They noted that even “ordinary suburban-type housewives” got all caught up in the “pounding, jerking rhythm” of Presley’s newest single, “Hound Dog.” The writers noted that “the weird pulsating rock and roll song” sold more than a million copies in just two weeks, making it RCA’s fastest selling record of all time. Presley’s embarrassing appearance with Steve Allen fueled the song’s rise, proving that the joke was not on Presley after all.
The Tribune writers compared Presley to a panther that crept across the stage, “with a masculine version of Marilyn Monroe wriggle in every jerking step, and blasted his feminine, heart wailing voice into every cranny of the huge armory.” Calling Presley’s voice feminine is ludicrous, and by this point the Wilder and Roberts article has morphed into an editorial. They praised Presley for being patient with reporters’ questions, which they called “stupid.” Chauvinist and unnecessarily judgmental articles like this one became common in Presley’s career. When writers put away their opinions and simply observed what was going on around them, their observations were compelling: “A mad rush of hundreds of mesmerized teenagers became a shouting, pushing, pulling, tugging mess of young humanity as the gates finally opened to the armory,” wrote Wilder and Roberts. “At least three persons fainted at two electrifying Rock ’n’ Roll performances.”
They noted three Chicago housewives who had left their husbands at home to care for a dozen children while the women saw the show and begged for Presley’s autograph. Another housewife, Mary Rubio, had her two children with her: three-year-old Terry Lee and two-year-old Michelle Denise. Reporters noted that she was “attractive” and wearing a low-cut black dress “that drew stares wherever she went.” But Rubio claimed she was only there because her toddlers listened to Presley on the radio every afternoon. “I can take him or leave him,” she nonplussed the reporters.
A dark-haired young man sporting a ducktail haircut was mobbed by girls who mistook him for Presley. Meanwhile Tom Parker seemed to be everywhere at once. He had convinced his friends from the Sertoma club, forty men who had volunteered their services, to act as bodyguards for both Presley and his newest Lincoln to make sure the girls didn’t get to either. One of the volunteers, Dr. West Magnon, helped with ushering duties while his five-year-old twins sat eating peanuts, oblivious to the goings-on around them.
A few girls skinned their knees crawling on the concrete floor to get to the front of the stage with cameras. The flashbulbs bathed Presley in a kind of stop-action strobe light. When each of the two shows was over, those who didn’t manage to get an up-close view or photo, didn’t get a wink or an autograph from their idol, were crushed. As Wilder and Roberts described it in their review, when “a dozen jumping, frenzied teenagers discovered they had missed out on getting a close look at their atomic-powered idol, they left the auditorium weeping, crying real tears.”
Policeman Manny DeCastro kept “the negro section” roped off. This is the only mention to date of black fans at any of Elvis Presley’s Florida shows; his music was fueled by the unique blending of his appeal as a handsome, magnetic young performer with the magic that came from the unbridled rhythm and blues borrowed from African American songs. Few if any fans in Presley’s audience knew that Big Mama Thornton originated “Hound Dog”; perhaps a fair number had heard Little Richard’s original version of “Tutti Frutti.” The rigid southern divide between black and white was everywhere, including at Presley’s concerts and in the words of those covering them.
Wilder and Roberts noted, “Only twelve negroes attended.” None was mentioned by name, and there was no description of what they were wearing or if any of them brought children. Apparently the reporters didn’t take time to find out Presley’s effect on his African American fans. It would have been interesting to know whether any of them was cognizant of how heavily Presley and his act drew on music from black culture. Five years later, in November 1961, Martin Luther King brought to this same venue a stirring call for integration. The history doesn’t stop there.
President John F. Kennedy spoke at the Art Deco–inspired armory on Howard Avenue in West Tampa four days before his assassination. The depot has been host to memorable musical performances by Buddy Holly, James Brown, the Doors, even Pink Floyd.
