Elvis Ignited

by Kealing, Bob;

  Once the boys got back on tour and Presley continued his path to becoming the biggest star in the world, Moore struggled to stay above water financially. “I and other band members were not sharing in the wealth,” Moore said. To make the monthly child support payments manageable, he had to refinance his guitar and amplifier. The Miami shows were Moore’s chance to put all the heartache and embarrassment aside and indulge his passion for the guitar and entertaining.

  When the show was over, Moscato and the legion of exhausted and exhilarated young girls weren’t about to go home. They hoped to get an autograph from Presley, to touch him, or at least to get one more glimpse of the charismatic young singer. When Presley appeared at the stage door, hundreds of girls broke a police line in hopes of getting to him. “We went outside and the crowd was in a frenzy. They just pushed me down an alley. In those days we wore starched skirts and crinoline and it rained that day and I lost a shoe and all the mud was washed up my leg and the starch was running down it. I went home and my Mom had a hissy fit.” To make matters worse, there in the next day’s paper was a photograph of Moscato, the girl in the cat’s-eye glasses, right up front, going crazy for Elvis.

  At this stage in his career Presley still cherished the interaction he had with fans who had helped him get so far so quickly. “Lots of times if I’m in a crowd at the door, and the people who hired us are wanting the crowd to leave,” Presley told a reporter in 1956, “it makes me feel real bad because I can’t get to all of ’em.” But not this time; things were so frenetic, Juanico said, that Presley “held my hand in a death grip” as they ran from the stage door to a waiting car.

  The fans managed to tear away parts of his pink jacket and dark pin-striped pants. Black and white photos show Presley sitting in a chair in his underwear, with socks and white shoes on, cutting up his torn stage outfit. He gave a couple of remnants to a young saxophonist whom he’d met on a previous tour in Texarkana, Del Puschert, who was now a local dental school student and had gotten the gig backing Presley in Miami. Since Presley couldn’t get to all the fans to sign autographs or take pictures—there were far too many—he’d come up with a novel idea for giving them a way to remember him.

  From the safety of his hotel room, Presley started dropping the cut-up remnants of his stage outfit to fans below still holding vigil for him on Southeast Second Avenue. For those who caught and kept them, the ragged strips of fabric falling like gargantuan shards of volcanic ash remained keepsakes. Puschert forgot all about the unusual souvenirs until he found them in a trunk at his mother’s home in Hollywood, Florida. Decades later, in Puschert’s barber shop in Annapolis, Maryland, the remnants of Presley’s pants and jacket are his prized possessions, framed alongside photos of Presley wearing that outfit onstage and of Puschert shaking hands with the young king of rock and roll at the Olympia.

  Bob Graham, who went on to become one of Florida’s most important and respected statesmen, said Presley’s youthful exuberance evokes images of the Miami he called home as a kid; still a relatively quiet, friendly, and laid-back place. “It was hot in Miami, Elvis was hot,” Graham remembered. “Miami was a place that was pretty open to out of the mainstream entertainers. Elvis was certainly that.”

  Newspaper photographer Charles Trainor, a twenty-nine-year-old Korean War veteran, snapped myriad classic images from the Friday shows. Decades after it was shot, a Trainor image graced the cover of a Rolling Stone special issue on the greatest singers of all time: Presley as the epitome of cool, on the balls of his feet, guitar slung over his shoulder, wailing into an old-fashioned Shure microphone, with Bill Black and his stand-up bass flanking the star. Once again, an image of Presley in Florida at the end of his early days touring the South came to define what most still regard as the most iconic period of his career.

  After his Friday performances, Presley found fan love notes and phone numbers, many scrawled in lipstick, all over his new Lincoln, forcing him to trade it in for a new one the next day. Enterprising reporter Damon Runyon Jr. of the Miami News Herald cornered Juanico in the wings during one of the concerts. She told him she was one of Presley’s two steady girlfriends. “I don’t know if I’m No. 1 or No. 2 in his life—but I’m happy being one or the other,” Juanico gushed. “It would be nice if Elvis loved me as much as I love him, but right now he’s married to his career and he isn’t thinking of marriage. If Elvis doesn’t marry it’d be a sin to let something like that go to waste.”

