“I was right at the back of the stage watching him,” said Ernest Bowen. “I saw him bring that crowd to hysterics, and he did it by teasing. He knew just how far to walk to the end of that stage, he would lean just far enough so that they could touch the tip of his finger.” One time he leaned too far and had a silver button torn from his bright velvet blouse. In the middle of “Don’t Be Cruel,” fourteen-year-old Judy Hopper, from Alamo, Tennessee, scaled the five-foot-high stage to throw her arms around her idol, who only appeared amused. After that six policemen stayed onstage with Elvis. He ended up with “Hound Dog,” naturally, at which point pandemonium really broke loose. “Elvis,” shrieked the girls in the front row, among them fourteen-year-old Wynette Pugh, later to become famous as country star Tammy Wynette. “ ‘Elvis,’ they shrieked,” reported the Journal, “tearing their hair and sobbing hysterically, ‘Please, Elvis.’ ”
After the show photographers got some more shots of Elvis with his mother and father, and a British journalist named Peter Dacre from the London Sunday Express ascertained that he would like to go to England, so long as he didn’t have to fly (“If something were to go wrong on a plane, there’s no land under you. That’s a long swim”). Then he was escorted back to his hotel by the four highway patrolmen assigned to him to get some rest for the evening performance.
Fifty National Guardsmen were added for the evening show, which was anticipated to draw half again as many spectators. There must have been close to fifty thousand visitors to town, including sightseers and lookers-on, the biggest crowd that anyone could remember since Roosevelt had visited at the height of the Depression. Elvis was relaxed and chewing gum but disappointed that he wasn’t feeling better for the occasion. “I’ve looked forward to this day for a long time,” he said, “and the heck of it is, I’m sick today.” He asked for the girl who had crashed the stage that afternoon and was introduced to Judy Hopper, who had her picture taken with him and said, “It was even more thrilling than I dreamed it would be.”
The evening performance was, if anything, less inhibited on the part of the audience than the earlier one. At one point Elvis stopped the show to admonish the crowd in a good-natured way that little kids were getting hurt and that he wouldn’t go on if they didn’t sit back down. They were back up again for “Don’t Be Cruel,” though, and by the end they were almost out of control. “As howling sirens carried Elvis away, the fairgrounds were wild with crying teenagers,” declared the Journal, “who fought for a chance for a last look at the boy who put burlesque back in business in a big way.”
Elvis and Nick had returned to Hollywood by the weekend, and the film finished shooting within a week, with a Thanksgiving release date planned and more prints expected (575) than for any other film in Twentieth Century Fox’s history. Then he was briefly back on tour, with Nick accompanying him and, with the Colonel’s blessing, doing impressions to open the show; in Dallas Nick was even served with a summons in a breach-of-contract suit by a Fort Worth process server who didn’t know what Elvis Presley looked like.
The Dallas show, which opened the four-day Texas tour on October 11, marked a watershed for the group. There were 26,500 on hand at the Cotton Bowl, which according to the Dallas Morning News had not witnessed such hysteria “since a December day in 1949 when a crazy-legged Mustang named Kyle Rote tied the score against the heavily favored Fighting Irish of Notre Dame.” It was the largest paying crowd ever to see an entertainer perform in Dallas (Elvis took home $18,000 out of a $30,000 gross), and from the moment Elvis appeared, waving to the crowd from the back of a Cadillac convertible as he circled the field, a kind of highpitched, earsplitting, seismic wail went up, there were “screams of anguish” and “shrieks of ecstasy,” the papers reported, that never wavered or stopped. The musicians couldn’t hear a thing, apart from the crowd, and Elvis, dressed in his kelly green coat and navy blue pants with a black and gold cummerbund, sang by instinct alone, dropping to his knees over and over again, and ending the show by jumping off the stage with the microphone and falling to the ground at the fifty-yard line before being whisked off in a limousine. “It looked like a war out there,” said drummer D. J. Fontana. “That’s when it really hit me: we went around the park on the back of that Cadillac, and all you could see was just thousands of bulbs going off. I thought, What’s this guy done? I just sat on the stage and looked around and thought, This guy draws more than the football players do. One man, and, you know, this park is full of people.”