When I stopped there many decades after Presley’s historic appearances, the venue most important to Presley history in Florida looked imprisoned; vacant and largely forgotten, it was surrounded by a fence topped with barbed wire. A concrete barrier blocked off the chain-locked front doorway; empty beer cans in small paper bags and a strong stench of urine made it even less appealing to linger there. Peering inside the empty hall, it was easy to visualize the stage and the rising young star when Red Robertson took his world-famous photo in 1955 and where Tom Parker kicked off his own concert promotion career.
Outside, a matching bank of garage doors beyond a “No Trespassing” sign marked where Presley parked his Lincoln in August of ’56, showing off the engine to a group of young men, having his picture taken with children, and as always, flirting with as many starstruck girls as he could. All these years later there were plans for what it might look like if renovated, and they rendered it nearly unrecognizable. Seeing and smelling nothing but neglect, I found the place stood out as one of the few disappointments in this journey of discovery and remembrance.
In May 2015 the building finally received a new lease on life and a new name: the Bryan Glazer Family Jewish Community Center to honor the co-chairman of the Tampa Bay Bucs pro football team, who pledged $4 million to the renovation. Alongside plans for a vibrant new center, the city of Tampa signed a ten-year lease to locate a new city art studio within the 100,000-square-foot confines. As the city of Tampa creates a new opportunity to reacquaint itself with the old armory, and once the dust settles, we can assess how history has been integrated within the renovation. How has the old been recast within the new? Can future generations learn about, walk, and rock with the still-palpable spirit of young Elvis, who made so much history here?
In August 1956 more sold-out shows and controversy awaited the young rock and roll sensation in Lakeland. Once he found out the incendiary things critics like Herb Rau had been saying about him, Presley’s patience with the press ran out. In Lakeland he dropped the polite country boy persona and struck back.
13
They’re Somebody’s Kids
August 6, Lakeland
Lakeland Ledger reporter Elvalee Donaldson perched herself on the back steps of the Polk Theater with a heavy camera, roasting for two hours in the sun just to snap a photo of Elvis Presley’s arrival. It was after 3:00 p.m. and his first of three shows was due to start in a half hour. “Finally, Elvis and his entourage drove up in a pink Cadillac. They brushed right by me and into the theater,” she recounted. In a later story she said he arrived in a Lincoln.
“Honey, you’ll have to come inside if you want to talk to me,” Presley said dismissively. Put out and angry, Donaldson did just that.
“I’m a reporter for the Lakeland Ledger and I’ve been waiting two hours for you to show up,” the headstrong young reporter announced.
“Oh,” Presley said with a frown. “I just thought you were some little girl waiting for me.” He apologized repeatedly, explaining that his managers always encouraged him “to hurry inside as fast as I can.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “Shoot.”
Presley paused on the theater staircase and Donaldson snapped a candid photo of him making his way up to a small dressing room. “His girlfriend of the moment, 18-year-old June Juanico, glared at me and ran up the stairs behind Elvis,” Donaldson recalled. The Ledger’s young reporter had been assigned to write a story every day for seven days in advance of the star’s arrival. Her output is some of the most interesting and incisive commentary on Presley’s time in Florida.
Reporter Elvalee Donaldson, who covered Presley’s Lakeland performances. Courtesy of Pegler Swift.
In one story Donaldson marveled at Presley’s
car collection: “four Cadillacs, a three-wheeled Messerschmitt sports car, and a motorcycle.” She also managed some endearing quotes from Gladys Presley recalling the days when nine-year-old Elvis asked her to let him drive. “We were parked facing a store and Elvis mistook forward for reverse and dropped the clutch. The car shot right up onto the curb and I thought we were going on through the store window,” Presley’s mother remembered. “But Elvis kept his head and stopped it. He insisted on backing it into the street also.”
Mrs. Presley said her son was always picking up things for them while he was out on tour. “His latest is lamps,” she confided. “He’s bought me so many lamps that I have to put some of them away and take turns using them. If ever there was a boy who cares about his home, it’s Elvis.”
Elvis Presley’s autograph to Elvalee Donaldson. Courtesy of Pegler Swift.
