Elvis Ignited

by Kealing, Bob;

  After an hour of taking photos and glad-handing, Presley and Helm were seated next to his father, Vernon, and new wife, Dee, to watch the show. One memorable image of the performance came when a pair of mermaids held up a sign that read: “Elvis Presley Underwater Fan Club.” Presley stood at the window drinking in the view of a shapely young performer holding the sign in her right hand, a breathing tube in her left, while giving the evening’s star attraction a sexy smile. After the show Presley sent his overwhelmed leading lady back to the hotel and stayed behind to make sure the crowd of an estimated two thousand did not go home disappointed.

  Elvis Presley at Weeki Wachee Springs with Underwater Mermaid fan club. Reprinted by permission of Bob Moreland, Tampa Bay Times.

  Behind a long fence stood some of the fans who had watched him perform live back in the 1950s when they were twelve or thirteen and who were now seventeen or eighteen. “Oh Elvis, do you remember me at all?” asked one. He just smiled and made an inquisitive face. Another who got a kiss from him declared: “Elvis IS famous, he IS handsome, and he IS a legend in his own time, but he’s also the sincerest guy I ever met or kissed.”

  Another notable photographer, Bob Moreland of the St. Petersburg Times, brought with him on assignment his eleven-year-old daughter Michele Marie. After a long afternoon in the swimming park, she held her place in that long autograph line, with a new brownie camera slung around her neck.

  She stayed out of the way as her father snapped photos of Presley fans. When it was his daughter’s turn, beaming with pride Moreland pointed out to Presley, “That’s my daughter.” With that, Presley bent over and gave Michele Marie an autograph and a kiss on the cheek. “It was magical!” she remembered more than a half century later. Her only regret: “I was ‘all shook up.’ And couldn’t even snap a picture of him myself with my new little brownie camera.”

  In a retrospective she wrote about meeting Presley at Weeki Wachee, Lynn Chadux said the friendship she had with Presley after meeting him on assignment also turned to romance: “He would call me twice a day, between scenes or call me from his motel room.”

  Presley’s interest during his bachelorhood in girls barely old enough to be in high school is well documented. When he met future wife Priscilla Beaulieu in Germany, she was fourteen. Such dalliances would be met with greater scrutiny today, given the prevalence of scandal-hungry gossip magazines, websites, and TV shows.

  On location in Florida, after all he had done to curry favor with his adoring fans, and the populace of the area in general, Presley could do just about anything he wanted. With his coterie of deputies never far away, Presley showed a keen interest in law enforcement and they responded favorably. But that relationship was put to the test when he developed a friendship with sixteen-year-old Katie Williams, daughter of former Inverness mayor Francis “Cowboy” Williams, then serving as clerk of courts in Citrus County.

  Presley befriended the girl after her father helped Katie land a role as an extra. “I bet you’re a cheerleader.” Presley said to the charmed high schooler.

  After asking more questions and having Williams and her friend Ann Gibbs sit next to him while he signed autographs, Presley made it his mission to get to know Williams’s family. That night her father told her, “I had a visitor in my office today, Elvis Presley.”

  “You what?” the stunned girl replied. “You gotta be kidding me.”

  Presley had contacted Williams’s mother too, even inviting her out on location under the Bird Creek Bridge, to an area called “Red Level.” After ingratiating himself and assuring the girl’s parents his intentions were honorable, Presley contacted Katie again. Presley told her, “I want you to come over here to Red Level like your Mom did and you can come over and spend the day.”

  Less than enthused, her father “Cowboy” Williams told his daughter, “You cannot go over there unless you have a chaperone.”

  After a security guard nearly turned their car around at the Bird Creek Bridge, Katie Williams and her very pregnant sister-in-law chaperone Emily arrived on location. “Oh my God, is she gonna have that baby right now?” an alarmed Presley asked. They sat her down and made Emily as comfortable as she could be at that late stage of pregnancy. Williams remembers fondly the interaction between Presley and the crew: “I remember them playing games together—they had Frisbee, football, and stuff like that, and played and played.”

