turning point - that was the real eye-opener, the Colonel said to him. By
the time the show got to Richmond three days later, it was as if Elvis had
never been anything but the Colonel's boy. The whole troupe was staying
at the old Jefferson Hotel, and by happenstance RCA c&w promotion
manager Chick Crumpacker was in Richmond on one of his three-or-fourtimes-
a-year southern swings to meet DJs, distributors, and field reps. Regional
representative Brad McCuen, who had heard Elvis' first record in
Knoxville the previous year and, witnessing the reaction to it, sent it on to
New York with a glowing report, persuaded Crumpacker to go to the
show, and Crumpacker, a sophisticated, serious, and witty Northwestern
School of Music graduate who continued to write classical compositions
but had a healthy respect for "America's folk music," enthusiastically accepted.
Both Crumpacker and McCuen knew the Colonel not only from
his present association with Hank Snow and his former management of
J A N UARY-MAY 1 9 5 5 '" 1 9 1
Eddy Arnold, RCA's two leading country artists, but because each had
briefly accompanied the RCA Country Caravan, which the Colonel had
managed the previous year. Both had had interesting experiences with the
Colonel. In Jacksonville the previous April, in Chick's presence, Parker
had accused publicist Anne Fulchino of "deliberately steering Life and
Look magazine people, whom she had gotten to cover the show, away
from him and his wife Marie, who he bragged were responsible for the
Caravan's success. When I attempted to explain that this wasn't so, he
turned nearly physical and said he would have both our jobs over it."
Brad, who had worked extensively with Snow and Eddy Arnold for a
number of years, had enjoyed a more congenial relationship overall, but
from the opportunity he had had to watch the Colonel in action, he, too,
was fully aware of Parker's mania for control, his need to maintain the
upper hand, and his predilection for unpredictable acts in order to keep
even close friends and associates on their toes. Neither man was entirely
certain of the reception they would get, but, true to form, the Colonel
surprised them by acting as if he couldn't have been more pleased to see
two such old and dear friends.
They were even more surprised by the show they saw that night. Although
Chick had been prepared to some extent by McCuen's description
of the music, and he might have heard one or two of the records himself
in passing, neither one of them had seen the boy perform, and neither was
prepared for either the ferocity of his performance or the reaction to it.
"We were astounded by the reaction," said Chick, "both among the Richmonders
and in ourselves. There were kids in the audience - it was definitely
a noisier audience than I remembered from the Caravan the year
before. And 10 and behold, out comes this guy whose picture we had seen
in the trade papers, and he was something else. All the mannerisms were
more or less in place. The body language - I don't remember exactly
what he sang, but there were frequent belches into the mike, and the
clincher came when he took his chewing gum out and tossed it into the
audience. This, of course, was shocking, it was wild - but what really got
the listeners was his energy and the way he sang the songs. The effect was
galvanic. It was also somewhat embarrassing, because as friends and promoters
of Jimmie Rodgers Snow, we had to watch him be totally
eclipsed. "
The next morning they had breakfast with the Colonel and Hank
Snow. Then to Chick's surprise: "In walks the young star. And the first
1 9 2 '" F O R B I D D E N F R U I T
impression 1 had is the one that will always stick: that he was s o unassuming,
he seemed somewhat withdrawn at first, looked nervously around
the room, but he had this quality - he was very, very smart behind it all,
and he knew how to flatter people. We talked about the show, exchanged
views about the crowd, the turnout, the other artists - he was very affable,
he would say to Brad and me how much he enjoyed being with us; 'I
like you, Chick,' he said. And while this may well have been a ploy, it
worked. We liked him, immensely, from the start."
Chick finished up his trip in Louisville, but not before purchasing all
four of Elvis' Sun records, two copies of each, one to present to RCA's
country and western division head, Steve Sholes. "Throughout that
spring and the early part of that summer 1 did a lot of wishful thinking
with Sholes - maybe we could sign this guy. But as far as 1 know, there
were no rumors at this point that his contract was for sale. There was no
question that the Colonel had his eye on him, though, the Colonel was
definitely taking a proprietary attitude, even if nothing was explicitly said
or voiced."
T A M P A, J U L Y 1 9 5 5. (P O P S I E. C O U R T E S Y OF G E R RIJ F F)
M YSTE R Y TRAI N
B
OB N E A L, manager of Elvis Presley," declared the July 9 issue
of Billboard, "reports that his charge this week begins a fortnight's
vacation before embarking on a busy summer and fall
schedule being arranged by Col. Tom Parker, Jamboree Attractions,
Madison, Tenn."
