Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  “One day after the shooting he invited me up to the hotel—I think we had a Coke downstairs, and then we went up to his suite on the top floor. And we went in and shot some pool and ate some peanuts, and we’re kidding around and talking about songs and music, and then the Colonel came in and it was like a scattering of birds: they all flew away. I was in the middle of a pool shot and looked up and nobody was there. When Elvis came back, he looked terrible. He said, ‘Mike, the Colonel’s all upset because you’re here, and I guess you gotta go.’ I said it was all right and took off. They just didn’t want anybody around, especially a songwriter—it was okay to work with him in a controlled area, but to be able to get to him and perhaps influence him, present him with a song…. That was the kind of control the Colonel had.”

  “I don’t feel like I’m property,” Elvis told columnist Joe Hyams, while lunching alone in his dressing room on a bowl of gravy, a bowl of mashed potatoes, nine slices of well-done bacon, two pints of milk, a large glass of tomato juice, lettuce salad, six slices of bread, and four pats of butter. “I can’t get it into my head that I’m property. People tell me you can’t do this or that,” he went on, “but I don’t listen to them. I do what I want. I can’t change, and I won’t change.” He was a hard worker, he said, he had worked hard all his life, and even though he got lonely as hell sometimes (“A lot of times I feel miserable, don’t know whichaway to turn”), he still loved every minute of it. “If I had to drop it all I could do it, but I wouldn’t like it.” And what about the Colonel? Hyams asked. “I’ve got an idea of how to handle me better than anyone else has as far as keeping me in line,” said Elvis. “Colonel Parker is more or less like a daddy when I’m away from my own folks. He doesn’t meddle in my affairs. Ain’t nobody can tell me ‘you do this or that.’ Colonel Parker knows the business and I don’t. He never butts into record sessions, I don’t butt into business. Nobody can tell you how to run your life.”

  He studied the daily rushes religiously every night. He was still dead set against acting lessons—it was like the difference between an opera singer and a singer who sang from the heart, he explained to George Klein; formal study might rob him of his spontaneity. But, as a great believer in self-improvement and self-education, he never left the studio at night without carefully scrutinizing his performance. “I always criticize myself in films,” he told an interviewer a few months later. “I’m always striving to be natural in front of a camera. That takes studying, of a sort.”

  He was serious about it, and he felt like he was getting somewhere. Mr. Thorpe wasn’t very approachable, but he sought tips wherever he could get them, asking assistant director Bob Relyea for suggestions, thanking character actor Glenn Strange for his patience in a difficult scene. “He interacted with everybody,” said Relyea. “One of the first days we were shooting a scene, and we were held up—and one of the crew just said, ‘Well, we should have a song.’ So he got his guitar out and played a song. It wasn’t any, ‘No, no, I don’t do that, uh, don’t embarrass me.’ He just said, ‘Give me my guitar!’ He had all these qualities that you knew that he could succeed at whatever he wanted to do. He probably would have been good as a schoolteacher, he would have been a good mechanic. He was so dedicated and focused, he knew what it was about: he knew what tomorrow’s work was going to be.”

  It was into this volatile mix of work and play, of desperate deal making and disingenuous denial, that Dewey stepped when he arrived for a Hollywood vacation several weeks into filming. He was all excited about the trip, which Elvis had even offered to pay for because, Bob Johnson wrote in the Press-Scimitar, “he wanted Dewey to spend a lot of time with him, and to watch him at work at MGM…. He didn’t put him in with the other fellows, but put Dewey up in a room in his own personal suite…. Elvis took Dewey to his dentist and spent about $400 getting Dewey some of those fancy porcelain caps just like Elvis’ for his teeth. He took him around to the various studios and stars’ homes, proud of his strange friend from Memphis.”

