gang of them; it was, according to Vince Edwards, like "The Clan of Elvis
Presley," with the limos pulling out of the Beverly Wilshire full of cousins
and kin. "When we got to the theater," said Russ Tamblyn, "we all got
out and bought our tickets and formed a line. Now by this time a crowd
has formed, you know, they'd see all these strange-looking characters get
out of the cars and wonder, who the hell is this, so if there wasn't a problem
before, there is now. Anyway, there would be two lines right up to
the ticket taker, and Elvis would be the last one, or if he had a girlfriend,
the girlfriend would come out with him, and Elvis would go right beA
P R I L- S E P TE M B E R 1 9 5 7 4 1 5
tween the two lines, and everybody would b e s o blown away they'd just
move back. I always thought Elvis loved the entourage, and he loved
playing the part - he seemed to have an instinct for entrances."
They went out to Russ' beach house one or two more times, and with
Russ on the verge ofleaving to shoot his new movie in Maine, Elvis asked
if he could rent it for the next couple of months. He was still seeing
Yvonne Lime occasionally, but he was dating Anne Neyland, a former
Miss Texas whom he had met on the MGM lot, and Venetia Stevenson,
too, when a rumor that he was about to marry Yvonne in Acapulco broke
at the end of May. "When I get married," he told the press, after the Colonel's
official denials, "it'll be no secret. I'll get married in my hometown
of Memphis, and the whole town' II be there."
He wasn't really serious about anyone for the time being, though. He
was enjoying the single life, and when he got bored he just had to tell the
guys to hunt up some girls in the lobby of the hotel. He would have them
brought up to the suite, offered one observer, "and Elvis would go in the
other room, he'd go in the bedroom or somewhere, and then when they
came back with the girls, the girls would sit there for maybe ten or fifteen
minutes, and finally one of the cousins would go in the bedroom and
come out himself and another ten minutes would go by - and then in
would come Elvis. And there would be like a silence, and then the cousins
would say, 'Oh, Mary Jane, this is Elvis: and the girls would be totally
gone." For the more experienced girls it wasn't like with other Hollywood
stars or even with other more sophisticated boys they knew. They
offered to do things for him, but he wasn't really interested. What he
liked to do was to lie in bed and watch television and eat and talk all
night - the companionship seemed as important for him as the sex and
then in the early-morning hours they would make love. "He had an
innocence at that time," said one of them. 'Tm sure it didn't last. But
what he really wanted was to have a relationship, to have company. He
was very clean-cut about it. There were a lot of things that he didn't like.
And another thing that you could not do around him was mention drugs,
he was dead set against it. There was a lot of grass around in Hollywood
at that time, and what the cousins said was, 'If you got any dope, don't
bring it out around Elvis.' If anyone wanted to tum on, they had to go
away and not do it around Elvis."
In a wholly unlikely tum of events, one of the newcomers to the scene
was songwriter Mike Stoller. Stoller had gotten a part in the movie when
4 I 6 '" J A I L H O U S E R O C K
Jerry Leiber, who, in the eyes of the film's casting director, looked more
like a piano player than his piano-playing partner, begged off film work
for a dentist's appointment. Stoller shaved off his goatee to play the part,
looking exceedingly uncomfortable on-screen without it. He found film
work boring but, to his surprise, enjoyed the opportunity it gave him to
get to know Presley a little better. "He was very comfortable in the recording
studio, but not so much on the set. I remember one time a couple
of extras were sitting around, and I witnessed this whole thing - these
two guys were playing cards and talking about their families, you know,
the baby, the car payments, that kind of stuff. And one of them said something
to the other, and they started laughing. Elvis came through at that
moment, and he turned around and zap, right on them, and he said, 'Boy,
you think you're so hot, huh?' They didn't know what he was talking
about, and he was already in a sense omnipotent - but he thought they
were laughing at him.
