Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  On the second day he recorded two of the songs that Mr. Sholes had brought to the “Hound Dog” session, “Too Much” and “Anyplace Is Paradise,” as well as “Old Shep,” the Red Foley tale of a boy and his dog with which he had won his first public recognition, at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair, in 1945. At his own insistence he played the piano on this number for the first time on an RCA session, and you can hear in the halting chords and the somewhat stumbling rhythm both the unmistakable emotion and the equally unmistakable valuing of emotion over technique. He nailed down “Old Shep” on the first take, while “Too Much,” an oddball piece of pop construction that aimed to emulate “Don’t Be Cruel” without either the craft or the charm, took twelve takes and still failed to achieve a satisfactory guitar solo (“It was in an odd key, and I got lost,” Scotty confessed, “but it felt good”) and “Anyplace Is Paradise,” a jaunty, upbeat bluesy number, took twenty-two. He cut three songs by Little Richard (for which Freddy had secured co-publishing), an old tune by Wiley Walker and Gene Sullivan called “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again,” which with its lilting country rhythms and easy, unforced fervor would have been equally at home on Sun, and a new song by Aaron Schroeder and Ben Weisman, two of Hill and Range’s top young contract writers. He fooled around with some gospel numbers with the Jordanaires and sang “Love Me Tender” to everyone over and over again.

  Time meant nothing to him in the studio. If he felt like singing spirituals, he would sing spirituals to his heart’s content. It was his way of finding his place; it was all part of the creative process as he had learned it in the Sun studio. If the feeling wasn’t there, you waited until it got there, you didn’t try to define it too precisely before it showed up—and if something else happened to show up while you were waiting, well, then, you took advantage of that. “He ran the session,” said Thorne. “He would be right in the center of everything. Like with the Jordanaires, when he sang, we would set it up with a unidirectional mike, so he would be standing right in front of them, facing them, and they would have their own directional microphone, and they would be singing to one another. He could spend two hours on a tune and then just throw it away.” If the band wasn’t able to do it the way he wanted, said Scotty, he’d just say, “Well, do whatever you can do, then.” “He was very loyal,” observed Thorne. And he was a movie star.

  On Tuesday he was back on the set, working first on the soundtrack, then on the picture, which had now been officially renamed to accommodate the Colonel’s marketing plans. He had a number of difficult emotional scenes, but he handled them in stride. When he had to beat up Debra, to prepare the audience for his own obligatory death (the story was a muddled Civil War drama in which Elvis, playing the youngest of four sons and the only one left at home, marries his oldest brother Vance’s fiancée, thinking Vance dead. Naturally, when Vance comes back…), Webb worked with him extensively on his motivation, and when in another scene Mildred Dunnock as his mother said, “Put that gun down, son,” according to Dunnock he was so deep into his character that he dropped the gun right away. “Oh my God, what in the world were you doing?” said the director. “You were supposed to keep on going.” “Well, she told me to put it down,” said Elvis, who may have been fooling—but Dunnock didn’t think so. To her: “For the first time in the whole thing he had heard me, and he believed me. Before, he’d just been thinking what he was doing and how he was going to do it. I think it’s a funny story. I also think it’s a story about a beginner who had one of the essentials of acting, which is to believe.”

  Meanwhile, he was growing more accustomed to the Hollywood life. He changed hotels, moving to the Beverly Wilshire, along with the Colonel, because his gang of fans had simply overwhelmed the Hollywood Knickerbocker. He was hanging out more and more with Nick and his friends and, through Nick, Natalie Wood, another in the “Rebel” crowd. The gossip columnists reported it as a sizzling romance, and Natalie, who presented him with matching red and blue velvet shirts from her dressmaker, was quoted by the wires as saying, “He’s a real pixie and has a wonderful little-boy quality.” But while he continued to pester Debra Paget fruitlessly for dates—and had to keep a careful eye (and ear) on his cousin Gene, who was still gawking around like a tourist—with Natalie and Nick, and sometimes Dennis Hopper, he felt more like he was part of a real gang; they all went around together, shared innocent enthusiasms, appreciated one another’s work, and disdained pretentiousness and “swank places.” One night they descended en masse on the home of Louella Parsons, who had been trying to get an interview with Elvis for some time and who reported with agreeable surprise: “Finally met Elvis Presley, who called on me accompanied by Natalie Wood, Nick Adams and his cousin, Gene Smith, who is a character straight out of a book. Elvis and his gang drink only soft drinks….” In an interview with Albert Goldman years later Natalie described herself, a child of Hollywood, as intrigued by his very conventionality. “He was the first person of my age group I had ever met who said to me: ‘How come you’re wearing makeup? Why do you want to go to New York? Why do you want to be on your own?’… It was like having the date that I never ever had in high school. I thought it was really wild!

