Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  Although Elvis himself had made it plain to the Colonel that he had little interest in just “singing in the movies”—if he was going to do anything in the pictures, he wanted to be a movie star, a serious actor like Brando, Dean, Richard Widmark, Rod Steiger—the screen test that he took consisted of two parts. In the first he was given what looked like a toy guitar and told to mime a performance to his recording of “Blue Suede Shoes.” The idea, according to screenwriter Allan Weiss, who was present for the test and cued up the record as a then-member of the sound department, was to see if the “indefinable energy” that had showed up on television would translate to film.

  There was never any doubt, wrote Weiss, as Presley stepped in front of the camera:

  The transformation was incredible… electricity bounced off the walls of the soundstage. One felt it as an awesome thing—like an earthquake in progress, only without the implicit threat. Watching this insecure country boy, who apologized when he asked for a rehearsal as though he had done something wrong, turn into absolute dynamite when he stepped into the bright lights and started lipsynching the words of his familiar hit. He believed in it, and he made you believe it, no matter how “sophisticated” your musical tastes were….

  The number was completed in two takes, and they moved in for close-ups. He protested mildly that he hadn’t been “dead-on” in a couple of places. It was explained that the closer shots would be intercut to cover it. I don’t think he understood, but with characteristic trust, he did what he was told. No stand-in was provided, and he stood uncomplainingly while the lights were being adjusted—bathed in perspiration.

  Then he did two scenes from The Rainmaker, a period comedy-drama set in Kansas in 1913 that was scheduled to start shooting in June with Burt Lancaster starring opposite Katharine Hepburn, in which he played the younger brother, a kind of male ingenue role. “I knew my script,” Elvis said proudly later that year. “They sent it to me before I came to Hollywood… and I got out there and just tried to put myself in the place of the character I was playing, just trying to act as naturally as I could.” He had never been in a play before; he had never spoken a single line onstage. He came across, wrote Weiss, “with amateurish conviction—like the lead in a high school play,” but if he was wooden from lack of dramatic training, that didn’t stop him from telling Mr. Wallis that he didn’t think the part was right for him when Wallis sat down with him sometime later to discuss his celluloid future. This character was “lovesick, real shy. I mean, he wasn’t real shy. Real jolly. Real happy, real jolly, real lovesick. It wasn’t like me…. Mr. Wallis asked me what kind of a part I’d like to play, and I told him one more like myself, so I wouldn’t have to do any excess acting.” But that wasn’t what he meant exactly. When the producer laughed, the boy just grinned and let it go, because he couldn’t say what he really meant: he couldn’t say that he knew he could do it, it would be like saying that he knew he could fly. And while he might never have been in a high school play, he had imagined himself up on the screen, he had studied the movies, he studied the actors—the way they presented themselves, the way they cocked their heads, the way they won the audience’s sympathy. He had imagined himself a singing star, and it had come true—so why not this, too?

  Wallis for his part was struck by the young man’s polite, well-mannered demeanor. After dealing with Jerry Lewis for seven years, it would come as a relief to work with such a tractable, essentially malleable young man. And Wallis and the Colonel (whom Wallis found “as fascinating as Elvis” in his own right) were both well aware of the long and profitable tradition by which virtually every popular male singing star, from Rudy Vallee to Bing Crosby to Frank Sinatra, ended up in Hollywood and, if he was lucky, was transformed into a movie star. This rock ’n’ roll might not last, but the boy was a real phenomenon, and if he was able—like Crosby and Sinatra before him—to turn that magnetism into the warmth of the all-around entertainer, then they would be able to make a lot of money together.

  He and the Colonel quickly came to an understanding that would be formalized over the next few weeks in what Wallis characterized—accurately or flatteringly, it would be impossible to say—as “one of the toughest bargaining sessions of my career.” It was a one-picture deal with options for six more, with the first picture paying just $15,000, the second $20,000, and the sum gradually escalating to $100,000 for the last. The Colonel reserved the right to make one picture each year with another studio, though that picture could be preempted by Wallis for a comparable fee. It was by no stretch of the imagination (except a studio PR man’s) a blockbuster deal, but at its heart was the Colonel’s fixed determination to sign with a legitimate filmmaker and, above all, to keep his options open, a strategy based as much upon his belief in his boy’s unlimited potential as upon his confidence that every deal could be improved once you got in the door.