He had been working steadily, virtually every night, since the show at
Ellis Auditorium on February 6, and in that short time he had come further
than either he or his manager had ever dared hope. He had opened
up new territory, more than held his own with some of the biggest Opry
stars, and attracted the favor of a man who had it in his power, Neal insisted,
to do even more for him than he had already done.
On balance Bob Neal was well satisfied: he had seen bookings pick up,
watched his own and Elvis' material situations dramatically improve, and
redrafted their agreement to last until March 1956, with an option to
renew. He had also witnessed the kind of growth he would never have
taken on faith, an almost exponential progression that had taken place
in the boy himself, not just in his stage manner (which would alone
have been remarkable enough) but in an appetite for change and selfimprovement
that seemed to know no experiential bounds. Not that the
boy would ever be mistaken for an intellectual - and he was far too jittery
to be called introspective. But he soaked up influences like litmus
paper; he was open to new people and new ideas and new experiences in
a way that defied social stereotype. He was serious about his work. Whenever
Neal went by the house, he found him with a stack of records - Ray
Charles and Big Joe Turner and Big Mama Thornton and Arthur "Big
Boy" Crudup - that he studied with all the avidity that other kids
focused on their college exams. He listened over and over, seeming to
hear something that no one else could hear, while able to carry on a perfectly
coherent conversation at the same time on the subject of bookings
or the upcoming Florida tour (what were they going to do in Jacksonville
1 9 5
1 9 b M Y S T E RY T R A I N
for an encore?) or something that Helen needed to know for the fan club,
with Dixie all the while sitting by his side.
Vernon was around most of the time - he didn't seem terribly ambitious
about going out and looking for a job. Bob was a little worried about
that; you could never tell what went on inside a family, and Bob wondered
if there might not be "a little rift" between father and son over the father's
disinclination to work. "But Gladys kept the family together, she was very
down-to-earth, always concerned about his health and well-being, and was
always concerned about those of us around him. He was very aware of the
fact that she did everything she possibly could to help give him a chance,
and he wanted so much to do big things and nice things particularly for his
mother. I remember coming back from a show one night, he was commenting
to Helen, 'Oh, I just want to be big, because I want to do something
for my folks.' He said, 'They're getting old.' I looked at Elvis, and I
said, 'Elvis, how old do you think I am?' And he said, 'Well, I don't
know.'... I was, I think, a year or two older than Vernon."
Elvis was glad to be home while at the same time anxious to be on to
the next step. It had all started to get to him a little toward the end of the
tour. Just one month before, on June 5, on the road between Hope and
Texarkana a wheel bearing caught fire, and he had watched his pretty pink
Cadillac burn up. He had had it for little more than two months, and he was
as proud of it as anything he had ever owned. For a moment, as Scotty and
Bill gave him a hard time and the instruments and clothing sat forlornly by
the side of the road, it was like watching all his dreams go up in flames -
but then there was business to be taken care of, they had to charter a plane
to get to the next show, call Bob, get someone to drive the Crown Victoria
down to meet them in Dallas, move on. Then on July 4 he found himself
playing a picnic with the Blackwood Brothers and the Statesmen Quartet at
gospel promoter W B. Nowlin's All-Day Singing and dinner on the ground
in De Leon, Texas. He showed up in his pink suit, according to James Blackwood,
but whether or not he knew anything in advance about Nowlin's
annual picnic event (it had started seven years earlier with Eddy Arnold and
the Stamps Quartet; in 1950 Hank Williams had been booked with the
Blackwoods), there was something about the scene that brought him up
short: all those families gathered with their kids, eating fried chicken in the
afternoon sunlight under the pecan trees in Hodges Park.
"I ain't gonna sing nothing but gospel music today," he told James in the
J U N E -A U G U S T 1 955 '" 1 9 7
Blackwood Brothers' new bus as they swapped stories and songs, and nothing
that James could say would dissuade him. Onstage it was almost as if he
were spellbound; he didn't respond when people called out for his songs,
"he fell flat on his face," said ]. D. Sumner, the bass singer with the group.
The spell - if that was what it was - was broken later that afternoon
when he played a second show with the whole troupe at an indoor jamboree
in nearby Stephenville that also featured Slim Willett ("Don't Let
the Stars Get in Your Eyes") and then a third in Brownwood that evening.
"It was mighty warm in our ree. hall," reported Stephenville OJ / promoter
Bill Bentley, 'but next year it will be cool, as we have decided to air condition
it."
