Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  Later, when the Colonel came to Elvis’ hotel room, he barely gave June a look. “Here, I thought you might want to see this,” he said, handing Gene a copy of the script for the picture they were going to start filming in Hollywood in three weeks. Then he turned on his heel and slammed the door. Elvis grabbed at the script eagerly, and he and June started reading through it, but he got impatient and couldn’t resist turning the pages to find out how it ended. He was keenly disappointed when he discovered that the character he played was going to die. “He said, ‘June, I don’t want to die in my first movie.’ I said, ‘Why not? I think it’s a good idea. I always remember the character who dies. Happy endings you forget. Sad endings stay with you longer.’ ”

  For the final show Elvis told everyone to be sure to be in the cars when he started the last song, not when he finished. He told June to stay away from the Colonel, who would be preoccupied with selling his pictures and souvenirs anyway; after all, he had to feel like he was doing something. In the car as they traveled through the night, they held each other. He put an unlighted cigar in his mouth and made fun of the Colonel, bravely declaring, “You’re seeing too much of this girl from Biloxi. She’s not good for you, son. You can’t be linked to any one girl. For God’s sake, don’t get her pregnant. You do, and you’re through in this business, that’s for sure.” They laughed till the tears streamed down from their eyes, but June knew his bravery in the dark would never see the light of day. He was trying to look out for them all, Red and Junior and Gene and June and her friends, his family, his fans, they were all counting on him, they were all looking up to him, and some part of him felt like none of this would have been possible, all of it could end in a minute, without the Colonel. So he tried to take care of the problems he could take care of, he did all he could to keep Red and Junior in line, he wanted, thought June, to make everything come out all right.

  The next day, in Tampa, the shit really hit the fan. The Miami paper had interviewed June’s mother over the telephone and then set her quotes against Elvis’ and the Colonel’s. Under the headline “Elvis Denies Biloxi Beauty Is His ‘Steady,’ ” Mrs. Mae Juanico was quoted as saying “—in no uncertain terms—that ‘The Pelvis’ had asked her daughter to be ‘his permanently’ in three years….‘I don’t object to her making the trip,’ Mrs. Juanico said. ‘He’s a nice boy, and June is a good girl. I talked to his parents and they said Elvis would take good care of her…. He said he can’t get married for at least three years, and he asked her to wait for him.’ ” The Colonel was rigid with rage, the boys reacted to Elvis’ quote that he had twenty-four other girlfriends by saying, “Yeah, that’s why he takes us along, we take care of the overflow,” and Elvis wanted June to call her mother right away and tell her not to talk to anyone else—he didn’t want to hear about her defending her daughter’s honor, he just didn’t want any more of this shit.

  There were two shows that day at the Fort Homer Hesterly Armory, sponsored by the Seratoma Civic Club, with seats at $1.50 and $2.00. There were boxes set up for a stage, no house PA, two microphones, and two amps, with the same incongruous procession of vaudeville acts that Al Dvorin, the Chicago booking agent, had been supplying since the spring, amounting to an hour and a half of mediocre warm-ups preceding the main twenty-minute show. “Fuck you very much,” Elvis said over the din, but no one could make out the words, the music, or the remarks. “It was more than obvious,” wrote Anne Rowe, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times who was there for an interview, “that he loved every scream and yell… and every minute on that stage. He wrestled with the mike, breaking two apart in his frenzy, and finally, with perspiration pouring down his face, he practically tore his jacket off and let go on two more numbers.”

  He felt like a different person, he told June, when he was onstage: “I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. It’s like your whole body gets goose bumps, but it’s not goose bumps. It’s not a chill either. It’s like a surge of electricity going through you. It’s almost like making love, but it’s even stronger than that.” Did it happen to all entertainers? June asked him. “I don’t know. The few I’ve talked to experience excitement and nerves, but they must not feel the way I do. If they did, they would say more about it, don’t you think? They say they get nervous, but after they sing a few lines they calm down. Hell, I don’t calm down till two or three hours after I leave the stage. Sometimes I think my heart is going to explode.”

