Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  THE TOAST OF THE TOWN

  October–November 1956

  WITH NATALIE WOOD OUTSIDE THE HOTEL CHISCA, OCTOBER 31, 1956.

  (ROBERT WILLIAMS)

  IT WAS A RELAXED, confident, and very much at ease Elvis Presley who made his second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, still popularly known as the Toast of the Town, on the evening of Sunday, October 28. Gone were the explosive nervous energy, the involuntary mannerisms, that had dominated his television appearances of just a few months before; even the self-abashed, somewhat shambling manner of his Sullivan debut had been replaced by a good-natured, almost studied and bemused playfulness, a kind of good-humored recognition of common cause both with his audience and that of his host. When he appeared following Sullivan’s characteristically stiff, almost wooden introduction, his hair high and a pleased, slightly embarrassed look on his face, it was as if for the first time he really took it all as his due—there appeared to be no rage hiding behind the mask, there was no caged tiger desperate to get out, he acknowledged the response with the deferential distraction of the grand seigneur. He was a recording star, he was a movie star, he was a servant of the Lord and the master of his own destiny; for one brief moment there was not even a hint of imposture in his mind.

  He had spent the day primarily fulfilling professional responsibilities and doing good works. After a couple of nights on the town with Nick, Dewey, his cousin Gene, and his new friend, Cliff Gleaves, all of whom he had invited to come up to New York at his expense, he reported for rehearsal at noon, while the Colonel handed out “Elvis for President” buttons at the unveiling of a forty-foot “statue” of the new Hollywood star above the marquee of the Paramount Theatre in Times Square, where Love Me Tender would premiere in a little more than two weeks. “The idol of the rock ’n’ roll juveniles also surprised an afternoon press interview by demonstrating to adult reporters that he is a polite, personable, quick-witted and charming young man,” reported the New York Times. “Teenagers are my life and triumph,” he declared to the assembled reporters. “I’d be nowhere without them.” He wished he could sit down with some of those parents who saw him as a bad influence, “because I think I could change their minds and their viewpoint. Ever since I got to be a sort of name I’ve examined my conscience and asked myself if I led anybody astray even indirectly, and I’m at peace with my conscience.” Somebody asked him if it wasn’t teenagers that had recently ripped his car apart. “That means nothing to me, sir. That’s a car and I’ve got other cars, but the idea of doing to others what you’d like them to do to you is what’s in my craw. It’s in the Bible…. I read my Bible, sir, and this is no story just made up for now. My Bible tells me that what he sows he will also reap, and if I’m sowing evil and wickedness it will catch up with me. I’m right sure of that, sir, and I don’t think I’m bad for people. If I did think I was bad for people, I would go back to driving a truck, and I really mean this.”

  At the end of the afternoon, in a public ceremony just as extensively covered by the media, he received an inoculation of the newly developed Salk polio vaccine. He was doing so, he said in a public service announcement he recorded for the March of Dimes, because “so many kids and adults, too, have gotten just about one of the roughest breaks that can happen to a person…. We can help these people. And the way to do it is this: join the 1957 March of Dimes.” “Halo, Everybody, Halo: Latest Presley Pitch” had been the headline for a recent Variety story, which suggested somewhat cynically an “institutional build-up to re-create the rock ’n’ roller into an influence for the good”—but that was really missing the point: Elvis didn’t need an institutional push, this was what he believed was truly intended for him, this was the real function of fame.

  The streets that night were so crowded you could barely get to the studio. There were policemen on horseback, and thousands of fans clamoring to get past the barricades, but Elvis insisted on signing autographs anyway, to the acute discomfiture of his traveling companions. Mr. Sullivan complimented the youngsters in the audience on their comportment; he had asked them not to yell during the songs themselves, he said, and they had kept their promise. A number of the reviews suggested that Elvis had been pressured to tone down his act, that either he or the cameras had been urged to restrain his body movements, but there is no evidence of that: mainly what you see is great good humor, a manner that exudes utter confidence, and a sense of vast amusement both at himself and, lovingly, his audience. Over and over again he stops in the midst of a practiced gesture and shrugs his shoulders, audibly exhales, rolls his eyes, freezes—just waiting for the wave that has been momentarily stilled to roll back over him. His eyes twinkle; he smiles and then catches himself and sneers (but affably); he listens to Mr. Sullivan say that Elvis will return for his second appearance on the show in just a couple of minutes and he impishly demurs, then after a brief colloquy agrees that yes, he’ll be back. At the conclusion of his third and final segment, he announces the scheduled opening of his new picture and his next appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in January. “And, uh, and uh,” he says, momentarily stuck, then recovers with a sincere “Until we meet you again, may God bless you as he has blessed me.”

