This Clodhopper Elvis

I was unfair to suggest that Alanna Nash’s book is just an Elvis sexfest, a counting up of the notches on his bedpost. When it comes to the women who loved him, the first chapters focus on Gladys, his mother, as well as his childhood sweethearts, and in this way we get a great childhood biography, and I have enjoyed a lot of new stories about the king, the man, and the boy. Still Elvis was almost clinically and comically girl crazy as a young boy, though it wasn’t always returned then, as you can see in one of my favorite passages:

In September 1946, Elvis entered the sixth grade at a new school, Milam Junior High. His classmates 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 started 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.”

For all my worship at the altar of Elvis, my biographical reading of the man had been largely limited to Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography. Since this is widely held to be the definitive biography, and seeing how it was a bit extensive, I did not hunger for more. But I am happier to see that there is a lot more story to enjoy.

This Clodhopper Elvis

I was unfair to suggest that Alanna Nash’s book is just an Elvis sexfest, a counting up of the notches on his bedpost. When it comes to the women who loved him, the first chapters focus on Gladys, his mother, as well as his childhood sweethearts, and in this way we get a great childhood biography, and I have enjoyed a lot of new stories about the king, the man, and the boy. Still Elvis was almost clinically and comically girl crazy as a young boy, though it wasn’t always returned then, as you can see in one of my favorite passages:

In September 1946, Elvis entered the sixth grade at a new school, Milam Junior High. His classmates 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 started 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.”

For all my worship at the altar of Elvis, my biographical reading of the man had been largely limited to Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography. Since this is widely held to be the definitive biography, and seeing how it was a bit extensive, I did not hunger for more. But I am happier to see that there is a lot more story to enjoy.