0 2 '"" " T H O S E P E O P LE I N N E W Y O R K.
pressed. "Glad to hear it." This appeared to be a routine. The Colonel
would start a conversation and Elvis would end it. "It's gonna be
good to get back home. I'm sure your folks'll be mighty glad to see
you," said the Colonel. "Yeah, it'll be good to see 'em."
That was the end of the conversation. The Colonel looked out
the window. Tom [Diskin] talked shop. Junior talked to Elvis, and
Elvis ate his sandwich. It was two generations sitting at separate tables.
When they finally reached the outskirts of Memphis, Elvis got off at a
small signal stop called White Station, made his way across an empty
field, inquired for directions to Audubon Drive, and, "still dressed in his
suit and white knit tie," Wertheimer noted, "with a wave to us, and a
smile that could be seen for a hundred yards, Elvis walked home alone. "
H e spent the rest o f the afternoon a t home, signing autographs for the
fans, going for a ride on his motorcycle, splashing in the new pool (which
Vernon was only filling just now with a garden hose), and playing the
RCA acetates for his nineteen-year-old "Memphis girlfriend," Barbara
Hearn, an advertising copywriter whom he had known since South Memphis
days (she had been going out with Dixie's friend Ron Smith when he
first met her) and with whom he had renewed his acquaintance early that
spring. Wertheimer got pictures of Vernon shaving, Gladys handing her
son a fresh pair of jockey shorts, and the family album, with the only
demurral corning from Vernon, who said, " 'But I got shaving cream on.'
I told him it was all right. He rinsed off his razor and smiled.... 'Well, if
that's what you want, okay.'... I wondered," wrote Wertheimer, "how a
house this open could remain a home."
TH E C O L O N E L A R R I V E D sometime after 9:00 with a police escort.
He deputized Tom Diskin to take care of the family and Barbara,
while he and Elvis rode to the midtown ballpark, home of the Memphis
Chicks, in a white squad car. It was a hot night, 97 degrees, and the show
had been going on for almost three hours at the old wooden stadium
when the police car finally delivered Elvis to the performers' tent at third
base. Not a few in the crowd of seven thousand (by comparison, an antiintegration
rally led by Mississippi's senior senator James O. Eastland at
the Overton Park Shell that afternoon drew thirty-five hundred) had
MAY-J U L Y 1 9 5 6 c-., 3 0 3
shown up as early as 9:30 that morning, with lu.nch and supper packed, so
as to be sure to get good seats. "The roaring was so loud and long," reported
the Commercial Appeal, that "extra rations of sleeping pills were
passed out to the patients of the four hospitals near the field," with Elvis'
name receiving mentions twenty-nine times in advance of his arrival and
each mention eliciting uncontrollable screams and squeals.
There was a "bop-dancing" contest, Elvis' signature fourteendiamond
horseshoe ring (worth six hundred dollars) was won in a drawing
by seventeen-year-old Roger Fakes, the Colonel sold oUt the five
thousand souvenir programs he had personally donated to the event
(when asked by AI Wertheimer why the programs didn't come with a
price tag, the Colonel pointed out, "You never want to put a price on anything"),
and Dewey Phillips was "cotton-pickin' cute," reported the
paper, and "worked like a Trojan" as MC. Among the more than one
hundred performers - including four bands, the Dancing Dixie Dolls, the
Confederate Barbershop Quartette, the Admiral's Band of Navy Memphis,
and a surprise appearance by the Jordanaires, who had flown in from
Nashville - was Jesse Lee Denson, who sang Gogi Grant's "Wayward
Wind" and with his brother Jimmy told everyone backstage who would
listen how he had taught Elvis Presley to play guitar back in the Lauderdale
Courts.
Then it was finally time for Elvis to go on, and Dewey did a good imitation
of the "old" Elvis and the "new" Elvis, as a squadron of police, firemen,
and shore patrol escorted him to the stage. He was dressed all in
black save for red socks and the red tie which he and his father had picked
out just before the show, and as he sauntered out and greeted Dewey
with casual grace, saluting his fans and acknowledging his faInily in the
front row, the place literally exploded. The fans "broke from their seats,
swept like a wave up to the stage.... Elvis pleaded with them as pleasantly
as he could to sit down, but it was like Canute telling the tide to
stop.... What made [it] all the more remarkable," reflected Bob Johnson
in the Memphis Press-Scimitar, "was that he had previously played to a
packed house in the Auditorium during the Cotton Carnival less than two
months ago." To sixteen-year-old Jack Baker, who had been living next
door to him just nine months before, "there was this keening sound, this
shrill, wailing, keening response, and I remember thinking, That's an
amazing sound, and then I realized I was making it, too." When the furor
finally died down, and Elvis had graciously accepted a city proclamation
3 0 4 " T H O S E P E O P L E IN N E W Y O R K.
designating Wednesday, July 4, as Elvis Presley Day, he turned to the
crowd and announced, with that inscrutable mixture of boyish charm and
adult calculation, "You know, those people in New York are not gonna
change me none, I'm gonna show you what the real Elvis is like tonight."
