going to happen, anyway.
They took the band's black Cadillac limo so as to be less conspicuous,
and June paid for the tickets before they dashed inside to watch the picture
from a private viewing room. They hadn't been in the theater twenty
minutes when two policemen came in to get Elvis' car keys. A crowd had
formed outside the theater and was tearing the car apart, scratching
names into the paint, breaking windows, ripping out upholstery, and
denting the fenders. The policemen moved the car, then came back for
Elvis and the two girls, escorting them through an inflamed mob that tore
at their clothes and, for the first time, really frightened June. Elvis didn't
want his parents to know what had happened, so they left the car at
Dewey's and Dewey drove them home. Gladys was surprised to see them
back so early, and the next morning Vernon cut the story out of the
paper - it had Barbara Hearn as his date and the white Cadillac vandalized
- in hopes that Gladys would not learn of the incident.
That afternoon Scotty and Bill and OJ, along with the Jordanaires,
came by for a brief rehearsal for the next Ed Sullivan appearance, which
was coming up on the weekend. After a brief run-through of the four
songs they were going to do on TV, they all sat in a little circle on the
floor singing spirituals, with Gladys beaming on the couch. Every so often
she would join in and softly sing a line, while June, never shy about her
singing, took the alto part on "In the Garden," which had been part of her
high school graduation ceremony. Later that night she and Elvis drove
out to Mud Island, where they had ridden Elvis' motorcycle at what
seemed like 100 miles an hour on her first trip to Memphis.
It was a more contemplative visit this time, sadder somehow; for June
there was a sense of almost ominous foreboding. She didn't doubt that he
3 4 8 L O V E M E T E N D E R
loved her, she knew he was there with her - and yet she didn't know if
she could ever get him back. Elvis told her he had just heard from Nick
and that Nick was coming to town tomorrow or the next day. He started
telling her all about Nick and Nick's friends and Jimmy Dean, but she
didn't want to hear. On their way home they passed a milk truck making
deliveries. Elvis swung around and waited for the milkman to come back
to his truck. He asked the man if he could buy some milk but then found
he had no money. The milkman said that was all right, and Elvis just autographed
an IOU. They drank the cold milk out of the bottle, and Elvis
wiped the milky mustache off his upper lip with the back of his hand, just
like James Dean, June thought, in Rebel Without a Cause.
It was all right when Nick arrived, but it was somehow, and not all
that subtly, different. They drove around town together and talked about
many of the same things, but she felt as if, without even bothering to disguise
it all that much, she and Nick were competing for his attention.
Nick was talking about Natalie all the time - he had even brought a dress
of hers as a kind of souvenir and made a big point of how Natalie really
filled it out. "I wish you could have invited him some other time," June
said to Elvis in a rare moment of privacy, but Elvis insisted that he hadn't
invited Nick, Nick had more or less invited himself. "He's just a lonesome
little guy struggling to make it in Hollywood," Elvis said, with compassion,
of his friend. But Mrs. Presley seemed to sympathize with June. "He
sure is a pushy little fellow," she said; she just wished Elvis could be a little
more careful in his selection of friends.
One night they went down to the radio station to see Dewey and ran
into Cliff Gleaves, a OJ from Jackson, who had met Elvis in passing seven
months before. He had just gotten back into town and was hanging
around the station on the off chance of seeing Elvis again. Afterward they
all went out to Dewey's house, on Perkins, and played pool for a while,
but then the men went off into the den, where a movie projector had
been set up, while Patsy and June stayed in the living room with Mrs.
Phillips. At one point one of the men came out and, with the door momentarily
ajar, June saw flickering images of naked bodies. Furiously she
marched up to the door, knocked, and then flung it open. She stood in
what she called her "Elvis position," her arms folded in front of her, staring
blankly ahead. "What the hell are you doing, June?" Elvis said, leaping
up in acute embarrassment. "I don't want you watching that shit."
