"Oh yes, that's where all the hillbilly singers come from, isn't it?"
"Maybe so, but I'm no hillbilly singer."
"Well, have you typed yourself, I mean your type of singing?"
"No, I don't dare."
"Why?"
"Cause I'm scared, know what I mean, honey? Real scared."
"What of?"
"I don't know... I don't know. Know what I mean, honey?"
At this point I thanked him for his time and started to make a beeline
for the door. He grabbed my hand, sat there looking sleepy-eyed
into my face and fanned his long lashes while he said:
"Write me up good, will you, honey?"
On Saturday night, April 21, they played two shows at the City Auditorium
in Houston. At the end of the first show, when the crowd wouldn't
leave, Elvis left the predominantly female audience with the thought that
270 '" T H E W O R L D T U R N E D U P S I D E DOWN
"it's been a wonderful show, folks. Just remember this. Don't go milking
the cow on a rainy day. If there's lightning, you may be left holding the
bag." As the Houston Chronicle reported, "Four thousand females just died."
After the show, with the first open date in weeks in front of them. Scotty
and Elvis and Bill headed for the Club EI Dorado across town, where blues
singer Lowell Fulson was headlining. Fulson, who had had a big hit the previous
year with "Reconsider Baby," was a regular at the Club Handy and
the Hippodrome in Memphis and a big favorite of Dewey Phillips'. During
the break Scotty introduced himself and Elvis, and Fulson called them up
onstage for a couple of numbers during the next set. For Scotty it was a
highly memorable experience. "I remember me and Lowell standing up toe
to toe, getting down on some blues." One of those, recalled Lowell, was
BigJoe Turner's "Shake, Rattle and Roll." "I don't know what the other one
was. Anyway, Elvis sounded good. and the house accepted it, so he [Scotty]
said, 'What do you think of him, what do you think of the boy?' 1 said,
'Well, one thing, he's a pretty boy, and the women will make him. He won't
have to work too hard.' He got a big bang out of that. He laughed for a
good while."
On the next day, a Sunday, they boarded a flight to Las Vegas.
TH E L A S V E G A S B O O KI N G appears to have come about as something
of a last-minute arrangement, since there were no advance notices in
the trades. Elvis was booked in for the first two weeks of a four-week
Freddy Martin engagement in the thousand-seat Venus Room, at the New
Frontier Hotel, at $7,500 a week, which the Colonel was said to have
demanded in cash because, as he told Time magazine, "no check is good.
They got an atom-bomb testing place out there in the desert. What if some
feller pressed the wrong button?" Bill Randle, the Cleveland OJ who had
remained in the picture up to this time (Steve Sholes pointed out to the
Colonel in March what a great job Randle was doing for them, to which the
Colonel responded somewhat acerbically that he had eyes of his own),
occasionally claimed credit for setting up the contract, and he may well
have had a hand in it, but the Colonel had his own contacts, and even with
so little lead time the Colonel left nothing to chance. When Elvis arrived in
Las Vegas, there was a twenty-four-foot-high cutout of Elvis Presley standing
out in front of the hotel beside the casino entrance - it was the same
MARC H-MAY 1 9 5 6 2 7 1
action photograph, taken in Florida in the summer of 1955, that graced the
cover not only of his first album but of the song folio and any number of
additional publicity items. His name was up on the marquee, just below
comedian Shecky Greene's, as "Extra Added Attraction Elvis Presley," and
in the print ads as "The Atomic Powered Singer."
