by Alanna Nash
His second ally was Robert Gene West, nicknamed “Red” for his carrot-colored hair, buzzed into a crew cut. An all-Memphis football star, Red was a year behind Elvis, who had quit the team almost immediately after he joined: To start with, at 145 pounds, he was too light, which made him self-conscious about school sports. Besides, he didn’t like to wear the helmet—it messed up his hair—and he needed to get an after-school job. Sometimes he didn’t have the fifteen cents for lunch, and Coach Rube Boyce would give it to him.
Red West, taut and muscular, had a reputation for being a quick man with his fists, and in the late summer–early fall of 1952, Elvis needed a little protection. While everyone else wore jeans and T-shirts, Elvis favored dress pants, and just to be different, he often wore a scarf fashioned into an ascot, like a movie star. Everything about his appearance made him a natural target.
Red had stopped at his locker to get his football gear one afternoon just after the bell rang and saw Elvis leaning against the wall. They had spoken before, but the hierarchy of high school had prevented them from becoming friends. Now Elvis could use one. Red could tell that something was up, and Elvis spilled it out: “There’s three guys outside who are going to beat me up.” Red nodded and said, “Let’s go check on it.” Outside, Red had a persuasive talk with the ringleader and all ended peacefully.
The following day, Elvis caught him after class and gave him a bashful smile. “Thanks a lot for yesterday.” Red smiled back. “Forget it, man.”
Not long after, Red walked into the boys’ bathroom and found Elvis in trouble again. Three guys had him pushed up against the wall, taunting him about his hair and threatening to cut it. Red saw a “look of real fear on his face . . . like a frightened little animal.” He knew the guys from the football squad, and laid it on the line. Elvis liked his hair like that, and if they cut it, they’d have to cut Red’s, too. “They did it just to make themselves feel big, and I intervened and stopped it, and I guess it stuck.”
That April Elvis learned that Red had a musical side, when they both performed in Humes’s annual Minstrel Show, a variety program featuring the school band and various soloists, from the Arwood Twins, billed as twirlers, to dancer Gloria Trout. A fund-raiser, the show was scheduled for a Thursday evening and was not expected to change anybody’s life. Elvis, listed sixteenth on the program, and identified as “Guitarist . . . Elvis Prestly” [sic], told only a couple of friends about it, and even then, they thought he might bow out. He’d sung once at a Christmas party in biology class, but that was about it. Now he was ready to go in Buzzy’s red flannel shirt. He’d accidentally torn a hole in it when he put it in the closet, and he’d rolled up the sleeves so it wouldn’t show.
Red, who played trumpet, had put together a little trio with a guitar and bass, and he’d just finished his act when he saw Elvis come out with his guitar. “I never thought he would have the guts to get out there in front of those people,” Red wrote. “I never even knew he sang.”
When Elvis first ambled out onstage, he looked the least prepared of all the performers. He seemed unsure of what to say or even do. He fumbled around with his guitar, and then with the lights bothering him, turned his head sideways, eyeing the audience through slits. He stood there too long for anyone’s comfort—at least a full minute, as if he might bolt. Finally, waves of talent and ambition crashed inside him, and he launched into his first number, Teresa Brewer’s new chart topper, “ ’Til I Waltz Again with You.”
Quietly, Elvis had been doing more than working on his ballads—he’d been experimenting with fast numbers, jumping around a little, just enough to put some pizzazz into it all. The teens in the Courts danced to a one-two-three bop beat, but Buzzy watched Elvis develop his own “crazy” rhythmic step, adding four-five-six to the one-two-three. He tried it out in front of eight or ten kids at the jukebox in the grocery store that Farley’s brother-in-law owned.
He also practiced in front of his family, Billy Smith remembers. “We got a piano that Christmas, and Elvis came over to our house. He started playing something fairly fast, what little he could play piano, and then he got to moving around a lot, and it was a sight to see! I thought, ‘Gosh, that’s weird to see him jump around like that and sing.’ He just done it for a few minutes, and he quit. He was trying to find something that fit him. And when he did, all at once, it just broke loose what was inside him.”
