Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  The Presleys returned to Memphis, and Elvis rented a four-bedroom house from the Hack family on Bayview Drive, just on the edge of the Gulf Hills resort, which afforded a greater measure of privacy than the villa could offer. It was a summertime idyll such as neither he nor June had ever experienced before. The next few weeks went by as if they would never end—and as if they would end before they had even begun. Mr. and Mrs. Presley came down again, one or another of the boys would go off from time to time to take care of unspecified business, and occasionally Elvis returned to Memphis, presumably because he had business to take care of, too. Sometimes June suspected that his business had to do with his “Memphis girlfriend,” Barbara Hearn—but she didn’t care. Not really. For Elvis and June a moment was an eternity, when he was with her he was with her alone, and as she told a reporter mischievously, “It’d be a sin to let something like that go to waste.”

  At Gulf Hills they rode, they water-skied, they played shuffleboard on a concrete court, they were in and out of the water all day long. At the “Hack House” they had fireworks battles at night behind the high hedge and on the golf course across the street, with everybody running around with little cigars in their mouths to light the fireballs that they threw at one another. Even at the resort they were pretty much left to themselves, so after waterskiing, they might all have dinner in the hotel dining room with June’s mother and Mr. Bellman, then walk over to the Pink Pony Lounge and gather around the piano, where Elvis would entertain everyone, and they would all join in on familiar old standards until he ended the evening with a spiritual. He wanted June right there with him all the time and complained when she kept her distance. “He said, ‘Other girls I’ve dated are always right next to me. They act like they’re proud to be with me. If I say something, they listen. If I want to say something to you, I have to find you first.’ ” She knew exactly what he was talking about. Sometimes she would even hang back on purpose, just to see if he would look for her—and he always did. “I said, ‘I’m not like your other girlfriends, Elvis, I’m not going to hang on your every word. When we first met, you said, “I like you, June, you’re different.” Now all of a sudden you want me to be like everybody else.’ ” No, he protested, but why was she spending so much time talking with the ski instructor when he wanted her to watch him ski? “Oh, really,” said June. “All you care about is how many guys I’ve made out with. But, you know, I’ve gone out with a lot of guys and never really done anything.”

  “He said, ‘Does that mean you’re still a cherry?’ I said, ‘I’m not only a cherry, George. I’m the whole pie.’ ”

  THEY WERE PERFECTLY MATCHED. June loved to cut up and fool around, and he was surprised to discover that she loved to sing, too. When they went riding, they sang “Side By Side,” “Back in the Saddle Again,” and “Let the Rest of the World Go By,” with June contributing the tenor harmony, and when they were swimming there was always a phonograph sitting beside the pool. Elvis played “My Prayer,” a hit by the Platters that summer, over and over again until, just at the point when the lead singer was approaching the climactic high note, “Elvis would always say, ‘I’m gonna get that note, I’m gonna get that note, one of these days I’m gonna get that note, here it comes, here it comes…’ And he’d try to relax and just let it out, and it just wouldn’t happen, and he’d scream and go under.” He sang all the time—sometimes it seemed he’d rather sing than breathe. June was not particularly a fan of his records, so they stuck mostly to old tunes like “That’s My Desire” and “Over the Rainbow” or big-voiced r&b hits like “Ebb Tide” and “Unchained Melody.” Not surprisingly, June didn’t hesitate to let him know her reservations about his music. “I thought most of his records sounded like he was singing in a tin can. I said, ‘Why don’t you let some of those guys who do your records hear you sing like this and see if they can find you some of this kind of material? You know, you have a wonderful voice.’ ”

  Most of all, though, they shared a sense of humor. Nearly all the pictures from that time show a smiling, laughing Elvis, relaxed in a way that reveals little self-consciousness, only youth and pride. Healthy, innocent, brimming with energy and a sense that he has arrived, he clowns around in these photographs in a way that the grave-faced youngster of Tupelo days never would, and the rising young star never could, his hat tilted back on his head, his hair mussed up, looking for all the world like the Greek god Pan.

