I fit in pretty well with that crowd, but I made one significant misstep at one of the first parties I went to. I was standing with George Klein (“GK”) in the TV room when Elvis came over. He mentioned to George that he liked the way I played football. Swelling with pride, I said, “Well, my cousin is David Lawrence.”
Cousin David had been a star football player at Humes High, and I thought dropping the name might work in my favor. Elvis looked away—his expression blank. Not angry, just blank. Then he nodded and walked across the room to talk to somebody else. George had a stricken look on his face. He leaned in toward me and whispered, “David Lawrence, and the guys like David Lawrence, were the ones who gave Elvis a real hard time back in high school.”
I don’t think I mentioned any branch of my family tree up there again. And it meant an awful lot when, later that day, Elvis waved me over with his cue stick to play a game of pool with him.
Elvis was an incredibly active, physical guy, and sometimes the fun had to move off the estate property. Elvis was a big amusement park fan, but his profile had become so high that just stepping into a place like that would lead to an unmanageable mob scene. So he’d gotten in the habit of renting out the nearby Memphis Fairgrounds after hours, hiring a park attendant or two to keep the place running, and bringing along groups of trusted companions for wild nights of rides on the Pippin—a huge, wooden-track roller coaster—collisions in the Dodgem cars, and unlimited Pronto Pups (basically an irresistible corn-dog-on-a-stick). The saying goes that youth is wasted on the young, but I think that even back then I had a sense that I was a part of something magical. Not only were we friends with Elvis, we were getting to live out a kind of fantasy life along with him—it was like having that carnival in East of Eden all to ourselves.
Occasionally that living fantasy could toss up some frights. The very first time I went to the Fairgrounds, I found myself lined up with the group to take a ride on the Pippin, which even in the fifties seemed old and rickety enough to add a little actual terror to every ride. Elvis got in the first car, and had Anita Wood snuggle up close to him. Patsy Presley, Gene and Billy Smith, and a few others got in the cars behind them. Those of us new to the Fairground experience stood on the platform as the ride began and the cars started their slow climb over the first hill. Then, just as the cars were out of sight, the ride roared into action. We could see the shadows of the cars zigging and zagging and shooting around turns, and making their seven-story climbs. We could hear continual yells of fear and excitement. But when the car finally came back around to the starting platform, we saw a heart-stopping sight: Anita Wood sat in the first car alone.
Elvis had been thrown from the Pippin. Some of the girls around me screamed. The rest of us stood frozen in shock. And then, just before the horror of what had happened really grabbed ahold of us, we heard a tremendous laugh coming up the stairs behind us. We turned to see Elvis, grinning like a happy, misbehaving little kid. It was a trick I saw him pull almost every time he brought new people to the Fairgrounds—he’d figured out a spot at the top of the first hill where he could jump out just before the ride took off at top speed. Then he’d scale down and sneak around back. And every time, he got a tremendous kick out of the looks of panic on everybody else’s faces.
Other nights were spent out at the Rainbow Roller Rink, which Elvis would also rent for after-hour private get-togethers. The Rainbow was a pretty typical roller rink, with a mirrored ball over the center of the floor, mirrors up on the walls, flashing lights, and an organ providing a stream of skatable pop tunes. But again, there was something special and dream-come-true about having a place like that all to ourselves. And again, Elvis would let loose his daredevil streak and turn an activity that I’d always seen as kind of dull into something thrilling, if not outright scary. I can picture him in his leather jacket and rider’s cap, organizing us into giant whips, which would spin around and pick up speed until the person at the end lost control and rocketed off. We might put on some knee pads and elbow pads—never helmets—and work up our own roller-derby games. There was a “last man standing” type of thing where you’d try to take somebody down by skating into them. People took some pretty good shots at Elvis—and he took hard shots at everybody else—but more than likely he’d be the one still on wheels at the end of the game (actually, I think he and Billy had some secret agreement worked out—more than once I saw somebody just about to take Elvis down, when little Billy would come zooming out of nowhere and knock the threat right down on its ass).
