Me and a Guy Named Elvis

by Jerry Schilling

  Elvis didn’t say much to Frankie and me, but he seemed perfectly comfortable to have us around. We hung around for the whole break between shows, and after a while there were other people around who wanted to talk to Elvis. He talked to them, but if he wanted another Pepsi, he got it from me or Frankie. The moment seemed special because it wasn’t special—just him and us, standing around drinking soda. He’d just walked away from a screaming audience to stand out here in the hallway, Frankie and I were in the hallway, and it was no big deal.

  But it was. At the Ellis Auditorium, I’d gotten the sense that something really big and exciting was happening around Elvis. Now, standing close to the guy, working the soda machine in the Chisca Hotel basement, I started feeling that, in some small way, I was a part of what was happening.

  Down South, when I was growing up, the most common summer vacation was to get the family piled in a car and drive down to Florida. My dad was a big advocate for Florida vacations—he felt that if he could get down there for a couple of weeks and spend as much time as possible in the salt water, it would keep him healthy throughout the year. An August trip to Miami became his annual vacation, and, come to think of it, I don’t actually remember him getting sick very often.

  In August of 1956, we loaded up his Pontiac for the trip to Miami, leaving room for four passengers—he was also bringing along his girlfriend, Lula, who would eventually become my stepmother, and one of their mutual friends, a lady named Helen. I wasn’t especially thrilled to be a part of this quartet, but I did look forward to the adventure of a trip out of town.

  On our way into Miami, we drove past a Lincoln dealership, and I spotted something that made the trip suddenly much more worthwhile. As Elvis’s fortunes had risen, he’d quickly bumped up from his pink Caddy to a yellow Cadillac convertible with a continental kit, and then to his latest ride, a brand-new, purple, white-top Lincoln Premiere. And passing that dealership, I spotted Elvis’s purple Lincoln sitting in the showroom window, sporting an unusual detailing job: The car was covered with love messages and phone numbers written in lipstick. Elvis was in town.

  In Miami, we checked into a not-too-pricey hotel that was within walking distance of the fancier Fontainbleau, where my dad and his female companions would hit the nightly dances. The three of them had plans for how they were going to spend their days and nights, and my dad didn’t pressure me to be a part of that group—I was trusted to take in Miami on my own. On the first day there, while the others were out getting some sun, I stayed next to the radio until I got the information I was after: Elvis was going to be performing in Miami at the Olympia Theatre over the next couple of days.

  I’d seen him that July 4th playing his biggest concert in Memphis to date, packing 7,000 fans into the Russwood Park ball field, but hadn’t seen him around much after that. I knew he was taking his own summer Florida trip, doing a string of theater dates during which he’d perform three or four times a day. And when this Florida tour was over he was heading out to Hollywood to start work on his first feature film. I can’t remember if I had to twist my dad’s arm much to get me a ticket to one of the Olympia shows, or if he just figured we should do at least one special father-son thing while we were away, but he and I ended up with a pair of tickets to a Saturday afternoon Elvis performance.

  I’d felt a little lost in the crowd at the Russwood show, so it was great to see Elvis perform in a small theater this time. Even on a little stage for a smaller audience, he didn’t hold anything back. Even before a note of music was played, he had the crowd going wild. He took the stage almost casually, walking out like that tiger again—knowing he could take his time before going in for the kill. He strolled right up to the corner edge of the stage, grabbed the curtain, and leaned out right over the audience. The girls went wild. He pulled himself back, walked over to his spot behind the mike, and then snapped into action as the band kicked in. When the crowd went even wilder, he feigned a moment of surprise—like he couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Then a little devilish smile flashed across his face—almost as though he were smiling at himself.