  Newsweek ran a column by John Lardner on July 16 excoriating Steve Allen for his attempt to “civilize” Elvis, “to mute and frustrate Presley, for the good of mankind…. Allen’s ethics,” declared Lardner, “were questionable.” Ed Sullivan announced on the twelfth that he had changed his mind and was booking Elvis at an unprecedented fifty thousand dollars for three appearances in the fall and winter. The Colonel was also working out a deal with Twentieth Century Fox after Hal Wallis informed him that he would not have a property ready for Elvis until the beginning of the following year. The deal was for $100,000, with co-star billing and options for two additional pictures at $150,000 and $200,000. The film was a western called The Reno Brothers which would start shooting at the end of August. Meanwhile, RCA was getting an almost incredible response—even judging by the tumultuous reaction to every other Elvis Presley record they had put out that year—to the coupling of “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel,” which was released on July 13 and within a week was on the verge of going gold.

  Meanwhile, Elvis got so sunburnt he was forced to water-ski in long pants and a long-sleeved jersey for a day or two (despite his incongruous dress, “his skill,” according to water-ski instructor Dickie Waters, “was almost professional-looking”), and June was in and out of the water so much that she finally just got fed up with fixing her hair and, at Elvis’ suggestion, had it all cut off. The world seemed far away, and when it intruded in unwanted fashion there was likely to be a spontaneous response. Elvis for some reason detested Teresa Brewer’s “Sweet Old Fashioned Girl,” which was popular that summer, and one time after they’d been horseback riding and were sitting around afterward with a giant pitcher of ice water, the song came on the radio. “I told him, ‘Here’s your favorite song,’ ” June said, and mischievously turned the radio up. “He took that entire pitcher of ice water and dumped it on his head! That was a typical Elvis thing to do.”

  The only sobering notes were Elvis’ all-too-imminent departure at the beginning of August for yet another Florida tour and the occasional intrusion of others—Red and Junior and sometimes Arthur, whom June called “Arthritis”—on their almost perfect happiness. It wasn’t that June didn’t like his friends, although she sensed a meanness on Junior’s part, not to mention a coarseness on Red’s, that flourished when the elder Presleys were away. That she could certainly have lived with—she was confident that she could give as well as she got. What disturbed her far more was their effect on Elvis: he seemed to need their approval so much that he became like them. Her friends didn’t have that effect on her, or on him; they were just fun to be around. But Elvis seemed to lose his confidence as well as his temper when he was around his gang. On the one hand, he desperately wanted to be a good influence on them, he shot them a look of sharp rebuke if they ever really got out of line, and he was good to them, too, he was always showing that wonderful generosity of spirit that she loved so much in him. On the other hand, she hated it when he showed off in front of them, when he tried so hard to act like one of the boys that he was no longer even himself. She was a person, too, she told him. She wasn’t a possession. She didn’t belong to anyone.

  “He always wanted me right there, right under his thumb. He’d always be looking for me, and when he found me, it was always, ‘Where the hell have you been? Who the hell do you think you are?’ This is in front of the guys. He was quick to fly off the handle, and I could be stubborn at times, too! So this one time he’s saying, ‘You’re not going to talk to me like that, you’re not going to treat me like that,’ and I chewed on his ass in fro
nt of them all. Well, he grabbed me—‘Come on!’ Just grabbed me by the arm like he was really going to read my beads and pulled me into the bathroom. But when we got in there, I mean he would just take my face in his hands and kiss me and say, ‘Baby, I know it. I know you’re right… and I’m sorry.’ But he would not show that to the guys. The guys just did not know that he had a tender heart.”

  June did, though. She sensed his spiritual side from the first, and she gave him a copy of The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, a graduation present from a former boyfriend the previous year. “He loved it. I would tell him my favorite chapters—my favorite was on love and friendship, and there was even a little bit on marriage.” They read it over and over and talked about it at length, and June thought it calmed him down some—though she doubted that anything would ever really do that. One night they stopped by the hospital to visit a little girl with leukemia whose mother June knew, and then they went to the pier where they had sat out till almost dawn the night they first met. Elvis told June to look up at the moon, to let herself totally relax and not think about anything else, just let herself float in the space between the moon and the stars. If you relaxed enough, he told her, you could get up right there next to them. “How long have you been doing this?” she asked him. “Since I was a little boy,” he told her. But he didn’t tell just anyone about it. “I learned a long time ago not to talk about it. People think you’re crazy when you talk about things they don’t understand.” His mother, he said, was the only one he had ever really trusted to understand.

