in short, Elvis's most important musical role model, as influential for her personal style as for her genre-bending sound, her appearance setting up an androgynous ideal in a young boy's heart.

In September 1946, Elvis entered the sixth grade at a new school, Milam Junior High. His cla.s.smates remember him as an odd boy in overalls who didn't fit in anywhere, not with the "in" group with money, or even the "out" group, which was poor. The girls considered him crazy because he flirted with nearly all of them, particularly Carolyn Brewer, whom he nominated for the "Most Beautiful" contest. Elvis was such a pest in that regard that some of the girls starting leaving home early for school to try to avoid seeing him on the street, and pleaded with their sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Camp, to make him behave. "Anyone wishing to provoke a little girl to tears of rage had only to chalk 'Elvis loves-' and then the girl's name on the blackboard when the teacher was out of the room," Elaine Dundy wrote. "The very idea that this goof, this clodhopper, would single you out for his affection was intolerable." High. His cla.s.smates remember him as an odd boy in overalls who didn't fit in anywhere, not with the "in" group with money, or even the "out" group, which was poor. The girls considered him crazy because he flirted with nearly all of them, particularly Carolyn Brewer, whom he nominated for the "Most Beautiful" contest. Elvis was such a pest in that regard that some of the girls starting leaving home early for school to try to avoid seeing him on the street, and pleaded with their sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Camp, to make him behave. "Anyone wishing to provoke a little girl to tears of rage had only to chalk 'Elvis loves-' and then the girl's name on the blackboard when the teacher was out of the room," Elaine Dundy wrote. "The very idea that this goof, this clodhopper, would single you out for his affection was intolerable."

Yet again, Elvis stood out for his pa.s.sion for music, whether it was hymns or hillbilly tunes. Maude Dean Christian remembered that the teachers closed the door and all the windows when he sang, even during the hot months, so the other kids wouldn't hear him playing guitar and want to come and listen. He trotted out "Old Shep," of course, and performed it so often that it got to be something of a joke. When he'd take his place in front of the group for the morning prayer program, several of his cla.s.smates would yell out, "Oh, no! Not another round of 'Old Shep' today!" Still, he persisted. At recess, cla.s.smate Shirley Lumpkin noticed, he would go out to the bicycle shed and sit and pick the guitar, almost always by himself. Elvis knew he was powerful only when he sang, and that he would have to win over tough audiences in the future if he was really going to be a singer.

The family was experiencing a number of changes, and few of them good. By 1942 Elvis's grandfather, J. D. Presley, had deserted his wife, the flinty Minnie Mae, going first to Mobile, Alabama, and then settling in Louisville, Kentucky. Now, four years later, he filed for divorce, claiming Minnie Mae had deserted him him in the fall of 1942, and that he'd begged her to join him in Louisville, where he worked primarily as a carpenter. in the fall of 1942, and that he'd begged her to join him in Louisville, where he worked primarily as a carpenter.

Minnie Mae refused to take it lying down and answered the divorce pet.i.tion with a letter written in longhand.

Dear Sirs:I am writing to you about the letter I received from you last week concerning a divorce. I didn't desert my husband. As a matter of fact, he deserted me, and has been living with another woman and he hasn't sent me any money in over a year, and I am not able to make a living. We have five children and they are all married and have families of their own, and I have to depend on them for a living. I want you to send me the Papers to fill out and if you want my husband's record, you can write to the Chief of Police Elsie Carr of Tupelo, Miss.

Sincerely yours,Mrs. Jessie Presley Two months later, their daughter, Delta Mae Biggs, took exception with Jessie's pet.i.tion in equity, and wrote a letter of her own in scrawled penmanship.

Dear Sir:I am writing in behalf of Mrs. Minnie Mae Pressely [sic], which is also my mother. Tell Pressley [sic] he can have a divorce if he will give Mama $200 cash. She won't ask for alimony. If he doesn't want to do that she will not give him a divorce. He told a falsehood about several matters to you. He has (5) children not (3). He also deserted Mama.

Thanks,Delta Mae Biggs When the divorce became final in 1948, Jessie seemed to reform. He stopped drinking, became active in his Baptist church, building the pulpit there, and married a retired schoolteacher, Vera Kinnard Leftwich, with whom he'd live the rest of his days. His stepgranddaughter, Iris Sermon Leftwich, considered them a good match. "They used to play little tricks on each other, and had a lot of fun. They each brought out the youth in the other." Jessie and Minnie Mae stayed at loggerheads-she never called him by name, only "that son of a b.i.t.c.h"-but he mended his relationship with Vernon, who kept in touch by phone and letter, and visited with him on numerous occasions, especially during Jessie's illnesses.

