on WHER, was the perfect hostess; Dot and Dewey Phillips were
there; and, of course, Sam's eleven- and nine-year-old sons, Knox and
Jerry, immaculate in their Lansky's-bought clothing and carefully sculpted
DAs, hung on Elvis' every word and gesture. Elvis introduced Yvonne to
many of his old friends and acquaintances, and as the evening wore on
and it started to rain, the party gravitated to the living room, where he
began to sing spirituals and hymns. "It was a thrilling experience,"
Yvonne wrote. He sang "on and on, until day began to break and it was
Easter morning." For Dot Phillips, who had known Elvis informally ever
since her husband had played the first record, it was one of the most moving
moments of a long acquaintance. They ended up out by the pool as
the sun came up on Easter morning, with Elvis singing and Becky serving
scrambled eggs just as hard as Elvis liked them.
C O L O N E L P A R K E R, W I T H P A N S. (A L F R E D W E RT H E I M E R)
J AILHOU S E RO C K
H B W A S S T A Y I N G at the plush Beverly Wilshire, occupying
the penthouse apartment plus the Presidential Suite. Scotty
and OJ. and Bill tried it, but they didn't like it - it was too
far removed from the hustle and bustle - so they moved
back to the Knickerbocker, in the heart of downtown Hollywood. Elvis
had plenty of friends to keep him company in any case. George and Gene
and Arthur Hooton ("Arthritis") had ridden out with him on the train,
and Cliff, of course, was there to meet them when they arrived. Junior
had wanted to come, too, and Elvis had told him that he could join them
in a little while - ifhe didn't fuck up. The Colonel's brother-in-law, Bitsy
Mott, had a single just down the hall, and Colonel and Mrs. Parker were
staying on another floor. There were always girls at the soda fountain
downstairs looking for dates - pretty little starlets, beautiful girls looking
to break into the business, it was known for that reason as "the Mink
Farm" to some. It was nice.
It had been the usual long, boring train ride out. Gene and Arthur
slept most of the time, but George was excited just to be going to Hollywood.
He read lines with Elvis until he knew most of the script himself,
and they talked about a lot of things. What was success, Elvis wondered
aloud, if you couldn't share it with your friends? Part of him still couldn't
believe it was real. "One time he turned to me, and he said, 'I wonder
how the people feel, George.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'When
I went to audition for Arthur Godfrey, they told me to watch the mailbox.
Well, man, every day for two weeks I met that mailman - I couldn't
wait. And I never got a response. I wonder how they -' I said, 'Well,
Elvis, I guess they're kicking themselves in the seat of the pants.'... He
kind oflaughed about it,
.
and then he told me about a couple more gaffes,
but the thing about it was, he had so much drive, so much determination
and energy, he just knew he was going to make it and nothing was going
to stop him."
4 0 6 <-.. J A I L H O U S E R O C K
H e reported to the recording studio on Tuesday, April 30, with
Freddy, Steve Sholes, a number of other RCA officials and MGM executives,
plus the band (augmented once again by Dudley Brooks on piano)
and Thome Nogar all in attendance. It was a good, productive session,
going from 10:00 in the morning till 6:00 at night. The only thing that
made it different from previous sessions - aside from the fact that there
was no battle over using the movie studio soundstage, once the Colonel
had made it clear that there was not going to be any battle - was the presence,
and the contributions, of the film's two principal songwriters.
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had been commissioned, more or less, to
write the score. Just two years older than Elvis, but with a string of r&b
hits (including "Hound Dog") going back into their teens, they had not
exactly leapt at the opportunity. In fact, Jean Aberbach had practically had
to lock them in their New York hotel room the month before just to get
them to settle down long enough to write four songs (the other two had
then been farmed out). As hipsters of long standing and deep-seated belief,
their attitude, simply stated, was: who was this lame ofay moving in
on their territory? They had hated the job he had done on "Hound Dog";
"Love Me," the second song they gave him, was their idea of a joke; and
they hadn't been particularly impressed by the two songs of theirs that he
had recorded for Loving You either. They were scarcely prepared, then, for
the person they actually met at Radio Recorders, where Big Mama Thornton's
original version of "Hound Dog" had been cut four years earlier,
with the same songwriters present and the same recordist, Thome Nogar,
engineering.