  Elvis certainly wasn’t a Memphis secret anymore at this point. He’d been seen by a national television audience on Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s Stage Show, The Milton Berle Show, and The Steve Allen Show, and his first album, Elvis Presley—the one with his name in pink and green letters—had shot to number one on the pop charts. But with all his success, Elvis was also starting to get a lot of negative attention from the national press: the New York Daily News had decried Elvis’s “Grunt and groin antics,” the New York Times announced that he had “no discernible singing ability,” and the Catholic weekly America called him “downright obscene.” With all that coming down on him, however, he wasn’t going to change a thing about his show. On that little Miami theater stage he was as unhinged and exciting as he’d been at Ellis, putting everything he had into his performance and again grabbing and dragging that mike around in a way that the Holy Names nuns would certainly not approve of. I’m not sure what my father, a big-band fan, made of it all, but I think I got him to at least concede that the music had a solid, danceable beat.

  Elvis got a huge reaction out of two of his newest songs, “Don’t Be Cruel” and his big closer, “Hound Dog” (both would be number-one hits through the rest of the summer). It was a heck of a jump for popular music to go from “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window” to “Hound Dog” in just a few years, but Elvis led us there fearlessly, and at this performance left us begging for more. But at these kinds of shows, Elvis did only about a half hour of material, and the theater management wanted to turn the crowd over pretty fast. When Elvis finished and the curtains closed and the screams started to die down, my father got up to go. Before we headed out, I spotted Red West over by the side of the stage. I went over to say hello, and Red told me what hotel they were staying at, and that they were leaving late that night to head for more shows in Tampa. He also explained that Elvis had driven into town in the purple Lincoln, but as soon as it was discovered outside his hotel by fans, it was thoroughly and lovingly defaced in the lipsticked manner we’d seen. Elvis had traded it in at the dealership we saw for a brand-new, white Lincoln Continental Mark II.

  That night, my dad and the ladies went out for another night of dancing at the Fontainbleau. And a couple hours later I headed out on the town with a different musical incentive. I wandered awhile before I came around a corner and knew instantly that I was in the right place. There was a small throng of excited girls clustering around something in front of a big building, and the closer I got, the more I could just about make out the outline of a shiny white Lincoln beyond the girls. I started milling around the edge of the crowd, feeling almost overcome by the smell of so many competing perfumes. The girls were desperately trying to edge each other out, but somehow they let little me slip through—and pretty soon I was close enough to see Elvis leaning against the Lincoln, apparently trying to sign as many autographs as he could before he left town.

  I always felt a little pang of insecurity when I hadn’t seen Elvis for a while—would our friendship pick up wherever it had left off, or had he just gotten too big? Too busy? I was starting to feel that pang now, when suddenly a few girls in front of me moved to the side and there I was, standing just a few feet away from Elvis. He had autograph albums and pictures being shoved in front of him, and dozens of very attractive girls bobbing all around him, and there’s no reason a fourteen-year-old boy should have caught his attention. But he saw me, and stopped signing whatever he was signing. He squinted for a moment like he wanted to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.

  Then he said, “Jerry! What in the hell are you doing here?”

  I didn’t have a chance to tell him much before the girls closed in again, but it didn’t matter. In the middle of all these crazy strangers, I was a guy he knew by name.

  3

  MIDNIGHT RAMBLES

  After September 9, 1956, it was har
d to believe that there was anyone left in the United States who wasn’t aware of Elvis Presley. That was the night he appeared on the season premiere of The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan was recuperating from injuries suffered in a recent car accident, so Elvis’s debut performance on the show was introduced by a surprising guest host, actor Charles Laughton. Laughton was hosting the show in New York City, but Elvis’s segments were broadcast from the CBS studios in Los Angeles, where he was working on his first movie. Elvis sang “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Ready Teddy,” “Hound Dog,” and a song from the new film called “Love Me Tender.” In the days after the broadcast, newspapers were saying that eighty percent of American TV viewers had watched Elvis that night. And a huge national audience watched again when he returned to the show at the end of October (Sullivan was back hosting by that time).

  I watched those Sullivan shows with a great deal of excitement—it was almost unbelievable that a guy who had started as a local talent was now on the biggest TV show in America. And it was made a little more exciting by the fact that Sullivan had at one point said that he wouldn’t ever have Elvis on the show—Elvis was just too controversial. After Elvis appeared on The Steve Allen Show and trounced Sullivan in the ratings, Sullivan changed his mind and welcomed Elvis.