  There was no time to savor the triumph. Elvis was due in San Diego for the Berle show, which was scheduled to be broadcast on April 3 from the deck of the U.S.S. Hancock, docked at the San Diego naval station. The Milton Berle Show was a definite step up from the Dorseys. Milton Berle, the original “Mr. Television,” was still a major star and had booked Presley only as a favor to his agent, Abe Lastfogel. Berle met Elvis and the Colonel for the first time at the airport. “I sat in the middle and Colonel Parker was on the other side and Elvis was on my right. So I said, ‘Oh, here’s the contract for the show,’ and I was about to hand it to Elvis when Colonel Parker grabbed it, says, ‘Don’t show that boy that contract!’ So Elvis didn’t know what he was getting. Colonel Parker held a hard hand!”

  They went directly to rehearsal, where Scotty and Bill and D.J. met them, having just rolled into town themselves after an arduous cross-country trek. D.J. was thrilled at the presence of the great drummer Buddy Rich, a member of the Harry James Orchestra, but Rich did not return the compliment. The musicians all sniffed when Elvis did not produce any charts, and when he launched into “Blue Suede Shoes,” Rich rolled his eyes at Harry James and said, audibly, “This is the worst.”

  The show itself was one more unmitigated triumph. It was a windy day, and flags were flying in the breeze, with the ocean as backdrop and an audience that was as good-natured as it was enthusiastic. Elvis opened with “Heartbreak Hotel,” naturally, after an elaborate introduction by Berle, who came out onstage dressed in an admiral’s uniform with plenty of gold braid. The performer that television viewers saw appeared in yet another stage of radical metamorphosis, more self-assured by half, more in command of his look and style than he had been just ten days before—but it is the stark visual imagery that sets off his performance most, as he stands, all in black save for white tie, white belt, and white bucks, legs spread wide apart and at a point of hitherto-unremarked stillness, just inviting the crowd to come to him.

  They did. The song was greeted by an audience made up predominantly of sailors and their dates with an appropriate mixture of screams and laughter—because it is clear by now that the performer is playing with them. It may not be as clear to the little girls, but there is no aggression in this act, he is teasing them, fooling with them, his laughter is their laughter, for the first time in his life he is one of them. He then introduced “my latest release, ‘Blue Schwede Shoes,’ ” and launched into the song in a loose, carefree manner that far surpassed any of his previous televised efforts. The crowd was with him all the way, and when he went into the repeated, almost mantra-like coda, Bill got on the bass and rode it for all it was worth, hands up in the air, legs sticking out, and whooping as the crowd whooped happily back. It was a moment, a picture, a perfectly lit snapshot, that the Colonel vowed was never going to be repeated: Bill Black was never going to take attention away from his boy again.

  Next was a comedy sketch with Berle in which the comedian came out dressed identically to his guest star, only with his pants rolled up and looking like a rube in oversize blue suede shoes. He was, he declared in the broadest Catskills cornpone accent, El
vis’ twin brother, Melvin, who had taught Elvis everything he knew. They played with that for a while, with Elvis declaring, “I owe it all to you, Melvin,” and then they went into a reprise of “Blue Suede Shoes,” which Elvis flung himself into as good-naturedly as he had the earlier rendition, while Berle pranced about the stage and did a limber send-up of his enthusiastic young friend. It would have been hard to detect any sign of resentment, if resentment existed, on the part of “America’s newest singing sensation,” whether because Berle was spoofing his act or because of the twin-brother routine; it was all just show business, after all—Gladys was probably laughing at home with some of the cousins and Grandma Minnie. They had always enjoyed Uncle Miltie, ever since they got their first television set; he was, of course, a very important and powerful figure in the business, said Colonel Parker, and Elvis should never forget, Mr. Berle was doing them a favor by having him on the show.