"We thought we were the only two white kids who knew anything
about the blues," said Mike Stoller, " but he knew all kinds of stuff." "We
thought he was like an idiot savant," echoed Jerry Leiber, " but he listened
a lot. He knew all of our records. He knew Eddie 'Cleanhead' Vinson.
He loved Ray Charles' early records. And he was a workhorse in the
studio - he didn't pull any diva numbers." They fenced warily for a
while, trading enthusiasms, and Elvis and Mike sat down at the piano to
play some four-hand blues. Afterward, Jerry and Mike ran through the
title song they had written for the new picture, and Elvis smiled approvingly
at Leiber's hoarse, knowing vocal and said, "Okay, let's make it."
They got three songs on the first day, but then, on the following day,
their luck ran out. The movie studio was concerned, evidently, at the
amount of time that had been spent recording three titles, and someone
A P R I L- S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 7 '" 4 0 7
spoke to the executive in charge of production about it. As Elvis warmed
up at the piano singing spirituals with the Jordanaires ("The thing that really
surprised us was that there was no clock," said Mike Stoller. "It was
amazing -Jerry and I just weren't used to that"), the studio man prodded
Thome and asked him if he couldn't do something. Then at lunchtime,
in Gordon Stoker's recollection, he approached the Jordanaires and
told them, " 'Get him off this stuff. In fact, if he starts singing [gospel],
don't sing with him.'
"So Elvis came back from lunch and started at the piano and we didn't
sing. And he said, 'Hey, what's wrong with you guys?' And it fell to my
duty to say, 'Elvis, they told us we couldn't sing with you.' He got up and
said, 'If I want to bring you guys out here and sing the entire week of
spirituals, this is what we'll do. ' And he left, just walked out and left."
Elvis didn't come back into the studio at all on the following day, but
when he returned on Friday it was as if nothing had happened, except
that, seemingly by the tacit consent of all concerned, Leiber and Stoller
were now in charge. To Freddy Bienstock it was a logical enough progression:
"They came in because we pushed them in, and they were certainly
more talented as record producers than Steve Sholes was." And whatever
reservations Elvis might have felt, he was now completely caught up in
the enthusiasm of the moment, in Leiber's manic flood of ideas ("Elvis
thought Jerry was completely crazy," said Bienstock, "with those two
different-color eyes, one brown, one blue"), in Stoller's patient musical
coaching of Scotty and the other musicians, in the inspired lunacy that for
the moment seemed to have come back into the recording studio. "He
was completely open," said Mike Stoller. "I played piano to demonstrate
- in fact I played piano on some of the sides - and Jerry would
sing. And then we would stay on the floor while he was recording, with
Jerry sort of conducting with body English. Frequently we'd have what
we thought was a take, and he would say, 'No, let me do it again: and he
would just keep doing it. As long as he felt like doing it. Sometimes it got
better, but other times we knew we had it, and he would just enjoy himself,
and then he would say 'Let's hear it: and then, 'Yeah, that one had
it.' In many ways he was a perfectionist, and in other ways he was very
relaxed in the studio - a strange combination."