  Even at the time, Elvis’s Sullivan performances felt historic. You had to admit that the world was a different place after Elvis shook hands with Ed Sullivan at the end of that second show. But for me, his most memorable television moment had come back in January, when Elvis made his first appearance on the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show. On that program, Elvis delivered a wild, untamed performance of “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” but almost as powerful as the performance itself was just the way he walked out on stage when he was introduced. If you just saw that walk and turned the TV off before a note of music was played, you’d still get the message: This guy was sex, danger, and good times all rolled into one. I guess that message was clear to the Sullivan producers—during Elvis’s first appearance, they had the cameras cut away from him when he began to dance during “Ready Teddy.”

  As big as Elvis had become, when he was back in Memphis he still liked to play football. So, on a crisp, beautiful fall November day, we football regulars had our green jerseys on, and a crowd of spectators was fanned around the edges of the field at Guthrie Park. Elvis, quarterbacking as usual, seemed to be in a particularly good mood. There was just one problem: For the first time ever at a Guthrie game, I was having a hard time following what he was saying, and having an even harder time keeping my eyes on him as he sketched out our plays and pass patterns. As much as I’d been looking forward to this game while Elvis was away, now that I was here in the middle of a huddle, I was thoroughly distracted.

  Natalie Wood was standing on the sidelines.

  I’d seen Rebel Without a Cause the year before and, just like a few million other adolescent boys, had developed a mad crush on the lovely brown-eyed girl who jeopardizes her “respectable” standing by falling in love with the brooding James Dean. Elvis had met her while he’d been out in Hollywood shooting his own movie. Word was that Elvis and Natalie had dated a few times, and when Elvis asked her and his newfound Hollywood actor pal Nick Adams to come with him for a few days of Memphis fun, they’d accepted the invitation.

  A bunch of the players and I had stood around the park for about half an hour after what had been the agreed-upon start time of the game that day, which was a little unusual, because even though Elvis had his own schedule for just about everything else, he was always on time for football. Looking back, I think this was a day that he wanted to make an especially big entrance, which is exactly what he did, roaring up to the park in great rebel style on a huge, brand-new Harley-Davidson motorcycle. And it made perfect sense that on the back of that motorcycle, clinging tightly to the driver, was a female passenger. It was only after that passenger dismounted and shook her hair out that I realized who I was looking at, and right away I felt my stomach twisting up and my knees getting shaky.

  I suppose that after hanging around Elvis so much, I should have known how to handle being in the presence of a celebrity. But with Elvis, I’d had the chance to know him as a regular guy before he’d gone on to be a local phenomenon and then a full-fledged star. I’d had some time to process the strange way in which a flesh-and-blood human becomes a famous face.

  But Natalie Wood seemed to have stepped right out of the movies and onto that field, and I had no idea how to make sense of that. She seemed at once incredibly petite and also too big to be standing under a North Memphis sky. Either way, she was absolutely stunning, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her. Catching an Elvis pass was one thing, but Natalie Wood on the back of Elvis’s motorcycle—that was pretty exciting stuff for a day in the park.

  “Come on, Jerry, look alive. Don’t let ’em get past you on a plain old slant.”

  Elvis was not happy with our defense—the guys lining up against us kept having success with the long ball, and since I was playing back in the secondary, that was my responsibility. Of course, I didn’t tell Elvis I was distracted by his imported cheerleader. I also didn’t tell him that I was having some trouble getting any kind of support from my partner in the secondary—Nick Adams. Adams had also been in Rebel Without a Cause and was getting steady work in features like Picnic and Our Miss Brooks. He was a little guy who looked like he could probably move with some speed when he wanted to, and Elvis had insisted that the actor side up with our team, but it was clear that Nick did not approach competitive athletics with anything near the kind of intensity that Elvis did. Not only did he never break a sweat, he’s the only guy I’ve ever seen reading a newspaper while playing cornerback.

