Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  They drove up to Sunrise Mountain. Elvis just wanted to see the lights of the city, he said. Joan had heard that one a hundred times before, and when he put the car in park, she continued to sit in the corner, not wishing to give him the wrong impression. Elvis was running out of tactics now, and so he started singing to her. When she still didn’t scoot over close, he said, “You obviously aren’t a fan of my music.”

  “I like to play the cello with my father,” she replied, and exasperated, Elvis cut to the chase. He asked her where she lived, and she told him she had an eight-by-forty-foot house trailer. He asked her to show it to him. “No way,” she told him. She wouldn’t allow anybody in her trailer. More than that, she didn’t let anybody get to know her, because she was underage. “I’d lied and said I was twenty-one because I was working at the Sahara.”

  But Elvis wore her down, as he knew he would. Still, his evening didn’t go as planned.

  “He was sitting on my couch and kissing me, and then he started to do a little more than kissing. I told him, ‘No, no, no,’ but he didn’t take no for an answer. So I pushed him backward, and he fell off onto a square Formica table.”

  Elvis hit the corner of it as he fell. Suddenly, he was lying on her floor moaning, “I can’t move!” For a terrifying moment, she thought he’d broken his back.

  Joan panicked. “I didn’t know what to do! I thought, ‘Do I call Colonel Parker? Do I call the Sahara? What do I do?’ But he said, ‘Don’t do anything. Just let me lie here.’ ”

  The next day, Elvis and the Colonel showed up at the Sahara “with every record that Elvis ever made. The Colonel said they were from his private collection.”

  Joan Adams would have a chance to add to that collection in another thirteen years. By that time, she would be married to Alex Shoofey, the man behind Elvis’s far more successful Vegas engagements.

  In the next months, Elvis would begin to make national headlines, with both Time and Newsweek running stories on his phenomenal rise, and other publications hurrying to follow suit. Elvis was now firmly in the national spotlight. But criticism over what some considered his lewd behavior began to mount. In May, after his performance in Lacrosse, Wisconsin, the editor of the local newspaper notified FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that Elvis’s act included “sexual self-gratification on stage.” Ten days later, there was another riot, this one twenty minutes into Elvis’s show in Kansas City, Missouri, where D. J.’s drums and Bill’s bass were smashed, and D. J. was thrown into the orchestra pit.

  Then on June 5, Elvis made his second appearance on The Milton Berle Show, singing “Hound Dog,” and making the most of the beat that D. J. had picked up drumming in strip clubs. It was the performance that would come to define him both as a cultural threat, and as an innovative creative phenomenon.

  Most critics rushed to thrash him, Jack Gould of the New York Times writing, “Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability,” and Jack O’Brian of the New York Journal-American deriding his “display of primitive physical movement [that is] difficult to describe in terms suitable to a family newspaper.”

  Interestingly, it was a woman, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who added the vitriol. “I applaud parents of teenagers who work to get the blood and horror gangster stories off TV. They should work harder against the new alleged singer, Elvis Presley. I caught him on Milton Berle’s show and was revolted. Dressed like a zoot-suiter, he acted as though he had St. Vitus dance and indulged in bumps and grinds that wouldn’t be permitted in the lowest burlesque houses.”

  Two days later, a nervous Harry Kalcheim at William Morris suggested to the Colonel that perhaps Elvis should do less shaking.

  Also on the show that night was twenty-two-year-old actress Debra Paget, a contract player for Twentieth Century-Fox. Elvis took note of her for two reasons: The petite, five-foot-two redhead was just his physical type, going back to Carolyn Bradshaw, and she was talked about to play the female lead in his first motion picture, a western tentatively titled The Reno Brothers, set to start filming in August. Producer Hal Wallis had loaned him out to the rival studio as a kind of test, to see how audiences would respond to him. Even Wallis was concerned about Elvis’s negative publicity, but he held fast to the memory of that fine screen test and decided he’d made the right choice in signing him.

  In defending his performance on the Berle show, Elvis told the Charlotte Observer that he hadn’t been any sexier than Debra Paget, who came out in a “tight thing with feathers on the behind where they wigggle the most [and who] bumped and pooshed out all over the place.”