"I know he was very insecure, and I think that he used the Colonel in
this as protection in a different way than the Colonel was using him. My
own feeling was that he felt comfortable surrounded by his friends, and I
think that also worked to the Colonel's idea of keeping him exclusive,
keeping him isolated and insulated so that no one could get to him and he
could never become too commonplace. I felt a little sorry for him because
he didn't have a shot at becoming a whole person: in twenty minutes he
would go from being arrogant and high-handed to frightened. He would
order people about, and the next minute he would be saying, 'Can I get
you a sandwich? Do you want some pie?'
"I used to hang out in the dressing room with the entourage, and one
day we were horsing around, and Elvis said, 'You know, Mike, I'd really
like you to write a ballad, a real pretty ballad, for me: and that weekJerry
and I wrote a song called 'Don't: and we made a demo of it up at Hollywood
Recorders with [rhythm and blues singer] Young Jessie singing, and
I came back to the set and gave him the record and he loved it and eventually
recorded it. But we caught hell for not going through the proper
channels. I was supposed to tell Jean and Julian [Aberbach] and to play it
for Freddy - and then Freddy was supposed to play it for Elvis. The Colonel
was very upset - it was supposed to work the way it always worked,
they didn't want any loose cannons around.
"One day after the shooting he invited me up to the hotel - I think
we had a Coke downstairs, and then we went up to his suite on the top
A P R I L -S E P T E M B E R I 9 5 7 n.,. 4 1 7
floor. And we went in and shot some pool and ate some peanuts, and
we're kidding around and talking about songs and music, and then the
Colonel came in and it was like a scattering of birds: they all flew away. I
was in the middle of a pool shot and looked up and nobody was there.
When Elvis came back, he looked terrible. He said, 'Mike, the Colonel's
all upset because you're here, and I guess you gotta go.' I said it was all
right and took off. They just didn't want anybody around, especially a
songwriter - it was okay to work with him in a controlled area, but to be
able to get to him and perhaps influence him, present him with a song.
... That was the kind of control the Colonel had."
"I don't feel like I'm property," Elvis told columnist Joe Hyams, while
lunching alone in his dressing room on a bowl of gravy, a bowl of mashed
potatoes, nine slices of well-done bacon, two pints of milk, a large glass of
tomato juice, lettuce salad, six slices of bread, and four pats of butter. "I
can't get it into my head that I'm property. People tell me you can't do
this or that," he went on, "but I don't listen to them. I do what I want. I
can't change, and I won't change." He was a hard worker, he said, he had
worked hard all his life, and even though he got lonely as hell sometimes
("A lot of times I feel miserable, don't know whichaway to turn"), he still
loved every minute of it. "If I had to drop it all I could do it, but I
wouldn't like it." And what about the Colonel? Hyams asked. ''I've got an
idea of how to handle me better than anyone else has as far as keeping me
in line," said Elvis. "Colonel Parker is more or less like a daddy when I'm
away from my own folks. He doesn't meddle in my affairs. Ain't nobody
can tell me 'you do this or that.' Colonel Parker knows the business and I
don't. He never butts into record sessions, I don't butt into business. Nobody
can tell you how to run your life."
He studied the daily rushes religiously every night. He was still dead
set against acting lessons - it was like the difference between an opera
singer and a singer who sang from the heart, he explained to George
Klein; formal study might rob him of his spontaneity. But, as a great believer
in self-improvement and self-education, he never left the studio at
night without carefully scrutinizing his performance. "I always criticize
myself in films," he told an interviewer a few months later. ''I'm always
striving to be natural in front of a camera. That takes studying, of a sort."
He was serious about it, and he felt like he was getting somewhere.
