Careless Love

GERMANY: MARKING TIME

October 1958–March 1960

AT HOME, GERMANY, 1959: VERNON, GRANDMA, ELVIS.

(COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF ELVIS PRESLEY)

HE ARRIVED IN BREMERHAVEN on October 1, 1958, as a member of the 750-man Thirty-second Tank Battalion, Third Armored Division, part of the fabled "Mailed Fist of Europe." He was met at the dock by fifteen hundred fans, five television news teams, two newsreel operators, and reporters and photographers representing virtually every major European periodical and newspaper. It was a well-planned operation, with only one autograph seeker breaking through police cordons, and one young woman, a German reporter, presenting Private Presley with a bouquet of flowers.

He was subdued on the troop train to Friedberg, just north of Frankfurt, some two hundred miles away, eating with the cooks in the kitchen car so as to have a moment or two of privacy, thanking each one individually for their hospitality. Military plans called for him to interact with the press and the public for the next few days—but only for the next few days, while he was still undergoing processing. A press conference was scheduled for the following morning, and he would undoubtedly be faced with the same kinds of questions that reporters came up with everywhere else. Did he still want to meet Brigitte Bardot now that she was formally engaged? What did he think of German girls, even if he had never met any? Would his music change? Would his popularity remain the same? Colonel said he just had to get through it; he had his job, the press had theirs, and there was no reason that they couldn't serve each other's needs. It was his job to be like any other soldier, and once this initial flurry of attention was over that was just what he would be.

It had been a strange and solitary crossing. Not so much because he was alone on the transport ship—he had made friends with a number of the guys—as because, with his mother gone, he was truly alone in the world. Seeking solace, he read and reread some of the poems about death and motherhood in the book he had been given by a fellow GI just prior to his departure, an anthology called Poems That Touch the Heart. He sought out the companionship of sympathetic souls, requesting to bunk with Charlie Hodge, the little guy he had met on the train to the Brooklyn Army Terminal who was a fellow southerner, singer, and veteran of show business himself. At night, Charlie said, he could hear him thinking about his mother—he could tell by the way Elvis breathed, and he would try to cheer him up, telling him jokes, running through old vaudeville routines, until at last his friend dropped off to sleep.

Several days out to sea, Elvis and Charlie were put in charge of a talent show on the U.S.S. Randall, and they held auditions and staged the program, with Charlie MCing and telling jokes and Elvis playing piano in the backup band. Although he threw himself into the entertainment, he would not take the spotlight, saying that he didn't want to steal attention from any of the other GIs but giving rise at the same time to rumors that he had been forbidden to perform by his manager. He was generally liked by, but distant from, his fellow soldiers, who observed him with the same understandable mistrust that he might just as well have felt for them. "Charlie," he told his new friend, "you keep me from going crazy."

In Friedberg he was stationed at Ray Kaserne, a barracks for German SS troops during the Second World War. He got through the obligatory press briefings (he was interested in German girls; he planned to buy a guitar in Frankfurt, since he had not brought one with him on the ship; he would like to see an opera and attend some classical concerts while stationed in Germany). He was initially designated jeep driver for the commanding officer of Company D but was quickly transferred to Company C, a scout platoon, where he was assigned to drive for Reconnaissance Platoon Sergeant Ira Jones. Not only was Jones, a tough, no-nonsense enlisted noncom, deemed to be the man for the job; the fact that the company spent much of its time in the field on maneuvers might help to remove Private Presley from the public eye.

His family arrived on Saturday, October 4, and Elvis had dinner with them at their hotel in Bad Homburg that evening. It was a strange grouping, the young towheaded soldier, his handsome forty-two-year-old father and gaunt sixty-eight-year-old grandmother, plus two buddies from home, Red West and Lamar Fike. He was avid for news of Memphis, almost desperate to connect. He needed people he knew, people he could trust, and to Lamar there was no great mystery as to why any of them were there; "Elvis always kept his own world with him; he kept his own bubble." After dinner he posed for photographs with his father and grandmother, then reluctantly returned to camp. He was exhausted, he told reporters; he just wanted to get back to the barracks and get some sleep.

