If his “entertainment” could be confined to records, it might not be too bad an influence on the young, but unfortunately Presley makes personal appearances.
He recently appeared in two shows in the Municipal Auditorium of La Crosse, Wisconsin. According to the La Crosse paper, his movements and motions during a performance, described as a “strip-tease with clothes on,” were not only suggestive but downright obscene. The youngsters at the shows—4,000 at one, about 1,200 at the second—literally “went wild,” some of them actually rolling in the aisles….
Yet the National Broadcasting Company wasn’t loath to bring Presley into the living-rooms of the nation on the evening of June 5. Appearing on the Milton Berle show, Presley fortunately didn’t go so far as he did in La Crosse, but his routine was “in appalling taste” (said the San Francisco Chronicle) and “his one specialty is an accented movement of the body that hitherto has been primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells of the burlesque runway” (New York Times).
If the agencies (TV and other) would stop handling such nauseating stuff, all the Presleys of our land would soon be swallowed up in the oblivion they deserve.
Juvenile delinquency, a widespread breakdown of morality and cultural values, race mixing, riots, and irreligion all were being blamed on Elvis Presley and rock ’n’ roll by a national press that was seemingly just awakening to the threat, the popularity of the new music among the young, and, of course, the circulation gains that could always be anticipated from a great hue and cry. In an age which attached little or no value to vernacular culture in any form and had always focused its fiercest scorn upon the South (“Dogpatch” was about as sophisticated a concept as existed for an appreciation of southern culture), the level of vituperation should perhaps have come as no great surprise—but, after the warm reception that Elvis had gotten almost everywhere that he had appeared throughout the South, and the generally indulgent one that he had received elsewhere, it clearly did. Mrs. Presley was beside herself with anger and shame (“She’d get mad and cuss sometimes, say some low-down things,” said Vernon’s brother, Vester), and even Elvis seemed taken aback by the onslaught of the debate. “I don’t do any vulgar movements,” he protested weakly to Aline Mosby, the UP reporter he had stood up in Vegas. “I’m not trying to be sexy,” he told Phyllis Battele of the International News Service. “It’s just my way of expressing how I feel when I move around. My movements, ma’am, are all leg movements. I don’t do nothing with my body.”
Only the Colonel kept his cool. Back in Madison the letters were pouring in by the truckload, most of them accompanied by dollar bills for the picture packets that were offered through the fan clubs. After the Berle appearance, Charlie Lamb, the veteran PR man whom Colonel Parker had left in charge back home, hired twenty girls to take care of the overflow: “I hired a doctor’s wife to handle the money and keep records of what’s coming in with the mail, and I called the bank and told them, ‘I got so much money I can’t bring it in.’ ” What did Colonel Parker think about it all? “I’m going to get a wiggle meter to time the wiggles,” said the Colonel with imperturbable calm. “When Elvis stops singing, we’ll put him on the stage and just let him wiggle!” Only his cigar hid the smirk of the jovial Colonel, “who was the exact opposite,” Miss Mosby reflected, “of the serious singer.”
ELVIS FLEW HOME to Memphis early on the morning of Monday, June 11, for the funeral of his cousin Lee Edward Smith, Gene and Junior’s brother, who had drowned. Coming back from the funeral with his parents, he drove up to the house and found June Juanico, a pretty little girl he had dated one night when he played Keesler Air Force Base, in Biloxi, almost a year before, standing in line with all the others. He recognized her right away and they started talking, and when he found out that she was in Memphis for the week with some girlfriends, he said he’d call her at her hotel and maybe they could get together later.