"You can watch that shit as long as you want, Elvis," she said, "but
A U G U S T - O C T O B E R I 9 5 6 '" 3 4 9
first you can take m e and Pat home." And ifhe thought she was just being
a prude, she added, "then y'all can kiss my ass."
The night before she was scheduled to return to Biloxi and Elvis was
due to go to New York for the Sullivan show, they all went out to dinner
with some wealthy acquaintances of the older Presleys who wanted to
provide a special occasion for Vernon and Gladys. It seemed like Gladys
was going to fuss with them forever about their manners and their appearance,
but then at dinner Elvis gave June his new temporary tooth
caps to hold, and she started fooling with them so she looked like a vampire,
and soon their hosts were as broken up as they were. "It's about
time you kids relaxed and had some fun," said the husband approvingly,
as Gladys laughed until the tears ran down from her eyes. Afterward they
went to a private screening of a rough cut of Love Me Tender. Everyone
thought it was wonderful except for Elvis. When June tried to tell him
how good he was, he made it clear that he did not want to be just "good."
"Quit being so damn hard on yourself, man," Nick muttered, "and give it
some time." He had been working for years, he said, to try to get to the
point where Elvis was now. "You've proved yourself as an actor, man.
Don't worry about it." Elvis took Nick's remarks as highly complimentary,
but June put them down more to jealousy.
In the end he wanted her to fly up to New York with him, and if she
wouldn't do that, why couldn't she just stay here in Memphis with his
parents? He would be back in a few days, and Natalie was going to come
visit next week: he wanted her to meet Natalie. Wait a minute, Nick protested,
if June was going to stay, he would just call Natalie and tell her to
come some other time - there wasn't enough room in the house for everyone.
"Don't worry, Nick, I'm not staying," June announced, leaving
the room. When Elvis followed her, she told him she wanted to go home,
and she wasn't interested in meeting Natalie anyway. "Baby, I didn't invite
Natalie," Elvis protested, it was Nick who had invited Natalie, and he
could just as easily uninvite her.
It was a sour note on which to end the week, and when she got back
to Biloxi and went to have her picture taken for the studio portrait that
she had promised Elvis, she told the photographer she thought she
wanted something really different. They talked about it for a while and
finally decided on a picture the photographer had never taken before: the
subject in tears. The photograph won second prize in an exhibit sometime
later.
W I T H N A T A L I E W O O D O U T S I D E T H E H O T E L C H I S C A, O C T O B E R 3 1, 1 9 5 6.
(R O B E R T W I L L I A M S)
THE TOAST O F THE TOWN
I
T W A S A R E L A X E D, confident, and very much at ease Elvis Presley
who made his second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, still popularly
known as the Toast of the Town, on the evening of Sunday, October
28. Gone were the explosive nervous energy, the involuntary
mannerisms, that had dominated his television appearances of just a few
months before; even the self-abashed, somewhat shambling manner of his
Sullivan debut had been replaced by a good-natured, almost studied and
bemused playfulness, a kind of good-humored recognition of common
cause both with his audience and that of his host. When he appeared following
Sullivan's characteristically stiff, almost wooden introduction, his
hair high and a pleased, slightly embarrassed look on his face, it was as if
for the first time he really took it all as his due - there appeared to be no
rage hiding behind the mask, there was no caged tiger desperate to get
out, he acknowledged the response with the deferential distraction of the
grand seigneur. He was a recording star, he was a movie star, he was a
servant of the Lord and the master of his own destiny; for one brief moment
there was not even a hint of imposture in his mind.
He had spent the day primarily fulfilling professional responsibilities
and doing good works. After a couple of nights on the town with Nick,
Dewey, his cousin Gene, and his new friend, Cliff Gleaves, all of whom he
had invited to come up to New York at his expense, he reported for rehearsal
at noon, while the Colonel handed out "Elvis for President" buttons
at the unveiling of a forty-foot "statue" of the new Hollywood star
above the marquee of the Paramount Theatre in Times Square, where
Love Me Tender would premiere in a little more than two weeks. "The idol
of the rock 'n' roll juveniles also surprised an afternoon press interview by
demonstrating to adult reporters that he is a polite, personable, quickwitted
and charming young man," reported the New York Times. "Teenagers
are my life and triumph," he declared to the assembled reporters.