  HE PLAYED LAKELAND, St. Petersburg, and Orlando, using Tampa as his home base for the first two. When he played Lakeland on Monday, he did an interview backstage with Tampa Tribune reporter Paul Wilder, which was scheduled to run the following month in TV Guide. Wilder had been with the paper for years and in fact had covered Tom Parker on a regular basis in his column “In Our Town” when the Colonel was merely Tampa’s inventive animal-control officer. He had reviewed Elvis’ show in Tampa with relative indifference (his daughter, Paula, had covered the teenager’s angle with considerably more fervor), but he began his interview, with unimaginable insensitivity, by reading lengthy excerpts from one of the most vicious write-ups Elvis had ever received.

  “ ‘The biggest freak in show business history,’ ” Wilder read, from Herb Rau’s column in the Miami News, in a flat, droning voice. “ ‘Elvis can’t sing, can’t play the guitar—and can’t dance. He has two thousand idiots per show, yet every time he opens his mouth, plucks a guitar string, or shakes his pelvis like any striptease babe in town….’ Do you,” he asked the startled performer, “shake your pelvis like any striptease babe in town?”

  For one of the few times in his career Elvis actually showed anger, not just for himself but for his fans. After first stipulating that Wilder probably knew about striptease babes because that’s where he must hang out, he protested the slur on his audience. “Sir, those kids that come here and pay their money to see this show come to have a good time. I mean, I’m not running Mr. Rau down, but I just don’t see that he should call those people idiots. Because they’re somebody’s kids. They’re somebody’s decent kids, probably, that was raised in a decent home, and he hasn’t got any right to call those kids idiots. If they want to pay their money to come out and jump around and scream and yell, it’s their business. They’ll grow up someday and grow out of that. While they’re young, let them have their fun. Don’t let some old man that’s so old he can’t get around sit around and call them a bunch of idiots. Because they’re just human beings like he is.”

  Okay, said Wilder, returning to his readings. But what did he think about Rau suggesting that what his female fans really needed was “ ‘a solid slap across the mouth?’ Have you any comment to that?” “Yeah, but I don’t think I should say it.” “Okay, okay, this isn’t over the air, this is for TV Guide,” Wilder inexplicably persisted, but Elvis continued to show a remarkable degree of restraint. He still didn’t think he should voice his reaction. “Okay—,” said Wilder. “ ’Cause I’m a singer, not a fighter,” said Elvis, to a background of sardonic laughter. What about all this talk about his gyrations? Wilder asked him. “I read a clipping, somewhere you were attributed as saying that Holy Roller—”

  “I have never used that expression,” Elvis exploded angrily. “That’s another deal. See, I belong to an Assembly of God church, which is a Holiness church. I was raised up in a little Assembly of God church, and some character called them Holy Rollers—” “Oh, I see. Well, you—” “And that’s where that got started. I always attended church where people sang, stood up and sang in the choir and worshiped God, you know. I have never used the expression ‘Holy Roller.’ ” What about the music in his church? Wilder wondered innocently enough. “Do you think you transfer some of that rhythm into your—”

  For the first time Elvis seemed to lose his composure altogether. “That’s not it. That’s not it at all,” he practically shouted, obviously stung by an implication far more sweeping than the dismissal of his music. “There was some article came out where I got the jumping around fr
om my religion. Well, my religion has nothing to do with what I do now. Because the type of stuff I do now is not religious music, and my religious background has nothing to do with the way I sing.”