  After a fun day on the film set, Emily drove the car while Katie rode back on the rumble seat of the limo listening to Presley and his entourage lamenting the lack of things to do when they got back to Crystal River. “For them it was like falling off the earth,” Williams said.

  Two days later Presley called again and sent flowers to the Williams home. Emboldened by their mutual crush, Katie decided to go back by herself to Presley’s motel. “Whatever possessed me to do this I have no idea,” she confessed. “I wasn’t going to lie to Dad. I told him I needed a new bathing suit, which I did.” She didn’t tell Presley she was coming.

  For a high school sophomore, the atmosphere when she made her surprise visit to Presley’s villa was eye-opening. His whole entourage of men was there, along with shapely blond women in bikinis. “All these guys were partying and the music was going and Elvis was acting out, you know. Then he snaps his fingers three times,” Williams recalled. The finger snapping along with a hand gesture was an obvious signal for the traveling party to clear out, leaving Presley and his teen crush all alone.

  “Do you want to go out in the boat?” Presley asked. When his young admirer said yes, Presley took Williams for a chauffeured spin around King’s Landing. After that Presley and his special high school friend decided to go for a swim in his private pool. Williams changed into her new bathing suit, and Presley promptly threw her in the pool. Soon the entourage of men and bikini-clad women reappeared and joined in the fun.

  Just then a knock on the door interrupted the good times. Burton “BR” Quinn, the imposing and no-nonsense sheriff of Citrus County, had come with a message for Katie Williams. Extending his arm to move Presley physically out of the way like a petulant teenager whose keg party was being busted, Quinn told the girl: “Little lady, I just want you to know that your daddy knows you’re over here.” With that Quinn stopped restraining Presley and left. Used to being a law unto himself, Presley realized he was putting law enforcement goodwill to the test by partying with the underage daughter of a county official. “I can’t believe that just happened, what kind of connections does your Daddy have?” he asked.

  “My Dad is Citrus County,” she told him.

  “Then I think the best thing for you to do is to get your things together,” Presley told the girl, laughing. When she saw her father back at the house, Katie Williams claimed he wasn’t angry. The sheriff’s demeanor, acting on her father’s behalf, had suggested the opposite.

  Tom Parker’s downtime at Port Paradise was far tamer and more solitary. He might walk over to Presley’s villa for a game of cards, but mostly he stayed to himself in his own room tending to business. That was where Miami News writer John Keasler was granted an audience. When all of the Hollywood pretense and unnecessary chest-thumping he encountered at Bird Creek fell away, Keasler found Parker to be quite friendly, lonely even; happy for a visit. “Do come in and sit,” offered the round-faced huckster with an ever-present cigar. Keasler asked Parker about an autobiography he claimed to be writing entitled How much does it cost if it’s free?

  “Well, every time I sell another ad in it I have to take out another chapter,” Parker explained.

  “Every time what?”

  “I sell another ad,” Parker replied, as if it were perfectly plausible to write a biography accompanied by paid advertisements. “No sense writing a book without selling ads in it.” He pulled out of a giant cardboard box one of his promotional triumphs, an oversized picture of Presley standing in his now iconoclastic gold lamé Nudie Cohen suit—another definitive image of Elvis in the 1950s. “I made one million prints
of this picture and sold them for a nickel apiece,” Parker boasted.

  “He smiled to his secret angels,” Keasler said, summing up Parker, the ultimate hustler. For Presley’s Svengali-esque manager, turning a buck was his all-consuming passion; losing tens of thousands of dollars at games of chance his malignant vice. “When passing time yanked the snake oil wagon, his spiritual home from beneath him, he landed on his feet and never missed a beat of the spiel,” Keasler wrote about Parker. “And his product—Elvis, sells like mad.”

  As July turned to August, shooting continued inside the historic courthouse in Inverness, the goings-on like a shot of adrenaline to Citrus County residents.

