4
WELCOME TO MY WORLD
In the fall of 1964, the Beatles were revolutionizing rock and roll and starring in their own film, A Hard Day’s Night. The American military had begun to drop bombs on some place called Vietnam. Cassius Clay had renamed himself Muhammad Ali and was riding high as the new heavyweight boxing champ. The first Ford Mustangs were burning rubber on roads all over the United States, and Dr. Strangelove was teaching moviegoers how to love the bomb and have a good laugh at the very idea of nuclear annihilation. Elvis was now a full-time movie star, and he had just had one of his biggest hits with Viva Las Vegas.
Back home in Memphis, I was just about ready to embark on a future that seemed clear, straight, and utterly respectable. In between stints of shift work at a trucking company, a cotton gin, a chemical plant, and the new airport, I had taken as many classes as I could at Memphis State, and was now just a semester of student-teaching away from launching myself into adult life as a qualified history teacher, potential football coach, and generally upstanding citizen. It was a good, solid plan for a good, solid future. And it was about to be tossed right out the window.
When I got back to Memphis after my New York adventure, I moved into my daddy’s house—he now had a place in Frazier, a part of town north of North Memphis. Because of my Eastern Airlines experience up north, it was easy to score a job with Eastern as a reservation agent at the brand-new Memphis International Airport. On one of my first days on the job there, I served up a ticket to George Klein, who was heading to L.A. to meet up with Elvis on the set of his next film, Girl Happy. I distinctly remember saying to GK, “Man, you’ve got the life. I wish I was going with you.”
Carol Cook and I saw a bit of each other, but things never really got back on track. Her calls had tipped the scales in my decision to come back to Memphis, but I’d grown a little tired of being the love-struck guy trailing after the girl—even a girl as exciting and attractive as Carol. I think we both began to realize that as much as we’d tried to convince ourselves that we were soul mates, we’d reached the end of our relationship.
I started taking regular classes at the university and putting in graveyard shifts loading trucks. I also tried to find some of the excitement (and decent coffee) that I had experienced in New York, and I began to spend a fair amount of time at a brand-new combination coffeehouse/art gallery in midtown called the Bitter Lemon. The place was owned and managed by a wild-eyed, shaggy-haired artist named John McIntire, who reigned as the central figure of bohemian life in Memphis. I liked going to the Bitter Lemon, and while I don’t think there was ever much chance that I was going to go entirely beatnik, I was thrilled to learn that there was a vibrant, underground culture blossoming in my hometown. The place was a stronghold of the budding folk scene, and I started to hear a new kind of music there from artists such as Odetta; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Pete Seeger; and Phil Ochs. This was stuff in which the beat didn’t matter as much as the message of uplift, hope, and togetherness. Hearing some of those aching voices and strummed guitars, I realized that some of the simplest music could be the most honest, and the most powerful.
Between classes, coffee, and work shifts, my only long stretches of free time were either late night or late-late night. Elvis hours. I’d check in with Alan Fortas or GK periodically, and when everybody was back in town there might be get-togethers at the house. There were still some Fairgrounds and Rainbow nights, but if Elvis wasn’t having people up at the house, it was more than likely he’d be at the Memphian Theater.
One of Elvis’s earliest supporters from the Memphis business community was a man named Mr. Schaeffer, who owned the Memphian and ran the Mid-South Film Exchange (out of that Southern-bred respect for elders, even Elvis always called him “Mr. Schaeffer”). The 35 mm film prints for all the theaters in the Mid-Southern states came through that exchange, and Mr. Schaeffer was always happy to lend any of them out to Elvis. He’d make sure that Elvis got the weekly catalogue of everything that was coming through, and he even let Elvis have his own keys to the Exchange, which was actually a huge warehouse in downtown Memphis.