''I'd be nowhere without them." He wished he could sit down with some
3 5 I
3 5 2 c-., T H E T O A S T O F T H E T O W N
o f those parents who saw him as a bad influence, "because I think I
could change their minds and their viewpoint. Ever since I got to be a
sort of name I've examined my conscience and asked myself if I led anybody
astray even indirectly, and I'm at peace with my conscience."
Somebody asked him if it wasn't teenagers that had recently ripped his
car apart. "That means nothing to me, sir. That's a car and I've got other
cars, but the idea of doing to others what you'd like them to do to you is
what's in my craw. It's in the Bible.... I read my Bible, sir, and this is
no story just made up for now. My Bible tells me that what he sows he
will also reap, and if I'm sowing evil and wickedness it will catch up with
me. I'm right sure of that, sir, and I don't think I'm bad for people. If I
did think I was bad for people, I would go back to driving a truck, and I
really mean this. "
A t the end o f the afternoon, i n a public ceremony just a s extensively
covered by the media, he received an inoculation of the newly developed
Salk polio vaccine. He was doing so, he said in a public service announcement
he recorded for the March of Dimes, because "so many kids and
adults, too, have gotten just about one of the roughest breaks that can
happen to a person.... We can help these people. And the way to do it is
this: join the 1957 March of Dimes." "Halo, Everybody, Halo: Latest Presley
Pitch" had been the headline for a recent Variety story, which suggested
somewhat cynically an "institutional build-up to re-create the rock
'n' roller into an influence for the good" - but that was really missing the
point: Elvis didn't need an institutional push, this was what he believed
was truly intended for him, this was the real function of fame.
The streets that night were so crowded you could barely get to the
studio. There were policemen on horseback, and thousands of fans clamoring
to get past the barricades, but Elvis insisted on signing autographs
anyway, to the acute discomfiture of his traveling companions. Mr. Sullivan
complimented the youngsters in the audience on their comportment;
he had asked them not to yell during the songs themselves, he said,
and they had kept their promise. A number of the reviews suggested that
Elvis had been pressured to tone down his act, that either he or the cameras
had been urged to restrain his body movements, but there is no evidence
of that: mainly what you see is great good humor, a manner that
exudes utter confidence, and a sense of vast amusement both at himself
and, lovingly, his audience. Over and over again he stops in the midst of a
practiced gesture and shrugs his shoulders, audibly exhales, rolls his eyes,
O C T O B E R-N O V E M B ER 1 9 5 6 '" 353
freezes -just waiting for the wave that has been momentarily stilled to
roll back over him. His eyes twinkle; he smiles and then catches himself
and sneers (but affably); he listens to Mr. Sullivan say that Elvis will return
for his second appearance on the show in just a couple of minutes
and he impishly demurs, then after a brief colloquy agrees that yes, he'll
be back. At the conclusion of his third and final segment, he announces
the scheduled opening of his new picture and his next appearance on The
Ed Sullivan Show in January. "And, uh, and uh," he says, momentarily
stuck, then recovers with a sincere "Until we meet you again, may God
bless you as he has blessed me."
The ratings were not quite as spectacular as they had been for the first
show, but Sullivan still beat the principal competition (Mary Martin and
Paul Douglas in a special television production of the play Born Yesterday)
by a margin of two to one and gained an overall 34.6 (57 percent share)
Trendex rating.