IT WAS HARD, harder perhaps than anything he had ever done—and army life was only part of it. Two days after his family arrived they changed hotels, and three weeks later, after Elvis had received permission to live off base with his two family dependents, they moved again, to the elegant Hotel Grunewald in Bad Nauheim, just twenty minutes from the base. There they had the whole top floor to themselves, but it was still cramped, with Red and Lamar sharing a bedroom and, more significantly, feeling distinctly out of place in the subdued setting of a European health spa for wealthy, primarily elderly visitors.

Red reacted, as he generally did, by blowing up at anyone and everyone who got in his way. Elvis wasn't paying either one of them anything, they were there as his friends, but he did tell his father to give them enough money to have a good time—a couple of hundred marks, or roughly $50, a week apiece. Vernon, who couldn't see what either one of them had done to deserve such largesse, doled out no more than two or three marks a night to each, and they nursed their money, and their resentment, at Beck's Bar around the corner, where Red was prone to sharp altercations with fellow drinkers and local policemen. There had never been any love lost between Red and Vernon anyway, and with Vernon doing his share of drinking, there was the constant possibility that things could really get out of hand. For Elvis the only truly peaceful time of the day was when he was with his grandmother, "Dodger," who never judged him, who wanted nothing from him, who called him "Son" and recalled every day of his childhood with the clarity and wonder generally reserved for chronicling the lives of the saints.

There was a moment of confusion just after his arrival, when it seemed as if the army was breaking its agreement with Colonel Parker not to put any pressure on Elvis to perform. The Colonel had waged an extensive campaign to develop contacts in Washington and then to persuade them that it would be against the interests of the armed services for Elvis to appear as anything but an ordinary soldier, while remonstrating at the same time to Elvis that he should resist any such opportunities, however innocent they might at first appear. Nonetheless, John Wiant, the European editor of Army Times, approached Elvis and Vernon about a Christmas benefit for German orphans and pursued the matter with Colonel Parker after Vernon explained that he had no authority to accept or decline such an invitation. Even the Colonel was panicked for a moment, since clearly the pressure was coming from above, but he counseled Elvis to make no commitments and immediately advised his principal contact in Washington, E. J. Cottrell, the assistant chief of information at the Department of the Army, that not only would this be against everything they had both been working for, it would also end up costing the army money to provide the security necessary for a show of this sort—and if such security were not provided, it would look very bad for the army. Cottrell responded in an amused but sympathetic vein, and while the story got into the newspapers and continued to surface in one form or another for some weeks, it seemed to reflect little more than an ongoing struggle between the State Department and the army over the correct deployment of Private Presley, with the outcome all but conceded to Colonel Parker.

Gradually things began to settle into a routine. Because Elvis was up at 5:30 A.M., the rest of the household was, too, though they could go back to sleep, of course, once he left for the base at 6:30 in the black Mercedes taxi he had hired to take him back and forth. Many days he was home for lunch, and he never returned later than 6:00 P.M. except on Friday, which was "GI party night," when they scrubbed the latrines and cleaned the barracks, often until ten o'clock, in preparation for Saturday-morning inspection. It was for the most part congenial enough work; he was improving his map- and compass-reading skills in preparation for maneuvers and keeping his jeep in top condition. And he had a little girl—she was sixteen, but she looked older—a typist with an electrical supply company in Frankfurt who had just showed up with a photographer the day after Elvis' family arrived in Bad Homburg. She and the photographer waited outside the hotel until Elvis emerged with his father, and when she approached him on the pretext of getting his autograph, not only the photographer that she was accompanying but all the other photographers who had staked out the hotel clamored for the two of them to kiss. Elvis was only too happy to oblige, and the papers were full of news of Elvis Presley's "German girlfriend," Margit Buergin, the next day. Lamar got her number for him, and he saw her a few times. She was a nice girl who lived with her mother and had to be home every night. Sometimes she even brought her little German-English dictionary along on their dates.