  There was an appearance the next day at a San Diego record shop and a riot the next night at the conclusion of the first of two appearances at the San Diego Arena. At one point Elvis had to admonish the crowd mildly to “sit down or the show ends,” and the girls went back to their seats, but the musicians couldn’t get out of the building for a full forty-five minutes after the show was over, and Elvis sat around backstage with some local musicians, talking about the Hayride and his rapid rise to fame. “The crowd was too noisy for most of the numbers to be heard,” sniffed the San Diego paper, which noted that his brief appearance followed “a woman vocalist, an acrobatic dance team, a comedian, and a xylophone player,” a far cry from the all-star country packages on which he had been appearing. “I changed my whole style,” said Glen Glenn, a twenty-one-year-old committed country singer from just outside Los Angeles who had driven down for the show with his guitar player and was introduced backstage by bass player Fred Maddox of the Maddox Brothers and Rose. “We all wanted to be like Elvis after that.”

  There was no stopping the juggernaut now. Elvis had made his last regular Hayride appearance on Saturday, March 31, flying in from Hollywood in the midst of the Hal Wallis negotiations. The Colonel had extricated Elvis from his contract by paying a penalty of ten thousand dollars and promising that he would do a benefit concert in December for free. The Sunday after the Berle show they played Denver, then flew to Texas for the start of a two-week tour that would be interrupted by a recording session on Saturday, April 14. It had reached the point where no one even knew any longer what day it was; they drove through the night because it was impossible to get to sleep until 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning anyway, Elvis said, he was just too keyed up. There were girls everywhere; more time was spent hiding from them than looking for them. There was, of course, at least one call a day home. He had yet to spend a single night in the new house on Audubon Drive.

  Everywhere he went, everyone wanted to know everything about him. They wanted to know how he got started in the business. They wanted to know about his mother and father. They wanted to know about the movies, naturally. He deflected every question with that unique combination of deference and candor. He answered every question with the truth. Yes, he was very excited about his Hollywood contract, it was a dream come true, it just showed that you could never tell what was going to happen to you in your life—but no, he wasn’t going to sing in the movies. No, he didn’t have any special girl, he had thought he had been in love, he had been in love once, in fact it was only when he started singing that they broke up. He still heard from her, she wrote to him sometimes. Did he still go to church? “I haven’t since I been singing, ’cause Saturday night is usually our biggest night, and almost every Sunday we have a matinee or we’re on the road…” Are you taking good care of yourself? There are rumors that you’ve been carousing around and don’t really know where you’re going. “Well, that’s about the truth. It really is. I can’t deny it, because half the time I—I don’t know from one day to the next where I’m going. I have so much on my mind, in other words, I’m trying to keep with everything, trying to keep a level head…. You have to be careful out in the world. It’s so easy to get turned.” And what did he like best about being so successful, aside from the money? “I would say the money in a way, of course that, like you said, is the biggest part, but actually the thing I like about it better is to know that people like—that you’ve got so many friends.”

  It was hard work—and it never let up. But no matter how hard he worked, he didn’t work any harder than the Colonel. Colonel was up at 5:30 every morning when they were just getting in, and he was there until the last ticket was counted, the last picture sold. He was in everybody’s face, it seemed, he didn’t let a promoter get away with a single unsold ticket, and he was always on Scotty and Bill about something they had or hadn’t done onstage. “He was working for Elvis, period,” said D.J., more of a disinterested observer than either of the other two. “He didn’t care what you did. That’s all he knew, twenty-four hours a day, Elvis. That was his boy.” Sometimes, it seemed, Elvis would test the Colonel—he would arrive late for one show after another and then, said D.J., when the Colonel was ready to jump down all their throats, “he’d say, ‘Don’t you worry about the Colonel. I’ll take care of it.’ And then the Colonel would jump us and say, ‘Hey, you guys have got to get here a little bit earlier.’ And we’d say, ‘You tell him,’ and that was the end of it. I think he done it just to make the Colonel mad sometimes.”