  Unfortunately, “strange” appeared to be the operative word. Dewey, as Scotty said, “acted just the way he did around Memphis. Of course everyone in Memphis knew him, but out there he was just out of his league.” He showed up on the set on the first day, got bored, and left after fifteen minutes. He got thrown off another set for taking pictures. Elvis took him over to the soundstage where they were making The Brothers Karamazov and introduced him to Yul Brynner, whereupon Dewey spontaneously observed, “You’re a short little mother, aren’t you?” and Elvis, mortified, apologized for his friend. “It was a star-crossed situation,” observed George Klein. “Elvis loved Dewey for what he’d done for him, but by the same token he was embarrassed by what Dewey was doing in Hollywood. We went to see Sammy Davis, Jr., at the Moulin Rouge, and they introduced Elvis, and Dewey jumped up between Elvis and the spotlight and said, ‘Dewey Phillips, Memphis, Tennessee,’ and there’s Elvis standing up to take a bow. We didn’t get mad. We just said, ‘That’s crazy Dewey.’ I mean, Elvis knew how Dewey was.”

  Before he left, Elvis played him a dub of his new single, “Teddy Bear,” from Loving You, and Dewey flipped over it, it was a damn hit, he said and asked to hear it again. When he got on the plane, according to Dewey’s report to Bob Johnson, “we even shed a few tears. I told him I’d never be able to repay him for all the nice things he’d done for me. His last words to me were, ‘Phillips, be sure and say a prayer before you get on that plane.’ ”

  Unfortunately Dewey had taken some stowaway luggage on board: against Elvis’ explicit instructions, he had appropriated a copy of the new single, which was not due for release until June 11 and which, against all protocol and advice, he played on the air immediately upon his return. The Victor people were furious, the Colonel was furious—it only vindicated what he had been saying about Elvis’ Memphis friends all along—and Elvis was furious, too. The headline in the Press-Scimitar was “These Reports True—Elvis and Dewey Had a Falling Out.”

  In the meantime shooting on the movie was rapidly coming to an end. When it was finished, it offered a neat little parable in black and white on the debilitating effects of fame (Vince Everett turned bigheaded before fate intervened) and the discrepancy that could exist between a truculent and much-criticized exterior and the essential sweetness that might lie underneath. It was a point Elvis had been arguing by deed, if not by word, for years, and one to which he clearly took, in a performance that marked an even further advance over the significant progress shown in Loving You. You couldn’t really say that he had achieved an acting style, because in each scene he was a little different: there were traces, of course, of Dean and Brando—Brando particularly in the penitentiary scene where Elvis was flogged and registered silent suffering while naked to the waist—but, not surprisingly, the most striking resemblance was to a young Robert Mitchum, or perhaps it was Billy Murphy he was thinking of. In any case, it was a most creditable performance, and one of which Elvis could be proud as he departed for home at the end of June.

  The train ride home was relatively uneventful, though it might have been less boring for Elvis if he had been aware of the behavior of his increasingly erratic cousin Junior Smith. Junior bunked with George, because at this point no one else could stand him. “He was drinking a lot, and when he’d get drunk he’d get mean. And he smoked in bed at night, and everyone was afraid he’d set the cabin on fire. So Elvis said, ‘George, do you mind if Junior stays with you?’ And I said no, because for some reason Junior and I hit it off, we’d kid around and tell old stories and it was fine. Well, this particular night he’d had a few drinks and he gets up and starts packing his bag, and it’s about three-thirty in the morning, and I said, ‘Junior, where in the shit are you going?’ And he said, ‘I’m getting off this fucking train.’ I said, ‘Junior, what are you going to do?’ He packed his bag, and I said, ‘Man, don’t wake up Elvis, Junior.’ He said, ‘I ain’t gonna wake up Cuz.’ So he pulls that fucking cord that stops the train, and the conduct
or comes running down to our little booth, and Junior says, ‘Stop this motherfucker, I want to get off.’ And I started talking to him, and the conductor started talking to him, and we finally calmed him down and got him back to bed.”

