over school integration, and there was..even a story with a Memphis dateline
about white students from still segregated Humes High School jeering
at Negro students on their way to nearby Manassas, but in Tupelo, the
paper noted on the front page, while the annual 4-H Club style show
would be held in front of the grandstand, "the Negro junior Jersey show
will start at 10 A. M. in the Negro section of the fairgrounds."
Mr. Savery, the fair manager, had them all over to dinner, and Jack
Cristil from WELO spent as much time interviewing Anita as he did Elvis.
A P R I L-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 7 '" 435
Did they have marriage plans? the reporters all shouted at him at the press
conference in the tent before the performance. "I haven't found the girl
yet," he said, staring straight at Anita with a look meant just for her. After
a slow advance sale, the grandstand was filled to capacity; the band with
Nashville's Hank "Sugarfoot" Garland on guitar and Chuck Wiginton,
a friend of D.J.' s from Dallas, on bass - sounded tight; Colonel made
sure that they put up a big banner announcing that Jailhouse Rock was
coming soon; and he worked the crowd, and himself, up into the usual
frenzy. But somehow it wasn't the same. It didn't feel right, he told OJ.
afterward. Garland was a helluva guitarist, but you could tell the difference
on "Don't Be Cruel"; Garland could really play, but he didn't hit that
intro the way that Scotty did.
A feeling of melancholy had stolen over him, as if, somehow, it was all
coming to an end. He felt badly let down by Scotty and Bill - he didn't
understand why they had done this to him. And even though things were
back to normal with Dewey as of last week, he wasn't sure they could
ever really be the same again. He had stopped by Sun, but things were
different there, too, with Marion gone. She and Sam had had a big fight,
and she had gone off and enlisted in the air force. The draft was hanging
like a dark cloud over his head. Every day there were stories in the paper
about it, and reporters wanted to know what he was going to do.
The week after the Tupelo homecoming, he decided to take them
back. Scotty and Bill played a miserable two-week engagement at the Dallas
State Fair and then formalized the arrangement, with everyone swallowing
his pride a little and the Blue Moon Boys returning on a per diem
basis. There were no hard feelings, Scotty said. It was a matter of money
all along. For Elvis, though, it would have been hard to say what it was
exactly. One day he heard "Jailhouse Rock" on the radio and declared,
"Elvis Presley and his one-man band," with a rueful shake of his head. It
seemed like everything was plunging headlong forward, and he didn't
know how to hold it back.
P O RT R A I T. (A L F R E D W E R T H E I M E R)
WALKI N G I N A D REAM
H
ERE. REA D T H I S I " said a reporter, shoving a magazine article
into Elvis' hands. "Rock 'n' roll smells phony and false,"
declared Frank Sinatra in the story's text. "It is sung, played,
and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by
means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty
lyrics... it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent
on the face of the earth.... [It] is the most brutal, ugly, desperate,
vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear."
And what was Elvis Presley's response to that? he was asked, standing
in front of a roomful of reporters. It was an hour before his October 28
performance at the Pan Pacific Auditorium, which would mark his Hollywood
debut. "I admire the man," said Elvis. "He has a right to say what
he wants to say. He is a great success and a fine actor, but I think he
shouldn't have said it. He's mistaken about this. This is a trend, just the
same as he faced when he started years ago. I consider it the greatest in
music," Elvis added mischievously, throwing the reporters a little off balance.
"It is very noteworthy - and namely because it is the only thing I
can do...."
"Is that all you have to say?"
"You can't knock success," declared Elvis and went on to answer
questions about his income, his sideburns, his draft status, and any plans
he might have for marriage, before taking the stage in gold jacket and
dress pants at 8:15.
