During his two shows at the Peabody Auditorium, Presley brought the loudest shrieks from the audience when darting from one end of the stage to the other singing his current hit, “Hound Dog.” When he dove on his knees toward the audience, coming down part of the stage steps, it brought the house down. Marsha Connelly, who spent time with Presley during his early Daytona Beach appearances, described the madness: “I remember sitting by a woman who at the time I thought was old; she was probably late 20s or early 30s, and she was going nuts. It was phenomenal.”
Another fan, Trish Robbins, had a hard time understanding the level to which she was caught up in Presleymania. “We cried so hard, we tore up a hanky in thirds and each piece was soaked with tears,” she recalled. “I never really understood why we reacted like we did. But you just couldn’t help it.”
After the show girls lay flat on their stomachs outside the stage door to pass pieces of paper underneath for an autograph. Others trampled through the bushes outside Presley’s dressing room:
“Touch me, touch me Elvis,” pleaded one young girl.
“I would if I could,” said Presley standing at the closed window and screen.
“Goodbye, I gotta go now,” said Presley as he returned to an interviewer. “I love ’em all, without ’em I’d be lost.”
“Is there some special girl somewhere?” a reporter asked. “No,” Presley replied, not willing to acknowledge June Juanico, his worst-kept secret on the Florida tour. “There’s no special girl anywhere.”
“Well hang on, Elvis is signing one of his pictures right now,” reported radio personality Ed Ripley, trying to interview the distracted star. “It’s pretty busy here in the dressing room this evening, and we’ve got movie cameras, autographs and everything else going on around here. We’ve even got some people out here knockin’ on the windows.”
If you only read Ripley’s interview, there’s little new information revealed. What makes the interview memorable is the audio recording of it, distinctive in its clarity and intimacy. Ripley puts the microphone before a Deland schoolgirl named Peggy, who is in the process of going down an obviously prepared list of questions for Presley, while the din of girls now banging on the windows chanting “we want Elvis” is remarkably clear.
“Uh, do you like the girls going wild over you?” Peggy asks in a southern drawl. “It’s what keeps me in business,” says Presley, echoing the sentiments of Tom Parker. “I have another one but I don’t know if I should ask it or not,” Peggy confesses. “Um are you a dope fiend?”
“Ya,” says Presley without skipping a beat, drawing laughs from other men backstage. Given all that Presley had been through that week, including widespread criticism from Florida columnists and reporters up and down the peninsula, his sense of humor remained intact. Ripley chimes in admiring Presley’s black sapphire horseshoe-shaped ring, and you can hear Peggy remark, “That’s neat.” Presley comments about the gold records he’ll be getting for his “new” records “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” and “Hound Dog/Don’t Be Cruel.”
As Ripley inquires about when Presley’s next record may come out a loud crash breaks up the conversation, causing one girl to scream. Undaunted, the intrepid radio man reports, “Uh, someone just broke a window here in Elvis’s dressing room.”
Not at all shocked and chuckling about the madness enveloping him, Presley tells the interviewer his next release will likely be “a couple months yet.”
For a man who is just twenty-one himself, Presley is honest, candid, and funny. He doesn’t talk down to the schoolgirl interviewing him, and he remains fun-loving even though his dressing room provides no respite from all the questions, cameras, and fans. His nature in this interview evokes the humorous way the Beatles handled all the suffocating attention when they broke big in America. As with the Beatles, Presley’s personality was key to his appeal and staying power. It wasn’t put on.
“Actually, the Tennessee Troubadour doesn’t have a bad voice,” assessed Daytona Beach writer Dotti Einhorn, “When his fans will let you listen to it.” She noted that Presley’s stage dive during “Hound Dog” didn’t prompt any of his fans to try to kiss him or tear his clothes off. “There were three cops at each stairway who scared them off,” she reported.
