scheduled to arrive sometime earlier, but Gladys had not been feeling
well and checked into Memphis' Baptist Hospital for a series of tests. It
was an undefined ailment, a kind of general malaise, brought on perhaps
by worry. "I was suffering some nausea and pain in my left shoulder," she
told the newspaper, but after the tests had been carried out, she announced
with some relief, "There is no surgery in sight." On their first
morning at the lot, reported a somewhat disingenuous press release, "the
officer of duty at the main studio gate was approached by a... man [who]
J A N U A RY-A P R I L 1 9 5 7 '" 3 9 3
said, with a Southern accent, 'Howdy, officer, can you tell me how to get
into this place? We've got a boy working here?' " Vernon was wearing a
light-colored suit, round-brimmed, pushed-back hat, and a too-short tie
bunched up by an ornamental tie clip, while Gladys wore a simple pinnedback
hat and an elegant new jacket over a dark dress. After it was ascertained
what exactly their boy did on the lot, they were ceremoniously
ushered in. Elvis showed them all around, and within days of their arrival
both they and their friends bought poodles, whom they named Pierre and
Duke (Gladys led Duke, named for John Wayne, around by a fake diamond
necklace collar), and Vernon introduced Carl Nichols to one and all
as his "decorator," which puzzled Hal Kanter until it dawned on him that
Nichols was by profession a housepainter.
Gladys was entranced. She had worried before coming out that her
boy might be made fun of, but she delightedly told friends and relatives
afterward, "There's somebody to comb his hair for him and even a man
to help him get dressed and another man to ask him if he's ready to
work." On weekends they went sightseeing, touring neighborhoods dotted
with imposing mansions, as Elvis pointed out Debra Paget's house,
Red Skelton's showplace, the homes of the stars. One time they went to
the movies, and he took eighteen-year-old Paramount contract player
Joan Blackman to see The Ten Commandments, but Gladys had to keep
shushing him as he enthusiastically explained every scene from a biblical
or "technical," cinematic point of view. Scotty Moore's wife, Bobbie,
came out for a week, and she and Scotty took the elder Presleys to Burbank
for the filming of Tennessee Ernie Ford's popular weekly show,
where Vernon and Gladys were introduced from the audience and later
met Tennessee Ernie and his wife backstage.
One day when they visited the set, on a whim Hal Kanter shot some
film of them and then invited them to come back to see themselves in the
daily rushes the next day. Gladys was concerned that she looked fat, but
Vernon reassured her that she looked fine, and overall they were so delighted
with the results that Kanter got the idea of including them in the
audience in the climactic show scene. When he broached the idea to
Elvis, Elvis said he was sure that they would love it. So in the final Coastto-
Coast broadcast that caps the picture and refutes all the mean-spirited
critics of rock 'n' roll, there is Elvis rocking away onstage, and there is
Gladys seated on the aisle -with Vernon beside her, and the Nicholses
beside him - clapping away in time to the music, intent on nothing but
3 9 4 "'"' L O V I N G Y O U
her boy. I t is perhaps the musical high point o f Elvis' career in films, yet
another reprise of "Got a Lot 0' Livin' to Do" which combines illusion
and reality in such a way as to heighten the attraction of each. Elvis swivels
his leg sharply, then good-naturedly drags it behind him. He stands at
the lip of the stage and, along with the Jordanaires, who are dressed in
matching cowboy outfits, leads the audience in hand clapping, then jumps
down and comes dancing up the aisle. Gladys' gaze never wavers. For a
moment he is standing to her left, and as she claps along she never takes
her eyes off her son. Then he backs away, climbs back up on the stage,
and the number is over, the studio audience is still applauding, Gladys
along with all the rest - but for her it is different, different even than for
the man beside her. For her it is the pinnacle of everything she has ever
dreamed or imagined. Her gaze is transformed by love.
