The enormous risk she took to achieve her secret dream was deceiving her parents.
Doris Tharp-Gurley wearing tee-shirt of 1955 images with Presley. Courtesy of Doris Tharp-Gurley.
The day before, Gurley and her friend Janet Green fibbed about staying the night at Gurley’s sister’s house. To catch a ride from Daytona Beach to Orlando, the girls bought Greyhound bus tickets. “Janet and I sat up all night at the bus station,” Gurley remembered. Too wired to sleep, they talked about Presley until it was finally time to board. After a long bus ride fraught with worry and excitement, their teenage conspiracy was paying off.
“Could we get a picture with you?” the girls asked him.
“Sure, but you’re gonna have to make it quick, I’ve gotta get inside,” Presley told them.
There’s one photo of Presley with a girl on either side, holding each at the waist. In pretty dresses, Gurley and Green are the picture of 1950s Florida schoolgirls: beaming, made up, happy to be on the arm of the pseudo prom king. Then, to Gurley’s astonishment, Presley took her in his arms and kissed her right on the lips; a moment forever frozen in time, captured on film. And then as quickly as it happened, like an apparition Presley was gone. The star-struck young friends didn’t even have tickets to get into the concert.
Presley kissing Doris Tharp-Gurley. Courtesy of Doris Tharp-Gurley.
Doris Tharp-Gurley, Elvis Presley, and Janet Green outside Municipal Auditorium in Orlando. Courtesy of Doris Tharp-Gurley.
The long bus ride home meant the two had to breach another rigid parental expectation: they skipped school the next day. “I never had the nerve to tell my parents what happened,” Gurley confessed. “They were very strict.”
In this vignette we see the youthful rebellion Presley was beginning to inspire. Never before had Gurley dared deceive her parents this way. But that fleeting kiss with him, and the excitement of seeing and hearing Presley perform earlier in the week, had made all the risk worth it. Within months his critics would seize upon this kind of behavior in America’s youth to denounce Presley. Hard as it is to imagine now, law enforcement leaders sought help from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself to stem the subversive tide they felt Presley represented.
In the audience at the Municipal Auditorium that night, Florida troubadour-to-be Gamble Rogers, son of celebrated Florida architect James Gamble Rogers, witnessed the power of musical performance in Presley. In his own performances from Florida roadhouses to Carnegie Hall, Rogers adapted a preacher’s cadence, spinning yarns of Florida folk life in “Oklawaha County”; he was the Sunshine State’s Garrison Keillor. On this night Rogers was eighteen and living in Winter Park.
“To be part of that audience was an astounding thing,” Rogers remembered. “It was an experience I will never forget. It was as to be part of a cauldron of raving sycophants. I have never seen such an effusion of emotion. This blue collar audience of country music fans recoiled at first because of his movements and attitude. First they thought he was drunk, then they thought he was daft, but before the first song was over they were caught up in it and swept away.”
The Orlando Sentinel columnist Jean Yothers was the first Florida journalist to write about the growing Presley phenomenon, in her “On the Town” column: “What really stole the show was this 20-year-old sensation Elvis Presley, a real sex-box as far as the girls are concerned,” Yothers observed. “They squealed themselves silly over this fellow in an Orange coat and sideburns who ‘sent’ them with his unique arrangement of ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll.’” After the show Yothers noted how Presley gave each girl seeking an autograph a long, slow look with his sleepy, puppy dog eyes: “They ate it up.”
Yothers’s colorful description of the concert, echoing Gamble Rogers, illustrated the effect of Presley’s music: “What Hillbilly music does to the Hillbilly fan is absolutely phenomenal. It transports him into a wild, emotional and audible state of ecstasy,” she noted. “He thunders his appreciation for the country-style music and the nasal twanged singing he loves by whistling shrilly through teeth, pounding the palms together with the whirling momentum of a souped-up paddle wheel, stomping the floor and ejecting yip yip noises like the barks of a hound dog.”
