Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  Elvis had the song played back for him again and started working it out on the guitar while the others listened for the first time. Then he sketched out a rough arrangement on the piano, which he showed to Shorty Long, who made notes on the lead sheet. By this time he had memorized the lyrics. Scotty tried out a couple of openings, and Elvis suggested that he leave a little more space and told D.J. to “come in behind Scotty and slow it down a little”; then the Jordanaires worked out their arrangement, and after about twenty minutes they were ready for a run-through. After a single rehearsal, Sholes was ready to record, but Elvis wanted to rehearse some more, so they did. The song continued to evolve through twenty-eight takes. It took on a lilting, almost casual, offhand kind of feel, as Scotty virtually sat out except at the beginning and the end, Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires came to sing a duet with Elvis on the chorus, and D.J. laid Elvis’ leather-covered guitar across his lap and played the back of it with a mallet, to get an additional snare effect. It was hardly a formulaic approach, and it was clearly one that left the nominal a&r director baffled. When they finally got the sound that he was looking for, Elvis pronounced, “That felt good,” and, though it was late, called for another playback on “Anyway You Want Me,” a pleading ballad that he had listened to at the beginning of the session. There was just one rehearsal. “At the fourth take,” Wertheimer wrote, “Steve said they had it. Elvis said again, ‘That’s fine, Mr. Sholes. Let’s try it one more time.’ ”

  “I wasn’t all that impressed with him, as a singer,” said Gordon Stoker. “I mean, I kind of got a kick out of ‘Don’t Be Cruel,’ I was entertained, so to speak, but then with ‘Anyway You Want Me,’ all of a sudden I took an entirely different attitude, the feeling that he had on that particular sound made the hair on my arm come up. I said to the guys, ‘Hey, men, this guy can sing!’ ”

  It was 9:00 by the time the session was over, and the studio was deserted. The guys were talking about going home by train the next morning; they were going to be playing that Milk Fund benefit at the ballpark in town, and then they were going to have the rest of the month off, their first extended break in six months. Everybody was looking forward to it, and Junior was laughing his evil little laugh, his hooded eyes regarding his famous cousin with what seemed like only thinly veiled jealousy. Steve Sholes had some songs he wanted Elvis to hear, but Elvis said he’d have to take them home with him if he was going to get a chance to listen to them at all. Anyway, he’d want acetates of the three songs they’d recorded that day—he wanted to learn the songs exactly the way they’d recorded them so he could do them that way in his shows. Sure, Sholes said, a little reluctantly, he’d get a package over to the hotel in the morning.

  There were still some fans waiting outside when they came out of the studio, and Elvis patiently signed autographs while the others waited. By now The Steve Allen Show seemed like a million years ago, and the verdict was long since in. Allen had trounced Ed Sullivan in the ratings, the reviews were no more kind toward the stationary Elvis than they had been toward the gyrating one (“A cowed kid,” declared the Journal-American, “it was plain he couldn’t sing or act a lick”), and Sullivan had publicly reiterated that he would not have the singer on his show at any price (“He is not my cup of tea”) while privately he had already been in touch with the Colonel. “Hey, Elvis, we gotta get back to the hotel,” said Junior. Elvis got into the car. It had been a long day, and now he was hungry again.

  HE RAN INTO GENE VINCENT at Penn Station the following morning as they were leaving the city. One of the boys pointed the new rock ’n’ roll star out to him, and Elvis walked over and introduced himself, congratulating him sincerely on the success of “Be Bop A Lula.” To his surprise Vincent immediately started to apologize. “The first thing he said was, ‘I wasn’t trying to copy you. I wasn’t trying to sound like you.’ Just right off the bat, without even being asked. I told him, ‘Oh, I know that, it’s just your natural style.’ ” And then the two twenty-one-year-olds compared notes on success.

  He spent most of the twenty-eight-hour train ride home relaxing and fooling around. The photographer Al Wertheimer, convinced that this was an historic opportunity that would not pass his way again, took the trip at his own expense and got shots of Elvis catching some sleep, flirting with girls, reading Archie comic books, contemplating a giant teddy bear that the Colonel had given him, and listening to the acetates of his songs on a portable record player, over and over again, with obsessive concentration. “How’d it go yesterday at the recording session?” the Colonel asked him in the restaurant car, as Wertheimer recorded the event.

