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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Eddie made home movies (silent but in color) and recordings, both quite rare in 1958, of his friend. After Elvis got out of the Army, in 1960, every photo would be posed and every movement choreographed to display maximum confidence and appeal; in 1958, Elvis wasn’t nearly as guarded or polished. In an early scene he sits surrounded by people at the Fadals’. A record was on the hi-fi, says Janice (“He didn’t want to hear any of his music, always what was hot at the time”) who, at four years old, is dancing (“Dad would say, ‘Dance for Elvis!’”). The camera—run by LaNelle—cuts to a shot of Elvis’ feet jiggling uncontrollably, then back to his face. LaNelle tries to get Elvis to smile, but he won’t, so she slides the camera back down again to his feet. When it comes back up, he gives a quick, forced smile and laughs and sits down and sips his drink. He self-consciously jokes with someone off-camera while LaNelle records his discomfort. Then he turns and says something to the camera. It looks like “I’m sorry.” He pauses for a second and reverts to the expression that always won over the girls: the sneer. This time it failed. “My mom thought he was arrogant,” says Janice. “After that night, he never again called her by her name. It was always Mrs. Fadal.”
There’s footage of Elvis—tanned and in uniform—with svelte Anita and Elvis kissing Janice on the cheek while he’s eating sweet pickles. Elvis chewing on a cigar on the couch in his pink-and-black playpen in front of several framed photos of himself, mugging for the camera. Elvis singing at the piano with Nervous Norvell. Elvis spent a lot of time at the Fadals’ piano, and on one of his early visits, Eddie turned on a tape recorder. Elvis is relaxed, playing the slightly out of tune piano with more feeling than technique. You can hear Janice and her brother, Dana, crying and playing in the background as Elvis plays and sings “Please Understand,” then “Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby,” with Eddie feeding him the words. Later Eddie puts on the single of the Tune Weavers’ version of the song. Elvis harmonizes with the low part, then a high one; he keeps asking Eddie to replay the song as he sings the low harmony, playing with parts and trying to get it right. At one point he says, “I like to sing bass, boy!” After another time he says, “I goofed up. I gotta have it one more time.” He sings the song eight times. It turns out that this, the unofficial Elvis, was as much a perfectionist as the official version, who would redo his vocals over and over in the studio. Indeed, the living room session is a small mirror of how they did things back at Sun studios only three years before, when Elvis, Scotty, and Bill stuttered and improvised their way endlessly through various songs before coming up with proto-rock and roll on “That’s All Right.” Elvis ends the tape by getting back on the piano and playing a jaunty version of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee,” while Dana cries loudly. The song ends and Elvis calls out something like, “Oh, now, hea!” And then you hear him humming another harmony as the tape fades out—as if he couldn’t stop singing.
Throughout that summer of 1958, Eddie would drive down and visit the Presleys in Killeen and bring banana cream and chocolate cream pies from the Toddle House diner and new 45s, both of which Elvis would devour. He sometimes ate a whole pie. Elvis would bring his parents up to visit the Fadals. On some weekends Elvis hit the road with friends, going to Dallas and Fort Worth, where they would go girl-watching at the Sheraton and the Quality Inn, a place that stewardesses were known to stay. Then—it was almost too good to be true—they heard about the American Airlines Stewardess College, the country’s first and only, in Fort Worth. One of Elvis’ people called and they visited. Ronnie Anagnostis was the house mother; her husband Nick was in charge of the building, grounds, and security. “I got a call saying he’d be coming,” she remembers. “I was looking out the window and saw him drive up. I got on the P.A. and said, ‘Girls, guess what? Elvis Presley is coming through the front door!’ I never heard such a commotion—running all over the place and screaming. The only thing they didn’t do was fly over the balcony.” In his book, Mansfield describes the scene in the giddy tone of a young man agog—driving up in a limo, young ladies opening the doors, and being escorted into a huge lobby with available beauties everywhere. “It was like something you would only see in the movies. Here was Elvis the King and us surrounded by a harem of beautiful women.”