  Already, she was on his mind. But he’d never forgotten about Dixie, either, and at the end of May, he’d stopped by her house as she returned from a dress rehearsal for her high school graduation. He told her he was seeing her friend Barbara Hearn now. Dixie was fine with it. She was moving on, too. The next night, Elvis was in the seats at Ellis Auditorium to watch her graduate.

  He might have tried to resurrect the romance had it not been for an event that came out of the blue. On June 11, 1956, he flew home off the road to attend the funeral of his cousin Lee Edward Smith, who had drowned.

  As Elvis and his parents returned home from the service, he spotted a gal in the crowd surrounding the house. It was June Juanico, the Biloxi girl he’d met a year earlier. She was eighteen now and prettier than she’d been when he met her.

  Weeks after Elvis repeatedly tried calling her from the road, only to leave messages with her brother, Jerry, June finally found out Elvis had made good on his promise. “Oh, by the way,” Jerry said, “some guy with a hillbilly accent called you on the phone.” By the time she called the operator back, it was too late—Elvis had long moved on from that number.

  She tried not to make a big deal out of it, despite her strong feelings, and purposely hadn’t followed his career. In fact, when her friend Marie, a huge Elvis fan who attended a number of his shows, suggested that June join her and a group of girlfriends on a trip to Memphis, June said she’d rather go to Florida. But Marie had the car, so Memphis it was.

  When they arrived in town, they drove to Beale Street and stopped at Lansky Brothers, the store where Elvis bought his loud clothing. Marie wheedled his address out of Bernard Lansky, one of the owners, who added that he wasn’t supposed to tell people where Elvis lived. But he guessed it wouldn’t do any harm to just ride by, because Elvis was out of town.

  Marie was upset—they’d come all this way and now Elvis wasn’t home? But June was secretly relieved. She didn’t know if he’d remember her. Now at the house, she could see the construction from the Presleys’ new swimming pool in the backyard. They were all wondering what shape it was going to be in—someone said she bet it was in the form of a guitar—when June said, “Well, let’s go take a look.”

  “I got out of the car, and they all followed me, trespassing. I was standing on the fence looking over, when a big black Cadillac drove up in the driveway. Out stepped Elvis and his mother and father, all dressed in dark clothing. I don’t know if he put two and two together, like, ‘Marie is from Biloxi, so that’s June standing at the fence,’ but I turned and had my back to him, and he came up behind me and took me by the waist, and picked me up off the ground and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ ”

  She explained that she was there with the girls, and he said he’d been looking all over for her, that he’d called and left those messages for her to call back, and why hadn’t she done it? They laughed about her nitwit brother, and then he said, “Somebody told me you were engaged to be married,” and looked over at Marie.

  Well, never mind, Elvis said. He told her she had to stay the week, and his parents would be happy to have her. (“I think I probably was the first female guest on Audubon Drive.”) He would show her Memphis, and if his 1956 ivory Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible were ready at the factory, they’d fly down to Houston and pick it up. He had all kinds of plans: They’d go motorcycle riding, they’d go to the movies, they’d see anything she wanted
to see. He was so glad she was there, and he had so much to tell her.

  There were also so many unspoken thoughts in his head. Now that he was getting a little notoriety, he thought more about his lost twin. He wondered what Jessie would think about all this crazy stuff! But now he had June, at least for a week, and he was going to make the most of it. They wore matching motorcycle caps with bright white bills, and when they walked down the street, people stopped them and asked, “Are the two of you twins?” They just looked so much alike.

  Gladys, too, enjoyed June’s company. They’d meet in the kitchen in the mornings while Elvis was still asleep and fix food together, sitting and drinking coffee as the sun came up.

  “She saw me as domesticated and wise for my young years. Since my mother was divorced and working, I was the lady of the house. When I would get home from school, I would do the cooking, and I used to design and make all my clothes. The first time Mrs. Presley met me she admired my skirt. I said, ‘Well, thanks, I made that.’ So she started taking it off of me, looking at the zipper. She said, ‘You sew really well. You could do this for a living.’ I said, ‘I don’t know, I never did think about it like that.’ ”

  June could see that Gladys needed a confidante, that she had things on her mind. She was worried about this Colonel Parker, this cigar-smoking shyster. He made her nervous. But everything made her nervous of late, she said, even though June thought she seemed awfully calm and wondered about the pills she saw Gladys take from the windowsill in the kitchen.

