Viva Fort Hood
Before he morphed into a light-comedy star and bloated Vegas entertainer, Elvis Presley drove tanks, chased women, and cruised with the locals in Central Texas, where he spent six months as an Army private.
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Elvis had visitors—Colonel Parker, Vic Morrow, some Hollywood buddies. Mary Jane Craig, who currently owns the house on Oak Hill, tells the story about the guy who’d been working on one of Elvis’ cars. He delivered it to the house and rang the bell to get the invoice signed. He got no answer but rang again and heard a woman’s voice call out to come in. He did, and she called, “In here!” from the bathroom. He entered and an arm appeared from behind the shower curtain to sign the paper. The arm belonged, he later learned, to Natalie Wood.
During the long days at Fort Hood, Elvis was in the middle of advanced individual training, learning to be a tanker. This was Patton’s division, and they trained on the sixty-ton M48 Patton Tank. (Elvis was gung ho about the general. When one of his lieutenants in Germany quoted to him Patton’s famous line, “I don’t want to die for my country; I want the other son of a bitch to die for his country,” Elvis replied, “Damn right!”) The soldiers cleaned tanks and fired them out on the range; they took the engines out and put them back, changed the tracks, and ran formations. Elvis placed third in tank gunnery. He liked tanks—perhaps they reminded him of his beloved Cadillacs—and he liked being in charge. Dorton Matthews remembers how once, after he put Elvis in command of a tank, the other recruits begged him to put someone else in charge. “He’s working us to death,” they complained.
Most of all, he liked working with his hands instead of his hips and being in the company of men, not young girls. It was easy to get the teenagers’ approval—he did that every day when he went home. It was harder with a bunch of soldiers. Sometimes he took over the company drum, keeping time while the men marched. He played football with the others. He took ribbings and dished them out. “I learned a lot about people in the Army,” Elvis said later. “I never lived with other people before and had a chance to find out how they think.” When GIs from other companies razzed Elvis during marches, Sergeant Norwood would stop the proceedings and dress the offender down. “We would not let people bother him,” Matthews says. “Maybe that was our special treatment of him.” Elvis was, everyone agreed, a good soldier, one of the best in the company. “He loved the Army,” remembers Mansfield. “It was a way to express himself and find out who he really was.” “At Fort Hood,” Anita Wood said later, “he had finally found himself.”
To lose himself, Elvis would go to Waco, about forty miles away. There’s a plaque in the grass outside the home at 2807 Lasker Avenue that reads: “In loving memory of Elvis Aaron Presley 1935-1977. A loving home away from home. Waco, Tx 1956-58.” Like Elvis’ own tombstone, the plaque misspells his middle name (it’s Aron), and like many monuments, it exaggerates the time frame. But Elvis did sleep here in the summer of ‘58—often. The home belonged to Eddie Fadal, a former DJ whom Elvis had met in Dallas in February 1956 on one of his frequent Texas tours (see the sidebar “On the Road in Texas,” at the end of this story). In October 1956 Eddie had gone to see Elvis at a show in Waco and invited him to his home afterward. Elvis came at about one in the morning with his buddies and his band, their instruments strapped to the roof of the car. Eddie’s wife, LaNelle, fixed a meal of bacon and eggs, and the group stayed up late, talking and playing records. Later, when Elvis was stationed at Fort Hood, Eddie drove down and visited and invited him back to Waco. Elvis came at least six times that summer, sometimes with friends, often with Anita. Eddie even added on an extra room to his house and decorated it to Elvis’ fancy, with pink-and-black cabinets, plush black-and-white carpet, a hi-fi, a glass cigar box filled with the Hav-a-tampa cigarillos Elvis loved to chew on, and a couch. It was a place for Elvis and Anita to relax in private. Janice Fadal, Eddie’s daughter, still lives in Waco and, along with her brother, still owns much of the Elvis memorabilia her father, who died in 1994, had collected over the years. It would eventually wind up in a museum that took up the family’s two-car garage (“The largest Elvis museum west of the Mississippi,” Eddie used to say). In her living room she sifts through several boxes of the King’s artifacts. One is full of scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings (“Pres. of Elvis fan club calls Waco a town of squares”) and photos, many of her father with Elvis and other fifties rock and roll stars. Another yields a black motorcycle cap (size 7) with a white star—the same cap on Elvis’ head in a photo on the wall at Waco’s famous Elite Cafe. Elvis bought it in Fort Worth. He got it, says Janice, because he thought it looked like the one Marlon Brando wore in The Wild One. Janice pulls out another hat—a cloth one bearing Elvis’ face and several song titles—and a tiny covered wagon showing his name and “1956,” from the first year of Elvis merchandising, which would lead to 78 Elvis products and gross sales of an unbelievable $55 million by the end of 1957.
