Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  About three weeks into filming, Vernon and Gladys Presley came out with their friends the Nicholses for an extended stay. They had been scheduled to arrive sometime earlier, but Gladys had not been feeling well and checked into Memphis’ Baptist Hospital for a series of tests. It was an undefined ailment, a kind of general malaise, brought on perhaps by worry. “I was suffering some nausea and pain in my left shoulder,” she told the newspaper, but after the tests had been carried out, she announced with some relief, “There is no surgery in sight.” On their first morning at the lot, reported a somewhat disingenuous press release, “the officer of duty at the main studio gate was approached by a… man [who] said, with a Southern accent, ‘Howdy, officer, can you tell me how to get into this place? We’ve got a boy working here?’ ” Vernon was wearing a light-colored suit, round-brimmed, pushed-back hat, and a too-short tie bunched up by an ornamental tie clip, while Gladys wore a simple pinned-back hat and an elegant new jacket over a dark dress. After it was ascertained what exactly their boy did on the lot, they were ceremoniously ushered in. Elvis showed them all around, and within days of their arrival both they and their friends bought poodles, whom they named Pierre and Duke (Gladys led Duke, named for John Wayne, around by a fake diamond necklace collar), and Vernon introduced Carl Nichols to one and all as his “decorator,” which puzzled Hal Kanter until it dawned on him that Nichols was by profession a housepainter.

  Gladys was entranced. She had worried before coming out that her boy might be made fun of, but she delightedly told friends and relatives afterward, “There’s somebody to comb his hair for him and even a man to help him get dressed and another man to ask him if he’s ready to work.” On weekends they went sightseeing, touring neighborhoods dotted with imposing mansions, as Elvis pointed out Debra Paget’s house, Red Skelton’s showplace, the homes of the stars. One time they went to the movies, and he took eighteen-year-old Paramount contract player Joan Blackman to see The Ten Commandments, but Gladys had to keep shushing him as he enthusiastically explained every scene from a biblical or “technical,” cinematic point of view. Scotty Moore’s wife, Bobbie, came out for a week, and she and Scotty took the elder Presleys to Burbank for the filming of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s popular weekly show, where Vernon and Gladys were introduced from the audience and later met Tennessee Ernie and his wife backstage.

  One day when they visited the set, on a whim Hal Kanter shot some film of them and then invited them to come back to see themselves in the daily rushes the next day. Gladys was concerned that she looked fat, but Vernon reassured her that she looked fine, and overall they were so delighted with the results that Kanter got the idea of including them in the audience in the climactic show scene. When he broached the idea to Elvis, Elvis said he was sure that they would love it. So in the final Coast-to-Coast broadcast that caps the picture and refutes all the mean-spirited critics of rock ’n’ roll, there is Elvis rocking away onstage, and there is Gladys seated on the aisle—with Vernon beside her, and the Nicholses beside him—clapping away in time to the music, intent on nothing but her boy. It is perhaps the musical high point of Elvis’ career in films, yet another reprise of “Got a Lot O’ Livin’ to Do” which combines illusion and reality in such a way as to heighten the attraction of each. Elvis swivels his leg sharply, then good-naturedly drags it behind him. He stands at the lip of the stage and, along with the Jordanaires, who are dressed in matching cowboy outfits, leads the audience in hand clapping, then jumps down and comes dancing up the aisle. Gladys’ gaze never wavers. For a moment he is standing to her left, and as she claps along she never takes her eyes off her son. Then he backs away, climbs back up on the stage, and the number is over, the studio audience is still applauding, Gladys along with all the rest—but for her it is different, different even than for the man beside her. For her it is the pinnacle of everything she has ever dreamed or imagined. Her gaze is transformed by love.

  They returned home in mid March with the Nicholses after a month-long stay in Hollywood. Elvis would be coming home in about a week—but then he would be off again in May, to make the new picture that the Colonel and MGM had jointly announced would make Elvis Presley, by one manner of accounting anyway, the highest-paid star in motion picture history. For his new movie, tentatively entitled The Rock, Elvis would get $250,000 up front plus a range of additional benefits (office, travel, staff, not to mention the Colonel’s fee for technical assistance), with 50 percent of the film’s net profits assigned to Elvis on the back end. It was, remarked Time magazine in its May account, “unheard of.”