Max Norris of the Daytona Morning News reviewed Presley’s appearance with the same dismissiveness as other male journalists in the course of the Florida tour. “Elvis Presley, whose tortured moans have found a vast audience in a tin-eared nation, slept here Wednesday night,” read the opening line of Norris’s article, another example of a reporter who had made up his mind and seemingly penned the lines before Presley ever set foot in town. Norris did track down Presley’s most devoted Florida tour followers, Anne Muncy and Nilla Shea, who declared Elvis “a nice boy.” Norris spoke to other girls who had camped outside Presley’s door at the Copacabana Motel and claimed to have hidden in his Miami hotel closet.
Marsha Connelly managed to get close enough to Presley for him to recognize her. “Everybody was getting his autograph and when I came up he said, ‘Marsha!’ You should have seen the looks on the faces of the other girls when he left with me,” she recalled. On a photo he wrote, “I still love ya, Marsha,” and included his address and phone number. For a while she allowed herself to believe there might be a chance at romance with the young king of rock and roll, but by then, girls were throwing themselves at him night in and night out.
As was custom on two previous tours, Jacksonville was the last stop on Presley’s final Florida tour during his rise to fame. A headline-grabbing judge was waiting to make sure there were no repeats of earlier fan riots—rumored or real. Reactionary preachers were spinning tales of gloom and doom over Presley’s unseemly shows. Journalists from the country’s leading periodical, Life magazine, were in town to document all the drama. The gauntlet was thrown down: clean up your act or go to jail.
A remarkable two-night stand and a six pack of shows lay ahead in the town where fans had rioted over Presley for the first time, setting in stone Tom Parker’s ambition to manage Presley, and where his first million-selling single was written and recorded for the first time. More defining moments of Presley’s early era awaited, northbound on US 1.
17
The Morals of Minors
August 10–11, Jacksonville
An exhibit called “American Cool” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., many years after Elvis Presley’s death included a 1956 photograph of him performing in the South. Fans reach for him as if they’re grasping for a rope to keep from drowning; his magnetism was like an irresistible, gravitational pull. In an article on the exhibit writer Ann Greer assessed the uniqueness of Presley’s impact in that period: “Elvis had the ability to be playful and seductive at the same time, bringing out the primal side of those around him. It made his concerts almost like revivals but with a twist. The dark-clad man with a commanding manner seems … a bit devilish.”
That phenomenon was never more in evidence than in Bob Moreland’s photo series of Presley’s interview with Tampa reporter Anne Rowe. His hands-on seductions of female journalists like Rowe could rightly be viewed as inappropriate and, in a religious context, downright sinful. But as quickly as he came on like a sex machine, Presley switched gears and made a joke or defused the tension with playfulness. This nuanced understanding of the duality of Presley’s appeal, given the context of time, was nowhere to be found among civic and religious leaders at his final 1956 Florida tour stop in Jacksonville. Their perceptions of Presley were far more black and white; the evil and the good.
At Trinity Baptist Church the Reverend Robert Gray held a Bible in his left hand and a concert poster of Elvis Presley in his right. With short black hair, suit, tie and glasses, the preacher resembled Buddy Holly as he stood at the church pulpit. This God-fearing preacher proclaimed his mission was to save Elvis Presley’s soul. In advance of Presley’s performances Gray held a prayer service in hopes of sparing the controversial
performer a trip to the bowels of hell. He instructed teenagers at the service to bow their heads and pray for Presley’s redemption. Reverend Gray proclaimed Presley had “achieved a new low in spiritual degeneracy. If he were offered his salvation tonight, he would probably say ‘No Thanks.’” A reporter and photographer for Life magazine were there to capture the preacher drawing a spiritual line in the sand.
Never mind that Gray’s claim was ridiculous, and he had never bothered to find out about Presley’s abiding faith in God, or he ignored it. As Presley’s FBI file indicated, this kind of misinformed adult reaction to his growing popularity was becoming the norm. Pompous newspapermen all over Florida had helped build on the mistaken notion. Supposedly responsible authority figures were basing their fear on rumored riots and fictional property damage, alleged moral degeneracy that anyone who did the least amount of fact-checking on Presley—or who bothered to take the time and plentiful opportunity to talk to him—soon found out did not exist. Preachers, police, and politicians of the day had ulterior motives: publicity or simply trying to reassure parents who saw their control of children eroding.