In her 1955 column Jean Yothers captured the birth of rock and roll for whites in segregated Orlando. Parents had no problem sending their children to what was supposed to be a benign Grand Ole Opry show, but in return Presley delivered something parents did not expect or necessarily approve of; a synthesis of countrified rhythm and blues that artists like Little Richard Penniman were already delivering to African-American audiences throughout the South on the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit.
Orlando had its own venue on the circuit, the South Street Casino, about six blocks from the Municipal Auditorium. For Presley’s young white fans, it might as well have been on the moon. Vanilla crooner Pat Boone made a laughable attempt to cover Little Richard’s 1955 classic “Tutti Frutti.” Presley was the first white artist who belted out those songs with credibility, bridging the color gap, and like Johnny Appleseed, spreading nascent rock and roll in all its vibrant, sexual, hip-shaking color to cloistered, impressionable youth worldwide. Less country, more juke joint—that was Elvis Presley’s magic and remains his most important legacy.
At the last stop on Elvis, Scotty, and Bill’s week-long Florida tour putting the jam in the Hank Snow jamboree, in Jacksonville their friend and local promoter Mae Axton was waiting. On the way out to the band’s motel, Presley and Axton spoke of family, home, and his determination to make something of himself.
“His clothes were a little ‘freaky’ for that age of sweaters and skirts, bobby sox, shirts and slacks and burr haircuts,” Axton remembered. “But I liked him immediately. I could sense something rare in this quiet, but extremely polite youngster.” In return, Axton was like a mother figure, and since she lived in Jacksonville, she could offer the boys a chance to stop by her house in the suburbs for a home-cooked meal; a rare treat in their world of truckstop burgers and diner flapjacks.
Like the good promoter she was, Axton spread the word to local newspapers, radio stations, and her sons Hoyt and Johnny about Presley’s alter ego and the dynamic performer who had made a splash around the Sunshine State during his first week of live shows.
Despite the positive buzz surrounding Presley’s act, at least one Jacksonville disc jockey was not impressed. “We felt Elvis was on the wrong show,” said Jeannie Williams of WRHC radio. “We were all pure country. He was different. Nobody was real excited to have him on the package deal. His music was not our music … I didn’t think he was much of a singer.”
Some believed the headliner Hank Snow, a diminutive man at just five feet, four inches tall, had a Napoleon complex and the self-doubt that came with it. Though Snow was business partners with Tom Parker, the ecstatic reactions Presley was receiving increased Snow’s insecurity. As evidenced by Parker’s willingness to make Presley the one and only featured attraction in Ocala earlier that week, Parker and his promoter Mae Axton were all in on Elvis. The performances in Jacksonville left no doubt and provided an exclamation point for Parker in his attempts to bring the young star into his stable permanently.
Ardys Bell and her brother Phil had no professional connections in the music business, no preconceived notions about Presley. A recent graduate in a class of ten from tiny Boca Grande High School, Bell was new to town and living at the local YWCA. “I was just getting acquainted with life,” Bell recalled. It was her brother’s idea to attend the concert at Jacksonville’s new baseball stadium, Wolfson Park.
Ardys Bell with Presley after excited fans had torn off his shirt. Courtesy of Ardys Bell.
Named after millionaire baseball owner Samuel W. Wolfson, the new stadium had opened just two months previously, providing the largest Florida venue Presley had played to date. The Bell siblings would be part of a crowd some estimated to be as large as twelve thousand. On this night Bell and her brother got their first look at both the dawni
ng of rock and roll and the earliest stage of Presleymania in Florida. Fittingly, it was Friday the thirteenth that Presley performed in this navy town on the Atlantic.
As usual, he chose outlandish colors for that night’s performance: a pink suit and shirt, frilly enough that Axton playfully teased Presley to let her have it as a blouse. At dinner, other female performers on the evening’s bill, the Carter Sisters and Skeeter Davis, also commented on Presley’s garish shirt revealing his bare chest. Presley was due to close the first half of the night’s show; Snow would headline the second half. Just before Presley went on, Pat Miles, the daughter of a local disc jockey, was introduced to him. “He was watching the entertainers, mesmerized. Very shy, polite, and always stood by himself.”