  Elvis handled it all with the utmost good grace and aplomb; everyone on the set agreed that he remained the same simple, thoughtful, almost unnaturally controlled and polite young man you might ever hope to meet—but there were at the same time unmistakable signs of pressure. He blew up at Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires, who had come to Hollywood to record with him and be in his picture, for making a record with Tab Hunter (whose “Young Love” had just beaten out “Too Much” for the number-one pop position)—even though he had always said the Jordanaires were free to record with whomever they pleased. The next day he apologized, and apologized profusely. You don’t have to do that, said Stoker, taken a little bit aback. “ ‘You don’t have to apologize to me or to anybody,’ I told him. ‘Yes, I do,’ he said. I never will forget it as long as I live. He said, ‘See that man sweeping the floor right there?’ We were on the movie set. ‘If I hurt his feelings, it would bug me till I went and apologized to him. I guess I’m a weird guy.’ ” He supposed he was just getting antsy; he was really beginning to miss his road trips, and he was just looking forward to getting back out there and working off some of this excess energy.

  At the wrap party Hal Kanter put a good deal of effort, and not a little of his own money, into thanking a cast and crew who he felt had given their all on this, his first picture. Due to some last-minute business involving a two-shot with Elvis and Lizabeth Scott, he was late getting to the party, and when he arrived he found the Colonel operating out of a booth decorated with RCA promotional material and a banner declaring “Elvis and the Colonel Thank You.” Colonel Parker was handing out Elvis Presley albums which had been provided by the record company and publicity pictures of Elvis with his autograph printed on them, and he was raffling off an RCA Victrola, giving everyone a number. “It cost me several thousand dollars, but it turned out to be his party!” remarked Kanter. The Colonel greeted him warmly, welcoming him to the festivities, and Kanter was reminded once again of the book that Parker had asked him to help write. “All I have is the title,” the Colonel had told him, recapitulating a familiar theme, “but I guarantee that it’s gonna be a best-seller.” What was the title? Kanter asked, going for the bait. “It’s called How Much Does It Cost If It’s Free?” The reason he knew it would be a best-seller, the Colonel hastened to assure the movie director, was that RCA had guaranteed to buy ten thousand copies of the book the moment it was published.

  ELVIS SPOKE TO HIS PARENTS on the telephone on Saturday just before boarding the train for home. They were both excited. They had just seen a house, an estate, really, and they thought he would be excited about it, too. They had made an appointment to go back to see it again on Tuesday after he got home. He sent a telegram to June to meet him when the train stopped in New Orleans. She went with some ambivalence but with more of an intention to pay him back for all the hurt that he had caused her, and when he told her that he wanted her to accompany him to Memphis—he had a surprise that she would really love—she told him that she was engaged. He didn’t believe her at first, but then he never told her his surprise, just looked at her blankly as the train pulled away.

  Graceland turned out to be beyond his wildest expectations. Built in 1939 in Whitehaven, about eight miles south of downtown Memphis, it was written up by Ida Clemens in the Memphis Commercial Appeal in the fall of 1940 as the new country home of Dr. and Mrs. Thomas D. Moore. “Located well back from Highway 51 in a grove of towering o
aks, it stands proudly on land that has been in the family nearly a century…. As you roll up the drive you sense its fine heritage from the past in its general feeling of aristocratic kindliness and tranquillity.” The facade of Tishomingo limestone and the Corinthian columns of the entrance portico were remarked upon. “Polished with the quiet manners characteristic of today’s beauty, the palatial home is a noteworthy example of the Georgian colonial style” with an “air of subtle luxury that pervades the exterior [and] seeps through the walls and penetrates every room in the house….

  “ ‘Our entire home is centered around music,’ ” Mrs. Moore told the Commercial Appeal reporter, alluding to her fourteen-year-old daughter, who went on to a distinguished career as harpist for the Memphis Symphony, and proudly showing Miss Clemens around the eighteen-room house, with its parlor that opened up for entertainment to a full seventy-five-foot length and its beautifully planted 18¼ acres. This was what remained of Mrs. Moore’s family’s almost 500-acre Hereford cattle farm after her great-aunt Grace (for whom the house was named) sold off much of the rest of the land for a subdivision and shopping center and Mrs. Moore herself subsequently gave away another 4½ acres to the Graceland Christian Church just before putting her home on the market.