Now, onstage at the Minstrel Show, he started his second song. Nobody seems to remember what it was, but Frannie Mae Crowder swears it was the moment when the real Elvis was born. “He was moving all over that stage. And his movements didn’t start with his hips. They started with his knees and worked their way up.”
And then in a flash it was over. “At first,” Red remembered, “he just stood there, surprised as hell.” The audience, too, seemed stunned. Nobody had ever seen a guy move like that. What was he doing? And how did he do it, this dunce with the impossible hair? The place went crazy.
“It was amazing,” Elvis said later, “how popular I became after that.”
He performed every chance he got, toting his guitar to school. All the same, some of the girls thought he was just too over-the-top, and when he would start to sing, they’d whisper, “Not again!” He still had few real friends at Humes aside from Red and George.
In early 1953 he went to a birthday party a few blocks from the Courts and ran into Regis Wilson, fourteen, who was there with two girlfriends, Carol McCracken and Judy Gessell. Regis, a petite girl with blond hair and a big smile, had formerly lived at the Courts for six years with her divorced mother and five siblings, including her brother Jim, who was Elvis’s age, and hung out with him around the complex.
Regis had a crush on Elvis, who she considered “a gentle soul, but all boy—he kind of had this swagger to him.” She used to see him playing football in the Triangle, the grassy open field at the complex. But she’d never spoken to him, and never thought he’d paid any attention to her—he seemed too interested in Betty or Billie. Of course, he was a weird dresser, in his yellow sport coat with brown trim, and he had a case of teenage acne. But from day one, she remembers, “I thought he was cute.”
She lived in a rooming house on Merriweather Street, a bus ride away, and hadn’t expected to see Elvis again. But there he was, and he was talking to her. And he still had those sideburns she’d always liked. “He was a loner, a looker. Very sexy, with slicked-back hair.”
They played spin the bottle that night, and Regis’s girlfriends, miffed that she had kissed a boy they liked, went off and left her by herself when their ride came. Regis was stranded. “I didn’t have anybody I could call to come pick me up, because by then my four older siblings had left home and my mother didn’t have a car.” Elvis offered to drive her, and she nervously agreed. She’d never been alone in a car with a boy before, and in fact, she’d never dated—she was a ninth grader at the all-girl Holy Names, “the poorest Catholic school in Memphis.” But when they got to her front porch and Elvis asked for her phone number, “I knew I wanted to see him.”
Though he was eighteen, the four-year age gap didn’t bother either one of them. “Growing up in housing projects with a single mom, five [other] kids, and a very dysfunctional family background, I pretty much raised myself,” says Regis. “So I was fourteen, but I was a very mature fourteen.” And Elvis, still stinging from Billie’s cruel rebuff, found the relationship with Regis finally put him in a position of control and made him feel like something of an older brother.
Psychologically, his attraction to her was more complex. Because his stunted emotional growth left him unable to move much past fourteen, Regis wasn’t just a little buddy but a replication of himself. Unconsciously, fourteen would now be the magic age for so many of his future romantic interests.
When they first began dating, Elvis worked at night part-time, ushering at Loew’s. (At some point, he was fired after an altercation with another usher, who complained that a concession stand girl gave him free c
andy.) His usual habit would be to drop by Regis’s place in the afternoon, sometimes waiting for her when she got home from school. But she never knew exactly when he was coming, and she never invited him in: “My mother had had another child—and still no husband—and I was left at home with this two-year-old. My family life was so chaotic that I just couldn’t talk about it to him.”
Regis was also embarrassed that her family didn’t actually own the house, an immaculate, large brick home with flowers in the yard, but simply lived in one rented room. Pretty soon she couldn’t tell him, because Elvis thought otherwise, and his imagination had run away with him. “He used to say, ‘One of these days, I’m going to buy my mama a house like this.’ ” And he told her about his twin.