Even coming home was not like coming home exactly. For one thing,
he was coming home to a new house, the first single-family structure the
Presleys had lived in since moving to Memphis, and even though he had
slept there before, it was never for more than a night or two, he had been
on the road so steadily since they had moved in some two months before. It
was a modest two-bedroom brick bungalow at 2414 Lamar, partway
between Katz Drug Store, where Elvis and Scotty and Bill had created such
a sensation not ten months previously, and the Rainbow skating rink,
where Elvis and Dixie had first met. If you continued east on Lamar, it took
you past the Eagle's Nest and, as Highway 78, all the way to Tupelo. It was
the road on which the Presleys had first arrived in Memphis, and he didn't
know how many times he had traveled it, going in and out of town as a
small child and as a young man, but somehow it seemed different now, he
felt almost like a stranger. For the first couple of days after he got home he
mostly slept.
The next-door neighbors, the Bakers, with three teenagers in the family,
two boys and a girl, waited eagerly for their first real glimpse of the
young scion of the house. The Presleys didn't have a phone of their own for
quite some time - it was difficult to get a new phone installed in those
days - so Mr. and Mrs. Presley were frequent visitors to the Bakers' house
to make calls, and Mrs. Baker had had a memorable encounter with Mrs.
Presley on the night they had moved in. Mr. Presley must still have been
moving things from their old house, because he wasn't there when one of
her cousins burst in on the Bakers and announced that Mrs. Presley had
passed out on the bed. The cousin didn't know if the Presleys had a regular
doctor of their own, so Mrs. Baker called her own doctor, who came out
1 9 8 M Y S T E R Y T R A I N
and pronounced Mrs. Presley a sick woman - Mrs. Baker understood it
was diabetes or a bad heart, something along those lines. Which was
a shame in such a young woman. Since then, while they never became
exactly friends, Mrs. Baker had felt sorry for Mrs. Presley, the nicestmannered
person but a "nervous creature" who seemed to carry such a
burden of sadness that she couldn't stand to even be in the house alone.
The night that Elvis' Cadillac burned up, as the Bakers remembered it,
they got the call, but Mrs. Presley seemed to know what was the matter
even before she picked up the phone. After that she could scarcely bear to
even contemplate the dangers that her son faced out on the road. As
much as she wanted success for him, it was almost as if any satisfaction
she might take in it was gone. One time she invited Mrs. Baker and her
daughter, Sarah, over to the house. "Come here, come here," she said,
and showed them his closet, full of clothes in black and pink. She was so
proud of all his shoes and the suits hanging up, and she talked about her
son in a manner that she talked about nothing else. She convinced Mrs.
Baker that he didn't deserve all the criticism that was being directed at
him, that he wasn't vulgar in his movements, that he didn't mean anything
by it, he just put his whole self into what he did.
Mr. Presley was another story altogether. He was what you might call
a very "dry" man, never offering much in the way of amenities or even
response. Mr. Baker had even started latching the screen door for a while,
because Mr. Presley would walk in without so much as a knock, to use
the phone or borrow something, day or night - he didn't mean anything
by it, he just didn't know any better, they supposed, but Mr. Baker didn't
like it so he put a hook on the door. They watched Vernon in the yard,
working with a brother or brother-in-law occasionally, installing air conditioners
in new cars whenever, it seemed, he felt like it, and they felt
even sorrier for poor Mrs. Presley, but they knew the family was very
dedicated to one another - they were even talking about buying the little
house someday and adding on a room for Mr. Presley's mother, who
stayed with them much of the time.
When he finally got used to being home, Elvis started popping in on
the Bakers to make some calls, and to take some, too, showing a graciousness
and a natural ease that they could never forget. The first time the
two younger kids, Jack and Sarah, saw him, he was on the phone, and he
turned to them and introduced himself, as if they would have no idea who
he was. It was as if, fourteen-year-old Sarah thought, "he was looking up
J U N E-AU G U S T 1 9 55 '" 1 9 9
to you, whoever you were, h e certainly didn't want any o f u s t o treat him
like he was more important than any of us were."
"We'll have to double-date sometime," he said to eighteen-year-old Don
Baker, and though they never did, no one in the family suspected him of
hypocrisy; it was all just part of the "mannerliness" that announced in a contradictory
way (because it denoted such self-assurance) "I am really someone."
When they saw him on the phone, they imagined that he was speaking
to Hollywood, to far-off, distant lands, even though he was probably just talking
to Scotty, his guitarist, or Colonel Parker in Nashville, who called more
and more frequently, it seemed, with details of his upcoming tour. As the
days passed they could hear him playing his records, the rhythm and blues
music that Dewey Phillips played on the air, through the open windows of
the little house on the busy city street on a still, hot summer's day.
