Elvis Ignited

by Kealing, Bob;

  When it was time for Presley and the crew to grab some lunch, Ocala policeman Martin Stephens was one of four officers assigned to the security detail. They stood watch, keeping fans and onlookers outside while Presley ate at the old Marion Hotel. Before they left, Presley ordered steaks for the officers while he ate grilled cheese. With so much downtime required during filmmaking, Presley spent a lot of time with his security detail.

  “He liked cops and respected the police,” Stephens said of Presley. “I had just gotten out of the Army and Elvis got out of the Army about a year before. We talked a lot about Army life and the military.” Stephens also stood guard while Presley signed endless streams of autographs and swears Presley never tired of accommodating fan requests. “It’s all part of doing business,” said Presley. When one wise guy in the crowd chided him as a “hillbilly” and a “pretty boy,” Presley ignored it and went about his business. His early days of being mocked by people like Ira Louvin for the way he dressed and performed had steeled his reserve.

  As the production progressed in downtown Ocala, work crews were putting in endless hours transforming an out-of-the-way piece of wilderness down the road from Inglis into Follow That Dream’s main filming location.

  24

  Yankeetown

  Florida’s State Development Commission voted to spend eight thousand dollars to turn three grown-over acres of land, owned by Yankeetown realtor Ollie Lynch and located under the Bird Creek Bridge, into a tropical paradise for the film Follow That Dream. This serene and out-of-the-way tip of Pumpkin Island, bordering the Gulf of Mexico along State Road 40, became the main shooting locale for the film. Limousines rolled in, turning plenty of heads in the small hamlet of Yankeetown, population 425, along the banks of the Withlacoochee River. “It was big excitement,” remembered local high school teacher Pat Langley.

  Once the land was cleared and the blacktop resurfaced so the road would look new, tons of sand were trucked in and coconut palms were planted—which promptly died, forcing crew members to spray-paint the wilted fronds green. A thatched structure was constructed at an eyebrow-raising cost of $6,000. All this made some locals wonder what these Hollywood types were really up to.

  Seventeen-year-old twin brothers Johnny and Tommy Jones were hired to turn a big pile of sand into a pristine beach for filming. “Every day they would pick us up in a white limousine to shovel dirt then the limousine would take us home,” Johnny Jones remembered. “We built a beach for the beach scene and they didn’t like it, so we had to build them another one.” Johnny and Tommy were allowed to hang around and do odd jobs. They were even paid twenty dollars to be among a group of extras pretending to catch rubber fish.

  Clockwise from top left: Elvis Presley posing for photo with Louise Sherouse and son Tony while filming inside the Commercial Bank, Ocala; Presley sweating through his shirt inside the Commercial Bank; Presley with security guard Tom High, who found Presley’s concert appearance in Ocala the previous year to be obscene; Presley and Red West, actor and longtime bodyguard. Courtesy of Louise Sherouse.

  Bird Creek site turned into beach for location filming in Yankeetown, Florida. Courtesy of Mike Robinson.

  Even as a teen, Jones thought it odd to see Presley constantly in the company of his circle of Memphis friends. “I tell you the honest truth, I felt sorry for him,” Jones said in a retrospective article. “Anybody who brought five guys along to play had to be lonely.” Tom Parker took offense to stories in the Tampa and St. Petersburg newspapers questioning the eight-thousand-dollar state expenditure to bring the film to Florida. Not a dime of the money was paid to Presley, his manager groused—“He doesn’t need it.” All of the funds were used to make the main location under the Bird Creek Bridge look more like a tropical paradise, he explained. And due to the fact that people dared to question what they money was used for, Parker opined that Hollywood producers from now on “would take a second look” before filming in Florida again.

  One newspaper editorial board agreed with Parker. By protesting the eight-thousand-dollar incentive, which had more than been paid back in national publicity and local economic impact, editors at the St. Petersburg Evening Independent concluded, “Florida has been guilty of childish conduct.”