  Elvis got in after midnight Monday night and went out to see the estate first thing on Tuesday with his parents and a reporter in tow. Accompanying the family was Mrs. Virginia Grant, a young real estate agent whom Gladys had met early in February in the parking lot of Lowenstein’s East department store. Mrs. Grant had had a number of properties to show them, but they were leaving for California the next day and didn’t contact her again until their return. They didn’t like the first house, a sprawling ranch on seven acres, and Mrs. Grant was feeling a little bit discouraged when Gladys said, “Don’t you have anything to show us with a Colonial home?” All of a sudden the image of Graceland, which had only recently come on the market and which she had never been inside, popped into her head, and though Vernon at this point thought that he might like to move to California, Gladys prevailed upon him to look at the property.

  “This is going to be a lot nicer than Red Skelton’s house when I get it like I want it,” Elvis told the Press-Scimitar reporter enthusiastically after going through the house for the first time, and before the deal was done or a firm offer even made, everyone in Memphis knew that Elvis Presley was going to pay $100,000 for Mrs. Moore’s beautiful old southern mansion. “We’ve found a house that we like very much, and we will buy it if we can come to terms,” said Vernon, ever cautious and aware that the price was not going to come down if they did not indicate some reluctance. Elvis was simply not one to negotiate, though. He knew how happy the house would make his mother (“I think I am going to like this new home,” Gladys announced publicly. “We will have a lot more privacy and a lot more room to put some of the things we have accumulated over the last few years”), and within a week the deal was done. The price was $102,500. Hugh Bosworth, the listing agent, took their old house at an assigned value of $55,000 in trade, and the Presleys put down $10,000 cash and took out a mortgage of $37,500. In fact, the only barrier to really cashing in on the deal was the Colonel’s decision that they would have to turn down a bubble gum manufacturer’s bid at a “fabulous” price to strip the newly installed wood paneling from the house on Audubon, chop it up, and distribute it as prizes with his bubble gum. The Colonel said this would conflict with merchandising deals they already had in place.

  Within a couple of days renovations had begun. Sam Phillips had just moved into his new house, out east in the higher-priced Memphis suburbs, earlier in the year, and on Sam’s recommendation Elvis contacted Sam’s decorator, George Golden, a forty-three-year-old former Lipton tea salesman with a taste for the eclectic and a flair for self-promotion. To advertise his business, Golden had several flatbed trucks cruising around Memphis, day and night, decked out with illuminated “three-foot-wide miniature rooms, built to scale, complete with carpet, wallpaper and a two-foot sofa, upholstered in chartreuse satin. That sofa with the shiny satin really caught everyone’s eye.” It evidently caught Elvis’ eye, or at least the futuristic touches and bold “lush life” style that marked Sam’s house did, and he wanted something on an even grander scale for himself. For his bedroom, he told the newspapers, he was going to have “the darkest blue there is… with a mirror that will cover one side of the room. I probably will have a black bedroom suite, trimmed in white leather, with a white [llama] rug [like Sam’s].” The entrance hall, he said, would be decorated with a sky effect, with tiny lights for stars and clouds painted on the ceiling, and he intended to build “a swimming pool on the south side of the house with a large sunken patio leading up to the pool,” a six-foot pink stone wall, purple walls with gold trim for the living and dining rooms, and a number of other resplendent touches.

  When it actually came down to it, he gave up the purple for pavilion blue at his mother’s request (her son, like most young people, she said understandingly, liked “dark, cozy colors”), and according to Golden, there were two priorities that asserted themselves most strongly. “One was that he had the most beautiful bedroom in Memphis for his mother. Number two, he wanted a soda fountain—a real soda fountain with Cokes and an ice cream thing—so his young friends could sit and have a soda.” He had an eight-foot-square bed built for himself and a fifteen-foot sofa custom-built for the living room, and with all the other touches that were planned—the swimming pool, the gates with the musical motif which Golden would have custom-made, the chicken house that Gladys wanted, the painting that Mr. Nichols was going to have to do throughout the house, and the structural repairs that were needed—he seemed ready to pay as much again for the renovations as he had paid already for the house. He just wanted it all to be ready by the summer, when he got home from making his next movie.