And he did. After all the personal changes that had taken place, and
the dramatic evolution that his career had witnessed in the previous few
months, it was perhaps not surprising that the "real Elvis" should be, in
Bob Johnson's description, "about halfway between the 'old' Elvis and
the 'new' Elvis," but what this really meant was that he was able to control
the crowd, to tantalize and manipulate them in a manner that differed
significantly even from his appearance a few short weeks before. "He
rocked 'em," wrote Johnson, "socked 'em, set them screaming with delight
as his sensational individualistic song style throbbed out over the
frenzied stadium." He opened with "Heartbreak Hotel," threw in "Mystery
Train" and "I Got a Woman," brought out the Jordanaires for "I
Want You, I Need You, I Love You" and "I Was the One," roared back
with "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Long Tall Sally," and ended, of course,
after half an hour, with "Hound Dog."
"When it was time to go," Johnson noted, "he made a quick retreat
thru a phalanx of police and Shore Patrolmen to a squad car backed right
up to the stage. The excited fans rolled around the car like a wave. Two
Shore Patrolmen and a policeman were picked up and carried back as tho
they were feathers, but [Police] Capt. Woodward got him in the car all in
one piece, and Elvis grinned as the car pushed thru the crowd."
It was a moment of unmitigated triumph, a moment of pure and unsullied
splendor that would be forever frozen in time. All Elvis wanted,
Bob Johnson had written, was to be "thought well of at home," and now
here he was succeeding in front of his family and his hometown in a style,
and on a scale, that to anyone else would have been utterly unimaginable.
W I T H J U N E J U A N I C O, 5 0 5 F A Y A R D S T R E E T, B I L O X I, S U M M E R 1 9 5 6.
(C O U RT E S Y O F J U N E J U A N I C O)
ELVIS AN D J U N E
T
HE F O L L O W I N G M O N D A y, July 9, he arrived in Biloxi, unannounced
and somewhat unexpected. He showed up in his
white EI Dorado convertible at June Juanico's house on Fayard
Street with Red, his cousin Junior, and his friend Arthur
Hooton, whose mother had worked with Gladys at Britling's Cafeteria.
They waited in the driveway while some neighborhood kids went looking
for June. When she got back, she and Elvis made a date for that night, and
he left to register at the Sun 'N' Sand Hotel, whose courtyard quickly
filled with fans as news of his arrival spread.
That night they went out on the town with June's mother, Mae, and
her boyfriend, Eddie Bellman. On their own they revisited many of the
sights June had shown him on his visit the previous year. They stayed out
late, talking excitedly and making plans. Elvis wasn't sure how long he
would be staying this time, he told her; he guessed she would just have to
wait and see. All he knew was that he was on vacation for three weeks,
footloose and fancy-free. He didn't know what he wanted to do exactly,
but he wanted to do something. A few days before, he had wheeled into
Tupelo on a whim and gone to see both his aunt and his fifth-grade
teacher, Mrs. Grimes, who had originally been responsible for his entering
the singing contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair. Now, it had just
been announced, he was going to be returning to headline the fair in September.
He was being written up in all the major newspapers and national
magazines, and he was going to star in a movie soon. He could buy his
mama and his daddy anything they needed, whatever they might want.
The next day he and June spent the whole day together. That afternoon
they heard reports on a New Orleans radio station that Elvis Presley
had become engaged to a Miss June Juanico of nearby Biloxi, and on the
spur of the moment they jumped in the car and drove to New Orleans to
dispel the rumors. Elvis got the address of the station at a pay phone, and
they just showed up at WNOE, at the St. Charles Hotel, pressing their
3 0 7
3 0 8 '" E L V I S A N D J U N E
noses to the plate glass until OJ Hal Murray noticed them, did a double
take, and then announced to his amazed listeners that "the man of the
hour" had just walked into the studio and hurriedly switched to an interview
format.
The only thing he was serious about at this point was his career, Elvis
told the radio audience. He didn't have time to even think about getting
engaged; right now he was just thinking about his vacation, which he was
planning to spend in Florida. "You probably won't have too much of a vacation,"
interpolated the OJ, 'because of the tremendous amount of kids
who will be down there and fans - " "Well, I don't mind," he said. "Without
them I'd be... lost." By the time they left the studio, the hotel lobby
was full, and a girl fainted from the excitement and the heat.
