because as far as I can find out he conducted himself very well after you left. At the press party he mingled with all the guests and made a very good impression there. As a result he is very hot material here in New York and with any luck at all I think we all should do extremely well….
On Friday we didn’t have any new material that suited Elvis so we recorded LAWDY MISS CLAWDY and SHAKE RATTLE AND ROLL. Neither one of these would be suitable for single release but I know they will make good selections for the second album.
On Sunday night Elvis was back in Richmond with an Opry troupe assembled by the Colonel that included the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle, Ernest Tubb’s son, Justin, and Charlie and Ira Louvin, who had already played a good number of dates with Elvis and were Mrs. Presley’s favorite country singing group. They were booked every night—in Greensboro, High Point, and Raleigh, North Carolina, then in Spartanburg and Charlotte the first week, with Saturday night off for Elvis to go up to New York to play the third Dorsey brothers show. Oscar Davis acted as the advance man, and the Colonel came in behind him to set up the show, hauling pictures, programs, and all the concessions that he was now personally peddling, taking away a lucrative source of outside income from Bill. Oscar’s expansive manner charmed every local newspaperman, promoter, desk clerk, and bellhop in sight, while the Colonel’s scrupulous, almost compulsive attention to detail, at such striking odds with the casualness of his appearance, his almost contemptuous dismissal of the niceties of human behavior, virtually guaranteed that everything would be just so. “The Colonel embarrasses me,” Oscar frequently complained to his cronies. “Goddam, he embarrasses the hell out of me—runs around like a goddam carny, with his damn shirttail hanging out and no necktie.” Parker could become no less infuriated by the way that Oscar threw his money around, but they were the perfect team so long as Oscar didn’t quit or the Colonel didn’t fire Oscar for giving a stagehand a fifty-dollar tip at any given show.
“We were working near every day,” said Scotty. “We’d pull into some town, go to the hotel room and get washed up or go right to the auditorium or movie house, and after we played our shows, we’d get back in the cars and start driving to the next town. We never saw any newspapers…. And we didn’t hear much radio, because it was drive all night, sleep all day…. All we knew was drive, drive, drive.” It was, said D.J., like being in a fog.
On Saturday night the whole troupe watched the third Stage Show appearance, when Elvis for the first time sang not only “Heartbreak Hotel” but his newly recorded version of “Blue Suede Shoes.” The performance of “Heartbreak Hotel” was something of a disaster, with Scotty and Bill hidden away in the shadows, the Dorsey brothers’ orchestra contributing an arrhythmic arrangement that Elvis was unable to move or cue, and Charlie Shavers taking a trumpet solo that left the singer with a sickly smile on his lips.
With the exception of the Carter Sisters, the troupe was probably not unhappy to see the young phenom fall on his face. There was a considerable amount of envy already over the attention that Elvis had been getting not just from audiences but from the Colonel himself, who was clearly focusing almost all of his energies and interest on his new acquisition. To Justin Tubb, who had grown up in the business and at twenty had already had three country hits and was a member of the Opry in his own right, everything about the tour was different right from the start. “The audiences were a lot younger, and it was the first time I’d ever seen them start screaming and waving their arms and hollering. You know, country singers and pickers had always been [considered] almost second class, pop musicians looked down on us. The kind of feeling you got was that here was somebody who was kind of using country music to get going, and yet he would go out and do his rockabilly stuff, his real raunchy stuff, and that’s what the girls wanted to hear.
“I’m sure there was some real—not jealousy, but envy, because he was happening and you could feel it. Not only in the audiences but in the importance of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ just being released and RCA buying his deal and him flying to New York to do the TV show and our all sitting there watching him.
“He was like a diamond in the rough. When he walked offstage, he would be just soaked, just dripping. He worked hard, and he put everything he had into it, and everything he did worked, because the audience just didn’t care—we had never seen anything like it before. My feeling was that they didn’t capture him on the television show—of course we had already seen him in action, and it could have been envy, but he seemed a little reserved from what we had seen, he seemed a little nervous, they didn’t seem to get his magnetism or charisma.”