Over the next two days he showed June a month’s worth of Memphis sights—he took her by Humes, stopped by the Memphis Recording Service, went up to the Hotel Chisca, where he introduced her to Dewey, showed her the Courts where he had grown up, and Crown Electric across the street, with the truck he had driven sitting out in the yard. He introduced her to Bernard and Guy Lansky and bought her a motorcycle cap just like his. Then they went out to Mud Island, where he drove his motorcycle so fast that they both got scared, and he made her put her hand on his chest so that she could feel his heart pounding. It was like the first night they had met, the previous June in Biloxi, when they sat out on the White House Hotel pier until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, “and I was very nervous—I was afraid of myself. My mother used to tell me, ‘Keep a good head on your shoulders. When you get in a compromising situation, think: “What would my mother think of me if she could see me right now?” ’ So here’s this beautiful boy with his luscious lips kissing me on the back of my neck, and he turns me around gently, and I don’t know if he’s going to start fondling on me and I felt like it would be all right if he did, so I was trembling, and then when he held me close I could feel him trembling, too. And so we laughed, and he said, ‘Which one is more nervous, you or me?’ and then we laughed about that.”
Mr. and Mrs. Presley couldn’t have been nicer. June felt right at home—with Mrs. Presley anyway. She fussed so over June and showed her how Elvis liked his chicken prepared, and when his daddy told him that his new Cadillac was ready for delivery, it didn’t surprise her one bit that Elvis asked her if she would go pick it up with him. It did surprise her when it turned out that they had to go to Houston to get it, but June bravely asked her girlfriends to pack a bag and bring it out to the house, and she went on her first plane ride ever, after first swearing to Mrs. Presley that she really was eighteen. In Houston they were booked into separate rooms on separate floors, but she stayed with him after he assured her that he would never hurt her. “Trust me, baby,” he said, and she did. They drove the white Cadillac El Dorado back to Memphis the next day, and when they pulled into the driveway, “Mrs. Presley came out and hugged him like he had been gone for weeks.” Before they parted on Friday she made him promise that he would come down to visit her in Biloxi, and he said he had some vacation coming up in July, so he thought maybe he would. They exchanged vows of undying love, and while June worried on the one hand that “I might never see him again,” she was in fact as confident of his character as she was of his continued success.
NBC, on the other hand, had its doubts. Not sure quite how to react to the furor that had surrounded the most recent Milton Berle Show appearance, the network put out conflicting press releases, and Steve Allen, who had already signed Elvis to a one-shot appearance at $7,500 (he had received $5,000 apiece for his two Berle appearances), stated on his late-night Tonight show that “there has been a demand that I cancel him from our show. As of now he is still booked for July 1, but I have not come to a final decision on his appearance. If he does appear, you can rest assured that I will not allow him to do anything that will offend anyone.” An NBC spokesman said, “We think this lad has a great future, but we won’t stand for any bad taste under any circumstances.” On June 20 a compromise of sorts was reached when NBC announced that Allen would be presenting a new, “revamped, purified and somewhat abridged Presley. He’ll wear white tie and tails, glory be,” wrote columnist Harriet Van Horne with understandable skepticism. “And he’ll stand reasonably still while singing…. With so much Bowdlerizing, he may well sing ‘Come, Sweet Death’ as far as his career is concerned.”
It was, said Allen, reflecting back on the experience, “a way of saying something comic.” It was also a way, of course, of getting around the Mrs. Grundys of the nation with a big wink. The irony, unfortunately, was lost on Elvis, who seemed bewildered at the force and ferocity of the criticism that continued to be directed at him and his music. It seemed as if all the pent-up forces of puritanism and repression had been unleashed simultaneously to discover in rock ’n’ roll the principal
source of America’s growing moral decadence and the world’s ills. What hurt most of all were the denunciations from the pulpit, but even the newspaper articles stung. He said for the record that the critics had a right to their opinions, they were only doing their job, and Elvis was always the first to disparage himself and his talents—but it wasn’t fair. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke (except for the little cigarillo Hav-a-tampas that he increasingly enjoyed, though not in public), he did his best to make sure that the boys always conducted themselves like gentlemen. It wasn’t supposed to matter how you looked.