  In this out-of-the-way stretch, accessible only by a lone two-lane road or by boat, there was no way to control completely what reporters and photographers might see or hear; Parker and the production team banned the press. For that reason alone, two legends of South Florida journalism, reporter John Keasler and photojournalist Charles Trainor of the Miami News decided to make the three-hundred-mile trek to see what kind of return taxpayers were getting on their eight-thousand-dollar investment.

  Five years previously Trainor had captured numerous unforgettable images surrounding Presley’s Miami concerts. To say Keasler and Trainor were not welcomed with southern hospitality on location in Yankeetown is an understatement. An irate deputy sheriff’s threat, “I will put you in jail!,” shattered the morning tranquility during one day of filming. He had just caught sight of Trainor up on the Bird Creek Bridge, snapping photographs of the faux squatters’ paradise constructed on the island below. “I have the backing of everybody from the governor on down,” the deputy thundered. Trainor kept on snapping. The deputy threatened the persistent photojournalist again, but Trainor was undeterred.

  Pumpkin Island bears little evidence of having once been a film set. Courtesy of Mike Robinson.

  “What the sheriff didn’t know was that a surefire way to get Charlie to take a picture,” a blogger once remarked, “was to tell him he couldn’t.” One of Florida’s great muckraking journalists long before Dave Barry became a satirist or Carl Hiaasen an investigative reporter, John Keasler faithfully recounted the goings-on with a flair common to Miami’s evening newspaper. As the two South Florida journalists had it out with Presley’s security team, the king himself arrived. “There he is!” girls waiting along the road shrieked.

  “Teen aged girls rushed screeching from the road toward the white Cadillac,” Keasler reported. “They came from everywhere. They seemed to be dropping from the trees.” One of the movie men barked, “No photographers!”—an order that bounced right off Trainor; he was finally getting to see the man he’d driven three hundred miles to photograph. “Charlie took some pictures of Elvis, who was then spirited away for his noon ambrosia and the crowd settled back in for its next delicious glimpse of the King,” Keasler wrote.

  “Have you ever heard of invasion of privacy?” asked a man Keasler described as “a short press agent in a tall pith helmet.”

  “Anyway,” he went on, “I thought I told you not to come.”

  He explained that it was none other than Elvis Presley’s privacy the intrepid duo had invaded that morning on Bird Creek Bridge, though one could certainly argue that the screaming girls were already doing so. Keasler later wrote that Tom Parker and his PR cronies “seemed to be under the impression that ‘publicity’ was something they could turn on and off with a switch.” Parker’s right-hand man Tom Diskin explained that if they allowed one newspaper in they would have to allow them all. “And you can see what that would cause,” he said. The bottom line, Diskin explained, was that meant no interviews with Presley or Parker, who also afforded himself celebrity status.

  “Is that definite?” Keasler asked.

  The Bird Creek Bridge. Photo by author.

  “Definite,” Diskin replied. “I told you that when you called from Miami.”

  “The sting and the agony of this refusal,” Keasler chided, “was somewhat mitigated by the fact that I had just finished talking to Elvis, by walking across the sacred precincts while the guards were busy berating Mr. Trainor.” While Keasler’s photojournalist partner was being threatened with jail and heaven-knows-what-else up on his Bird Creek Bridge perch, he nevertheless managed to get a photo of Keasler and Presley, walking side-by-side with shirts open, on the steamy waterside film set. Elvis even wore shorts. This was Keasler’s a
ccount of his conversation with the star of Follow That Dream:

  “How’s it going?” I said, to Elvis, who was standing around.

  “Pretty good.”

  “Hot enough for you?”

  “Sure is.”

  “How do you like Florida?”

  “I like it.”

  “Better than Memphis?”

  “Well, Memphis is home.”

  Keasler mentioned that he had also attended Humes High School in Memphis, years before Presley was a student there.

  “Well,” Keasler said. “We’re glad to have you down here.”

  “Glad to be here,” Presley replied as he readied himself to pass through the gauntlet of girls to get to his car.

  “I mean there was not much use standing there in the hot sun talking about West Berlin or something,” Keasler confessed to his readers. “Everybody who has met him said they found him to be a very nice, down-to-earth lad without a trace of Hollywood, and that’s the way he seemed to me.”