All the nerves evaporated as soon as Presley went on to close the first half of the show. After two songs the teenage crowd poured from the stands over the barricades and, as at the Ocala show a few nights earlier, gathered directly in front of the stage. Pat Miles saw it happen right in front of her: “The crowd came over the barricades and rushed the stage,” she remembered. “I had never seen this before.” Sensing the excitement in his audience, at the end of the set Presley uttered a single sentence that triggered a watershed event: “Thank you ladies and gentlemen and girls, I’ll see you back stage.”
According to Axton, hundreds of young people emptied from the stands immediately. Though she and Parker had arranged for police security in the players’ locker rooms that served as a performer dressing area, someone had left an overhead door open, through which girls came like a tidal wave of teen lust. “It was like a sudden ocean swell,” Axton marveled.
In minutes, as the story goes, dozens of teenagers mobbed Presley, tearing off his pink jacket, tie, belt, and frilly pink shirt. “Ripped to pieces,” Axton recalled, “and divided among the teenagers as souvenirs.” Presley climbed to the top of the showers to make his escape while Jacksonville police attempted to clear the room. In her memoir Axton recalled asking a young student nurse why she was screaming and crying over Presley. In a response famous to Presley fans worldwide she told Axton, “Well, he’s just a great big beautiful hunk of forbidden fruit.”
It is likely this so-called riot has grown in legend and intensity over the years, but Ardys Bell and her brother Phil witnessed one remarkable aspect of the aftermath. As they walked underneath the grandstands the two happened upon Presley. Wearing no shirt and winded, he was eating ice out of a soft drink box near a remote concession area.
“When we saw him, I walked up and asked permission for us to take pictures,” Bell recalled. “I wasn’t ‘ga ga’—I was talking to him.” The resulting image snapped by her brother Phil shows Ardys looking at a bare-chested Presley with a grin on her face. He appears nonplussed. It’s such an odd moment; if not for her perspective on the image, you would swear this classic snapshot is a scene from an early Elvis movie; it looks so staged. The only thing comparable to this fan reaction would come nine years later when the Beatles played Jacksonville’s Gator Bowl across the parking lot from the baseball stadium.
According to legend and Mae Axton, the Jacksonville fan frenzy left Parker with “dollar marks in his eyes” and an unshakable resolve to gain full managerial control of twenty-year-old Elvis Presley. He also saw to it that news of the commotion made its way into the papers. The opportunist promoter knew he had found his money train and how to exploit the growing phenomenon. This alchemy was crucial to Presley’s breakout stardom.
Soon Parker would make it clear to Presley’s hard-working road brothers Scotty and Bill that their tickets to ride were located far to the rear of their youthful front man. There would only be one star in Tom Parker’s show. His earliest Florida tour had come to an end, but in two scant months Presley was right back in the Sunshine State. His second round of barnstorming in the midst of a sweltering summer, Presley’s last as a support act, would prove every bit as eventful as the first.
II
ANDY AND ELVIS
4
July 25–27
Fort Myers, Orlando
After his first Florida tour Elvis Presley spent the next two months performing in North Carolina and Virginia. He returned to his crucial launching venue, the Louisiana Hayride, where he was still under contract to perform. In June, during a series of concerts across Texas, Presley appeared in Midland with Roy Orbison. In Lubbock Buddy Holly opened for Presley as part of a duo known as Buddy and Bob. Presley played Hope, Arkansas, birthplace of William Jefferson Blythe, who became President Bill Clinton; the boy was eight years old at the time.
“Elvis Presley continues to gather speed over the South,” wrote Cecil Holifield, operator of record stores in Midland and Odessa, Texas. “West Texas is his hottest territory to date.”
There were difficult times on the road; after the gig in Hope, Presley was driving through Fulton, Arkansas, when the brake lining of his car caught fire. He and a local girl he was taking to his next concert managed to escape. All he could do was stand by the side of the road in despair as flames charred his cherished Cadillac, the first he ever owned. Scotty and Bill drove over to Memphis to retrieve as a temporary replacement the car Presley bought for his parents.