Behind the scenes, Tom Parker was chuckling all the way to the bank.
A full-page photograph in Life magazine showed Reverend Gray’s followers, many of them children, with eyes closed, bowing in prayer. Some of the teens shown in the photograph must have been conflicted; Presley was now a cultural phenomenon, the talk of the town. Tickets to his six shows were selling out quickly. Boys were getting ducktail haircuts to look like Presley and learning his dance moves. Droves of girls entered a contest to have a dinner date with him. And yet the preacher was trying to convince them Elvis Presley would burn in hell without prayers of the faithful to save his soul.
The buck stopped in Jacksonville by way of Juvenile Court judge Marion Gooding. Upon hearing the tales of woe from civic leaders and reading about Presley in the papers, Gooding filled out warrants on Presley to be served if he repeated his suggestive thrusting moves again in Jacksonville. The charge: impairing the morals of minors. Gooding labeled Presley’s act “an obscene burlesque dance” and invited the entertainer to his chambers before the show, “to put him straight.” Presley refused.
This took the criticism of influential columnists like Herb Rau to a new and disturbing level; now an authority figure with the ability to stop the show entirely made it clear that he was willing to do just that. The relatively benign and tired criticism of Presley’s performances, comparing him to an exotic dancer, had morphed into institutionalized fear of the damaging effect of his concerts. Presley was not about to fire back in the press at Judge Gooding as he had at Herb Rau. Tom Parker, who had seen the inside of a jail cell, was nowhere on this one.
Scotty Moore saw the judge’s posturing as pure public relations. “Gooding used the threat as if it were a platform in a political campaign,” Moore groused. “He treated Elvis like a terrorist who had invaded the homeland.”
Many decades later, former Florida governor Bob Graham, who had seen Presley just a few stops before Jacksonville, said the performance he witnessed was not offensive. “I would say he was certainly provocative,” Graham recalled. “I would not use the word obscene.” For Graham there was a broader societal context to consider; parents drawing upon the cultural mores of the Depression and World War Two were getting their initial taste of the new America Presley and other cultural figures of the time were ushering in: the hippie movement of the 1960s, civil rights activism, resistance to the Vietnam War, the women’s movement, and rock and roll.
“He was kind of the leading edge of the social reforms that were to follow,” said Graham, who dealt with more than his share of societal turmoil in Florida. As governor he reinstated the death penalty in 1979, despite harsh criticism for doing so. In August 1956 most Elvis fans could not have cared less about the danger he represented to their parents. As usual, it was good for business. For the 3:30 show on Friday, August 10, a long line of youngsters waited outside the Florida Theater in downtown Jacksonville. “The fans were screaming and hollering for blocks,” wrote newspaperman Ron Wolfe. “A total of 13,200 fans got to see the hottest act ever to play Jacksonville.”
One of those attending Presley’s first show, stern faced and sitting all the way in the back, was Judge Gooding. He told the newspaper: “That was my belief that the vast majority of Jacksonville youngsters didn’t believe in Mr. Presley’s type of performance.” Six sellout shows suggested just the opposite.
Among the young fans in the audience was Ardys Bell, who had run into Presley moments after he’d had some of his clothes torn off in Jacksonville in May 1955. She could feel tension inside the Florida Theater and understood what was at stake: “I knew when we went to that concert he had been told, if he did anything beyond what the judge told him he could do, Judge Gooding would walk him across the street,” Bell said, referring to the jail, which was just steps from the theater. Bell ignored what adults were saying about Presley. “Our parents thought he was going to hell in a hand basket,” she recalled. “I think Elvis was a very religious young man.”
