Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  Throughout the session people drift in and out, the guitar is passed around, while Snearly Ranch Boys piano player and sometime session musician Smokey Joe Baugh contributes his gravelly comments and harmonies. You can hear comments by unidentified women and children, doors slamming, and musicians departing (the Perkins brothers exit fairly early in the proceedings), which leaves a clear field for singers and piano pickers almost exclusively. At the end of the day Jerry Lee Lewis finally gets a chance to really show off his wares as he storms through both sides of his new single as well as “You’re the Only Star in My Blue Heaven” and “Black Bottom Stomp.” “That’s why I hate to get started in these jam sessions,” says Elvis affably, “I’m always the last one to leave….

  “Jerry, it was good to have met you,” he says to the brash newcomer, inviting him to come out to the house sometime, while good-byes are being exchanged all around. “It was totally extemporaneous,” said Sam Phillips, the proud progenitor, “everything was off mike, if it was on mike it was by accident—I think this little chance meeting meant an awful lot to all those people, not because one was bigger than another, it was kind of like coming from the same womb.” “I never saw the boy more likeable,” wrote Bob Johnson, “than he was just fooling around with those other fellows who have the same interests he does.”

  Three nights later Elvis was among other fellows with much the same interests, but under entirely different, if no less newsworthy, circumstances. WDIA, which had been broadcasting since 1949 with programming aimed exclusively at Memphis’ black population, but with white management, news announcers, and engineers, had established a Goodwill Fund almost from its inception with the goal of helping “needy Negro children.” Each year the station put on a revue on the first Friday of December, which for the last several years had taken place at Ellis Auditorium. In 1956 the headliners were Ray Charles, former WDIA disc jockey B. B. King, the Magnificents, and the Moonglows, along with a gospel segment that featured the Spirit of Memphis Quartet and the Happyland Blind Boys. Each year’s show featured a theme acted out by the current DJ staff, and this year’s had to do with a contingent of “hep Choctaws,” led by Chief Rockin’ Horse (Rufus Thomas) and his bride, Princess Premium Stuff (Martha Jean the Queen), who are determined to introduce rock ’n’ roll to a recalcitrant, and hopelessly square, rival tribe.

  One of the engineers at the station, Louis Cantor, who doubled as a part-time gospel and r&b announcer under the names of Deacon and Cannonball Cantor, had graduated from Humes a year ahead of Elvis and George Klein and was a fellow student with Klein at Memphis State, as well as a fellow congregant at Temple Beth El Emeth. Wouldn’t it be something, the powers that be at WDIA speculated, if they could get Elvis Presley to make a guest appearance on the show? Cantor approached Klein, who spoke to Elvis about it. He would be thrilled, he said, to put in an appearance, but he couldn’t, of course, perform—that was something the Colonel had drilled into him since the very beginning of their association.

  He and George showed up on the night of the show and stood quietly in the wings as some of his biggest heroes appeared onstage. Ray Charles sang “I Got a Woman” to Princess Premium Stuff; Phineas Newborn, Sr., led an all-star pit band dressed in Indian costumes of its own; and the ubiquitous Professor Nat D. Williams, master of ceremonies both here and at the amateur talent shows at the Palace Theatre as well as a popular columnist in the Negro press, crowned the station’s “Miss 1070,” as he did every year. “I was fourteen,” said Carla Thomas, Rufus’ daughter, a member of the highly disciplined Teen Town Singers, who sang backup for many of the singers on the show and had a performing spot of their own, “and I told my girlfriend, ‘That’s Elvis Presley back there in the wings.’ We were on the completely other side, but I could see it was Elvis. She said, ‘That’s not Elvis Presley, he’s not on the show.’ I said, ‘I know.’ He was just watching from the wings. They didn’t announce him until the very end, because they didn’t want everybody to get carried away, and when they did and he came out and did his little ‘How you doing?’ everybody said, ‘More! Do a little something for us.’ So he did a little shake, and he tore everybody up.”

  “I told them, If you put Elvis into the front of the show, the show is over,” said Carla’s father, Chief Rockin’ Horse for this evening, “so they took me at my word and put Elvis on near the end. I took Elvis onstage by the hand, I had this great big headdress with all the feathers, and when I took Elvis out there and he did that little wiggle that they wouldn’t let him do on television, the crowd just went crazy. They stormed all backstage, beating on the doors and everything!”