It was the same everywhere he went on this tour. There were riots even when they didn’t show up, as teenagers in Temple tore up the Kyle Hotel because they had heard he might be staying there (he was thirty-five miles away, in Waco, at the time). The next night, in Houston, he begged the crowd three times to quiet down and listen, but with little success.
Meanwhile, the single of “Love Me Tender,” which had already been certified gold, was about to enter the Billboard charts, and Elvis’ next movie, a Hal Wallis production called Lonesome Cowboy, had been announced to the trades with a projected starting date of December or January. Reporters were pestering him about his draft status (he had gotten his pre-induction questionnaire in Hollywood around the first of the month, but, he said, he didn’t know what that meant in terms of being called up, or how soon that might be expected to happen). Everyone wanted to know about his love life, of course. He was getting only four hours of sleep a night, he conceded, but when reporters asked why he didn’t take it easier, he suggested that “the Lord can give and… the Lord can take away. I might be herding sheep next year.” He arrived home exhausted on Monday, October 15, immediately went to see Barbara, and then called June about her upcoming visit at the end of the week. “Well, it won’t be long now,” he said for what must have been the thousandth time and couldn’t resist repeating the joke that Richard Egan pulled on him when he expressed the same sentiment one too many times on the set. “You remind me of that damned monkey,” Egan had said. “What monkey is that, Mr. Egan?” Elvis blundered innocently along. “The monkey that was sitting on the railroad track, and the train come along and cut off his tail. That’s what he said. ‘It won’t be long now.’ ” Elvis laughed and laughed—he loved the joke, and he loved being considered one of the boys enough by Richard Egan that Egan would pull it on him. Then he told June to be packed and ready; he would wire her the money for her flight in a couple of days.
EVERYONE IN BILOXI knew about June’s trip, and everyone was excited about it. The owner of Rosie’s Dress Shop gave her a new outfit to wear, and the beauty shop trimmed her new pixie hairdo for free. When she went to Western Union on Thursday, she and her friend Patsy announced proudly that they were waiting for a money order from Elvis Presley, but they needn’t have bothered—everyone at Western Union already knew she was Elvis Presley’s girl from the telegrams they had delivered from Hollywood. She and Patsy waited and waited, going next door to Klein’s Bakery, trying to mask their growing discomfiture with cream puffs and coffee. Eventually June went home, utterly humiliated. She was there only a few minutes when the phone rang. It was Elvis, who told her that he had run into a little trouble and would send her the money as soon as he could. She didn’t know what to think—she was worried and pissed off—and when her friend Buddy Conrad came by later, the three of them, June, Patsy, and Buddy, proceeded to get drunk.
Only on the next day did she find out what had happened. It was in all the papers. Elvis had been in a fight with a filling-station manager. He had stopped for gas in his Lincoln at the Gulf station at the corner of Second and Gayoso. He asked the attendant to check his tank for a leak—he was getting a gas smell in the air-conditioning vents. When a crowd formed, the manager, Edd Hopper, asked Elvis to move along; he had other customers to take care of, too. By Elvis’ account he was unable to move, because of the crowd surrounding the car, and he explained that to Mr. Hopper, but Hopper got mad and reached inside the car and slapped Elvis on the back of the head. With that Elvis leapt out and decke
d the forty-two-year-old Hopper, who then pulled a knife. By this time there were two policemen on the scene, and one of them restrained Hopper’s six-foot-four attendant, Aubrey Brown, who had gone after Elvis and been on the receiving end of a punch himself. “I’ll regret this day as long as I live,” Elvis was quoted as saying. “It’s getting where I can’t even leave the house without something happening to me.” On his way to the police station, where all three were booked on charges of assault and battery and disorderly conduct, Elvis said, “Maybe you’d better put down Carl Perkins,” when asked to state his name.