However relaxed he may have been feeling at this point, though,
there was an incident toward the end of the session that betrayed some of
the longtime tensions in the group. Bill Black was feeling increasingly
4 0 8 J A I L H O U S E R O C K
frustrated not just at the indifference with which he saw himself and
Scotty being treated but by his own difficulties in trying to learn how to
play the electric bass (the electric bass had just come into common use,
achieving almost instant adoption in all fields but bluegrass, because it
was compact, amplified, and for the precise fretting it allowed). Bill had
only recently gotten a Fender bass of his own, and he couldn't get the ominous,
rhythmic intro to Leiber and Stoller's "(You're So Square) Baby, I
Don't Care," one of the highlights of the film score. He tried it again and
again, got more and more pissed off and embarrassed by his failure, and
finally just slammed the bass down, slid it across the floor, and stormed
out of the studio, while everyone watched in disbelief. "Most artists," said
Gordon Stoker, "would have said, 'You pick that bass up and play it,
buster, that's your job: but not Elvis. You know what Elvis did? Elvis
thought it was funny. He picked it up and played it himself. He just picked
up that bass, put his foot up on my chair, and played that song all the way
through. "
They were i n the studio for more than seven hours altogether, and
when they were done they had virtually completed the entire soundtrack.
There were still overdubs to do (like the vocal for "Baby, I Don't Care"),
but they had recorded a typically witty, specially commissioned, more
than slightly cynical set of songs "mostly by Jerry Leiber and Mike
Stoller," as the film credits would declare, a set of self-contained "playlets"
of the tongue-in-cheek variety (listen to "Jailhouse Rock" sometime
if you doubt the satiric intent) that Leiber and Stoller had pioneered in
their work with the Coasters. They had done different versions for different
stages of the character's musical evolution (Vince Everett, whom
Elvis played, was, needless to say, a singer), some intentionally flat in
their affect, some with the undeniable Presley touch. It was, all in all, an
exciting enterprise and the kind of thing that could at least make the musical
interludes endurable - so long as it was necessary to make musicals
at all.
On Monday he reported to the studio for costume fitting and met
some of the cast and crew. It was a different kind of studio, and a different
kind of set, than the Loving You shoot at Paramount - MGM seemed a
little more imposing, and the set, without the presence of Hal Wallis constantly
hovering over the proceedings, a little more impersonal - but in
the end people everywhere were pretty much the same, and the similarities
were bound to outweigh the differences. Elvis was assigned the Clark
A P R I L- S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 7 '" 4 0 9
Gable dressing room, and when they drove in through the Thalberg
Gates for the first time, secretaries and executive secretaries and office
workers poured out of their offices in such numbers that security had a
real problem on the lot. Richard Thorpe, the sixty-one-year-old director, a
veteran of scores of low-budget pictures delivered on a tight schedule
from 1923 on, showed no great personal enthusiasm (he was known as a
man who refused to discuss anything to do with the film in progress over
lunch) but was cordial enough, and Elvis had little doubt that he could
win him over, whether by charm or by persistence. He was getting to
know the game. His mother had taught him these people weren't any
different than anyone else, and Colonel had certainly reinforced the
lesson.
He met his leading lady, Judy Tyler, who had played Princess Summerfall
Winterspring on the children's show Howdy Doody and had more
recently appeared as a regular on Caesar Presents, Sid Caesar's comedyvariety
hour, and in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Pipe Dream, on
the Broadway stage. Judy had just gotten married to a young actor named
Gregory Lafayette, so that eliminated any chance of anything going on
there, but he liked Judy, and he liked Mickey Shaughnessy, his costar, who
had played strong secondary roles in a number of pictures (including From
Here to Eternity) and did an imitation of Elvis in his nightclub act. He met
the choreographer, too, Alex Romero, who was already planning the big
dance sequence that was scheduled to be shot at the beginning of the following
week. Romero had a dub of the song for the sequence, "Jailhouse
Rock," and showed Elvis some of the steps that he had devised for it along
the lines of a typical Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire number.
"Elvis looked at me, and 1 looked at Elvis and Cliff," said George
Klein, who had gone to the rehearsal room with the others, "and - Alex
Romero was a really nice guy, and he said, 'Elvis, will you please try it?'
