Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  Later that afternoon, Elvis allowed himself to be inoculated for polio with the newly perfected Salk vaccine. He took the needle in a very public proceeding during which he applauded a medicine that helped “so many kids and adults too.” The press again warmly applauded Elvis for his service to the American people.

  Back in Memphis, Elvis appeared and spoke at the yearly “Road-E-O” safe-driving contest for teenagers in which he urged youngsters to follow the rules of the road. It was another brilliantly targeted, well-publicized event. If there had ever been a generational war going on, Elvis had switched sides.

  On January 6, 1957, Elvis concluded his third performance on The Ed Sullivan Show by reverently singing a mainline religious song, “Peace in the Valley.” No rock, no roll, not even a Pentecostal shout. Sullivan himself was now at peace with Elvis and ended by giving him his priceless stamp of approval. He held up his hand in his usual casually commanding and masterful way to halt uproarious applause. “I wanted to say to Elvis Presley and the country,” he declared, “that this is a real decent, fine boy.” Ed closed by asking for “a tremendous hand for a very nice person.” Elvis was mentally awake, morally straight, sanitized, certified, and approved for nationwide consumption.

  Then, having conquered television, Elvis all but disappeared from it for more than a decade. The single exception was an appearance on the Frank Sinatra show in 1960 immediately after his release from the army. He gave up live performances too, except for three in 1961 when he did two shows at Ellis Auditorium in Memphis for “Elvis Presley Day” and another at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu to support turning the sunken battleship Arizona into a national monument. To hear Elvis, fans had to buy a record. To see a moving, talking, singing image of him after 1957 and before 1968, they had to go to the movies. For eleven years out of twenty-three years of his career, Elvis was available only on records and in films.

  Creating the “Good Elvis”

  In the beginning, it was by no means certain that Elvis’s films would be merely vehicles for his musical talent. The possibility of re-creating Elvis as a film star with acting talent of some magnitude and making a profit seemed real. The formula for moving a highly successful performer from his or her original venue to success in the movies was already well established, most notably by singer Bing Crosby, dancer Fred Astaire, ice skater Sonja Henie, and even swimmer Johnny Weissmuller (Tarzan). Frank Sinatra had done even better. In 1953 he had established himself as a serious, unsinging, and convincing dramatic actor in the movie From Here to Eternity.

  Elvis’s chances for crossing over were heightened significantly by the death of the young actor James Dean in an auto accident in September 1956. The original “rebel without a cause,” Dean had made his reputation in the film East of Eden. His death left a huge vacuum in the hearts of young Americans. The first Elvis, the Elvis the girls had created, was an obvious candidate to replace him.

  In April 1956, just after his appearance on the USS Hancock with Milton Berle, Elvis did a screen test at Paramount Studios in which he “lip-sang” “Blue Suede Shoes” and then acted out a part in a scene from a prospective film, The Rainmaker. Burt Lancaster was cast in the movie as the Rainmaker. For his screen test, Elvis read the part of the Rainmaker’s younger brother. Afterward, he complained that the character wasn’t suitable for him. He told producer Hal Wallis that he would like to play a part “more like myself, so I wouldn’t have to do any excess acting.” Wallis was amused. The Rainmaker’s brother was young and naive.

  To professionals, Elvis’s screen test indicated a high potential for singing in the movies and a low potential for acting. As it happened, however, his first film did not showcase his musical talent. An ambivalent screen test led to an amateurish performance in Love Me Tender, a story set in the Civil War South. At the end of the tale, the youthful character played by Elvis died melodramatically, making way for his sexy widow, played by Debra Paget, to marry his strikingly mature older brother, played by star Richard Egan, to whom she had been engaged before he went off to the Confederate Army only to be mistakenly reported as killed in battle, ostensibly leaving her free, ridiculously, to take Elvis as her boy-husband.

  Obviously, this was not Gone with the Wind. Elvis seemed to be the only actor who took more than a workmanlike interest in his or her performance in this vaguely incestuous play. He was exceedingly earnest, highly energetic, and totally unbelievable. Elvis’s character, on the way to his eventual demise, slid improbably into song four times. The most memorable song, “Love Me Tender,” became the name of the film almost as an afterthought, replacing the flat but descriptive original title, The Reno Brothers.

