Just to get everyone in the spirit of his usual "pull-out-all-stops" promotion
campaign, the Colonel had a big bunch of balloons made up with
"King Creole" written on them, and he led Trude Forsher, the William
Morris agents, and everyone else he could commandeer around the lot
carrying the balloons before marching into the commissary and releasing
them to the ceiling. Elvis posed politely for pictures, showed off the prop
Civil War blunderbuss that he had been given as a gift, and ate a little bit
of cake decorated with the figure of an army private peeling potatoes.
Then he was off to Memphis, with less than two weeks until his formal
induction. He was so impatient to get home that, once again, he got
off the train, this time renting a fleet of Cadillacs in Dallas. He was met by
a Commercial Appeal reporter when he arrived at Graceland at 6:30 on Friday
night, March 14. The questions were all about his new movie and the
army. How did his parents feel about his going in? "Well, my mother
hates to see her son go in service," he said candidly, but added: "My
mother is no different from millions of other mothers who hated to see
their sons go, though." As far as the movie went, he had reason to be
proud. "It was quite a challenge for me because it was written for a more
experienced actor," he said. It was, he felt without false modesty, his best
performance to date, one in which he had acquitted himself well in truly
distinguished company. But what about his popularity? asked the reporter.
Did he think it would slip while he was in the army? "That's the
sixty-four-dollar question," replied Elvis plaintively. "I wish I knew."
ON T H E S T E P S O F G RA C E L A N D, A U G U S T 1 4, 1 9 5 8. (J A M E S R E I D)
IIPREC I OUS MEMORI ES"
T
HE TEN DAYS that he had left before going in were a blur of
activity. On Monday he met Dewey down at Poplar Tunes,
and a lot of misunderstandings, reported Bob Johnson, seemed
to just fall away. Elvis bought Dean Martin's "Return to Me,"
Nat King Cole's "Looking Back," Pat Boone's "Too Soon to Know," Jo
Stafford's "Sweet Little Darling," Don Gibson's "I Can't Stop Loving
You," and "Maybe" by the Chantels. He got a haircut at Jim's Barber
Shop, his second in less than a month, and declared that he liked the new
crew cut style so much he intended to get it cut even shorter before induction.
On Wednesday he looked at cars with Anita, who was now customarily
described in the national press as both a "Hollywood starlet"
and a "frequent companion," but it was also reported in the papers that
he was entertaining a parade of women, "no fewer than twelve beautiful
girls," by one count. "I screwed everything in sight," he told a friend
years later in an uncharacteristic, and perhaps inaccurate, display of sexual
bravura, while to reporters he simply commented, ''I'd be crazy to get
married now. I like to play the field."
Whoever his companion for the evening, every night he would go in a
group to the movies, to the skating rink after it was closed, back to Graceland
after all other sources for fun were exhausted, in what seemed like an
almost desperate attempt to pack in every last element of civilian experience,
a vain effort to stave off the inevitable moment by hiding himself in
the crowd.
Over the course of the week he let the last of the boys go, wrote Bob
Johnson, about to be without their company for the first time in more
than two years. He had "fed them, clothed them, paid them in return for
simple duties, but mostly their job was just to keep him company in a
rather extraordinary world where new friends could have no understanding
of a world he knew. " He said good-bye to Scotty and Bill: "It was just
4 6 0 '" " P R E C I O U S M E M O R I E S "
'SO long, see you when I get out,' " said Scotty, who detected little nervousness.
"We were just like two mules turned out to pasture." Over the
weekend he gave Anita a 1956 Ford. She felt he was dreading the army,
"because it was something unknown to him, he didn't know what to expect,
but it was something that he had to do - he could have gotten out
of it, but he wanted no part of that. " He told her that he had to do what
was expected of him and reassured his mother that he was going to be all
right. "I can make it," he said. "I can do this." To Barbara Pittman, who
had known him from childhood, he was somewhat more unbuttoned.
"He was very upset about it. He kept saying, 'Why me, when I can stay
here and make so much more money? My taxes would be more important
than sticking me in the service.' He was crying. He was hurt. He
couldn't understand why he had to go." Judy Spreckels, who described
herself as "like a sister" ("Girls come and go," she said, "but sisters stay
forever"), flew in from the Coast to provide support.