  Elvis couldn’t wait to get home to see the renovations and stay overnight at Graceland with his parents, who had already moved in. So impatient was he that, after trying to get June to meet him in New Orleans, only to find out that she had been married on June 1, he got off the train in Lafayette, Louisiana, rented a car with Cliff, and drove the rest of the way home. “When we got there, the wall, the limestone wall, was not finished, and the gate was not up, and these little sticks guided you up the driveway with these orange markers because the asphalt was not fixed yet. Well, we made the little curve, got out, and went up to the door, and he stopped—it was about eleven-thirty at night, and he says, ‘Well, Cliff, here goes.’ He opened the door, and there was a little foyer there, and he went in, and, standing under the chandelier in the extended part of the foyer, were his mother and father. And she said, ‘Welcome home, son.’ And we talked for most of the night. It was not the excitement you might expect. Not, you know, ‘Hey, we made it. We’re on top of the world.’ That never came out of that family—it was against their nature. They just talked. ‘It’s nice.’ ‘They’ve done a good job.’ Elvis’ father explained to him, ‘We’ve still got to do this or that… I think this man here charged a little too much. I think we ought to change this guy, get another contractor…’ That kind of talk.” Had they completed the hog pens and chicken coop out back? Elvis wondered. Elvis’ mother told him she had put in the garden.

  THERE WAS NOTHING PLANNED, there was nothing that he had to do, there was nowhere that he needed to be. “Teddy Bear” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On,” the new song that Sam had put out on Jerry Lee Lewis, were vying for number one, “Love Letters in the Sand” was still going good for Pat Boone, seventeen-year-old Ricky Nelson was doing all right with his first record, and he liked Tommy Sands, too—“There’s plenty of room for all of us,” he reassured his friends when they started running down one artist or another, though he didn’t ever want to be taken for granted, either. The world premiere of Loving You was scheduled to be held in Memphis on July 9 at the Strand Theatre on South Main, and he was planning to attend. In the meantime he wanted to make sure that everything at Graceland was just right. He had heard that geese were good for keeping down a lawn, so he took one of the Cadillacs, drove it down to Mississippi, and filled up the backseat with sixteen geese, which, not surprisingly, left a substantial deposit. Another time he took over from Vernon on the driving mower, heading straight for his mother’s tulip bed. He was just fooling around, but then his mother started to yell, “Elvis, Elvis, don’t!” and a look of panic came over her face, which only added to the temptation. Tulips flew everywhere, and his mother eventually started laughing, too, but Mr. Presley was worried that he was going to be blamed.

  Then on the night of July 3 he heard that Judy Tyler had been killed with her husband in an automobile crash out west. She had played the record company girl who became his manager and love interest in Jailhouse Rock, and he was devastated. He showed up at George’s house with Arthur at 10:00 the following morning, an unheard-of hour. “I was still living across from Humes with my mother, and she came into the bedroom and said, ‘Elvis is at the door.’ I said, ‘No, Mom, Elvis is not at the door.’ He was real serious, so I said, ‘What’s wrong, man?’ but he just wanted to take a ride. So we got in the car and he said, ‘Hey, man, Judy got killed.’ So we drove around for a while and he explained it to me, he just felt so bad.”

  He was determined to go to the funeral, he told the newspapers later in the day, even if it meant missing the premiere. “She was at the peak of success,” he said, fighting back tears. “Nothing has hurt me as bad in my life…. I remember the last night I saw them. They were leaving on a trip. Even remember what she was wearing.” He didn’t know if he could stand to look at the movie now, he said. “I just don’t believe I can.” In the end he didn’t attend the funeral. It was his mother, not the Colonel, who told the papers a couple of days later that he would just send flowers, he didn’t want to disrupt the service.

  That Sunday he met a girl he had been seeing on TV ever since getting home. Anita Wood was nineteen, a beauty-contest winner, blond, pert, and talented, who had been appearing with Wink Martindale on the Top Ten Dance Party on WHBQ for the past few months. She was from Jackson, Tennessee, originally, like Wink, and Cliff knew her from there, while George knew her through Wink. Elvis had George check the situation out, and when George came back and said she’d like to meet him, he had George call her up. The first time she was busy, and when she had to decline a second time, she thought he would never call again, but the third time George called she was free. They drove by the Strand to see the cutout of Elvis that the theater had put out in anticipation of the movie opening in two days. George and Cliff were in the backseat, and Lamar, too, and they went out for hamburgers at Chenault’s afterward. Then he gave her a tour of his new home and its grounds: the swimming pool, the six cars, his collection of teddy bears, from which he lightheartedly selected one as a gift. He showed her his bedroom, but she told him she didn’t feel comfortable there, so they went back downstairs and spent the rest of the evening talking and playing records and singing at the piano. At the end of the night he took her home to the room she rented in Mrs. J. R. Patty’s house, and they chastely kissed good-night.