T
HERE WAS s o M U C H T O D O in the little time that he had left. Now
that he had a real place of his own, Scotty and Bill came by a few times to
rehearse. They played out on the little screened-in porch, and the kids next
door and their friends sat out on the grass and listened. "What do you want
to hear?" Bill said to them, clowning around, and Elvis favored them with his
dazzling smile, asking if they liked the music. With Bob Neal's help once
again (the title and financing were still in Bob's name) he purchased another
Cadillac, brand-new this time, and at Helen Neal's suggestion had it painted
in his customized colors of pink and black. When he drove it down to Lansky's,
he showed it off proudly to everyone on Beale and then walked up to
Guy Lansky in the store dangling the keys. "He told me to drive it around the
block. He said, 'Mr. Lansky, I want you to tell me what you think of it: He
loved it, and this was the biggest mistake I ever made: here I am heavily in
debt with all this merchandise, and I think, 'If I drive it around the block, if I
wreck this automobile, it's gonna cost me a ton of money.' So I refused him.
And he was really disappointed. He felt bad that I wouldn't drive it: he
couldn't get over it. He loved that automobile, and here I dropped him. I've
felt bad about it ever since." He got a new Martin 0-28 guitar, too, bigger
than the 0-18, with a hand-tooled leather case that muffled the sound a little
but looked almost as sharp as the pink-and-black Cadillac.
Dixie came by the house just as often as she ever had. Young Jack
Baker and his sister spied on them sometimes holding hands in the backyard,
playing with the little white dog that Sarah took care of when the
2 0 0 '" M Y S T E RY T R A I N
Presleys were away. Elvis had just taken Dixie to her junior prom, borrowing
Bob Nears brand-new Lincoln for the occasion and double-dating
with Dixie's best friend, Bessie Wolverton, and his cousin Gene. He
looked handsome in his white tuxedo jacket; she was really proud of him
and proud to be able to show him off to all her friends. She tried to make
friends with some of his new acquaintances, but she found it harder and
harder to fit into his life. She knew Red West, of course - Red had been
with him off and on all winter and spring, and since school had gotten out
he had started accompanying Elvis regularly on tour. When he went off
to college in the fall, she knew, Elvis wanted to get him a car. Red was
nice enough, he was always courteous to her, anyway, but some of the
new guys who had started hanging around just weren't the kind of people
that she and Elvis had ever been drawn to. "They used horrible language,
they all smoked, everybody had a drink - it was a group of people I was
totally uncomfortable with." More and more, it seemed, he wanted to be
with the crowd, they rarely were alone together even in the brief time
that they had; "a lot of times he had to go with the guys and party around,
that sort of thing." She could understand when he went off to play football
with Red at Guthrie Park or down at the Triangle with his old friends,
but sometimes it seemed as if he had been swept up in the turmoil himself
- he came alive only when other people were around and seemed to
crave their attention in a way that neither of them had imagined he ever
would.
They had broken up more than once already. Usually the argument
was about what she was doing while he was away, though really, she suspected,
the shoe should have been on the other foot. He couldn't stand
for her to have any kind of independent existence, even as he was escaping
the very world they had constructed for themselves. What was she
doing? Who was she seeing? Where had she been when he called? She
wasn't going to lie about it. "Of course I had other friends, the same circle
of girlfriends I had always had. I wasn't dating anybody, but we would go
out to a canteen called the Busy Betty on Lamar. They had a jukebox, and
we'd dance. It got to the point where, Look, you're gone three weeks, and
I'm supposed to just sit here every weekend and watch TV? That was the
basis of every argument we ever had. He was very possessive and very
jealous. I think he knew that what he was asking was unreasonable, but
there was nothing he could do about it. It was very dramatic. Several
times I gave him back his class ring, or he took it back. And that would
J U N E- A U G U S T 1 9 5 5 '" 2 0 1
last maybe a day, maybe just that night, sometimes before I would get in
the house he would drive around the block and come back and say,
'Wait,' and we would sit out on the porch and cry about it. Sometimes
my mother would come to the door two or three times and peck on the
glass and say, 'Come in: and I'd say, 'Just a minute.' I thought, you know,
'I can't leave: because we were both so upset and we were going to break
up and we didn't want to break up, because we were still friends. You
know, I probably spent more time with his mom and dad than he did with
them. When he was out of town, I would go over and stay with them, I
spent the night lots of times and slept in his bed while he was gone. Mrs.
Presley and I cooked together and ate, and we'd walk. We'd come uptown
and just browse around. We'd just kind of console each other."
