that [she knew that] he was going to come along and tear the world up, it
was just something that was in him. Vester came along and taught him a
couple of chords, nobody paid much attention, it was just an isolated
event, but she was very proud of him. She said, 'I just hope to hell we all
live.' 'Cause it upset her, she was not thrilled with his big-time success,
she was not carried away by the fame, the only thing that counted was
Elvis."
At night they would frequently sit around listening to gospel music:
the Blackwood Brothers, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Clara Ward Singers,
the Statesmen Quartet - Elvis would always point to the singing of Jake
Hess as they listened. Often he would sit at the organ and sing the songs
himself, as Mr. and Mrs. Presley nodded appreciatively. For Cliff it was
something of an education, because though he considered himself a
"spiritual" person, he had never heard this kind of music before. For
Cliff it was something of a trial, too. There was no smoking or drinking
allowed in the house, and Cliff was not by nature an abstemious person,
but he abided by house rules. "Elvis did not want to be around people
when they were drinking. He had tremendous willpower, and he just
felt like people who were out of control - how many times did he say,
O C T O B E R- N O V E M B E R 1 9 5 6 c,., 3 5 9
'Cliff, I just can't afford being around people who are not in control of
themselves.' "
One night they were invited over for " cocktails" by a wealthy young
couple with " old Memphis" roots who lived up the street. Frank Pidgeon,
whose family owned the Pidgeon-Thomas Iron Company, had written
the insurance on the house, and Betty Pidgeon was the granddaughter of
E. H. "Boss" Crump, who had virtually ruled Memphis from his election
as mayor in 1910 until his death in 1954. Elvis was reluctant to go at first -
the neighbors had been unremitting in their rejection, he felt, not just of
him and his family but of his fans. He could understand their being upset
at the disruption which his presence had caused the once-quiet little
street, and he had done everything he could to accommodate their concerns,
but there had even been public discussion of buying the Presleys
out, which Elvis had countered by offering to buy the neighbors out in
tum. As one Memphian wrote to Elvis biographer Elaine Dundy, "From
the point of view of the world I was born and raised in, the world of the
country club etc., he was referred to... as an embarrassment."
Cliff recalled the social occasion vividly. "Elvis said, 'Mama, I don't
want to go, these people got a lot of money, and I don't fit in, I don't feel
comfortable, I just don't want to do it.' She said, 'Son, these people don't
want anything from you. They've already made their mark in the world,
and they are prominent people from two prominent families here - you
know that she's a Crump. What they are doing is welcoming you to the
neighborhood, that's all. You can't give them anything, they are just
proud of you, another Memphian who is making his own mark in the
world.' "
They drove the short distance up the street, arrived a little late, and
declined the bourbon and sodas they were offered, taking Cokes instead
to wash down their Cheez Whiz crackers. Elvis seemed "a little nervous
at first" to Pallas Pidgeon, who was eight at the time, "but he was very
nice, very friendly and accommodating. Daddy asked if he would mind
calling my father's first cousin, who lived in Plainfield, New Jersey, and
she was a great fan of his. So we put the long-distance call through to her.
Then we called my aunt, the youngest daughter of my grandparents, who
were also there - she was at St. Catherine's School in Richmond, and her
whole dorm went crazy. Then I asked him if he would mind calling my
best friend, Louise, and he did the same thing. 'Louise, this is Elvis. ' It was
3 6 0 T H E T O A S T OF T H E T O W N
just incredible. Then we went o n a tour of the house, and we went in the
bedroom, he and Cliff and my mother and I, and I had a lot of stuffed animals
on the bed, and he asked me when my birthday was, and he said he
would send me a teddy bear, which he never did, but at least I could
dream about it for a few months."
He was hurt that people judged him without knowing him, he told
Marion Keisker one day when he stopped off at Sun. Mr. Phillips was busy
a lot of the time -Johnny Cash was really hot now, and he was trying to
get Carl back on track, and he had some new boys he was excited
about - but Elvis always felt comfortable just stopping by and talking to
Marion with the sun beating down on the blinds and the sights and
sounds of a recording session coming through the window cut into the
partition wall. He was still upset by that Jacksonville preacher who had
been written up in Life magazine, he told her. "The only thing I can say is
they don't know me."
As the date of the movie opening approached, he became more and
more nervous, he felt increasingly on display, even in his own hometown.
He finally took the Colonel's advice and got out of town for a little while,
taking a vacation in Las Vegas, which saved him from having to make excuses
when the reporters inevitably asked for his reaction to the reviews.