Elvis shot a new ending for the film the following day at the Junco
Studio on East Sixty-ninth Street. Pressure had been building ever since it
had been announced he would perish in his first screen role, and there had
been pickets all week in front of the Paramount Theatre with suspiciously
uniform printed signs that pleaded, "Don't Die! Elvis Presley." Whether
prodded by public pressure or perhaps just acceding to the publicity value
of the occasion, the studio had acknowledged the protest and flown in director
Robert Webb, cameraman Leo Tover, and a crew of technicians. It
was going to be a simple shot of the image of Elvis Presley superimposed
over the dying Clint Reno and singing the title song of the film as the
character expires. There was no need even to change his shoes, and he
played the scene in the white bucks he had worn on the television show
the night before.
On the next day the new RCA contract which the Colonel had been
negotiating for the last couple of months was announced: royalty payments
were to be spread out in such a way that Elvis would be guaranteed
SI,OOO a week for the next twenty years. He had at this point sold well
over ten million singles for RCA (this would compute to a record royalty
of roughly S450,000), which represented approximately two thirds of
RCA's singles business. In fact, Variety had declared him a millionaire just
the previous week on the basis of their unofficial computations of record
royalties, movie income (S250,000, figuring in the new movie that was
coming up in a couple of months), song publishing, TV appearances, and
354 T H E T O A S T O F T H E T OWN
personals. It was a situation virtually unprecedented in the record business,
rivaling anything that had ever been seen in the larger world of show business,
and it didn't even take into account merchandising.
Just three short months before, the Colonel had entered into a deal
with a thirty-seven-year-old merchandiser from California named Hank
Saperstein for the exclusive right to exploit and commercially promote the
Elvis Presley image. Saperstein, who had offices in Beverly Hills, had been
in the business for seventeen years and had previously conducted highly
successful campaigns for Super Circus, Ding Dong School, Lassie, the Lone
Ranger, and Wyatt Earp, but, as Variety noted, this was the first all-out merchandising
campaign in memory aimed at teens, not "moppets." By the
time that The Reno Brothers started shooting, Saperstein's campaign was
fully operational, with something like eighteen licensees and twenty-nine
products, many of which (belts, scarves, skirts, jeans, lipstick, lockets,
charm bracelets, publications, and western ties) were laid out on the hood
of Saperstein's car in a publicity shot taken on the movie set. By the end of
October the program was really getting into gear, with thirty licenses and
fifty products to be marketed through Sears, Montgomery Ward, W T.
Grant's, and Woolworth's, among others, and Variety was endorsing Saperstein's
prediction of $40 million in retail sales over the next fifteen months.
This would come to SI8 million wholesale, which at the customary 5 percent
licenser's royalty would mean S900,000, to be split between Saperstein
and Elvis Presley Enterprises equally.
In the offing were hound dogs and houndburgers, and Saperstein,
clearly a realistic man, who advertised "promotion in depth," foresaw at
least a two-year life to the market. It was just the kind of deal the Colonel
loved, and one he knew how to exploit the hell out of both for himself and
his boy. In a Look magazine article about the Elvis Presley phenomenon,
the author, Chester Morrison, quoted the title song of the movie and then
remarked:
There are two grown men who love him true and tender and hope
that they will never have to let him go. They are the two who operate
the Great Elvis Presley industry, and, Lord, how the money rolls
in!... Hank Saperstein and Tom Parker are a great pair. They are sardonically
gay, as Fred Allen used to be. The Colonel sometimes drops
absent-minded ashes from his good cigar onto the folds of his plumpness.
Hank is younger, handsomer, taller and he doesn't sag anyO
C T O B E R-N O V E M B E R 1 9 5 6 3 5 5
where. Both of them have a reverence for money and work hard for
it. But both of them give the impression that if they didn't get any fun
out of making money, the hell with it.