  While other reporters might have been afraid to part from the love fest narrative Tom Parker fed them, John Keasler provided some much-needed perspective when recounting the goings-on. He wrote that Florida’s economic impact for one Yankeetown merchant on the tax dollars spent for the film amounted to this: “two additional cups of coffee and two rolls of film may be traced to the movie making.” A filmmaker even asked to “borrow” Yankeetown innkeeper Bud Finley’s woodpile.

  Another reporter who managed to find her way to Presley in Yankeetown was Anne Rowe, the St. Petersburg Times reporter with whom Presley got up close and personal during his 1956 tour. Because of his familiarity with Rowe she was considered a “friend” and given an audience with Presley while he sought refuge from the heat in his air-conditioned Cadillac limousine.

  “The car is his home away from home,” Rowe observed. “A haven from peering eyes, the shrieks and sighs of flocks of fans who have flooded the Yankeetown area, scene of the filming. He eats in the car, he naps in the car, he talks in the car.”

  As Rowe leaned through the car window, Presley spoke of his fondness for Florida: “It’s like coming home, sort of. You know I got my start in this state—going around with a hillbilly group. I really like it here.” His failure to credit or mention Scotty Moore or Bill Black is telling. Presley invited another familiar Floridian from those days, Mae Axton, to come and visit him in Yankeetown, which she did.

  When the cameras stopped rolling, at night Presley seemed to vanish without a trace, rarely venturing out. Keasler concluded there was simply nothing to do around Crystal River after dark. “Well,” one local near the Port Paradise Lodge said, “sometimes around dusk we go down to the feed store and watch them roll up the awning.”

  Nighttime was no time for Presley and the crew to wind down. In the governor’s suite, the largest on the property, Presley hosted card games for money and caroused with his buddies Red West and the other Memphis Mafia. Anne Helm was in on it too. “I sort of went along for the ride,” she remembered. “He was a night owl. He loved to play music. He loved to play cards and be silly.” Helm found it odd that while she was trying to further a romantic relationship with Presley, his all-male entourage of six or seven was always around. There was a price to be paid when the time came for the crew call early every morning. Presley solved the problem the same way he did in the army, with prescription drugs.

  “We had to prop ourselves up in the morning,” Helm said. “Elvis had Dexedrine. It was not called speed in those days. And we would take them if we were feeling tired.” She said Presley also took Valium and other pills to get to sleep. Helm bristles at the notion either of them was an addict or even drug dependent. “There was an innocence to it,” she explained. “It wasn’t like we were popping drugs.”

  While Presley got his start with pills in the military, they became part of Helm’s life as a young New York model. “We were sent to diet doctors and given Dexedrine to keep the weight down,” she said. In New York Helm was introduced to speed at fourteen. She says she never developed the kind of prescription drug addiction that ravaged Presley. As he performed day in and day out in the hot sun, clear-eyed, engaged with the material and the throngs of adoring fans, Helm saw the signs of a developing dependence and a diet she described as “atrocious. He could eat a pound of bacon at one sitting.” Presley remarked that he thought he looked fat in some of the scenes.

  From her intimate view of Presley, Helm saw boredom as another developing issue in his career. “I can’t sit back in judgment of the Colonel,” Helm reflected. “He did launch Presley’s career.” But clearly, she said, Presley longed for more challenging material than doing a take on Li’l Abner for Follow That Dream. “He might have won an Academy Award,” Helm believed, if he had been able to accept some of the films Parker turned down as too risqué or beneath Presley. Among them, The Fugitive Kind—that went to Marlon Brando, and years later, the lead opposite Barbara Streisand in A Star Is Born. Parker dismissed Streisand, a superstar who by that time had already won an Academy Award, as unworthy to share the screen with Presley. The role went to relative newcomer Kris Kristofferson.