  “I hadn’t been around anyone who was [that] religious. He felt he had been given this gift, this talent, by God. He didn’t take it for granted. He thought it was something that he had to protect. He had to be nice to people. Otherwise, God would take it all back.”

  On September 9 he was scheduled to appear on the premier Ed Sullivan Show of the season. Sullivan, however, was recuperating from an August automobile accident and, as a result, was not going to be able to host the program, which Elvis would perform from the CBS studio in Los Angeles. Elvis sent Sullivan a get-well card and a picture autographed to “Mr. Ed Sullivan” and was thrilled to learn that the show would be guest-hosted by Charles Laughton, star of Mutiny on the Bounty. Steve Allen, who had presented him in his last television appearance, was not even going to challenge Sullivan on the night in question: NBC was simply going to show a movie.

  He opened with “Don’t Be Cruel,” strolling out alone from the darkened wings onto a stage spotlighted with silhouettes of guitars and a bass fiddle. He was wearing a loud plaid jacket and an open-necked shirt, but his performance was relatively subdued, as every shoulder shrug, every clearing of his throat and probing of his mouth with his tongue, evoked screams and uncontrolled paroxysms of emotion. Then he announced he was going to sing a brand-new song, “it’s completely different from anything we’ve ever done. This is the title of our brand-new Twentieth Century Fox movie and also my newest RCA Victor escape—er, release.” There was an apologetic shrug in response to the audience’s laughter, and then, after an altogether sincere tribute to the studio, the director, and all the members of the cast, and “with the help of the very wonderful Jordanaires,” he sang “Love Me Tender.” It is a curious moment. Just after beginning the song he takes the guitar off and hands it to an unseen stagehand, and there are those awkward moments when he doesn’t seem to know quite what to do without his prop and shrugs his shoulders or twitchily adjusts his lapels, but the moans which greet the song—of surprise? of shock? of delight? most likely all three—clearly gratify him, and at the end of the song he bows and gestures graciously to the Jordanaires.

  When he comes back for the second sequence, the band is shown, with Jordanaire Gordon Stoker at the piano and the other Jordanaires in plaid jackets at least as loud (but nowhere near as cool) as his own. They rock out on Little Richard’s “Ready Teddy,” but when Elvis goes into his dance the camera pulls away and, as reviews in the following days will note, “censors” his movements. It doesn’t matter. The girls scream just when he stands still, and when he does two verses of “Hound Dog” to end the performance, the West Coast studio audience goes crazy, though the New York Journal-American’s Jack O’Brian, after first taking note of Presley’s “ridiculously tasteless jacket and hairdo (hairdon’t)” and granting that “Elvis added to his gamut
(A to B) by crossing his eyes,” pointed out that the New York audience “laughed and hooted.” “Well, what did someone say?” remarked host Charles Laughton, with good humor, at the conclusion of the performance. “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast?”

  The show got a 43.7 Trendex rating (it reached 82.6 percent of the television audience), and in the Colonel’s view, which he shared gleefully with Steve Sholes, really boosted Presley’s stock with an adult audience for the first time. A number of disc jockeys around the country taped the performance and started playing their tape of the new ballad on the air, and that undoubtedly hastened the release of the single, which came out about three weeks later. In the meantime prerelease orders built up to close to a million, and the Colonel pushed RCA to find that millionth customer not only as a confirmation of Elvis’ well-established popularity but as a credit to Ed Sullivan, and the power of his show, which could then be proffered to Sullivan as a gratuitous gift.

