Elvis Ignited

by Kealing, Bob;

  Elvis and the boys pulled into Pensacola on February 26, 1956, after the long-haul drive from Shreveport. For each of the day’s three concerts at 2:00, 5:00, and 8:00 p.m., adults paid $1.25 and kids 50 cents. A photograph taken that evening showed how sparse the set-up still was: Presley stands center stage wearing a light-colored jacket, Bill Black is on his left on the stand-up bass, Scotty Moore flanks his right, and D. J. Fontana is directly behind with a small drum kit. The auditorium, constructed at the end of a manmade peninsula at 900 South Palafox Street, was only a year old when Presley and his band made their first and only appearances there. It stood for fifty years until a direct hit from Hurricane Ivan in 2004 rendered the building too badly damaged to be saved.

  Presley on stage with Scotty Moore, Florida, 1956. Courtesy of Linda Moscato.

  The Pensacola concerts marked the end of another historic and intense run in and around Florida for Elvis, Scotty, Bill, and D.J.: nineteen shows in seven days covering three states, driving more than two thousand miles. After run-ins Ira Louvin had with Parker and Presley during the tour, this show also marked the last time the Louvin brothers opened for Presley. The fact that Presley was playing several of these cities for the first time could help explain why the reception for him in places like West Palm Beach, Sarasota, and Pensacola was more muted.

  Everything changed in March when Tommy Durden and Mae Axton’s song “Heartbreak Hotel,” the single Sam Phillips and Glenn Reeves scorned, started its slow march to the top of the charts. By March 7 Billboard reported it had sold 300,000 copies. By the end of March, “Heartbreak Hotel” broke into the top ten at number 9. On May 5 Presley had his first nationwide number 1 smash, and it remained in that spot until late June. The song’s success, followed by highly rated, controversial, and at times humiliating national television appearances that summer opened the floodgates. Only Beatlemania in 1964 would be comparable to the Presley phenomenon of 1956.

  “‘Heartbreak Hotel’ zoomed Elvis’ star to the high heavens nationally,” wrote Mae Axton, the woman who had practically held Presley’s hand through his first Florida tour a year earlier. In March Presley bought his parents a new house on Audubon Street in the Memphis suburbs. Knowing he had taken his parents out of the projects and looming poverty and into a home with its very own swimming pool had to give the young performer immense satisfaction. That same month Presley’s first full-length LP was released, featuring Red Robertson’s cover shot of Presley taken in Tampa on July 31, 1955.

  The last vestiges of Presley’s early days ended when his Memphis-based manager Bob Neal quietly stepped out of the picture for good, leaving Tom Parker with the complete control he coveted. Given all he had done to move Presley to a bigger label, a national audience, and a rich man’s income, Parker deserved it. Presley’s next Florida tour in the stormy, sweltering summer of 1956 reflected everything Parker had done to bring him fame and fortune; by then, Elvis Presley was on fire.

  IV

  PRESLEYMANIA

  August 1956

  11

  A Tsunami Storms Ashore

  August 3–4, Miami

  The full-on, white-hot onset of Presleymania began in Florida in August 1956, more than a month before Presley’s first Ed Sullivan Show appearance. In June and July he appeared on national television on Milton Berle’s show and the Steve Allen Show. Berle made fun of Presley’s music, to be sure, but it was Allen who took it to an unnecessary extreme by having Presley dress in formal attire and sing his new hit “Hound Dog” to an actual Bassett Hound.

  Presley’s good nature throughout a humiliating appearance paid big dividends when his next single, “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” became another number 1 Billboard smash. His debut album became the first of the rock and roll genre to top the Billboard charts, spending ten weeks at number 1. In the summer of 1956 Elvis Presley was a bona fide national phenomenon.

  “Who wasn’t aware of Elvis in 1956?” asked Florida’s former governor Bob Graham, a freshman at the University of Florida that year. “Just being alive, breathing, walking around, you were familiar with Elvis, he was kind of a pervasive cultural figure.”

