Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  “I looked up and Elvis was standing there absolutely white as a ghost. He was passing by on his motorcycle and had seen me through the blinds, and he was really upset and shaky. He said, ‘Marion, I thought you were dead!’ ” She was going to miss that boy.

  On November 21, 1955, all the parties, even Bob Neal, met at Sun and signed the final contract, the Colonel patting Gladys on the back as she gave her son a kiss.

  But Gladys didn’t trust the Colonel, and he knew it. That’s why he sent Hank Snow, his business partner, to sweet-talk Gladys into letting Elvis sign the management contract, having already used Jimmie Rodgers Snow to bond with Elvis for the same goal. “Basically, we were about the same age, and I carried the first good intention contract to Lubbock, Texas, where I met Elvis and was put on the same show with him to discuss the idea of him signing with Jamboree Attractions. I didn’t know enough about what was going on to honestly know what was happening, if you know what I mean. I was just a teenager.”

  The elder Snow assumed, of course, that Presley would be signed to the agency he jointly owned with Parker. But when the Colonel traveled to Memphis, he took two contracts with him that day. One bound Elvis to Hank Snow Enterprises–Jamboree Attractions, but the other exclusively to Parker. It was the second one the Colonel got the Presleys to sign, effectively swindling Snow out of half of Elvis’s earnings for life.

  Gladys had no knowledge of any such chicanery: She just wasn’t sure which she feared most—what Parker was going to turn the boy into, or what might happen to him on his own. Her fears were not unjustified. Already, the floor had collapsed at a show in Bono, Arkansas, and more than one man had been overheard saying things like, “I’d better not see any girlfriend of mine going up after an autograph from that singer.”

  Things had gotten much rougher at Elvis’s appearance at the Reo Palm Isle Club in Longview, Texas, in August 1955, when a trucker went to the parking lot to look for his wife, who had somehow disappeared after Elvis’s performance. They’d been there with another couple, and Elvis had flirted with the women throughout his songs, giving them “that sizzling, sultry look from the stage,” as Stanley Oberst and Lori Torrance wrote in Elvis in Texas: The Undiscovered King 1954–1958. They giggled like teenagers, their husbands just rolling their eyes.

  The trucker thought that perhaps his wife had gotten sick afterward, but she wasn’t in the women’s room, so in Oberst and Torrance’s account, he decided to check the car, his friend following him for a breath of air and a smoke. “As they approached the car, they noticed a stranger glancing out the window and then disappearing. The two increased their speed and ripped open the door. His wife screamed from the passenger side and dove for the petticoats in the floorboard. Elvis fell onto the dirt parking lot, struggling to zip up. The trucker reached down with huge, burly arms and grabbed the skinny frame, shaking the stuffing out of it and driving in a couple of well-placed right hooks.

  “ ‘Not my face, not my face!’ the singer yelled, covering the aforementioned location. ‘I’ve gotta go back and play.’ The truck driver got in a few more gut busters, then let his quarry flee back to the club.”

  Grover Lewis, the late master of New Journalism, witnessed a similar, if not the same, situation that year. He was in college at North Texas State and knew Elvis from the Big D Jamboree. As one of “the only serious writers at North Texas at the time” (the other was Larry McMurtry), he was “always looking for guys like [Marlon] Brando and [James] Dean, who spoke uniquely to people our age, our generation, and Elvis qualified. He had that dangerous sense.” As such, Lewis became acutely attuned to Elvis’s sensual, raw, and bluish music, having grown up with strict segregation in small towns around Dallas and Fort Worth. In 1955, then, he went to a number of Elvis’s shows around the region.

  Lewis could not precisely remember where he saw Elvis take a beating, though it might have been the M-B Corral in Wichita Falls in April 1955. Nearly forty years later, in 1994, Lewis described it as “a country place somewhere near Wichita Falls—it was one of those places that had . . . a barn dance ambiance, but it was an old World War II hangar that somebody had dragged out into a wet part of the county. If there was a headliner that night, it would have been him. He was dressed like a cowboy country singer, and already driving a Cadillac, [though] old and rusted-out.”