They returned home in mid March with the Nicholses after a monthlong
stay in Hollywood. Elvis would be coming home in about a weekbut
then he would be off again in May, to make the new picture that the
Colonel and MGM had jointly announced would make Elvis Presley, by
one manner of accounting anyway, the highest-paid star in motion picture
history. For his new movie, tentatively entitled The Rock, Elvis would
get $250,000 up front plus a range of additional benefits (office, travel,
staff, not to mention the Colonel's fee for technical assistance), with 50
percent of the film's net profits assigned to Elvis on the back end. It was,
remarked Time magazine in its May account, "unheard of."
Elvis handled it all with the utmost good grace and aplomb; everyone
on the set agreed that he remained the same simple, thoughtful, almost
unnaturally controlled and polite young man you might ever hope to
meet - but there were at the same time unmistakable signs of pressure.
He blew up at Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires, who had come to Hollywood
to record with him and be in his picture, for making a record with
Tab Hunter (whose "Young Love" had just beaten out "Too Much" for
the number-one pop position) - even though he had always said the Jordanaires
were free to record with whomever they pleased. The next day
he apologized, and apologized profusely. You don't have to do that, said
Stoker, taken a little bit aback. " 'You don't have to apologize to me or to
anybody,' I told him. 'Yes, I do,' he said. I never will forget it as long as I
live. He said, 'See that man sweeping the floor right there?' We were on
the movie set. 'If I hurt his feelings, it would bug me till I went and apologized
to him. I guess I'm a weird guy.' " He supposed he was just getting
J A N U ARY-A P R I L 1 95 7 c-.. 3 9 5
antsy; h e was really beginning to miss his road trips, and h e was just looking
forward to getting back out there and working off some of this excess
energy.
At the wrap party Hal Kanter put a good deal of effort, and not a little
of his own money, into thanking a cast and crew who he felt had given
their all on this, his first picture. Due to some last-minute business involving
a two-shot with Elvis and Lizabeth Scott, he was late getting to the
party, and when he arrived he found the Colonel operating out of a booth
decorated with RCA promotional material and a banner declaring "Elvis
and the Colonel Thank You." Colonel Parker was handing out Elvis Presley
albums which had been provided by the record company and publicity
pictures of Elvis with his autograph printed on them, and he was raffling
off an RCA Victrola, giving everyone a number. "It cost me several thousand
dollars, but it turned out to be his party!" remarked Kanter. The Colonel
greeted him warmly, welcoming him to the festivities, and Kanter
was reminded once again of the book that Parker had asked him to help
write. "All I have is the title," the Colonel had told him, recapitulating a
familiar theme, "but I guarantee that it's gonna be a best-seller." What
was the title? Kanter asked, going for the bait. "It's called How Much Does
It Cost!fIt's Freer" The reason he knew it would be a best-seller, the Colonel
hastened to assure the movie director, was that RCA had guaranteed
to buy ten thousand copies of the book the moment it was published.
EL vI S S P O K E T O H I S P A R E N T S on the telephone on Saturday just
before boarding the train for home. They were both excited. They
had just seen a house, an estate, really, and they thought he would be excited
about it, too. They had made an appointment to go back to see it
again on Tuesday after he got home. He sent a telegram to June to meet
him when the train stopped in New Orleans. She went with some ambivalence
but with more of an intention to pay him back for all the hurt that
he had caused her, and when he told her that he wanted her to accompany
him to Memphis - he had a surprise that she would really love she
told him that she was engaged. He didn't believe her at first, but then
he never told her his surprise, just looked at her blankly as the train pulled
away.
Graceland turned out to be beyond his wildest expectations. Built in
1939 in Whitehaven, about eight miles south of downtown Memphis, it
3 9 6 '" L O V I N G Y O U
was written up by Ida Clemens in the Memphis Commercial Appeal in the
fall Of I940 as the new country home of Dr. and Mrs. Thomas D. Moore.