  The timing could not have been better. In 1956 there were 13 million teenagers in America with spending power of $7 billion; a massive legion of young people with the money to go to concerts and buy records and record players as never before. That year Tom Parker arranged for more than fifty licenses of Presley merchandise, eventually raking in an estimated $40 million in retail sales. Some 80 percent of the dolls, charm bracelets, diaries, and miniature pink Cadillacs were marketed to teen girls. Elvis Presley memorabilia was big business.

  The rising star spent much of July vacationing in the small Gulf of Mexico resort town of Biloxi, Mississippi, with his girlfriend June Juanico (pronounced “juan-ee-coh”), the beautiful brunette who had caught his eye when he performed at a military base there the year before. As an indication of Presley’s growing love, his parents traveled to Biloxi to meet Juanico’s divorced mother. Photographs taken during the trip showing a shirtless Presley, his hair mussed, making him look like a typical American youngster of the era. In home movies his parents join the young couple and a group of other friends on an offshore fishing trip.

  Presley had an underlying motive for bringing his parents along on his summer vacation. After much cajoling from him and assurances from Gladys Presley that her son was a good boy, June’s mother gave permission for her daughter to go on the road with Presley during his upcoming Florida tour, with the caveat that she be accompanied by one of her girlfriends. Knowing this would not go over well with his domineering manager Tom Parker, Presley wanted to try to keep Juanico’s presence on the tour a secret. Given the amount of attention Presley was getting in the national press thanks to his breakout hit records and television appearances, that notion was impossible.

  “He’s already told me about seeing too much of you,” Presley told Juanico in a moment of total candor. “He’ll shit a brick if he sees you in Florida.” Nonetheless, the two went on with their clandestine plan, foolish though it may have been to think they could keep any aspects of his dating life a secret now that Presley was the hottest act in American music.

  Throughout the most historic phase of Presley’s time in Florida, the brash, intelligent, and observant Juanico was along to provide an intimate account of Presley’s life in the eye of a hurricane. He was still years away from finding the girl he would eventually marry, Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he met while serving in the army in Germany, well out of the clutches of Parker, who remained stateside. Had it not been for Parker’s overbearing control at this stage of Presley’s career, Juanico might have had a chance to be The One.

  “I’m the first one to say there would have been no Elvis without Colonel Parker,” said producer Steve Binder, who clashed with Parker repeatedly during the making of Presley’s 1968 comeback special. He watched Parker’s attempts at total control of his client, personally and professionally. “Bully is a good word,” said Binder. “They’re going to push as hard as they can until someone says no. It was amazing to me the whole hierarchy of show business bowed to his demands.”

  Presley’s fourth Florida tour in fifteen months called for the most grueling and profitable stretch yet, barnstorming the peninsula south to north: seven cities, nine days, twenty-five shows, 63,000 fans, and a gross conservatively estimated at $100,000. It was all big cities and swank theaters, starting with his first-ever live shows in Miami, Florida’s closest thing to the big time.

  “Miami bustles under a golden sun as warm as a woman’s embrace,” wrote Jack Kofoed in Moon Over Miami. “The sun shines on jockies in multicolored silks booting thoroughbreds down the homestretch at Hialeah; on golfers, water skiers, and vacationers; on high-busted slim-legged girls in postage stamp bathing suits lolling along its beaches.” When the moon came up, a constellation of talent shone: Nat King Cole, Jackie Gleason, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sinatra held court in grand rooms like the Fontaineblea
u’s La Ronde on Miami Beach or Pompeii in the Eden Roc.

  The cool, debonair Sinatra, who had drawn strong reactions from young girls when he debuted a generation earlier, made no attempt to hide his vitriol for rock and roll and its new crown prince. “His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac,” opined Sinatra of Presley and his music. “It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.”

  “Sinatra was on the way out and this was a giant threat to him,” said Linda Moscato, a South Florida teen at the time Presley came to town. Hers was a world of classical music and a staid, regimented life dominated and directed by her parents. That is, until she listened to “Heartbreak Hotel” at a downtown Miami department store. It was a turning point in her life, and Moscato’s parents didn’t like what they saw or heard.