It was just like in high school—he might have appeared one way, but he was really another. He had always believed that what was important was who you were underneath, but now he was beginning to have his doubts. He treated every girl who deserved to be treated with respect with the respect that was due her, didn’t he? And he tried not to swear too much in public and generally set a good example. But when in Charleston he nibbled a reporter’s fingers just to get her attention, it made national headlines—“Girl Reporter Bitten by Elvis”—and his mother was upset that now he was being accused of some new form of moral degeneracy until he reassured her that there was nothing to it. In Charlotte on June 26, on the same tour, he uncharacteristically exploded at all the criticism that had been coming at him for the last month and talked seriously about what his music meant to him.
Elvis Presley is a worried man. Some, that is, for a man with four Cadillacs and a $40,000 weekly pay check. Critics are saying bad things about him. It has been especially rough during the past three weeks. And that is why he bucked his manager’s orders to stay away from newsmen in Charlotte Tuesday until showtime. That is why he refused to stay in the seclusion of his hotel room. At 4:10 he couldn’t stand it any longer, and with “Cousin Junior” left the room.
He walked quickly to a restaurant a few doors away for a barbecue, flirtation with a few women and a 30-minute round of pool next door.
“Sure I’ll talk. Sit down. Most of you guys, though, been writin’ bad things about me, man!”
His knees bounced while he sat. His hands drummed a tattoo on the table top.
Eyes, under long lashes, darted from booth to booth, firing rapid winks at the girls who stared at him. “Hi ya, baby,” he breathed. And she flopped back in the booth looking like she’d been poleaxed. “This Crosby guy [the critic for the New York Herald-Tribune], whoever he is, he says I’m obscene on the Berle show. Nasty. What does he know?
“Did you see the show? This Debra Paget is on the same show. She wore a tight thing with feathers on the behind where they wiggle most. And I never saw anything like it. Sex? Man, she bumped and pooshed out all over the place. I’m like Little Boy Blue. And who do they say is obscene? Me!
“It’s because I make more money than Debra. Them critics don’t like to see nobody win doing any kind of music they don’t know nothin’ about.”
And he started to eat. The waitress brought his coffee. Elvis reached down and fingered the lace on her slip.
“Aren’t you the one?”
“I’m the one, baby!”
Presley says he does what he does because this is what is making money. And it is music that was around before he was born.
“The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in the shanties and in their juke joints, and nobody paid it no mind ’til I goosed it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.”
Yep, some of the music is low-down.
“But, not like Crosby means. There is low-down people and high-up people, but all of them get the kind of feeling this rock ’n’ roll music tells about.”
Elvis says he doesn’t know how long rock and roll will last. “When it’s gone, I’ll switch to something else. I like to sing ballads the way Eddie Fisher does and the way Perry Como does. But the way I’m singing now is what makes the money. Would you change if you was me?…
“When I sang hymns back home with Mom and Pop, I stood still and I looked like you feel when you sing a hymn. When I sing this rock ’n’ roll, my eyes won’t stay open and my legs won’t stand still. I don’t care what they say, it ain’t nasty.”
It was all strangely familiar and yet at the same time surprisingly revealing, the sort of interview he might have given in high school, perhaps, if anyone had thought to interview the strange, silent boy who had attended Humes High, and it was filled with the same odd mixture of crudeness and sensitivity, truculence and hurt. He still seemed to enjoy the anomaly created by the gulf between character and appearance, but it was no longer working in quite the way that he wished. Perhaps this was what he had been thinking of when he confided to Bob Johnson the month before, “Mr. Johnson, you know some things just change when something like this happens. I can’t just do like I did.”