  Seldom thereafter did Hollywood attempt to promote Elvis as a serious dramatic talent. In his heart of hearts, Elvis wanted nothing more than to become a great actor on the order of James Dean or Marlon Brando, but he hobbled himself by adamantly refusing to take any acting lessons, insisting that he simply wanted to be himself onscreen. Hollywood honored his wish. They asked no “excess acting” of him and made excellent profits from cheap movies.

  In his second movie, Loving You (1957), Elvis sang seven songs, and a costar added three more. In Jailhouse Rock (1957), he burst into song six times. In King Creole (1957), he sang eleven songs in a film that lasted 116 minutes. Many critics say this was his best film ever.

  In the first three films that he did after Love Me Tender, all released the same year, Elvis was clearly the star, and all the storylines said that here we are giving you the real Elvis doing the real story of his life. In Loving You, he is a young truck driver named Deke Rivers who has a God-given gift for singing. Unscrupulous managers use his voice and his overwhelming sex appeal to advance his fantastically successful career and reap the profits. Naive and innocent, Deke becomes confused by the attentions of a bad woman on one side and the love of a good girl on the other. He runs away. Older and somehow wiser from his suffering, he returns to perform on a major national television show where everyone sees that he is really a noble young man. Furthermore, he gets the girl.

  In Jailhouse Rock, Elvis is a young man justly convicted of manslaughter for accidentally killing a man in a barroom brawl. However, like Deke Rivers in Loving You, he finds redemption through a natural gift for song, a gift discovered in prison by his wise, musically talented, and significantly older cellmate.

  In King Creole, Elvis is a young man rebelling against his father. Working in a New Orleans nightclub called King Creole, he gets involved with gangsters and a bad girl, drops out of high school, is tempted to join a street gang, gets knifed in a fight, comes to his senses, reconciles with his family, and falls in love with a good girl. Having seen the light, he develops his singing skills and is thereby saved.

  In each of the films, Elvis plays the part of a young man who made some really serious mistakes. In each, he is redeemed primarily by his God-given musical talent and innate goodness, but also with the aid of wise and sympathetic adults. The real message seems to be that if young Elvis Presley had indeed transgressed as charged, he had suffered severely as he should have, repented, and confessed his sins. Now he would be good. Adult persons had aided him in his redemption and could fairly and graciously readmit him to the communion. Now his good work, including manifestations of his gift for song, reflected their good work. He and they were one.

  The New Elvis in Person

  The tide of public regard for Elvis had turned visibly favorable in January 1957, when arch conservative and arch anti-Communist crusader Ed Sullivan said to Elvis in essence, “Go, and sin no more.” The image of the good Elvis swelled in March when RCA released Elvis’s first gospel album, Peace in the Valley, which concluded with “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” It established Elvis’s credentials as a deeply spiritual and Christian person. Elvis won gold and platinum awards from RCA for selling huge numbers of their records. Eventually, some two billion of his records were distributed around the world. But he won only two Grammy Awards for his records, both for gospel al
bums. Elvis’s image as a good person rose yet again when all of America learned in April 1957 that he had moved his beloved mother into a mansion on a hill in Memphis. Marvelously, even providentially, the mansion was already named Graceland.

  Meanwhile, Elvis was also busy proving himself a virtuous citizen of the highest order by conspicuously supporting charities with gifts of money and by personal appearances to support noble causes. Regularly, he made sizable, calculated, and well-publicized contributions to local charities, especially the Cynthia Milk Fund for poor children. In December 1956, he was at Ellis Auditorium for the annual all–African American Goodwill Review, organized to raise money for the needy, particularly needy African American children. He watched the show from backstage. He was not allowed by the Colonel to perform there or anywhere else without a contract and careful preparation. But he did come onstage for an introduction and in response to a request that he do “a little something” for the African American audience, he gave them a “little wiggle.” The young women in the crowd “went crazy.”

