In 1956, a 21-year-old Elvis Presley impishly touched tongues with a young woman, and photographer Al Wertheimer captured the moment of contact. Her identity remained a mystery for decades—until she told the story herself.
Several years ago, Malcolm Gray was watching an Elvis Presley tribute show on Pay Per View when a still photograph appeared: the iconic 1956 shot of the 21-year-old rock ‘n’ roll star playfully romancing a blonde fan backstage. Gray’s eyes widened. “My God, come here!” the electrical engineer shouted to his girlfriend, Barbara, now his wife. “They’ve got you on that big screen.
But how could they not? This was a Kim Novak look-alike, dressed for Saturday night—sexy, flirty, wearing four-inch, plastic Springolator pumps, rhinestone fan earrings, a black chiffon spaghetti-strap dress, and a see-through purse festooned with faux pearls. Whoever she was, this was not a girl to forget.
In 1996, Wertheimer decided to abandon a movie-equipment-leasing business to concentrate full-time on Elvis, selling prints through *The New York Times’*s online store and Washington’s Govinda Gallery . He also entered into a licensing agreement with Elvis Presley Enterprises, which began emblazoning photos of the singer and the mystery kisser on calendars, note cards, screen-savers, purses, refrigerator magnets, and the like.
But while Wertheimer says he’s been searching for the bona fide blonde since the 60s, he bided his time before answering. “Over the years,” he explains, “I’ve had at least a half a dozen women—from Houston, Atlanta, almost always from the South—tell me that they were the one who got kissed by Elvis. I’d say, ‘I don’t doubt it, but you weren’t the one in’ And they would say, ‘How do you know that?’ Well, most of those women said they were somewhere around five foot eight or nine.
Gray’s background, by any measure, reads like something out of an Erskine Caldwell novel. A self-described “free spirit,” she was the illegitimate daughter of a factory worker and a cop whom, she says, would occasionally beat her. When she was 12, her boyfriend raped her. By 14, she had run away to marry a kid named Harry Wright, with whom, at 16, she had a daughter, Debbie. A year later, she was divorced and doing a little hustling. “I was a pretty loose gal,” she admits.
As Barbara tells it, she was drunk that evening and accepted the dare, wobbling a little as she picked up the phone behind the bar, and asking the hotel operator to put her through to Presley’s room. His oddball cousin Gene Smith supposedly answered.
Elvis never stood up, but motioned for Bobbi to sit on the vinyl chair next to him, and then gave her a hug before angling closer. “Come on,” Elvis said. “You’re going to be with me for the show.” As they got up to leave, Elvis suggestively grabbed his new friend, which sent her running out the side door of the hotel and into the street, Elvis in pursuit and calling her “Fat Butt.” She liked him better now.
Wertheimer climbed up on a railing and scissored his legs for balance. He was now four feet from the girl, shooting over her shoulder, more or less into Elvis’s face. Through his viewfinder, the scene was illuminated by harsh backlight from a nearby window and a 50-watt bulb overhead. ‘That’s a bunch of crap,” says Gray. “I never said, ‘I’ll bet you can’t kiss me.’ I might have said, ‘You can’t kiss me, because I have a boyfriend and I will not kiss you.’ But right after that, I pulled away from him, and he chased me across the stage trying to kiss me, just before the show started.”
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