Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  Lamar and I climbed in the front seat, and Elvis and Anita sat in the back. We were just tooling along, when all of a sudden Anita announced in a loud voice, “My cunt hurts!” What? My mouth dropped down to my ankles. Maybe I misunderstood. I cleared my throat, Lamar did the same, and we drove on a little farther. Then Anita burst out again. “Did y’all hear me? I said, ‘My cunt really hurts!’ ”… It wasn’t until we got back to Graceland that I found out that Elvis had told Anita the whopping lie that “my cunt hurts” is a Hollywood expression for “my rear’s sore.” And every time she yelled it out, it was only because Elvis nudged her…. She had no idea what it meant.

  Alan didn’t think much of the cousins and the uncles and the aunts—they were, he wrote, “an odd lot…. Sometimes I’d talk to Gene and it was almost like talking to a retarded person. I didn’t know if he was acting or whether he was really that dumb.” Mostly they just had a helluva time, though. They went everywhere and they did everything on the slightest whim. The only place they didn’t go was to the Hotel Chisca. Ever since getting back, Elvis had studiously avoided the radio station, and now he wouldn’t even come to the phone when Dewey called. Dewey had apologized right after he got back—almost under duress, it seemed—and there had even been a brief period of rapprochement, but then Dewey began to feel aggrieved that Elvis wasn’t coming by with a sack of Krystal-burgers anymore, and he started telling anyone who would listen that he thought Elvis had the big head.

  One night he came by the house at 3:00 in the morning, ranting that Elvis had forgotten his old friends, and when he was turned away at the gate, he “climbed the fence,” the paper reported, “and went in and roused the household shouting: ‘I’m through with you, Elvis.’ Elvis is said to have doubled him in spades. One person close to Elvis said, ‘What made it especially bad is that Mrs. Presley is so nervous, especially since Liberace’s mother got hurt.’ ” The story was quite different, according to an obviously remorseful Dewey. It was only about 1:00 A.M., he thought, and he’d gone out there to retrieve a Polaroid camera that Sam Phillips had given him for Christmas. He needed it back, because he was about to take the rest of his vacation and he wanted to take some pictures. “It wasn’t really late for Elvis,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me in and I still haven’t got my camera. I said some things I shouldn’t have said…. I still love that boy like a brother. Or maybe it would be better to say like a son.”

  There were lots, of course, of other nights at Graceland. One night the great rhythm and blues singer Ivory Joe Hunter, whose anthemic 1950 hit, “I Almost Lost My Mind” (remade with even greater success as “Since I Met You, Baby” in 1956), was one of Elvis’ favorites and whose “I Need You So” Elvis had recorded in February, came out to the house. Brother Dave Gardner, the comedian whom Elvis had first met in Biloxi the previous summer, was in town recording a follow-up to his unexpected pop hit, “White Silver Sands.” Somehow or other he had hooked up with Ivory Joe, and he called up Elvis and asked if he could bring him over. Elvis was thrilled, and they were all sitting on the white couch in the living room swapping stories when, according to George Klein, “Elvis said, ‘Ivory Joe, I sure do like your songs. You ain’t got any more of them for me, do you?’

  “Now Ivory Joe was a real friendly guy. Great big ‘Hey, baby, how you doing, baby?’ kind of guy. You just immediately liked him. And he said, ‘Well, baby, I just have—I got one just for you.’ So we went in the piano room, and he sang ‘My Wish Came True,’ and Elvis said, ‘Shit, I’m cutting that at my next session!’ Which he did, even though it didn’t come out for a couple of years. And they sat there for hours, mostly singing Ivory Joe’s songs, a few of Elvis’—man, I just wish I’d had a tape machine.”