He was determined to impress his celebrity-studded audience, and he
did. In front of a sold-out, paid attendance of more than nine thousand (at
the Colonel's insistence, even Hal Wallis was required to buy his own
ticket), he flung himself about, "wiggled, bumped, twisted," and at the
conclusion of the fifty-minute performance rolled around on the floor
with Nipper in a manner longtime critic Jack O'Brian of the New York
4 3 8 W A L K I N G I N A D R E A M
Journal-American declared "far too indecent t o mention in every detail."
The audience went wild, but the newspapers took a somewhat dimmer
view. "Elvis Presley Will Have to Clean Up His Show - Or Go to
Jail," declared one headline, while O'Brian characterized the music as "a
terrible popular twist on darkest Africa's fertility tom-tom displays" and
Los Angeles Mirror-News entertainment editor Dick Williams noted: "If any
further proof were needed that what Elvis offers is not basically music but
a sex show, it was proved last night." His performance, wrote Williams,
resembled "one of those screeching, uninhibited party rallies which the
Nazis used to hold for Hitler," and many parents who had attended with
their children, including actors Alan Ladd and Walter Slezak, expressed
equal outrage to authorities and the newspapers. The result was that the
Los Angeles Vice Squad contacted the Colonel, who told Elvis that he
would have to cut out some of the dancing and in general tone down his
act. What was Elvis' reaction? the Colonel was asked. "This isn't the first
time," said the Colonel. "You know, they done it a couple of times
before." Did Elvis complain about not being able to dance? "Naw, he
didn't complain.... He just said, 'Well, if I don't dance tonight, maybe I
don't have to take a shower tonight: " "Colonel Parker said that?" declared
Elvis incredulously. "He couldn't have! You see," Elvis explained,
genuinely upset, "I take a shower every night, whether I dance or just
sing."
When the police showed up with movie cameras on the second night,
the show was considerably toned down, and the only person to object was
Yul Brynner, "whose bleeding heart," wrote Jack O'Brian, "led him to
protest [the censorship] as if it were an invasion of someone's privacy."
Brynner, declared O'Brian olympianly, was "ridiculous." Elvis, for his
part, kept his own counsel.
Still, he felt good about it. He had done what he did best in front of a
town in which he was only beginning to feel comfortable - and it had
caused just as much of a stir as it would have in Memphis or Saskatchewan.
The single of "Jailhouse Rock" was currently at number one, the
film had just had its world premiere in Memphis at the same theater
where Elvis had ushered as a teenager and was scheduled to open in theaters
throughout the country the following week, and the Colonel had estimated
that, with the deal they had with MGM, Elvis was likely to make
more than two million dollars when it did. As he said to one reporter who
raised the question of what he would do if his popularity were to decline,
O C T O B E R 1 9 5 7 - M A R C H 1 9 5 8 439
"You can't stay on top forever. Even if I stopped singing tomorrow, I'd
have no regrets. I had a ball while I was there."
There was a party that night at his suite, and everyone was there:
Sammy, Nick, Vince Edwards, Venetia, Carol Channing, Tommy Sands, a
whole bunch of pretty girls, even seventeen-year-old Ricky Nelson
showed up, riding the crest of his first big Imperial hit. Elvis knew that
Ricky was friendly with Scotty and Bill, but he and Ricky had never really
talked, and Ricky was just hanging around on the edge of the party when
Elvis pushed his way through the crowd, picked him up in the air, and
said, "Man, I just love your new record." He loved The Adventures of Ozzie
and Harriet, too, he watched it all the time, he told Ricky, and he wondered
whether Ricky's brother, David, was here tonight. When Photoplay
editor Marcia Borie told Elvis that Ricky was about to go out on tour for
the first time and could use some advice, Elvis took Ricky aside and filled
him in. "You'll never know how much tonight has meant to me," Nelson
told Borie later in the evening. "Imagine Elvis Presley watching our
show. He repeated episodes I'd even forgotten about. He remembered
them word for word. And he gave me some great tips about things to do
on my tour. I still can't believe it." Cliff, Nick, and Sammy Davis, Jr., entertained
the guests with impressions, and Elvis' date for the evening was
Anne Neyland.