  Elvis replied blandly, “It went pretty well.” The Colonel carried on the conversation. “The reaction was terrific on the ‘Steve Allen Show.’ Better than I thought.” Elvis shrugged. He seemed unimpressed. “Glad to hear it.” This appeared to be a routine. The Colonel would start a conversation and Elvis would end it. “It’s gonna be good to get back home. I’m sure your folks’ll be mighty glad to see you,” said the Colonel. “Yeah, it’ll be good to see ’em.”

  That was the end of the conversation. The Colonel looked out the window. Tom [Diskin] talked shop. Junior talked to Elvis, and Elvis ate his sandwich. It was two generations sitting at separate tables.

  When they finally reached the outskirts of Memphis, Elvis got off at a small signal stop called White Station, made his way across an empty field, inquired for directions to Audubon Drive, and, “still dressed in his suit and white knit tie,” Wertheimer noted, “with a wave to us, and a smile that could be seen for a hundred yards, Elvis walked home alone.”

  He spent the rest of the afternoon at home, signing autographs for the fans, going for a ride on his motorcycle, splashing in the new pool (which Vernon was only filling just now with a garden hose), and playing the RCA acetates for his nineteen-year-old “Memphis girlfriend,” Barbara Hearn, an advertising copywriter whom he had known since South Memphis days (she had been going out with Dixie’s friend Ron Smith when he first met her) and with whom he had renewed his acquaintance early that spring. Wertheimer got pictures of Vernon shaving, Gladys handing her son a fresh pair of jockey shorts, and the family album, with the only demurral coming from Vernon, who said, “ ‘But I got shaving cream on.’ I told him it was all right. He rinsed off his razor and smiled….‘Well, if that’s what you want, okay.’… I wondered,” wrote Wertheimer, “how a house this open could remain a home.”

  THE COLONEL ARRIVED sometime after 9:00 with a police escort. He deputized Tom Diskin to take care of the family and Barbara, while he and Elvis rode to the midtown ballpark, home of the Memphis Chicks, in a white squad car. It was a hot night, 97 degrees, and the show had been going on for almost three hours at the old wooden stadium when the police car finally delivered Elvis to the performers’ tent at third base. Not a few in the crowd of seven thousand (by comparison, an anti-integration rally led by Mississippi’s senior senator James O. Eastland at the Overton Park Shell that afternoon drew thirty-five hundred) had shown up as early as 9:30 that morning, with lunch and supper packed, so as to be sure to get good seats. “The roaring was so loud and long,” reported the Commercial Appeal, that “extra rations of sleeping pills were passed out to the patients of the four hospitals near the field,” with Elvis’ name receiving mentions twenty-nine times in advance of his arrival and each mention eliciting uncontrollable screams and squeals.

  There was a “bop-dancing” contest, Elvis’ signature fourteen-diamond horseshoe ring (worth six hundred dollars) was won in a drawing by seventeen-year-old Roger Fakes, the Colonel sold out the five thousand souvenir programs he had personally donated to the event (when asked by Al Wertheimer why the programs didn’t come with a price tag, the Colonel pointed out, “You never want to put a price on anything”), and Dewey Phillips was “cotton-pickin’ cute,” reported the paper, and “worked like a Trojan” as MC. Among the more than one hundred performers—including four bands, the Dancing Dixie Dolls, the Confederate Barbershop
Quartette, the Admiral’s Band of Navy Memphis, and a surprise appearance by the Jordanaires, who had flown in from Nashville—was Jesse Lee Denson, who sang Gogi Grant’s “Wayward Wind” and with his brother Jimmy told everyone backstage who would listen how he had taught Elvis Presley to play guitar back in the Lauderdale Courts.