"Located well back from Highway 51 in a grove of towering oaks, it
stands proudly on land that has been in the family nearly a century.... As
you roll up the drive you sense its fine heritage from the past in its general
feeling of aristocratic kindliness and tranquillity." The facade of Tishomingo
limestone and the Corinthian columns of the entrance portico
were remarked upon. "Polished with the quiet manners characteristic of
today's beauty, the palatial home is a noteworthy example of the Georgian
colonial style" with an "air of subtle luxury that pervades the exterior
[and] seeps through the walls and penetrates every room in the
house....
" 'Our entire home is centered around music,' " Mrs. Moore told the
Commercial Appeal reporter, alluding to her fourteen-year-old daughter,
who went on to a distinguished career as harpist for the Memphis Symphony,
and proudly showing Miss Clemens around the eighteen-room
house, with its parlor that opened up for entertainment to a full seventyfive-
foot length and its beautifully planted 181,4 acres. This was what remained
of Mrs. Moore's family's almost soD-acre Hereford cattle farm
after her great-aunt Grace (for whom the house was named) sold off
much of the rest of the land for a subdivision and shopping center and
Mrs. Moore herself subsequently gave away another 4112 acres to the
Graceland Christian Church just before putting her home on the market.
Elvis got in after midnight Monday night and went out to see the estate
first thing on Tuesday with his parents and a reporter in tow. Accompanying
the family was Mrs. Virginia Grant, a young real estate agent
whom Gladys had met early in February in the parking lot of Lowenstein's
East department store. Mrs. Grant had had a number of properties
to show them, but they were leaving for California the next day and
didn't contact her again until their return. They didn't like the first house,
a sprawling ranch on seven acres, and Mrs. Grant was feeling a little bit
discouraged when Gladys said, "Don't you have anything to show us
with a Colonial home?" All of a sudden the image of Graceland, which
had only recently come on the market and which she had never been inside,
popped into her head, and though Vernon at this point thought that
he might like to move to California, Gladys prevailed upon him to look at
the property.
"This is going to be a lot nicer than Red Skelton's house when I get it
J A N UARY-A P R I L 1 9 5 7 3 9 7
like I want it," Elvis told the Press-Scimitar reporter enthusiastically after
going through the house for the first time, and before the deal was done
or a firm offer even made, everyone in Memphis knew that Elvis Presley
was going to pay $100,000 for Mrs. Moore's beautiful old southern mansion.
"We've found a house that we like very much, and we will buy it if
we can come to terms," said Vernon, ever cautious and aware that the
price was not going to come down if they did not indicate some reluctance.
Elvis was simply not one to negotiate, though. He knew how
happy the house would make his mother ("I think I am going to like this
new home," Gladys announced publicly. "We will have a lot more privacy
and a lot more room to put some of the things we have accumulated
over the last few years"), and within a week the deal was done. The price
was $102,500. Hugh Bosworth, the listing agent, took their old house at an
assigned value of $55,000 in trade, and the Presleys put down $10,000 cash
and took out a mortgage of $37,500. In fact, the only barrier to really cashing
in on the deal was the Colonel's decision that they would have to tum
down a bubble gum manufacturer's bid at a "fabulous" price to strip the
newly installed wood paneling from the house on Audubon, chop it up,
and distribute it as prizes with his bubble gum. The Colonel said this
would conflict with merchandising deals they already had in place.
Within a couple of days renovations had begun. Sam Phillips had just
moved into his new house, out east in the higher-priced Memphis suburbs,
earlier in the year, and on Sam's recommendation Elvis contacted
Sam's decorator, George Golden, a forty-three-year-old former Lipton tea
salesman with a taste for the eclectic and a flair for self-promotion. To advertise
his business, Golden had several flatbed trucks cruising around
Memphis, day and night, decked out with illuminated "three-foot-wide
miniature rooms, built to scale, complete with carpet, wallpaper and a
two-foot sofa, upholstered in chartreuse satin. That sofa with the shiny
satin really caught everyone's eye." It evidently caught Elvis' eye, or at
least the futuristic touches and bold "lush life" style that marked Sam's
house did, and he wanted something on an even grander scale for himself.