  After the show was over he stood backstage talking quietly and having his picture taken with B.B. and Miss Claudia Marie Ivy, the newly crowned WDIA queen. “To all who were in earshot,” reported the TriState Defender to its black constituency proudly, “Presley was heard telling King, ‘Thanks, man, for the early lessons you gave me.’ Arthur Godfrey would surely call that ‘humility.’ ”

  “He stayed around a long time after the show,” said Carla. “My sister Vaneese and I had our pictures taken with him, and there was an old piano backstage and he played some little runs on it. The audience was gone, and there were just the people getting dressed, and finally the stage manager said, ‘All right now, y’all got to go.’ He stayed that long, and we were just having a lot of fun. I remember that Elvis.”

  The accounts in the Negro press in succeeding weeks and months were just as positive, with one exception. Various reports pointed out that Elvis freely acknowledged not only his debt to B.B. but, implicitly, to black music in general, and the Memphis World cited an account of six months earlier that had Elvis “crack[ing] Memphis segregation laws [on June 19] by attending the Fairgrounds Memphis amusement park on East Parkway, during what is designated as ‘colored night.’ ” For the most part there was little question that he was a hero in the black community. Nat D. Williams alone demurred. In his column in the December 22 issue of the Pittsburgh Courier, he wrote:

  Maybe it’s the Indigo Avenue’s blase blues sophistication, native ignorance of the important, or just pur-dee meanness, but ordinarily nobody generally excites Beale Streeters enough to cause them to cue up to buy tickets or crash lines for autographs…. But Elvis Presley has ’em talking. And they ain’t talking about his “art.” You see, something happened the other night that the average Beale Streeter doesn’t altogether dig or appreciate.

  What the average Beale Streeter didn’t dig or appreciate, Nat D. went on, appeared to be a variation on the same thing that so disturbed the white middle-class (and middle-aged) mainstream.

  A thousand black, brown and beige teen-age girls in the audience blended their alto and soprano voices in one wild crescendo of sound that rent the rafters… and took off like scalded cats in the direction of Elvis. It took some time and several white cops to quell the melee and protect Elvis. The teen-age charge left Beale Streeters wondering: “How come cullud girls would take on so over a Memphis white boy… when they hardly let out a squeak over B. B. King, a Memphis cullud boy?”… But further, Beale Streeters are wondering if these teen-age girls’ demonstration over Presley doesn’t reflect a basic integration in attitude and aspiration which has been festering in the minds of most of your folks’ women folk all along. Huhhh?

  Just six days later, on December 13, Hal Kanter, the screenwriter and director for Lonesome Cowboy, Elvis’ first Hal Wallis production, which was scheduled to start shooting in mid January, flew into town. Kanter, a thirty-seven-year-old native of Savannah, had started out writing comedy skits in the pioneer days of TV, worked on a couple of Bob Hope movies, directed television’s top-rated George Gobel Show, and most recently written screenplays for Tennessee Williams’ Rose Tattoo and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’ Artists and Models for Hal Wallis—but this would mark his celluloid directorial debut. Elvis was slated to make his final appearance on the Louisiana Hayride two days later, the charity performance at Hirsch Coliseum th
at the Colonel had worked out back in April (along with the ten-thousand-dollar buyout) so as to free him of all contractual obligations, and Wallis thought it would be a good idea for Kanter to get a sense of the flavor of his star performer’s life, since Lonesome Cowboy was intended to be something of a rock ’n’ roll biopic.

  Elvis met Kanter at the airport with Cliff and Gene and Freddy Bienstock, too, the dapper twenty-eight-year-old Hill and Range representative with the pronounced Viennese accent. Bienstock wasn’t quite sure what he was doing there, except that he sensed that Elvis was a little nervous about Kanter coming to visit his home and he wanted to make an impression on the “Hollywood director.” The first thing he did once they got to the house was to put Kanter in the same vibrating chair in which he had installed Bienstock upon his arrival, flipping the switch that set the chair in motion without any warning, which gave Kanter something of a surprise. Then he proudly showed off the house before his mother announced it was time for dinner. They had fried chicken and okra and greens, but Alberta, the maid, had forgotten to put any water on the table, and Kanter was parched, so he asked if he could please have some water. Elvis, being, naturally, a little embarrassed, “started screaming for the maid,” Freddy recalled, “and he yells ‘Alberta, some water please!’ So she comes in with a pitcher of water and puts it in the middle of the table, but she didn’t bring any glasses. So Kanter was looking at the water, and Elvis screams, ‘Alberta, you forgot the glasses!’ And Kanter says, ‘It’s all right, a straw will do.’ Which I thought was very funny—but Elvis resented it. He didn’t take to strangers easily, and later on in the evening, when I was getting ready to go back to New York, he came to me and said, ‘Listen, man, you got to come with me [to Shreveport]. This director, I don’t really know how to approach him—he’s supposed to be directing my next movie, and he turns out to be a fucking comedian!’ ”