  The ratings were not quite as spectacular as they had been for the first show, but Sullivan still beat the principal competition (Mary Martin and Paul Douglas in a special television production of the play Born Yesterday) by a margin of two to one and gained an overall 34.6 (57 percent share) Trendex rating.

  Elvis shot a new ending for the film the following day at the Junco Studio on East Sixty-ninth Street. Pressure had been building ever since it had been announced he would perish in his first screen role, and there had been pickets all week in front of the Paramount Theatre with suspiciously uniform printed signs that pleaded, “Don’t Die! Elvis Presley.” Whether prodded by public pressure or perhaps just acceding to the publicity value of the occasion, the studio had acknowledged the protest and flown in director Robert Webb, cameraman Leo Tover, and a crew of technicians. It was going to be a simple shot of the image of Elvis Presley superimposed over the dying Clint Reno and singing the title song of the film as the character expires. There was no need even to change his shoes, and he played the scene in the white bucks he had worn on the television show the night before.

  On the next day the new RCA contract which the Colonel had been negotiating for the last couple of months was announced: royalty payments were to be spread out in such a way that Elvis would be guaranteed $1,000 a week for the next twenty years. He had at this point sold well over ten million singles for RCA (this would compute to a record royalty of roughly $450,000), which represented approximately two thirds of RCA’s singles business. In fact, Variety had declared him a millionaire just the previous week on the basis of their unofficial computations of record royalties, movie income ($250,000, figuring in the new movie that was coming up in a couple of months), song publishing, TV appearances, and personals. It was a situation virtually unprecedented in the record business, rivaling anything that had ever been seen in the larger world of show business, and it didn’t even take into account merchandising.

  Just three short months before, the Colonel had entered into a deal with a thirty-seven-year-old merchandiser from California named Hank Saperstein for the exclusive right to exploit and commercially promote the Elvis Presley image. Saperstein, who had offices in Beverly Hills, had been in the business for seventeen years and had previously conducted highly successful campaigns for Super Circus, Ding Dong School, Lassie, the Lone Ranger, and Wyatt Earp, but, as Variety noted, this was the first all-out merchandising campaign in memory aimed at teens, not “moppets.” By the time that The Reno Brothers started shooting, Saperstein’s campaign was fully operational, with something like eighteen licensees and twenty-nine products, many of which (belts, scarves, skirts, jeans, lipstick, lockets, charm bracelets, publications, and western ties) were laid out on the hood of Saperstein’s car in a publicity shot taken on the movie set. By the end
of October the program was really getting into gear, with thirty licenses and fifty products to be marketed through Sears, Montgomery Ward, W. T. Grant’s, and Woolworth’s, among others, and Variety was endorsing Saperstein’s prediction of $40 million in retail sales over the next fifteen months. This would come to $18 million wholesale, which at the customary 5 percent licenser’s royalty would mean $900,000, to be split between Saperstein and Elvis Presley Enterprises equally.

  In the offing were hound dogs and houndburgers, and Saperstein, clearly a realistic man, who advertised “promotion in depth,” foresaw at least a two-year life to the market. It was just the kind of deal the Colonel loved, and one he knew how to exploit the hell out of both for himself and his boy. In a Look magazine article about the Elvis Presley phenomenon, the author, Chester Morrison, quoted the title song of the movie and then remarked:

  There are two grown men who love him true and tender and hope that they will never have to let him go. They are the two who operate the Great Elvis Presley industry, and, Lord, how the money rolls in!… Hank Saperstein and Tom Parker are a great pair. They are sardonically gay, as Fred Allen used to be. The Colonel sometimes drops absent-minded ashes from his good cigar onto the folds of his plumpness. Hank is younger, handsomer, taller and he doesn’t sag anywhere. Both of them have a reverence for money and work hard for it. But both of them give the impression that if they didn’t get any fun out of making money, the hell with it.

