Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  “What do you mean?” June asked.

  “Elvis could have any girl in the whole world, and you’re the one. He can’t shut up talking about you.”

  June liked her. “Elvis was gone visiting with the guys, so we talked for a good fifteen minutes that night. We got to be good friends and even stayed in touch.”

  But Elvis wasn’t just talking with the guys. He was off seeing about fourteen-year-old Jackie Rowland and her mother, his invited guests. The Colonel had admitted them to an afternoon show via the back door of the theater, and now Elvis had achieved the slick trick of getting two of his three dates to entertain each other while he checked about the third.

  The next night, at the theater, Elvis would take Jackie off to a little prop room to show her how to kiss in a grown-up way. (“I had never kissed a boy before. . . . Elvis was a very loving and gentle teacher.”) Her mother caught them, but still Elvis had time to say, “You know, when you grow up, you are going to be mine.” It was a solemn moment, as Jackie remembers. “I said, ‘Yes, I know that.’ The moonlight was coming in, and it was so romantic. I still remember his scent and the warmth from his body.”

  Then it was time for him to go onstage, and he paused a moment and told Jackie “Don’t Be Cruel” would always be for her. “Don’t be cruel / To a heart that’s true . . .”

  He had invited both of the Rowlands back to the hotel after the show, and when they arrived, he was still upset about Judge Gooding. “He came out of the bar, and tears were running down his face. He was hurt very badly by that situation, and he hugged me, and just held on, and cried on my shoulder. And me being fourteen at the time . . . what can you do at fourteen? You’re not a grown woman. You’re still a little girl.

  “He told my mother that she could go, that he would take very, very good care of me. And my mother said, ‘Absolutely not.’ He said, ‘I really promise, Mrs. Rowland. I will take good care of her. I won’t let anything happen to her.’ She said, ‘And you’re going to take her in that bar? No, sir, you are not. She is underage, and my little girl is going home with me.’ Being the obedient child that I was, I didn’t open my mouth. But inside I was dying. And so he turned around and went back into the bar and we left. Of course, I was so embarrassed. I thought, ‘I’ll never get to see him again.’ ”

  But Jackie would hear from Elvis through the early 1960s. And when she left that night, she had a wonderful souvenir. Her mother had snapped a playful photo of them lost in each other, staring moon-eyed. (“We thought we were alone—we didn’t even know she had taken the photo.”) And Marguerite slyly got Elvis to sign the back of one of the Audubon Drive photos, later comparing the handwriting to that on the letter purportedly from Gladys.

  Jackie and her mother continued to attend numerous Elvis concerts around the area until he went into the army in 1958. Years later, when her mother died, Jackie was stunned to find more letters from Elvis in Marguerite’s belongings, one written on pink stationery two weeks after the Florida Theatre shows. Marguerite had kept them from her all those years.

  “I really trusted my mother. I thought that either Elvis or Mrs. Presley was calling her and inviting us for the different shows and visits. Now I really regret not knowing more. But dating a rock-and-roll star was like a Southern Baptist becoming Catholic.”

  Though Marguerite was a good chaperone, Elvis and Jackie had other moments where “he and I got off together and had some time to share with one another.”

  One such event occurred backstage at the Florida Theatre. Elvis and Jackie sat in a pair of chairs and talked while Elvis’s scary cousin, Junior, perched on the stairs nearby. Suddenly, everyone noticed that the strap on Jackie’s sundress had slipped down and fallen off her shoulder. “Junior made a smart remark, something to the effect of, ‘Yeah, baby, take it all off!’ Elvis jumped up out of that chair, grabbed him, shook him, and said, ‘Don’t you dare talk to her like that! She’s my girlfriend and she’s a lady!’ ”

  Predictably, they never had sex (“We kissed and hugged, but he never touched me inappropriately”), and chances are they wouldn’t have, even if Jackie had been willing. Elvis wasn’t having intercourse with June, either.