Often they simply sat in the glider on the screened-in porch and talked (“His humor was the type that he could just come out with funny remarks”), and sometimes he sang to her with his guitar, just strumming and humming. He was working on a new ballad, “My Happiness,” and he sang that to her, too, his baritone, melancholy and soft, floating on the humid air. She was amazed that someone as shy as he was could put his heart on the line like that. “He sang it so tenderly. It seemed like it held a lot of emotion for him.”
Evening shadows make me blue,
When each weary day is through,
How I long to be with you,
My happiness . . .
Soon he began courting her in the evening, too. His worn-out Lincoln had a little seat in the back, and sometimes his cousin Gene Smith and his girl would double-date. They made the usual teenage excursions: riding over to West Memphis, Arkansas, for a drive-in movie and popcorn, or the “Teen Canteen” at McKellar Lake for hamburgers and shakes. Sometimes they just went tooling around. “He was a very simple, sweet person. He thoroughly enjoyed just sitting there watching the Mississippi River roll by, and he loved driving cars.”
As he had been with Billie, Elvis was a consummate gentleman. His looks completely belied his behavior. (“If you were to see him on the street, you’d probably think he was a hoodlum.”) At fourteen, she didn’t think she could really be in love with someone, but she liked him a lot. She kissed him every night from the second date on, and she had her expectations. Carol and Judy still hung out around the Courts, and reported he was a good kisser, “and I wanted to see for myself.” She had heard he knew how to kiss in that deep way, but that presented a dilemma.
“The nuns at my school told us we shouldn’t allow boys to kiss us with their mouths open. So I’ll just say Elvis gave me long kisses. You could say we made out. But he never tried to go farther. He wasn’t like that.”
Regis knew he was serious about music, but he was so modest he never even mentioned his big success at the Humes Minstrel Show. One of his favorite things to do was to take her to the All-Night Gospel Singings at Ellis Auditorium, where the Statesmen and the Blackwood Brothers would perform.
“About two in the morning, I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer, and we’d leave.” But Elvis could have lasted until dawn. “Some of those spirituals had big, heavy rhythm beats like a rock-and-roll song,” he would remember in 1965. “That music didn’t hurt anybody, and it sure made you feel good.” Sitting in the audience, he sang right along with everyone onstage, trying to hit all the high and low notes. Regis scrunched down in her seat. “I would look at him like he was crazy, but that didn’t stop him from going right on singing.”
Regis didn’t know it, but he afforded their dates by working the auditorium’s concessions, particularly on Monday nights when the hall staged professional wrestling. Guy Coffey, the concessions manager, hired him and other Humes students to sell Cokes, and on a good night Elvis earned three or four dollars. He loved the magic of the place, and he fantasized playing there one day, standing on the same stage as all the greats.
“Sometimes after the night’s event had ended and the Humes kids had settled up financially,” Coffey remembered, “Elvis would go up on the stage and play to imaginary crowds, bowing to their applause. I would have to tell him, ‘Come on now, Elvis, we have to close the place up.’ And he would say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and we would walk silently out of the building.”
Regis enjoyed the gospel sings, for which Elvis always got dressed up in his good clothes, as if he were going to church. But Elvis never invited her to services anywhere, perhaps because he only sporadically attended, and his parents had never become members anywhere once they moved to Memphis. He also knew that there was significant prejudice against the Assembly of God church. In fact, Regis’s own family referred to Pentecostal groups as “Holy Rollers,” and as she remembers, “I got the impression that the Presleys were religious, but I would have to say that he didn’t talk about [the Assembly of God] because it was snickered about. It was something he wouldn’t have told many people.”
If Elvis felt like an alien among other teenagers most of the time, he was never so out of place than on the night of his senior prom at the swanky and segregated Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis. Now, at the end of the school year and four months into his courtship of Regis, he asked her to be his date. Precisely why he went is a mystery, but he felt some kind of pressure to go, and to give the evening a special flair. “It was the most exciting thing I had ever done,” Regis says. “I felt like Cinderella getting ready to go to the Royal Ball.”