At the dedication of the newly air-conditioned Slavonian Lodge in Biloxi, Mississippi, some of the men found Presley “a little cocky,” and chided him for having “pimples all over his face.” The promoter who booked Presley at the lodge, Frankie “Yankee” Barhanovich, quipped, “The members were all making fun of me for bringing in this hillbilly.”
During this difficult stretch, things got even worse at the enlisted airmen’s club on nearby Keesler Air Force Base, home of the 81st Training Wing. Presley was booed and stayed back behind the tiny stage area during intermission. A sergeant at the base concluded: “He’ll never make it.” During his two-night stand in late June, Presley eventually won them over, even becoming friendly with said airman who proclaimed his career doomed. When he was encouraged to play longer Presley confessed, “I only know seven songs.”
During this three-date swing through Mississippi, Presley grabbed the arm of an attractive girl walking past. “Where are you going?” he asked playfully. The encounter marked the beginning of his serious romance with seventeen-year-old June Juanico, an auburn-haired beauty whom a reporter once described as a “blue-eyed girl built on the order of the Mississippi River, long and lots of curves.” Besides her beauty, Juanico was no shrinking violet. She had a strong will and did not hesitate to share opinions with her young paramour.
That night the two sat in his car outside Juanico’s house. She recalled: “The first thing I said was ‘what is your real name?’ because I’d never heard of a name like Elvis before. He said ‘What do you mean my real name? Elvis Aaron Presley.” As her mother kept an eye on them from the house, Juanico answered Presley’s questions about her parents’ divorce, something unusual at a time when marriage was still considered forever. Presley opened up about his twin brother who died at birth. The two talked until dawn, and over the next year found time to see each other during Presley’s rapid ascent to fame, including his most chaotic and controversial Florida tour.
In early July 1955 Bill Haley and the Comets began their historic eight-week chart-topping run with “Rock Around the Clock.” In a year bookended by bland number 1 hits like the Chordettes’ “Mister Sandman” in January and Tennessee Ernie Ford’s standard “Sixteen Tons” in December, Haley’s single became an early rock and roll archetype and another clear signal of where popular music was headed. After a history-making year with Sam Phillips and Sun Studios, on July 11 Presley recorded his last Sun single, eventually his first number 1 on the country charts: “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” with “Mystery Train” on the flipside.
Elvis Presley in Orlando. Courtesy of Travis Norby.
At the end of July his manager Bob Neal announced that Presley would embark on his next Tom Parker package tour through Florida headlined by an up-and-coming comedian, Andy Gr
iffith. Years before Griffith enchanted the nation as Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, in 1953 his monologue comedy record, ‘What It Was, Was Football” sold 800,000 copies, led to an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, and established Griffith as a comedy star. Ads for the tour listed Presley as an “extra” and proclaimed his appearance “by popular demand.” In truth he still occupied the bottom of the bill below Ferlin Huskey, Marty Robbins, and a rockabilly singer and radio host out of Jacksonville, Glenn Reeves.
A year to the day after he recorded the breakthrough single “That’s All Right,” Presley purchased a new pink Cadillac Fleetwood Series 60 to replace the car that had burned. After some minimal days of downtime in Memphis, and that final Sun recording session, three weeks into July Elvis, Scotty, and Bill packed up the new car and headed off on the thousand-mile drive to sleepy Fort Myers, population 20,000.
During lengthy car trips through the South, the trio liked to keep up the chatter and play practical jokes to pass the time. To calm the adrenaline still pumping from a concert, on lengthy all-night drives Scotty Moore said they liked to tune in to a midnight jazz radio show out of New Orleans, Moonglow with Martin.
Wafting through the humid night air along endless two-lane roads or the occasional divided highway came the deep, calming voice of all-night disc jockey Dick Martin: “Hi to you big doc and you too baby doll … WWL radio, Loyola University of the south, broadcasting from our studios in the beautiful Roosevelt Hotel in downtown New Orleans.” Long before you could plug an iPod into a USB port or choose from an immense selection of offerings on satellite radio, as the night wore on there wasn’t much left on the airwaves except solitary voices like Martin’s. For that they hold a cherished place in the hearts of those who remember them.
Elvis Ignited Page 4