  Linda Moscato, pictured circa 1956, saw Elvis Presley at the Olympia Theater. Courtesy of Linda Moscato.

  “Elvis was a breaking out,” said Moscato, her voice taking on the vibrancy of that time. “It was like a new world and everything opened up like a flower from a bud, to a full flower. We woke up as people and individuals.” Before, there was not a lot to look forward to, but now Presley was coming on like a shimmering streamliner pulling into the Florida East Coast station. When they heard Presley was booked for seven shows at the Olympia Theater, Moscato and her teenage friends were determined to go.

  Miami columnist Herb Rau shared the growing contempt adults felt for the new phenomenon. “Every delinquent kid in town—plus many who aren’t delinquents but are fascinated by a duck-tailed hairdo playing the guitar and squirming his hips—will be on hand Friday and Saturday.”

  Florida State Theaters, Rau reported, hired a dozen policemen and even a few firemen to guard Presley during his Miami run, “to prevent the kind of disorders and near riots that characterized Presley’s personal appearances elsewhere.” Tom Parker, ever cognizant of fanning the flames of controversy, said he turned down an invitation for Presley to stay at the ritzy Fontainebleau, for fear of the damage his adoring fans might cause.

  “The Pelvis is due to arrive in Miami Friday morning,” Rau sniped, “unless he’s arrested again for speeding.” What Rau and other columnists could not deny was the money Presley raked in. “We’ve had the biggest advance sale of tickets for anything we’ve staged here,” Rau quoted the head of Florida State Theaters. Thirty percent of those sales went to adult women.

  “Don’t expect him for a rehearsal,” boasted Parker to theater management. “He just doesn’t need a rehearsal. He’ll go on stage and kill ’em.”

  The Olympia Theater, Miami, circa 1926. Photo by W. A. Fishbaugh, State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/30144.

  Elvis Presley on stage at the Olympia Theater. Reprinted by permission of Charles Trainor Jr.

  The Olympia provided as ornate a venue as South Florida had to offer. Built in 1926 as a grand silent movie palace in the Vaudeville era, the Olympia featured Moorish architecture and a simulated night sky that provided a dramatic, dreamlike setting. Said to be South Florida’s first air-conditioned building, the Olympia provided welcome luxury for Presley’s fans who would spend hours in the heat and humidity.

  “He’ll never last,” said Linda Moscato’s mother, dismissing the Presley phenomenon. Despite reservations about allowing her daughter to be part of such a raucous atmosphere, she gave her permission for Linda to attend the concert, with one admonition. “Just don’t end up in the newspaper,” she warned.

  On August 3 fans starting lining up outside the Olympia at 4:00 a.m., almost a full twelve hours before Presley’s first matinee performance. Black and white photos show young girls looking as though they’re headed to church or a special dance: hair done, and some wearing pearls and white gloves. Photo captions also referred to Presley dismissively as “the Pelvis.” One girl had cut short her New Orleans vacation to see Presley. There she stood with a tissue-wrapped box containing a stuffed rabbit and money as presents for Presley.

  Jim Ponce, the West Palm Beach hotel manager who tried unsuccessfully to buy Presley a beer during his February appearance at the Palms Theater, was also in attendance at the Olympia. Ponce’s boss asked, “For one hell of a favor, would you drive my son down to Miami to see Elvis Presley?” If nothing else, Ponce would score some brownie points with the boss and see for himself what all the fuss was about.

  The crush of fans outside the Olympia Theater. Reprinted by permission of Charles Trainor Jr.

  Also at the Olympia during Presley’s historic run was the studious South Florida teen Bob Graham, who had an inkling of the history he and others were about to witness. “It was an exciting night,” he recalled more than two generations later. “People were aware they were going to be entertained by somebody who was special. I don’t think we appreciated how iconic he was going to be.”