  There were just two more weeks of shooting before Elvis was scheduled to leave for the Tupelo homecoming concert that had been booked in July. Filming was originally supposed to be over by then, but now he was going to have to come back for a few more days after the concert. That was all right. He was enjoying himself now. They had filmed his death scene, which the director said was really going to touch audiences everywhere. Colonel was busy making deals and keeping everyone on the set off balance in a way that irritated some but always tickled Elvis. “We’re the perfect combination,” Elvis often told friends. “Colonel’s an old carny, and me, I’m off the wall.” At one point the would-be producers of a rock ’n’ roll pastiche called Do Re Mi approached Colonel about getting Elvis to sing a couple of songs in the picture for $75,000. Colonel professed to be insulted, then offered to roll the dice for his boy’s salary, double or nothing. Other members of the Love Me Tender cast claimed to be shocked, and William Campbell was convinced that Elvis’ lack of reaction as Colonel told the story indicated an acceptance of his role as chattel or worse, but in Elvis’ view, the Colonel was simply a very smart man: “He’s a very amusing guy. He plans stuff that nobody else would even think of.” And as he made clear to more than one interviewer who tried to cast the Colonel in a Svengali role, “We more or less picked each other.” What people didn’t understand was that Colonel mostly kept out of his hair. He took care of business, and he left Elvis to take care of his private life. Oh, he could be a pain in the ass sometimes, and he expected Elvis to keep his nose clean in order to maintain his end of the bargain. But for the most part he just left him alone—and he did his best to help Nick out, too. Elvis was glad Colonel liked Nick. Nick didn’t have anything better to do, so he was going to come to Tupelo with them. Elvis was looking forward to showing him Memphis for the first time.

  They flew into Memphis on Saturday, September 22, and went out to the fair briefly that night. On Monday they visited Humes, where Elvis introduced Nick to his old homeroom teacher, Miss Scrivener, who had sponsored the talent contest in which he had first performed in front of all his classmates senior year. Nick did impressions for Miss Scrivener’s class, and Elvis beamed as the kids broke up. He presented the ROTC drill team with $900 for uniforms and gave another teacher a television set “to be used for educational purposes.” They visited the Tiplers at Crown Electric, too, and Nick put his feet up on Mr. Tipler’s desk while Elvis explained, said his former employer, “how he had his money arranged so he wouldn’t get it all at one time.” They even went by Dixie’s house one afternoon, and she told Elvis she was getting married, and he congratulated her and wished her well.

  On Wednesday they left for Tupelo around noon. Mr. and Mrs. Presley, Nick, and Barbara Hearn all drove down with Elvis in the white Lincoln, missing the parade that was being held in his honor but not missing any of the hoopla. Main Street was decked out in bunting and a giant banner that proclaimed “Tupelo Welcomes Elvis Presley Home,” while every store window was decorated at the suggestion of fair manager James M. Savery with an “Elvis theme.” The fact that it was Children’s Day, too, the very day that the children of East Tupelo had been transported to the fair eleven years earlier and Elvis had quaveringly sung “Old Shep,” only made the symbolism complete.

  Vernon and Gladys were practically overcome. She wore a brocade dress and a locket with a photograph of Elvis around her neck. “It made me feel bad,” she told a friend afterward, “to go back there like that and remember how poor we was.” Vernon, on the other hand, was practically exuberant. He was wearing a dark suit, white shirt, and tie, with the tie loosened and slightly askew on this very hot day. Outside the big tent in back of the stage he spotted Ernest Bowen, for whom he had had a delivery route when he was working for L. P. McCarty and Sons, the last job he had held before leaving Tupelo. Bowen was now general manager of WELO and trying fruitlessly to gain entry to the tent so he could get an interview for his announcer, Jack Cristil. “All of a sudden this guy hollers at me—I didn’t even recognize him, but it was Vernon, all cleaned up and greeting me like a long-lost friend. He wanted to know if he could do anything, and I said, ‘Yeah, get me in the tent.’ He said, ‘Just follow me,’ and he just like parted the waves. I asked Vernon, ‘How are y’all doing?’ He said, ‘Oh, we doing just great.’ Said, ‘The boy is really taking care of us.’ And I said, ‘Good!’ ”