It was all in keeping with the new management strategy of removing him
from the public eye (the Colonel indicated that he might have to start
charging reporters for interviews with Elvis soon), but at the same time it
suited the very impulse that had led him to duck into the Suzore NO. 2 the
night that Dewey played his record for the first time.
In Vegas he was a celebrity among celebrities, and while his comings
and goings were duly noted, it was from a distance, and with a casual disinterest,
that left him pretty much on his own. He stayed at the New
Frontier with his cousin Gene and attended all the shows. At the outset of
his visit he dated Marilyn Evans, a dancer at the New Frontier, and invited
her to come see him in Memphis in December. Then he met Dottie Harmony,
a blond eighteen-year-old dancer from Brooklyn who had come to
town to do a show at the Thunderbird and who had a girlfriend at the
Frontier who was getting married. He kept sending emissaries over to her
table to see if she would join him, but she told them to get lost "until all
of a sudden I looked over, and there was Elvis on his knee, saying,
'Ma'am, you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in my life.
O C T O B E R-N O V E M B E R 1 9 5 6 3 6 1
Would you have a drink with me?' " They started seeing each other almost
exclusively, he came to see her show, "we spent almost every single
day and evening together, except for when I worked." On November 14,
the night before the Love Me Tender premiere in New York, he attended
Liberace's opening at the Riviera and was introduced from the front row
by the flamboyant entertainer, who was dressed in gold-sequined cutaway
and matching pants. Afterward they exchanged jackets and instruments,
cutting up for the cameras and singing and playing songs like "Girl
of My Dreams" and "Deep in the Heart of Texas." "Elvis and I may be
characters," commented Liberace, "but we can afford to be."
He and Dottie were totally caught up in each other. "He was just the
nicest guy. He used to call his mother every night, and he made me call
mine. He would tell me stories about how his family had all lived together
in this one room and how his father used to pray every night that
things would get better and how happy he was now that he could make it
better for his parents. It's a little hard to believe, but we mainly just hung
around. We would go out to the airport and watch the planes take off.
One night we stopped and helped an old man change a tire. You know,
we were just kids." They would fight on occasion, usually about the attention
Dottie got from other men ("I knew everybody in town, and I
think that bothered Elvis, but I said, 'What's good for the goose is good
for the gander' "). Sometimes when they fought, Elvis would rip the
phone out of the wall, "but next thing I knew it was always fixed again."
One night they went to see Billy Ward and His Dominoes, one of Elvis'
favorite r&b groups, whose young lead singer, an unbilled Jackie Wilson,
in addition to reprising the various Dominoes hits ("The Bells," "Rags to
Riches," "Have Mercy Baby"), also did an Elvis Presley medley in his act.
He did "Hound Dog" and one or two other numbers that didn't impress
their originator all that much, but then he did "Don't Be Cruel," slower
and with more dramatic impact than the record, and Elvis went back to
see him four nights running. Nick came into town to visit, and a couple of
other Hollywood pals, too, but mostly it was just the two of them doubledating
with Gene, and before Elvis left he made Dottie promise that she
would spend Christmas with him in Memphis.
June had read about Natalie and him in the Memphis papers. He had
telephoned her the day that Natalie left, but by the time she called back,
Gladys said he was in Las Vegas and she wasn't sure when he'd be home.
3 6 2 '" T H E T O A S T O F T H E T O W N
The two o f them had a nice long chat anyway, but Elvis didn't call when
the movie opened, he missed her birthday on November 19, and she was
less and less inclined to blame it on the Colonel.
The movie premiered with great hoopla on the fifteenth. There were
fifteen hundred teenagers lined up when the doors opened at the New
York Paramount at 8: 00 A. M. for the first show, and there would have
been more in attendance if truant officers hadn't combed the lines. When
the film opened on November 21 at Memphis' Loew's State and 550 other
theaters across the country, it did record-breaking business and by the end
of the month was reported by Variety to be enjoying "sock grosses,"
which "underscored the need for the industry to develop players and subject
matter to bring out the juvenile audience sector." It outperformed
Marilyn Monroe's earlier Bus Stop and The Seven Year Itch in the same or
similar locations, was running neck and neck with Giant and The Ten Commandments,
which opened around the same time, and, it was reported, the
concession business was "astounding."
The reviews were for the most part extremely condescending, if occasionally
granting Elvis a certain measure of grudging respect. Time was
particularly derisive, asking, "Is it a sausage?" of the new, sleekly packaged
Hollywood image, while the New York Times gave Elvis backhanded
credit for failing to recognize the film's limitations and providing an animated
performance in the midst of a lusterless vehicle. "Richard Egan is
virtually lethargic as the brother who comes home from war," Bosley
Crowther wrote, "and Debra Paget is bathed in melancholia," while "Mr.