The tour continued. Elvis and Scotty and Bill kept pretty much to themselves, according to Justin. “Elvis always stood in the wings and watched everybody, especially the Louvins, he was a fan.” Once in a while he would go out to eat with the others, but Red West, who was doing most of the driving, and D.J. were the ones who were more likely to be hanging out. At the end of the second week, Elvis and his three band members flew back to New York from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to play the TV show with borrowed instruments, while Red loaded up theirs on a little trailer cart that Vernon had had made up and painted pink (“It looked more like a rolling toilet than anything else,” said Red in his book, Elvis: What Happened?, “[but] the way Elvis’ dad went on about that thing, you would have thought it was a goddamned yacht”) and took off on the fifteen-hour drive to Tampa. By now the record was finally starting to show some movement. It was just about to debut on the pop charts and had been steadily gaining attention in Billboard, particularly in its country and western “Best Buys” column, which declared that sales had “snowballed rapidly in the past two weeks, with pop and r.&b. customers joining Presley’s hillbilly fans in demanding the disk.” Perhaps as a result of this new flurry of activity, Jackie Gleason Enterprises had picked up the option on Presley’s contract and scheduled two more appearances on Stage Show for the end of March at the agreed-upon $1,250 each.
Meanwhile on the tour things had already reached something of a boiling point. A few days before that fourth Dorsey appearance, in Wilson, North Carolina, the promoter oversold the show, and the Colonel told the troupe they would have to work a second one at no additional pay that night. Exasperated by Colonel Parker’s increasingly peremptory manner (they were beginning to feel as if they were being treated not just as “entertainers,” a necessary nuisance in the Colonel’s book, but as second-class citizens, little more than stage props on this tour), they banded together and refused to do it. Ira Louvin, who could charitably be described as hot-tempered even under the best of circumstances (“My brother didn’t get along with a lot of people,” said Charlie Louvin understatedly), went on and on about who did this Presley kid think he was, that no-talent sonofabitch, trying to take over their music—and fuck the Colonel anyway, he was going to go to the Colonel and let him know they weren’t going to take this shit anymore.
They had a meeting, with Ira moderating his demands only slightly and Justin Tubb, who had known the Colonel since he was a child (and whose father was as widely respected and loved as anyone in the country music community), making a calmer and more reasoned presentation. But if they thought that Tom Parker was going to be moved by sentiment, or backed into a corner by a unified stand, they had made a serious miscalculation. The Colonel was appalled—appalled, he said—that his motives should be questioned in this way. He had heard that Ira was mouthing off and saying, “Fuck the Colonel.” “Why did you say that, Iwa?” said Tom Parker in his unmodulated, Elmer Fudd accent. “Why did you say, ‘Fuck the Colonel’?” And as for Justin, the Colonel shook his head, the Colonel was surprised at Justin. The Colonel had known Justin’s mother, known his father, even given him a little Shetland pony for his birthday when Justin was a small child (“It was old and nearly blind,” said Justin, but not to Tom Parker’s face), what did Justin mean by coming to him and making these outrageous demands? The Colonel’s eyes alternately flashed with fire and
filled with tears. As Justin recognized, “he was an old carny, and he grew up the rough, tough way, he was a self-made man—he was brusque, but, I mean, he was the Colonel, I think most of us expected that of him. We didn’t bear him any ill will, we just had to make a stand.”
In the end the Colonel capitulated—all the performers got paid, and the show went on. But feelings definitely lingered, tempers continued to fester, there was no question in anyone’s mind that the Colonel was mad and that Ira Louvin, who sniffed out slights even when there were none, was seething. A couple of days after the incident in Wilson, things came to a head backstage between shows. Elvis was hanging around the dressing room with the Louvins, singing hymns and playing the piano when, in the recollection of Ira’s younger brother, Charlie, “Elvis said, ‘Boy, this is my favorite music.’ Well, Ira walked up and said, ‘Why, you white nigger, if that’s your favorite music, why don’t you do that out yonder? Why do you do that nigger trash out there?’ Presley said, ‘When I’m out there, I do what they want to hear—when I’m back here, I can do what I want to do.’ ” Ira flashed and “tried to strangle him,” according to Charlie, “and they were very distant from that point on.”