  Things weren’t beyond salvaging, though—Elvis was simply embarassed, and Kanter was understandably feeling his way. After dinner they sat around in the recreation room, shot some pool, and talked about the movie. Hal Wallis had specifically enjoined the director from bringing a script, but after Elvis had expounded on his theory of screen acting (the ones who lasted were the ones who didn’t smile much), Kanter hastened to reassure him that this wasn’t just another “jolly” film where Elvis would sit around grinning all the time; in fact he wouldn’t have to smile at all if he didn’t really want to. You know, Elvis is a really good actor, Gene volunteered to Kanter. I’m sure he is, said Kanter agreeably. He had seen the screen test and he thought it was very good. “ ‘Man, that screen test ain’t nothin’. You oughta hear him do his piece. Elvis, do that piece of yours for him.’ Elvis said, ‘Naw, I don’t want to, I don’t—’ He said, ‘Go ahead, do the piece.’ I said, ‘What piece are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Oh, it’s a little something I learned.’ And I said, ‘What is it?’ He said it was General MacArthur’s speech to Congress, his farewell address. I said, ‘Why did you learn that?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. I just wanted to see if I could memorize it, and I did.’ ”

  The next day Elvis gave Kanter a tour of Memphis, and that night they left for Shreveport in the Lincoln, with Scotty and Bill driving the instruments in the big yellow Cadillac limo. Kanter rode with Elvis in the front seat, while cousins Gene and Junior and the Colonel’s brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott, rode in the back. At one point everybody was asleep except Elvis and the director, “and we passed a dog, an old dog howling in the night, and he said how much he envied that dog. That dog had a life of his own. He said, ‘He goes out at night, and he’s doing this, and he’s doing that, and nobody knows what he’s up to, but he’s having more fun—and when the sun comes up he’s back under the front porch, just thinking, and nobody knows the life he’s been living during the night.’ ”

  They pulled in to Shreveport at 5:00 A.M. and registered at the Captain Shreve, where the fans were already gathered in force and making enough noise that Elvis had to stick his head out of his room window to ask them to please let him get some sleep. “He awoke in late afternoon and breakfasted with two travelling companions,” wrote Kanter in an article entitled “Inside Paradise,” which was published in Variety some three weeks later. The story bore no specific reference to Elvis Presley, but it could have been about no one else, starting with its striking lead about “the young man with the ancient eyes and the child’s mouth… [who] awoke from the nightmare of poverty to find the brilliant sun of Fame suddenly burst in his eyes….

  The lobby of the hotel had been swarming with camera-equipped hordes waiting for his brief flight to the auditorium; police had been detailed to keep order; one was posted at his door in the hallway…. Now, the hours drag by for the young man. He reads a magazine, plays some records, chats with his travelling companions, looks over the newspapers, signs a few autographs for the hotel manager. Now it is time to dress. He takes his time, stretching out every movement to consume more minutes, to eat away the hour remaining.

  On schedule the assistant manager arrives with the two burly police who escort him to the waiting patrol car. Down the service elevator, through the kitchen, into the alley where the patrol car hums, poised for immediate flight….

  Another squad of police wait at the stage entrance of the auditorium, leaning heavily against the throng of fans straining for a glimpse of their hero. A shout goes up as the car wheels into view. It turns into screams, high-pierced, splitting the night air, beseeching, fanatic, as he leaps from the car and hurdles himself past clutching hands into the comparative safety of the auditorium.

  Backstage there are milling scores who want to slap his back, shake his hand, “remember me” him. Then the reporters, the photographers, the disk jockeys with their tape-recorders, city officials, civic dignitaries, fan club presidents, business associates. Talk. Laugh. Shake. Smile. Pose. Answer. Listen. Stand. Sit. Walk. See. Sign. Hear. Acknowledge. Deny.