One week later he sailed for Hawaii. The three shows scheduled there
were the last of a broken six-day tour (San Francisco, Oakland, Hollywood,
and Hawaii) that seemed to have been arranged at the last minute
and was elongated even further by the four-day boat ride. The Colonel
and the Jordanaires and the band, of course, all flew over, but Elvis stuck
to his promise to his mother not to fly unless it was absolutely necessary.
There was one small surprise at the dock: Billy Murphy showed up with
his bags packed just as the ship was about to sail. Elvis had invited him
sometime earlier, but there had been no further discussion of the subject,
and now a mild flurry of confusion arose before someone finally purchased
a ticket for him. Other than that, the cruise was a dull one, made
up of typical tourists and retirees and a notable absence of eligible girls.
Cliff, who continued to aspire to Hollywood hipness, followed Billy
around to the point that Murphy finally told him, "Cliff, you're colorful
and you're interesting, but you're ninety percent exaggeration and ten
percent lies." Which kind of took the wind out of Cliff's sails and gave the
others something to chew on. When they finally arrived, Elvis enjoyed his
440 '" WAL K I N G I N A D REAM
first view of Hawaii; the Colonel's old pal, Lee Gordon, who still had hopes
of getting Elvis to Australia, promoted the shows with his usual flamboyance;
and Elvis even went down to the beach in shorts on the last night to
sign autographs.
They were back in Hollywood by November 17, with nothing, really, to
do. The Colonel didn't want him making any recordings - RCA had more
than enough in the can - and the new movie deal with Twentieth Century
Fox had fallen through when Hal Wallis refused to release Elvis from his
contractual obligation to make another picture with Paramount first.
There was no further touring planned, and he had no particular reason to
be home, so he returned to Las Vegas, where he had spent a couple of
weeks in October going out with showgirls and catching every act in town.
On this visit he met a fresh-faced, twenty-one-year-old singer named Kitty
Dolan, whom he formally "dated," as he had dated Dottie and June before,
as well as the stripper Tempest Storm, to whom he announced, at an appropriate
moment, 'Tm as horny as a billy goat in a pepper patch. I'll race you
to the bed."
It was a strangely unsettled time. The draft wasn't going to go away,
his career seemed to be in a temporary state of limbo, even the tour with
the exception of his appearance at the Pan Pacific - had been without
any real luster. There had been the usual riots, there had been the
usual challenge of provoking the crowd into a frenzy, of teasing them
until they were aroused past the point of turning back - but there was
nothing new. It was all something he had done before, all just the playing
out of a masquerade. For the first time in a long time he was no longer
sure what was supposed to happen next. Perhaps the one real surprise had
come in San Francisco when security guards came backstage to tell him
that there was a rabbi outside insisting that he had to see Elvis. George
scrutinized the scribbled note and realized to his astonishment that it was
Rabbi Fruchter, his old rabbi from Temple Beth EI Emeth, but he couldn't
for the life of him figure out how Rabbi Fruchter would know George
was there or what the connection with Elvis might be. "Elvis said, 'Oh,
we used to live underneath him on Alabama Street, he was really nice to
me, he'd loan me money, and sometimes he'd ask me to turn on the lights
for him on Saturday.' So I went and got him, and Elvis hugs him and
shakes hands with him, and at the press conference he introduces Rabbi
Fruchter, and the reporters all look at this rabbi, and they just couldn't
relate!"
O C T O B E R 1 95 7 - M A R C H 1 9 5 8 4 4 1
Some guys from Tupelo showed up at the same performance, and
Elvis recalled them, too, riding on a train with George sometime later.
"We'd be going through some little country town, and he'd say, 'Shit, this
reminds me of Tupelo.' He said, 'You remember when we were in San
Francisco, George, and those guys came up to us, and all they wanted to
talk about was Tupelo? They kept saying, "Elvis, remember back in
Tupelo?" And all I was thinking was, "Fuck Tupelo. I want to forget
about Tupelo.", He wasn't putting down Tupelo. He just meant he was
glad to get out. Tupelo was a little small town where there really wasn't
much to do. Memphis was where everything had happened for him."