  Scotty and Bill knew the Colonel would just as soon cut their throats as look at them. They’d be gone in a minute, they both agreed, if it was up to the Colonel; he had long ago made that plain. They never really brought it up directly with Elvis, though—they knew Elvis would never consider anything that would change his music, and they doubted that Colonel would ever push him on this point. It was clear what happened if anyone pushed Colonel. Red had had a blowup with the Colonel, and it didn’t escape anyone’s attention that Red was gone, at least for this tour. In Red’s account Elvis had been with a girl, and he wouldn’t get out of bed with her.

  When he finally emerged, he looked like he had been mixed up with an eggbeater…. Well, we’re really late now. It’s winter time, and it’s sleeting and raining colder than hell. We jump in the car, I drive like a madman through snow and everything to Virginia to this auditorium…. We arrive there, I guess we’re fifteen minutes late, or something like that. Now it’s still snowing like hell, but out in front of the auditorium I see this crazy guy in a T-shirt. I get out of the car, and I notice he is puffing on this cigar, and he has got an expression on his face like he is going to kill me… kill me, not Elvis. Then I notice that, despite the fact he is wearing a T-shirt in this damn snow, he is so worked up he is sweating…. He just looks at me as if he was going to rip a yard from my ass. Right away he starts in, “Where in the hell you been? Do you know what time it is? I got these people waiting, and you’re damn well late. You can’t keep people waiting. Who do you think you are?”

  There was little room for sentiment in the new order of things. The business was changing, the mood was changing, and the show was necessarily changing, too. The crowds were so frenzied by now that you could no longer hear the music. The screams that started up from the moment they took the stage, the tortuous faces and blinding tears—Scotty and Bill watched it all with something like disbelief, playing as loud as they could while all they could hear over the din was the occasional sound of D.J.’s drums. “We were the only band in history,” Scotty frequently joked, “that was directed by an ass. It was like being in a sea of sound.” It was true, but as intently as they watched him, they could never really tell what he was going to do next. “I’ll bet I could burp,” said Elvis impishly, “and make them squeal.” And then he burped and did.

  They chartered a plane out of Amarillo in the middle of the night so that they could get to Nashville in time for the recording session at 9:00 the following morning. Just before dawn they got lost and landed at an airstrip outside of El Dorado, Arkansas, to refuel. It w
as chilly, and the musicians huddled together in the little coffee shop, yawning and making desultory conversation. It was just light when they took off again. Scotty was sitting beside the pilot, who asked him to hold the wheel for a minute while he studied the map. Just as Scotty took the wheel, the engine coughed and died and the plane started to lose altitude. There was a good deal of confusion, and Bill pulled his coat over his head and cursed the day he had ever let himself be persuaded to go up in this rickety machine, before the pilot discovered that when they refueled they hadn’t switched over to the full tank and the airstrip attendant hadn’t bothered to refill the empty one. When they finally got to Nashville, Elvis announced half-jokingly, “Man, I don’t know if I’ll ever fly again.”

  The session reflected the edginess of everyone’s mood. They worked from 9:00 till 12:00, did close to twenty takes of a single song, and ended up with only that one song, a ballad called “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” that Steve Sholes had come up with for the date. Once again the backup singers were the same mismatched trio that had been assembled for the first Nashville session: Ben and Brock Speer of the Speer Family, and Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires. Where were the other boys? Elvis asked Stoker during a break. He had played with the Jordanaires in Atlanta just a month before, on the same bill with country comedian Rod Brasfield, Mississippi Slim’s cousin, and his brother, Uncle Cyp, and they had made plans to get together in the studio sometime soon. This gave Stoker, who was fuming over the other Jordanaires’ exclusion, just the chance he needed. “It was the worst sound on any of Elvis’ records. It was a strained sound and a very bad sound. We didn’t have a full quartet. Chet didn’t even honor Elvis enough to get him a full quartet. Brock was a bass singer, a real low bass singer, and Ben is middle-of-the-road, and here I am first tenor. Elvis was not knocked out by it. He was extremely courteous about it and tactful in everything he said, but he knew exactly what he wanted. So I let him know that I was the only one of the Jordanaires that was asked. Elvis never really had much time for chatting, and that could have been one reason he never had any time to chat after that. But he asked me, ‘Can the Jordanaires work with me [from now on]?’ And I said, ‘We sure can. We’ll be there!’ ”