Me and a Guy Named Elvis

by Jerry Schilling

  Surrounded by old and new friends, Elvis could still be the same exciting, mischievous, unpredictable, and fun-loving (though moody) guy to hang around with. But there was something different about Elvis, too. He wasn’t so much a young rebel anymore, but very much a man. He was still only twenty-five, but you could now sense a maturity quite a bit beyond his years. And that maturity translated into the way he presented himself as a performer. When he came back the first thing he did was the Frank Sinatra TV show, and watching Elvis come out in a tux and sing with Sinatra, you couldn’t help but notice that this wasn’t quite the same guy who had gotten the pundits and preachers upset by shaking his hips on Ed Sullivan’s show.

  Over the course of his first year back, attitudes toward him seemed to shift as well. Even the diehard Elvis detractors seemed to accept the fact that this supposedly antisocial force had gone into the army without a complaint and happily served his country (maybe “proudly” is a better word than “happily”—I happen to know that Elvis hated being away, and would have much preferred two years of performing onstage to two years of sitting in a jeep). I witnessed the changes in Elvis and his fans firsthand at a big charity show he did in Memphis at the good old Ellis auditorium in early 1961—his first big post-army concert. This show didn’t have the feel of any gathering of underground rock and rollers or squealing teenyboppers. This was a packed house of respectable, middle-America Memphians. In fact, the Tennessee governor and Memphis mayor had declared Saturday “Elvis Presley Day”—a pretty big endorsement for a guy who had once been considered the worst possible influence on America’s youth.

  The show was great and Elvis was still a phenomenal talent to watch in action, but what I remember most from that show is the moment he first walked out on stage. This was a very different walk from the one I’d seen on the Dorsey Brothers’ TV show. There was a little less slouch and a little more strut. Before the army, Elvis was the loose, shoulder-rolling James Dean kind of guy. Now, he took the stage more like John Wayne.

  By the end of high school, I’d felt ready and eager to move toward some of my own goals. While I always enjoyed the time I got to spend around Elvis, it also seemed pretty obvious to me that he was going to keep living his amazing life on his own terms, and I had to think about living a life of my own.

  Kids from North Memphis weren’t naturally expected to go to college, but my daddy—a guy who’d never gotten past the eighth grade—was very encouraging about my getting a higher education. And though my brother and I didn’t always have the easiest relationship, Billy Ray also gave me a push and made sure I got out applications on time and pursued football scholarships through the proper channels. (To be honest, I think Billy Ray was more than a little surprised at how well Little Brother had ended up doing in high school, and didn’t want to see him go from class president and All-Memphis wide receiver to gas-pumping grease monkey at the Texaco station on Breedlove.)

  With Billy Ray’s help, I managed to line up a couple of scholarships to play ball at either Southwestern University or Arkansas State College, and, after a bit of a false start at Southwestern, I ended up at the AS campus in Jonesboro, Arkansas—a dry little college town about seventy miles outside of Memphis. I was redshirted my first year and had a good season working out with the team as a wide receiver, really learning the subtleties of the game from my sharp-eyed backfield coach, Larry Lacewell. When the football season was over, I headed back to Memphis just about every weekend, but I spent very little time at home—I was either hanging out with Elvis if he was around, or spending time at Carol Cook’s house (she and I hadn’t done much more than dance, hold hands, and neck a bit, but we considered ours to be a very serious relationship). Though Memphis was only seventy miles away, the trip in my ’49 Dodge sometimes took most of a day—I had to stop four or five times to add oil to the engine, and I started driving around with a case of oil in the trunk at all times.