  “I have a fear of waking up one day and all this just being a dream,” she told her. She’d had nothing all her life, she said, and she just figured all this was too good to be true. It was happening too fast.

  Then the mood lifted, and Gladys was saying, “You’ve got to pick a name for me other than ‘Mrs. Presley,’ because you’re going to be part of the family one day.” June thought for a minute and decided on “Lovey,” an affectionate form of Gladys’s middle name, Love. Gladys was wild about it, and about this girl.

  “She thought I was a good catch for Elvis because I could do all these things, and I was from Mississippi, and I was crazy about her son. I was healthy-looking, too, so she thought I was perfect breeding stock, as we used to say. I was five foot six and a half inches, about 128 pounds. She’d hug me and tell me I was pretty. And she would stroke my face. She was always telling me that Elvis needed someone to take care of him.”

  And so Gladys didn’t balk when Elvis said he was taking June to Houston with him to pick up his car, and that they would be gone overnight. Vernon drove them to the airport, where Elvis bought her ticket under the name of June Prichard, choosing it to protect her identity, and also as a kind of joke—he’d tried to call her from Prichard, Alabama, soon after they met.

  When they got to the hotel, they both signed in at the front desk, and he said, “Let’s go see your room first, and then we’ll go see mine.”

  He opened the door to her room, “and we hugged and kissed a little bit, and then we left. I don’t think I even put my overnight bag down, because he said, ‘Take that with you. Come on.’ ”

  She didn’t know what to think, or even what to do, and he saw it on her face.

  “June,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I respect you and love you. I want you to stay with me. I promise I will not touch you. I just want to hold you.”

  And, she says, “That’s what happened. We slept like spoons in the bed the entire night.” Then they flew back to Memphis.

  That’s when she fell in love with him, on the way home.

  “We’d spent so much time together, and I’d get lost in his eyes. He was just so very sincere. From then on, I knew I could trust him.”

  Jackie Rowland in a playful moment with Elvis at the Florida Theatre, Jacksonville, August 1956. During his two-day engagement, he signed an earlier photograph to Jackie and her mother: “My best to you, a bunch of real nice folks, Elvis Presley.” (Copyright Jackie Rowland 1978. All rights reserved.)

  Chapter Nine

  Love Times Three

  Elvis was scheduled to appear on The Steve Allen Show on July 1, 1956, but two weeks before, the variety show host announced that the pressure to cancel the hip-wiggling sensation had been so strong that if Elvis did appear, he “will not be allowed any of his offensive tactics.”

  Allen, a savvy show business veteran, considered the controversy “a piece of good luck,” he said later. All the media hype and attention “worked to our advantage,” and Elvis was never really in danger of being canceled.

  The host, who was also a comedian, jazz musician, writer, actor, poet, and television pioneer, had tuned in Stage Show one night, where he saw “this tall, gangly, kind of goofy-looking but cute, offbeat kid.” He only caught two minutes of him, but “I could see he had something, [and] made a note to our people to ‘book that kid.’ I didn’t even know his name.”

  Partly to capitalize on the outrage over Elvis’s movements on The Milton Berle Show, Allen scratched his head for a different way to spotlight him and also keep his movements contained. As he recalled nearly forty years later, “I personally came up with the two ideas that made Elvis look so good that night—the singing ‘Hound Dog’ to an actual dog, and the Range Roundup sketch with Andy Griffith and Imogene Coca,” the latter of which was a spoof on the Ozark Jubilee, the Grand Ole Opry, and Elvis’s barn dance home, the Louisiana Hayride.

  Some of Elvis’s fans were offended at the notion of their idol singing to a live basset hound. But Elvis took it all in stride, even agreeing to be fitted for a tuxedo (the twitchy basset would wear a top hat) for the occasion.

  At the morning rehearsal on June 29, Elvis became reacquainted with Al Wertheimer, a young photographer only slightly older than Elvis who had photographed him during his fifth Stage Show appearance. RCA’s Anne Fulchino had hired the German émigré as part of her dedication to making Elvis a huge pop phenomenon.