It was the first sit-down gig of his career. As fellow promoter Gabe
Tucker wrote, even the Colonel appeared to be taken in by this newfound
elevation in status, which followed statements to his colleagues that he
needed to find a whole new kind of venue for his act suitable to Elvis' phenomenal
success. Bandleader Freddy Martin, who specialized in pop arrangements
of the classics (he started with Tchaikovsky but branched out to Grieg,
Rimsky-Korsakov, movie themes, and Khachaturian as well), had been enjoying
hits consistently since 1933 and featured a $40,000 floor show, including
a seventeen-piece orchestra, twenty-eight singers, twin pianos, dancers, ice
skaters, and selections from Oklahoma! On opening night, New Frontier vice
president T. W Richardson, who according to Gabe Tucker had first heard
Elvis in his hometown of Biloxi and contacted the Colonel about the booking
the month before, invited a bunch of friends up from Houston to catch
the show. Elvis was the closing act, and as the Freddy Martin Orchestra
played their arrangement of "Rock Around the Clock," the curtain rose to
reveal a very nervous, very out-of-place hillbilly quartet. Scotty and OJ. and
Bill were all wearing light-colored sports jackets, dress pants, bow ties, and
white shirts, while Elvis was dressed neatly in loafers, dress pants, and black
bow tie, with a light-colored, western-cut checked sports jacket with a darkcowled
collar. From the opening notes of the song that he introduced as
"Heartburn Motel" to his stammered attempts to thank Freddy Martin for
the nice introduction, you could hear a pin drop. When Elvis started singing,
Tucker related, one of Richardson's guests "jumped up from their ringside
table and shouted, 'Goddamn it, shit! What is all this yelling and screaming? I
can't take this, let's go to the tables and gamble.' "
"For the first time in months we could hear ourselves when we played
out of tune," said Bill Black plaintively. 'l\fter the show our nerves were
pretty frayed, and we would get together in pairs and talk about whoever
wasn't around to defend himself." "They weren't my kind of audience,"
said Elvis. "It was strictly an adult audience. The first night especially
I was absolutely scared stiff [but] afterwards I got a little more relaxed
and I finally got 'em on my side." "We didn't even know we were failures,"
272 '" T H E W O R L D T U R N E D U P S I D E D O W N
said Scotty, but after that night, reported Billboard, they no longer closed
the show.
Nonetheless he persisted. He played out the full two weeks, and as
hometown reporter Bob Johnson wrote, "Elvis, who has played hard
audiences before, kept right in there busting guitar strings and shaking his
legs and the rafters.... And the ice began to break." Bill Randle, who
viewed the engagement almost as a social "embarrassment," had arranged
to have some of the performances filmed, and Hal Wallis showed
up to check out his investment. Judy Spreckels, the attractive twenty-fouryear-
old divorced sixth wife of sugar king Adolph Spreckels II, whom
Elvis had met briefly in California, showed up and served as his "secretary"
and aide-de-camp. Curiosity-seeking celebrities like Ray Bolger, Phil
Silvers, and Liberace were prominent in the audience, and there is even a
film of Elvis and Liberace clowning it up for the cameras. Liberace, one of
his mother's favorite performers (Elvis made sure to get the flamboyant
showman's autograph), is pretending to play Scotty's guitar, while Elvis
flings himself into it, throwing his head back and laughing easily as he
sings, perhaps, "Blue Suede Shoes." Not about to be upstaged, Liberace
draws a square in the air, pointing at his brother George. It is, in many
ways, a picture of perfect innocence.