And Elvis got up to copy his steps, and, just from the first instant, you
could tell it wasn't going to work. And Elvis said, 'Man, it's not me.' So
Alex, being such a sharp guy, said, 'Have you got any of your records in
your dressing room?' And we put the records on - 'Don't Be Cruel' and
'Hound Dog' and 'All Shook Up.' And Alex said, 'Would you just show
me what you do onstage?' Well, Elvis would go along if he thought you
knew what you were doing, so he went through about three songs, and
Alex Romero said, 'I got it. See you later, Elvis. ' And Elvis said, 'What do
you mean you got it?' He said, 'Elvis, what I'm going to do is I'm going to
4 1 0 '" J A I L H O U S E R O C K
go home tonight and I'm going to take what you d o and work it into the
routine, and it's going to be you, what you normally feel comfortable
doing onstage, but I'm going to choreograph it: The next day we came
back to that same little rehearsal hall, and Alex Romero's choreographed
the scene so it looks like you're watching Elvis. He put 'Jailhouse Rock'
on and put little markings on the floor, and said, 'Elvis, just do what you
feel comfortable doing.' So Elvis whipped through it, and, man, he had it.
And then he couldn't wait to do the dance sequence!"
He liked show people. He enjoyed being back in Hollywood. It was
good running around with Nick again - there was always something
happening, and the hotel suite was like a private clubhouse where you
needed to know the secret password to get in and he got to change the
password every day.
On the weekend Nick called up his friend Russ Tamblyn, who had a
small, one-bedroom beach house on the Pacific Coast Highway just south
of Topanga Canyon, and asked if he could bring his friend Elvis over.
Tamblyn, who at twenty-two had been in the business from early childhood
on, both as an actor and as a dancer, and who saw Nick as something
of a hustler, said sure, come on out.
''I'll never forget it. I mean, no one could forget it. First, because Elvis
was so big at the time. And, second, when he came, they drove up in
three limousines, and there were Elvis and all of his cousins and hangerson
and girls - it was like fifteen or twenty people pouring out of these
limos, and then they came in. It was nuts - I thought Nick was just going
to bring Elvis over, and it ended up like twenty people came pouring into
the room. They brought in soft drinks, and I had a record on, it was aJosh
White record, that Elvis just flipped over. I can't remember the title, but it
was a weird song, it was a good one with a real low, gutty guitar sound -
I could never quite figure what it was about - and we played it about ten
times in a row until Elvis finally asked if he could borrow it. Everybody
else was sort of partying out on the porch, which was right out on the
beach, and Elvis and I were over in front of the record player, and as he
listened to the music, he started doing his dance with his knees like he
does, and I said, 'Great.' I said, 'Throw those knees.' I guess just being a
dancer, I could see where a couple of suggestions might help, so I said,
Throw those knees out more: So I showed him, and he said, 'What did
you do? Show me again: So the music was on, and we were standing
there dancing in front of the record player, and I remember a girlfriend I
A P R I L- S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 7 '" 4 1 1
had at that time was coming over that night and she told me later she
came in and she couldn't believe it, 'There you were dancing with Elvis!'
But he was really interested. It wasn't that I technically knew that much,
but I was a street dancer, and I understood what he was doing, and I could
see right away where with little exaggerated movements it would look
better - it would just put it on another level and make it a little stronger,
and he got some of that in Jailhouse Rock. "
Principal shooting started the following Monday, May 13, and began
with the dance sequence that Alex Romero had worked on with Elvis the
previous week. The set was a skeletal scaffolding with barred doors suggesting
cells on two levels. There was a fireman's pole for the inmates on
the upper level to slide down, and a cast of professional dancers was outlined
in silhouette behind bars at the start of the number. The dancers
then swing out on the cell doors in their striped prison shirts and whitestitched
denims and jackets. Miming the song's story line, they escape,
only to return in the end to their cells, because the party that the warden
has thrown - the "Jailhouse Rock" of the title - is so much fun that who
would ever want to leave? Elvis flung himself into the number with utter
abandon ("He couldn't wait to do it," said George Klein), so much abandon,
in fact, that on Tuesday he swallowed one of the temporary caps for
his teeth as he was sliding down a pole. He told the assistant director, Bob
Relyea, that he thought he could feel something rattling around in his
chest, and Relyea called a doctor to the set, but after examining him the
doctor reassured Elvis and Relyea that it was just Elvis' imagination, no
more than a scratch. "So now we get the entire crew and all the dancers
down on their hands and knees looking for the [cap], 'cause it's very very
small and it must be on the floor someplace, and we decide it's all in his
mind. About an hour later he comes up after a take and says to me, 'You
know that scratch that I think I feel? It's moved. It's over to the left now.'