In city after city, whether because they were smitten by him or because Presley was more willing to let his guard down, women who covered Elvis on his early Florida tours consistently filed more in-depth, detailed stories about him than did their male counterparts. Thanks to the work of journalists like Jean Yothers in Orlando, Anne Rowe in Tampa, promoter Mae Axton in Jacksonville, and Elvalee Donaldson in Lakeland, a more rounded version of Presley’s early years emerges. Some made critical comments, but they were never harsh or obviously condescending.
Donaldson, Yothers, and Rowe had long, significant careers in journalism. Rowe led the transformation of the women’s pages at what is now the Tampa Bay Times. Previously the ladies’ section focused primarily on society, club, and bridal news, and the so-called four fs: fashion, food, family, and furnishings. Rowe spearheaded the transition of women’s pages to broader-appeal feature sections; what was revolutionary in the late 1960s is commonplace today in newspapers nationwide.
Elvis Presley just after his arrival at the Polk Theater in Lakeland. Courtesy of Elvalee (Donaldson) Swift via Pegler Swift.
Elvis Presley’s dressing room at the Polk Theater. Courtesy of Mike Robinson.
To be sure, even at his young age, Presley was adept at courting and manipulating female reporters. He had to reassure one young woman in Tampa who was shaking as she tried to interview him, putting his arm on her shoulder. Others got dramatic stares and kisses. The way he caressed and came on to them would be out of the question today, or at least roundly criticized, in a professional interview.
Tampa Tribune reporter Paul Wilder, who co-wrote the hyperbolelaced review of Presley’s final shows at the Hesterly Armory, caught up with him again backstage at the Polk Theater. Wilder audio-recorded the session for TV Guide magazine. In a dry, just-the-facts voice that evokes Jack Webb’s Detective Joe Friday from Dragnet, Wilder made his feelings apparent by reading to Presley in its entirety what Miami columnist Herb Rau had written.
In retrospect, it’s a good thing Wilder went right for the jugular. The usually reserved and quiet Presley was now aware of Rau and angry, more than willing to drop his normal country boy reserve. “He aint nothin’ but an idiot or he wouldn’t sit up there and write all that stuff,” Presley seethed. “He just hates to admit that he’s too old to have any more fun.” Presley wasn’t finished; as Wilder continued his line-by-line dissection of the Rau column with the agitated young singer, Wilder asked, “Do you shake your pelvis like any striptease babe in town?”
“He should know,” Presley fired back, speaking of Rau. “I guess that’s where he hangs around.” Presley saves his most serious contempt for Rau’s assessment that all the young fans who’d come to see him in Miami were “idiots.”
“I just don’t see that he should call those people idiots, because they’re somebody’s kids,” Presley protested. “They’re somebody’s decent kids, probably raised in a decent home, and he hasn’t got any right to call those kids idiots. If they want to pay their money to come out and jump around and scream and yell, it’s their business … while they’re young let them have their fun.”
This was still a conservative time in American history, when married television characters weren’t allowed to be shown sharing a bed, communist paranoia was everywhere, and Presley’s gyrations were generally considered far beyond what was acceptable for public viewing. “My pelvis had nothin’ to do with what I do,” Presley explained. “I just get kinda rhythm with the music. I jump around to it because I enjoy what I’m doin’. I’m not trying to be vulgar; I’m not trying to sell any sex. I’m not tryin’ to look vulgar and nasty.” To say he was not trying to sell sex is disingenuous. Presley exploited his sex appeal with overheated young fans and smitten female reporters on every tour stop.
To some in authority, Presley exceeded vulgarity. In his declassified FBI file are letters written by people in law enforcement and the clergy to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself, clearly trying to ingratiate themselves with one of the most powerful men in America and at the same time expressing alarmist worry about the effect Presley was having on America’s youth.
“There is also gossip of the Presley fan clubs that degenerate into sex orgies,” wrote one pastor from La Crosse, Wisconsin. “I would judge that he may possibly be both a drug addict and a sexual pervert.”