  Nat O. Williams, a leading African American journalist in Memphis, was amazed and somewhat disturbed that these middle-class black girls went wild over the mere sight of Elvis but had uttered no screams for the highly talented black guitarist and singer B. B. King, who had just performed. He wrote that “a thousand black, brown, and beige teenage girls in the audience blended their alto and soprano voices in one wild crescendo of sound that rent the rafters and took off like scalded cats in the direction of Elvis.” Williams suspected that such behavior reflected “a basic integration in attitude and aspiration which had been festering in the minds of most of your folks’ women folk all along.” Black girls loved Elvis just like white girls loved Elvis. The race line seemed to evaporate.

  Colonel Parker

  Colonel Parker assiduously orchestrated everything for maximum positive publicity and income. Elvis was not only a great talent worthy of the high cost of his hire; he was also a model citizen and an adorable person, worthy of respect not only from female teens but also from young men and adults, rich and poor, blacks and whites.

  Parker radically changed Elvis’s venues; Elvis radically changed his image. The Colonel was only following the money; Elvis was giving his changing audience what he felt they wanted with uncanny accuracy. It came to be that Elvis’s new image and its broad acceptance in the nation worked powerfully to improve the projection of a united America confronting the Communist menace, a projection that was very much needed in a Cold War that had recently heated up to a near disaster in Korea and would soon become an absolute disaster in Vietnam. Elvis brought blacks and whites together as if there were no race line in America. He also significantly melted the lines that might divide generations and genders, and religions and classes in the nation.

  The Army

  In 1958, Tom Parker pulled off the last act in the image shift of the century. He persuaded a very—even bitterly—reluctant Elvis to submit to being drafted into the United States Army for two years as if he were an ordinary unprivileged American boy. He also managed to get Elvis to publicly and repeatedly express his willingness—even eagerness—to embrace his patriotic duty, even though Elvis, privately and personally, was not at all elated by the prospect of military service and at times resented the imposition. He had a horror of being forgotten, of sinking back into relative anonymity.

  Colonel Parker’s gamble paid off handsomely. Elvis’s fans remained loyal. During his service and for a few years into the 1960s, they bought his records and went to his movies as never before. The result was that his gross income rose to millions of dollars a year. But most of all, his image went from black to white and then to absolutely golden. For adult and conservative Americans in the mid-1950s, Elvis had been evil incarnate—literally a walking, talking, singing, and dancing devil in the flesh. He returned from valiant service at his post on the front line of freedom in Europe in March 1960, strikingly crisp, clean, and neat in his army uniform with his sergeant’s stripes on his arm. Elvis Presley was a brave defender of the American way, the nation’s poster boy in the Cold War against Communism. The onstage Elvis of the first two years of his career was left, essentially, to living memory, and the girls went on with their lives.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  EAST TUPELO AND TUPELO

  The War

  Vernon continued working with the Lee County Sanitation Project into 1941. At some point he took a job with the S and W Construction Company in Sardis, Mississippi, seventy miles west of Tupelo. Possibly the company had been engaged by the U.S. government during the New Deal to help build a dam—“the largest earthen dam in America,” locals would boast—across the Tallahatchie River nearby. For decades Sardis Lake and its recreation area would be a favored resort for residents from miles around. On Saturday, January 24, 1942, Vernon quit his job, citing ill health.

  By then, America was at war, and at first Vernon seemed eager to leave Lee County and take advantage of well-paying job opportunities abundantly available elsewhere. On August 1, 1942, he was living with Gladys and Elvis in Ozark, Alabama, some three hundred miles southeast of Tupelo, where he worked for the J. H. Jones Construction Company. On August 8, he began a job at the Ferguson-Oman Gulf Ordnance plant in Aberdeen, Mississippi, only forty miles south of Tupelo. On November 22, he went back to work for the S and W Construction Company, this time in Como over in the Delta, where he helped build a camp for prisoners of war. Como was named for the Italian lake, and the camp was intended for captured Japanese soldiers, but it came to hold Germans, initially some of those captured in the North African campaign. Within two weeks of Vernon’s arrival, however, construction on the camp was coming to an end. Vernon asked his friend and fellow worker Bill Parham if he had received a notice of termination. Bill had not. Vernon had. But because of the war, he knew exactly what to do. “Well,” Vernon said to Bill, “guess I’ll be going up to Memphis now to look for work.” Within a week he had found it. On December 12, he began work with Dunn Construction Company at a military base near Millington, Tennessee, a dozen miles north of Memphis. He left that job after nine weeks.