Once Elvis's career took off, he, too, resumed relations with J.D., and the two exchanged birthday cards and notes. During a trip to Louisville for an appearance in 1956, Elvis bought his grandfather a snazzy new two-tone Ford Fairlane and a television, and peeled off a crisp $100 bill to go with them.

Jessie, liking a taste of fame, made a three-song record of his own, "The Roots of Elvis," and in 1958, he won a spot on the television show I've Got a Secret. I've Got a Secret. There, the sixty-two-year-old, seated in a rocking chair, sang "The Billy Goat Song" in a high, thin tenor as host Garry Moore backed him on drums. The elder Presley, who would last work as a night watchman at the Louisville Pepsi-Cola plant, told a Toronto newspaper reporter that he didn't like rock and roll, preferring the religious and working songs he learned picking cotton in Mississippi. And no, he didn't want Elvis to help him. "I want to make it on my own," he said. Elvis was amused, and the two remained friendly until J.D.'s death from heart disease in 1973. There, the sixty-two-year-old, seated in a rocking chair, sang "The Billy Goat Song" in a high, thin tenor as host Garry Moore backed him on drums. The elder Presley, who would last work as a night watchman at the Louisville Pepsi-Cola plant, told a Toronto newspaper reporter that he didn't like rock and roll, preferring the religious and working songs he learned picking cotton in Mississippi. And no, he didn't want Elvis to help him. "I want to make it on my own," he said. Elvis was amused, and the two remained friendly until J.D.'s death from heart disease in 1973.

Jessie's desertion meant that Minnie Mae had nowhere to go but to her children. By 1946 she was living with Vernon, Gladys, and Elvis, whom she adored. The feeling was mutual. With her dry wit, laconic manner, and elongated body, she resembled, if not a James Agee character, then certainly a Walker Evans Depression-era photograph come to life. Gladys was glad to have her help ("She did all the work," in Lillian Smith's view), and Elvis found her a comical figure.

One day he was playing ball and overthrew his pitch, missing her face by a fraction of an inch. He promptly nicknamed her "Dodger," a term of endearment that stuck throughout her life. The living arrangement also took hold. Vernon counted her a dependent on his 1947 tax return, and she never left the Presley household again. Minnie Mae would reside under the same roof as Elvis all her life and outlive her famous grandson by three years.

By the time Elvis entered seventh grade in 1947, his mind was seldom on his studies. His grade point average was about 70, making him a C student. But the twelve-year-old felt confident enough about his musicianship to take his guitar to school with him almost every day, practicing chords and working on new songs during lunch. Cla.s.smate Roland Tindall remembered that he announced to the cla.s.s more than once that he was going to sing at the Grand Ole Opry. If the majority of his fellow students ignored him or smirked at his bid for attention-a group of bullies, intolerant of another rendition of "Old Shep," would cut the strings off his guitar at some point-others knew he had a shot at stardom.

"Most people wouldn't believe this," a cla.s.smate said years later, "but I went up to him and I told him, 'Elvis, one of these days you're gonna be famous.' And he smiled at me and said, 'I sure hope so.' "

Maggie Morgan also supported his ambition. She'd gone with him to perform on WELO, where he still gazed motionless at hillbilly singer Mississippi Slim, and as far as she was concerned, theirs was a serious relationship. He'd told her he loved her, and she'd whispered back, "I love you, too." And they'd shared three kisses-one during the carving of the heart on the tree, another on the swing on his parents' front porch, and the third in the car en route to a church rally.

"I didn't expect my life to end or go anywhere without Elvis. He was my love. He was my man."

But if things were going well for the young couple, Vernon Presley was just about at the end of his rope. Living in a "colored" neighborhood on Tupelo's North Green Street, where Elvis heard early R & B, jump blues, and swing tunes throbbing through the walls at the nearby juke joints, the family was deeply in debt. Vernon was still driving a grocery truck and sc.r.a.ping to make a living ("There's a story that he pretty much got kicked out of Tupelo for moonshining," says Billy Smith), and Gladys brought in a little money as a seamstress. But the bank was threatening to foreclose on a loan, and the Presleys were buying everything on time and borrowing money where they could. Gladys remembered her son's concern.

"Elvis would hear us worrying about our debts, and he'd say, 'Don't you worry none, baby. When I grow up, I'm going to buy you a fine house, and pay everything you owe at the grocery store, and get two Cadillacs-one for you and Daddy, and one for me.' "

Vernon and Travis Smith had already gone to Memphis scouting for work, returning after three weeks with no prospects. Now they decided to try again, Vernon saying, "There has to be more than this."