On his last night of freedom he was up all night with his friends. He
and Anita and some of the boys went to the drive-in to see Tommy Sands
in Sing, Boy, Sing, the story of the rise and fall of a rock ' n' roll star told in
somewhat harder-hitting terms than any of Elvis' movies. Sands, just
twenty but a recording artist from the age of fourteen, and a longtime
protege of Colonel Parker's, had gotten the role, originally written for
Elvis, only through the intercession of the Colonel. "We pulled in to the
drive-in in the Cadillac limousine," said George Klein, "and Nick Adams
was playing a combination of all of Elvis' sidekicks in the movie - he
played me and Gene and Cliff and Arthur, all rolled into one. It was kind
of cold, and we all wanted to stay up with him until the last minute, you
know, and keep his mind occupied so he wouldn't have to think about
leaving the next day. And I think he appreciated that, but we got quite a
kick not so much out of Tommy Sands as out of Nick Adams playing all
the other guys." Afterward they went to the skating rink for the eighth
night in a row, and when it finally came time to leave, "he got in and out
of the panel truck three times," the owners told writer Vince Staten. "He
didn't want to go. "
H e hadn't eaten o r slept when dawn came up. "Overnight," he said,
"it was all gone. It was like a dream."
* * *
M A R C H-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 8 4 6 1
HE S H O W E D U P a t the draft board in the M&M Building a t 198 South
Main at 6:35 the next morning and parked just south of the Maleo
Theatre. He was accompanied by several cars full of friends and relatives
and was greeted by a couple of dozen photographers and reporters, including
representatives of the British press. It was raining lightly, and he
was half an hour early. He was wearing dark blue trousers, his loud grayand-
white-checked sports jacket, a striped shirt, and pink and black socks,
and he was carrying a pigskin shaving kit. Gladys looked as if she were
about to cry, while Vernon gripped her hand tightly. Lamar gave everybody
a laugh by pretending that he wanted to enlist, too, but at 270
pounds there was little likelihood that he would be taken. Anita looked
prettily composed while Judy remained in the background and the Colonel
hovered on the edge of the proceedings, making sure that everything
went off without a hitch. Among the recruits was an old friend from Lauderdale
Courts, Farley Guy, who told reporters it was "the same old
Elvis." "If! seem nervous," said Elvis, "it's because I am," adding that he
was looking forward to the army "as a great experience. The army can do
anything it wants with me. Millions of other guys have been drafted, and I
don't want to be different from anyone else." At TI4 the thirteen inductees
left the draft board in an olive drab army bus. They were bound for
the Kennedy Veterans Hospital several miles away, where they would be
examined and processed. The army of newsmen, friends, fans, and relatives
all followed, but not before Anita got special permission from Recruiting
Sergeant Walter Alden to visit Elvis at the induction station that
afternoon in order to say a special good-bye.
At Kennedy he was examined, weighed, and pronounced fit, all under
the scrutiny of reporters' pencils and pads, microphones, and cameras.
The picture of him in Life magazine the following week revealed a wellnourished
white male, still showing some evidence of baby fat, standing
on the scale in his underpants with his eyes on either side of the heightmeasuring
extender. His gaze is distracted) his mouth is downcast, and
you could imagine either that he was momentarily lost in thought or frozen
in fear. To the Life reporter he simply said, "Heaven knows I want to
live up to what people expect of me." In conversations with other photographers
and newsmen "Elvis recalled that in the days before he became
famous, he pawned his old guitar for $3 'five or six times.' Also, he
remember[ ed] that in 1952 he sold a pint of his blood to Baptist Hospital
4 6 2 '" " P R E C I O U S M E M O R I E S "
for SIO. Elvis said his has always been a happy family and is happy today,
but that money brings a lot
.
ofheadaches...."
The army provided a box lunch of a ham sandwich, a roast beef sandwich,
a piece of apple pie, an apple, and a container of milk, which Elvis
wolfed down, explaining that he hadn't eaten since the previous night.
"Man, I was hungry," he said. Then he lay down on a rec room couch and
took a nap for half an hour. More friends and relatives continued to show
up, and a telegram from Governor Frank Clement arrived, declaring that
"you have shown that you are an American citizen first, a Tennessee Volunteer,
and a young man willing to serve his country when called upon to
do so."
Outside, the Colonel was marching around handing out more balloons
that advertised King Creole, while the crowd grew larger and larger
and the Presleys looked increasingly stricken. The army brass were growing
nervous that they would not fulfill the quota of twenty (including
volunteers as well as draftees) necessary to requisition a bus and get out of
Memphis today. Finally a draftee named Donald Rex Mansfield, who had
just arrived on the bus from Dresden, Tennessee, and was not slated to go
in until the following day, was rushed through processing, and Private
Elvis Presley, serial number 53 310 761, was put in charge of the I50-mile
bus trip to Fort Chaffee. He rapidly embraced his mother, who was virtually
inconsolable by now, and his father, who was openly weeping.