From there the party of seven went on to Pontchartrain Beach, where
they wandered the midway. Elvis won a host of stuffed animals to join the
panda he had won for June at the Memphis Fairgrounds which they had
christened Pelvis. In the course of the evening, it was reported in the press,
Elvis consumed three halves of fried chicken and June three soft-shell
crabs. On the way home they stopped off for a snack, and Elvis ordered his
eggs over hard with the bacon burnt. When the eggs weren't cooked to his
satisfaction, he sent the order back, and when the waitress brought it back
again and it still wasn't right, she said, "What do you want, special treatment
because you're Elvis Presley?" "No," he said, "I'd just like to be
treated like a regular customer," and dumped the plate at the waitress's
feet. They got home at 3: 45 in the morning, and June responded from her
bed to a New Orleans Item reporter's queries the next day. "Did I kiss him
good night? What do you think? Certainly I kissed him good night. We
were standing on the porch. No, not by the garden gate; on the porch. He's
wonderful!"
TH EY S A W E A C H O T H E R every night and spent almost all of each day
together. Elvis kept telling the press that he was leaving for Florida
any day, but he never left. On Thursday they went deep-sea fishing with
June's mother and Eddie Bellman, and they had so much fun that he
called his parents from the pier and told them to come down. In the
meantime, with Eddie Bellman's help, he rented a villa out at the Gulf
Hills Dude Ranch, in exclusive Ocean Springs. The crowds at the beachJ
U LY -A U G U S T I 9 5 6 '" 3 0 9
front hotel had become impossible; there were close t o five hundred people
waiting for them when they returned from their fishing expedition,
and Elvis' Cadillac was constantly covered with addresses, phone numbers,
and love notes written in lipstick. When asked by the same reporter
who had interviewed him earlier in the week when he was planning to
leave for Florida, "keeping a sardonic smile on his lips," Elvis replied,
"Well, if this keeps up, probably tonight." By the time that Vernon and
Gladys arrived in their pink Cadillac and checked in at the Sun 'N' Sand
on Friday, it didn't even matter that Elvis was no longer around; a crowd
surrounded the car and grew bigger and bigger as Mrs. Presley stared out
silently in curiosity and fear. When they went deep-sea fishing on Saturday,
neither of the elder Presleys could have been any happier - Mr.
Presley just liked being out on the water, with nobody to bother him or
tear at his boy, and Mrs. Presley made Elvis peanut butter and banana
sandwiches and fed them to him while he trolled for fish, wiping the
crumbs away from his lips when he was done. It was a bright sunny day
with a deep blue sky and not a cloud in sight.
On Monday they all drove to New Orleans. They went to the zoo,
walked around in a cemetery overhung with Spanish moss, visited June's
grandparents, who used to manage the Astor Hotel on Royal Street, and
drove by some of the beautiful antebellum mansions in Pass Christian.
Mr. and Mrs. Presley held hands, and Gladys asked Vernon ifhe wouldn't
like to live in a big house like that someday. Mrs. Presley obviously liked
June. She said, "You know, I've never seen my boy so taken with a girl.
You two are planning to get married one of these days, aren't you?" They
didn't have to answer, she said. She knew, she just had a feeling. "You just
better not let Colonel Parker know how serious you are about June," she
told her son. "You know how he feels, especially about marriage." Gladys
called June "Satnin'," and June, who had not been able to bring herself to
call Mrs. Presley "Gladys" even after she was asked, started calling her
"Lovey" for her middle name, Love. "You know, my son's going to make
me very proud of him," she confided to June - as if he hadn't made her
proud already!
The Presleys returned to Memphis, and Elvis rented a four-bedroom
house from the Hack family on Bayview Drive, just on the edge of the
Gulf Hills resort, which afforded a greater measure of privacy than the
villa could offer. It was a summertime idyll such as neither he nor June
3 I O '" E L V I S A N D J U N E
had ever experienced before. The next few weeks went by as if they
would never end - and as if they would end before they had even begun.
Mr. and Mrs. Presley came down again, one or another of the boys would
go off from time to time to take care of unspecified business, and occasionally
Elvis returned to Memphis, presumably because he had business
to take care of, too. Sometimes June suspected that his business had to do
with his "Memphis girlfriend," Barbara Hearn - but she didn't care. Not
really. For Elvis and June a moment was an eternity, when he was with
her he was with her alone, and as she told a reporter mischievously, "It'd
be a sin to let something like that go to waste."