And I said, 'No, no, it's all in your mind.' So about an hour later, after a
take he came up and said, 'Ah, it's in my mind? Listen to this.' And then,
when he was breathing, you could hear a whistling sound!"
Elvis called George Klein from the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. It
turned out that he had aspirated the cap, which had lodged in his lung, so
the next day a surgeon went in and got it out. Oddly enough, there was a
scene just like this in the movie, where Vince Everett, the character Elvis
played, is punched in the throat by his former cellmate, Hunk Hogan, and
everyone is gathered around him toward the end of the picture anxiously
4 I 2 '" J A I L H O U S E R O C K
waiting t o see if he will ever sing again. I n this case, according to Relyea,
the scene in the recovery room was not much different, with Colonel
Parker present and the doctor coming in to announce that everything was
fine. " 'We got it: he said, 'we just had to, we had to part the vocal cords
and put the tool through and get in the lung.' And he said, 'Then the dam
thing broke in two, and we had to get one piece out and then - it's like
arthroscopic surgery - get the other piece out.' When he got to the part
about separating the vocal cords to put the instrument through, it got
Colonel Parker's attention!"
Elvis was a little hoarse for a couple of days, and when he got back on
the set he ran into Russ Tamblyn, who was getting ready to go out on
location for Peyton Place. "I remember they were rehearsing, and I
watched a little bit. When he got done with what he was doing, he came
over and got me and said, 'I want to show you something.' And he took
me back to his dressing room, and we went inside and he shut the door
and said, Tve been working on this: and he started going into this dance,
and sure enough he had really gotten his knees out further and gotten his
elbows back and was doing more with his arms. He wanted to show me
how he had been practicing, but he didn't want anybody else to see. "
Meanwhile the retinue had grown by the addition of one. Lamar
Pike, who had been hanging around with George and Cliff in Memphis
the previous fall in hopes of an introduction, was down in Texas visiting
his mother when he read in the newspaper that Elvis was in the hospital.
He had been calling George regularly for the past couple of weeks suggesting
that he might like to come out, and George had been telling him
things were kind of tight, everybody was busy, "in other words I didn't
want to be responsible for him." At this point Lamar took matters into
his own hands, jumped into his '56 Chevy, and drove straight to the Beverly
Wilshire, without asking permission of anybody. When he showed
up, all three hundred pounds of him in chartreuse shorts and yellow
cowboy boots, George wasn't there, but according to his understanding,
Cliff met Lamar at the door. "He went into his con, and Cliff went into
his con, and Lamar said, 'Man, can I come in?' And Cliff said, 'Man, it's
kind of tight. I mean, Elvis is real particular here in Hollywood.' So, finally,
Cliff goes and tells Elvis, he says, 'Elvis, there's a guy here from
Memphis. He's hung out with me and George, and he's kind of jolly and
he's kind of funny and he drove all the way from Texas. Can he come in
tonight and party with us?' So Elvis said yeah, and Lamar made an imA
P R I L- S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 7 4 1 3
pression like h e always does and that's how he worked his way into the
group."
ON C E T H E D A N C E S E Q U E N C E was finished, the picture moved
along at a brisk pace. There were none of the relatively complicated
setups of Loving You, and Richard Thorpe worked fast anyway. For
George, just being on the lot was like a fantasy come true. "Cliff, Arthur,
and I were on the payroll now - of course Gene was already on the payroll.