"Good-bye, baby," he said to Anita as the bus was about to pull out.
"Good-bye, you long black sonofabitch," he said, referring to his black
Cadillac limousine standing at the curb. The other recruits laughed nervously.
That, reported Rex Mansfield, broke the ice. After that he was, at
least nominally, "one of the boys."
AC A R A V AN O F C A R S containing newsmen and fans followed the
army bus out of Memphis, and when it made its regular scheduled
stop just across the Mississippi at the Coffee Cup restaurant in West Memphis,
there was a crowd of close to two hundred already assembled, and
the bus driver had to bring sandwiches and drinks back to the bus. At Fort
Chaffee, the information officer, Captain Arlie Metheny, a native Arkansan
and twenty-year vet, had been anticipating the arrival since January,
but nothing in his previous experience (not even his stint as information
officer during the Little Rock integration crisis) could have fully prepared
M A R C H - S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 8 c-.. 463
him for the mob scene that erupted when the bus finally pulled in at U:15
that night. More than a hundred civilian fans, forty or fifty newsmen, and
another two hundred dependents of military personnel descended on the
hapless new recruit, with the Colonel leading the greeting committee.
The newsmen followed Elvis into a reception room for roll call and
photographed him making his bed over and over again for the cameras,
though when a photographer hid in the barracks to get a shot of a sleeping
Private Presley, that was too much for even the army's tolerance, and
Captain Metheny had the photographer thrown out. Throughout it all
Elvis bore up with extraordinary patience, presenting a bright, cheerful
exterior, offering up quips and self-deprecating statements, entertaining
all requests without demurral, refusing only to sign autographs while he
was "in ranks."
He estimated that he slept no more than three hours and was up well
before 5:30 reveille the next morning, dressing and shaving while the others
were just waking up. The Colonel and twenty photographers joined
him for breakfast at 6:00 ("It was good, but I was so hungry I'd eat anything
this morning," he was reported as saying), and then he was scheduled
for five hours of aptitude tests, a two-hour postlunch lecture on a
private's rights and privileges, a brief classification interview, the issuance
of seven dollars in partial pay (What are you going to do with all that
money? reporters shouted. "Start a loan company," Elvis replied goodhumoredly),
and, finally, the bestowal of the standard-issue GI haircut.
There were fifty-five reporters and photographers standing around waiting
to record this historic moment. "Hair today, gone tomorrow," said
Elvis, holding some of the hair in his hand and blowing it away for photographers,
but he was flustered enough that he forgot to pay the barber
the sixty-five-cent fee and, to his embarrassment, had to be called back.
He spotted a phone booth and went off to telephone his mother. When
reporters sprinted after him, Colonel Parker blocked their way. "I think a
boy's entitled to talk to his mother alone," said the Colonel.
On Wednesday he was issued his uniform, and the Colonel, clowning
for the cameras, tried to get him to try on a western string tie with it.
"No, sir. IfI wore a string tie in here, I'd have to take the punishment, not
you," Elvis replied, as the Colonel declared to the photographers, "I wish
you boys would stop taking pictures of yourselves." That afternoon there
was an announcement (surprising only because it came sooner than expected)
that Elvis Presley would be assigned to the Second Armored Divi4
6 4 '" " P R E C I O U S M E M O R I E S "
sion - General George Patton's famous "Hell on Wheels" outfit - at
Fort Hood, just outside Killeen, Texas, for basic training and advanced
tank instruction. He had been a good soldier so far, announced post commander
General Ralph R. Mace; "at least in my opinion, he has conducted
himself in a marvelous manner." And Hy Gardner wrote a column in the
form of a letter to Elvis' fellow soldiers, proclaiming Elvis a credit to his
country:
Where else could a nobody become a somebody so quickly, and in
what other nation in the world would such a rich and famous man
serve alongside you other draftees without trying to use influence to
buy his way out? In my book this is American democracy at its best -
the blessed way of life for whose protection you and Elvis have been
called upon to contribute eighteen to twenty-four months of your
young lives.... I hope you go along with my sentiments.
S
IX O F T H E T H I RT E E N original Memphis draftees were assigned to
Fort Hood, including Rex Mansfield and William Norvell, whom
Elvis immediately dubbed "Nervous" Norvell. After being chased for
more than two hundred miles by a convoy of devoted fans (,'I'd hate to
see anyone get hurt," said Elvis worriedly. "Maybe if I wave..."), the
chartered Greyhound bypassed the usual stops in Dallas and Waxahachie,
where hundreds of people had already gathered, finally stopping for lunch
in Hillsboro, Texas, at 1:30. Captain). F. Dowling assigned two of his largest
men to sit on either side of Elvis: "I think we must have set some kind
of record. We went twenty-five minutes before anyone recognized him."