This was still good clean fun—I don’t remember anybody drinking anything stronger than root beer. But it was fun that left you sore the next morning. Over the years the Rainbow was home to quite a few contusions, several chipped teeth, and even a couple of concussions.
When the weather was nice enough through the fall and winter of ’57 into ’58, we’d still get a football game together. Though now we moved on from Guthrie Park to the lighted field at Whitehaven High School that Elvis rented for us to play night games. I can’t say that Elvis and I actually got closer during these times, but I did start to feel that I was accepted, that he actually liked having me around. There was a smile he’d throw my way when I was the one on my ass at the Rainbow—or a way he’d bark out “Jerry, c’mere,” to show me something at the Fairgrounds—that just felt friendly and familiar. At the Fairgrounds and the rink and the football games I started to get a sense of the incredible energy and love of life he had. He could get crazy, silly, and unpredictable, too—an amazing blend of an amiable cockiness and an openhearted sensitivity. The cockiness was clearly backed up by talent, but the sensitivity was the real surprise, and if you got to see even the slightest bit of it, you felt further drawn to the guy.
Some of those late nights at the Fairgrounds or the Rainbow seemed to go on forever, but actually that period of easy good times shot by very quickly. I got used to going a month or two or three without seeing Elvis as he kept up his frenetic work schedule (in addition to his film and recording work, there were concert tours of the West Coast and Hawaii). At the beginning of 1958, word quickly spread that Graceland would be without its host for a much longer period: Elvis had been drafted.
Elvis was not thrilled about becoming a GI, and yet, whatever strings he might have been able to pull back then, he wasn’t going to refuse to go. He felt he was no different from anybody else in that regard. The army did allow Elvis a few months’ deferment so that he could finish making King Creole (taking over a lead role that had first been developed for the late James Dean). Then, without much fanfare, Elvis shipped off to basic training in Texas.
Did the government target Elvis specifically to try to shut down rock and roll? We won’t ever know for sure. This much is certain: From 1954 to 1958, Elvis wasn’t making speeches, but he was making a statement. And following his lead, young people were starting to have a voice—a voice with a melody and a rhythm to it—and that was heard as a powerful and frightening threat to the status quo. I know that when Elvis got his military haircut and headed off to boot camp, a lot of parents in Memphis and the rest of the country heaved a sigh of relief and hoped that maybe now that boy and his music would just fade away.
There were significant changes in Elvis’s life and in my life while he was off in the army. For him, the biggest change was a tragic one—his mother, Gladys, died of liver failure while he was in basic training (he was somewhat begrudgingly allowed time off to be with her in her final days). I never had the chance to meet Mrs. Presley, but it had always been clear just how much she meant to Elvis.
For me, the changes were both highly positive and a little surprising. Suddenly, I wasn’t just keeping up academically—I was excelling. And now, I was a good enough football player to be a varsity starter and co-captain of the team, with a shot at a college scholarship. Football had brought me and Elvis together in the first place, and I think it was the combination of success on the field and my friendship with Elvis that thoroughly transformed me f
rom that lost little Tonto in Mamaw’s apple tree to a guy popular enough to be elected class president in my freshman, sophomore, and junior years, and vice president in my senior year.
The friendship with Elvis gave me confidence, but it wasn’t something I played on for popularity. Just as I’d held tight to my first Elvis-Guthrie Park experiences, I kept my Elvis association very quiet all through high school. I think all of us who had been accepted into the inner circles around Elvis considered it a real honor, and all of us understood that what went on at Graceland or at the other outings wasn’t something you used to boost your own status away from the house. We realized that the time we spent with Elvis was a good portion of the only private time he ever got, and we all felt a stake in protecting that privacy for him. I would never have considered saying to any classmates, “Oh, yeah—I was up at Graceland last night…” and I really don’t think most of them ever realized that I was one of the lucky few who was riding the Pippin at two in the morning with Elvis Presley.