  “Elvis was very loyal and naïve,” said producer Steve Binder. “He felt he never could have made it without the Colonel.” More than most, Binder saw the controlling, stifling effect of Parker’s treatment of Presley as a moneymaking commodity, not an artist; his willingness to take Presley’s career into the ditch and ignore what his client was doing to himself, if it meant Parker’s enormous gambling debts got paid and his own luxurious lifestyle was supported.

  One of the longest-tenured members of the Memphis Mafia, Red West, one of the few who dared to question Presley about his drug use, was fired for the transgression. Then in the minds of many fans West betrayed Presley at his lowest point by writing a tell-all book. West believed Presley became “bored with his life…. The songs were terrible, the scripts were terrible.” Yet Parker was more than willing to keep Presley sweating it out on a treadmill of mediocre films and a breakneck schedule as a Las Vegas saloon singer.

  Parker always quashed Presley’s dreams of conquering new territory in Australia or Germany—so many places where his fans would have died to see Presley perform. But that would mean Parker risking his well-guarded illegal alien status finally being laid bare to the world and his own fictional legend crumbling. “I think we all have to take responsibility for our own actions,” said Binder definitively. “It has to fall back on Elvis.”

  In the short term, many Presley fans enjoyed weeks of up-close encounters with him. In his home away from home, Presley constantly accommodated fan requests for autographs and photos. The weeks spent filming Follow That Dream represented the last time Florida fans could still see young Elvis walk among them.

  25

  Weeki Wachee and the Mayor’s Daughter

  On Sunday July 30, 1961, Presley and Anne Helm went out on what she called their “first date.” Sanctioned and arranged by Tom Parker, their visit to the City of Mermaids at Weeki Wachee Springs became a tour de force photo op with hundreds of fans.

  For Helm, who had seen how fans reacted to her co-star in Ocala and Yankeetown, this was her first big dose of the magnitude of Presley’s stardom: “I was always separated from that,” she said. “I could never get a handle on how famous he was until we went out.”

  Parker was running interference in a jaunty white cap, chomping a Havana cigar and sweating noticeably through his shirt. The madness all around didn’t appear to bother Presley, who was dressed like Mack the Knife in a dark suit and white shirt. Helm, in a summer dress with her hair up, having a chance to display her own Hollywood sex appeal, looks ill at ease in photos from that evening. “I was really overwhelmed by it because I’d never seen such madness for someone,” she recalled.

  Weeki Wachee is a vintage Florida attraction, a beloved tourist destination located at the intersection of State Roads 50 and 19, and a throwback to days before megaparks and combustible thrill
rides. It was the brainchild of a former U.S. Navy Seal and swimming instructor named Newton Perry, who chose the spring in 1946 as the site for his new underwater business. To facilitate freedom of movement, he also perfected the method of breathing through an air hose without bulky scuba apparatus.

  Newton carved out a theater six feet into the limestone, so that as many as eighteen spectators at a time could view the beauty of the springs. On October 13, 1947, he staged his first mermaid show in Weeki Wachee Springs. The swimmers breathed through air tubes hidden within the underwater scenery. Those who think synchronized swimming fifteen to twenty feet down in a free-flowing spring is easy have never tried it.

  Three days before Presley showed up, newspapers all over the state reported his plan to make a rare public appearance while on location on Florida. A front page article in the July 27 St. Petersburg Evening Independent carried the headline, “Okay Girls—Get Set, Elvis Readies Outing.” Parker told the newspaper any fan who brought a photograph would get it signed. That ensured Presley would have a lot of fans there and a tremendous amount of work to do.

  “Spending the afternoon with Presley is like taking a friendly walk with a forest fire,” wrote Lynn Chadux, teen reporter for the St. Petersburg Times. “The tall Greek God, olive skinned legend in his own time … and his entourage swept into [the] Springs in a miraculously white Cadillac at 4:30 p.m.” Presley asked the young reporter, “Are you Miss Florida?” Then he kissed the smiling teen four times. Even on this so-called date with Anne Helm, Presley found plenty of opportunity to flirt with other young women. “That day we got along like a house on fire,” Chadux recalled. “He asked me to walk with him all day and we held hands part of the time.”