Presley... goes at it as though it were 'Gone With the Wind.' " Perhaps
the most interesting review appeared in The Reporter, which led an all-out
assault on popular culture with a vilification of Elvis Presley ("Presley
resembles an obscene child") and his so-called "music" (a "vacillation between
a shout and a whine") but posed the pertinent question: "Who is
the new hero? How does he look, move, talk and dress?" And went on to
answer it by comparing Elvis with Brando and James Dean, and characterizing
the new hero as possessing
mannerisms by Brando out of the Actor's Studio.... First of all he
does not walk: he slouches, ambles, almost minces. His hand gestures
are all tentative, incomplete, with arms out in front as though he
were feeling his way along a wet-walled underground passageway, or
folded back against the body as though he were warding off a blow.
O C T O B E R - N O V E M B E R 1 9 5 6,..., 363
... The new hero is an adolescent. Whether he is twenty or thirty or
forty, he is fifteen and excessively sorry for himself. He is essentially a
lone wolf who wants to belong.
The Colonel's only public comment was his advice to theater operators
to be sure to empty the house after every matinee showing. Otherwise,
the Colonel said, Elvis' fans would stock up on food and camp out in
the theater all day, thereby depriving theater owners of a valuable source
of revenue.
Elvis himself was embarrassed, according to Cliff, both by the inadequacy
of his own performance and by the reaction of his fans. " 'I'll never
make it: he said, 'it will never happen, because they're never going to
hear me 'cause they're screaming all the time. ' He really meant that." At
the same time he was what he had always wanted to be: a movie star.
Critics might tear him apart, he told reporters at the Ed Sullivan news
conference just two and a half weeks before the movie's opening, and if
they did he might have to rethink his approach, but he could see a lifetime
career in the movies, long after he had stopped singing. ''I'm not going
to quit," he said, "and I'm not going to take lessons because I want to
be me."
W I T H B. B. K I N G AT T H E W D I A G O O D W I L L R E V U E. D E C E M B E R 7. 1 9 5 6.
(E R N E S T W I T H E R S. M I M O S A R E C O R D S P R O D U C T I O N S I N C. / M I C H A E L O C H S A R C H I V E S)
T H E EN D O F SOMET H I NG
IT W A S A T U E S D A Y A F T E R N O O N in early December. Cliff and Elvis
were cruising down Union Avenue with Marilyn Evans, the darkeyed
dancer from Las Vegas whom he had dated before meeting
Dottie Harmony. As they drove by 706, it looked, in the words of
Marion Keisker, like a "chicken coop nested in Cadillacs." There was obviously
a session going on, and on an impulse Elvis wheeled the car
around and parked out in front of the studio. Once inside, he found Carl
Perkins and his brothers Jay and Clayton, with "Fluke" Holland on drums
and a new blond-haired boy on piano, working on a couple of Carl's new
tunes. The session quickly broke up - they were just listening to playbacks
at this point anyway - and, after general greetings all around, Mr.
Phillips introduced him to the piano player. His name was Jerry Lee
Lewis, he was from Ferriday, Louisiana, and he had a new single just out,
his first on the Sun label - but, it turned out, he didn't really need much
of an introduction, he wasn't shy in the least. As a matter of fact, he
would have talked Elvis' ear off if Elvis hadn't already been talking with
Carl and Mr. Phillips about Hollywood and Las Vegas and the new RCA
single that was coming out in January: the B side would definitely be
Stan's song "Playing for Keeps," on which Mr. Phillips had the publishing.
Sam was pleased to hear that, and Elvis and Carl were enjoying catching
up on old times, but the piano player was getting impatient with all this
small talk - he just wanted to get back to the piano.
Eventually a jam session did develop. They fooled around with "Blueberry
Hill" and "My Isle of Golden Dreams," and then someone provided
an acoustic guitar out of the trunk of his car, and Elvis began to warble
"You Belong to My Heart," a 1945 Bing Crosby hit from the Disney animated
feature The Three Caballeros, rolling his rs in the Latin manner with
exaggerated, eye-rolling passion. Next they launched into a bunch of spiritual
numbers with Carl and the band pitching in and the new boy echoing
Elvis high-spiritedly on every number and taking the lead on some. "This
3 6 5
3 6 6 T H E E N D O F S O M E T H I N G
is fun!" says Jerry Lee. "You ought to get up a quartet," someone suggests,
and a woman - maybe Marilyn - requests "Farther Along" from
this "Rover Boys trio." Elvis does imitations of Bill Monroe, and of Hank
Snow singing an Ernest Tubb song. Has he heard the new Chuck Berry
single? someone asks him. Yes, he likes "Brown Eyed Handsome Man"
better than "Too Much Monkey Business," and without further ado they
are off and running on that. Carl has just gotten back from being out on
tour with Berry, he says. Man, he just set out behind the stage and - he
shrugs helplessly at Berry's prolific genius and creativity. Which just sets
them off again on another pass at "Brown Eyed Handsome Man."