  Then it was finally time for Elvis to go on, and Dewey did a good imitation of the “old” Elvis and the “new” Elvis, as a squadron of police, firemen, and shore patrol escorted him to the stage. He was dressed all in black save for red socks and the red tie which he and his father had picked out just before the show, and as he sauntered out and greeted Dewey with casual grace, saluting his fans and acknowledging his family in the front row, the place literally exploded. The fans “broke from their seats, swept like a wave up to the stage…. Elvis pleaded with them as pleasantly as he could to sit down, but it was like Canute telling the tide to stop…. What made [it] all the more remarkable,” reflected Bob Johnson in the Memphis Press-Scimitar, “was that he had previously played to a packed house in the Auditorium during the Cotton Carnival less than two months ago.” To sixteen-year-old Jack Baker, who had been living next door to him just nine months before, “there was this keening sound, this shrill, wailing, keening response, and I remember thinking, That’s an amazing sound, and then I realized I was making it, too.” When the furor finally died down, and Elvis had graciously accepted a city proclamation designating Wednesday, July 4, as Elvis Presley Day, he turned to the crowd and announced, with that inscrutable mixture of boyish charm and adult calculation, “You know, those people in New York are not gonna change me none, I’m gonna show you what the real Elvis is like tonight.”

  And he did. After all the personal changes that had taken place, and the dramatic evolution that his career had witnessed in the previous few months, it was perhaps not surprising that the “real Elvis” should be, in Bob Johnson’s description, “about halfway between the ‘old’ Elvis and the ‘new’ Elvis,” but what this really meant was that he was able to control the crowd, to tantalize and manipulate them in a manner that differed significantly even from his appearance a few short weeks before. “He rocked ’em,” wrote Johnson, “socked ’em, set them screaming with delight as his sensational individualistic song style throbbed out over the frenzied stadium.” He opened with “Heartbreak Hotel,” threw in “Mystery Train” and “I Got a Woman,” brought out the Jordanaires for “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” and “I Was the One,” roared back with “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Long Tall Sally,” and ended, of course, after half an hour, with “Hound Dog.”

  “When it was time to go,” Johnson noted, “he made a quick retreat thru a phalanx of police and Shore Patrolmen to a squad car backed right up to the stage. The excited fans rolled around the car like a wave. Two Shore Patrolmen and a policeman were picked up and carried back as tho they were feathers, but [Police] Capt. Woodward got him in the car all in one piece, and Elvis grinned as the car pushed thru the crowd.”

  It was a moment of unmitigated triumph, a moment of pure and unsullied splendor that would be forever frozen in time. All Elvis wanted, Bob Johnson had written, was to be “thought well of at home,” and now here he was succeeding in front of his family and his hometown in a style, and on a scale, that to anyone else would have been utterly unimaginable.

  ELVIS AND JUNE

  July–August 1956

  WITH JUNE JUANICO, 505 FAYARD STREET, BILOXI, SUMMER 1956.

  (COURTESY OF JUNE JUANICO)

  THE FOLLOWING MONDAY, July 9, he arrived in Biloxi, unannounced and somewhat unexpected. He showed up in his white El Dorado convertible at June Juanico’s house on Fayard Street with Red, his cousin Junior, and his friend Arthur Hooton, whose mother had worked with Gladys at Britling’s Cafeteria. They waited in the driveway while some neighborhood kids went looking for June. When she got back, she and Elvis made a date for that night, and he left to register at the Sun ’N’ Sand Hotel, whose courtyard quickly filled with fans as news of his arrival spread.

  That night they went out on the town with June’s mother, Mae, and her boyfriend, Eddie Bellman. On their own they revisited many of the sights June had shown him on his visit the previous year. They stayed out late, talking excitedly and making plans. Elvis wasn’t sure how long he would be staying this time, he told her; he guessed she would just have to wait and see. All he knew was that he was on vacation for three weeks, footloose and fancy-free. He didn’t know what he wanted to do exactly, but he wanted to do something. A few days before, he had wheeled into Tupelo on a whim and gone to see both his aunt and his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Grimes, who had originally been responsible for his entering the singing contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair. Now, it had just been announced, he was going to be returning to headline the fair in September. He was being written up in all the major newspapers and national magazines, and he was going to star in a movie soon. He could buy his mama and his daddy anything they needed, whatever they might want.

