Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  DOTTIE HARMONY FLEW IN from Hollywood the following week to celebrate Christmas with the Presley family. There had been a snowstorm, and her plane was delayed, so when she got to Memphis there was nobody at the airport to meet her, and she fell asleep disconsolately next to a heater. “The next thing I knew, I heard a whole bunch of kids shouting, and I open up my eyes, and there are a bunch of girls with banners that say, ‘Go home, Dottie Harmony.’ Then I heard screams, and in comes Elvis, who proceeds to pick me up and carry me out to the Lincoln, and we went home, where he introduced me to his mom and dad.”

  Dottie found Mrs. Presley a totally sympathetic figure—Gladys hugged her and made a big fuss over her—and while Vernon didn’t show anywhere near as much personality, “they were very affectionate with each other, and he was very much so with Elvis, too.” Within an hour of her arrival Gladys had bundled her up and given her a Christmas list. “Mind you, I’d never met any of the people on this list, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to get them. I got the female list, and Elvis took the males, and we went to this big department store downtown, walked in, and he tells me, ‘We’ll meet here when we’re done.’ So I went about my business, bought gifts left and right, and I had a whole bunch of presents stacked up and waiting when all of a sudden I saw him running right past me, out the door to the car—’cause he had a whole bunch of fans running after him. About twenty minutes later, Cliff came back and got me, and we went home and had dinner.”

  Dottie spent a little over two weeks at the house, sleeping in Elvis’ room while he stayed down the hall. He spoke to her parents in Brooklyn several times on the phone to reassure them that she was all right; they rode around town in matching motorcycle outfits, and he introduced her to his friends and showed her where he had grown up and gone to school. The Colonel came by on a number of occasions, but he barely acknowledged her presence. “He acted like I wasn’t even there. I remember one time, he wanted to talk to them about some kind of money deal and he asked me to leave, and Elvis’ mother said, ‘Doroty’—she always called me Doroty—‘stays right here. Doroty is part of the family.’ He didn’t like that one bit.”

  Mrs. Presley talked about her garden (“Doroty, we’ve got tomatoes as big as your two fists”) and cooked black-eyed peas and greens and a coconut cake for Elvis almost every night. The fan magazines had a field day, but it wasn’t, said Dottie, “anything like you might think. We used to read the Bible every night, if you can believe that—he used to read aloud to me and then talk about it. He was very religious—there was nothing phony about that at all. At six o’clock at night he made me go out and sign autographs with him, which I thought was so ridiculous. I said, ‘I mean, what do people want my autograph for, Elvis?’ He said, ‘Just sign it.’ He said he wouldn’t be where he was if it wasn’t for his fans. He really felt that way.”

  Elvis tried to get Dottie to give up smoking (“I knew I didn’t have to worry about that, because he promised to stop chewing his nails if I did”), and he lectured her frequently on the “many lives he had seen ruined by drink.” One time she and Gladys managed to get him out of the house, “and we cracked a beer. One beer!” On Christmas Day they all exchanged gifts under a white nylon Christmas tree. Gladys wore her brocade dress and a red Santa hat, and there were pictures in the newspapers of Elvis and Dottie, of Elvis surveying his presents (including any number of stuffed animals and teddy bears), of Dottie opening her presents, even of a touch football game at the Dave Wells Community Center two days later, with Red home on leave and Elvis wearing tennis shoes and rolled-up dungarees, hair flopping across his forehead and a determined expression on his face.

  June saw the pictures in the paper and fumed. “Here I am, I’m being good, I’m being faithful, I’m not doing anything—and I’ve had lots of offers to go out. And then Christmas Day we were home till about noon, but then we were invited to some friend’s house. I even made myself a brand-new blue velvet dress to wear for Christmas Day, and I felt really pretty. I’m thinking, This is Christmas, and he’s got to call. When I woke up on Christmas Day, I was thinking about Elvis Presley—but he wasn’t thinking about me. Because Dottie Harmony was there. Well, that really clinched it for me, it really broke my heart, I had no idea it was all just this game. He called me afterwards and said that he had called and we didn’t answer, and that’s probably true, but right after that I met someone and started going out with him, and he just swept me off my feet, eased my heartache, and asked me to marry him, and I said yes.”