Almost from the start Sam had the tape recorder turned on. He was all
set up for a session anyway, and he realized immediately that this could
be an historic occasion. "I told Jack Clement [who was in the control
room, too], 'Man, let's just record this. This is the type offe el, and probably
an occasion, that - who knows? - we may never have these people
together again.' " He didn't fail to recognize the potential for publicity either,
and he called Johnny Cash, currently Sun's biggest star, who showed
up briefly with his wife, and Bob Johnson at the Press-Scimitar, who came
by with a UP reporter and a photographer in tow. "I never had a better
time than yesterday afternoon," wrote Johnson, a little disingenuously, in
the paper the next day, as he added: "If Sam Phillips had been on his toes,
he'd have turned the recorder on when that very unrehearsed but talented
bunch got to cutting up. That quartet could sell a million." Phillips
himself sent the write-up out to DJs with a note headlined "Our Only Regret!,"
the regret being that "each and every one of you wonderful OJ's
who are responsible for these boys being among the best known and liked
in show business could not be here tool"
If they had, they would have been amazed. "I heard this guy in Las
Vegas," Elvis reports to his captivated audience, "there was a guy out
there [with Billy Ward and His Dominoes] that was doing a takeoff on
me - 'Don't Be Cruel.' He tried so hard till he got much better, boy,
much better than that record of mine. " There are polite murmurs of
demurral. "No, wait now, I mean, he was real slender, he was a colored
guy, he got up there and he'd say -" And here Elvis begins to perform
the song in imitation of the singer imitating him. "He had it a little slower
than me.... He got the backing, the whole quartet, they got the feeling
on it, he was hitting it, boy. Grabbed that microphone, and on the last
D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 6-J A N UARY 1 9 5 7 367
note he went all the way down to the floor, man, looking straight up at
the ceiling. Man, he was cutting out. I was under the table when he got
through singing.... And all the time he was singing, them feet was going
in and out, both ways, sliding like this.... He's a Yankee, you know," said
Elvis, remarking with bemusement upon the singer's strange pronunciation
of "tellyphone" and coming back to the song yet again, even trying
"Paralyzed," the Otis Blackwell song he had recorded in September, in
similar fashion. "All he needed was a building or something to jump off
of," says someone, won over by the sheer enthusiasm of Elvis' description.
"That's all he needed," agrees the unknown singer's foremost admirer,
"that would have made a big ending."
They sang "No place Like Home" and "When the Saints Go Marching
In" with the blond-haired boy on piano ("The wrong man's been sitting
here at this piano," said Elvis when Jerry Lee took his place. "Well, I
been wanting to tell you that all along," responded Jerry Lee without
missing a beat. "Scoot over!") and "Is It So Strange?," the number Faron
Young had given him some months ago which he and June had taken as a
twisted symbol of their love. He didn't know ifhe was going to record it,
though, he said; Faron didn't want to give him any of the publishing.
When he sang "That's When Your Heartaches Begin," the song he had
cut in this very studio the summer after his senior year, he told everyone,
"I recorded the sonofabitch and lost the dub on it. " He thought it could
still be a hit, he said. With the right arrangement and the same kind of
deep baritone voice that had been featured in the background of the Ink
Spots' original, he thought it could still sell.
Throughout the session people drift in and out, the guitar is passed
around, while Snearly Ranch Boys piano player and sometime session
musician Smokey Joe Baugh contributes his gravelly comments and harmonies.
You can hear comments by unidentified women and children,
doors slamming, and musicians departing (the Perkins brothers exit fairly
early in the proceedings), which leaves a clear field for singers and piano
pickers almost exclusively. At the end of the day Jerry Lee Lewis finally
gets a chance to really show offhis wares as he storms through both sides
of his new single as well as "You're the Only Star in My Blue Heaven"
and "Black Bottom Stomp." "That's why I hate to get started in these jam
sessions," says Elvis affably, ''I'm always the last one to leave....
"Jerry, it was good to have met you," he says to the brash newcomer,
3 6 8 '" T H E E N D OF S O M E T H I N G
inviting him to come out to the house sometime, while good-byes are
being exchanged all around. "It was totally extemporaneous," said Sam
Phillips, the proud progenitor, "everything was off mike, if it was on mike
it was by accident - I think this little chance meeting meant an awful lot
to all those people, not because one was bigger than another, it was kind of
like coming from the same womb. " "I never saw the boy more likeable,"
wrote Bob Johnson, "than he was just fooling around with those other
fellows who have the same interests he does."