I’d been at the Memphian when Elvis had screened some of his own films, and I used to love watching him watch himself. Elvis, Red, Alan and the rest of the guys would talk right through the picture, as if they were all sitting in a living room. The interesting thing was that they wouldn’t talk about the story of the film, but would instead point out strange little details of the set or the face of somebody in the background: “Hey, there’s what’s-his-face the stuntman!” or “Hey, there’s that girl Red was after!” They’d all been together through the making of the film, and what I saw as a piece of entertainment, they saw as a strange kind of home movie. I thought that if I could ever be a part of those kinds of conversations, I would have made it to the innermost circle.
On a typical movie night, Elvis would send a couple of his guys with the keys to the Exchange, and they’d go in, call him up, and read titles off the giant film cans that were stacked up there in rows and rows. Elvis would look up the titles in the catalogue, check the casts and plot summaries, and would eventually pick five or six films he wanted the guys to bring to the Memphian (he wouldn’t watch that many in a night, but if something didn’t grab him, he’d switch reels and start another). He’d watch anything and everything, as long as it was quality work. He had a great and broad curiosity about films, and could be just as happy with a crazy comedy as a heavyweight drama. By 1964, Elvis was already frustrated with the quality of his own films, and when I think back on some of the choices Elvis made for those Memphian nights, it’s almost heartbreaking to think how sophisticated his tastes were. He was completely taken with the artistry of Lawrence of Arabia, and was moved by To Kill a Mockingbird. He really loved Rod Steiger’s powerful and wrenching performance in The Pawnbroker, and was also impressed with that film’s cutting-edge jazz score by Quincy Jones.
There was one stretch during which Elvis had us watch Dr. Strangelove at least a dozen times. Me and the boys were probably not the most astute judges of political satire, but, hearing Elvis bust up laughing, we’d start to see the film through his eyes and end up laughing just as hard. Even better on some of those nights was the impromptu after-show that Elvis would put on. He knew how to use that remarkable voice of his not just as a singer but as an expert mimic, and he’d do drop-dead impersonations of every part in the film—George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson, Sterling Hayden’s General Jack D. Ripper, and of course Peter Sellers’s good Dr. Strangelove (Elvis was a huge Peter Sellers fan). He had every word and mannerism down, and it was always amazing to watch him. As a matter of fact, he did a masterful impression of Dr. Strangelove being choked by his own misbehaving prosthetic hand, an impression that he startled us with countless times over the years.
I remember that Elvis used to impress me with what seemed like a bit of movie-insider magic. We’d be sitting there watching a film and he’d lean back and whisper, “Reel change, Jerry.” Sure enough, seconds later, there’d be a little jump in a scene or that telltale shift of sound and color that marked a reel change. I thought maybe from his experiences in Hollywood he’d somehow become an expert at timing the projectionists, until one night he laughingly explained that there was a little blip in the corner of the screen that was a signal to the projectionist. I started seeing those blips on every film I watched in the theater. And even though Elvis had let me in on his secret, every so often he’d lean back and say, in an ultraserious voice, “Reel change, Jerry.”
On a late September night in that fall of ’64, I was finishing up work at the trucking company, forklifting pallets of cargo onto tractor-trailers. By punch-out time, I was dead tired, but I got a jolt of energy as I drove past the Memphian. The theater was on my route to and from work, and since Elvis had been out of town for a couple of months, I’d gotten used to driving past the theater’s empty parking lot late at night. But now the lot had some cars in it—chief among them Elvis’s new
est big, dark Cadillac.
I parked and went around to knock on the front glass. Somebody came and let me in and when I walked into the theater it looked like a movie had just ended. Elvis was down by one of the side entrances near the screen, talking to a group of people and apparently signing autographs for a friend of a friend of somebody. He looked as tired as I was feeling, so I figured I’d just slip back out, get my sleep, and try to hook up with him the next day. As I turned to go, I just about bumped into Richard Davis, one of the guys who had started hanging around with the Memphis crowd after Elvis got out of the army, and who was now working for Elvis.
“Hey, Jerry,” said Richard. “I’ve got to take the films back to the exchange. You want to take the ride with me to take them back, and we can go out and get some breakfast?”