They played what Elvis calculated to be twenty-eight twelve-minute
shows (two shows a night, at 8:00 and midnight, for fourteen nights), and
the rest of the time he was free to do as he liked. He and his cousin Gene,
whom he described as his "utility man" and who had replaced Red on this
tour, rode the Dodgem cars at the local amusement park almost every
day, and in two weeks Elvis estimated that he spent more than a hundred
dollars on rides for himself and his friends. He lounged around at poolside,
flirted with the girls, went to the movies, caught as many acts as he
could, stayed up all night long, and if he felt any doubts he kept them to
himself. "One thing about Las Vegas pleased Elvis," wrote Johnson, who
went out to report on the event, "it never goes to sleep. He had company
during those long night hours, and night had become like day to him." It
was like being in a city where you played dress-up all the time. Every time
he entered a room he created a stir, the showgirls fawned on him, you
never knew what was going to happen next. But he didn't drink, he didn't
gamble CIt don't appeal to me," he said, explaining why he "never
dropped a nickel in a slot machine"); whatever he was doing, whether it
was what his mother had raised him to do or not, he wasn't hurting anyM
A R C H-MAY 1 9 5 6 '" 273
body. One time he missed an appointment with United Press reporter
Aline Mosby because he was at the movies, a Randolph Scott western, but
he made it up to her. He saw the Four Lads again and met former teen
sensation Johnny Ray for the first time (both were discoveries of Bill Randle's;
Elvis had met the Four Lads at the Cleveland show that Randle had
filmed). He caught a little bit of Liberace's show at the Riviera, and he
went back again and again to catch the lounge act at the Sands, Freddie
Bell and the Bellboys.
The Bellboys, a highly visual act who provided both action and comic
relief, had had a minor hit the previous year with a song that had been a
huge rhythm and blues success for Duke/Peacock artist Big Mama Thornton
in 1953. "Hound Dog" had been written by two white teenagers, Jerry
Leiber and Mike Stoller, who specialized in rhythm and blues, and was a
very odd choice for a male performer, since it was written from a female
point of view. Nonetheless, it was the showstopper of Bell's act, even retaining
some of the original's rhumba-flavored beat, and it sparked a determination
on Elvis' part to incorporate it into his own show. "We stole
it straight from them," said Scotty. "He already knew it, knew the song,
but when we seen those guys do it, he said, 'There's a natural.' We never
did it in Las Vegas, but we were just looking on it as comic relief, if you
will, just another number to do onstage."
On the first Saturday of the engagement the New Frontier scheduled a
teenage matinee especially for Elvis Presley fans. Proceeds from the show
were to go toward lights for a youth baseball park, and finally there was
some semblance of Elvis Presley normality. "The carnage was terrific,"
wrote Bob Johnson in a story that was headlined "The Golden Boy
Reaches for a Star While the Music Goes Round and Round and -":
"They pushed and shoved to get into the IOoo-seat room, and several hundred
thwarted youngsters buzzed like angry hornets outside. After the
show, bedlam! A laughing, shouting, idolatrous mob swarmed him....
They got his shirt, and it was shredded. A triumphant girl seized a button,
clutched it as tho it were a diamond."
They played out the rest of the engagement with increasing confidence.
Mr. Martin was more respectful, even ifhe retained a little bit of a
tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the whole thing. "We should have five
minutes' silence now," he announced after Elvis' act. "Makes me wonder
if I've been wasting my time for the last twenty years." One of the
casino owners, Mr. Frank Williams of Osceola, Arkansas, gave him an
274 c.., T H E W O R L D T U R N E D U P S I D E D O W N
eight-hundred-dollar watch with diamonds for the numbers, and Elvis
reciprocated with half a dozen letters of thanks. Even the Colonel, who
was initially discomfited by what amounted to the first misstep in a series
of otherwise perfectly calculated moves, seemed finally to have come to
terms with the value of the experience. In Scotty's view, "I think in one
sense it was good, because it was completely different. That's what's
funny about Vegas. People that were there, if you'd lifted them out and
taken them over to San Antonio, the big coliseum, they'd have been
going crazy. It's just a different atmosphere. But we had a ball out there.
We really did."
On the last night, which was recorded by a member of the audience
and released by RCA twenty-five years later, Elvis still sounds nervous,
self-conscious, glad to be done with it all - but aware that he has carried
it off. "Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen," he says as the polite
applause dies down. "I would like to tell you, it's really been a pleasure
being in Las Vegas. This makes our second week here, and tonight's our
last night, and we've had a pretty hard time - stay... ah, had a pretty
good time while we were here." He introduces "Blue Suede Shoes" by
saying, "This song here is called, 'Get out of the stables, Grandma, you're
too old to be horsing around: " and when that doesn't get much of a
laugh he turns to the orchestra leader and says, "Do you know that song,
Mr. Martin? You do? You know that one about 'Take back my golden garter,
my leg is turning green'?" When Martin calls him back graciously for
an encore, he says, "Thank you, friends, I was coming back anyway."