  After that they kept almost constant company. Elvis didn’t attend the Loving You premiere, which set box office records in Memphis and, a few weeks later, across the country, but he took Anita and his parents to a special midnight showing, which they all enjoyed. During the day they frequently drove around in an old panel truck that guaranteed anonymity, as Elvis showed her all the places that meant something to him in his life. He was painstaking, almost compulsive, about pointing out to her the route he had walked to the store, where he had played as a child, where his friends and cousins lived, the places where he had worked and played. He dreaded going into the army, he told her, and started calling her “Little” because of the size of her feet. Sometimes he would talk baby talk to her the same as he would talk to his mother. It was all very down-to-earth and flattering, too, if only for the way he simply adored her. He didn’t play the big star, he was just like a boy that you would meet and fall in love with and then expect to marry—and his family was so welcoming, too. “I just can’t wait,” Gladys told her, not long after Anita had become a regular fixture, “to see that little ol’ baby walking up and down the driveway.” She had been sick a lot lately and stayed up in her room. “She had a heart problem, I think, and she was overweight with fluid—her ankles and her legs would swell a lot…. She never ceased to worry about Elvis.”

  They drove all around on his motorcycle and went horseback riding and played badminton out on the lawn. There was a special dining room reserved for them in the back room at Chenault’s Drive-in; they went out to McKellar Lake on occasion or to the Fairgrounds to ride the Dodgems and the Pippin, the oldest operating wooden roller-coaster ride in the country. The guys were with them almost constantly, George or Cliff, Lamar, Arthur, the cousins. Once in a while Elvis would run into one of his old friends and invite him up to the house. Buzzy Forbess from the Courts came by one evening, and Elvis surprised him by fooling around with a classical harp he had just bought, but to Buzzy there were just too many people sitting around holding out their hands, and the atmosphere was kind of forced, so he didn’t go back for a while. George Klein brought around a friend named Alan Fortas, who had been an All-City tackle at Central High, then went on to Vanderbilt University and Southwestern before dropping out and going to work at his father’s junkyard. George, who knew him through the temple and a number of other Jewish organizations, needed a ride out to Graceland one night.

  “George didn’t drive, he was one of the few people who didn’t, so
he asked me if I’d like to go out to meet Elvis. Of course I was an Elvis fan, I had seen him in a couple of shows at the Overton Park Shell and Russwood Park, and I had been out to the Eagle’s Nest. So I said, ‘Man, I’d love to,’ and I picked George up, and we went out there and, of course, Elvis was a big football fan and he remembered me from high school and showed me all around the house. Well, I left after a couple of hours, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome, and when I left, he said, ‘Well, I’ll see you again, Alan.’ So a couple of nights later George called and said, ‘Elvis asked about you and wanted to know why you hadn’t been back.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I didn’t want to press my luck.’ He said, ‘Oh, he liked talking to you. Come back out.’ So I went out, and when I left that night, he said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow night.’ One thing led to another, and every night I left he said, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow night, Alan.’ ”

  Elvis seemed to really take to him. Before long he started calling him “Hog Ears,” just as he called Lamar “Mr. Bull” and George “GK.” It was cool going out to Graceland—you never knew what was going to happen. Where else were you going to find donkeys in the swimming pool (courtesy of Colonel Parker) and peacocks on the lawn? As the summer wore on, Elvis started renting out the Fairgrounds through a friend of George’s named Wimpy Adams, and they would have it to themselves from midnight till sunrise. They rented out the Rainbow Rollerdrome, too, from Joe and Doris Pieraccini, and had skating parties where the guys put on knee and elbow pads and divided up into teams, playing rough games of tag and roller derby, with one of the cousins acting as referee. One night, Alan recalled in his memoir of that time, Elvis was “more keyed up than usual” when they piled in the car to go home.