  The next day he and June spent the whole day together. That afternoon they heard reports on a New Orleans radio station that Elvis Presley had become engaged to a Miss June Juanico of nearby Biloxi, and on the spur of the moment they jumped in the car and drove to New Orleans to dispel the rumors. Elvis got the address of the station at a pay phone, and they just showed up at WNOE, at the St. Charles Hotel, pressing their noses to the plate glass until DJ Hal Murray noticed them, did a double take, and then announced to his amazed listeners that “the man of the hour” had just walked into the studio and hurriedly switched to an interview format.

  The only thing he was serious about at this point was his career, Elvis told the radio audience. He didn’t have time to even think about getting engaged; right now he was just thinking about his vacation, which he was planning to spend in Florida. “You probably won’t have too much of a vacation,” interpolated the DJ, “because of the tremendous amount of kids who will be down there and fans—” “Well, I don’t mind,” he said. “Without them I’d be… lost.” By the time they left the studio, the hotel lobby was full, and a girl fainted from the excitement and the heat.

  From there the party of seven went on to Pontchartrain Beach, where they wandered the midway. Elvis won a host of stuffed animals to join the panda he had won for June at the Memphis Fairgrounds which they had christened Pelvis. In the course of the evening, it was reported in the press, Elvis consumed three halves of fried chicken and June three soft-shell crabs. On the way home they stopped off for a snack, and Elvis ordered his eggs over hard with the bacon burnt. When the eggs weren’t cooked to his satisfaction, he sent the order back, and when the waitress brought it back again and it still wasn’t right, she said, “What do you want, special treatment because you’re Elvis Presley?” “No,” he said, “I’d just like to be treated like a regular customer,” and dumped the plate at the waitress’s feet. They got home at 3:45 in the morning, and June responded from her bed to a New Orleans Item reporter’s queries the next day. “Did I kiss him good night? What do you think? Certainly I kissed him good night. We were standing on the porch. No, not by the garden gate; on the porch. He’s wonderful!”

  THEY SAW EACH OTHER every night and spent almost all of each day together. Elvis kept telling the press that he was leaving for Florida any day, but he never left. On Thursday they went deep-sea fishing with June’s mother and Eddie Bellman, and they had so much fun that he called his parents from the pier and told them to come down. In the meantime, with Eddie Bellman’s help, he rented a villa out at the Gulf Hills Dude Ranch, in exclusive Ocean Springs. The crowds at the beachfront hotel had become impossible; there were close to five hundred people waiting for them when they returned from their fishing expedition, and Elvis’ Cadillac was constantly covered with addresses, phone numbers, and love notes written in lipstick. When asked by the same reporter who had interviewed him earlier in the week when he was planning to leave for Florida, “keeping a sardonic smile on his lips,” El
vis replied, “Well, if this keeps up, probably tonight.” By the time that Vernon and Gladys arrived in their pink Cadillac and checked in at the Sun ’N’ Sand on Friday, it didn’t even matter that Elvis was no longer around; a crowd surrounded the car and grew bigger and bigger as Mrs. Presley stared out silently in curiosity and fear. When they went deep-sea fishing on Saturday, neither of the elder Presleys could have been any happier—Mr. Presley just liked being out on the water, with nobody to bother him or tear at his boy, and Mrs. Presley made Elvis peanut butter and banana sandwiches and fed them to him while he trolled for fish, wiping the crumbs away from his lips when he was done. It was a bright sunny day with a deep blue sky and not a cloud in sight.

  On Monday they all drove to New Orleans. They went to the zoo, walked around in a cemetery overhung with Spanish moss, visited June’s grandparents, who used to manage the Astor Hotel on Royal Street, and drove by some of the beautiful antebellum mansions in Pass Christian. Mr. and Mrs. Presley held hands, and Gladys asked Vernon if he wouldn’t like to live in a big house like that someday. Mrs. Presley obviously liked June. She said, “You know, I’ve never seen my boy so taken with a girl. You two are planning to get married one of these days, aren’t you?” They didn’t have to answer, she said. She knew, she just had a feeling. “You just better not let Colonel Parker know how serious you are about June,” she told her son. “You know how he feels, especially about marriage.” Gladys called June “Satnin’,” and June, who had not been able to bring herself to call Mrs. Presley “Gladys” even after she was asked, started calling her “Lovey” for her middle name, Love. “You know, my son’s going to make me very proud of him,” she confided to June—as if he hadn’t made her proud already!