  I eventually got my head in the game enough to bat down a few passes on defense and make a few catches on offense, but I never quite forgot that a Hollywood beauty was just a few yards away at the side of the field. At the end of the game, Elvis and Natalie stood together, and a few of the guys went up and said hello to her. I didn’t go anywhere near them. I loved Natalie within the safe, dark confines of the Rialto movie theater, but the idea of actually talking to her was a little too much.

  The crowd of spectators that the Guthrie games drew sometimes made it difficult for Elvis to make as quick an exit as he liked, and this was a day when he used one of his rather ingenious escape maneuvers. Standing with Natalie, he casually pulled a comb from his pocket and began to work it through his hair. Then, in equally casual manner, he tossed the comb out on the field. When a cluster of the most avid fans surged out on the grass to try and grab up the souvenir, Elvis and Natalie darted the other way, toward the waiting Harley, and sped off down Chelsea Avenue.

  Hollywood had come to North Memphis, and a few weeks later I got to witness North Memphis returning the favor. On November 21, I was at the Loews State Theater as part of one of the first paying audiences to get a look at Elvis Presley’s debut feature film, Love Me Tender. The screams of the girls around me made it just about impossible to follow the story—this was the first time I’d ever seen an audience treat a film like it was a live concert, loudly responding to every move made and word uttered by their favorite star. I concentrated as best I could on watching the movie.

  I’d sat in that same theater just a month before on a school field trip to see The Ten Commandments. That epic film had a tremendous, enduring impact on me—I didn’t see how anything on screen could be bigger or better. But I’d never played football with Charlton Heston. Watching Love Me Tender, I saw Elvis, someone I knew pretty well, holding his own up on the same big screen where Moses had worked miracles. I was watching Elvis play a character, but at the same time I could recognize a whole lot of the guy I’d played football with. Between seeing Natalie Wood off the screen and Elvis up on it, I felt I was starting to understand some of the mystery of the movies—the people up on screen were real people doing a job. And, at the Loews, Elvis was doing his job pretty darn well.

  As Elvis began his film car
eer, he was taking a step closer to mainstream American entertainment, but he was still seen by many as a dangerous element in American society. That split was made very clear during Elvis’s third and final appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in January of 1957. Elvis had become an even more controversial figure after his first two appearances, but Sullivan didn’t flinch from having him back. However, a concession was made to the moral outrage that Elvis had stirred up—when he performed this time, he was only filmed from the waist up (as with most acts of censorship, this only made its target even more exciting). But in a way, Elvis was already way ahead of the cameras. On TV now, he was not the wild, untamed performer I’d seen on the Dorsey Brothers’ show—he was having fun, but he was also clearly determined. As much as the camera tried to contain him, he’d already figured out how to look right through that lens and reach a TV audience with the smallest of gestures.

  Here was a performer so “dangerous” that we couldn’t see his whole body, and yet, at the end of the show, Ed Sullivan did something very surprising, announcing to his huge American TV audience, “I just wanted to say to Elvis Presley and the country that this is a real decent, fine boy,” and going on to say that he’d never had a more pleasant experience dealing with a big-name guest. The way Elvis looked out at us at that moment, I thought I could see a mix of hurt over the attacks he’d been subjected to in the press, and a deep pride in who he was and what he was doing.

  In some ways, “rebel” is the perfect word for Elvis—just by being who he was and making the music he wanted to make, he was taking on the musical and social conventions of the day. But “rebel” doesn’t get all of it—the word can feel too negative, and you have to be against something to stage a rebellion. On a personal level, Elvis was not fired up with anger and negativity—he wasn’t raging against the world he saw around him. He was fired up with a passion for great music—music that happened to come from both black and white experiences—and he simply wasn’t going to let the world around him get in the way. As far as those early days go, I think “pioneer,” and “trailblazer” fit Elvis as much as “rebel” does.