Knowing the eyes of Jacksonville’s morality police were upon him, Presley stood mostly still and delivered his show to 2,200 screaming fans. He had been told before the concert to keep things clean and that was what he did. In return, his fans were robbed of the opportunity to see the most dynamic live performer in contemporary music at his most entertaining. In between shows Gooding met with Presley to secure a photo of himself laying down the law to the nation’s most famous young singer. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” Presley told reporters. “I know my mother approves of what I’m doing.”
Presley was adept at turning on the dumbed-down part of his personality to counter his controversial side. By this time he was well aware of why adults found his performances objectionable. It was bringing in big dollars and record sales; Presley and Parker had no intention of changing the formula.
If that wasn’t enough trouble, a representative from the American Guild of Variety Artists was in Jacksonville to demand that Presley join the union (at a cost of three hundred dollars), or he threatened to stop other performers from appearing. Presley resented the pressure tactics but in the end consented to join. Parker took care of the cost, which also included a performance bond and insurance.
That night Presley started to thrust his hips and caught himself. “Wait a minute, I can’t do this,” he told the audience. “They won’t let me do this here.” Standing virtually frozen, Presley wiggled his pinkie finger instead, bringing howls of laughter. “Everybody got the biggest charge out of that,” said Gooding’s daughter Marilyn, who was also in the audience. In another playful jab at the judge Presley dedicated “Hound Dog” to Gooding as he continued to wiggle his pinkie finger.
In time Gooding became a Presley fan and suggested the reactionary attitudes of those around him were to blame for the warrants and threats of arrest. “They had me convinced no teen-aged girl was safe around Presley,” a contrite Gooding recalled years later. Privately, Presley was just as steamed at the judge as he was at Miami columnist Herb Rau. According to June Juanico, at the end of Presley’s sixth and last performance that Saturday night, he looked in the judge’s direction and, instead of his customary thank you, muttered into the microphone, “Fuck you very much.”
After Presley’s return to his dressing room, a stunned Juanico asked him if she had heard what he said correctly. “You heard correctly,” he assured her. Had Presley’s parents or Tom Parker been aware of what he said, they would have been outraged. Had Gooding heard, Presley would surely have ended his Florida tour behind bars.
Presley was proud to have had the last laugh on Gooding and his morality police: “I showed them sons of bitches, call me vulgar. You don’t think I’m vulgar do you baby?” When he wiggled his pinkie, Presley told his girlfriend, it drew the loudest shrieks from the crowd he’d heard, Miami included. Gladys Presley told her son never to go back to Jacksonville; whe
ther fans were chasing him, exhaustion was overtaking him, or a judge was threatening to throw him in jail, trouble always seemed to find him there.
After performing fifty-nine live shows in the Sunshine State over sixteen months, after seeing his star rise like a streaking rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, after Mae Axton and Tommy Durden wrote his first million-seller in Jacksonville and Red Robertson took the world-famous “tonsil photo” of Presley in Tampa, after setting the state on fire over the first week of August 1956 and being threatened with incarceration, the last sentence Elvis Presley uttered to a Florida audience during this historic period started with “fuck you.”
V
1960–1961
18
Presley and Sinatra TV Special
March 1960, Miami
To show how much things had changed since Elvis Presley was the controversial pseudo burlesque dancer who flirted with obscenity arrest in Florida, four years later Frank Sinatra, who often bad-mouthed Presley during his rock and roll years, planned a television special to welcome him back from the army. The bizarre and unlikely pairing was due to film in Miami over three days in late March 1960. The show would mark Presley’s first Florida performance since his last Jacksonville concert in August 1956. In four years Presley’s life and career had undergone a dramatic transformation.
By the latter part of 1957 Presley ended his touring days to concentrate on his more lucrative film career. For the members of Presley’s backing band who’d been with him since day one, Scotty Moore and Bill Black, no touring meant no chance to make more than two hundred dollars a week in salary; about the same money members of Presley’s back-slapping entourage of yes-men known as the “Memphis Mafia” made. “Except members of his entourage also received free automobiles and expensive gifts,” Moore wrote in his memoir. “Elvis never once purchased cars for Bill or me. It just seems so crazy.”
Elvis Ignited Page 14