  Already, Elvis’s reputation as a sex symbol was becoming a burden. In the 1960s, he would tell Larry Geller, his spiritual adviser and a member of his entourage, that in the early days of his fame, he had relations with so many women that he was hospitalized for exhaustion. Whether that was the reason behind his 1955 hospital visit in Jacksonville isn’t known. But according to Geller, the incident taught Elvis that he should not live his life as a sex machine, and that sex without love meant nothing, even though he could not always control himself.

  Elvis’s label as a sex god, then, hampered him psychologically. Women assumed, from his image and his movements onstage, that he was a lover of legendary proportions. But he was insecure about his sexual prowess, and felt inadequate once his lovemaking moved beyond dry humping and other adolescent practices. And since he was brought up to please, and pleasing is part of any entertainer’s personality, he feared that he might not measure up to a woman’s expectations in bed. His apprehension was so incapacitating that it often made him withdraw from actual intercourse and extend his foreplay instead.

  This was also a factor in his gravitation toward thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls. At that level of sexual development, young teens of his generation were likely to still be innocents, satisfied to simply make out and abstain from intercourse—precisely where Elvis felt most at ease. He wanted virgins—he called them “cherries”—so that he might mold them sexually, but also so they wouldn’t have anyone to compare him to as a lover. That way, they would be less likely to critique or pass judgment on his performance.

  But Elvis failed to realize the damage that sexual flirtation could have on young girls, especially coming from someone so famous and charismatic. Though Jackie went on to marry, “Once you’d kissed Elvis, it was all downhill after that. . . . I guess you could say the flame still sizzles.” Her sentiment is common among women who enjoyed any involvement with Elvis, particularly if he was the first male with whom they were involved, and the divorce rate among them is high. Jackie herself divorced after nearly forty-two years of marriage.

  One of the ironies of her story is that Jackie and Eunice Gooding, Judge Gooding’s wife, became good friends. While Jackie could see both sides of the issue, Elvis never did. After his last performance at the Florida Theatre on August 11, according to June Juanico, Elvis had a message for the judge and his cronies in attendance. “You know how Elvis always said, ‘Thank you very much’? I heard it just as clear as day. He said, ‘Fuck you very much. Fuck you very much.’ Everybody was screaming, but all the members of his entourage heard it. He did it twice and he looked over at me and grinned.” Once they were together in the room, June asked him if she’d heard him correctly. “You heard correctly,” he said.

  The tour wound up the next day in New Orleans on August 12. In the Big Easy, where almost anything went, Elvis gave his performance without restraint and even received the key to the city. It had been an incredible ten days, during which he’d made $20,000, plus a $7,500 commission on souvenirs.

  As usual, his thoughts turned to Gladys after the show. He knew she always worried about him, even though both Elvis and Gladys had turned June into a surrogate mother. That night he was so exhausted he had chills and a fever. Perspiration gathered in hot beads on his forehead, and then gave way to cold sweats. He was just at the point of collapsing in the bed, but he said, “I have to call my mother before I go to sleep.”

  When he got her on the phone, as June remembers, “He told her, ‘I’ll be home in a couple of days. Don’t worry about me, Mama. June is right here.’ Anytime he called her, he would say, ‘Here, talk to her.’ So he handed me the phone and she said, ‘How is he? Is he getting enough rest? Is he eating? Don’t let him run himself crazy, June.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m right here with him.’ ”

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nbsp; Still, he was so keyed up and sick that it took its toll. Contrary to his normal routine with June, Elvis was unable to relax and sleep. (“Whenever we went to bed, he just died, he died.”) But on this night, he was back to his old restlessness. They had a suite at the hotel, and June moved into the living room so as not to disturb him. But that didn’t seem to help, either.

  “He sat straight up in his bed and he called, ‘June! June! Come in here!’ I went in and he was sweating, he was trembling, and he said, ‘I had a horrible dream. I was in a coffin and my mother was looking down crying over me!’ ”

  June saw it as more evidence of a premonition he’d had that he was going to die young. He’d mentioned several times, “I’m not going to be here long.” Yet the timing was also curious. June had refused a ring, accepting only a radio with rhinestones all over it for her birthday. But it was the first time he’d gotten so close to really committing to a woman. His dream, then, seems more about the death of his lifestyle—about anxiety over marriage, of breaking his bond with Gladys—than about physical demise.