  The budding reporter was fascinated both by Elvis and by the phenomenon he represented, “because he virtually epitomized the southern high school hood. On this night, and I believe it was a weeknight, he got up and was doing his act, singing country songs, and he began to make eyes at a young woman who was sitting close to the front with her boyfriend. The boyfriend was a big, tough oilfield worker, a roughneck type. One of the guys seated at the table went to the restroom, and Elvis made goo-goo eyes at this girl, and then made signals, which I could follow, to meet him in the parking lot. I suspect he was feeling magically charmed around that time, and there was a recklessness about it. In other words, Elvis was full of his own sexy charisma and thought he could get away with it. And the girl was more than willing.”

  Lewis trailed Elvis and the girl out to the parking lot just to see what would happen. “I knew very likely that there would be a fight, and, in fact, a fight is what happened. The roughneck came back to the table, discovered that his girlfriend was gone, waited around for her, and then went looking for her.” He discovered them out in Elvis’s Cadillac, smooching.

  “I don’t know if it went any further than that, because I didn’t get close enough to see. But the guy hauled Elvis out of the car and just literally beat the hell out of him. Just beat him bloody. In fact, he didn’t play anymore for the rest of the evening. He got his butt tromped.”

  Even without jealous husbands and boyfriends, Elvis was getting so big now that anything could happen at any time, even a repeat of the Jacksonville, Florida, riots. Without meaning to, the crowds could tear him apart like jackals on a rabbit. The fan reaction was so intense, so out of control, it was frightening to just be seen with him, even in Memphis. Marion had witnessed it herself.

  WHER had a broadcast booth at the Mid-South Fair that fall, and Marion was on her way one day, walking from her home.

  “All of a sudden this car pulls over to the curb, and there’s Elvis, all shining and resplendent. Since he never passed up a gal walking down the street without some kind of greeting, he said, ‘Hop in, Marion.’ So I did. What girl could resist a ‘Hop in’ invitation from Elvis?

  “We decided to go to the fair together, and we parked out in the back and started walking. Suddenly, I realized we weren’t alone, and I began to hear these cries of ‘It’s him!’ ‘No, it’s not him.’ ‘Oh, it is him! I tell you it’s him!’ Well, the crowd started to swell up like sugar candy on a cone. And this one strange little girl was clinging to him. I don’t know what she was asking him, but she kept on, ‘Will you please, Elvis? Will you please?’ And she wouldn’t let go. Finally I took her hands and said, ‘Okay, he promised.’ Someone said, ‘Who’s she?’ And Elvis said, ‘This is my wife.’ It was the wildest thing, and you never heard such a to-do and carrying on.

  “As we moved through the Fairgrounds, we picked up a constantly growing entourage. We finally got to a booth where Elvis said he was going to win me a teddy bear. He started pitching balls, and he won me a teddy bear the very first throw. The lady who was operating the stand handed it to me, and before my arms could close around it, the bear went whish! All of a sudden it was gone. That little girl snatched it. So Elvis said, ‘Okay, I’ll win you another bear,’ and he did, and the same thing happened. I promptly lost three teddy bears.

  “By this time the crowd had closed in, and they were pressing me so hard against the booth that my shinbones were about to crack on the planks that ran across the front. We were in such peril that the owners helped us leap across the counter. We went under the canvas in the back and raced madly for the front gate, and got in a police car. They whisked us around the corner to where Elvis’s car
was parked, but the whole thing left me bruised and battered, and without any of the teddy bears.”

  It was certainly a horrible example of what can happen if you’re out with a personality like Elvis and get caught up in a fan mob, Marion thought.

  “After that, I never wanted to be seen with him in public again.”