  She understood. She understood that when she was with him she had something that others couldn’t break. And she understood that when he was in public he had something that she was not allowed to threaten. It would be three years, he told her a little apologetically, before he could have a life of his own. Then he could do whatever he wanted to do. Then he would be free to marry, have children, admit in public that he did not simply belong to the public, but until then he had promised the Colonel, this mysterious personage she had never met, that he would never do anything detrimental to his career.

  For all of that, though, life in Biloxi was tucked away enough so that they could almost pretend to be leading normal lives, and the town itself was sufficiently accustomed to celebrity that after a while it could simply pretend to ignore them. They went to see The King and I at the Saenger Theatre downtown and walked out because, Elvis said, he thought movie musicals were ridiculous, people bursting into song at the drop of a hat just when things were getting serious. They hung around with June’s friends, Patty Welsh and Patsy Napier and Buddy Conrad, who drove a sharp new mint green Lincoln Continental, and they went to Gino’s Pizza and King William’s Cellar in Ocean Springs and, of course, the Pink Pony, typical teenagers, just having fun. All of her friends adored Elvis and wouldn’t hear a word against him. One time, as a favor to Eddie Bellman, Elvis made an appearance at Dave Rosenblum’s clothing store, where Mr. Bellman owned the ladies’ shoe department with Lew Sonnier, and the crowd was so large, the newspaper reported, that it stopped traffic downtown. One night they went to Gus Stevens’ famous Supper Club, “the nightclub of the Coast,” because Elvis wanted to see the comedian Brother Dave Gardner, and Mr. Gus made a big fuss over them, put them in a private dining room, and had his picture taken with the rising young star.

  Toward the end of July Elvis had to go back to Memphis for a week, and when he returned he had a brand-new Lincoln Premiere with a wisteria purple bottom and a white top, which he said would be “less conspicuous.” He couldn’t get back into the “Hack House,” so he rented both sides of a villa which would ordinarily be shared by two families, allowing June and Elvis to maintain their privacy from the guys. With the time of Elvis’ departure rapidly approaching, they clung to each other more and more—neither one of them, it seemed, could imagine it ever ending. Finally he said couldn’t she just go with him? She asked her mother, and her mother said no, but then Elvis said to just leave everything to him. He had his mother call Mrs. Juanico and assure her that June would be properly chaperoned. Then he went out to Keesler Air Force Base and persuaded the father of June’s seventeen-year-old friend Patsy, Sergeant Napier (who June thought would never go for it, not in a million years), to let his daughter accompany them. Then, when Sarge agreed, he enlisted their friend Buddy to drive.

  On the last night at the villa, with the older Presleys down for one final visit, June stayed the night, falling asleep in his arms. When she woke up early and started to get dressed, he pulled her back into bed, and they started fooling around, as they frequently did, wrestling and giggling and carrying on. “We had spent night after night falling asleep in one another’s arms without anything beyond a lot of kissing and a little touching. Elvis respected women, I think because he respected his mother so much, and he always stopped before I would ever have to say no. But this one time I didn’t want to say stop, and I don’t think he wanted to stop either, so I got hysterical with giggling—that’s what I do when I get nervous—and then my giggling rubbed off on him, and here we were rolling over and over on top of one another without any clothes on just laughing our asses off, because we were both afraid of what we were about to do. And then we stopped, and all of a sudden there was a little tap at the door, and it was Mrs. Presley. She said, ‘I heard it was quiet in here, and then I heard giggling, and then I heard quiet again. So I thought I’d better come see. You know, maybe we’d better get June on some pills to keep her from having too many babies.’