  “He is very spiritually minded,” said Hunter, who had felt some trepidation to start off with because, “frankly, I’d heard he was color prejudiced.” The rumor had been circulating throughout the Negro community that spring and summer, in fact, that Elvis Presley had said, “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.” After determining that “tracing the rumored racial slur to its source was like running a gopher to earth” (the remark was said to have been made either in Boston, which Elvis had never visited, or on Edward R. Murrow’s national television show, on which he had never appeared), Jet magazine sent a reporter to the set of Jailhouse Rock to confront the singer himself. “When asked if he ever made the remark, Mississippi-born Elvis declared: ‘I never said anything like that, and people who know me know I wouldn’t have said it.’ ” The reporter, Louie Robinson, then spoke to some people who were in a position to know and heard from Dr. W. A. Zuber, a Negro physician in Tupelo, that Elvis used to “go around with quartets and to Negro ‘sanctified’ meetings,” from pianist Dudley Brooks that “he faces everybody as a man,” and from Elvis himself that he had gone “to colored churches when I was a kid, like Reverend Brewster’s,” and that he could honestly never hope to equal the musical achievements of Fats Domino or the Ink Spots’ Bill Kenny. “To Elvis,” Jet concluded in its August 1 issue, “people are people, regardless of race, color or creed.” And to Ivory Joe Hunter, who verified the matter for himself, “he showed me every courtesy, and I think he’s one of the greatest.”

  All in all it was a peculiarly lazy, idyllic kind of existence, an adolescent daydream that seemed like it could go on forever. In the basement the jukebox was playing all the time, and the soda fountain was fully stocked. If he felt like it, he might fix a visitor a milk shake, and with no fans around to observe him, he could smoke the little Hav-a-tampas that he and the guys all enjoyed without compunction—but without inhaling either. According to Bettye Maddox, a DJ at WHER whom Elvis met after seeing her do a commercial for Honeysuckle Cornmeal on Dewey’s Pop Shop TV show, “It was like a magic spell—it was like each night you knew something magic was going to happen, but you didn’t know what it was.” Some nights Anita would call and Bettye would be out there, and he would just tell the guys to say that he was busy. Venetia Stevenson flew in from Hollywood to stay with him, and there was a trio of fourteen-year-old girls that he had known since the previous fall (one of their fathers operated a garage that Vernon patronized); they came around from time to time, and he roughhoused with them and had pillow fights and kissed and cuddled some (“We’d tickle, fight, laugh, mess around,” said one, “but all you’d have to say is ’Stop!’ and he’d roll over and quit”), until Lamar had to drive them home. But mostly it was Anita. She saw him almost every night, though she told a reporter a couple of months was much too early to tell whether there was anything really “serious” to it.

  From Alan Fortas’ perspective there was a quality of wholesomeness, whether internally or externally determined, that was almost unreal, and largely attributable to Mrs. Presley’s presence. “It never got wild at Graceland,” he wrote. “People respected Graceland as the Presleys’ home. And the language never got [too] rough around there, either…. If anybody said ‘goddamn,’ he erupted in a rage…‘You can use any other word you want to, but don’t use the Lord’s name in vain!’ ” He had his high school class picture up on the wall, and he would point it out to everyone, in George’s presence, saying, “Look who’s up there at the top.” And they would always say, “Who is that, Elvis? It’s hard to see.” He would say, “That’s George Klein. He was one of the few guys that was nice to me in school,” to George’s acute discomfiture and radiating pride.

  Vernon couldn’t have been happier—everybody came to him for decisions, he had plenty to do, Elvis deferred to him on money matters, he was as proud as one of the peacocks on the lawn. For Gladys, on the other hand, there was a clear sense of resignation, a pervasive air of sadness; she didn’t seem able to ever really settle in to her new home. “She never did go nowhere after they moved out there,” said her sister Lillian. “She used to go to the grocery store, but she quit going to the grocery store. She never was satisfied after she moved out there—I think the house was too big,
and she didn’t like it. Of course she never told Elvis that.” When her cousin Frank Richards visited with his wife, Leona, that summer, Gladys confessed to her, “I’m the most miserable woman in the world,” and Alan always recalled her “sitting by the window in the kitchen, daydreaming, or looking out in the backyard at her chickens.” Every so often she’d have a beer or two with Cliff. “We never did that at Audubon, but up at Graceland we’d be sitting and chatting in the kitchen, maybe two or three times a week in the afternoon—that was it—and Elvis would come in and shake his head like, ‘My God, you people are going to hell, drinking beer like this.’ I’m serious! She just said, ‘Son, Cliff and I are going to have a beer, whether you like it or not.’ And he’d turn around and shake his head and just walk out without saying another word.” It was all right, she told Lamar, if Elvis blew up at him, or at any of them, once in a while. “ ‘When Elvis gets mad at you,’ she said, ‘always remember, it’s from the mouth out.’ That was one of her expressions. She knew him better than anybody. She could tell what he was going to do before he did it. She was scared to death something was gonna happen to him. She used to say, ‘I hope I’m in the grave before he is. Because I could never stand to see him dead before me.’ ”