  26

  Inverness Courthouse

  The climactic scenes filmed at the 1912 courthouse in Inverness gave Elvis Presley a chance to make a case for his fictional family and his own dramatic acting ability. When his character Toby Kwimper spurns the advances of Follow That Dream’s femme fatale, social worker Alicia Claypoole, played by Joanna Moore, she hatches a scheme to have the Kwimper twin boys and their baby sister, Ariadne, removed from the family. Before an audience of sympathetic townspeople, Toby and Pop Kwimper, played Arthur O’Connell, try to keep their family intact without the benefit of a lawyer to make the case for them.

  The old courthouse is situated right in the middle of Inverness like a crown jewel. US 41 snakes around the historic building, which made the filming location accessible to the curious. Policemen had to blow their whistles to keep traffic flowing. While filming went on in the courtroom upstairs, the newspaper reported, “necessary business was conducted” on the lower floors. Crowds stood behind a police barricade. Linda Conner told the town newspaper she brought her daughters Cheryl and Harlyn Sanders from Teaneck, New Jersey, in hopes of getting a glimpse of Presley.

  “We came all the way here just to see Elvis,” Conner told the Citrus County Chronicle. “And we were lucky enough to be kissed.”

  Now a museum, the historic Inverness courthouse where Elvis Presley’s 1961 filming took place is well documented and is celebrated every day. Courtesy of Mike Robinson.

  The casting call had gone out for extras twenty-one and older to fill out the audience. In publicity stills from the film, the courtroom’s segregated balcony, the African American section, remained empty. The bottom rows were all white faces. Though they were only sixteen, Katie Williams and Ann Gibbs plied Court Clerk Cowboy Williams’s connections to be allowed as courtroom extras. “The scene, which lasts about ten minutes in the movie, took about six days of shooting,” Gibbs remembered. “We did the scene so many times all of us in the courtroom knew each of the characters lines and we knew when they messed up.” That led to laughter and a close bond between townspeople, cast, and crew. To preserve the film’s continuity, after each day of filming, extras were expected to wash the clothes they had on and then wear them again the following day.

  Every morning Presley appeared from his dressing room at the Valerie Theater across the square and made his way up to the north entrance of the courthouse. That gave the extras a chance to stand on the steps, tell him hello, and shake hands. One morning on his way upstairs he turned to Ann Gibbs unexpectedly, “Want to go out?” Then he laughed and was on his way.

  Gibbs was stunned, “I didn’t say anything, I was flabbergasted.” For Gibbs, Presley was unlike any other adult man she’d seen in Citrus County. Young men walked around with cigarettes rolled up in their shirt sleeves, dressed for a day of farming or other blue collar work. When he wasn’t in costume, Presley dressed in high style, even in the Florida low country. “His shoes were Italian leather with a lightning bolt, and everything he had and had on bore his initials on it—pants, shirt, shoes, bathing suit. Everything was custom—the most expensive fabric, custom for him,” Gibbs remembered, “just as if he was stepping out on stage.”

  In a sense the world was indeed Presley’s stage. There was nowhere he could go in public where he wouldn’t become a spectacle. Yet he maintained a genuine ability to relate to his fans and show them gratitude for putting him where he was; just six years earlier he had been making fifty dollars a night performing up the road in Ocala. One day fans were delighted to see Presley passing the time, feasting on watermelon one of his fans brought, tossing a football with some local boys. The St. Petersburg Times reported one “wayward football allegedly thrown by the King himself” broke a window of the Valerie Theater. Not only Presley’s dressing area, the quaint 1925 one-screen movie theater was also where the crew watched daily footage shot in the courthouse. Other accounts suggest the football broke the theater marquee. Presley sent a check to cover the damages.

  Another photo shot on location shows members of the cast including Presley, Helm, O’Connell, and others taking a break in the jury room, one of the few cool places in the building. A man is bouncing one of the twin boys on his knee, Helm adjusts her makeup, Presley is drinking a Coke. Bill Bram, a dedicated researcher into all facets of Presley’s film career, caught up with a particularly opinionated extra from the courthouse scenes, Miss Mary Brent. “One day Elvis started playing his God-awful guitar which I cannot bear, and without thinking I said, ‘Do we have to have that dreadful noise?’”