  Now the secret about Presley’s girlfriend was out, and his prediction was spot-on: Parker was furious. Presley had just gotten back to his hotel room and was finally relaxing on the couch when there was a loud knock at the door. “In stormed the Colonel,” Juanico remembered. “Elvis jumped up from the sofa and went to his side.” Slapping the newspaper with the back of his hand, Parker thundered, “Son we can’t have this kind of publicity … make damn sure you do something about it.” To emphasize his last point, Parker glowered at Presley’s young love interest. Juanico saw, even at that stage in Presley’s career, Parker’s omnipresent influence—and was not a fan. “His relationship with his manager was more like that of a son with his father,” Juanico remembered. “I didn’t like Colonel Parker, but I respected Elvis’s feelings of loyalty.”

  Runyon had his scoop, and Presley and Parker went into spin control. “I’ve got about 25 girls I date regular,” Presley explained. “She’s just one of the girls.” That statement had to hurt, considering that Presley had just spent a romantic stretch of his time off with Juanico where the two met in Mississippi. Parker poured salt into her wounds. “They show up—sometimes eight at a time—in the hotel or theater lobby,” Parker told reporters. “All claiming they’re his steadies.”

  Runyon dug further, calling Juanico’s mother in Biloxi. “When he’s in Biloxi, he doesn’t go out with any other girl but her,” she said of Presley. “He said he can’t get married for at least three years and he asked her to wait for him.” Though she was only defending her daughter’s true standing with the young king of rock and roll, the fact that Juanico’s mother confirmed the seriousness of the relationship angered Presley, who yelled at her for the first time: “If only your mother hadn’t talked to that damn reporter! Call your mother June, tell her never to talk to anyone else.”

  His scoop on Juanico aside, Runyon saved his worst words for his review of Presley’s two-day stand, referring to Elvis as an “idol of the infantile.” Runyon found Presley’s stage antics vulgar and his effect on teens unwholesome, unwelcome, and threatening: “His pelvis performance is clearly contrived … slack-jawed gibberish, the glassy gape of a hypnotized hillbilly, the unmannered gesture of wiping the nose, the staggering and shaking as if he’d had a bad fit.”

  Letters to the editor reflected the same holier-than-thou attitude toward Presley’s act. “It was apparent the teen agers present had to force themselves to the hysterical peaks which they felt Elvis deserved,” wrote eighteen-year-old skeptic Bob Posnak. “There was hysteria, yes, but it was not an honest hysteria.”

  Columnist Herb Rau ratcheted up the venom for Presley and his young fans to a stunning degree given that many of them were his readers’ children: “Elvis can’t sing, can’t play the guitar and can’t dance. Yet two thousand idiots per show yelp every time he opens his mouth, plucks a guitar string or shakes his pelvis like any striptease babe in town.” The columnist wasn’t done; for the fourteen thousand fans who attended and enjoyed the show, Rau suggested a “gift.” In all caps and bold print he wrote: “A SOLID SLAP ACROSS THE MOUTH.”

  Rau could not see from across the developing generational divide what was at the root of all the hysteria for Presley fans like Linda Moscato and future Florida governor and United States senator Bob Graham. Presley cracked open the door to what awaited in the next decade when these children of the fifties became adults of the sixties: liberation, rebellion, exuberance, finally life on no one’s terms but their own. By that time, adults and critics were powerless to try to marginalize
rock and roll and youth culture. Elvis Presley was merely riding the first wave.

  Well into her seventies, Moscato sat in her central Florida living room surrounded by photos, souvenirs, and memories of Elvis at the Olympia Theater in Miami. “It was a totally unforgettable experience,” she reflected. “I’m thrilled to death I was a teen-ager and I got to see him at that time and got to be part of it … Elvis happening in Florida.”

  In Miami there was also a foreshadowing of what was to come when Presley received a script for his first film role, in The Reno Brothers. His excitement over what was originally supposed to be a non-singing character role was tempered when the film was later renamed Love Me Tender and called for Presley to sing the title number. There, in the midst of Presleymania, was the beginning of Parker’s plan to transform Presley from cool and controversial rock and roller into a crooning matinee idol. To be sure, his young star was on board; ready to conquer Hollywood and even bigger paydays.