BA C K H O M E I N M E M P H I S the same overhanging miasma continued
to prevail. In the midst of public celebration an unsettling sense of
spiritual malaise would overtake him, which he might share, occasionally,
with friends or reveal, almost despite himself, in public statements. After
the Easter service at First Assembly, for example, which he had proudly
attended with Yvonne Lime, he had sought out the Reverend Hamill.
"He said, 'Pastor, I am the most miserable young man you have ever
seen. I have got more money than I can ever spend. I have thousands of
fans out there, and I have a lot of people who call themselves my friends,
but I am miserable. I am not doing a lot of things that you taught me, and
I am doing some things that you taught me not to do. ' " To Photoplay
magazine he announced, in what the magazine described as a state of dejection
and what might more accurately be seen as a moment of neardesperation:
"I never expected to be anybody important. Maybe I'm not
now, but whatever I am, whatever I will become will be what God has
chosen for me. Some people I know can't figure out how Elvis Presley
happened. I don't blame them for wondering that. Sometimes I wonder
myself.... But no matter what I do, I don't forget about God. I feel he's
watching every move I make. And in a way it's good for me. I'll never feel
comfortable taking a strong drink, and I'll never feel easy smoking a Cigarette.
I just don't think those things are right for me.... I just want to let a
few people know that the way I live is by doing what I think God wants
me to. I want someone to understand. "
He visited Lansky's one night at 9:00 or 10:00, "and we had a big feast
for him," said Guy Lansky. "I went down to the deli to pick up corn beef
4 4 2 '" W A L K I N G I N A D REAM
and salami, we had a beautiful spread for him, and all he wanted was potato
salad. He reached over and got that quart of potato salad and said,
'That's all I'm going to eat.' And I said, 'How about a com beef sandwich,
Elvis?' And he said, 'No, Mr. Lansky, this is all I want. Give the rest to
Lamar. He's my garbage disposal.' He got a big laugh out of that, but
Lamar didn't take it so pleasantly. There were still some customers in the
store, and Elvis said, 'Give them anything they want' - I mean, up to a
certain limit. I said, 'You're on, Elvis. Whatever they want.' Man, they
couldn't get over it, the customers - and of course it was mostly black
customers in Lansky's at that time - but for his entourage he didn't buy
them anything, he never bought them anything. I couldn't figure that one
out."
On December 6 he attended the WDIA Goodwill Revue once again.
His appearance didn't cause the commotion that it had the year before,
but he had his picture taken with Little Junior Parker (the originator of
"Mystery Train") and Bobby "Blue" Bland, and he was quoted in the
paper as saying that this music was "the real thing.... Right from the
heart." You couldn't beat it, he said, watching from the wings and smiling
and swaying to the music. "The audience shouted in time to the solid
rhythm," reported the paper. " 'Man: grinned Elvis, 'what about that!' "
It was a strangely desultory Christmas. The tree was taken down out
of storage, Elvis distributed a considerable amount of money to local
charities as well as the United Fund and the March of Dimes, the Christmas
album reached the number-one chart position even as it encountered
vicious criticism (from Irving Berlin, among others) for what was seen as
a desecration of the traditional Christmas spirit. The Colonel told him he
had two more movies definitely lined up upon the completion of the new
Hal Wallis production, a specially tailored adaptation of the Harold Robbins
novel A Stone for Danny Fisher. The first of the outside projects was an
unnamed picture for Twentieth Century Fox, the other a Hank Williams
biopic for MGM - both, if he bothered to read the trades, at enormous
sums of money - but he doubted somehow that either was ever going to
get made.