I hadn’t even had time to change out of my dirty work clothes. “I’d like to, Richard, but I’m a mess. Let’s do it tomorrow.”
“Can’t do it tomorrow, Jerry,” said Richard.
“Why not?”
“We’re going to California tomorrow.”
Richard wasn’t Elvis, but he was very likable, fun to be around, and a good guy to have as a friend. You never saw Elvis standing at the gates of Graceland, or at the entrance to the Memphian, or the turnstiles to the Fairgrounds—it was guys like Richard who checked with Elvis about who got in and who didn’t, just like the guys guarding the velvet rope in front of some VIP nightclub. Suddenly I wasn’t so tired anymore.
“OK,” I told Richard. “Let’s get some breakfast.”
We had just finished getting the films back on the right shelves at the Exchange, when the phone rang in the office over there. Richard answered. He talked a moment, then hung up and turned to me. “Elvis just called and told me he couldn’t find Jerry Schilling. I told him you were here, and he said he wanted me to ask you if you’d come to the house.”
I liked hearing that Elvis himself had made a call to track me down. Of course I’d come to the house.
I’d been to Graceland so many times before that morning, but I distinctly remember driving through those grand gates and thinking that this was the first time I’d actually been personally summoned there. I quickly learned, though, that even an urgent summoning didn’t mean there’d be an immediate meeting—I waited in the living room for a long, long time, watching the dawn start to break outside and wondering if perhaps Elvis had forgotten about calling for me.
Richard had wandered off to tend to the cars and head off to bed, and I was just beginning to think that maybe I should head back home, when Elvis and his father, Vernon, appeared at the top of the stairs and started slowly descending a step at a time, arm-in-arm. Elvis was twenty-nine years old at the time, and I knew him as a guy in absolute peak physical shape, so what I saw when I looked closely at him shocked me—he had an oxygen mask over his face and was taking deep hits from a small tank that trailed behind him. He seemed a little bit out of it—not just tired from a long night out but truly, deeply exhausted—and it was the first time I’d ever seen him looking less than perfect, a sign of just how early there was trouble stemming from Elvis-the-man’s attempts to live up to the demands of Elvis, the superstar.
When Elvis saw me from the stairs, and took in the surprised expression on my face, he casually tugged the mask off, pocketed it, and said, “You know, Jerry—this California smog will get to you.” As stunned as I was to see him looking worn-down, I was equally surprised to see how he could snap himself out of it—how he could physically will the sparkle back into his eyes even when he didn’t feel it inside.
He asked me to wait for him out on the front porch. So I stepped back outside and sat in one of the wrought-iron chairs there. I looked out at the gentle, sloping hill of the property and watched the first few smudges of sunshine break through the gray sky of a Memphis morning. A few minutes later, Elvis came out the front door—now looking perfectly put together—and took a seat next to me. He ran a hand through his hair and kind of squinted at the sky over Graceland. “Might be a nice day coming.”
“Yeah. Might be, Elvis.” I knew he didn’t call me here to talk about the weather.
He looked a little lost in his thoughts for a moment. Then he leaned in, and focused on me with a look that was about as serious as any I’d ever seen on him.
“Jerry—I need you to come work for me.”
I was dumbfounded for a moment. Ever since I was a scrawny, lonely twelve-year-old kid, this guy had been the epitome of everything I wanted to be. I’d wanted nothing more than to get closer to him, and I’d only dreamed that someday he might really need me for something. But after ten years of those dreams, I’d stopped thinking there was any chance of them becoming a reality.
“Work for you, Elvis?” I stammered a bit.
“Yeah. Things aren’t working out with Jimmy and Joe right now. They’re not going to be around here anymore. I need somebody. Should be you, Jerry.”
“Well, uh—when, Elvis? When would you want me to start?”
“We’re leaving for California today—driving the bus back to Los Angeles. You ought to be with us.”
“Today?”
“That’s right, Jerry.” A little bit of a smile crept across his face. “I need you on board, man.”