Three nights later Elvis was among other fellows with much the same
interests, but under entirely different, if no less newsworthy, circumstances.
WDIA, which had been broadcasting since 1949 with programming
aimed exclusively at Memphis' black population, but with white
management, news announcers, and engineers, had established a Goodwill
Fund almost from its inception with the goal of helping "needy
Negro children." Each year the station put on a revue on the first Friday
of December, which for the last several years had taken place at Ellis Auditorium.
In 1956 the headliners were Ray Charles, former WDIA disc
jockey B. B. King, the Magnificents, and the Moonglows, along with a
gospel segment that featured the Spirit of Memphis Quartet and the Happyland
Blind Boys. Each year's show featured a theme acted out by the
current OJ staff, and this year's had to do with a contingent of "hep Choctaws,"
led by Chief Rockin' Horse (Rufus Thomas) and his bride, Princess
Premium Stuff (Martha Jean the Queen), who are determined to introduce
rock 'n' roll to a recalcitrant, and hopelessly square, rival tribe.
One of the engineers at the station, Louis Cantor, who doubled as a
part-time gospel and r&b announcer under the names of Deacon and
Cannonball Cantor, had graduated from Humes a year ahead of Elvis and
George Klein and was a fellow student with Klein at Memphis State, as
well as a fellow congregant at Temple Beth EI Emeth. Wouldn't it be
something, the powers that be at WDIA speculated, if they could get Elvis
Presley to make a guest appearance on the show? Cantor approached
Klein, who spoke to Elvis about it. He would be thrilled, he said, to put in
an appearance, but he couldn't, of course, perform - that was something
the Colonel had drilled into him since the very beginning of their association.
He and George showed up on the night of the show and stood quietly
in the wings as some of his biggest heroes appeared onstage. Ray Charles
sang "I Got a Woman" to Princess Premium Stuff; Phineas Newborn, Sr.,
D E C E M B E R 1 95 6-J A N UARY 1 95 7 <--... 3 6 9
led an all-star pit band dressed in Indian costumes o f its own; and the
ubiquitous Professor Nat D. Williams, master of ceremonies both here
and at the amateur talent shows at the Palace Theatre as well as a popular
columnist in the Negro press, crowned the station's "Miss 1070," as he did
every year. "I was fourteen," said Carla Thomas, Rufus' daughter, a
member of the highly disciplined Teen Town Singers, who sang backup
for many of the singers on the show and had a performing spot of their
own, "and I told my girlfriend, 'That's Elvis Presley back there in the
wings.' We were on the completely other side, but I could see it was
Elvis. She said, 'That's not Elvis Presley, he's not on the show.' I said, 'I
know.' He was just watching from the wings. They didn't announce him
until the very end, because they didn't want everybody to get carried
away, and when they did and he came out and did his little 'How you
doing?' everybody said, 'More! Do a little something for us.' So he did a
little shake, and he tore everybody up."
"I told them, If you put Elvis into the front of the show, the show is
over," said Carla's father, Chief Rockin' Horse for this evening, "so they
took me at my word and put Elvis on near the end. I took Elvis onstage by
the hand, I had this great big headdress with all the feathers, and when I
took Elvis out there and he did that little wiggle that they wouldn't let
him do on television, the crowd just went crazy. They stormed all backstage,
beating on the doors and everything!"
After the show was over he stood backstage talking quietly and having
his picture taken with B.B. and Miss Claudia Marie Ivy, the newly
crowned WDIA queen. "To all who were in earshot," reported the TriState
Defender to its black constituency proudly, "Presley was heard telling
King, 'Thanks, man, for the early lessons you gave me.' Arthur Codfrey
would surely call that 'humility.' "
"He stayed around a long time after the show," said Carla. "My sister
Vaneese and I had our pictures taken with him, and there was an old
piano backstage and he played some little runs on it. The audience was
gone, and there were just the people getting dressed, and finally the stage
manager said, 'All right now, y'all got to go.' He stayed that long, and we
were just having a lot of fun. I remember that Elvis."
The accounts in the Negro press in succeeding weeks and months
were just as positive, with one exception. Various reports pointed out that
Elvis freely acknowledged not only his debt to B.B. but, implicitly, to
black music in general, and the Memphis World cited an account of six
370 na" T H E E N D O F S O M E T H I N G
months earlier that had Elvis "crack[ing] Memphis segregation laws [on
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