For his bedroom, he told the newspapers, he was going to have "the darkest
blue there is... with a mirror that will cover one side of the room. I
probably will have a black bedroom suite, trimmed in white leather, with
a white [llama] rug [like Sam's]." The entrance hall, he said, would be
decorated with a sky effect, with tiny lights for stars and clouds painted on
the ceiling, and he intended to build "a swimming pool on the south side
3 9 8 "'"' L O VI N G Y O U
of the house with a large sunken patio leading u p t o the pool," a six-foot
pink stone wall, purple walls with gold trim for the living and dining
rooms, and a number of other resplendent touches.
When it actually came down to it, he gave up the purple for pavilion
blue at his mother's request (her son, like most young people, she said
understandingly, liked "dark, cozy colors"), and according to Golden,
there were two priorities that asserted themselves most strongly. "One
was that he had the most beautiful bedroom in Memphis for his mother.
Number two, he wanted a soda fountain - a real soda fountain with
Cokes and an ice cream thing - so his young friends could sit and have a
soda." He had an eight-foot-square bed built for himself and a fifteen-foot
sofa custom-built for the living room, and with all the other touches that
were planned - the swimming pool, the gates with the musical motif
which Golden would have custom-made, the chicken house that Gladys
wanted, the painting that Mr. Nichols was going to have to do throughout
the house, and the structural repairs that were needed - he seemed
ready to pay as much again for the renovations as he had paid already for
the house. He just wanted it all to be ready by the summer, when he got
home from making his next movie.
For now he scarcely had time to think. He had another disturbing runin
downtown when he was accused of pulling a gun on a nineteen-yearold
Marine who claimed that he had insulted his wife. The gun turned out
to be a prop Elvis had brought back from Hollywood, Elvis had never
even met Private First Class Hershel Nixon's wife, and the whole thing
was settled in ]udge Boushe's chambers the day before he went back out
on the road, but it was beginning to seem like he couldn't go anywhere in
Memphis anymore without something happening.
On the same day as the incident with the Marine, there was an announcement
in the paper that Elvis would be returning to Tupelo for an
appearance at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair in the fall. "The fair wanted
Elvis back," the Press-Scimitar reported, "[and] offered his manager, Col.
Tom Parker, a guarantee of $10,000 for an appearance. Parker turned
[them] down. 'Elvis has been thinking about returning to Tupelo ever
since last year,' Parker said. 'He has spoken about it a number of times.
We'll come to Tupelo, but all money over actual expenses will go to build
a youth recreation center for boys in the East Tupelo section, where Elvis
grew up.' " He was excited about that, and he was excited about the upcoming
tour, too. Cliff had remained in California to try to promote his
J A N UARY-A P R I L 1 9 5 7 n.> 3 9 9
"career," and Elvis was increasingly disinclined t o take along his cousin
Junior, whose behavior was becoming more erratic - but Gene, of
course, would be with him, as always, and Arthur Hooton would be
going out again for the first time in a while, and his friend George Klein
was going to be accompanying him for the first time ever.
"I had gotten fired from WMC because they quit playing rock 'n' roll.
One night I was up at HBQ visiting Dewey, and Elvis dropped by and
said, 'What are you doing, GK?' And I said, 'Well, I got fired, Elvis: He
said, 'You want to come work for me?' I said, 'What do I do?' He said,
'Nothing: I said, 'Really, what do I -' He said, 'You're just my traveling
companion.' I said, 'Elvis, you know I'll just go along for the ride.' He just
wanted some hometown guys with him so he wouldn't get lonesome.