  A nerve-shattering hour and then the moment to appear onstage. The introduction is drowned by the shout that goes up at the merest hint he is next on the bill. The shrill, deafening, roof-lifting screams continue.

  “That’s the night my car got stomped in,” said Horace Logan, the head of the Hayride, who introduced Elvis wearing his trademark Stetson hat and pearl-handled six-guns. “I parked it right behind the dressing room behind the Coliseum, and the little old girls stomped the roof in standing on top of it trying to see Elvis. That was the night they had roped off the front of the stage, about twenty-five feet. Nobody was supposed to get down there, and when we got there, they were jammed up against the stage. And the fire chief said, ‘Get them to move back or there is no show.’ Well, you’re talking about eight thousand people on the lower floor, they had to move their chairs back, all eight thousand of them would have had to move. Now how am I going to do that? I told the fire chief, I said, ‘I’ll tell them there is not going to be any show, but I’m going to tell them who canceled it—and they’ll kill you!’ Then I got an inspiration. We had some kids out there in iron lungs, and I told them, ‘Folks, I’m sorry to have to do this, but these young people over here in the iron lungs are the only ones I’m going to allow down here. Every one of you has got to back up and move over, so we can put those kids in the front.’ And they did it.”

  The show itself lasted for about half an hour, and there was screaming from start to finish. Hal Kanter, who had admittedly come to scoff, came away a true believer. When he had driven out to the Coliseum earlier in the day with Bill, the fans had converged on the car, thinking it was Elvis’, and he thought he was going to be torn apart. Then, after they realized their mistake, he saw something he could scarcely believe. “I saw a young girl open her purse and take out a Kleenex, and she wiped her hand on the car, took some dust, put it in the Kleenex and folded it and put it back in the purse. I thought, ‘My God, I’ve never seen any kind of devotion like this anywhere, about anything.’ ”

  At the show that night he saw further evid
ence of this same strange sense of almost trancelike absorption. He saw a young girl who looked as if she were about to strangle herself by swallowing her hand. “She appeared to have her hand in her mouth all the way down to her wrist, and I was wondering, how can a little girl like this get her whole hand down her throat? And then at one point she pulled her hand out of her mouth, and I found out she didn’t have a hand at all. She was just sucking on the stump. And I thought, ‘God, I’ve got to get that in the picture!’ ” He saw twins clapping to the music, one twin using her left hand, the other using her right. Most of all, he saw a kind of mass hysteria, and a mass adulation, that he had never seen before or since. “I’m a man who saw Al Jolson on the stage, and I never saw anything like the reception that Al Jolson got until Elvis Presley—and he made Al Jolson seem like a passing fancy.”

  Nobody had seen anything like it before. If there had been any doubt that Elvis Presley had outgrown the Hayride, that doubt was now erased. It was, in a way, the end of the Hayride itself. Though it would limp along for another few years, how could it follow an act like this? Webb Pierce had succeeded Hank Williams, Slim Whitman and Faron Young had succeeded Webb Pierce, and Elvis Presley had succeeded them all—but who was going to succeed Elvis Presley?

  Backstage there was an uproar of activity. Paul Kallinger from 150,000-watt station XERF in Mexico, which broadcast unimpeded, and essentially unregulated, just across the border from Del Rio, Texas, got Tillman Franks to introduce him, but Elvis spent at least an equal amount of time with Tillman’s daughter, Darlene. Even Sandi Phillips, a reporter for the Broadmoor Junior High School student newspaper, got an interview. She was there with a group of girls from Broadmoor, and they all went backstage after the show. “I said I was a reporter for the Bulldog Bark, and there were all these guards, and they weren’t going to let me in, and then all of a sudden this man says, ‘Let her in,’ and it was him—I’m getting goose bumps just telling this—and he said, ‘Hey, little lady, you want an interview or something?’ Something like that. And his hair was flopping around, and he was sweating, and he had a towel around his neck, and I had a little pad and pencil and I was wearing jeans and a Levi shirt and I had a ponytail, and I asked him a few questions (who knows what in hell I asked him?), and he answered whatever I asked, and he kissed me on the cheek, and I remember going out into the hall and all my girlfriends were just screaming at the top of their lungs and I just fell into their arms and, of course, I wouldn’t let anyone touch me or wash that spot for weeks.”