  After that even Wilder seemed to get it, and he backed off on his questioning, so much so that by the end of the interview he appeared to be totally disarmed. Then, with the show going on in the background, he interviewed his old friend the Colonel, but it was obvious that he never had a chance. Was there a possibility of more frequent television appearances? “I think one of the main reasons that I don’t book Mr. Presley on television more often is that to my way of thinking many of the artists today are overexposed on television…. My way of thinking may be wrong on this. However, I’ll have plenty of time to find out next year. If it doesn’t work this way, we’ll try something new.” The wiggling, and the criticism it provoked? “I have tried to figure out many angles. First of all, for many months we were touring the country, and Elvis had never appeared on television, and the only way people would know about Elvis was by his records. And I have tried repeatedly to play his records and figure out some way where I could see him wiggle while listening to his records. Which is impossible.” Elvis’ future as an actor? “Well, Mr. Wilder, when we made the screen test for Mr. Hal Wallis at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, they tested Mr. Presley in a singing role, and also, while he was there, they gave him a short story or some play—whatever you call it—and Mr. Wallis decided after seeing the test that Mr. Presley was capable of starring in a dramatic production. When and how I don’t know, but Mr. Presley had no training in acting, and I saw the test, and if I was not his manager, I could not be more excited about a new personality than I am now being Elvis Presley’s manager, for his acting ability was the greatest…. I think Elvis Presley could play any role he makes up his mind to play.”

  He did three shows in Lakeland, three in St. Petersburg (renamed “St. Presleyburg” for the day), two in Orlando, and two in Daytona Beach. By the time that he arrived in Jacksonville on Friday, August 10, the town had taken on all the trappings of a religious revival. The faithful were gathered as always in a long line in front of the box office from the predawn hours before the first show; a minister was offering up prayers for Presley at the Trinity Baptist Church after declaring that the singer had “achieved a new low in spiritual degeneracy”; reporters from two national magazines, Life and Collier’s, were on hand to cover his every move; a contest winner named Andrea June Stephens was flown in with her mother from Atlanta by Hit Parader magazine for a date she had won with an essay entitled “Why I Want to Meet Elvis”; June Juanico was hissed at and gossiped about and cursed as a whore by girls who had read about her or just didn’t like the confident way she stood at “his” side; and Judge Marion Gooding, who was determined not to see a repeat of the previous year’s performance when “aroused fans ripped nearly all [of Elvis’] clothes off,” met with the Optimist Club and prepared warrants charging Presley with impairing the morals of minors, which he said he would serve if the singer acted in a fashion that “put obscenity and vulgarity in front of our children.”

  Judge Gooding was at the first performance at 3:30 Friday afternoon and subsequently invited the singer to a meeting in chambers. There Elvis expressed his shock at the judge’s reaction (“I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong,” he said to reporters; “I know my mother approves of what I’m doing”), and the judge repeated his determination to serve the warrants if the show were not toned down. A compromise was reached, and Judge Gooding was satisfied that Presley complied with the agreement, “judging from reports of the later shows.” Meanwhile, the Jacksonville Journal informed its readers, a representative of the American Guild of Variety Artists told Presley that, because of his suggestive body movements, it would be necessary to post bond and join the guild (which represented exotic dancers, among others), or they would block the show. The Colonel took care of that, and Presley, noted the paper, “kept a nonchalant attitude throughout the day,” answering reporters’ questions, taking Andrea June Stephens out for a cheeseburger (which Andrea June declined), and, in place of the body movements, wiggling his little finger lasciviously in a move that sent his audience into paroxysms of ecstasy. Back in the hotel room afterward he told June, “Baby, you should have been there. Every time D.J. did his thing on the drums, I wiggled my finger, and the girls went wild. I never heard screams like that in my life. I showed them sons of bitches—calling me vulgar. Baby, you don’t think I’m vulgar, do you?” And he put a pair of June’s underpants on his head and glided around the room.

  WITH THE TOUR’s triumphant conclusion in New Orleans, he returned to Memphis, while June went home to Biloxi. The Life magazine team was still with him, and he was never far removed from a reporter’s question or a photographer’s flashbulb. The Life photographer got a picture of the fence that had been installed just a few weeks before, complete with musical staff and notes. It didn’t really keep the fans out—Life also ran a picture of some girls plucking blades of grass from the lawn, and the newspaper reported lines of cars so long that the neighbors called the police. Vernon’s brother, Vester, still working full-time at Precision Tool, was now moonlighting as a kind of security guard, but mainly he just chatted with the fans or tried to get them to keep their racket down so Grandma and Gladys could get some rest. There was no question of running them off: Elvis wouldn’t hear of it. He knew who he owed his success to.