The Colonel was a former carnival man, Morrison noted, who "is happy,
but he is certainly not unsophisticated, and he has seen the Tattooed
Lady. He genuinely loves those people who come to the carnival, because
every last one of them buys a ticket. He is writing an autobiography that
should find a place in every home. He calls it The Benevolent Con Man, but
his alternate and better title is How Much Does It Cost If It's Freer"
NA T A L I E A R R I V E D for her Memphis visit on Halloween night. Elvis
and Nick picked her up at the airport and showed her the sights,
then took her back to the house, where Elvis promised the fans they
would come out again in half an hour to talk and sign autographs. After
supper they drove around town some more, got ice cream cones, and
ended up at the Chisca, where they went up to the "magazine floor" (the
mezzanine, in other words) to see Dewey. By the time they came out,
hundreds of fans had collected in the street, and they were barely able to
recapture the white Lincoln.
The next day Elvis bought himself a new motorcycle, and that night
they went for a long ride, with Natalie clinging to Elvis and Nick "chugging
along behind," the newspapers reported, on Elvis' old Harley. In the
next few days Elvis took Natalie on the standard tour: she met his family,
she met his friend George Klein, they drove by Humes, they went out to
the Fairgrounds and stopped by Sun, he introduced her to a few of his policemen
friends, they even stopped in to see Bob Neal at the new Stars
Inc. management firm he had set up in partnership with Mr. Phillips. To
Natalie, who was accustomed to celebrity, it was both an eye-opening,
and a somewhat numbing, experience. It was, she told a reporter some
years later, "like a circus come to town the minute I got off the plane. A
mob of people stood outside his house night and day. Someone sold hot
dogs and ice cream from a wagon.... When we went out on Elvis' motorcycle,
we had an instant motorcade behind us. I felt like I was leading
the Rose Bowl parade." Elvis was sweet, she told friends and reporters
alike, but, she suggested, maybe there was such a thing as being too
sweet. According to her sister, Lana, she called home in the middle of her
356 '" T H E T O A S T O F T H E T O W N
visit and begged her mother t o get her out o f this. "He can sing," Natalie
confided to Lana afterward, as recorded in Lana's memoir, "but he can't
do much else." On Saturday Nick and Natalie headed back to Hollywood,
after a visit on Natalie's part of only four days.
For Elvis, though, it was good just to have some time to himself. Colonel
thought it would be something like two months before they started
work on the new picture, and with Love Me Tender scheduled to open in
ten days, on November 15 in New York, and the day before Thanksgiving
in Memphis and everywhere else, he was perfectly happy to be able to
concentrate on more mundane matters, like the Beginner Driver Range,
"the nation's first police-sponsored behind-the-wheel driving school,"
whose opening Elvis attended on Monday, November 5, as a past finalist
in the annual Road-E-O safe-driving contest for teenagers four years
before. " 'If there is anything I can do to set an example, I want to do it:
Presley said to the new class of 31 students, mostly teenagers. No one
shrieked or swooned," reported the Press-Scimitar. "They did look serious
and determined.... It was a community project, designed to make Memphis
a safer place to live."
Meanwhile, Cliff Gleaves was back in town after his fantasy trip to
New York, a tale so improbable that even Cliff, who was accustomed to
putting an optimistic spin on the truth, with his OJ's wit, comedian's flair,
and philosopher's penchant for positive thinking, was having a difficult
time believing it. When he got back, he couldn't seem to run into Elvis
again, though, let alone find the opportunity to thank him. He went by
the Chisca on a number of occasions, but he never saw him there. He
missed him the whole time that Natalie was in town. He started showing
up at WMC every afternoon, just as George Klein was finishing his shift as
host of Rock 'N' Roll Ballroom, and dropped broad hints to George about
getting together with Elvis sometime. But while George sprang for dinner
almost every night, he never picked up on the hints.