  Elvis and Barbara Hearn, backstage at the Tupelo Fairgrounds, September 26, 1956. She had left his shirt, a gift from Natalie Wood, back in Memphis. Later, she gave him the gold vest he wore with it on The Ed Sullivan Show. (Courtesy of Barbara Hearn Smith)

  Chapter Eight

  “An Earthquake in Progress”

  As history would see it, 1956 would be year one, ground zero in the phenomenon known as Elvis Presley. So much metamorphosis would occur in both his personal and professional lives that 1956 could be seen as a reference point, a time when Elvis would go from being a regional performer to a national sensation, ending his age of innocence. By the end of the year, the shedding of his old skin would be both powerful and complete, and Elvis would be almost unrecognizable as the shy, unassuming boy that fame could never change.

  On January 8, he celebrated his twenty-first birthday, flying home to Memphis from a Hayride appearance in Shreveport, and then insuring his 1955 pink-and-black Cadillac Fleetwood. He was taking care of business and being responsible. No one could have known it, but he was precisely through the first half of his short life, destined to die at forty-two.

  Though he was now officially a man, a grown-up, he would never reach an adult’s maturity in his relationships with women. His fun-loving pranks of handcuffing and wrestling would evolve into more acceptable forms of physical teasing, and he would begin to have more complex relationships. But he would remain the puer aeternus, a Latin term for “eternal boy,” seen in mythology as a child-god of divine youth, an Adonis who stays forever young.

  In pop psychology, the puer is seen as being a socially immature adult and suffers from what has entered the lexicon as the Peter Pan Syndrome. The reference is to J. M. Barrie’s much-loved novel and play, as well as to Dan Kiley’s 1983 book, The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up. But in analytical, or Jungian, psychology, the puer is defined as an older man whose emotional life remains arrested at the level of adolescence, and who is almost always enmeshed in too great a dependence on his mother.

  The life of the puer is provisional, since he fears being caught in a situation from which he cannot escape, whether it is with a woman or a job. He fantasizes that he is simply marking time, and that in the future, the real woman, or the right career opportunity, will come along. What he dreads most is to be bound to anything at all, and so he refuses to grow up and face the challenges of life head-on. Instead, he waits for others or divine providence to do it for him.

  “He covets independence and freedom, chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable,” writes Daryl Sharp in Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts. “Common symptoms of puer psychology are dreams of imprisonment and similar imagery: chains, bars, cages, entrapment, bondage. Life itself . . . is experienced as a prison.”

  On January 10, 1956, Elvis arrived at the RCA recording studio in Nashville, a small building at 1525 McGavock Street, not far from downtown. The label had not yet established its own Nashville facilities, and so the company built the studio with the Methodist TV, Radio and Film Commission. Chet Atkins, the country guitarist who was also RCA’s Nashville studio chief, sat behind the console as Elvis recorded his first RCA sides. Yet some of the players were already familiar to Elvis. Both drummer D. J. Fontana and piano virtuoso Floyd Cramer from the Hayride were on the sessions. And among the three songs they cut that day was “Heartbreak Hotel,” the morbid and oddly unsettling blues tune that Mae Axton had written with her friend Tommy Durden about a dwelling place for the lost and lovelorn. By April, the single, both eerie and menacing, would sell one million copies, earning Elvis his first gold record.

  The song found its genesis when Durden, who followed the ponies, picked up a copy of the Miami Herald. He looked at the horse-race entries, and then scanned the rest of the paper. “I just happened to catch a little small thing in there about a man who killed himself. I don’t recall any names, but the only thing he left in the way of a suicide note was a sentence, ‘I walk a lonely street.’ ”

  Atkins recalled that on one of the livelier songs they recorded that day—either Ray Charles’s rhythm-and-blues classic “I Got a Woman,” or the Drifters’ “Money, Honey”—Elvis “started jumping around, and he split his pants right in the seat. I’ll never forget them. They were pink with black piping on the sides. He asked somebody to go back to the motel and get him another pair, and he left his old ones lying around someplace. The next day, this girl who worked for the Methodists found them. She said, ‘What am I supposed to do with these?’ I said, ‘Keep ’em. They’ll be worth a lot of money one day.’ She thought that was very funny. But six months later, I heard she was trying to get on I’ve Got a Secret. Her secret was going to be that she got Elvis Presley’s pants.”