  Now, in his fevered state, “He kept saying, ‘I can’t leave my mother! My mother needs me! I can’t leave her! She needs me!’ It was a real dream to him.”

  Things just seemed to be happening quicker than he could absorb them, and there was never any time to think about any of it. He was scared about so many things, scared he might lose it all. He’d even mentioned it to Jackie, a mere child. But he couldn’t quit obsessing about it. What if it all just ended tomorrow?

  Four days later, on August 16, Elvis would leave for Hollywood to begin his first movie.

  Elvis and Debra Paget get better acquainted on the 20th Century Fox ranch during a break from filming Love Me Tender, late August 1956. “She’s the most beautiful girl in the world,” he said. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

  Chapter Ten

  Hillbillies in Hollywood

  Elvis arrived in Los Angeles with his cousins Gene and Junior, and immediately after checking into his eleventh-floor suite at the Knickerbocker Hotel—a favorite of show business luminaries on their way up or down—the trio went to Long Beach Amusement Park, where they reportedly blew $750. It was a huge sum of money to throw away on bumper cars and crap carnival food in 1956. But Elvis was hardly a young sophisticate. And Gene, never a smart boy, with a speech impediment that made him seem even dimmer, appeared such a bumpkin as to barely be believed. Together, with the eternally bewildered Junior, they were hillbillies in Hollywood, and the film community would nearly fall over itself to see who could make the most derisive comment or the cruelest joke.

  Vernon and Gladys also had trouble believing where fate had led them, and Elvis was mystified to explain his success. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “I just fell into it, really. My daddy and I were laughing about it just the other day. He looked at me and said, ‘What happened, El? The last thing I remember is I was working in a can factory, and you were driving a truck.’ And I remember how, after something big happened along the way, I was sitting at home and found my mama staring at me. I asked her why, and she just shook her head and said, ‘I don’t believe it.’ We all feel the same about it still. It just . . . caught us up. But I sure hope it doesn’t stop.”

  Elvis had been to Los Angeles before, both for television and show dates, but now the City of Angels seemed to be one big play lot, offering up the opportunity to fulfill every dream he’d ever had. His producer on The Reno Brothers was David Weisbart, who had brought one of Elvis’s favorite movies, Rebel Without a Cause, starring his idol, James Dean, to the screen. Within four days of his arrival, Elvis would meet Nick Adams, a close friend of Dean and part of a Hollywood clique of talented but troubled young actors who embraced the “live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse” philosophy.

  Elvis had cried when Dean died, and now it looked as if he were about to be welcomed by all of the late actor’s acolytes and brethren, the “in” crowd that included Dennis Hopper (Adams’s roommate at the time), Russ Tamblyn (another movie hood, then married to Venetia Stevenson, whom Elvis would later date), and Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood (who were still teenagers and going to school). It made his head spin, even though he didn’t know that the reckless Adams, who was said to use pills, and who was on probation after being arrested for speeding nine times in one year, hoped to trade on the friendship to win a part in Elvis’s film. In fact, Elvis had beat Adams out for the supporting actor role, and most of the larger studios were loath to touch him.

  The picture, directed by Oscar winner Robert D. Webb, was cast very late, and though Joanne Woodward had originally been slated for the female lead, by now Elvis knew that Debra Paget had won the part. Elvis was ecstatic. Only months earlier, Elvis had told Milton Berle in a television skit, “Really, Mr. Berle . . . the type I dig is someone like that Debra Paget. . . . She’s real gone.” She, too, had nice things to say about him, even if she gave him a backhanded compliment: “I’ll admit that my impression of Elvis, before I met him, was the same as many others who don’t know him. I figured he must be some kind of moron. Now, I think the best way to describe his work is to say it’s inspired.”

  They would circle around each other as principal photography began. In Robert Buckner’s screenplay, set in Texas at the end of the Civil War, Elvis plays Clint Reno, snared in a love triangle with his older brother, Vance (Richard Egan), and Cathy, the woman they love (Paget).