In Jacksonville on February 23, Elvis collapsed. He had completed the first night’s show at the Gator Bowl and they were loading up the instruments in the parking lot when, in Bill’s account, he “fell out cold.” They took him to the hospital, where he was kept under observation for a couple of hours and told by a doctor that “I was doing as much work in twenty minutes as the average laborer does in eight hours. He said if I didn’t slow up, I’d have to lay off a couple of years.” But he checked out of the hospital before morning, because, he told his friends with a wink, the nurses wouldn’t give him any rest. And besides, he said to Red, it was all just a stunt to impress Anita Carter. He played the Gator Bowl again that night with undiminished energy and effect. He had no intention of slowing down.
They were back on the Hayride the following week for the first time in a month. A lot had happened in that month, but for Elvis and Scotty and Bill there had been no time to gauge it, and it didn’t appear all that different from everything else that had been building and going on for the last year. They did “Heartbreak Hotel” for the first time, said Scotty, “and that damn auditorium down there almost exploded. I mean, it had been wild before that, but it was more like playing down at your local camp, a home folks–type situation. But now they turned into—it was different faces, just a whole other… That’s the earliest I can remember saying, What is going on?”
THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
March–May 1956
WITH COLONEL PARKER, LAS VEGAS, APRIL 1956.
(JAMES REID)
THE ELVIS PRESLEY who made his sixth and final appearance on the Dorsey brothers’ Stage Show, on March 24, 1956, was a far cry from the ill-at-ease, fidgety, almost manic gum-chewing figure who had made his television debut just two months before. He strode out purposefully, leaned into “Money Honey,” and just poured it on without ever letting up. Even his hair was different, less obviously greasy, more carefully sculpted, and where in earlier appearances his vocal energies appeared to wax and wane and that moment when he pulled back into the shelter of the little group to do his dance seemed as much an attempt to incite a response from the crowd as to invite one, now he regarded the adoring multitudes with a look of amused—not so much contempt as authority. He took their adulation gratefully as his due… and then just poured it on some more. When he announced that he would do one side from his latest record, there were screams from the crowd, and “Heartbreak Hotel” took on a sensuous intensity that was dispelled only when he slipped into the small, childish voice he used to break up Scotty and Bill at unpredictable moments. This time it was little more than an allusion, betrayed by the slightest self-amused smile, before he jauntily went on with the show. And then he was gone, coolly, casually striding off the stage and skipping out again for a deep bow. Elvis, as Jimmy Dorsey had announced at the beginning of the show, was off to Hollywood for a screen test.
The band left that night, driving into a snowstorm but stopping off in Dover, Delaware, to visit Carl Perkins in the hospital where he was recuperating from a bad automobile accident in which his two brothers (who played bass and rhythm guitar in his band) were also seriously injured. His song “Blue Suede Shoes” was competing furiously with “Heartbreak Hotel” in the charts, and he had been on his way to New York to appear on The Perry Como Show, opposite the Dorsey brothers, when the accident occurred. Elvis meanwhile remained in New York that evening to complete an interview with Coronet magazine reporter Robert Carlton Brown in which he mused on his current success. He called his parents every day, he said, because “my mother is always worried about a wreck, or me getting sick. So I have to let her know, because she’s not in real good health anyway, and if she worries too much, it might not be good for her.” He had just bought his parents a new house, he informed Brown; as a matter of fact “they moved in Tuesday. It’s a ranch-type, seven-room house. Three bedrooms, a den, playroom, it’s a pretty nice place.” As for his father, “he doesn’t do any—he takes care of all my business. In other words, he’s much more important to me at home than he is on the job. Because I have so much stuff piling up for me when I’m gone, and if he wasn’t there to help, when I got home I wouldn’t get a bit of rest. He takes care of everything—you know, any business that pops up, any insurance, or just oodles of things that I could mention.” And the Colonel? “I read,” said the interviewer, “that Colonel Tom Parker has given you a lot of advice and help. What kind?” “Everything,” said Elvis without hesitation. “He’s the one guy that really gave me the big breaks… I don’t think I would have ever been very big with another man. Because he—he’s a very smart man.”
