Some would later aptly describe Kerouac as a literary Elvis. Besides their good looks, both men pushed the societal bounds of post–World War II America. Kerouac went to his sister’s house at 1219 Yates Street in Orlando to make the final edits to his 1957 novel On the Road, seen by many as the first rock and roll book of the so-called Beat Generation. Kerouac’s florid description of a transient lifestyle, casual sex, and drug experimentation was far ahead of its time and brought critical scorn.
Young people devoured the book’s message: refusing to accept a perceived ideal of children and marriage, a comfortable home in suburbs going up all over America, providing more ethos to the nation’s developing youth culture and generational divide. Presley and Kerouac appealed to the same restless energy; the desire to explore outside the boundaries of stringent 1950s societal norms, to pursue the notion of true youthful freedom, to blaze along America’s highways to the sounds of rock and roll and all-night jazz.
Rock and roll’s version of The Wild One, Elvis Presley, his band, his backup singers the Jordanaires, June Juanico, and driver–security man Red West caravanned along US 92 out of St. Petersburg, turning north on the famous Orange Blossom Trail, past the gleaming new Tupperware Home Parties headquarters where trailblazing female sales maven Brownie Wise was breaking through management glass ceilings.
“We had a certain little game we would play to break the boredom,” West recalled. “We’d drive along the countryside, we’d be going over a bridge. We had this little thing where somebody was talking about something really important, you’d tap them on the head, they were supposed to like change the channel, go to completely something different.”
As they passed over the bridge, whoever was tapped on the head knew what was expected: “Take his shoes off and throw them out the window into the river!” exclaimed West. “Things like that, stupid little things just to break the monotony.” That kind of fun was what Bill Black lived for. Red West called him “one of the craziest guys I ever met.”
After finishing the ninety-three-mile journey to Orlando’s Municipal Auditorium at 401 West Livingston Street, the touring party stashed their cars out of sight and headed into the auditorium barely a half hour before the first show was set to start. By Wednesday, the middle of Elvis Presley’s most historic and demanding Florida tour, the band had already performed more than a dozen headlining shows for 35,000 fans. In Orlando, two more concerts and 6,500 youngsters awaited, as did Florida’s first journalist to recognize the coming Presley phenomenon the year before, Jean Yothers.
“How long do you think you’ll stay on top in show biz?” Yothers asked.
In a relaxed southern drawl Presley replied, “I wish I knew ma’am, people change a lot.”
As hard as it is to imagine now, even at this early zenith in his career, Presley and those around him were still not convinced about his staying power. “He knows he won’t be on top forever,” added Bill Black backstage. “He’s going into movies and maybe save some money to fall back on.” In the early days Presley was known for buying lavish gifts for friends and family, but they rarely filtered down to bandmates. “He can spend and spend,” Black said of Presley, “and not spend at all.”
Writer George Miller described Presley’s dramatic entrance in Orlando: “Elvis, in a bright red sport coat, its collar turned up, and white shirt open to his belt buckle, paced out of the dressing room door and into the wings where he hitched his pants, spread his legs like a child walking astride a broomstick, and hobble-swaggered on stage to a screaming ovation and a million exploding flash bulbs.”
In the front row ecstatic fan Pat Hix said she liked Presley’s “style of singing and his flashy clothes” best. Others had a different take on Presley’s wardrobe and what it meant. “My mother was there. She kept saying, ‘That guy’s gonna make it. He’s gonna be big,’” remembered Sanford resident Randi Russi, whose father also attended the concert. “My Dad thought he was gay because he wore silver and pink.”
Moore scoffed at any notion Presley was homosexual or bisexual. From time to time, Presley liked to break away and have his own dates during modest downtime. Most of the time, Presley’s bandmates were close by and witnessed his habits, including sexual dalliances. In his memoir Scotty and Elvis Aboard the Mystery Train, Moore recalled what he believed to be the night Presley lost his virginity. While on a 1954 Louisiana Hayride tour, the bandmates waited in the lobby while Presley used their only hotel room to have sex with a girl he’d met.