About ten days before Christmas he started getting serious pitches
from the army, the navy, and the air force about what they could do for
him. They had suggestions for various kinds of deals - the navy proposed
an "Elvis Presley company" that could be specially trained, and the air
O C T O B E R 1 95 7 - M A R C H 1 9 5 8 443
force offered a deal where he would merely tour recruiting centers
around the country - but when he and the Colonel talked it over, he
could see that the Colonel was right once again, it would merely serve to
inflame public opinion and create a vicious backlash if he did not go in
and receive the same treatment as every other citizen.
Then, on December 19, he got word informally from Milton Bowers,
chairman of the draft board since 1943 and former president of the Memphis
School Board, that his induction notice was ready and that he could
simply stop by the draft board to pick it up. Bowers didn't want to put it
in the mail, he said, for fear that the news would be leaked by someone
who saw the letter addressed in an official Selective Service envelope.
Elvis dropped in at the Sun studio the next day, just after picking up
his notice, and announced cheerfully, "Hey, I'm going in," but with
George and Cliff and the other guys he was somewhat more revealing.
"We were at Graceland," said George, "and I walked in. First thing he did
was hand me the note. I said, 'What's this?' He said, 'Read it.' And I
opened it up, and it said: ' G R E E T I N G S. ' I said, 'Oh no, Elvis.' He said,
'Yeah, I've been drafted.' He was devastated -just down, depressed. I
said, 'Damn, what are we going to do?' He said, 'Man, I don't know.' He
said, 'The Colonel says we might could get a deferment to make King Creole,
but he says I probably got to go.' I said, 'Well, man, there's no war
going on' - we were trying to make him feel better, me and Cliff and Arthur,
and Gene. Cliff said, 'Wait a minute, Elvis, they'll never take you.
You're too big! You're the biggest thing in show biz. They won't let them
take you, the kids won't let them. Elvis, just think' - and Cliff's a real
quick thinker, and he said, he immediately zeroed in, 'Elvis, you're paying
the government ten million dollars a year in taxes, you know there's no
war going on. It's all -' And so he kind of got Elvis' mind off it, but the
last thing Elvis said when he got on the damn bus to go in the army was,
'Fuck Cliff Gleaves!' "
James Page, a Press-Scimitar reporter, caught up with him well after
midnight as he was coming in from a night on the town. There were dozens
of fans still at the gate maintaining a mournful vigil when Elvis roared
up in his Continental. He professed himself relieved to have the situation
finally resolved and expressed sincere feelings of gratitude for "what this
country has given me. And now I'm ready to return a little. It's the only
adult way to look at it."
4 4 4 '" W A L K I N G I N A D REAM
"Would you like to go into Special Services?"
"I want to go where I can do the best job."
"What about your movie contracts?"
"Don't know -just don't know."
"How about a look at your draft notice?"
Elvis grinned sheepishly: "Man, I don't know what I did with it."
The search was on.
"Maybe in the kitchen," someone suggested. It wasn't.
"Last time I saw it, it was right there," said Elvis and pointed to a
place in the front hall. No notice.
Finally: "Here's the envelope - the notice must be in my parents'
bedroom."
One thing sure: There is a notice for Elvis and ''I'll do what I have
to - like any American boy."
He left for Nashville that same night to deliver his Christmas present
to the Colonel. It was a little red Isetta sports car, and he loaded it onto a
rented truck, which he drove, with Lamar and Cliff following in the Lincoln.
They arrived at the Colonel's home in Madison early the next morning,
but there was already a gang of reporters and photographers waiting.
He and the Colonel posed for pictures in the car. "It is snug," observed
Parker. "It is only a small, small way of showing my feelings for you,"
replied Elvis on the record. "Now isn't he a sweet kid?" Colonel said to
the newspapermen, his eyes "dewing up." "He could have just sent
something in the mail." In addition, Elvis answered questions about the
draft (who knew, he said, he just might reenlist when his hitch was up)
and even tried on an army surplus set of fatigues, which a photographer
thoughtfully provided and in which he looked exceedingly uncomfortable.