  On his manager’s orders Presley arrived a day early, navigating his new lavender Lincoln Premiere down US 1. The day of his first show, as usual he hadn’t left much time between arriving at the venue and his 3:30 matinee. By the time the doors had opened, the line of teens zigzagged well down the block, cooking in Florida’s August sun. Unlike most of Presley’s previous Florida shows, all the concerts on this tour were treated like the historic events they became: reporters, photographers, and columnists documented nearly every moment of Presleymania. Miami News writer Bella Kelly managed to get into Presley’s suite at the Robert Clay Hotel. As he prepared to take a morning nap before a long day of performing before thousands of screaming teens, Presley was asked if he ever really wore blue suede shoes.

  “I don’t wear ’em cause there’s too many people wantin’ to stomp all over ’em when I do,” Presley declared while reading comics in the morning newspaper. “Except for his gold and brown sideburns,” Kelly wrote, “Presley was dressed all in black—like the clerk he sings about in his ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ record.” Presley said these days he preferred black, having “got sick” of the color pink. Nonetheless he performed his first Miami show in a pink jacket.

  Backstage a circle of five people chosen by the Miami Herald, two adult journalists and three students, the youngest just twelve, were charged with trying to analyze what made the country’s rock and roll phenomenon tick. Judging from the way fans were screaming and shrieking, they knew the young king was arriving. Before an exhausting schedule of three concerts that first day, Presley had to face more inquiring minds and more questions right up until show time.

  “He knew he was being heckled when he was asked questions of politics, art, current events and classical music,” noted one young female interviewer. “He dropped his gaze like a boy in school who hadn’t studied and tried to give some answer.” That led another student interviewer, Luther Voltz Jr., to conclude, “Golly Presley doesn’t know anything about the news…. I just thought he was kind of dumb.” Presley’s knowledge of culture and current events was the last thing on the minds of the throng of teenagers waiting for him to perform.

  The Olympia’s luxurious environs amped up the anticipation: “Velvet curtains and marble fountains, not really a place you would expect to see Elvis,” Linda Moscato remembered. “But it did add an extra element of drama.” A half hour after the show was set to begin, fresh from his current events quiz, Presley staggered onto the stage “like a drunken Brando,” one reporter noted. Just the sight of Presley in his pink jacket, open-collar shirt, black pants, and white shoes brought a crescendo of roaring adulation from the crowd. Jim Ponce was flabbergasted: “Believe me, I wasn’t ready for those kids running up and down the aisles screaming and carrying on. It was quite a revelation to see what was happening.”

  Juanico stood watching in the wings, also not prepared for the hysteria she was witnessing. Just a year previously when she met Presley at a club show he performed in her hometown, the level of interest had been nothing like this. “I knew the effect he had on me,” she recalled. “But seeing so many gir
ls go completely wild was a little frightening.” When she retreated to Presley’s dressing room, the door was locked. From the sounds inside, it soon became clear that Presley’s driver and bodyguard Red West was having sex with one of Presley’s titillated fans.

  Moscato, in her Sunday-best dress, shoes, and cat’s-eye glasses, was in the middle of the screaming crowd right up close to the stage: “It’s imprinted on my mind,” she said. “The crowd was wild, absolutely wild, everybody was screaming so much you could hardly hear what he was singing.” Presley and his bandmates were having a blast; enjoying the rocketship ride to who knew where. Bill Black slapped and twirled his stand-up bass, hooting and hollering back at the crowd. Presley shimmered, jumping, singing, shouting. “His legs were like rubber on stage,” said Moscato. Like a “male burlesque star,” Presley stood on his toes and shook. Now a seasoned performer, he advanced on the crowd to within a seductive few inches, then withdrew smiling. Within moments of his setting foot on the Olympia’s stage, Presley’s image would be emblazoned in the minds of concertgoers for the rest of their lives.

  For Scotty Moore, the Miami show ended weeks of humiliation and restless waiting to get on the road and make some money. While Presley vacationed in July, per their agreement Parker cut Moore’s salary in half, from $200 a week to $100. His ex-wife Mary “had seen me on television and convinced herself that anyone touring with Elvis Presley and appearing on network television certainly had the money to pay his child support.” While Presley took time off, deputies came to Moore’s Memphis home, arrested the veteran navy man, and booked him into jail on charges of being $240 delinquent on child support.