The fourteen-year-old hurried to Lerner’s to pick out a strapless pink taffeta dress for $14.98, and then, her budget blown, accessorized it with the pink shoes she’d gotten at Easter. Someone suggested she could get her hair done free at the beauty college right across the street from the Peabody, and she quickly made an appointment. She’d never even been in the Peabody before, and as she sat in the beauty chair, looking at the hotel through the window, she said to herself, “Just think, in a few hours from now I will be back here all dressed up.”
Elvis was also grooming his hair—his sideburns were now extra long—and choosing his outfit. Regis wondered what he would wear, since “he would show up in outfits that were so flashy I would open the door and blink my eyes.” But he passed on the idea of a white jacket like the other boys wore and decided on a conservative dark blue suit and blue suede shoes. He showed up at her door in a shiny rented Chevy, also dark blue, paid for by money he had saved from ushering. Shyly, as Regis blushed, he pinned a pink carnation corsage on her dress.
As they entered the Continental Ballroom at the Peabody, the band was playing, and couples were already out on the floor. But Elvis steered Regis to a seat and offered to get her a Coke.
Given Billie’s rejection and his embarrassment at not knowing how to dance, Elvis would have been enormously uncomfortable at his prom, and tortured at the idea of getting out on the floor in front of his peers. Finally, in case Regis was wondering, he told her.
“I can’t dance,” he said, cracking a self-conscious grin and perspiring under his jacket.
Regis took it that he didn’t dance because of religion, and simply said, “That’s all right.” And so they sat out the entire night, talking and sipping on soda pop and watching all the other dancers, Elvis’s dark blue suit, the color of heartache, further setting them apart. Finally, they lined up with all the other couples for the grand march, stepping through a mammoth heart as their names were called, and had their picture taken. In it, Regis manages a half-smile, but Elvis looks as stiff as a soldier, peering solemnly into the camera. Regis saw it as part of his humor, like the way he curled his lip into a sneer.
He made no attempts to socialize, and no one, not Buzzy, or George, or Red, approached them. But Elvis promised Regis they’d have more fun afterward at Leonard’s Barbeque, where they were to meet some of his friends and go on to a party. They drove out and waited, but nobody ever showed. Regis could tell it bothered him, and finally, chagrined, Elvis took her home.
A few weeks after the prom, Elvis dropped by her house and found the family had simply vanished. Regis’s mother, financially strapped, had decided to move in wi
th a relative. And Regis had gone to Florida to help her older sister, who was expecting a baby.
“I jumped at the chance, because going to Florida and living in a stable home was a lot more inviting than staying in Memphis with this fractured family life.” Yet she couldn’t bring herself to tell Elvis how bad her situation was. They’d moved so many times, and she was embarrassed. Besides, “girls didn’t call boys in those days,” so she never said good-bye. Like Billie, she just moved off and left. To Elvis, it must have felt as if he’d been spurned three times in a row—by Betty, Billie, and now Regis. He never learned any different.
“I’ve always regretted that. I just figured he’d find out I had left by driving by the house. I’ve often wondered if he knocked on the door and saw all these strangers, the other people who rented rooms, and wondered who they were.”
In the move, Regis lost her photo of her prom date. But Elvis kept his, and a few years later, Gladys gave a copy to a fan magazine. By then Elvis was a teen heartthrob and a national sensation, with very specific dance moves all his own.
Dixie Locke and Elvis at her junior prom, May 6, 1955. Gladys bought her dress. “I was waiting for her to get out of school so we could get married,” Elvis said years later. (Courtesy of David Troedson/Elvis Australia)
Chapter Four
Dixie’s Delight
In July 1953 Elvis was reading the afternoon paper, the Memphis Press-Scimitar, when he noticed a lengthy article that seemed to speak his name. Three years earlier, twenty-seven-year-old Sam Phillips had opened the Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union Avenue. It was only about a ten-minute walk from the Peabody Hotel, where Phillips and one part-time assistant, a woman named Marion Keisker, worked for Memphis’s top radio station, WREC. Phillips had become an announcer there in 1945, but he held a number of duties, including engineering the big-band broadcasts of Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey and Glenn Miller on a network hookup from the Peabody Skyway each Saturday night.