  Early on in my freshman year, I began to aim toward a major in history and a minor in education, and I did as well in the college classes as I had done toward the end of high school. Not being around on the weekends, I didn’t make too many close friends on campus, but through football I did strike up a friendship with a guy from Philadelphia named Rick Husky. Rick was a big sports fan and was always around at football practices, which is where we met. We hit it off pretty quickly, and I soon discovered that Rick was a big music fan, too. On the weekends that I didn’t go back to Memphis, Rick and I would go out searching for some cool music to listen to (I can distinctly remember driving to Truman, Arkansas, to see Charlie Rich play in a club so small and informal that Charlie was using a Coca-Cola crate for a piano bench). Rick also happened to be president of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity on campus, and before long he had me pledged into the frat as his “little brother.” A lot of the stuff that went on at the frat house struck me as pretty silly—after years of hanging out with Elvis, scavenger hunts and chug-a-lugs didn’t seem all that exciting. But Rick’s room was this big dark space at the back of the house that he had decorated with large, colorful neon bar signs for Schlitz and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. When those neon lights were the only light in the room, and the right record was on in there, it felt a little more like what I had been used to in the TV room at Graceland.

  As it turned out, in becoming Rick’s brother I was becoming Elvis’s brother, too. At the beginning of the school year, Rick had sent a letter to Elvis asking him to become an honorary brother in TKE. To everyone’s surprise, Elvis accepted (I would come to learn that one of Elvis’s great regrets was his lack of higher education, and he was sincerely touched by the frat’s offer). Elvis even invited Rick and some TKE brothers to Graceland so that he could receive a ceremonial plaque from them. Later on we three brothers—Rick, Elvis, and I—would spend a lot more time together in Los Angeles.

  My football dreams ended in my sophomore year, when, after running too many buttonhook patterns and taking too many direct hits from oversize linebackers, my back started to give out. After having to crawl off the field during one practice and barely making it to the locker room, I realized I just wasn’t going to make it through the season. The trouble was, if I wasn’t going to play ball, the school wanted to cut my scholarship in half. That didn’t strike me as fair—I’d played as hard as I could and had been willing to offer up my spine in the name of school spirit. So I quit Arkansas State, moved back to Memphis, transferred my units to Memphis State, and got a job at the Midtown Sears (my Aunt Dot worked there, and I think she put in the good word for me). I’d get my education, stay closer to Carol Cook, and be able to hang out more with Elvis and the guys.

  I was increasingly convinced that Carol Cook and I had a future together. But a couple of times it seemed like having both Elvis and Carol in my life was going to be a problem.

  By 1962, Elvis was having some larger parties up at Graceland again, and I was very happy to show up at one with Carol on my arm. I figured that bringing a sweet, smart, beautiful girl up to the house was a good move. This was one of the gazebo nights, when people were hanging outside and playing a lot of music. Carol thought the place and the people were just as special as I did, and that made me love her even more. We were both in a great mood and started dancing together.

  Carol was a wild dancer, and I don’t think there was a guy there who didn’t notice the way this lovely girl was moving to the music. And as her proud date, I’m sure I was probably looking very pleased with myself. Around the dance floor we saw nothing but smiles shining out at us. What we didn’t see was Elvis. Elvis was a star, but he was a fleshand-blood male who had a jealous streak and suffered bouts of insecurity just like any other guy. This was his party, and if there was going to be a girl there that was going to get the attention, it had better be Elvis’s girl. Not Jerry Schilling’s. The sight of my knockout date as the center of attention at his party—that didn’t make Elvis happy.

  When Carol and I took a break and I noticed that Elvis wasn’t around, I ap
proached Alan Fortas. He told me Elvis was inside the house, and when I asked if I could bring Carol in to say hello, Alan shook his head.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Jerry.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, there was something he said before he left.”

  “What, Alan?”

  “Uh—he said, ‘Who the hell does Jerry Schilling think he is, bringing that chick up here?’”

  Suddenly I didn’t feel like dancing much anymore. I didn’t see Elvis the rest of the night, and for a tense week or so I didn’t call the house or show up at the Graceland gates again. Then I got a call from Alan. Elvis wanted to get a football game together, and he wanted me to be there. I was still in. Though apparently Elvis preferred to see me in cleats rather than dancing shoes.