"Like a jug of com liquor at a champagne party," declared Newsweek.
"Elvis Presley, coming in on a wing of advance hoopla, doesn't hit the
mark here," reported Variety. Life headlined its April 30 story "A Howling
Hillbilly Success." Any publicity, said the Colonel, was good publicity.
"Heartbreak Hotel" was at number one; "I Want You, I Need You, I
Love You" had just been released to advance sales of 300,000; RCA Victor
reported that Elvis Presley's records accounted for half of their pop sales;
and he was going home to the new house he had been able to purchase
with his earnings for himself and his parents. They could write whatever
they liked, there was no stopping him now. He really believed that.
He was back in Memphis two days later and stopped by the newspaper
office on Tuesday night. "Man, I really like Vegas," he announced.
'Tm going back there the first chance I get." He was nettled at a report
that a Halifax radio station had given all of its Elvis Presley records away
M A R C H-MAY 1 9 5 6 ", 275
in hopes that it would hear no more. "I didn't know that there were any
radio stations in Nova Scotia" was his first reaction, reported the newspaper.
"The more they try to ban the stuff, man, the more they'll have to
listen to. I mean, man, a lot of people like it, man, it's really hot right
now." Then he reminisced about his start in the business just two short
years ago. "I was strumming the guitar in Mississippi before I ever came
to Memphis," he said. "My father bought one for $12 - it was the best
investment he ever made." And then he was off into the night in his
"Kelly green frontiersman shirt, black trousers and doeskin loafers,"
whether on his Harley motorcycle, one of his three Cadillacs, or the
three-wheeled German Messerschmidt he had recently purchased, the
paper didn't report. He was going to be headlining the big Cotton Carnival
bill at Ellis Auditorium one week from tonight, and he had gigs
booked in Minnesota and Wisconsin starting on the weekend, but for
now he was just going to ride around town.
R U S S W O O D P A R K. J U L Y 4. I 9 5 6. (R O B E R T W I L L I A M S)
IIT H O S E P E OP L E I N N EW YO RK ARE
NOT G O N N A C H AN G E M E N O N E "
FO R H I S M A Y 1 5 A P P E A R A N C E on opening night of Memphis'
twenty-second annual Cotton Carnival, in which a king and queen
were crowned and a midway set up on Front Street, both sides of
Ellis Auditorium were opened up for a performance for the first
time since Liberace had played the hall. The show was scheduled to begin
as close to 7:30 as possible but had to await the landing of the Royal Barge
at the foot of Monroe, where the reigning monarchs were to take part in
opening ceremonies before traveling to the nearby auditorium to signal
the start of the show. Bob Neal was master of ceremonies, and Hank
Snow and the Jordanaires were featured, while Eddie Fisher appeared on
the Royal Barge and the Carter Sisters, George Morgan, and a host of
other country stars were headlining an all-star event at the festival tent on
the midway. There was little question, though, that the hometown boy
was the focus of this "new and open-to-the-public feature of the Carnival
season [that] helps add excitement to its opening night." Country comedian
Minnie Pearl flew in for the occasion at the urging of her husband,
Henry Cannon, a charter pilot who had recently been flying Elvis all
around the country and who had flown him in from La Crosse, Wisconsin,
early that morning. "Henry introduced me to him, and he was such a
nice man. 1 always kidded him that he treated me like an old-maid schoolteacher,
he was so overly polite - but he always was."
For Elvis, though, this homecoming was a chance to prove himself.