  For now he scarcely had time to think. He had another disturbing run-in downtown when he was accused of pulling a gun on a nineteen-year-old Marine who claimed that he had insulted his wife. The gun turned out to be a prop Elvis had brought back from Hollywood, Elvis had never even met Private First Class Hershel Nixon’s wife, and the whole thing was settled in Judge Boushe’s chambers the day before he went back out on the road, but it was beginning to seem like he couldn’t go anywhere in Memphis anymore without something happening.

  On the same day as the incident with the Marine, there was an announcement in the paper that Elvis would be returning to Tupelo for an appearance at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair in the fall. “The fair wanted Elvis back,” the Press-Scimitar reported, “[and] offered his manager, Col. Tom Parker, a guarantee of $10,000 for an appearance. Parker turned [them] down. ‘Elvis has been thinking about returning to Tupelo ever since last year,’ Parker said. ‘He has spoken about it a number of times. We’ll come to Tupelo, but all money over actual expenses will go to build a youth recreation center for boys in the East Tupelo section, where Elvis grew up.’ ” He was excited about that, and he was excited about the upcoming tour, too. Cliff had remained in California to try to promote his “career,” and Elvis was increasingly disinclined to take along his cousin Junior, whose behavior was becoming more erratic—but Gene, of course, would be with him, as always, and Arthur Hooton would be going out again for the first time in a while, and his friend George Klein was going to be accompanying him for the first time ever.

  “I had gotten fired from WMC because they quit playing rock ’n’ roll. One night I was up at HBQ visiting Dewey, and Elvis dropped by and said, ‘What are you doing, GK?’ And I said, ‘Well, I got fired, Elvis.’ He said, ‘You want to come work for me?’ I said, ‘What do I do?’ He said, ‘Nothing.’ I said, ‘Really, what do I—’ He said, ‘You’re just my traveling companion.’ I said, ‘Elvis, you know I’ll just go along for the ride.’ He just wanted some hometown guys with him so he wouldn’t get lonesome.

  “Mrs. Presley always liked me, I don’t really know why—she liked my mother, too. She told me, �
��George, when you go out on the road with Elvis, he has some bad habits, so please watch him because he’s my baby.’ She said, ‘Make sure you go through his pockets before you send his clothes to the wash because he’ll leave money in his pants. And he has a bad habit of walking in his sleep.’ She told me how to handle it. She said, ‘He’s a very nervous young man, and when he gets up to walk in his sleep, you talk to him real soft. And when he talks back to you, you talk back to him real soft: “That’s right, Elvis, now why don’t you come back to bed?” ’ So then I knew how to handle it.”

  The first date on the tour was in Chicago on March 28. Elvis had a press conference at the Saddle and Sirloin Club at the Stockyards Inn in the afternoon, and that night he unveiled the $2,500 gold-leaf suit that the Colonel had had made up for him. The idea had come from the gold cutaway that Liberace wore in Las Vegas, and the Colonel had Nudie Cohen, Hollywood tailor to the stars (or perhaps a certain kind of star, including all the bespangled country and western luminaries), come out to the movie set in his steer-horn-decorated Cadillac to measure him for it. There were twelve thousand in attendance at the International Amphitheatre, with a $32,000 gross, and thirteen girls passed out during the performance, but what stood out most for the Colonel was the first time Elvis fell to his knees like Al Jolson and left fifty dollars’ worth of gold spangles on the floor. He went up to Elvis after the show and asked him please not to do it again. Elvis wore the suit the following night at the Kiel Opera House, in St. Louis, which sold out for only the second time in its history (the first was for Liberace), but after that for the most part he stopped wearing the suit pants, substituting dark slacks to set off the jacket, sometimes wearing the gold slippers and bow tie, sometimes not. After a while he came to be embarrassed by it—it was as if he were advertising the suit rather than the other way around.