Mr. Thorpe wasn't very approachable, but he sought tips wherever he
could get them, asking assistant director Bob Relyea for suggestions,
4 1 8 ", J A I L H O U S E R O C K
thanking character actor Glenn Strange for his patience in a difficult
scene. "He interacted with everybody," said Relyea. "One of the first
days we were shooting a scene, and we were held up - and one of the
crew just said, 'Well, we should have a song.' So he got his guitar out and
played a song. It wasn't any, 'No, no, I don't do that, uh, don't embarrass
me.' He just said, 'Give me my guitar!' He had all these qualities that you
knew that he could succeed at whatever he wanted to do. He probably
would have been good as a schoolteacher, he would have been a good
mechanic. He was so dedicated and focused, he knew what it was about:
he knew what tomorrow's work was going to be."
It was into this volatile mix of work and play, of desperate deal making
and disingenuous denial, that Dewey stepped when he arrived for a
Hollywood vacation several weeks into filming. He was all excited about
the trip, which Elvis had even offered to pay for because, Bob Johnson
wrote in the Press-Scimitar, "he wanted Dewey to spend a lot of time with
him, and to watch him at work at MGM.... He didn't put him in with the
other fenows, but put Dewey up in a room in his own personal suite....
Elvis took Dewey to his dentist and spent about $400 getting Dewey some
of those fancy porcelain caps just like Elvis' for his teeth. He took him
around to the various studios and stars' homes, proud of his strange friend
from Memphis."
Unfortunately, "strange" appeared to be the operative word. Dewey,
as Scotty said, "acted just the way he did around Memphis. Of course everyone
in Memphis knew him, but out there he was just out of his
league." He showed up on the set on the first day, got bored, and left after
fifteen minutes. He got thrown off another set for taking pictures. Elvis
took him over to the soundstage where they were making The Brothers
Karamazov and introduced him to Yul Brynner, whereupon Dewey spontaneously
observed, "You're a short little mother, aren't you?" and Elvis,
mortified, apologized for his friend. "It was a star-crossed situation," observed
George Klein. "Elvis loved Dewey for what he'd done for him, but
by the same token he was embarrassed by what Dewey was doing in Hollywood.
We went to see Sammy Davis, Jr., at the Moulin Rouge, and they
introduced Elvis, and Dewey jumped up between Elvis and the spotlight
and said, 'Dewey Phillips, Memphis, Tennessee: and there's Elvis standing
up to take a bow. We didn't get mad. We just said, 'That's crazy
Dewey.' I mean, Elvis knew how Dewey was."
A P R I L-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 7 '" 4 1 9
Before he left, Elvis played him a dub of his new single, "Teddy Bear,"
from Loving You, and Dewey flipped over it, it was a damn hit, he said and
asked to hear it again. When he got on the plane, according to Dewey's
report to Bob Johnson, "we even shed a few tears. I told him r d never be
able to repay him for all the nice things he'd done for me. His last words
to me were, 'Phillips, be sure and say a prayer before you get on that
plane.' "
Unfortunately Dewey had taken some stowaway luggage on board:
against Elvis' explicit instructions, he had appropriated a copy of the new
single, which was not due for release until June II and which, against all
protocol and advice, he played on the air immediately upon his return.
The Victor people were furious, the Colonel was furious - it only vindicated
what he had been saying about Elvis' Memphis friends all along and
Elvis was furious, too. The headline in the Press-Scimitar was "These
Reports True - Elvis and Dewey Had a Falling Out."
In the meantime shooting on the movie was rapidly coming to an end.
When it was finished, it offered a neat little parable in black and white on
the debilitating effects of fame (Vince Everett turned bigheaded before
fate intervened) and the discrepancy that could exist between a truculent
and much-criticized exterior and the essential sweetness that might lie underneath.
It was a point Elvis had been arguing by deed, if not by word,
for years, and one to which he clearly took, in a performance that marked
an even further advance over the significant progress shown in Loving
You. You couldn't really say that he had achieved an acting style, because
in each scene he was a little different: there were traces, of course, of
Dean and Brando - Brando particularly in the penitentiary scene where
Elvis was flogged and registered silent suffering while naked to the
waist - but, not surprisingly, the most striking resemblance was to a
young Robert Mitchum, or perhaps it was Billy Murphy he was thinking
of. In any case, it was a most creditable performance, and one of which
Elvis could be proud as he departed for home at the end ofJune.