  With no budget for publicity—or certainly nothing like the $200 or $300 a day Columbia Records paid freelance shutterbugs—she’d gone in search of “talented, hungry kids who’d work cheap,” striking a deal in which the photographers were free to shop their pictures and make a few bucks once she’d finished her campaign. That’s the way she worked with Wertheimer.

  She picked him over a temperamental photographer she’d originally considered because Al, a quiet, laid-back, easygoing person, “had the right personality” to shadow the singer in close quarters and a variety of circumstances. “I also knew he could handle the Colonel.”

  She made the right choice. After late 1956, Parker lowered an iron curtain around Elvis, restricting media access to only a handful of carefully orchestrated events. Before that happened, Wertheimer, a night person like Elvis, would travel with him for a week, shooting some 3,800 frames, all unposed and in natural light, to chronicle both his professional and personal life—onstage, backstage, in the recording studio, at home with his parents and friends, and on the road with his fans.

  No other photographer would capture such startlingly intimate moments or chronicle such an important phase of Elvis’s career. The resulting photos, elegant, eloquent, and iconic, “were probably the first and the last look at the day-to-day life of Elvis Presley,” Wertheimer has written. “I was a reporter whose pen was a camera.”

  While RCA needed images that promoted Elvis as an explosive young singer on the rise, Wertheimer had another agenda. “Basically I was covering the story because Elvis made the girls cry, and I couldn’t understand what he had that was that powerful, that brought all that raw emotion to the surface.”

  As Fulchino predicted, Al was so unobtrusive and good at his job that many of the people who surrounded Elvis hardly knew he was there. And Elvis himself enjoyed being documented, allowing closeness that embarrassed even the photographer, particularly for an image Wertheimer calls The Kiss, a brief encounter between Elvis and a fan in the stairway of the Mosque Theatre in Richmond, Virginia.

&nb
sp; According to Wertheimer, Diane Keaton, the actress and photographer, has called it “the sexiest picture ever taken in the whole world.”

  On the afternoon of June 29, after The Steve Allen Show rehearsal, Elvis took the train to Richmond with the Colonel and an entourage that now included his cousins Bobby and Junior Smith, the latter of whom bore the haunted, eerie look of a crazed killer, having come home from Korea with a Section 8. The following day, Elvis was scheduled to perform two shows at the Mosque Theatre, at 5 and 8 P.M.

  His date for the day was a well-dressed young woman in a dark, sleeveless dress and cluster pearl earrings. A southern girl, she had a fresh-faced look about her, with her dark blond hair cut in a summer bob. Elvis apparently made her acquaintance in the Hotel Jefferson coffee shop, where only a few minutes earlier, he’d wrapped his arm around the waitress.

  He had his script for The Steve Allen Show, and “flipping through some of the pages,” as Al remembered, “he was trying to impress this young lady whose name I forgot to get. But she remained cool, not wanting to look too impressed. Elvis continued to try and loosen her up with conversation. At one point, he came in close, within three inches of her face, and just shouted, ‘Ahhh!’ ”

  Al clicked off some shots, and then Junior said it was getting late and they needed to go to the theater for rehearsal. Elvis invited the blonde to come along, and a trusting soul, she climbed in the cab. On the ride to the theater, Elvis tried to amuse her, pointing out silly things like light fixtures, and cracking jokes. He “continued to be at turns debonair and playful, or stern,” Al observed, “wrapping both hands around her neck in a mock ceremony of choking her.”

  While the other performers took turns onstage, Elvis flirted with her in another part of the theater, leading her into a dark, narrow alcove along the stairway, lit only by a window and a fifty-watt lightbulb. Al, walking from the men’s lavatory, which doubled as the musicians’ dressing room, was surprised to find the couple there and realized he’d stumbled on an intimate moment. Elvis, dressed in a dark suit and white buck shoes, propped his arm on the stair rail, slouching toward his date, who coyly leaned against the wall. She tipped the lower half of her body, inching toward him, her feet with his, so that the two of them made almost a V-shape standing so close together.