  Toward the end of the summer Freddy Bienstock came down to go over material for the upcoming session in Hollywood in September. “It was the second time that I went to Memphis, ostensibly to play songs for him. I was told that he wasn’t going to get up till about three o’clock, and it was a hot day, so I went into the swimming pool and a couple of ducks jumped in and one of them clipped me on the ear, and I jumped out of that pool so fast…. He had all kinds of animals around, and he had built columns around the pool—he told me afterwards that he had the idea of building these columns from seeing the movie The Philadelphia Story. Anyway, he showed me around—he was very proud of Graceland without putting on any airs about it—and in the evening we all went out to dinner. I hadn’t eaten very much, so I was really looking forward to a terrific dinner. We were driving in two limousines, and he said to Lamar, who was an endomorph for sure, to call the restaurant on the car phone—they were very rare in those days—he wanted a private dining room reserved for him. So I thought this is really going to be a lovely dinner. He said, ‘We may as well order now, so when we get there the food will be ready and we don’t have to wait.’ The first order was a hamburger and an orange pop, and, you know, then a ham and cheese sandwich and a Pepsi-Cola, a bacon sandwich and a glass of milk, and so forth, and when it came to me I didn’t want to be different, so I ordered another cheese sandwich and an orange pop. And then, when it came to paying the bill, the whole thing came to, I think, fourteen or fifteen dollars, and Elvis pulled out a twenty and grandly says, ‘Keep the change.’ ”

  THE SCENE AT THE TRAIN STATION as he left for the Coast at 11:00 on the night of August 27 threatened to get out of hand. The Colonel had set up a whirlwind tour of the Pacific Northwest (five cities in four days) to precede the September 5–7 recording session that Steve Sholes had finally gotten him to allow Elvis to do. George, Lamar, and Cliff, who would once again be his traveling companions, had all driven to the station with his parents and him, while his uncle Travis and aunt Lorraine had come in their own car, but Anita was without question the center of attention. “Anita is number one with me—strictly tops,” Elvis told the small crowd of fans and reporters who had gathered to see him off. He then embraced his mother several times, reported the paper faithfully, and she reminded him to ‘Be good, son,’ as he boarded the train. ‘Take care of yourself, boy,’ said Mr. Presley…. Elvis kissed Anita twice for photographers (and about five times for himself) before hopping aboard. As the train moved away, Anita burst into tears and Mrs. Presley put her arm around her. The Presleys and Anita walked arm in arm out of the station to the Cadillac again, with Uncle Travis, himself moist-eyed, following.”

  And then they were gone. Anita had just won the Mid-South Hollywood Star Hunt the previous Thursday and was traveling to New Orleans to take part in the finalists’ competition, which promised a small movie role to the winner. He was keeping his fingers crossed, he told her, but for himself Elvis was just looking forward to getting back to work. The promoter for the tour was Lee Gordon, the same flamboyant Detroit-born entrepreneur who had booked them into Canada and the Midwest the previous spring and was now imprecating Colonel Parker—so far without success—to agree to an Australian tour. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the songwriters, were all set for the Hollywood session. And Elvis was going to have Millie Kirkham, the soprano who had done a good deal of Nashville session work with the Jordanaires and whose backup vocals he had admired recently on a Jimmy “C” Newman release, flown in specially for the session. He hadn’t heard anything from the draft board lately, though there were rumors in the papers every day, and maybe that would work out, maybe the Colonel could fix it—why would the government want to give up all those millions of dollars in taxes?

  The tour went pretty much according to plan. There were riots in virtually every city, but security was generally good, and he enjoyed teasing the crowd, dancing suggestively and lying down and writhing on the stage, sometimes with a model of RCA’s trademark dog, Nipper. “A chunky, effeminate-looking man with long hair, later identified as a member of Presley’s entourage, seemed almost in a trance as he snapped his fingers, wiggled his body and shouted over and over: ‘Yeah man, yeah man, yeah, yeah, yeah,’ ” reported the Tacoma News Tribune. “I lose myself in my singing,” Elvis told one press gathering. “Maybe it’s my early training singing gospel hymns. I’m limp as a rag, worn out when a show’s over.” His first love was “the old colored spirituals,” he told a press conference in Vancouver. “I know practically every religious song that’s ever been written,” he boasted proudly.