The train ride home was relatively uneventful, though it might have
been less boring for Elvis if he had been aware of the behavior of his increasingly
erratic cousin Junior Smith. Junior bunked with George, because
at this point no one else could stand him. "He was drinking a lot,
and when he'd get drunk he'd get mean. And he smoked in bed at night,
and everyone was afraid he'd set the cabin on fire. So Elvis said, 'George,
4 2 0 '" J A I L H O U S E R O C K
do you mind if Junior stays with you?' And I said no, because for some
reason Junior and I hit it off, we'd kid around and tell old stories and it
was fine. Well, this particular night he'd had a few drinks and he gets up
and starts packing his bag, and it's about three-thirty in the morning, and I
said, 'Junior, where in the shit are you going?' And he said, 'I'm getting off
this fucking train. ' I said, 'Junior, what are you going to do?' He packed
his bag, and I said, 'Man, don't wake up Elvis, Junior.' He said, 'I ain't
gonna wake up Cuz.' So he pulls that fucking cord that stops the train,
and the conductor comes running down to our little booth, and Junior
says, 'Stop this motherfucker, I want to get off. ' And I started talking to
him, and the conductor started talking to him, and we finally calmed him
down and got him back to bed."
Elvis couldn't wait to get home to see the renovations and stay overnight
at Graceland with his parents, who had already moved in. So impatient
was he that, after trying to get June to meet him in New Orleans, only
to find out that she had been married on June I, he got off the train in
Lafayette, Louisiana, rented a car with Cliff, and drove the rest of the way
home. "When we got there, the wall, the limestone wall, was not finished,
and the gate was not up, and these little sticks guided you up the driveway
with these orange markers because the asphalt was not fixed yet. Well, we
made the little curve, got out, and went up to the door, and he stopped -
it was about eleven-thirty at night, and he says, 'Well, Cliff, here goes.' He
opened the door, and there was a little foyer there, and he went in, and,
standing under the chandelier in the extended part of the foyer, were his
mother and father. And she said, 'Welcome home, son.' And we talked for
most of the night. It was not the excitement you might expect. Not, you
know, 'Hey, we made it. We're on top of the world.' That never came out
of that family - it was against their nature. They just talked. 'It's nice.'
'They've done a good job.' Elvis' father explained to him, 'We've still got
to do this or that... I think this man here charged a little too much. I think
we ought to change this guy, get another contractor...' That kind of talk."
Had they completed the hog pens and chicken coop out back? Elvis wondered.
Elvis' mother told him she had put in the garden.
TH E R E W A S N O T H I N G P L A N N E D, there was nothing that he had to
do, there was nowhere that he needed to be. "Teddy Bear" and
"Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On," the new song that Sam had put out on
A P R I L -S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 7 4 2 1
Jerry Lee Lewis, were vying for number one, "Love Letters in the Sand"
was still going good for Pat Boone, seventeen-year-old Ricky Nelson was
doing all right with his first record, and he liked Tommy Sands, too "
There's plenty of room for all of us," he reassured his friends when they
started running down one artist or another, though he didn't ever want to
be taken for granted, either. The world premiere of Loving You was scheduled
to be held in Memphis on July 9 at the Strand Theatre on South
Main, and he was planning to attend. In the meantime he wanted to make
sure that everything at Graceland was just right. He had heard that geese
were good for keeping down a lawn, so he took one of the Cadillacs,
drove it down to Mississippi, and filled up the backseat with sixteen geese,
which, not surprisingly, left a substantial deposit. Another time he took
over from Vernon on the driving mower, heading straight for his
mother's tulip bed. He was just fooling around, but then his mother
started to yell, "Elvis, Elvis, don't!" and a look of panic came over her
face, which only added to the temptation. Tulips flew everywhere, and
his mother eventually started laughing, too, but Mr. Presley was worried
that he was going to be blamed.