Suddenly, Presley came down to the lobby with her and exclaimed, “The rubber busted, what do I do now?” Black made a smartass comment; Moore was dumbfounded. Finally Presley took the girl to a local hospital for an emergency douche. When he told the older men what he’d done, both were surprised hospitals did that sort of thing. “Elvis was certainly an original thinker,” Moore mused.
During the brief half-hour intermission between the Orlando shows, Presley tinkered on a beat-up piano backstage while five girls hovered, a blond, three brunettes, and another described as “half and half.” As Presley picked out a blues tune on the piano, writer George Miller noted the singer’s apparent exhaustion, though some of it could have been for dramatic effect to hold the attention of all the girls surrounding him.
“His large eyes almost closed under a shroud of tumbling hair,” Miller observed. “One time Elvis slumped over the keyboard exhausted. Half and Half gently messaged his neck.” Then Presley arose and starting pounding on some drums backstage, drawing the attention of a new house of fans waiting for the second show. “Half and Half” was likely Juanico. In a rebellious moment, she’d had a blond streak added to her brunette hair at the previous stop in St. Pete. Presley was not enamored with the new look.
“We Want Elvie, We Want Elvie,” the crowd chanted.
“He’s really wound up tonight,” concluded the girl now known as Half and Half. As his band took the stage, Presley walked back into the smoke filled, high-ceilinged dressing room. Noting that Presley wasn’t ready, Red West told the boys onstage to begin without him. “Play one,” West instructed. When Presley was finally ready to amble out onstage to the familiar shrieks and flash bulbs, he blinked and stared, and pulled at his shirt, once again open to the waist: “Ladies and gentlemen,” Presley broke into a smile and a giggle. “Yea, I want to tell you, I’m gonna tell you … I HEAR YA KNOCKIN’.”
After his now-standard opening number “Heartbreak Hotel,” Presley’s first million-seller, he hopped around like a june bug to Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally,” bringing the crowd into a frenzy all over again. Four policemen kept girls from rushing the stage while Presley removed his coat and belted out his new single, “Hound Dog.” Jean Yothers gauged crowd reaction: “A delighted squeal erupted from the house that could have blown the top from Vesuvius.”
Like Elvalee Donaldson in Lakeland and Anne Rowe in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Jean Yothers took the time to speak with and observe Presley, finding him to be a “real nice kid.” Yothers treasured a photo of Presley giving her a peck on the cheek. “I egged him on,” she confessed in an interview years later.
Juanico remembered that one of her all-time favorite moments with Presley came during the Orlando stop. Away from the bevy of other girls, Presley took Juanico’s hand backstage and led her to the upright piano. “I’ve been working on something new, just for you, baby,” he said with a grin on his face. With that, Presley started playing and singing “Unchained Melody,” an all-time sentimental fan favorite due to the song’s soulful, intimate lyrics, Presley’s dramatic interpretation of them, and because it was reportedly the last song Presley ever sang the night before his death.
Oh my love, my darling, I’ve hungered for your touch. A long, lonely time.
“He sang beautifully, looking at me after every tentative chord change,” recalled Juanico. “That special afternoon, with just the two of us at the piano, was one of the treasured times in our relationship, and it would stay in my mind forever.” With
in the din of screaming girls and controversy that dogged Presley during this phase of his career, it’s easy to overlook the depth of his talent. Through a plaintive song like “Unchained Melody” Presley’s voice, adaptable to so many genres, transported his girlfriend to the depths of his soul.
After seeing the Presley show in Orlando, three young buddies who worked for the local phone company in Deland pointed their car north on Highway 17-92 to head back to their rooming house in Volusia County. In the warm and humid August night the trio passed lakeside motels and restaurants on the road that led tourists to Big Tree Park in Longwood, where the three-thousand-year-old bald cypress known as “the Senator” towered in all its majestic glory.
Cresting a hill where 17-92 becomes French Avenue in Sanford, the boys noticed a brightly colored Lincoln that had pulled into a darkened service station not far from the Farmer’s Market. “The service station was closed but the Coke machine was lit up,” remembered Roy Brand, one of the three young men who’d seen the show that night and came to realize the star attraction was right in front of them: “My God that’s Elvis,” he exclaimed to his buddies.