Western Union called June shortly after she read the account in the paper: the money was finally there. When she went to sign the order, she noticed it had been sent by Vernon, and when she and Patsy arrived at the Memphis airport the following day, it was the elder Presleys who picked her up in the pink Cadillac, not Elvis. Elvis had been acquitted of all charges and advised by Acting Judge Sam Friedman that because of his “avocation” and the fact that “wherever you go you have a large following… [you should] try to be considerate and cooperate with businessmen. Avoid crowds where business will be interrupted.” The two gas-station employees were fined $26 and $16 apiece, but for Mrs. Presley this was not the end of it. She was frightened of Elvis even going out of the house, she said. She knew her boy, and she knew he could take care of himself, but what if some crazy man came after him with a gun? she said to June, tears streaming down her face. “Now, Mama, he’s gone be just fine,” said Mr. Presley reassuringly, patting her on the leg. “That was the biggest black eye I ever saw,” Patsy declared of the picture of Edd Hopper she had seen in the paper, and that broke the ice a little as Mr. Presley chuckled, but Mrs. Presley was still visibly shaken.
They stayed around the house for most of the first couple of days. They played darts and bumper pool, and Elvis shadowboxed with June in the empty swimming pool, with one hand behind his back. He was clearly feeling restless and trapped, and his mother got mad at him when, in sheer frustration, he flung some darts up at the ceiling, where they stuck until she knocked them down with a broom. “Next time I’m going to use the broom on you,” she said with grim affection, but everyone knew she was just worried about him. She fixed his favorite fried chicken and little treats like peanut butter crisscrosses out of her Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook. June and Patsy occasionally went out to the fence, where the fans patiently waited, and they saw Bitsy Mott, the Colonel’s brother-in-law, whom they knew from Florida, working security there. They were allowed to talk to the fans from their side of the fence but not to go out on the street and mingle. “You’re so lucky,” some of the girls said. They all wanted to know what he was really like, they wanted to know what it was like to kiss him. Elvis conscientiously came out two or three times a day to chat and sign autographs, and Gladys sometimes had to call him two or three times to get him to come in.
Finally on Sunday night he couldn’t stand it any longer: they were going to go out, he didn’t care what his mama thought. One of the local theaters was running the Fox Movietone newsreel of the Tupelo concert, and he wasn’t just going to let himself become a prisoner. Nothing was going to happen, anyway.
They took the band’s black Cadillac limo so as to be less conspicuous, and June paid for the tickets before they dashed inside to watch the picture from a private viewing room. They hadn’t been in the theater twenty minutes when two policemen came in to get Elvis’ car keys. A crowd had formed outside the theater and was tearing the car apart, scratching names into the paint, breaking windows, ripping out upholstery, and denting the fenders. The policemen moved the car, then came back for Elvis and the two girls, escorting them through an inflamed mob that tore at their clothes and, for the first time, really frightened June. Elvis didn’t want his parents to know what had happened, so they left the car at Dewey’s and Dewey drove them home. Gladys was surprised to see them back so early, and the next morning Vernon cut the story out of the paper—it had Barbara Hearn as his date and the white Cadillac vandalized—in hopes that Gladys would not learn of the incident.
That afternoon Scotty and Bill and D.J., along with the Jordanaires, came by for a brief rehearsal for the next Ed Sullivan appearance, which was coming up on the weekend. After a brief run-through of the four songs they were going to do on TV, they all sat in a little circle on the floor singing spirituals, with Gladys beaming on the couch. Every so often she would join in and softly sing a line, while June, never shy about her singing, took the alto part on “In the Garden,” which had been part of her high school graduation ceremony. Later that night she and Elvis drove out to Mud Island, where they had ridden Elvis’ motorcycle at what seemed like 100 miles an hour on her first trip to Memphis.
It was a more contemplative visit this time, sadder somehow; for June there was a sense of almost ominous foreboding. She didn’t doubt that he loved her, she knew he was there with her—and yet she didn’t know if she could ever get him back. Elvis told her he had just heard from Nick and that Nick was coming to town tomorrow or the next day. He started telling her all about Nick and Nick’s friends and Jimmy Dean, but she didn’t want to hear. On their way home they passed a milk truck making deliveries. Elvis swung around and waited for the milkman to come back to his truck. He asked the man if he could buy some milk but then found he had no money. The milkman said that was all right, and Elvis just autographed an IOU. They drank the cold milk out of the bottle, and Elvis wiped the milky mustache off his upper lip with the back of his hand, just like James Dean, June thought, in Rebel Without a Cause.