Then on the night of July 3 he heard that Judy Tyler had been killed
with her husband in an automobile crash out west. She had played the
record company girl who became his manager and love interest in Jailhouse
Rock, and he was devastated. He showed up at George's house with
Arthur at 10:00 the following morning, an unheard-of hour. "I was still
living across from Humes with my mother, and she came into the bedroom
and said, 'Elvis is at the door.' I said, 'No, Mom, Elvis is not at the
door.' He was real serious, so I said, 'What's wrong, man?' but he just
wanted to take a ride. So we got in the car and he said, 'Hey, man, Judy
got killed.' So we drove around for a while and he explained it to me, he
just felt so bad."
He was determined to go to the funeral, he told the newspapers later
in the day, even if it meant missing the premiere. "She was at the peak of
success," he said, fighting back tears. "Nothing has hurt me as bad in my
life.... I remember the last night I saw them. They were leaving on a trip.
Even remember what she was wearing." He didn't know ifhe could stand
to look at the movie now, he said. "I just don't believe I can." In the end
he didn't attend the funeral. It was his mother, not the Colonel, who told
the papers a couple of days later that he would just send flowers, he didn't
want to disrupt the service.
422 '" J A I L H O U S E R O C K
That Sunday h e met a girl h e had been seeing on TV ever since getting
home. Anita Wood was nineteen, a beauty-contest winner, blond,
pert, and talented, who had been appearing with Wink Martindale on the
Top Ten Dance Party on WHBQ for the past few months. She was from
Jackson, Tennessee, originally, like Wink, and Cliff knew her from there,
while George knew her through Wink. Elvis had George check the situation
out, and when George came back and said she'd like to meet him, he
had George call her up. The first time she was busy, and when she had to
decline a second time, she thought he would never call again, but the
third time George called she was free. They drove by the Strand to see the
cutout of Elvis that the theater had put out in anticipation of the movie
opening in two days. George and Cliff were in the backseat, and Lamar,
too, and they went out for hamburgers at Chenault's afterward. Then he
gave her a tour of his new home and its grounds: the swimming pool, the
six cars, his collection of teddy bears, from which he lightheartedly selected
one as a gift. He showed her his bedroom, but she told him she
didn't feel comfortable there, so they went back downstairs and spent the
rest of the evening talking and playing records and singing at the piano. At
the end of the night he took her home to the room she rented in Mrs. J. R.
Patty's house, and they chastely kissed good-night.
After that they kept almost constant company. Elvis didn't attend the
Loving You premiere, which set box office records in Memphis and, a few
weeks later, across the country, but he took Anita and his parents to a
special midnight showing, which they all enjoyed. During the day they
frequently drove around in an old panel truck that guaranteed anonymity,
as Elvis showed her all the places that meant something to him in his
life. He was painstaking, almost compulsive, about pointing out to her
the route he had walked to the store, where he had played as a child,
where his friends and cousins lived, the places where he had worked and
played. He dreaded going into the army, he told her, and started calling
her "Little" because of the size of her feet. Sometimes he would talk
baby talk to her the same as he would talk to his mother. It was all very
down-to-earth and flattering, too, if only for the way he simply adored
her. He didn't play the big star, he was just like a boy that you would
meet and fall in love with and then expect to marry - and his family
was so welcoming, too. "I just can't wait," Gladys told her, not long
after Anita had become a regular fixture, "to see that little 01' baby walkA
P R I L- S E P T E M B E R 1 9 57 '" 423
ing Up and down the driveway." She had been sick a lot lately and
stayed up in her room. "She had a heart problem, I think, and she was
overweight with fluid - her ankles and her legs would swell a lot....
She never ceased to worry about Elvis."