For maybe one full second I thought about how silly it would be to turn my life upside down on the basis of a quick, early-morning, Graceland front-porch conversation; how ridiculous it was to scuttle all the plans for my future that I’d put together so carefully; how absolutely crazy it seemed to forget about everything else in my life and simply jump on a bus with Elvis Presley. Maybe a second. Then I heard myself say, “OK, Elvis. Do I have time to pack a bag?”
I was in a daze by the time I got back home, but I think I managed to throw a couple of pairs of pants and a few shirts in a suitcase. I know I did make calls to my employers to tell them I wouldn’t be coming in; I called my student counselor at the university to apologize for the unscheduled break in my studies; and I had a short but heartfelt talk with my father. He’d been deeply proud of my decision to put myself through college, and had been tremendously concerned about my academic career when I’d taken the time off to go to New York—he worried that I was throwing all my education away without getting a degree. I insisted to him that whatever happened, wherever I ended up, I’d get back to school somehow and try to finish my studies (I didn’t think too hard about where or when that might be—my main concern was getting back to Graceland before Elvis changed his mind about inviting me along). My dad still didn’t warm up much to the idea of my hitting the road with Elvis, but he told me that he had confidence in me and just wanted to know that whatever I was doing was what I really wanted to be doing. He knew that my friendship with Elvis was real and that what was being offered to me was a very solid opportunity of sorts. He was concerned, but, as always, basically supportive of what I wanted to do.
I headed back to Graceland, was waved through the gates by Uncle Vester, who didn’t even stop to call up to the house first. I don’t know if he spotted the grin on my face, but I’d been waiting for years to be waved in like that. I drove up the hill and parked my car in the most out-of-the-way spot I could find around the side of the house. I’d worked my way up from the ’49 Dodge to a little MG sports car, but it still didn’t quite fit the ambience Elvis was shooting for around Graceland. I went in through the screened-in porch in the back of the house (years later this room was converted into the Jungle Room). The house was absolutely quiet, and again it was hard to believe that the conversation with Elvis just a couple hours before had taken place. I didn’t want to walk around the house and disturb anybody who was trying to sleep, so I settled into one of the more comfortable wicker chairs on the porch and, though I felt charged up with energy and excitement, might have eventually dozed off for a while.
A few hours later, the house was an entirely different place, buzzing and humming with activity. Richard Davis was running around with suitcases, takin
g care of Elvis’s wardrobe. Billy Smith was moving almost as fast as he did on skates as he packed up audio and video equipment. Alan “Hog Ears” Fortas was running back and forth like the friendliest of linebackers, stocking up the forty-foot Dodge mobile home parked in front of the house. Marty Lacker, an acquaintance of George Klein’s who also had a background in radio, had become the new right-hand man for Elvis, and was very carefully going through a pile of papers. Mike Keaton, a guy who had been hired on by Elvis just a couple of weeks before, was carrying boxes around with a dead serious expression on his face. Mike was a friendly, dependable guy, but that serious expression was about the only one you’d ever see on his face—the rest of the guys kidded around a lot but a smile out of Mike was a rarity. Red West had been working steadily for Elvis, but was also getting film work on his own and was already out in L.A.
The guys had varied personalities and temperaments, but each could generally be described as a “Memphis boy.” I’d recently met one member of the inner circle who definitely did not fit that description—Larry Geller, a hairstylist from Jay Sebring’s upscale Los Angeles salon who had recenty begun cutting Elvis’s hair. Larry wasn’t a football-and-roller-skates kind of guy—his main outside interest was in reading all he could on theories of spirituality. Apparently, his discussions with Elvis during haircuts had gotten deep, and the two had bonded quickly. Larry had been out in Memphis for a while over the summer, but he and his family had just flown back to L.A. a few days before.
The Memphis boys seemed pleased to see me in the house, and whether or not they knew I was now part of the team, they took it in stride. I was trying to figure out how to pitch in and help somebody when I heard that familiar voice right behind me.
“Jerry. You ready for California?”
Me and a Guy Named Elvis Page 10