"Mrs. Presley always liked me, I don't really know why - she liked
my mother, too. She told me, 'George, when you go out on the road with
Elvis, he has some bad habits, so please watch him because he's my baby:
She said, 'Make sure you go through his pockets before you send his
clothes to the wash because he'll leave money in his pants. And he has a
bad habit of walking in his sleep: She told me how to handle it. She said,
'He's a very nervous young man, and when he gets up to walk in his
sleep, you talk to him real soft. And when he talks back to you, you talk
back to him real soft: "That's right, Elvis, now why don't you come back
to bed?", So then I knew how to handle it."
The first date on the tour was in Chicago on March 28. Elvis had a
press conference at the Saddle and Sirloin Club at the Stockyards Inn in
the afternoon, and that night he unveiled the $2,500 gold-leaf suit that the
Colonel had had made up for him. The idea had come from the gold cutaway
that Liberace wore in Las Vegas, and the Colonel had Nudie Cohen,
Hollywood tailor to the stars (or perhaps a certain kind of star, including
all the bespangled country and western luminaries), come out to the
movie set in his steer-horn-decorated Cadillac to measure him for it.
There were twelve thousand in attendance at the International Amphitheatre,
with a $32,000 gross, and thirteen girls passed out during the performance,
but what stood out most for the Colonel was the first time
Elvis fell to his knees like AI Jolson and left fifty dollars' worth of gold
spangles on the floor. He went up to Elvis after the show and asked him
please not to do it again. Elvis wore the suit the following night at the Kiel
Opera House, in St. Louis, which sold out for only the second time in its
history (the first was for Liberace), but after that for the most part he
400 L O V I N G Y O U
stopped wearing the suit pants, substituting dark slacks t o set off the
jacket, sometimes wearing the gold slippers and bow tie, sometimes not.
After a while he came to be embarrassed by it - it was as if he were advertising
the suit rather than the other way around.
For his part, George was having a ball. The shows themselves were
outrageous, there were bomb threats and riots, the atmosphere was
charged, and after the show there were always girls to "promote."
George served as a kind of scout and advance man ("Elvis knew I could
talk"). But after a while he was forced to carry identification with him - a
picture of Elvis and him together -just to prove he was who he said he
was. The Colonel didn't much like it, George knew; what was he going to
do about it, though? Colonel was always worrying about potential trouble,
and George tried to be careful in his selection process. He told the
girls they had nothing to worry about, it was a good bunch of guys, no
drunken orgies or wild sex scenes, but in the end who was he going to
please, Elvis or the Colonel? There was only so much the Colonel could
expect from Elvis, and the Colonel understood that, too.
"Hysterical Shrieks Greet Elvis in His GoldJacket and Shoes" read the
headline in the Detroit paper, which complained that "the trouble with
going to see Elvis Presley is that you're liable to get killed. " "Convent
Suspends Eight Elvis Fans," declared the Ottawa Citizen with reference to
the expulsion of eight girls from the Notre Dame Convent school for attending
the Ottawa show. In Philadelphia, in his first major appearance in
the Northeast, he was pelted with eggs by Villanova University students,
and in a headline that could have summed up the general journalistic reaction,
under the sarcastic banner of "Music (?) Review," the Toronto
Daily Star trumpeted, "All Too Plainly Visible Elvis Is Barely Audible."
In Canada, Oscar Davis finally made his move. Playing on the split
that had clearly grown up between Elvis and his musicians, Davis, who
was still doing all the advance work for his onetime protege but dreamt of
a day when he could once again operate on his own, approached first
Scotty and Bill, then OJ., and then the Jordanaires, about haVing him represent
them. They were not tied to the Colonel, he argued, but they were
clearly being exploited - and he could just about guarantee them that the
boy would not risk losing his entire musical troupe over a matter of a few
dollars. His importunings did not fall on deaf ears. Scotty and Bill were
more than ready to make the leap, and in the end OJ. was, too: Presley
was making millions, and they were still on s200-a-week pay when they
JA NU ARY-A P R I L 1 9 57 '" 4 0 1
were working, $Ioo-a-week retainer when they were not. In the end the
Jordanaires were the lone holdouts, but without them there was simply
not enough leverage. "He offered us a better deal than what the Colonel
had offered us," said Gordon Stoker, "but I think we more or less didn't
trust him. He was beautifully dressed, and he didn't have the bull that the
Colonel had, but he was a con artist, too. A beautiful con artist, immaculately
dressed, always sharp as a tack - but that's the reason we didn't fall
for it."