Down at the bottom is something Janice’s father never expected anyone to see: Two bottles of prescription drugs, both about 42 years old. The first is made out for “Elvis Pressley,” the second for “Elvis Presly.” The first holds the powdery remains of a dozen or so odorless white, gray, and pink pills; the other has about the same number of gooey black lumps, stuck together like so many Good & Plenty candies that have had their shells sucked off. They smell sweet, like lost chemicals, and after several attempts at odor identification, one’s teeth begin to rattle. Perhaps it’s just the thrill of sticking your nose into Elvis Presley’s pill bottles.
“My father knew all the doctors in town,” says Janice. “It was easy to get a prescription filled.” Uppers? Downers? “Yeah. He’d say, ‘Elvis needs to sleep.’” The man who would shake America from its dormancy in the fifties would become, as the country went wild in the sixties, a complacent, drug-addicted boor. It was either during his time at Fort Hood or just before that Elvis developed a fondness for amphetamines. His mother was taking speed to control her weight, and it has been reported that Elvis’ drug use began when he got into her diet pills. However it came about, Elvis believed prescription drugs were harmless, and he took them often (in Germany he would graduate to buying quart bottles of speed from the base pharmacist). Needless to say, the bottles weren’t part of the official Eddie Fadal Elvis Museum. “My father was always trying to protect Elvis,” says Janice. “I don’t do that.”
Elvis felt at home at the Fadals’. “We were a Lebanese family,” says Janice, “warm and welcoming.” On his first visit, during basic training, Elvis had called home to his mother. Eddie later remembered the phone call: “When he got her on the line, all he said was, ‘Mama …’ And, apparently, she said, ‘Elvis… .’ And from then on, for a whole hour, they were crying and moaning on the telephone—hardly a word was spoken.”
Eddie lived for Elvis. “Whatever it took to make him comfortable,” he once said, “I’d do it. When he said, ‘I want a banana cream pie,’ brother, I rushed down to the Toddle House and got him a banana cream pie.” Elvis would go with Eddie to drive-in movies but would stay in the car when Eddie went to get concessions. Elvis couldn’t go anywhere in public and would rent out theaters after-hours and invite friends. Neighbors and tourists would park on Lasker Avenue and wait for a glimpse when he came home.
Janice remembers, “I’d sit at a table in the back of the house, coloring. Once I saw a bunch of limos pull up and I ran screaming through the house, ‘Elvis is here!’ Dad was excited but Mom freaked out. She knew that she had to cook for Elvis and the people with him.” Her mother, she would later learn, resented Elvis. “He became my father’s focus instead of us—the family. Elvis didn’t mean to. It’s the way people reacted to him.” Still, LaNelle learned to cook Elvis’ way—burnt bacon, hard fried eggs, and fried peanut butter-and-banana sandwiches. Once she prepared a steak dinner for Elvis and his troupe, but Elvis told her, politely, that he didn’t eat steak. Did she have any bacon? LaNelle was nearly out, so she ran down to the corner store, bought a pound, and brought it back and cooked it. While everyone else ate steak, Elvis dined on a pound of bacon.
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