It was all right when Nick arrived, but it was somehow, and not all that subtly, different. They drove around town together and talked about many of the same things, but she felt as if, without even bothering to disguise it all that much, she and Nick were competing for his attention. Nick was talking about Natalie all the time—he had even brought a dress of hers as a kind of souvenir and made a big point of how Natalie really filled it out. “I wish you could have invited him some other time,” June said to Elvis in a rare moment of privacy, but Elvis insisted that he hadn’t invited Nick, Nick had more or less invited himself. “He’s just a lonesome little guy struggling to make it in Hollywood,” Elvis said, with compassion, of his friend. But Mrs. Presley seemed to sympathize with June. “He sure is a pushy little fellow,” she said; she just wished Elvis could be a little more careful in his selection of friends.
One night they went down to the radio station to see Dewey and ran into Cliff Gleaves, a DJ from Jackson, who had met Elvis in passing seven months before. He had just gotten back into town and was hanging around the station on the off chance of seeing Elvis again. Afterward they all went out to Dewey’s house, on Perkins, and played pool for a while, but then the men went off into the den, where a movie projector had been set up, while Patsy and June stayed in the living room with Mrs. Phillips. At one point one of the men came out and, with the door momentarily ajar, June saw flickering images of naked bodies. Furiously she marched up to the door, knocked, and then flung it open. She stood in what she called her “Elvis position,” her arms folded in front of her, staring blankly ahead. “What the hell are you doing, June?” Elvis said, leaping up in acute embarrassment. “I don’t want you watching that shit.”
“You can watch that shit as long as you want, Elvis,” she said, “but first you can take me and Pat home.” And if he thought she was just being a prude, she added, “then y’all can kiss my ass.”
The night before she was scheduled to return to Biloxi and Elvis was due to go to New York for the Sullivan show, they all went out to dinner with some wealthy acquaintances of the older Presleys who wanted to provide a special occasion for Vernon and Gladys. It seemed like Gladys was going to fuss with them forever about their manners and their appearance, but then at dinner Elvis gave June his new temporary tooth caps to hold, and she started fooling with them so she looked like a vampire, and soon their hosts were as broken up as they were. “It’s about time yo
u kids relaxed and had some fun,” said the husband approvingly, as Gladys laughed until the tears ran down from her eyes. Afterward they went to a private screening of a rough cut of Love Me Tender. Everyone thought it was wonderful except for Elvis. When June tried to tell him how good he was, he made it clear that he did not want to be just “good.” “Quit being so damn hard on yourself, man,” Nick muttered, “and give it some time.” He had been working for years, he said, to try to get to the point where Elvis was now. “You’ve proved yourself as an actor, man. Don’t worry about it.” Elvis took Nick’s remarks as highly complimentary, but June put them down more to jealousy.
In the end he wanted her to fly up to New York with him, and if she wouldn’t do that, why couldn’t she just stay here in Memphis with his parents? He would be back in a few days, and Natalie was going to come visit next week: he wanted her to meet Natalie. Wait a minute, Nick protested, if June was going to stay, he would just call Natalie and tell her to come some other time—there wasn’t enough room in the house for everyone. “Don’t worry, Nick, I’m not staying,” June announced, leaving the room. When Elvis followed her, she told him she wanted to go home, and she wasn’t interested in meeting Natalie anyway. “Baby, I didn’t invite Natalie,” Elvis protested, it was Nick who had invited Natalie, and he could just as easily uninvite her.
It was a sour note on which to end the week, and when she got back to Biloxi and went to have her picture taken for the studio portrait that she had promised Elvis, she told the photographer she thought she wanted something really different. They talked about it for a while and finally decided on a picture the photographer had never taken before: the subject in tears. The photograph won second prize in an exhibit sometime later.
Last Train to Memphis Page 43