  The Colonel was a former carnival man, Morrison noted, who “is happy, but he is certainly not unsophisticated, and he has seen the Tattooed Lady. He genuinely loves those people who come to the carnival, because every last one of them buys a ticket. He is writing an autobiography that should find a place in every home. He calls it The Benevolent Con Man, but his alternate and better title is How Much Does It Cost If It’s Free?”

  NATALIE ARRIVED for her Memphis visit on Halloween night. Elvis and Nick picked her up at the airport and showed her the sights, then took her back to the house, where Elvis promised the fans they would come out again in half an hour to talk and sign autographs. After supper they drove around town some more, got ice cream cones, and ended up at the Chisca, where they went up to the “magazine floor” (the mezzanine, in other words) to see Dewey. By the time they came out, hundreds of fans had collected in the street, and they were barely able to recapture the white Lincoln.

  The next day Elvis bought himself a new motorcycle, and that night they went for a long ride, with Natalie clinging to Elvis and Nick “chugging along behind,” the newspapers reported, on Elvis’ old Harley. In the next few days Elvis took Natalie on the standard tour: she met his family, she met his friend George Klein, they drove by Humes, they went out to the Fairgrounds and stopped by Sun, he introduced her to a few of his policemen friends, they even stopped in to see Bob Neal at the new Stars Inc. management firm he had set up in partnership with Mr. Phillips. To Natalie, who was accustomed to celebrity, it was both an eye-opening, and a somewhat numbing, experience. It was, she told a reporter some years later, “like a circus come to town the minute I got off the plane. A mob of people stood outside his house night and day. Someone sold hot dogs and ice cream from a wagon…. When we went out on Elvis’ motorcycle, we had an instant motorcade behind us. I felt like I was leading the Rose Bowl parade.” Elvis was sweet, she told friends and reporters alike, but, she suggested, maybe there was such a thing as being too sweet. According to her sister, Lana, she called home in the middle of her visit and begged her mother to get her out of this. “He can sing,” Natalie confided to Lana afterward, as recorded in Lana’s memoir, “but he can’t do much else.” On Saturday Nick and Natalie headed back to Hollywood, after a visit on Natalie’s part of only four days.

  For Elvis, though, it was good just to have some time to himself. Colonel thought it would be something like two months before they started work on the new picture, and with Love Me Tender scheduled to open in ten days, on November 15 in New York, and the day before Thanksgiving in Memphis and everywhere else, he was perfectly happy to be able to concentrate on more mundane matters, like the Beginner Driver Range, “the nation’s first police-sponsored behind-the-wheel driving school,” whose opening Elvis attended on Monday, November 5, as a past finalist in the annual Road-E-O safe-driving contest for teenagers four years before. “ ‘If there is anything I can do to set an example, I want to do it,’ Presley said to the new class of 31 students, mostly teenagers. No one shrieked or swooned,” reported the Press-Scimitar. “They did look serious and determined…. It was a community project, designed to make Memphis a safer place to live.”

  Meanwhile, Cliff Gleaves was back in town after his fantasy trip to New York, a tale so improbable that even Cliff, who was accustomed to putting an optimistic spin on the truth, with his DJ’s wit, comedian’s flair, and philosopher’s penchant for positive thinking, was having a difficult time believing it. When he got back, he couldn’t seem to run into Elvis again, though, let alone find the opportunity to thank him. He went by the Chisca on a number of occasions, but he never saw him there. He missed him the whole time that Natalie was in town. He started showing up at WMC every afternoon, just as George Klein was finishing his shift as host of Rock ’N’ Roll Ballroom, and dropped broad hints to George about getting together with Elvis sometime. But while George sprang for dinner almost every night, he never picked up on the hints.