They played ten cities in ten days - big cities, far removed from their
former regional base - and the tour grossed more than $300,000 with a
commensurate sale of programs and souvenirs. It generated coverage,
controversy, and cash, and from nearly every point of view could not fail
to be accounted a success, but if anything was needed to confirm the Colonel's
growing conviction that this was a phenomenon that had orbited
out of control ("All those sweet little girls out there, they're fucking animals,"
he had told Hal Kanter), this tour served to do it. It wasn't just the
riots, egg throwing, and ridicule, nor even the concerted effort by the
Catholic Church to paint Presley as some kind of a moral pariah (in St.
Louis, Catholic schoolgirls had burned him in effigy and recited prayers
"as public reparation for excesses committed by teenagers"). It was just
too damn out of control - and it was becoming increasingly impossible
even to do the show. "Girls screamed and hundreds of flash bulbs were
discharged," reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of a typical scene, "making
the hall look as if it were under an artillery barrage. Presley clung to
the microphone standard and staggered about in a distinctive, distraught
manner, waiting for the noise to subside a bit...." He couldn't even hear
himself. Perhaps thinking of this, Gordon Stoker came to feel that he
sought protection in the group; "on some numbers he worked almost just
up in our face because he would feel more secure this way."
In Philadelphia, speaking to a group of high school newspaper reporters,
Elvis expressed suitable humility in the face of a flurry of not particularly
respectful questions ("Is it true you can't get married before you're
twenty-three - that it's in your contract?"). What were his most memorable
high school experiences? he was asked. When he didn't answer, the
reporter persisted: "Well? Didn't you have any?" What did he think of his
first movie? "It was pretty horrible. Acting's not something you learn
overnight. I knew that picture was bad when it was completed. I'm my
own worst critic. But my next picture is different. I know I done a better
4 0 2 '" L O V I N G Y O U
job in it." And what o f the future? "I just take every day a s i t comes,"
Elvis told the teenage reporter, who identified herself as Rochelle. "I
don't plan too far ahead. There'll be record albums, of course, and movies,
too. Don't know anymore; maybe I'll go back to driving a truck."
And then he was home. The work on Graceland was proceeding, but
the house wasn't close to ready and the Presleys were still living on Audubon
when Yvonne Lime came to visit the Friday of Easter weekend. The
first thing that Elvis did was to take her out to see his new home, and he
proudly showed both it and her off on Saturday as a newspaper photographer
snapped pictures. In one photograph, which went on the UP wire,
they are standing in front of the mansion holding hands, the pillars and
the portico in the background. Yvonne is wearing a striped, pajamalike
outfit and looking up adoringly at an Elvis who appears studiedly sincere.
In another shot they are clowning around, holding up a window frame in
front of them, Yvonne more animated but still wholesomely perky.
Yvonne was surprised to discover how small and cramped the house on
Audubon Drive was, she reported in Modern Screen magazine, made even
more cramped by all the furniture Elvis had bought and all the fan mail
that was boxed up on the porch. They ate meat loaf and mashed potatoes
and after dinner sat out on lawn chairs in the back. Elvis held Yvonne's
hand and Gladys' and declared that they were his "two best girls."
On Saturday night they went over to Sam's new house for a party, and
Elvis checked out the decor. Sam's wife, Becky, a DJ and big band authority
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