At Gulf Hills they rode, they water-skied, they played shuffleboard on
a concrete court, they were in and out of the water all day long. At the
"Hack House" they had fireworks battles at night behind the high hedge
and on the golf course across the street, with everybody running around
with little Cigars in their mouths to light the fireballs that they threw at
one another. Even at the resort they were pretty much left to themselves,
so after waterskiing, they might all have dinner in the hotel dining room
with June's mother and Mr. Bellman, then walk over to the Pink Pony
Lounge and gather around the piano, where Elvis would entertain everyone,
and they would all join in on familiar old standards until he ended
the evening with a spiritual. He wanted June right there with him all the
time and complained when she kept her distance. "He said, 'Other girls
I've dated are always right next to me. They act like they're proud to be
with me. If I say something, they listen. If I want to say something to you,
I have to find you first.' " She knew exactly what he was talking about.
Sometimes she would even hang back on purpose, just to see ifhe would
look for her - and he always did. "I said, 'I'm not like your other girlfriends,
Elvis, I'm not going to hang on your every word. When we first
met, you said, "I like you, June, you're different." Now all of a sudden
you want me to be like everybody else.' " No, he protested, but why was
she spending so much time talking with the ski instructor when he
wanted her to watch him ski? "Oh, really," said June. "All you care about
is how many guys I've made out with. But, you know, I've gone out with
a lot of guys and never really done anything."
"He said, 'Does that mean you're still a cherry?' I said, 'I'm not only a
cherry, George. I'm the whole pie.' "
* * *
J U LY-A U G U S T 1 9 5 6 n.. 3 I I
TH EY W E R E P E R F E C T LY M AT C H E D. June loved to cut up and fool
around, and he was surprised to discover that she loved to sing, too.
When they went riding, they sang "Side By Side," "Back in the Saddle Again,"
and "Let the Rest of the World Go By," with June contributing the tenor
harmony, and when they were swimming there was always a phonograph sitting
beside the pool. Elvis played "My Prayer," a hit by the Platters that summer,
over and over again until, just at the point when the lead singer was
approaching the climactic high note, "Elvis would always say, 'I'm gonna get
that note, I'm gonna get that note, one of these days I'm gonna get that note,
here it comes, here it comes... ' And he'd try to relax and just let it out, and
it just wouldn't happen, and he'd scream and go under." He sang all the
time - sometimes it seemed he'd rather sing than breathe. June was not particularly
a fan of his records, so they stuck mostly to old tunes like "That's My
Desire" and "Over the Rainbow" or big-voiced r&b hits like "Ebb Tide" and
"Unchained Melody." Not surprisingly, June didn't hesitate to let him know
her reservations about his music. "I thought most of his records sounded like
he was singing in a tin can. 1 said, 'Why don't you let some of those guys who
do your records hear you sing like this and see if they can find you some of
this kind of material? You know, you have a wonderful voice.' "
Most of all, though, they shared a sense of humor. Nearly all the pictures
from that time show a smiling, laughing Elvis, relaxed in a way that
reveals little self-consciousness, only youth and pride. Healthy, innocent,
brimming with energy and a sense that he has arrived, he clowns around in
these photographs in a way that the grave-faced youngster of Tupelo days
never would, and the rising young star never could, his hat tilted back on his
head, his hair mussed up, looking for all the world like the Greek god Pan.
Newsweek ran a column by John Lardner on July 16 excoriating Steve
Allen for his attempt to "civilize" Elvis, "to mute and frustrate Presley,
for the good of mankind.... Allen's ethics," declared Lardner, "were
questionable." Ed Sullivan announced on the twelfth that he had changed
his mind and was booking Elvis at an unprecedented fifty thousand
dollars for three appearances in the fall and winter. The Colonel was
also working out a deal with Twentieth Century Fox after Hal Wallis
informed him that he would not have a property ready for Elvis until
the beginning of the following year. The deal was for SIOO,OOO, with
co-star hilling and options for two additional pictures at $150,000 and
S200,000. The film was a western called The Reno Brothers which would
start shooting at the end of August. Meanwhile, RCA was getting an
3 1 2 '" E L V I S A N D J U N E
almost incredible response - even judging by the tumultuous reaction to
every other Elvis Presley record they had put out that year - to the coupling
of "Hound Dog" and "Don't Be Cruel," which was released on July
13 and within a week was on the verge of going gold.
Meanwhile, Elvis got so sunburnt he was forced to water-ski in long
pants and a long-sleeved jersey for a day or two (despite his incongruous
dress, "his skill," according to water-ski instructor Dickie Waters, "was
almost professional-looking"), and June was in and out of the water so
much that she finally just got fed up with fixing her hair and, at Elvis' suggestion,
had it all cut off. The world seemed far away, and when it intruded
in unwanted fashion there was likely to be a spontaneous response.