  Knowing full well Presley could have fired her on the spot, she was relieved when instead he stopped and apologized like a chastised school boy: “Sorry Miss B.” Brent was all too happy to share her opinions with and about Presley, his co-stars, even his personal business. “Elvis and I had many discussions,” she told Bram. “He complained very little.” When Vernon Presley showed up with his new wife, Dee, Presley was obviously icy toward them both, failing to acknowledge their presence.

  The courtroom where Elvis Presley filmed the climactic scene of Follow That Dream. Stills from the film were used as a guide to re-create the courtroom for historic preservation. Courtesy of Mike Robinson.

  “I had a long talk with him stressing that Vernon was not being disloyal to his mother by remarrying,” Brent explained. “After that he did a complete reversal and they worked out their differences.” Miss Mary did not mince words about one Presley co-star whom she labeled “a letch, always chasing broads.” Another she called a “BIG NO TALENT, who cost the company untold amounts by being totally inadequate.” Of Presley and his co-star Anne Helm, Miss Mary was equally honest: “Elvis was very good at remembering his lines, not so good at interpretation…. Anne Helm was a really lovely girl, smart enough to listen and learn.”

  Some of Helm’s fondest memories of Presley derive from the days spent on location in Inverness—the publicity shots showing the two so young and vibrant outside the courthouse—and remembering his acting in the film’s climactic scene. His plea to the judge not to break up the Kwimper family came across as genuine and heartfelt. To Helm, it was proof of the deep well of dramatic talent Presley possessed, if only his domineering manager had allowed him to spread his wings creatively.

  “I think he really identified with the character,” Helm said. “He had a lot of them in tears when he did his monologue in the courtroom. They believed him and they were crying.” On film it was more than enough to convince the grandfatherly judge, played by journeyman actor Roland Winters, to side with Toby and Pa Kwimper.

  Presley left another important legacy in Inverness; when the courthouse was renovated in 1994, noted historic preservationist John Parks used scenes from Follow That Dream as key reference points during the seven-year, $2.5 million restoration. Today the Old Courthouse Heritage Museum is a daily celebration of Citrus County history and a reminder of Presley’s time there. In 2011, on the fiftieth anniversary of the making of the film, a musical entitled When Elvis Came to Town was staged in Inverness. Standing in that same courtroom today, the history is palpable.

  It could be argued that other important architectural treasures throughout Florida, like the Polk Theater in Lakeland, were saved and still stand today at least in part because of Presley’s history within their walls. With the final, climactic co
urtroom scenes now in the can, Presley’s days in Florida were almost over.

  27

  Bye Bye Bird Creek

  During the final days on location Tom Parker made yet another shrewd decision. To smooth over any bad public relations remaining from the eight thousand dollars in tax money paid to producers to transform Pumpkin Island into a squatters’ paradise, Parker arranged for the thatched building used as the Kwimper family cottage to be donated to the Florida Sheriffs Boys Ranch in Live Oak.

  On August 8, 1961, with other cast members surrounding him, Presley handed over the keys to the building to Sheriff James Turner. The entire structure had to be hoisted up on a trailer and hauled slowly across the Bird Creek Bridge to the boys ranch in north Florida, where it remained for decades. Miami journalist John Keasler was still around digging for the real story beneath all of Colonel Parker’s public relations. He found it in Giles Gete, who ran the Pure Oil station in Crystal River and handled all the film crew’s fuel needs. “The first week, they paid me right on time,” Gete said. “Second week I had to go after it.” Finally, Gete took his $587 fuel bill and receipts to the film crew offices. Despite every cent being accounted for, the company bean counters balked.

  Gete recalled, “Messed around, fooled around, arguing, wouldn’t honor ’em they said.” With that he went back to the Pure Oil station and waited. He opened up the next day, fueled up a Cadillac, kept servicing trucks, and waited until the big camera rig with all the equipment pulled in. Giles Gete proceeded to impound it for nonpayment of monies owed.