  There was one other interesting Elvis/Carol Cook incident when we were invited as a couple to Elvis’s private New Year’s Eve party at the end of 1962, to be held at the Manhattan Club, a small, out-of-the-way nightspot down on Highway 51 near Graceland. Elvis wanted some great music for everybody to enjoy, so he lined up Carla Thomas (Rufus’s daughter), who’d had a big hit with “Gee Whiz (Look At His Eyes).” Also on the bill was Sir Isaac and the Doo-dads, led by a muscular keyboard player named Isaac Hayes.

  All the familiar faces were there, including Elvis’s serious new love interest, a striking young girl named Priscilla Beaulieu.

  Priscilla was the daughter of an Air Force officer, and Elvis had met her when he was stationed over in Germany. They’d stayed in touch over the next couple of years, and that summer of 1962 Elvis had flown her from Germany for a two-week visit in Los Angeles, where he’d just finished filming Girls! Girls! Girls! Back in Memphis, Elvis hadn’t talked much about Priscilla to us guys, but his feelings about her must have been pretty clear to some—by the end of the summer, Anita Wood, who’d been living at Graceland, moved out and announced to the local press that she and Elvis had broken up.

  Now, Priscilla had come to Memphis for the first time, and she’d been a presence at some of the usual gatherings in the week around Christmas. She’d watched us knock each other off our skates at the Rainbow, and she was right there beside Elvis when we got together for a private movie screening at the Memphian or Malco theaters. She was only sixteen, but there was a seriousness about her that made her seem older. Watching the way Elvis treated her, it was clear that he was in love, and one of the great images I have of that night is the sight of Elvis and Priscilla dancing—it was one of the few times I ever saw Elvis dance when not on a stage.

  But the image that had the more powerful effect on me that night was the sight of Carol dancing—with other guys. Now it was my turn to be jealous. And my jealous streak, helped along by one of my first-ever nights of excessive alcohol consumption, got the better of me. Carol and I had a blowout argument, and I got worked up enough that I stormed to the back of the club and hit one of the side walls with all the charging linebacker force I could muster. Then I went home to my daddy’s house and celebrated the New Year by suffering through my first-ever hangover.

  The phone rang the evening of New Year’s Day. I was hoping it might be Carol Cook begging forgiveness. Instead, it was Alan Fortas.

  “Hey, Jerry, how you doing?”

  “OK. Why?”

  “I just wanted to let you know—that wall you hit last night…?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. I lost control of myself. Why?”

  “Well, it’s just that there’s a liquor store on the other side of that wall. When you hit it, a whole shelf of bottles fell over. Elvis paid for the lost liquor, but he wanted me to check up on you.”

  I felt young and stupid and about as embarrassed as I’d ever been. But as I fought my way through the fog of that hangover, I was comforted by one thought: Who else but a real friend would cover for you when you broke a wall’s worth of liquor bottles?

  I was making money for tuition working in the order-filling department at Sears, a job in which I prowled about the top floors of the store, receiving customers’ order slips from the floors below through a system of pneumatic tubes. Once the order was fired up to me, I ran around to find the requested item, which I would then slide down to the appropriate department by way of a system of chutes (for a low-tech system it was pretty darned cool). There was one other guy manning the tubes, chutes, and inventory with me—a very interesting fellow named George Gill. George was a small, wiry, highly intense guy with a head of bright red hair.

  Maybe having gotten used to all the characters around Elvis, I approached George with more of an open mind than he probably expected from an ex-jock, and we became fast friends. George was using his Sears paychecks to support a budding career as an artist and painter, and hearing the way he talked about painting got me excited about it, too. When George got word that he was actually going to have some of his work shown at a gallery up in New York City, he asked me to take a road trip up there with him. I said yes.