" 'More than anything else: " he had told the Press-Scimitar's Bob Johnson
earnestly in Las Vegas just two weeks before, " 'I want the folks back
home to think right of me. Just because 1 managed to do a little something,
1 don't want anyone back home to think 1 got the big head.' He
wants almost desperately," added Johnson, perhaps not really needing to,
"to be thought well of at home."
He arrived accompanied by a police escort to find the usual waiting
throng in front of the auditorium. One girl said, "I grabbed his hand, and
278 <'61 "THOS E PEOPLE IN NEW YORK... "
he grinned and he said, 'Cut me loose: so I cut him loose. It was heavenly."
Vernon and Gladys were already present, seated in a box above the
stage on the north side of the hall, eagerly anticipating their first opportunity
in some months to see their son perform. In his role as MC Bob Neal
whipped up the crowd with sly references to Elvis' upcoming appearance,
and one time he even put the spotlight on Elvis' mother and dad, who
smiled nervously and took a polite bow. The other acts had a good deal of
trouble trying to figure out how to deal with both sides of the auditorium
at once, a problem that Hank Snow solved to no one's satisfaction by
singing one song to one side, the next to the other. When Elvis came
bounding out, however, in black pants, white shirt, and kelly green jacket,
he seemed to give the matter no thought at all but, in the words of one
thirteen-year-old spectator, simply "staggered all over the stage. Up until
he came out I remember thinking, this is a lousy show," recalled Fred
Davis, an eighth-grade student at Messick High School where Elvis,
Scotty, and Bill had appeared as part of Sonny Neal's student council campaign
the previous year. "Then I'd seen him at Ellis with Carl Perkins in
November, and he was all over the stage, riding Bill's bass, popping three
or four strings, but there was no climax, it didn't seem really practiced,
there were just a few screams. This time it was solid noise from start to
finish, there were girls in hysterics, I never heard a word he said. No one
rushed the stage, no one stood in the aisle, but the flashbulbs were going
from start to finish, and I just remember thinking, 'What have I seen?!' "
He opened with "Heartbreak Motel," introduced "Long Tall Sally" as
a song by a friend of his whom he had never met (Little Richard), brought
the Jordanaires out for "I Was the One," called out to Scotty to "go wild"
on "Money Honey," pretended to burp as he introduced "I Got a Woman,"
on which Bill joined in with a high-pitched call, introduced "Blue
Suede Shoes" to wild applause, and then announced that he would be
back in just a few weeks in a benefit performance for the Press-Scimitar's
Cynthia Milk Fund. And for anyone who wasn't planning to be there,
"just remember this one thing, friends, if you're not there, friends, just
remember this one thing..." At which point he launched into the opening
bars of his final song, the still unrecorded "(You Ain't Nothin' But a)
Hound Dog." When he got to the end there was even more wild applause,
and he looked back at D.]., repeated slyly, "Ladies and gentlemen,
remember this one thing," and kicked into a half-time coda, declaring
over and over again to the audience the simple one-line message of the
MAY-J U LY 1 9 5 6 '" 279
song. It was a curious performance, far removed from the loose spontaneity
of his Hayride shows of just six months before, but after twenty
minutes both he and his fans were exhausted. The last time he had appeared
at Ellis he had come out onstage afterward and patiently signed
autographs, but with that no longer a possibility, this time he was
whisked away into the night before the applause had even died down.
The next day he played Little Rock, then Springfield, Missouri; Des
Moines; Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska. In Kansas City there was a riot:
the band was overrun, D.].'s drums and Bill's bass were smashed, and D.J.
was thrown into the orchestra pit, but everyone escaped with their lives
and aplomb intact. In Detroit he was billed as "the atomic explosion," but
back home in Memphis the review of the Cotton Pickin' Jamboree appearance
declared more meaningfully, "Only a few times previously
(Billy Sunday, Eddy Arnold, Liberace at his height) have so many persons
gathered under one roof in Memphis for one attraction, and the reception
had a fire and enthusiasm never in memorable history granted a native
son."