  Scotty and Bill saw the pictures, too, and it only reinforced their growing feeling that they were on the outside looking in. Christmas was a bleak season for them that year. Although they had worked a lot of dates the first half of the year, since August there had been no more than two weeks’ worth of work, and this didn’t add up to much on a $100-a-week retainer (even when they were working, they were earning $200 a week tops and were enjoined from making any product endorsements or taking any free goods). “We were broke, flat broke,” said Scotty’s wife, Bobbie. After living in Elvis’ old house on Getwell for a few months, they had moved in with her three sisters and a brother-in-law in a big house on Tutwiler, near Sears, and Bobbie was having to hide money from Scotty in a jewelry box just to be sure to have enough to pay the bills. Scotty and Bill (and D.J., too, in a good-humored subsidiary role) gave an interview to the Press-Scimitar in mid December in which they spoke in only slightly veiled terms of their straitened financial and social circumstances. They didn’t see as much of Elvis as they once had, they conceded—“just can’t be that way.” He was still fun to be around, though; “[he’s] always got some jazz going, likes to keep up chatter and joking,” said Bill. “I don’t think anyone should criticize him until they try to put themselves in his shoes and figure out what they would do.” They used to split the money three ways before D.J. came into the group, reported the newspaper, but “when [Elvis] hit the real big time, they realized that different financial arrangements would have [to be] made, and were happy that they came out of it as well as they did.” The real purpose of their “press conference” was to announce that they had just been given permission by management (which explicitly did not permit them to work with anyone else or “appear as a unit without Elvis in between tours”) to make a record of their own, an instrumental that RCA would put out sometime after the first of the year. They were very excited about this new opportunity. “We don’t even know how they will title us yet,” said Bill. “Maybe as ‘Elvis’ Boys.’ ”

  ON JANUARY 4, 1957, Elvis’ new single was released, and he reported for his pre-induction physical. He asked Dottie if she could stick around and go in with him, and she and Cliff accompanied him to the examination center at Kennedy Veterans Hospital, on Getwell, where he had performed in the rec room not long after his first record came out. Ordinarily there would have been forty or fifty men processed on any given day, but the army had decided that Elvis should be put through on an “off day,” all by himself. No one was supposed to know about it (the notice had been telephoned, not mailed), but there was a legion of photographers and reporters waiting when they pulled up in the rain. Dottie waited in the car at first, then joined Cliff inside, and Elvis announced to them both with a broad smile that he thought he had passed the intelligence test. Then she flew back to California, and Elvis left for New York on the train later that evening to play The Ed Sullivan Show for the third and final time.

  The Ed Sullivan appearance could best be described as the triumph of inclusion over exclusion, the boldfaced embrace and declaration of respectability that civilization inevitably has to offer. With the gold lamé vest that Barbara had given him for a Christmas present worn over the blue velvet blouse that he had worn for his appearance in Tupelo, Elvis looked something like a Middle Eastern pasha, while the Jordanaires, dressed in checked salesmen’s sports jackets, gave their booster’s all behind him. For his first segment he delivered an easygoing medley of his biggest records (it was not that they w
ere any bigger in size, he hastened to kid his totally rapt audience, as per custom), concluding with a rendition of “Don’t Be Cruel” that owed everything, from finger rolls to his pronunciation of “tellyphone” to the big pumped-up ending, to the performance by Jackie Wilson he had witnessed in Las Vegas. Then he did “Too Much” and “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again,” the lilting 1941 hit that he had included on his second album, and thanked his thoroughly mesmerized audience for the best Christmas he had ever had—and for the 282 teddy bears that they had sent him. After another break he came out again, this time dressed in one of his loudly tweedy sports jackets and, with eyes closed, straining up on his toes, he sang a song that Ed Sullivan introduced as “sort of in the mood that he’d like to create,” the spiritual “Peace in the Valley.”