  It wasn’t just George and art that made up my mind, though. Carol and I had made up after the New Year’s Eve incident and had gotten serious enough again to start talking about getting married. Her parents, who had always been welcoming and loving toward me, drew the line there. The combination of my not being Jewish and my working-class background made me less than ideal son-in-law material. Carol was shipped up to New Rochelle, New York, to live with an older sister, whose husband had a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

  With visions of the big city in my head, Carol in my heart, George at my side, and a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket, I boarded a New York–bound train in early 1964. The dollars didn’t last long—when we got to the D.C. station and had a couple of hours before our transfer, I fell asleep on a bench and was promptly pickpocketed. But George and I did make it up there, and I consider the six months I spent in New York—the time when I was technically a “college dropout”—to be one of the most important periods of my education.

  George and I got a just barely livable one-room apartment on West 75th Street, and I got a job whistling for cabs as a doorman at the Carlyle Hotel and, later, as a reservations agent for Eastern Airlines. Just about every spare dollar I earned was spent on New York’s public transportation system—specifically, the trains to New Rochelle. Carol’s sister, Connie, was not supposed to find out that I had followed Carol up north, so protocol was that I’d take the train up, walk to Connie’s house, sneak around back, crawl through a basement window, and wait for Carol to sneak down to join me. We’d whisper and neck a bit, until it was time for me to crawl out the window again and get back down to the city in time for work. More than once while I sat in that New Rochelle basement, Carol went out with some other guy—a decoy date—to keep her sister from suspecting anything. (The fact that this plan made perfect sense to me at the time tells you how head over heels I was for this girl.)

  A couple of times, Carol and I did manage to get out on the city together, and I was always impressed with her adventurous streak. One night, she insisted that we check out a Harlem nightclub she’d heard about called Smalls Paradise. We got uptown and found the place, and maybe the door staff was a little surprised to see a young white couple up there, but we were welcomed right in. The place had an incredible vibe to it—a swinging, upscale hangout for what looked like the wealthiest and most beautiful of NYC’s black elite. This wasn’t like any Beale Street joint I’d been around—more like a black version of the nightclub at the top of the Peabody Hotel. More Quincy Jones than Rufus Thomas.

  I guess we didn’t know enough to feel as out of place as we might have—we settled into a booth and got comfortable pretty quickly. We weren’t drinking anything stronger than sodas, and when Carol asked for some extra cherries, she was presented with a beautiful dish of them that looked like something from a floral shop. She was surprised and excited to spot some models she recognized from the cover of Ebony magazine. I was surprised to hear that Carol read Ebony, but, then again, one of things that
I loved about her was that I was always learning or experiencing something new when I was with her.

  We had a few great outings like that, and some nice times in the New Rochelle basement, but eventually, despite all our careful sneaking around, our forbidden love affair was discovered. Carol was immediately sent back to Memphis, and I stayed down on 75th Street. At first I was consumed with heartache, but without any more commuter trains to catch, I really started to take in the city around me and open myself up to its pleasures: concerts at Carnegie Hall, museums full of the works I’d seen in my freshman art class books, old-style steakhouses, and neighborhood coffee shops. Just walking the streets and riding the subway, I began to feel more alive, more present, and I dedicated myself to exploring what the city had to offer. I toured the UN building, sat in Central Park reading James Baldwin novels, and hung out in Washington Square Park, marveling at the beautiful children of the mixed-race couples strolling by. I picked up discount theater tickets to catch Richard Burton’s performance as Hamlet. My spirits soared in Manhattan—around me I saw opportunities for adventure and new ways to expand my perspective.

  The move to New York was a permanent one for George Gill, and I think it might have been for me except for one factor that I couldn’t quite dismiss: phone calls from Carol Cook. It took only a few of them, with her getting teary and both of us professing our love all over again, before New York—for all its wonders—just didn’t feel right.

  Being in love wasn’t quite the thrill it had started out as—I didn’t want to climb through any more basement windows. But great theater and affordable steak were no match for a beautiful girl crying over a long-distance connection. Pretty soon I had a ticket back to Memphis.