When they finally did, there was a small riot, and it took at least another
twenty-five minutes before they could make their way out of the restaurant.
"Elvis was very nice about the whole thing," said Captain Dowling.
"Some of the men ordered meals that exceeded the allowance on the
meal ticket, but Elvis said he'd pick up the check for the difference. And
before we got him on the bus, he managed to buy cigarettes and candy,
which he passed out to the boys. As we left Hillsboro, the girls were fighting
over who would keep the chair that Elvis had sat in."
At Fort Hood things were under substantially more control from the
start. The information officer, Lieutenant Colonel Marjorie Schulten, had
already made the determination, before the bus arrived, that she was
M A R C H-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 8 465
going to take a different approach than the one that had been tried at Fort
Chaffee. "He was due in on [March] twenty-eighth about four P. M.," she
told writer Alan Levy. "Beginning at eleven A. M. the media people started
to come in here. I've never seen so many people.... When I saw a Fort
Worth editor with a reputation for never leaving his swivel chair, I knew
this was an event." Colonel Parker stopped by not long afterward to offer,
Levy observed, "his services, advice, and moral support. Lieutenant Colonel
Schulten turned to 'Colonel' Parker and, couching her words in the
respect accorded a higher-ranking person - particularly one who made all
his rank 'on the outside' - she told him: 'Colonel Parker, the Second Armored
Division will not be able to train this boy at the rate these requests
are coming in. You have an enormous investment, so you may not like
what I'm about to do here and now.' Parker, whose most detailed preinduction
plans had never anticipated a woman officer,... surrendered to
the inevitable with a meek, 'Well, Colonel, you're the boss.' "
What she was about to do was declare Elvis Presley off-limits to newsmen
and photographers after his first day at Fort Hood. "You will have
carte blanche as promised," she said, "but just this one day. After today,
nothing!" And that was the policy she stuck to.
The first few days were extremely difficult for a very homesick, very
isolated Elvis Presley. The others just watched, some of them ragged on
him a little CBoy, you ain't wiggling right," someone was likely to call
out as he ran past, and "Miss your teddy bears, Elvis?" was a common
put-down), but mostly it was Elvis' own private battle, Rex Mansfield observed,
as he struggled desperately to find his equilibrium and be accepted
as one of the guys. Gradually he was, and gradually he relaxed a little, too,
but recruit instructor Sergeant Bill Norwood, who befriended him and allowed
him to make private calls from Norwood's home, witnessed his
homesickness and tears at first hand and worried what would happen if
the others saw him like this. "When you come in my house," he told
Elvis, "you can let it all out. Do whatever you want to, and don't worry
about anything. But when you walk out of my front door, you are now
Elvis Presley. You're an actor. You're a soldier. So, by God, I want you to
act! Don't let nobody know how you feel on the inside. "
He got his marksman medal with a carbine, sharpshooter with a pistol,
and he was named acting assistant squad leader for his squad along
with Rex for his squad and "Nervous" Norvell for his. Gradually, he said,
he came to be accepted. "I didn't ask for anything, and they didn't give
4 6 6 ", " P R E C I O U S M E M O R I E S "
me anything. I just did the same thing everybody else did. I made it very
well." He just didn't know who to trust.
The Colonel came to see him once or twice to get his signature on
some pieces of paper and report to him on sales and strategy. It was reassuring
to hear news of his career, even ifhe cared little about the facts and
figures, but when a Waco businessman named Eddie Fadal, whom he had
first met during a five-day Texas tour in January 1956, came to see him
two weeks into basic, it was as though he had found a long-lost friend.
Fadal, in his thirties, married with two daughters, was one of those not so
rare individuals who had responded more than instantly to Elvis' appeal.
He had in fact quit his job as a Dallas OJ after Elvis' spur-of-the-moment
invitation to go out "as a general flunky," in Fadal's words, on that brief
1956 tour, and he had rejoined him for another few days when Elvis returned
with Nick Adams for a performance at Waco's Heart 0' Texas
Coliseum later that year. "I thought, he probably won't remember me,
but I'm going over to the base and see. I went through a lot of red tape at
the gate, and I went to see the sergeant of the day room, and he gave me a
lot of flak, too, but finally he went to get Elvis for me. And sure enough,
he did remember me. I invited him to come to our house when he could
get away, told him that we'd give him a home away from home, provide
him with privacy and home-cooked food and all of those things, and he
said, 'Sure, I'll be there.' He said, 'I can't come for another two weeks, but
I'll be there.' I thought to myself, 'Yeah, I'll bet you will: but, true to his
word, in two weeks my telephone rang...."