  “Elvis, ladies and gentlemen,” said Ed, “inasmuch as he goes to the Coast now for his new picture, this will be the last time that we’ll run into each other for a while, but I—” Screams from the audience. Elvis laughs. “Now wait a minute.” Ed holds up his hand. “I wanted to say to Elvis Presley and the country that this is a real decent, fine boy, and wherever you go, Elvis, all of you… we want to say that we’ve never had a pleasanter experience on our show with a big name than we’ve had with you. So now let’s have a tremendous hand for a very nice person.” Elvis is clearly gratified and, with a generous gesture, includes both the band and the Jordanaires in his circle of acclaim, as Ed shakes the hand of each backup singer. There will be no more appearances on the show, the Colonel has made that clear by setting what amount to prohibitive terms for all three networks: if they want Elvis in the future, they will have to pay a $300,000 fee, which will cover two guest appearances and an hour-long special. But Ed’s gesture does not seem to be motivated by the normal show business considerations; he appears genuinely taken with the young man. And Elvis for his part is just as genuinely thrilled—he says as much to friends and fellow musicians—to receive recognition and validation from someone so widely respected, so experienced in the business. “This is a nice boy, and I want you to know it,” Ed repeated that same night in a television interview with Hy Gardner, on Hy Gardner Calling! “He could so easily have his head turned by all that’s happened. But it hasn’t….”

  By then, though, Elvis was already on the long train ride back home. He wanted to spend his twenty-second birthday with his mother and father before leaving for the Coast in a couple of days. On Tuesday he celebrated quietly at the house and made plans with his parents to join him in California several weeks later. The draft board announced that same day that he was an “A profile,” which meant that he would be classified I-A, or draftable, as soon as his local board received the report, though he would probably not be called up for six or eight months. It didn’t matter, Elvis told reporters who telephoned, he was happy to serve, he would simply go whenever he was called. He knocked around Memphis for the next couple of days, got a haircut at Jim’s Barber Shop, on the corner of Beale and Main, stopped by the police station just to shoot the bull (in December it had been reported that he told his “home town police friends” that he thought Debra Paget was the prettiest of the Hollywood stars, but Kim Novak was a good-looking girl with a good figure, and Rita Moreno really knocked him out), saw Dewey and George at their respective radio stations, and briefly dropped by the place that Dixie worked. She was married now, she told him. She had gotten married not long after the last time she had seen him with Nick. “Well, I’ll see you around,” he said, and then he was on the train to California with Cliff and Gene, stocked up with Reese’s peanut butter cups and comic books and movie magazines, and looking forward to making what he felt would amount to his real movie debut, his first chance at a genuine starring role.

  LOVING YOU

  January–April 1957

  WITH YVONNE LIME, IN FRONT OF GRACELAND, EASTER WEEKEND, 1957.

  (ROBERT WILLIAMS)

  THE MOVIE HAD BEEN RETITLED Loving You (after a new Leiber and Stoller ballad of that name, expressly written for the picture) by the time that Elvis arrived in Los Angeles by train on January 11. It had been planned with all the characteristic care and attention to detail of a typical Hal Wallis production, with the casting of seasoned stars (Wendell Corey and Lizabeth Scott) who were unlikely to overwhelm the new “singing sensation,” the secondary interest of another Hal Wallis discovery (eighteen-year-old Dolores Hart, née Hicks, whom Wallis was said to have found in a campus production of Joan of Lorraine just weeks before), colorful contract players like James Gleason in significant minor roles, a carefully prepared script, and an experienced studio crew. It was, in short, the kind of lighthearted, freshfaced picture with which a major studio might have introduced an exciting new star twenty, or even five, years before, but it was worlds away from the flurry of rock ’n’ roll exploitation features that had sprung up in the previous year to fill the void that Variety had pointed to in its review of Love Me Tender.