HE ARRIVED at NBC’s midtown rehearsal studio on Friday morning, June 29. He had played Charleston, South Carolina, the night before and was scheduled to play Richmond the following evening, with rehearsal for the Sunday-night show sandwiched in between. Other than the Colonel, only his cousin Junior Smith had accompanied him on the train ride north, and Junior stood staring out at the street while Elvis fooled around at the piano beside him and the Colonel talked business with two William Morris agents and representatives of RCA and Hill and Range. A young photographer named Al Wertheimer, who had taken some publicity shots for RCA at the time of Elvis’ fifth Dorsey brothers appearance three months earlier and, in the wake of all the bad press, had been contacted by RCA’s Anne Fulchino to take some more, asked if he could shoot some pictures. “Sure, go ahead,” said Elvis diffidently. “I couldn’t tell if he recognized me,” wrote Wertheimer, an admirer of the David Douglas-Duncan school of eloquent, documentary realism, “or if he was just keeping up his side of the conversation.” Elvis went on playing as Steve Allen entered, surrounded by his entourage. He was then introduced to the star, who gave him a rather flippant greeting (“Allen eyed him much as an eagle does a piece of meat,” recalled Hill and Range rep Grelun Landon, to whom the offbeat, hip-talking comedian had always been “one of my gods”) and was handed a script for a “western” skit called “Range Roundup.” Playing the part of “Tumbleweed,” Elvis rehearsed with Allen, Andy Griffith, and Imogene Coca. “A secretary whispered to Steve as they wrapped up the rehearsal,” recorded Wertheimer. “He turned to Elvis, who was studiously flipping back and forth through his script, and said, ‘The tailor’s here.’
Elvis looked up, confused, and replied, “Yes, sir? What about?”
“Remember, you’re wearing tails while you’re singing to the hound dog.”
“Oh yeah, I remember.”
Elvis stepped into a broom closet and reappeared in baggy pants and floppy tails. With the same unlit cigar jammed in a corner of his mouth, Colonel Parker stepped forward to make sure his boy got a custom job. After the tailor made his last chalk mark, Elvis turned to the mirror across the room, snapped the lapels and checked his hair with that half-leer, half-smile that kept me guessing.
The room returned to a chapel-like serenity when the door slammed closed on the last of Allen’s group. The Colonel instructed Junior about hotel accommodations and train schedules for a concert in Richmond, Virginia, the following day. Elvis didn’t pay any attention. He was back at the piano playing another spiritual.
On a whim, Wertheimer accompanied him to Richmond. Just as in New York, not simply at the Steve Allen rehearsal but on an earlier occasion, when Wertheimer had captured him shaving and sculpting his hair (“Sure, why not?” Elvis had replied when the photographer asked if it was okay to come in the bathroom and shoot some pictures), Elvis was “the perfect subject for a photographer, unafraid and uncaring, oblivious to the invasion of my camera.” Perhaps because he was
so easily bored, but even more due to his quick inventiveness and tongue-in-cheek humor, “if you just stuck around with him for five minutes there was something happening.”
In Richmond there were two shows scheduled, at 5:00 and at 8:00, and after a breakfast of bacon and eggs, milk, home fries, and cantaloupe à la mode, Elvis went up to his room. Wertheimer didn’t see him again until about an hour before the start of the first show, when he found him eating a bowl of chili at the Jefferson Hotel coffee shop.
I was hot and sweaty, and he was cool and clean, looking almost dignified in a slate-grey suit, pressed white shirt and white knit tie. It was the white bucks that gave him away.
A woman was with him. She wasn’t interested in a quick lettuce and tomato. She was dressed for Saturday night…. She was trying to appear casual, not an easy task since a photographer was on the other side of the salt and pepper. Elvis was cool, “Oh, he’s the photographer, that’s okay, he’s with me,” as if to say it’s only natural to have a photographer on a date…. She crossed her legs and in a soft Southern accent asked what he was reading. He was only too happy to oblige, telling her it was the script for the “Steve Allen Show”—“It’s gonna be on tomorrow night, are you gonna see the show?”—and talking about learning his lines…. Elvis set the script aside and finished his chili, and when he set that aside he turned his full attention to her, talking about how nice her hair was and how pretty her earrings were. He was sweet and natural.
Junior, who had been sitting glowering at the far end of the counter the whole time, tapped his fingers impatiently and said it was time to go. “Go where?” said Elvis. But Junior wasn’t in any mood for a joke.
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