In the meantime Anita had come down at the invitation of Sergeant
Norwood and his wife, who made their home on the post available to her.
When she first arrived, Elvis was assigned to guard duty for twenty-four
hours, but Sergeant Norwood suggested that, according to army regulations,
he could get out of the assignment if he could find a substitute of
equal rank. Elvis approached Rex Mansfield and offered him twenty dollars
to take his place. "I told him straightaway that I would be glad to pull
his guard duty, but in no way would I take his money," wrote Rex, who
had observed with distaste the competition for Elvis' attention. "I said to
him that I would do this for any other GI whose girl was waiting to see
him.... This was the real beginning of our friendship."
Elvis brought Anita with him to Waco to visit Eddie Fadal. "He called
me from the circle at the confluence of all the highways that come into
Waco, and I had a hard time finding him because he didn't stay right
MARC H - S E P T E M B E R I 9 5 8 '" 4 67
where I thought he would be. But he followed my car and he followed me
out to my house, and from then on it was every weekend." Nervous Norvell
accompanied him once or twice with his wife, who had come to
Texas to keep Anita company. But mostly it was just Elvis and Anita and
the Fadals. They sang and played records, and Elvis called home at least
once a day. "He'd say, 'Mama,' and I imagine she would say, 'Son.' And
then it would just go on from there - it was weeping and sobbing, and
crying. He thought his career was over. He told me many times, 'It's all
over, Eddie.' He told me, 'They aren't going to know me when I get
back.' I said, 'Elvis, it's not over. It's just beginning. You're never going to
be forgotten.' He said, 'Naw, it's all over. That's it.' He firmly believed
that."
Toward the end of basic, Anita got word that she would be recording
in New York during the first week of June, and one night as they sat
around the piano, Elvis prompted her to sing Hank Williams' "I Can't
Help It (If I'm Still in Love with You)" and Connie Francis' brand-new hit,
"Who's Sorry Now?," while he mostly sang gospel. Someone turned on a
tape recorder, and you can hear Eddie saying to Anita, "I can't wait till
your first record comes out." "It better be a good one," Elvis jumps in. "I
wish they'd let me pick it." If they did, he says, it would be a song like
"Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby," which the whole gang has just been
singing. Or it might be something like "Cold Cold Heart," something
with some heartbreak in it. "What I'm afraid of is they're going to put her
on something a little too modem, a little too popular, you know what I
mean?" "It will just die out quick?" "No..." "It'll catch on and then
fade?" "No, what I'm talking about - they're gonna give her some music
I'm afraid is more of a Julie London type. They got to give her something
like Connie Francis sings. Something with some guts to it." Anita demurely
assents to any and all suggestions, and they go back again and
again to "Happy, Happy Birthday" as Elvis sings along with the Tune
Weavers' record and ends the impromptu recital with a beautiful, selfaccompanied
version of "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" while one of the
Fadals' daughters cries in the background. Eddie had little doubt that Elvis
was going to marry Anita someday. They were so comfortable with each
other, and he was so obviously at home in her company and in the Fadals'
house. "His mother said to me later that he told her the Fadals had provided
him with a home away from home."
Furlough was scheduled to begin at n:oo A. M. on Saturday, May 3I,
4 6 8 n.> " P R E C I O U S M E M O R I E S "
but at the last minute it was moved up to 6:00 A. M., and Anita and the
Colonel were waiting at the post gate. Elvis dropped them in Dallas,
where they caught planes to Memphis arid Nashville respectively, and
then continued on his way with Rex Mansfield and "Nervous" Norvell.
He dropped Nervous off on Lamar Avenue and then took Rex to Graceland,
where hundreds of fans were waiting at the gate when they arrived.
Elvis didn't stop the car, wrote Rex, because he was tired and impatient to
see his folks, but he promised to come out later to sign autographs. "The
treatment which I received from Elvis upon our arrival... was really
amazing to me. After the usual hugs and kisses to his mother and dad and
the warm welcome to his old friends, he turned all of his attention to
me." He showed Rex around the mansion, which Rex in his memoir
sought to describe, "but mere words have limitations and seeing is better
for believing.... I had never before seen the inside of any house, even
in the movies, that was as beautiful and luxurious as Graceland Mansion
....
"Elvis then amazed me further by, personally, going to the trouble to
take me to my parents [when they arrived at his brother-in-Iaw's house in
Memphis]. We went out the back gate of his home through a big field in
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