  It was an odd role in which to make his screen debut, but Elvis gave it his all and tried not to be intimidated by his costars, who included the fine character actress Mildred Dunnock, twice nominated for an Academy Award, as his mother. Critics would pan the novice actor—he was, after all, an easy target—but Dunnock was surprised at his solid performance. “When I came back from making the picture, my friends saw it and said, ‘Why Millie, this boy can act!’ This rather threw me, because I said I had spent twenty-five years trying to learn how to act, and Elvis Presley hadn’t spent twenty-five minutes. So I do not in any way depreciate his value as an actor.”

  The truth was, Dunnock, a fellow southerner, had taken a shine to Elvis, and when he confessed to her that he didn’t really know what to do, how to make the lines ring true, she took it upon herself to coach him. First the former schoolteacher had to educate him in the art of theatrical projection.

  “Elvis would have a line like, ‘Can’t do it, Maw, can’t do it.’ And he would say [it] really pleasant and nice. But I’d tell him to say it like he really meant it. And after a certain number of tries he would finally say [with strong emphasis], ‘I can’t do it, Maw, I can’t do it!’ And Mr. Webb would say, ‘Shoot.’ ”

  In one of the film’s most crucial scenes, the family was led to believe that the Yankees had killed Clint’s brother. “He really hadn’t been killed,” Dunnock remembered, “but my baby Elvis was upstairs, and I was in the kitchen cooking. There was only one line of dialogue in this scene, and it was mine. All the rest was plain action. I was going to say it firmly, so I rehearsed it and rehearsed it. The lighting men decided what they were going to do, and we sat down and drank Coca-Colas and waited for about two hours.”

  As Dunnock told the story, the director finally said, “Everything seems ready, so let’s rehearse it one time.” Elvis said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Webb.”

  Then the director took Elvis through it, saying, “In this scene, the Yankees come by horse up into the backyard, which you can see from your window upstairs. You come down and go to the window and see those Yankees kill your brother. You go to the sideboard, open the drawer, and pull out a gun. You start across that floor to go meet those damn Yankees, and end of scene.”

  “Yes, sir,” Elvis said confidently.

  “The Yankees are going to rap on the door,” Webb continued. “I’ll go, ‘Ready, lights, shoot,’ then I’ll make a knocking sound, and that’s your cue to come down those stairs. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Webb called for action, and rapped out the knock.r />
  In Dunnock’s retelling, “Elvis came down those stairs, went to that sideboard, took out that gun, and when I said my line, ‘Put that gun down, son!,’ well, he dropped it right away. Mr. Webb said, ‘Cut! Cut! Oh, my God, what are you doing? You’re supposed to keep on going!’ Elvis said, ‘She told me to put it down.’ ”

  Most actresses of Dunnock’s caliber would have held her head, livid at having to put up with so inexperienced an actor. But Elvis had gotten to the real mother in her, and she chose to frame his blunder as an asset.

  “You see, for the first time he heard me. Before, he was just thinking about what he was doing and how he was going about it. It’s a funny story, [but] I also think it’s a story about a beginner who had the first requirement of acting, which is to believe in what you’re doing.”

  Though Elvis hoped he would play the part as a straight dramatic role, and do no singing, Colonel Parker dashed that dream straightaway. Seeing how Hollywood’s The Blackboard Jungle spurred the chart-topping success of Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” the year before, the Colonel insisted that Fox and RCA make the most of a similar opportunity. Parker had no faith that Elvis would amount to anything as an actor and got him involved with motion pictures primarily as a vehicle to sell records.

  The Ken Darby Trio was part of the session team that replaced Scotty Moore and Bill Black on the soundtrack—the producers found their Memphis sound far too raw—and Darby wrote all four songs for the film, including “Love Me Tender,” a massaging of the Civil War ballad “Aura Lee,” written by W. W. Fosdick and George R. Poulton. The Colonel, intending to bleed every penny out of the film, insisted that Elvis be cut in as a songwriter. So Darby officially credited “Love Me Tender,” which inspired the title change of the picture, to both Elvis and Vera Matson, Darby’s wife. The singer hadn’t written one bar of it. But he now had a music publishing company administered by Parker’s old friends, the brothers Julian and Jean Aberbach.