I'll never forget, he said, 'I'll pay all you guys' expenses, if you need
any money you know you can always come to me. But Colonel says
we're making a movie so I've got to put you on salary for tax purposes.'
So he put us on salary at fifty dollars a week. Gene and Cliff and Arthur,
they'd get bored on the set and would just lay down and go to sleep in the
dressing room, but I was all over that lot like crazy, I didn't want to miss a
thing. The first day we got there Glenn Ford was there, he'd just finished
a picture for MGM. And he was talking to Elvis, he was telling Elvis something
- he was a real nice guy - and he was going through these motions
just like he did in movies, and I said, 'God, he acts just like he does in
the movies, Elvis!' And Elvis says, 'Shut up, shut up.' He didn't want me
to sound like I was starstruck, but me and Cliff were, you know.
"Whenever there was a break in the action, I'd jump off this soundstage
and run over to another soundstage and watch Yul Brynner work or
John Ford or Kim Novak - she was unloading some stuff from her car,
and I told Cliff, I said, 'Shit, I'm going to go over and talk to her. She
might not say a word to me, but I got to talk to Kim Novak!' I remember,
they were making Saddle the Wind with Robert Taylor and Julie London,
and one day I go over to the set ' cause Anne Francis was on the set and I
wanted to see what she looked like. So I'm on the set standing in the background
watching - it was an open set - and Vince Edwards walks over
to me and starts talking. He said, 'Hey, man, ain't you with Presley?'
'Cause I guess everybody on the lot noticed who was with Elvis. And I
said, 'Yeah,' and he introduced himself, and we start talking and he said,
'Man, I'm a big fan.' Now he was just starting out in Hollywood, but he'd
been a big swimming champion at Ohio State, and he said, 'You want to
meet Anne Francis?' And I said, 'Sure.' So when they took a break, he said,
'This is Elvis' buddy.' And he said, 'I'd like to meet Elvis,' so I said, 'Come
over to the set.' Well, Vince came over, and immediately Cliff liked him
4 1 4 J A I L H O U S E R O C K
and Elvis liked him and I liked him, so Elvis invited him up to the Beverly
Wilshire and he started coming every now and then. "
Edwards became a regular member of the group, and he introduced
them to an actor named Billy Murphy, who had been in Sands oflwo Jima
with John Wayne, and to Sammy Davis, Jr., too, who came up one night
and scared the hell out of Elvis with his impression of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde. Murphy was a Hollywood character, a few years older than the
others, who walked up and down Hollywood Boulevard dressed in
black - black pants, black shirt, black hat, black gloves - and carrying an
unproduced screenplay that he had written about Billy the Kid in a bold,
illegible script. "Elvis was just infatuated with him, " according to George,
"we all were, because he was just so colorful and interesting. Some directors
were scared of him, I think, because he was very physical, even
threatened one or two of them. He was friends with Robert Mitchum and
Rory Calhoun on a first-name basis, he had a certain way of walking, kind
of like Mitchum, and he had a pet phrase that we all picked up: 'You bet
your life, mister, and you may have to.' It came out of an old Clark Gable
movie, really, but we picked it up from Murphy. Nick Adams would tell
us wild stories about him. I think he just became a little too erratic for
Hollywood. "
Mitchum himself stopped by one afternoon, because he wanted Elvis
to play the part of his brother in the upcoming production of Thunder
Road, a moonshiner's tale which he was producing and for which he had
written the story. Elvis was thrilled at the visit, and at the offer Mitchum
had gotten him "all shook up," he told Russ Tamblyn, who arrived
just after Mitchum's departure - and listened enthralled to
Mitchum's real-life tales of growing up hard in the South and doing time
on a Georgia chain gang.
In the evenings they would go to the movies sometimes, the whole
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