There was another guy, a big fat jolly young fellow named Lamar
Fike, who had started hanging around George lately, too, and was interested
in getting into radio. He drove a brand-new '56 Chevy, talked like he
knew everything about everything, and was desperate to meet Elvis. Cliff
was on the verge of telling him to get lost when Lamar happened to flash
his billfold, and Cliff, always quick on his feet, said, "Yeah, man, I guess
you can come to dinner with us." After that he let Lamar bug them for
radio pointers on a regular, paying basis, which didn't get either one of
O C T O B ER-N O V E M B E R 1 95 6 '" 3 5 7
them any closer t o Elvis, and Cliff finally came t o the conclusion that if
this thing was going to happen, it was just going to have to happen on its
own. He was nearly at the point of giving up hope, and his room at the
YMCA, when he finally ran into Elvis again, and this time turned out to
be the charm.
He was on his way to the Chisca on a Monday night, ostensibly to see
Dewey, when he saw a pink Cadillac coming toward him on Union.
"Hey, Cliff, follow me," Elvis said, leaning out the window and leading
him to Madison Cadillac, just a few blocks away.
"At that point my life changed. At that point I made a lBo-degree tum
with old Elvis. Understand: we pull in. He says, 'I got this car for my
mother, and she doesn't have a license, and I don't want to touch it anymore,
but I like to keep it tuned. I just bought an EI Dorado, but they still
got the masking tape on it, and I want to know if you'll do me a favor.' I
said, 'Elvis, are you serious?' I had already thanked him for the weekend,
and he just said, 'If you can't have fun, what is it? If enjoyment is not in
there, what is it worth?'
"He said, 'Cliff, can you take me a couple of places?' Well, no sense in
going into the petty details, but about five-thirty he says, 'Cliff, I'd like to
invite you home to meet my parents. I'd like you to have dinner with us.'
Boom! 1 said, 'Great! ' and we drive out to Audubon Drive, where he
lived. After dinner he said, 'Cliff, you know Red West?' I said, 'No, I
don't.' He said, 'He was with me, and he joined the Marine Corps.' He
said, 'I'm alone now.' He said, 'I like you, my mama and daddy like
you' - you see, dinner is over, and we're in the living room now. 'I'm
alone now, and I'd really like for you to be with me. When I invited you
to New York, I really wasn't thinking that way.' I said, 'Elvis, I'll tell you
what. I have obligations here and there.' I said, 'To do that, you know the
obligation factor, 1 really can't take that offer. I have to be a free agent,
free spirit, I can't be obligated. But as a fiiend - that's a different ball
game.'
"He said, 'You mean the only thing stopping you from joining me is
that?' 1 said, 'That's about it.' He said, 'Cliff, let's go get your clothes.'
That night I moved into my bedroom on Audubon Drive. Elvis' bedroom
is down at the end, down the hallway is what they call Natalie's room,
because that's where Natalie Wood stayed when she was there, and Elvis'
mother and father are at the other end of the house. Three bedrooms,
two baths - no problem. I moved in bag and baggage. His mother said,
3 5 8 n.. T H E T O A S T O F T H E T O W N
'That was Natalie's room, now it's yours.' From that point on, h e always
wanted me there."
Cliff found life with the Presleys utterly beguiling. Elvis, as he saw it,
was "an innocent. He didn't know about the tricks, the 'worldly ways'; he
operated on sheer instinct. Never was there any arrogance - he was simply
not going to let people trying to get to him be denied. He did not have
the 'informal schooling' of being out in the world too long. He wasn't out
there just a little bit when he walked into Sun Records: only thing he
knew was his parents' home to Sun to making money to fame. He had no
introduction to the world." His parents? "Vernon was not an innocent,
'cause he'd been burned. Vernon was finely tuned to the world, a dollar
was a dollar to Vernon, a quarter is a quarter. One night at dinner Elvis
said, 'Daddy's a hard man, but you can't blame him. You got to know
what happened to him.' Then they explained it all. Vernon said, 'Hey,
Cliff, I offered to work as long as the man would let me work it off- but
he refused.' He said, 'Cliff, that was hard.' "
Gladys, on the other hand, was simply proud of her boy - no more,
and no less, than when he had won the singing prize at the fair. "It wasn't
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