  After the seventh and final Olympia show, a crowd of screaming girls surrounded the Miami taxicab bringing Presley back to the Robert Clay Hotel. Patrolman Al Doncetelli helped clear the mass of youngsters. After the motorcade was finally able to pull away from the theater, Doncetelli hit a strip of gravel at Southeast Second Avenue and Third Street, causing the motorcycle to overturn. Doncetelli went flying off the cycle and had to be transported to Jackson Memorial Hospital with back injuries.

  More girls stood outside the hotel for a last look at their idol’s departure for the next tour stop. Even late at night, after an exhausting seven shows in the prior forty-eight hours, Presley still had to be surrounded by policemen to get to his new Lincoln parked outside. For the rest of the tour this was the new norm; constant hysteria everywhere Presley went, with very little downtime. For Presley, Juanico, and the rest of the traveling party, a long nighttime drive to Tampa lay ahead, as did big crowds and more critical press.

  12

  Home Away from Home

  August 5, Tampa

  Presley and Juanico pulled out of Miami late on the night of August 4, bound for the next tour stop in Tampa. With all the friends and band members, there were now a pair of cars in Presley’s touring party. These all-night drives were nothing new, but in 1956, the Tamiami Trail across the heart of the Everglades, teeming with alligators and home of the North American crocodile and Florida panther, was especially desolate. Streaking along the two-lane road under a blanket of stars in the infinite night sky, the group was traversing the middle of nowhere. If they had a breakdown, Presley joked with his girlfriend, they’d be eaten alive by snakes and alligators.

  The conversation turned to the long lecture Presley had gotten from Parker about Juanico. Always a prankster, Presley even put an unlit cigar in his mouth and started to imitate him: “She’s not good for you son. You can’t be linked to any one girl,” said Presley in his best Parker bombast. “Don’t get any ideas about marriage either. And for God’s sake don’t get her pregnant.” Parker need not have worried on that front; while sexual tension between the two was rising with the South Florida heat and humidity, Juanico insisted they were not having sex.

  “And what do you think Elvis, or does it matter?” said a perturbed Juanico, offering to leave the tour right then and there. “Stop the damn car and you won’t have to worry about the Colonel or the fans.” Presley apologized, insisting he was not worried about his manager or his fans, but June knew better.

  Halfway down the Tamiami Trail, still in the middle of the Florida back country, the neon lights of an all-night restaurant beckoned; an oasis for bleary-eyed truckers or an American rock and roll icon hoping to grab a late-night bite. As fame began to envelop him during the day, Presley became increasingly nocturnal. At night he could also spend some time with his girlfriend without the press being able to pick up on it so easily. By that time, as Presley’s bodyguard and driver Red West put it, “He was a prisoner of his own career.” Perhaps to Presley’s disappointment, perhaps to his relief, the restaurant jukebox had none of his records in it, and the waitress had no idea who he was. Looking at the expensive cars in which they drove up, she asked: “What’d you kids do, rob a bank?”

  “Yes ma’am,” said Presley with a convincing straight face. “But we’d appreciate it if you waited at least an hour before you call the sheriff.” The young adults feasted on salad and fried chicken that Presley declared second best in the world, second only to his mother’s. He winked at the waitress, who patted his shoulder: “That aint the only thing she did good.” After all, the flirty waitress was working for tips, and Presley gave her a good one. Fueled for the rest of the south-to-north drive up Florida’s west coast, Presley’s tour pulled into Tampa before daylight.

  On Sunday, August 5, he returned to the only venue at which he appeared during each of his four 1955–56 Florida tours, Tampa’s Homer Hesterly Armory. Unlike the rude treatment he had received from Miami writers, on the west side at least one female bay area journalist took the time to get to know something about Presley in person, and she came away with a far more balanced take. Twenty-year-old St. Petersburg Times writer Anne Rowe holed up with Presley in his stifling dressing area before the show. Presley’s “reputation,” she wrote, “had given this reporter reason ‘to proceed with caution’ in his presence.” She was quickly disarmed when “the king of rock ’n’ roll” picked up a broom and started sweeping out his dressing room.

  Missing from Rowe’s account is the way Presley turned on a good measure of his public persona to win her over. What starts as a typical interview evolves into another Presley seduction session: he holds Rowe’s face in both hands, shows her his tongue, and embraces and kisses her. Then Presley defuses it all with humor; Rowe smiles as Presley turns his back on her.