Home was a nagging memory that on occasion he could barely sustain. He called some of his pals and told them how much he missed Memphis, kidding around about the German "chiclets"; he had his father call home on October 15 to order a generous supply of alfalfa pills from a Memphis pharmacy because he had heard that that was a good way to help keep your weight down. He wrote breezily to a few girls, confiding his unease but acting as if he could handle it. But Anita Wood was the only one to whom he truly unburdened himself—even though he was not exactly sure how he really felt about her.

He knew how he was supposed to feel. The papers had linked them almost from the day they met in the summer of 1957, and he knew that Anita was certainly expecting that they would get married someday. In fact, in a moment of desperation, just before he left, he had even spoken to her about bringing her over to visit once things got sorted out. He wrote to her now that she should keep herself clean and wholesome, that he had never, and would never again, love anyone in his life as he loved her, that he looked forward to their marriage and "a little Elvis." In another letter he referred to himself as a "lonely little boy 5000 miles away," even as he was denying the newspaper stories about Margit (referred to as Margrit in the American press), and added in a self-conscious p.s.: "No one ever reads this, OK?"

But even as he wrote and tried to communicate some of his feelings of helplessness and isolation, things were actually starting to look up. He heard from Janie Wilbanks, the girl he had met at the train station in Memphis when the troop train had pulled in on its way to the Brooklyn Army Terminal, that she was going to be coming over to visit her uncle, an army chaplain in Germany, sometime around Christmas and couldn't wait to see him again. His buddy Charlie Hodge, from the U.S.S. Randall, showed up at the hotel on his first weekend leave and fit right in with the rest of the group. Elvis prompted him to tell Vernon the same jokes he had told on their crossing, and his daddy got a good laugh for what seemed like the first time since Mama died. Red and Lamar obviously liked Charlie, too, and they all harmonized on some old gospel numbers, which they sang a cappella or accompanied by the guitar that Elvis had gotten on his first leave in Frankfurt, with Vernon, too, joining in on more than one occasion.

There was a flurry of activity just before the company went out on maneuvers at the beginning of November that reinforced this growing semblance of normality. Elvis heard that Bill Haley was going to be performing in Frankfurt and Stuttgart on October 23 and 29, and went to see him both times, with happy reunions backstage at which Elvis confided to the older star that if it hadn't been for Haley's help and encouragement, he might still be driving a truck. A few nights later, on the Saturday night before departure, he had another date with Margit, who told the press that he was "a very nice boy" and she liked him very much. The following night, November 2, according to a wire-service report, he threw a "noisy pre-maneuvers party in his hotel, where the sounds of his guitar and singing bounced down to the sidewalks below and caused a crowd to collect. Between plunks on his guitar he confessed he liked Margit 'very much' and added, 'And I'm glad her parents like me as well.'"

He got a peculiar call from a woman named Dee Stanley around this time; she was the wife of a master sergeant stationed in Frankfurt, she explained to him, and she just wanted to invite him to dinner with her family. She knew he must be lonely, and she wanted to show him that a foreign country didn't have to be so cold and inhospitable. After spending a few minutes trying to figure out what she was driving at, he eventually told her to call on Monday, when he knew he would be on maneuvers and Daddy could just handle it.

Then they were off to Grafenwöhr, a cold, dismal location near the Czech border. At first reporters hounded him for pictures, and soldiers and officers who hadn't seen him before asked for autographs. But then the reporters were banned, and the soldiers got used to his presence, and things settled down into a predictable routine over the next seven weeks. This was where he finally proved himself to his platoon sergeant's satisfaction, enduring the same harsh conditions as everyone else, showing himself to be a resourceful soldier in field exercises as his reconnaissance unit took eight prisoners thanks to a clever ruse that he had worked out, finally becoming one of the boys. The first weekend that they had leave to go back to Friedberg, a notice was posted that buses would be available at a cost of $6 round-trip. When a number of his fellow soldiers didn't have money for the fare, Elvis told Sergeant Jones that he would like to help out, giving Jones money to loan out to the soldiers, who eventually repaid Jones without ever learning the identity of their benefactor.