In the fall of 1948, when Elvis was thirteen, the Presley and the Smith families packed everything they owned into Travis's eleven-year-old green Plymouth and left overnight for Memphis to start life anew.

Maggie hadn't seen Elvis since he moved to Green Street, but she was shattered at the news.

"It broke my heart when the Presleys announced they were moving to Memphis. For a long time after that, I cried. I missed [Elvis] so much. I even kept missing him after I got married and had children. I know in my heart we would have gotten married. We were very young, but we were very much in love."

Secretly Elvis, too, fantasized about their future. In 1994 his estate auctioned Vernon and Gladys's marriage license, and on the back, in a child's hand, was a testimony to a mock marriage between Elvis Presley and "Magdline" Morgan. Elvis's signature, in pencil, was authentic, though Maggie's was not. Elvis, who had never learned to correctly spell his beloved's name, had scrawled it all out in a grand romantic gesture on September 11, 1948, just as the family was preparing to leave Mississippi. Before he signed his next marriage license, nearly twenty years later, Elvis would become far more callous about romance.

Elvis and Betty Ann McMahan, Lauderdale Courts, circa 1949. Gladys introduced them through her mother. She broke his heart in choosing an Arkansas boy over him. (Margaret Cranfill/from the author's collection) (Margaret Cranfill/from the author's collection)

Chapter Three.

Blue Heartache.

With a population of 237,000, Memphis was the largest city in the mid-South, and a serendipitous destination for the Presley family. King Cotton had built this town from the lazy banks of the Mississippi River, but in the postWorld War II years, Memphis looked like a country boy in his first zoot suit, as urban and rural cultures came together to bolster the city as a regional hub of commerce and culture, and to move it from an agricultural to an industrial mecca. serendipitous destination for the Presley family. King Cotton had built this town from the lazy banks of the Mississippi River, but in the postWorld War II years, Memphis looked like a country boy in his first zoot suit, as urban and rural cultures came together to bolster the city as a regional hub of commerce and culture, and to move it from an agricultural to an industrial mecca.

Though middle-cla.s.s jobs were not yet plentiful, opportunity crackled in the air, as if change itself were a seed in the fertile Mississippi Delta. And the mere size of the city meant that an ex-con like Vernon could reinvent himself with new friends and employers, and perhaps even with his wife. Gladys was so energized by the move that she seemed to enjoy her husband's advances, an early friend of Elvis remembering that Vernon "was always hugging her and kissing her and showing her affection. He could never keep his hands off her."

For Elvis, thirteen and just coming into p.u.b.erty, everything was exciting and new. Still burning with the fire to be a singer, he was exhilarated to find himself smack in the home of the blues, historically a woeful or triumphal form of musical salvation, summoned in the cries and the catharsis of the worried and the worn-down. Before long, he would be poking around on Beale Street, staring at the photographs in the window of the Blue Light Studio, his ears tuned to the music-solo guitarists, wailing vocalists, harmonica players, or maybe just guitar and drum groups-pouring out of the smoky clubs. Music was everywhere on Beale Street. Men even played saxophone in the park.

Sometimes he'd meander over to North Main, every now and then summoning the courage to walk into the Green Owl, a black beer joint, where people spilled out onto the sidewalk on weekend nights. Elvis was wide-eyed at the city slickers and the pimped-up dandies in their bright Lansky Brothers clothes, and even more so at the women whose illegal turns helped buy them. He was also enthralled by the musicians, slack-jawed blacks who played with their eyes closed, a cigarette or something stronger tugging at the corners of their lips. And he especially got a kick out of the guy who made a ba.s.s out of a five-gallon bucket and a broom handle. Though he was too young to be in there, it was worth a rough little reprimand to hear the wild, wanton sounds of the blue notes, and to feel his own libido ripple down below.

When they first arrived in the Bluff City, the Presleys (Vernon, Gladys, Elvis, Minnie Mae) and the Smiths (Travis, Lorraine, Bobby, Billy) stuck together like immigrants in a new land, clutching their few belongings, fearful of the loud sounds of the city, and straining their ears at the oddity of the new language. Elvis had been there before on Noah Presley's bus trips to the zoo and for picnics and concerts at the Overton Park Sh.e.l.l. But in a sense they were all just that, strangers in a strange land. Memphis was only ninety miles northwest of Tupelo, but it might as well have been a thousand.