  There were only four days left before his scheduled departure for Hollywood, and he had a lot to pack in. On the first night he went out to the Fairgrounds, and Red got into another fight. The next day Vernon told Red that he didn’t want him around anymore, that Red wouldn’t be going out to Hollywood with Elvis, because they just didn’t need that kind of bad publicity. Red got pissed off and said he was going to join the Marines; he was mad because he didn’t hear Elvis speaking up for him, and what else was he going to do, anyway? Elvis saw a lot of Barbara Hearn, and he stopped off to see Dewey down at the radio station almost every night—they laughed and talked about the old days. Dewey was just about to start a TV show, which would go on at 8:00 on Saturday night, just after Lawrence Welk. “You better warn those Welk listeners to grab that dial quick,” Dewey told Bob Johnson at the paper, “ ’cause if they don’t switch quick, I’ll be right there at ’em.”

  Everyone was talking about Hollywood, and no one who knew him doubted that he would make a big success. Sam Phillips told him that he would be another James Dean, and Dewey figured he would just nail all the little starlets he met. He heard from the Colonel out in Hollywood that there were going to be one or two songs in the picture, and that was all right, as long as they didn’t take away from the dramatic impact of the role. Was he going to take acting lessons? the reporters all asked. No, he told each and every one, although he had not recited so much as a single line onstage in his life, “I don’t think that you learn to become an actor, I think you just, maybe you’ve got a little bit of acting talent and develop it. If you learn to be an actor, in other words, if you’re not a real actor—you’re false.” On the precipice of something he had never experienced before, he seemed strangely serene—but then why shouldn’t he be? Everything he had ever dreamed had come true, so far. “I’ve made a study of Marlon Brando,” he confided to Lloyd Shearer when Shearer had come down to Memphis to do a story for Sunday Parade the month before. “I’ve made a study of poor Jimmy Dean. I’ve made a study of myself, and I know why girls, at least the young ’uns, go for us. We’re sullen, we’re broodin’, we’re something of a menace. I don’t understand it exactly, but that’s what the girls like in men. I don’t know anything about Hollywood, but I know you can’t be sexy if you smile. You can’t be a rebel if you grin.”

  LOVE ME TENDER

  August–October 1956

  STUDYING LINES WITH COSTAR RICHARD EGAN AND DIRECTOR ROBERT WEBB, RIGHT.

  (MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES)

  HE ARRIVED IN HOLLYWOOD on Friday, August 1
7. There were signs as he got off the plane at the Los Angeles airport announcing “Elvis for President,” but when reporters asked him about it, he indicated no serious interest in the post, declaring, “I’m strictly for Stevenson. I don’t dig the intellectual bit, but I’m telling you, man, he knows the most.” With that he was off to his hotel, the Hollywood Knickerbocker, on Ivar off Hollywood Boulevard, where the Colonel was already staying and where he and his cousin Gene occupied a spacious suite on the eleventh floor.

  He reported to the studio for meetings and costume fittings at the beginning of the following week. Unsure exactly what preparations were required, he had memorized the entire script, not just his own part but everyone else’s, too. “I have no trouble memorizing,” he told a reporter proudly. “I once memorized General MacArthur’s farewell address, and I can still reel off Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech from when I memorized it in school.” He met his costars, Richard Egan and Debra Paget (to Egan he confided that he had never acted before and that he was “plenty scared”), as well as director Robert Webb, a fifty-three-year-old veteran of the system who was understandably concerned that, with Elvis’ late entry, the film, a modest B western, might be turned into a sideshow. To Mildred Dunnock, who was to play his mother in the film, he was a nice boy whose extremely polite and deferential manner indicated an obvious willingness to learn. The person he was most excited about meeting, though, was forty-one-year-old producer David Weisbart, who had produced James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause the previous year. Weisbart was talking about filming a documentary-style James Dean Story, something, Elvis blurted out to Weisbart, he would like to do “more than anything else.” He sat with his legs tucked under him, chewing gum and stroking his chin nervously. “I’d sure like to take a crack at it,” he said. “I think I could do it easy.”