  There was another guy, a big fat jolly young fellow named Lamar Fike, who had started hanging around George lately, too, and was interested in getting into radio. He drove a brand-new ’56 Chevy, talked like he knew everything about everything, and was desperate to meet Elvis. Cliff was on the verge of telling him to get lost when Lamar happened to flash his billfold, and Cliff, always quick on his feet, said, “Yeah, man, I guess you can come to dinner with us.” After that he let Lamar bug them for radio pointers on a regular, paying basis, which didn’t get either one of them any closer to Elvis, and Cliff finally came to the conclusion that if this thing was going to happen, it was just going to have to happen on its own. He was nearly at the point of giving up hope, and his room at the YMCA, when he finally ran into Elvis again, and this time turned out to be the charm.

  He was on his way to the Chisca on a Monday night, ostensibly to see Dewey, when he saw a pink Cadillac coming toward him on Union. “Hey, Cliff, follow me,” Elvis said, leaning out the window and leading him to Madison Cadillac, just a few blocks away.

  “At that point my life changed. At that point I made a 180-degree turn with old Elvis. Understand: we pull in. He says, ‘I got this car for my mother, and she doesn’t have a license, and I don’t want to touch it anymore, but I like to keep it tuned. I just bought an El Dorado, but they still got the masking tape on it, and I want to know if you’ll do me a favor.’ I said, ‘Elvis, are you serious?’ I had already thanked him for the weekend, and he just said, ‘If you can’t have fun, what is it? If enjoyment is not in there, what is it worth?’

  “He said, ‘Cliff, can you take me a couple of places?’ Well, no sense in going into the petty details, but about five-thirty he says, ‘Cliff, I’d like to invite you home to meet my parents. I’d like you to have dinner with us.’ Boom! I said, ‘Great!’ and we drive out to Audubon Drive, where he lived. After dinner he said, ‘Cliff, you know Red West?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ He said, ‘He was with me, and he joined the Marine Corps.’ He said, ‘I’m alone now.’ He said, ‘I like you, my mama and daddy like you’—you see, dinner is over, and we’re in the living room now. ‘I’m alone now, and I’d really like for you to be with me. When I invited you to New York, I really wasn’t thinking that way.’ I said, ‘Elvis, I’ll tell you what. I have obligations here and there.’ I said, ‘To do that, you know—the obligation factor, I really can’t take that offer. I have to be a free agent, free spirit, I can’t be obligated. But as a friend—that’s a different ball game.’

  “He said, ‘You mean the only thing stopping you from joining me is that?’ I
said, ‘That’s about it.’ He said, ‘Cliff, let’s go get your clothes.’ That night I moved into my bedroom on Audubon Drive. Elvis’ bedroom is down at the end, down the hallway is what they call Natalie’s room, because that’s where Natalie Wood stayed when she was there, and Elvis’ mother and father are at the other end of the house. Three bedrooms, two baths—no problem. I moved in bag and baggage. His mother said, ‘That was Natalie’s room, now it’s yours.’ From that point on, he always wanted me there.”

  Cliff found life with the Presleys utterly beguiling. Elvis, as he saw it, was “an innocent. He didn’t know about the tricks, the ‘worldly ways’; he operated on sheer instinct. Never was there any arrogance—he was simply not going to let people trying to get to him be denied. He did not have the ‘informal schooling’ of being out in the world too long. He wasn’t out there just a little bit when he walked into Sun Records: only thing he knew was his parents’ home to Sun to making money to fame. He had no introduction to the world.” His parents? “Vernon was not an innocent, ’cause he’d been burned. Vernon was finely tuned to the world, a dollar was a dollar to Vernon, a quarter is a quarter. One night at dinner Elvis said, ‘Daddy’s a hard man, but you can’t blame him. You got to know what happened to him.’ Then they explained it all. Vernon said, ‘Hey, Cliff, I offered to work as long as the man would let me work it off—but he refused.’ He said, ‘Cliff, that was hard.’ ”

  Gladys, on the other hand, was simply proud of her boy—no more, and no less, than when he had won the singing prize at the fair. “It wasn’t that [she knew that] he was going to come along and tear the world up, it was just something that was in him. Vester came along and taught him a couple of chords, nobody paid much attention, it was just an isolated event, but she was very proud of him. She said, ‘I just hope to hell we all live.’ ’Cause it upset her, she was not thrilled with his big-time success, she was not carried away by the fame, the only thing that counted was Elvis.”