HI S M I N D WAS I N C R E A S I N G L Y on things that hadn't happened
yet - things that Bob Neal and Mr. Phillips had told him would
come about, things that Colonel Parker had promised would come to pass
before too long in ways that he couldn't altogether imagine. He told Dixie
about the Colonel, though she wasn't sure she understood; he talked with
Bob about all the ways in which the Colonel would be able to help them
out; he talked to his parents all the time about this Colonel Parker, who
had done such a great job promoting the last Florida tour. He kept telling
them about Colonel Parker, said Vernon, "talking about [what] a great
man he had met, how smart he was and all of that.... Gladys and I warned
him that we really didn't know anything about this man, and anyway, he
had an agreement with Bob Neal." Bob would be a part of any arrangement
that was made, Elvis assured them. This was something that Bob
couldn't really handle on his own. Bob knew that as well as anyone. Bob
didn't have the connections that Colonel Parker had. The Colonel had
friends in high places. The Colonel had been to Hollywood.
He wanted it as badly as anything he had ever wanted in his life, and
he went about getting it in exactly the same single-minded way, even
though - it was kind of funny - he could no more name what it was
than he could have predicted what was going to happen when he first
walked in the door of the Sun studio. Gladys didn't want to hear any
more about what the Colonel could do for them; she was simply fearful
for her son, while Vernon reacted after a fashion of his own. He was
proud of his boy, to the casual acquaintance he showed all the slow2
0 2 c-., M Y S T E RY T R A I N
witted pride of a man who'd won the lottery, but to those who knew this
handsome, soft-spoken man, withdrawn at times almost to the point of
sullenness, he seemed increasingly unsure of himself, increasingly adrift.
To Dixie both parents were equally affected. "I think a lot of it had to do
with Mr. and Mrs. Presley's resistance to the lifestyle that he was getting
into - they had no control over him anymore. It was a very frustrating
feeling." And yet the father knew what the boy was saying probably made
sense. He liked Bob, he was comfortable with Bob, you could talk to
Bob - and like he told the boy, he didn't know a thing about this Colonel
Parker. But he supposed he was going to have to learn, because the man
never stopped calling and sending telegrams; he obviously didn't worry
about his long-distance bills. And he was beginning to see that what this
Colonel fellow was saying to Elvis was probably true: Memphis wasn't
big enough, Sun Records didn't have the kind of national distribution or
pay the kind of money that the big companies did, he could see that. Marion
Keisker detected what she felt was a very noticeable change in manner
toward Sam. "I got the feeling that Mr. Presley felt that Sun Records
depended on Elvis Presley rather than vice versa. One day he said within
my earshot, 'Well, you know, the studio wouldn't be nothing without my
boy.' I don't think Sam was even there, but I thought, 'Well, that does it.'
The whole picture was changing."
Meanwhile Bob Neal was fielding offers, or at least inquiries, on an
almost weekly basis from nearly every major and independent label with
whom he had any contact. According to Neal, "Sam had let it be known
that he would be interested in talking to them if the money was right,"
and while Neal made it clear that he did not represent the record company
in any way, that he was only an intermediary, most of the offers
came through him. Sam always turned them down or upped the ante in
such a way that he could be confident that he would be turned down. One
time Columbia head Mitch Miller, who had been hyped by Bill Randle,
the Cleveland OJ (Randle had recently handed Miller "The Yellow Rose
of Texas," Columbia's, and Miller's, latest hit), reached Neal on the phone
in a West Texas motel. "He said, 'What do you want?' I said, 'I'll find out:
and I called Sam. As I recall, it was around eighteen thousand dollars that
Sam was asking that day, so I called Mitch back, and he said, 'Oh, forget it,
nobody's worth that much.' " Frank Walker, president of MGM, telegrammed
Sam on June 8 after having heard from Sam's brother Jud that
Elvis' contract was available, and Sam turned down Decca when they
J U N E-AU G U S T 1 9 5 5 '" 203
made an offer that met Jud's price. Capitol, Mercury, Chess, Atlantic,
Randy Wood's Dot label (currently enjoying great success with Wood's latest
discovery, Pat Boone), and RCA all exhibited active interest - there
were rumblings throughout the entire industry.
And while Sam liked to act as if selling Elvis' contract were the furthest
thing from his mind, as though all this was happening solely at the
instigation of strangers, or that Bob Neal was going around without
authorization just shooting off his mouth, Bob knew that Sam was
strapped for cash, that the little record company was stretched to the limit
by its very success, and that Jud was pressing Sam for money (he either
wanted some return on his investment or cash to buy out the minority
interest he had acquired when he helped Sam buy out Jim Bulleit the previous
year). As Marion said, Sam was not a "partner-type person in any
form or fashion," but Bob knew that if Sam wanted to preserve his
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