  Elvis was all over the television that year, beginning on January 28, when he made his first of six appearances on Stage Show, a variety hour produced by Jackie Gleason and hosted by big-band legends Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. He flew into New York a few days earlier with the Colonel to meet the top brass at RCA, including Anne Fulchino, the Boston-bred national publicity director who had upgraded RCA’s pop and country coverage, but always hoped the label would break a big new pop artist. Elvis had been to New York once before, in 1955, when he and Scotty and Bill auditioned for Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, where a woman (possibly Godfrey vocalist Janette Davis, who hailed from Memphis and became a full member of the production staff in 1956), turned them down. But it was still all so new to Elvis, meeting all these people who didn’t talk like he did, and who didn’t seem to share his sense of humor. He didn’t really know how to act. When Fulchino extended her hand, she was horrified to find that Elvis grasped it wearing an electric buzzer on his finger.

  “My attitude was to make a total star out of Elvis. Not a kid with a one-hit record, but a broad, overall star. So I said to him, ‘You know, that may be big in Nashville, but it will never go in New York. Don’t ever do it again.’ Now, he was a smart kid, and if you caught him doing something that was dumb for the occasion, he absorbed it and he didn’t repeat it.

  “For example, I took him to Klube’s, a German restaurant on Twenty-third Street, just a block across the street from where the RCA office was at that time. I ordered pork chops, and he started to pick his up with his hands. Then suddenly he noticed that I was eating mine with a fork. And he paid attention to where the forks were and what I did with them. This is where I give him great credit. He wanted to get somewhere and he knew he had to do certain things to get there. He was very intelligent. Not the Harvard-type intelligence—the instinctive intelligence.”

  But it was still a lot to deal with in a short span of time. A few days later, Fulchino and RCA hosted a press reception for Elvis, and reporters, amused by the flash in the pan with the funny clothes and the suggestive stage moves, asked about his reaction to his success. “It scares me,” Elvis said. “You know, it just scares me.”

  By spring, his anxiety about fame seemed just as strong. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, British reporter Lionel Crane, of the London Daily Mirror, asked about the audience reception, “a scream that I thought would split the roof,” as Crane put it. “It makes me want to cry,” Elvis said. “How does all this happen to me?” Five days later, it was the same in Waco, Texas. His fame “happened so fast,” Elvis told a local reporter. “I could go out like a light, just like I came on.” By then, the press was calling him “the most talked-about new personality in the last ten years of recorded music.”

  It was all snowballing now. The Colonel, putting pressure on Harry Kalcheim at the William Morris Agency in New York, got him booked on The Milton Berle Show for April,
and after a Hollywood screen test at Paramount Studios in late March, producer Hal Wallis signed him to a contract for one motion picture with an option for six more, the money starting at $15,000 for the first film, up to $100,000 for the seventh.

  Elvis’s acting experience, however, consisted almost entirely of the Christmas pageants in the Assembly of God church in Tupelo as a child. He was understandably nervous, then, for his tryout, especially as he was given the material—two dramatic scenes from The Rainmaker, which Wallis was about to begin filming with Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn—only the night before. For a musical number, he lip-synched his new single, a cover of Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes,” while strumming a prop guitar.

  The results of the screen test surprised nearly everyone. Steve Sholes, head of RCA’s country and R & B divisions, and Chick Crumpacker of the label’s promotion staff, viewed the test in New York along with other Victor people, and Crumpacker recalls they could barely believe what they saw. Elvis suggested he had the power to legitimately follow Marlon Brando or his hero, James Dean.

  “We went back to the office, and it was the talk of the place, like, ‘My God, this guy has all of that natural quality that these other actors have become famous for, because he has that same directness and ability to be himself on the screen.’ It looked like he wasn’t acting at all. We were stunned.”

  Screenwriter Allan Weiss, who would later write five Presley pictures, also saw it. In his view, Elvis seemed amateurish in the dramatic scenes, looking like “the lead in a high school play.” But once the music was added, “the transformation was incredible . . . electricity bounced off the walls of the sound stage. [It was] like an earthquake in progress, only without the implicit threat.”