  Inside the tent, while June Carter was performing, or maybe it was Mississippi Slim’s cousin Rod Brasfield, telling jokes for the hometown crowd about his experiences on the Opry or making a Hollywood picture, Elvis told James Savery, with some exaggeration—but probably not much—that this was the first time he had actually been through the main gate; as a kid he had always had to climb the fence. “And just think, you’re paying me for it, too!” There was a host of friends, relatives, and acquaintances (and would-be acquaintances) wanting to catch up on old times, with every one of them, seemingly, reminding him of how poor they had all been, of how they, too, had snuck into the fair with him. Elvis graciously received them all, passing off his success, for the most part, as a simple twist of fate, but with the father of one old schoolmate who was attending the University of Mississippi school of pharmacy “so he could amount to something,” his answer was a little more revealing. In the account of a New York reporter, “Presley grinned at the older man and replied: ‘Shucks, why don’t you tell him to just get himself a guitar. That’s all he needs.’ ”

  There was an informal press conference before the afternoon show, and Elvis returned to the same theme repeatedly. He couldn’t “hardly remember how I looked in overalls,” he said. “It’s all great,” he responded good-humoredly to another question. “I’ve been looking forward to this homecoming very much. I’ve been escorted out of these fairgrounds when I was a kid and snuck over the fence. But this is the first time I’ve been escorted in.” How about Natalie? someone called out. “I worry about her when I’m out there where she is,” replied Elvis nonchalantly. “I don’t think about her when I’m not.” The reporters tried in vain to get Colonel Parker to say something, but Mr. and Mrs. Presley, who according to the Tupelo Daily Journal seemed “a little bewildered by all the commotion… but smiled pleasantly for photographers,” expressed their gratitude first to a reporter from the Journal and, later, to a radio interviewer. What were their favorite records? the radio interviewer wanted to know. “ ‘That’s All Right,’ ” said Mr. Presley. “ ‘Baby, Play House,’ ” said Gladys. “That’s a good one,” said Mr. Presley. “And ‘Don’t Be Cruel,’ ” added Mrs. Presley. “There’s so many of them I can’t remember the names,” said Vernon. “It was terrific,” said the interviewer in summation about the parade he had just determined that they had missed, “and everyone was having such a fine time and I know that you’re sorry you missed it and I know that you’ve heard it was a wonderful parade…. Well, I’m sure that you know that the whole town is just wide open to the Presley family.”

  Mississippi governor J. P. Coleman, whose car had been mobbed by fan
s who mistook his arrival for their idol’s, was backstage, and while they were taking a picture together, Elvis told the governor he thought he might go into politics himself. Oh, what would you run for? asked the governor. “The city limits,” said Elvis affably. A highway patrolman asked Elvis to autograph a pile of pictures, and he signed away. Then it was time to go out and do the show, and he manfully made his way into the sea of sound.

  He was wearing the heavy blue velvet shirt that Natalie had given him, even in all this heat, and Colonel had arranged for a ceramic model of the RCA dog, Nipper, to be placed onstage. Fox Movietone News was filming the show, and from the first notes of “Heartbreak Hotel” the crowd of five thousand—mostly teenagers, mostly girls—went crazy. There were forty city police and highway patrolmen on hand, but “reporters and photographers had to scramble up on the stage to safety,” reported the Journal, “when Elvis first opened his mouth and a yelling wave of teenage girls broke for the guitar king.” At the conclusion of “Long Tall Sally,” Governor Coleman was announced, and after Elvis quieted the crowd (“Excuse me, Governor,” he apologized to the startled chief executive), Coleman read off a text that proclaimed the young Tupeloan “America’s number-one entertainer in the field of American popular music, [our] own native son.” Then Tupelo mayor James Ballard presented him with a key to the city in the shape of a metal-sculpture guitar and declared, “The people of this community and of this city admire you and certainly are proud of you.” “Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, very much, and, uh, and uh—” The crowd’s screams drowned out any further comments he might have had in mind.