  With a customary two-month studio shooting time and its newly commissioned score alone, Loving You would have differed substantially from Rock Around the Clock or Don’t Knock the Rock, for example, the two 1956 quickie productions by exploitation master Sam Katzman which set a rock ’n’ roll movie trend for even more rudimentary filmic exercises like Rock, Rock, Rock (filmed in less than two weeks) to follow. Each of these movies presented stars like Bill Haley and DJ Alan Freed who, in the face of adult opposition, conspire to put on a show that inevitably includes a panoply of rock ’n’ rollers—from Little Richard, the Platters, and Fats Domino to such Las Vegas staples as the Treniers and Freddie Bell and the Bellboys—trotted out on a soundstage to lip-synch their latest hits.

  What the Colonel and Hal Wallis had in mind was something quite different. Their idea, linked by a partnership of convenience and a shared canniness which had approached similar challenges and similar partnerships in the past, was to build a career that would last, a career that could survive musical trends, which inevitably come and go, while permitting an incandescent talent to continue to shine. In keeping with that goal, the Colonel knew, it was necessary to distance his boy from the hurly-burly; he was becoming increasingly concerned that the very controversy that had originally fueled Elvis’ fame was now serving to limit it. He had worked hard to get his boy on Ed Sullivan and pointed with pride not only to the ratings, which clearly reflected a substantial, and substantially growing, adult audience, but to Sullivan’s public endorsement and embrace—and he was now determined to work just as hard to achieve success in the movies.

  The Colonel had always paid close attention to newspaper accounts and never failed to note criticism. In Elvis’ case he had exploited it for a time, assuring RCA that he knew what he was doing and that, if they didn’t like it, they could just step off the merry-go-round. Now it was time for them all to step off the merry-go-round. The criticism had simply become too intense, and it was becoming all too clear that rock ’n’ roll now served as a lightning rod for a more and more sharply divided society. Denounced from the pulpit, derided in the press, increasingly linked to the race issue, and even subject to congressional hearings, the music was being used to stigmatize a generation. New York congressman Emanuel Celler, chairman of the Antitrust Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, which was looking into the issue of “payola,” declared that while “rock ’n’ roll has its place [and has given] great impetus to talent, particularly among the colored people,” the music of Elvis Presley and his “animal gyrations… are violative of all that I know to be in good taste.”

  To the Colonel it was all business. The attacks, the whipped-up emotion, the moral outrage—these were simply the actions of concerned businessmen, secular and ecclesiastic, determined to protect their investment in society. But the Colonel was determined to protect his investment, too, and to that end, without ever announcing his policy or spelling it out in specific detail, he was prepared to remove Elvis from the fray, he was committed to the idea of getting him off the road and
out of the glare of needless, negative publicity. Elvis’ business was communication, after all, and what better way to communicate with his audience all around the world than from the silver screen, where the image always flickered, the candle burned but never flamed—and fame, carefully nurtured, need never go away?

  Meanwhile, Wallis, a veteran of seven of the first eight Martin and Lewis pictures and one of the most careful polishers of image and fame, however unlikely the source, was not about to overlook his own investment. He recognized in the Colonel a kindred spirit. “He was a genius,” he said of Parker in a quote that might well have been applied to himself, “at getting every possible inch of financial mileage out of his astonishing protégé,” and he was somewhat taken aback by Hal Kanter’s rather cavalier take on the whole phenomenon. When Kanter, in recounting his experiences on the road, mentioned the girl he thought had swallowed her hand and suggested that perhaps they could find an attractive amputee from central casting, Wallis, who had thoroughly enjoyed the recitation up to that point, reacted with horror. “Oh God, you can’t put that in the picture,” he said. Leave the satire to Frank Tashlin, whose The Girl Can’t Help It at Twentieth Century Fox was a clever takeoff on rock ’n’ roll, with Edmond O’Brien, as a love-struck gangster, warbling songs like “Rock Around the Rock Pile” and Jayne Mansfield competing for attention with Gene Vincent and Little Richard. Hal Wallis was not simply in the business of exploiting fads, and he was as determined as Tom Parker to see to it that Elvis Presley’s career was a long, and mutually profitable, one. As far as he was concerned, Loving You was going to be good entertainment, a typical name-above-the-title Hollywood production, with the best of the “new music,” a clever (but not too clever) script, and a wholesome Hollywood patina to spread over any recognizable real-life details. It would be a picture you could take the whole family to.