Hank Snow meanwhile was finally beginning to accept the conclusion
he had long since come to: he was never going to see any money from
this deal. It had been six months now since they had signed the contract
with RCA, and while some tour money had come to him initially
through the Hank Snow Enterprises-Jamboree Attractions booking
agency, he had seen not a penny from the RCA deal or the phenomenal
RCA sales. He had been to his attorney some months before, who was
shocked to discover that there were no formal papers of incorporation and
urged Snow to insist on this at least as a first step toward straightening
out the partnership's tangled affairs. But when he had approached his
partner and pressed him on this point, "Parker immediately flew into a
rage. Pacing up and down my office floor, he told me he thought we
should dissolve our relationship in every aspect of our business.... I
thought for several minutes and then asked him, 'If we do, what happens
to our contract with Elvis Presley?' He twirled his big cigar back
and forth in his mouth, pointed his finger at his chest, and said, 'You don't
have any contract with Elvis Presley, Elvis is signed exclusively to the
colonel. ' "
* * *
280 "THOSE PEOPLE IN NEW YORK... "
E L V I S W A S D U E to make his return appearance on The Milton Berle
Show on June 5. He spent most of the previous week at home for what
amounted to the longest extended period of time offhe had had (six days)
since the beginning of the year. He was too jittery to stay home - after
all this time on the road he couldn't really sleep more than three or four
hours a night, and Gladys was worried almost constantly that he was just
going to bum himself up. 'Tm so proud of my boy," she said over and
over again, and she would get up early in the morning to run off the fans
so Elvis could sleep. Still, there was no escaping them: they lined up politely
by the carport from morning till night in the manicured residential
neighborhood that the Presleys had moved into at the end of March. All
they wanted was a glimpse of Elvis, or any of the family, for that matter.
Mrs. Presley answered the doorbell in her housecoat and slippers every
time it rang, and sometimes she let them borrow the phone if they said
they needed to call their mama and daddy. On a hot day she might even
have the new maid, Alberta, bring them a glass of ice water - after all,
she said, "they like my boy." Sometimes, she would confide to a friend,
she just wished that Elvis would quit right now. He could have a good
living, buy himself " a furniture store... marry some good girl and have a
child - where she would see it and be with it. And she'd be the happiest
person in the world," she told Mrs. Faye Harris, an old Tupelo neighbor,
"if he would [just] quit and come home and stay with them there in
Memphis."
Mr. Presley on the whole was less sanguine about it all. "I wish," he
said to a contractor friend named Carl Nichols who was doing some work
around the house, "they would all go away." "You wouldn't be here if
they did," said his friend. But he still felt like they were all taking advantage
of him - of him and his family. He enjoyed playing skill pool in the
game room with his son or his brother, Vester, or the various in-laws and
cousins, who had virtually moved into the house since they had come up
in the world, and he was in the process of having Nichols build him a pool
out back because Elvis thought they would all enjoy the chance to cool
off in the hot Memphis summertime. But he watched every nickel, and he
regarded every newcomer with glowering suspicion, and Elvis had to explain
to his friends sometimes that that was just the way his father was.
It wasn't that it didn't feel like home - Gladys had filled the house
with what Elvis called "a museum of me," and bought so much furniture
that they'd had to pile up a lot of their old things out on the sunporch.
MAY-J U LY 1 9 5 6 '" 2 8 1
When he surveyed his life, he liked what he saw. H e liked the pale green,
seven-room ranch house that sat here " out east" in the kind of affluent tract
development that he could never have imagined living in back when he was
going to Humes High. He was proud of his mama and his daddy - his
mama would never change, she never wanted anything for herself, and she
was just happy with her kennel and vegetable garden in the backyard. And if
the people who lived out here in this nose-up-in-the-air neighborhood didn't
think she was as good as any of them, well, they could just kiss his ass. They
were all right, though, he supposed. It was just that there was increasingly
little differentiation between his public and private lives. Bob Neal had told
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