  “One minute he’s out on the make,” wrote Ger Rijff and Jan Van Gestel in their book Elvis the Cool King, “the next he’s stepping outside and starts playing with some toddlers.”

  The young man who had by now appeared repeatedly on national television, and who had several number 1 hits and a number 1 album, nervously swept the dressing room of cigarette butts, then crooned a little “Don’t Be Cruel” into the broom handle. He posed for pictures, answered questions, and to reporters like Rowe came across “like a real regular guy” during the hour he spent with them.

  Presley picked up his leather-bound guitar and started singing “Don’t be Cruel” again, calling it his favorite song because “it has the most meaning.” He had another reason to be upbeat; his vocalist friends the Jordanaires were in town to perform and joined him backstage.

  As was custom in the singer’s harried, circuslike life on the road, Presley now held an impromptu press conference. Snacking on coffee and ice cream, he took questions from a WALT-AM 1110 radio reporter. Initially the WALT station managers tried to avoid playing rock and roll. But spearheaded by the popularity of Presley’s music, it changed format and rocketed to number 1 in the ratings as Tampa’s first top-forty station.

  Unlike some of the mindless questions and pat answers common in most of Presley’s early interviews, his answers here had more depth and covered a wider range of issues. He admitted being embarrassed by having had to sing dressed in a tuxedo to an actual hound dog on the Steve Allen Show. “All I thought about that suit, was gettin’ out of it,” he joked. Asked what he would do if his popularity and rock and roll were a passing fad, Presley said: “I’ll probably sit back and think about what I once had, with no regrets.” It’s a statement filled with irony, considering what became of Presley later in his life and career.

  He was hopeful his upcoming foray into acting would be a success but promised, “I won’t give up singing for acting.” In later years that statement proved to be true; but Presley did sing what many early fans felt were inferior songs in bland films. He also cut off his electrifying performances, making tours like this one all the more special to those lucky enough to see him live.

  Not fully aware of all the cruel things said about
him in Miami, Presley also addressed his critics: “Those people have a job to do just like me. I think when you’re in this business you’ve got to expect that sort of treatment.” Presley acknowledged that his music and performances weren’t for everyone, but they were clearly a formula for his growing success: “Some people wouldn’t pay a nickel to see me. But as long as my records keep selling and these folks keep turning out to hear me sing, I’m happy.”

  While Presley accommodated the press, local Tampa emcee Frankie Connors warmed up the crowd with a couple of corny Irish ballads. Then the Jordanaires took the stage, followed by a magician named Phil Maraquin. This oddball hodgepodge of warm-up acts had to be interminable for most fans, already worked up for the main attraction. After an hour with Rowe, who was now completely disarmed by the young performer, there was a knock on the door; time for Presley to go on.

  Fans shrieked during his still brief twenty-minute headlining concert. “Elvis displayed his terrific showmanship,” Rowe recounted. “Now Presley was in his glory. He rocked ’n rolled his way through seven numbers, laughing, winking and wriggling in the well-known Presley manner. While his fans yelled, cried, pulled their hair, held their ears, jumped, clapped and laughed.”

  The stage consisted of a series of oversized, unstable wooden boxes, the sound system nothing more than a couple of microphones and a pair of fifty-watt amplifiers. At the matinee show there was no spotlight or lighting at all; just Presley out front in a packed auditorium, with Bill Black sweating, hooting, and hollering, Moore coolly plucking out the lead licks, and Fontana keeping the beat. The performance was vintage, raw Presley, almost unimaginable given the Vegas-style glitz and showmanship of his later years.

  Though Presley put on in Tampa a mirror-image performance of the same live show he had given in Miami, critical interpretation could not have been more different. Rowe, who went on to have a long and distinguished career at her newspaper, saw that Presley’s act, like his mock seduction backstage, was all in good fun. Herb Rau in Miami, in contrast, had encouraged parents to slap the Presleymania right off the faces of their own children. No matter what Presley said to try to explain his motives and put them in perspective, the worst was yet to come. A pair of male writers for the Tampa Tribune gave Presley the Miami treatment: “America’s only male hootchy-kootch dancer gave 10,000 kids the screaming heebi-jeebies in Tampa,” wrote Paul Wilder and Harry Roberts.