All the while, Colonel Parker did his best to keep Elvis in the public eye. “Hard Headed Woman,” recorded during his two-week leave, was released in June and became a number one hit. The movie King Creole came out in July, giving Elvis the best reviews he ever got—even the New York Times gave him a nod. It was a good time to be Elvis.
And then his world ended. In early August the recruits began the final phase of their time at Fort Hood—basic unit training, a more refined tank training. Around the same time, Gladys, an alcoholic with a speed problem who had never been comfortable in the Texas heat, began feeling poorly. She was losing her color and her eyes got a yellow tinge to them. When she took a turn for the worse, a local doctor recommended sending her to her regular physician in Memphis. Elvis put her on a train on August 8 and soon followed. On August 14 she died of a heart attack, brought on by acute hepatitis. Elvis was inconsolable. One of his first calls was to Sergeant Norwood. They talked until four in the morning. Elvis called Eddie and told him, “I’ve lost the only person I ever really loved.” His leave was extended five days, and he wandered around Graceland in a daze, babbling his grief. At the cemetery, as he was led away from the casket, he cried out, “Oh, God! Everything I have is gone!”A grieving Elvis went back to work at Fort Hood on August 25. His dad, Vernon, grandmother Minnie, cousins Gene and Junior Smith, as well as right-hand man Lamar Fike, were there to keep him company. Colonel Parker and Anita Wood visited. Minnie cooked, and the bunch spent the nights playing and singing gospel songs until late. The whole country mourned (more than 100,000 cards and letters poured into Parker’s headquarters). The men at Fort Hood did too. “Things were never quite the same again at Fort Hood,” wrote Mansfield. “We all suffered.” They became even more protective of their friend. “After his mother died,” Matthews says, “we saw to it that nobody interfered with his privacy. He got a lot more serious. I doubt he was ever as happy after she died. I don’t think he ever got over it.”
During his last week at Fort Hood, Elvis was promoted to private, first class. That week, the crowds outside the Oak Hill Drive home were the largest of his stay. Some nights a hundred people kept vigil. On his last night, reported the Killeen Daily Herald, “a very nice, orderly group” lined the yard but left the driveway clear so Elvis could leave for a dinner date. “Only a scream or two from teenage girls disrupted the orderly way in which the crowd greeted Elvis.” Later that night Elvis’ gang got together at the house one last time. Elvis asked Eddie to lead the group in prayer, and then he drove to the troop train that would take him and 1,360 other GIs to Brooklyn, where they would sail for Germany. “I just feel sad,” Elvis told a reporter as he waved to Anita, Eddie, and a dozen fan club presidents who stood in the light rain. They had tears in their eyes, and so did he. Earlier that night Elvis had told Eddie, “Eddie, I really feel this is the end of my career. Everybody is going to forget about me.”
Like that was ever going to happen. The truth is, Elvis spent the next seventeen years abandoning his fans, making movies in which his action-toy roles seemed to mirror his increasing personal confusion, recording banal albums, and isolating himself more and more with drugs and his Memphis mafia. His mother—his moral and emotional compass—was long gone, as were his Army buddies, the last men to whom he would ever feel accountable. At the end, he had nothing left to prove and no one to prove it to, and it killed him, at age 42. If, as Elvis lay bloated and dying on the bathroom floor at Graceland on August 16, 1977, he saw pieces of his unbelievable life pass before his eyes, you’d like to think that he dreamed of himself as he used to be, as the young, gorgeous rebel whose greatest joys were music, his mother, and pleasing his fans waiting out on the street. You hope that he imagined himself one last time, walking from his house up the long driveway to the street where the girls stood, breathless. He’s at ease, talking to everyone, listening, calming their teenage nerves. He smiles, holds their hands, kisses them, and sends them away feeling like he feels—chosen. Then, when everyone is gone, he goes back inside, where his mother is waiting.
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