They drove all around on his motorcycle and went horseback riding
and played badminton out on the lawn. There was a special dining room
reserved for them in the back room at Chenault's Drive-in; they went out
to McKellar Lake on occasion or to the Fairgrounds to ride the Dodgems
and the Pippin, the oldest operating wooden roller-coaster ride in the
country. The guys were with them almost constantly, George or Cliff,
Lamar, Arthur, the cousins. Once in a while Elvis would run into one of
his old friends and invite him up to the house. Buzzy Forbess from the
Courts came by one evening, and Elvis surprised him by fooling around
with a classical harp he had just bought, but to Buzzy there were just too
many people sitting around holding out their hands, and the atmosphere
was kind of forced, so he didn't go back for a while. George Klein brought
around a friend named Alan Fortas, who had been an All-City tackle at
Central High, then went on to Vanderbilt University and Southwestern
before dropping out and going to work at his father's junkyard. George,
who knew him through the temple and a number of other Jewish organizations,
needed a ride out to Graceland one night.
"George didn't drive, he was one of the few people who didn't, so he
asked me if I'd like to go out to meet Elvis. Of course I was an Elvis fan, I
had seen him in a couple of shows at the Overton Park Shell and Russwood
Park, and I had been out to the Eagle's Nest. So I said, 'Man, I'd
love to: and I picked George up, and we went out there and, of course,
Elvis was a big football fan and he remembered me from high school and
showed me all around the house. Well, I left after a couple of hours, I
didn't want to overstay my welcome, and when I left, he said, 'Well, I'll
see you again, Alan.' So a couple of nights later George called and said,
'Elvis asked about you and wanted to know why you hadn't been back.'
'Well: I said, 'I didn't want to press my luck.' He said, 'Oh, he liked talking
to you. Come back out.' So I went out, and when I left that night, he
said, 'I'll see you tomorrow night.' One thing led to another, and every
night I left he said, 'I'll see you tomorrow night, Alan.' "
Elvis seemed to really take to him. Before long he started calling him
"Hog Ears," just as he called Lamar "Mr. Bull" and George "GK. " It was
424 '" J A I L H O U S E R O C K
cool going out to Graceland - you never knew what was going to happen.
Where else were you going to find donkeys in the swimming pool
(courtesy of Colonel Parker) and peacocks on the lawn? As the summer
wore on, Elvis started renting out the Fairgrounds through a friend of
George's named Wimpy Adams, and they would have it to themselves
from midnight till sunrise. They rented out the Rainbow Rollerdrome,
too, from Joe and Doris Pieraccini, and had skating parties where the guys
put on knee and elbow pads and divided up into teams, playing rough
games of tag and roller derby, with one of the cousins acting as referee.
One night, Alan recalled in his memoir of that time, Elvis was "more
keyed up than usual" when they piled in the car to go home.
Lamar and I climbed in the front seat, and Elvis and Anita sat in the
back. We were just tooling along, when all of a sudden Anita announced
in a loud voice, "My cunt hurts!" What? My mouth dropped
down to my ankles. Maybe I misunderstood. I cleared my throat,
Lamar did the same, and we drove on a little farther. Then Anita
burst out again. "Did y'all hear me? I said, 'My cunt really hurts!' "
... It wasn't until we got back to Graceland that I found out that Elvis
had told Anita the whopping lie that "my cunt hurts" is a Hollywood
expression for "my rear's sore." And every time she yelled it out, it
was only because Elvis nudged her.... She had no idea what it
meant.
Alan didn't think much of the cousins and the uncles and the aunts they
were, he wrote, "an odd lot.... Sometimes I'd talk to Gene and it
was almost like talking to a retarded person. I didn't know ifhe was acting
or whether he was really that dumb." Mostly they just had a helluva time,
though. They went everywhere and they did everything on the slightest
whim. The only place they didn't go was to the Hotel Chisca. Ever since
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