  He ended every show with “Hound Dog,” which he had taken to introducing as the “Elvis Presley national anthem.” Meanwhile, the Colonel, never one to miss a trick, was selling nearly as many “I Hate Elvis” buttons as “I Love Elvis” ones. In Vancouver a small contingent of Canadian Mounties was not up to the task of holding back a crowd of almost twenty-five thousand at Empire Stadium, and for the first time the Colonel, who had protested bitterly over the size of the force, Mounties or no Mounties, was impelled to actively intervene.

  “The Colonel came out and pulled Elvis offstage,” said George Klein, “and the MC said, ‘You are going to have to get back in your seats, or we can’t go on with the show.’ Meanwhile, the Colonel told Elvis, ‘Elvis, don’t tease this crowd. These people are crazy.’ Well, if you tell Elvis not to do something, that’s the surest way you’re going to get him to do it, so he goes back onstage and the first thing he does is, ‘Welllllll…’ And here come fifty thousand more people! So the Colonel runs out again—this is the first time I ever saw Colonel Parker go out onstage—he got mad, and he went onstage because he was protecting his property. And he said, ‘Okay, you can stay on the field if you act right and you don’t tear the stage up. Otherwise Mr. Presley’s not going to be performing.’ And he says to Elvis, ‘Elvis, please don’t do an hour. Do thirty minutes tonight.’ So Elvis did about forty-five or fifty minutes, and when we left that stage the last thing we saw was the stage being turned over—sheet music flying up in the air, they grabbed music stands, instruments, drumsticks, everything they could get. That was a pretty scary night.”

  “A gang moved into our town,” declared the Vancouver Province. It was nothing more than “subsidized sex,” sniffed the paper’s music critic, Dr. Ida Halpern. The performance “had not even the quality of a true obscenity: merely an artificial and unhealthy exploitation of the enthusiasm of youth’s body and mind.” Meanwhile, Elvis heard from Anita that she had won the talent contest in New Orleans. She told him excitedly that she would join him in Hollywood the following week, and he sounded really happy and told her not to be nervous and said that he was really looking forward to showing her around.

  The session we
nt smoothly enough. Mr. Sholes had just been promoted to head of pop a&r—it hadn’t been announced yet, but he and Mr. Bullock were celebrating. That still didn’t stop Colonel from getting in his little zingers every chance he got. The principal aim of the session was to record a Christmas album, and Elvis wanted to get in the right mood, so Mr. Sholes arranged to have a tree in the studio and made sure that there were wrapped presents under it. Elvis had never been satisfied with the version of “Treat Me Nice” he had recorded for the movie, so he did it again, and he cut “Don’t,” the ballad that Jerry and Mike had written for him in June, as well as a beautiful version of Ivory Joe Hunter’s “My Wish Came True,” on which he coached the Jordanaires to mimic the harmonies of the Statesmen and in particular Jake Hess’ habit of crisply enunciating his syllables. Freddy tried to sneak in a song that he had pitched without success back in January—he figured Elvis would never remember it—but he didn’t get more than eight bars into it when Elvis said, “I’ve heard that song before, and I don’t like it any better now than I did then.”

  They recorded a number of Christmas standards, including a recreation of the Drifters’ arrangement of “White Christmas” from a couple of years before and the Ernest Tubb country standard, “Blue Christmas.” With “Blue Christmas” Elvis wanted the sound that Millie Kirkham had created on Ferlin Husky’s “Gone,” and he had her singing a soprano obbligato all the way through. “It was horrible,” said Kirkham, who was six months pregnant at the time. “It was sort of comical. It wasn’t supposed to be, but the longer it goes the funnier it gets—but he liked it. He was a star, but he was so much fun to be around. He was very polite to everybody, amazingly so to me. When I walked in, he said, ‘Get this woman a chair!’ I was the only female, of course, but if one of the guys happened to say something off-color he would just say, ‘Wait a mínute, guys, we got a lady in the room,’ and they were never offended. We always used to say they laughed on cue.” Toward the end of the session they ran out of material, and Jerry and Mike went back into the mix room, where they concocted “Santa Claus Is Back in Town,” a wonderful double-entendre blues that Elvis delivered with great panache.