Bob Neal watched bemusedly from the sidelines, now that he was completely, and formally, out of the picture. On March 15, his own contract with Elvis had run out and as per his November 21 agreement with the Colonel, he chose not to exercise the option. On March 26 the Colonel’s new status as “sole and exclusive Advisor, Personal Representative, and Manager in any and all fields of public and private entertainment” was formally ratified and his 25 percent commission reaffirmed at the same time. “I suppose,” Neal said to Jerry Hopkins in 1971, “really, in many ways, I—felt that I should try to continue in the picture, but at the same time with the things that I had going in Memphis—with my radio show and the promotions, and we owned a record shop… had a big family, kids in school and so forth… I decided to more or less let things go.” While he was undoubtedly gratified by Elvis’ own success, it must have galled Neal nonetheless to see the headlines in the trades week after week and to realize that he could, and perhaps should, have been a part of it. “A WINNAH! Presley Hot as $1 Pistol” was the headline in Billboard on March 3.
The hottest artist on the RCA Victor label this week has been none other than the amazing young country warbler, Elvis Presley, who has been on the label for only about two months.
Presley has six hit singles in the company’s list of top 25 best sellers, five of which had been previously issued on the Sun label…. The coupling of “Heartbreak Hotel” and “I Was the One,” cut by Victor, is the label’s No. 2 seller, right behind Perry Como’s “Juke Box Baby.”
By the end of March the single had sold close to a million copies and, in an unprecedented achievement (mirrored only by Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” at virtually the same time), was closing in on the top of all three charts: pop, country, and rhythm and blues. Moreover, the new album, released on March 13, stood at nearly three hundred thousand sales, making it a sure bet to be RCA’s first million-dollar (at $3.98 retail) album, and the EP containing “Blue Suede Shoes,” which RCA had released on the same date as the LP and which was also simply entitled Elvis Presley without any additional credit or qualification (as per the Colonel’s instructions, neither musicians nor recording supervisors were named), had alrea
dy started up the charts itself. Steve Sholes, as another Billboard headline trumpeted a few weeks later, was definitely having the last laugh.
ON SUNDAY, MARCH 25, after a few hours’ sleep, Elvis flew out to the West Coast. He was scheduled to appear on The Milton Berle Show the following Tuesday, and his screen test with producer Hal Wallis had been hurriedly set up for the week in between. Wallis, a fifty-six-year-old veteran of the movie business who had made such well-known pictures as The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and The Rose Tattoo and currently had N. Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker in preproduction, had first heard about Presley at the beginning of February from his partner in New York, Joseph Hazen. Hazen’s sister-in-law, Harriet Ames, one of the seven wealthy Annenberg sisters, was a “television addict” who happened to be watching the Dorsey show. She called Hazen, who lived across the street from her at 885 Park Avenue, “and I called my partner in California,” Hazen remembered. “I said, ‘Turn on the television and look at the show. This kid is terrific.’ ”
Wallis was impressed, he later wrote, with Presley’s “originality,” but he was probably more impressed with the sales figures and the stir he was creating (not to mention the clear potential to tap into the new youth market, which was crying for a successor to the late Jimmy Dean), factors that were pointed out to him forcefully by Abe Lastfogel of William Morris. The screen test was scheduled to coincide with the Berle appearance, and the Colonel waved off any RCA efforts to set up press or radio promotion for the West Coast trip until all the details with Wallis were nailed down. From Anne Fulchino’s point of view, “That’s when we really lost control. I remember the Colonel came up to me [just before he went out to Hollywood], and he put his arms around me, and I smelled a rat right away. He said, ‘You know, I want to apologize to you for what I did in Jacksonville [this was the incident that took place with Chick Crumpacker on the RCA Country Caravan two years before].’ Boy, did I smell a rat then, because he never apologized, even if he was dead wrong, so now I knew something was coming. And he said to me, ‘You did a tremendous job on Elvis. But,’ he said, ‘now you can rest.’ ”
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