From Louisville, Kentucky, Colonel Carl E. Heustis wrote to Hoover of his concern that Presley and Bill Haley and his band the Comets, “rivals for the attention of quote rock and roll fans unquote,” were booked on the same date in his jurisdiction. Such simultaneous appearances in other cities had caused riots and “many thousands of dollars in property damage.” A man used to receiving speculative, the-sky-is-falling letters, Hoover replied: “The bureau has no specific information regarding these disturbances.”
In August 1956 an anonymous postcard mailed from Niagara Falls, New York, and addressed to “Elvis Presley, Memphis Tennessee” threatened: “If you don’t stop … we’re going to kill you.” The FBI wrote it off as a “crank” message, but Presley took these threats seriously. Later in his career, after his fame and the unsavory elements it attracted increased exponentially, Presley often worried about being assassinated onstage.
During this final Florida stretch of Presley’s early career, another threat loomed just a few more tour stops away: the very real possibility that he could end up in jail.
There were no such threats waiting in Lakeland, just a wave of Presleymania sweeping the town. Luminaries like Babe Ruth, Greta Garbo, and Booker T. Washington had visited Lakeland in prior decades, but nothing compared to the town’s anticipation of Presley’s three shows at the Polk Theater. The Lakeland Ledger dedicated a small army of a half-dozen reporters to examine every aspect of the phenomenon.
Elvalee Donaldson was spot on in deflating the establishment’s fears of Presley. “He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, and nightclubs bore him. He is devoted to his parents and bought them a $40,000 air-conditioned ranch home,” she explained, “with a swimming pool.”
Presley liked to hang out at carnival midways and reveled in winning kewpie dolls. When too keyed up at night to sleep, he played old Abbott and Costello movies—on the ceiling. Donaldson labeled Presley “overly polite, extremely self-conscious and aware of the importance of other people.” Like those of Orlando columnist Jean Yothers in 1955, Elvalee Donaldson’s assessments of Presley are prescient in contrast to some of the other local and national reportage of the day.
Elvis Presley’s signature on the wall at the Polk Theater. Courtesy of Mike Robinson.
“Actually, this guy’s just sorta different, you know?” Donaldson opined as if confiding in a friend. “He’s unexplainable. In one short year, he shot from nowhere into the hottest spotlight any American entertainer has held in such a short time. The public is examining him from every possible angle. He has no private life. Every bit he used to have is exposed.” Donaldson was dead-on again; and this was before Presley made any films, before the first of his Ed Sullivan Show appearances.
Three male reporters from the Ledger who “covered” Presley’s concerts in Lakeland w
ere interviewed for the article “Three Unbiased Males Give Views of Elvis.” Bob Swift, the “general assignment man,” called Presley “the first male burlesque dancer I’ve ever seen who didn’t have a rhinestone in his navel.” City Hall reporter Bob Jarrell said the other acts were “well worth” the price of admission and recommended the show to any parent who accompanies teenage daughters to the theater and whisks them away in the final 15 minutes, when Presley comes on.” The rest is similar drivel.
The male-dominated editorial board at the Ledger took their predictable shots: “As the tumult rages, most adults look on with attitudes that range from amusement to disgust,” the board wrote in an editorial that ran the day of Presley’s appearance. “Presley is a fad and an oddity. Within a little while his popularity will begin to wane.” The editorial all but apologizes for the amount of coverage dedicated to Presley, “not because he is an important public figure, which he isn’t, but because he has managed to create unusual furor and frenzy and thereby upped his income from $40 a week to a million dollars a year.”
And, without doubt, he generated a sharp uptick in newspaper sales. To say Presley was not an important public figure at this point reflects the other end of the spectrum when it came to common adult reaction to him: unfounded fears or derision and complete dismissiveness. The editorial board members were so busy pandering to readers that they failed to recognize in their midst a pivotal figure in American culture, representing a turning point in music history from which there was no turning back.
Elvis Ignited Page 11