Life was very different with Elvis away in the army. Even though I was becoming a fairly big man on the Catholic High campus, I missed hanging out at Graceland, and the football field, and the Rainbow. I missed hanging out with Elvis and the guys. I went and saw King Creole a half dozen times and was again impressed with Elvis’s talents, but having him twenty feet tall on a movie screen was just never as satisfying as getting hit by his Dodgem car at the Fairgrounds.
I also spent a lot of time listening to Elvis’s records. I’d always enjoyed his music for the way it made me feel. But now I started listening harder to the feelings that Elvis had been putting into his songs. I went back again and again to that great first album, with his name in pink and green letters on the black-and-white cover, and really listened to what Elvis was doing. I’d always been grabbed hardest by Elvis’s rockers, but now I was caught in the spell of some of the quieter tunes: “I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’)” and “One-Sided Love Affair.” I’d recognized the range and the power of Elvis’s voice on “I Was the One,” but now I really thought about the feelings that had to be inside Elvis in order for him to use his voice the way he did. I listened countless times to his eerie cover of “Blue Moon,” thinking that nobody could sing that song that way unless they truly knew what loneliness felt like. I figured that, somewhere along the line, he too must have been dumped by a young love like Loretta Cuccia.
True romance came my way during senior year. “One-Sided Love Affair” had pretty much summed up my love life until then, and I’d gotten used to falling for girls who were somehow unattainable. But at a local dance my senior year I spotted a beautiful girl with auburn hair who was the wildest dancer out on the dance floor. I summoned my newfound confidence and walked up and introduced myself. Instead of a brush-off, I got an invitation to dance along. Her name was Carol Cook, she went to Central High, and she lived out in the well-to-do neighborhoods of East Memphis. She was also Jewish, and there were probably a good number of my Catholic High classmates who would have recoiled at that religious difference. But this was a case where my mixed-up, semi-rootless childhood came in handy: It never occurred to me to let somebody else’s prejudice get in the way of my dancing with a pretty girl.
The night wasn’t all budding romance. There was a guy from Central High who felt he had a stronger claim to be Carol’s dance partner, and the situation could not be resolved without some punches being thrown. The intruder ended up with a bloody nose, and I ended up with his blood all over my white dress shirt. I also ended up with Carol Cook, who took me back to her house and tenderly attempted to clean me up. She was obviously impressed with my heroic stand on the dance floor, and the more she dabbed at my shirt, the more hooked I felt. Suddenly that Elvis song “I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’)” was making sense to me in a whole new way.
It felt both strange and familiar to be standing at those Graceland gates again on a chilly March evening in 1960. Strange in that I wasn’t the same little kid anymore, and I was sure Elvis had been through some changes of his own. But familiar in that I was just as excited to get through those gates as I’d ever been. After two years overseas, Elvis was home.
It felt great to walk through that front door again—almost as if I were the one coming home. I immediately encountered a cluster of people off to the right in the living room. There were plenty of familiar faces around, and I met each smile with a smile, but my eyes went to the figure standing at the end of the room in a kind of fighting stance: Elvis, looking serious and formidable in a white karate gi and a black belt. He was in the process of putting on a martial-arts demonstration. I’d soon learn that karate was a new passion that he had developed over in Germany. He’d met a German karate expert who’d given him intensive personal training in the physical and spiritual aspects of the discipline. Karate was still something entirely exotic and odd to most of us in Memphis, but Elvis had become a fiercely devoted student.
Big Lamar Fike and a somewhat fidgety Gene Smith were standing a few paces in front of Elvis, and both were holding up a cushion from the white living-room sofa. He checked their grips on the cushions, and positioned their hands so that the cushions were right in front of their faces. He stepped back and got into a sort of fighting crouch, with his arms out and his hands extended in front of him. Some of the spectators were still smiling, but Elvis stayed intently focused.