" 'I guess I'll be wearing this stuff for real, soon: he said, looking
ruefully down at the green twill." Whatever private feelings he had he
kept to himself or reserved for the private conference that he and the Colonel
had, as per custom, behind closed doors.
Gordon Stoker came out at the Colonel's direction to pick up the Jordanaires'
four thousand dollars in Christmas bonuses, and Elvis asked if
he'd be going to the Opry that night. "He told me, 'If I had some kind of
clothes, I'd go with you guys. Well, I called Mallernee's down on Sixth I
happened to know the man who owned the store - and I told them,
'I'm going to bring Elvis Presley in there to get something to wear down
O C T O B E R 1 9 5 7 - M A R C H 1 9 5 8 '" 445
to the Grand Ole Opry tonight, but if any of the salesmen or anyone
makes anything over him, he'll walk right out in the middle of a fitting, so
don't tell anyone he's coming.' Anyway, surprisingly, he picked out a tuxedo
with a tux shirt, tux tie, even tux shoes. I was shocked. I thought he'd
just buy a suit or a sports coat. But that's what he wore down to the Opry
that night. "
His draft situation was really bugging him, Stoker felt; h e still couldn't
understand why the Colonel hadn't fixed things better, but he didn't say
much about it. At the Opry that night he just walked out onstage and
waved and visited with old friends backstage. How were things going?
asked T. Tommy Cutrer, who had promoted him in Shreveport and was
announcing the Opry now. "He said, 'It's lonesome, T.' I said, 'How can
you talk about that, with thousands of people... ' He said, 'Well, I can't
go get a hamburger, I can't go in some little greasy joint, I can't go waterskiing
or shopping' - and he loved to go shopping. By this time he'd dyed
his hair and had on makeup, which was strange to me. The only one of
the Opry stars that would make up back then was Ferlin Husky, and that
was to go onstage. So I said, 'Cat, why you got that shit on you?' He said,
'Well, that's what the movies want.' But he never changed a bit, he was
always the same."
He had his picture taken with old friends and current Opry stars: he
and the Colonel posed with the Duke of Paducah and Faron Young and
booking agent Hubert Long, and he was pictured with his arm around an
absolutely thrilled-looking Brenda Lee (who at thirteen looked no older
than ten), with Johnny Cash, Ray Price, Hawkshaw Hawkins, the Wilburn
Brothers, even Hank Snow, who seemed to hold no grudge against
his onetime protege even if his feelings toward his former partner were
less than mixed. Jimmie Rodgers Snow, too, came by with his fifteen-yearold
fiancee to say hello, "and he asked me what I was doing. I said, 'Nothing
special, why?' And he said, 'Why don't you come over to Memphis
around the first, we'll have some fun.' And I said, 'Fine.' '' Then he
changed back into the clothes he had worn on the trip over and, according
to Gordon Stoker, threw his new tux into a barrel full of stage ropes
before setting off on the 230-mile drive back to Memphis.
By Monday morning the draft board had received a letter from Paramount
studio head Y. Frank Freeman requesting a sixty-day deferment
for Elvis on the basis of financial hardship: the studio had already spent
between $300,000 and $350,000 in preproduction costs for King Creole (for4
4 6 '" W A L K I N G IN A D REAM
merly Sing, You Sinners) and stood to lose that amount or more if Elvis
Presley were not permitted to film it. That was all very well, declared
draft board chairman Milton Bowers, the board might very well look favorably
upon such a request, but the request had to come from the inductee.
On Tuesday, December 24, Elvis wrote to the draft board, explaining
that as far as he was concerned he was ready to enter the army immediately,
but he was requesting the deferment for Paramount "so these folks
will not lose so much money, with all they have done so far." He concluded
by wishing the three board members a merry Christmas. Three
days later the request was granted, which the Colonel called "very kind,"
adding, "I know of nothing that would prevent his induction when his deferment
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