Elvis for some reason detested Teresa Brewer's "Sweet Old
Fashioned Girl," which was popular that summer, and one time after
they'd been horseback riding and were sitting around afterward with a
giant pitcher of ice water, the song came on the radio. "I told him, 'Here's
your favorite song: " June said, and mischievously turned the radio up.
"He took that entire pitcher of ice water and dumped it on his head! That
was a typical Elvis thing to do."
The only sobering notes were Elvis' all-too-imminent departure at the
beginning of August for yet another Florida tour and the occasional intrusion
of others - Red and Junior and sometimes Arthur, whom June
called "Arthritis" - on their almost perfect happiness. It wasn't that June
didn't like his friends, although she sensed a meanness on Junior's part,
not to mention a coarseness on Red's, that flourished when the elder Presleys
were away. That she could certainly have lived with - she was confident
that she could give as well as she got. What disturbed her far more
was their effect on Elvis: he seemed to need their approval so much that
he became like them. Her friends didn't have that effect on her, or on
him; they were just fun to be around. But Elvis seemed to lose his confidence
as well as his temper when he was around his gang. On the one
hand, he desperately wanted to be a good influence on them, he shot
them a look of sharp rebuke if they ever really got out of line, and he was
good to them, too, he was always showing that wonderful generosity of
spirit that she loved so much in him. On the other hand, she hated it
when he showed off in front of them, when he tried so hard to act like one
of the boys that he was no longer even himself. She was a person, too, she
told him. She wasn't a possession. She didn't belong to anyone.
"He always wanted me right there, right under his thumb. He'd alJ
U LY-AU G U S T 1 9 5 6 ", 3 13
ways be looking for me, and when he found me, it was always, 'Where
the hell have you been? Who the hell do you think you are?' This is in
front of the guys. He was quick to fly off the handle, and I could be stubborn
at times, too! So this one time he's saying, 'You're not going to talk
to me like that, you're not going to treat' me like that: and I chewed on
his ass in front of them all. Well, he grabbed me - 'Come on!' Just
grabbed me by the arm like he was really going to read my beads and
pulled me into the bathroom. But when we got in there, I mean he would
just take my face in his hands and kiss me and say, 'Baby, I know it. I
know you're right... and I'm sorry: But he would not show that to the
guys. The guys just did not know that he had a tender heart."
June did, though. She sensed his spiritual side from the first, and she
gave him a copy of The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, a graduation present
from a former boyfriend the previous year. "He loved it. I would tell him
my favorite chapters - my favorite was on love and friendship, and there
was even a little bit on marriage." They read it over and over and talked
about it at length, and June thought it calmed him down some - though
she doubted that anything would ever really do that. One night they
stopped by the hospital to visit a little girl with leukemia whose mother
June knew, and then they went to the pier where they had sat out till almost
dawn the night they first met. Elvis told June to look up at the
moon, to let herself totally relax and not think about anything else, just let
herself float in the space between the moon and the stars. If you relaxed
enough, he told her, you could get up right there next to them. "How
long have you been doing this?" she asked him. "Since I was a little boy,"
he told her. But he didn't tell just anyone about it. "I learned a long time
ago not to talk about it. People think you're crazy when you talk about
things they don't understand." His mother, he said, was the only one he
had ever really trusted to understand.
She understood. She understood that when she was with him she had
something that others couldn't break. And she understood that when he
was in public he had something that she was not allowed to threaten. It
would be three years, he told her a little apologetically, before he could
have a life of his own. Then he could do whatever he wanted to do. Then
he would be free to marry, have children, admit in public that he did not
simply belong to the public, but until then he had promised the Colonel,
this mysterious personage she had never met, that he would never do
anything detrimental to his career.
3 1 4 '" E L V I S A N D J U N E
For all of that, though, life in Biloxi was tucked away enough so that
they could almost pretend to be leading normal lives, and the town itself
was sufficiently accustomed to celebrity that after a while it could simply
pretend to ignore them. They went to see The King and I at the Saenger
Theatre downtown and walked out because, Elvis said, he thought movie
musicals were ridiculous, people bursting into song at the drop of a hat
just when things were getting serious. They hung around with June's
friends, Patty Welsh and Patsy Napier and Buddy Conrad, who drove a
sharp new mint green Lincoln Continental, and they went to Gino's Pizza
and King William's Cellar in Ocean Springs and, of course, the Pink Pony,
typical teenagers, just having fun. All of her friends adored Elvis and
wouldn't hear a word against him. One time, as a favor to Eddie Bellman,
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