He took two quick steps forward, shouted something, and leapt into the air, simultaneously kicking a foot into each cushion. The kicks were full force, but he had enough control to make contact with the cushions without hurting the faces behind them. That distinctively loose-limbed manner of his that turned up on the football field disappeared—his karate moves were executed precisely and emphatically. There was applause, and Elvis, still looking intense and focused, nodded our way. He spotted me.
“Jerry, c’mere,” he said, motioning me over. “Help me with something.”
That little moment felt huge. There was no slap on the back. No “Hello” or “How you been?” Just a “Jerry, c’mere.” And with one gesture to join him on the snow-white carpet of the Graceland living room, I was right back in.
He squared me off opposite him and began to slowly demonstrate how his kicks and punches would work against an opponent. He coached me a little on how to defend against a move, then would show a countermove that would cut through the defense. I got the hang of a couple of blocking moves and we gradually picked up speed and got closer to full-force strikes. We were going at it pretty good, and I started to feel proud that I was keeping up, blocking his punches and counterpunches. I was learning fast, but not quite fast enough—my wrestler’s stance left me vulnerable to kick attacks, and Elvis faked a punch, spun, and then landed his leather boot in my groin, just barely making contact with my most delicate region. Thank God he’d studied hard enough to have the control he had, because if he’d kicked any harder I would have been writhing on the floor, hitting soprano notes. And as I stepped back to join the small living-room crowd, I realized that, coming from Elvis, a kick in the groin was a lot more personal and heartfelt than a slap on the back.
Almost as soon as Elvis got back to Memphis, he resumed the hectic pace of his film career (GI Blues was up first) and began traveling back and forth to Los Angeles. When he was in town, he still had people up to Graceland, but the get-togethers didn’t have the easy spirit of pre-army times. I’m sure part of this was due to the fact that Elvis’s mother was gone, and it just wasn’t easy for him to have the same carefree feeling around the house. But there was a different kind of shift in the atmosphere, too. There was still the basic excitement of being at Elvis’s house, but there was a new intensity, too. Instead of just leading a pool game, Elvis might read to us from some of the books he’d read about karate, impressing upon us the fact that it was a mental and spiritual pursuit as well as a system of self-defense. And instead of the sounds of a jukebox, it became more common to hear the sounds of practice boards snapping with th
e impact of karate kicks and punches. It almost felt like the discipline of Elvis’s army training was carrying over to Graceland.
But there were still wild nights at the Fairgrounds or the Rainbow and a lot of movie nights at the Memphian, and on those nights I got familiar with a few new faces that had been welcomed into the circle. There was one fellow from Chicago named Joe Esposito, a close army buddy whom Elvis had convinced to come back with him to Memphis. And there were some new Memphis guys—Richard Davis and Jimmy Kingsley and Ray “Chief” Sitton. And Red West’s cousin Sonny West had become a part of things, too. Some of these guys traveled with Elvis when he made his trips to L.A., and most had developed a mix of friendship and working relationship with Elvis. When Elvis took these guys to Las Vegas for a weekend break during the making of GI Blues, the group strutted around town in dark suits and dark shades, looking like Graceland’s answer to the Rat Pack. The local press dubbed Elvis’s entourage “The Memphis Mafia.” The name stuck. As far as I could tell, there weren’t any official jobs or duties for the Memphis Mafia guys, they just knew what had to be taken care of, though it did become clear pretty quickly that Joe Esposito was going to be in the role of right-hand man.
There was one more new face that actually did manage to bring back some moments of carefree fun to Graceland—Scatter, a pet chimpanzee that Elvis had brought into the house. Scatter lived in style in an air-conditioned, converted laundry room downstairs at Graceland, and he and Elvis would play around together like they were best buddies. But what I remember most about Scatter is his forward manner with women. When there were mixed parties at Graceland now, most of us guys were on our best behavior. But Scatter thought nothing of darting around the room and looking up girls’ skirts.
Me and a Guy Named Elvis Page 8