  In the year 1942, Vernon held five jobs. Despite the inconstancy of his labor, he was making money at a rate that must have amazed and delighted him. He had qualified as a carpenter with the WPA, and in all of these jobs he was a card-carrying member of the carpenters union. With time-and-a-half for overtime, he was making about $50 a week. In the WPA, he had made $52 a month. Manpower was in such great demand that Parchman was suspending the sentences of men who would agree to join the war effort.

  Working away from home, Vernon lived in communities where he had no local reputation. He did not have to tell anyone that he had served time as a convicted criminal in Parchman. He was freed from the scrutiny of police officers in Tupelo and Lee County, distanced from the humiliation of having been jailed. He could offer himself to strangers, both women and men, as a man in an image that he desired, tall, handsome, and intelligent, and, for a time at least, be accepted in that image.

  In 1943, Vernon continued his peripatetic ways. In mid-February, he quit his job in Millington and within the month was working at the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant back in Tupelo. Several weeks later, on April 29, when he left Pepsi, the clerk made a note on his last pay slip. “Gone to shipyard,” it said. On May 16, Vernon started working at the Moss Point Shipyard on the Gulf Coast near Pascagoula, Mississippi. This time, Gladys and Elvis went with him, as well as his cousin Sales Presley and his wife, Annie, and their two little girls. The work was hard, but exceedingly well paid. Vernon got $1.20 an hour for a forty-hour workweek and $1.80 an hour for overtime. Workers and families lived in slapped-together quarters made of wood, canvas, and screen. It was not comfortable, especially as summer heat rose and insects came on, but Gladys and Elvis had the company of Annie and her kids. Elvis was eight years old. He took a liking to Annie’s baby, Diane, and would carry her around riding astraddle his hip, his arm around her waist.

/>   On Sunday, June 20, five weeks after they had arrived, Sales and Annie decided to go back to Tupelo. Vernon and Gladys decided to stay. Within hours, Vernon, Gladys, and Elvis threw their things into their car and headed north. About noon Sales, Annie, and the girls were at a roadside stand having lunch at an outside table. Annie looked up to see the Vernon Presley family in their car turning off the highway. Joining them, Gladys delivered the explanation. “We’re not staying down there alone,” she declared, “watching all those uptown folks eating shrimps and oysters.”

  Vernon took Gladys and Elvis with him to live in Ozark, Alabama, and Pascagoula, Mississippi, but otherwise they stayed home while he went off to do war work. At first, they lived with Frank and Leona Richards and then shared a duplex in East Tupelo with Vester Presley and his wife, Clettes, Gladys’s sister. Their baby daughter, Patsy, was Elvis’s “double first cousin,” not a rare phenomenon in close-knit Southern communities in which brothers and sisters sometimes married brothers and sisters; she would later become Vernon’s loyal and very able secretary at Graceland. When Vernon was doing war work elsewhere, he sometimes came home on weekends, but mostly it was Gladys and Elvis alone again.

  On one occasion, Vernon was very much needed, and he was not there. While he was working in Como, Gladys was brought to the hospital in Tupelo on a stretcher. She was in great pain. Elvis was holding her hand and crying. Gladys, it turned out, was having a miscarriage. She was distressed about the cost. She had only $10 to live on until Vernon returned, she said, and could not pay the hospital bill. Nurse Leona Moore told her not to worry. The county paid in situations such as hers. Still distressed, Gladys asked what would become of Elvis. Again, Nurse Moore said not to worry; she would send for Vernon’s uncle Noah Presley to come and get him.