  “Neither one of us ever said anything about it like ‘I’m sorry it went almost that far.’ It was more like, ‘Boy, we almost did it, June, didn’t we?’ That was his comment. ‘We almost did it, didn’t we, baby?’ And I said, ‘We almost did.’ He said, ‘That was close, wasn’t it?’ Like it was fun for him, and it was fun for me, too, and it was close. After that, we really didn’t have too many more occasions when we were totally alone. There was only a few times—but it never really got as close as it did that night.”

  Then he was gone. He would meet them in Miami, he said. Just look for Red or Junior or Gene—any one of those three would take care of them.

  THEY ARRIVED in Miami on Friday, August 3, just as Elvis was going on for the first of three daily shows at the Olympia Theatre, a vaudeville redoubt from the 1920s still resplendent with stuffed peacocks and a ceiling twinkling with painted stars in a painted sky. June was immediately ushered backstage, where a Miami News reporting team discovered her and recorded that

  she reportedly stroked [Elvis’] brow between stage shows…. Furthermore, June Juanico, 18, the Biloxi beauty whom Presley evidently prefers to aspirin, admitted that Elvis is as unsteady in love as he is on the stage. “It would be nice if Elvis loved me as much as I love him,” June sighed. “But right now he’s married to his career and he isn’t thinking of marriage.” June, whose hair is bobbed Italian-style, said she’s going on the Presley tour of six [additional] Florida cities and New Orleans. But when he returns to Memphis, she said, “I don’t know just what I’ll do.”

  Interviewed in the tunnel underneath the Olympia stage, June recounted the story of their meeting and subsequent courtship.

  “Well, you know how love is. Eight months went by, and I never heard from him.”… Overhead, while June was talking and posing for us deep down under the stage, Presley was warming up and she didn’t want to miss even one performance…. We asked why the girls, especially the younger set, threw such hysterics—and how come she didn’t scream. Without missing a knee jerk or bounce June replied: “If you were a member of the opposite sex you’d appreciate him, too. And I do feel like screaming.”

  They went back to the Robert Clay Hotel after the final performance. Elvis’ two-week-old Lincoln was covered with names and messages and phone numbers. There had been reporters underfoot all day, and Elvis was irritated both with himself and with them. At a press conference that afternoon he had stumbled over a question about the Suez Canal crisis, and he felt like he ha
d made a fool of himself. He told June, “Well, I shouldn’t have said anything then. I should have waited and thought about it for a second and not come out with anything so dumb.” June and Patsy had their own room, of course, and after taking a shower Elvis came back to see them—and to get away from the Colonel and the boys. He lay down on the twin bed with June, touched her as if he couldn’t believe she was really there, fooled around with Patsy, a mischievous little sister as no-bullshit and sharp-tongued as June, murmured sweet nothings in June’s ear, and then, before she knew it, was fast asleep.

  The next day June’s interview ran in the newspaper, and the Colonel came storming into the dressing room before the first show. His gaze went first to June, then back to Elvis, and he had the paper in his hand. “Son, we can’t have this kind of publicity,” he declared, face red, eyes flaring, rapping the newspaper loudly against his palm. “You’ve got to do something about this, son,” he announced again meaningfully. For the first time since she had known him, Elvis looked really scared. “What is it, Colonel?” he asked, stuttering the way he always did when he was agitated. “Read it yourself, son, and make damn sure you do something about it.”

  Elvis was still upset after the show—he seemed to blame her for giving the interview, he seemed to feel like if she hadn’t talked to “that damn reporter,” no one would ever have noticed her presence here in Miami. He was obviously just frustrated and upset, and when he finally calmed down he decided to go car shopping with his manager while June went back to the hotel. On a whim he plunked down $10,800 for a white Lincoln Continental just like Buddy’s, with his brand-new lipstick-covered Premiere used as a trade-in. A reporter tracked him down as he lingered in the showroom and asked about June. “Now this is the way it is,” Elvis declared nervously. “I got twenty-five girls I date regular. She’s just one of the girls.” “They show up sometimes eight at a time,” chimed in the Colonel, seemingly restored to good humor, “all claiming they’re his ‘steadies.’ One girl even claimed she was my daughter, and I don’t have a daughter.”