The boys pulled in alongside the two Lincolns from Presley’s traveling party. They scrambled over to the machine to buy Presley a contoured bottle of Coke for a nickel, went over to his car, and greeted him. Always one to have time for his fans, Presley started talking with the boys and engaging in the so-called distance game. Up until the 1960s, print on the bottom of Coke bottles included where they came from. In one version of the game, players compared whose bottle was manufactured closest to a player’s hometown or to where they were at that moment.
“What do you boys do?” Presley asked.
When they told him they worked for the phone company, Presley decided to stick around a little longer and engage in what Brand called “a little good ol’ boy talk.” Juanico got into the other car with Red West and the rest of the entourage and headed on to the next stop in Daytona Beach. Presley told Brand and his friends he’d gotten as a gift a phone with a spring cord. Presley said in a near whisper, the phone company didn’t know he was using the fancy ten-dollar device. But there was a problem; the phone line was scratchy and Presley couldn’t figure out why.
Brand explained that it had to be a party line phone on a private line connection. At that time, people using party lines could expect their conversations to be heard by any one of a number of families using that same line. Brand explained the simple way to manipulate the green and yellow wires to remove the interference. “That’s great, that’s great,” Presley exclaimed, now all alone in the central Florida night with three young men he’d just met. The significance of this random late night meeting was not lost on Roy Brand: “So here he is, already a multi-millionaire and he’s screwing the phone company out of ten dollars or ten dollars and fifty cents.”
In August of ’56 Presley was yet to become a millionaire, but his income for that year alone came to just under $300,000. Brand, like Presley, had grown up dirt poor and concluded after many years of thinking about it that some parts of being so destitute never leave you. When Presley withdrew from the world in later years, Brand saw his situation as similar to that of the world-renowned but famously reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Both men ended up prisoners of their own fame and fortune.
But not on this night in Sanford; even as the tumult of fame and controversy swirled around him on his current Florida tour, Presley could stop for a Coke and some idle chitchat about party line phones with three guys he’d never met before and feel secure enough to be left all alone with them. “He was free,” Brand declared.
After his late night bull session, Presley bade the trio farewell and took off for Daytona Beach, where inner strife between band members was about to reach a boiling point.
16
Boiling Over
August 9, Daytona Beach
In Daytona Beach Presley and his bandmates could have been forgiven if they brought along a little hubris. Only fifteen months previously, he had stood at the railing of his beachside motel staring at the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, tour promoter Mae Axton practically holding his hand. At Presley’s first Florida concert, few in the audience knew what to make of him, fellow musicians kept their distance, and his performance consisted of a quick song or two. But no longer.
Now, the hillbilly oddity was the unquestioned king of rock and roll. Thanks to endless touring, and Tom Parker’s fearless deal making, Presley was on a major record label, where he had produced multiple million-selling singles and a platinum album; he had made numerous successful national television appearances with the Dorsey Brothers, Milton Berle, and Steve Allen; and he had moved his family out of poverty in the Memphis projects to their own sprawling ranch home with a swimming pool. Not bad for a young man who had been making forty dollars a week just two years before.
The next chapter in Presley’s rise to fame lay just a few short weeks ahead. After he finished the last few dates on this tour, Presley was headed to Hollywood to begin shooting his first feature film. Then he was slated to make his run of appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, the nation’s most talked-about variety program. In his storied career, 1956 was the year that made it all possible for Elvis Presley.
There was no hero’s welcome awaiting Presley when his tour arrived back at the World’s Most Famous Beach; far from it. “Everyone in the show was on edge,” Scotty Moore recalled. For whatever reason, the group didn’t stay in Orlando, preferring to make the late night drive over to the beach. After Presley stayed behind in Sanford, the rest of the tour members went on ahead. “It was one of those godawful all-night rides and everyone was ill and in a bad mood,” said Moore.
It couldn’t have been worse timing for a lapse in Parker’s advance work. Mae Axton wasn’t along this time either to make sure things ran smoothly. Late into the night the touring party bounced from beachside motel to motel, none of which had reservations or rooms for them. It was no time for Bill Black to make some sort of wisecrack, but that was what he always did.
“All I remember is that it had something to do with the motel,” said Moore. “We went to blows and had a fistfight right there in the parking lot.”
Black was a lot bigger than Moore, but as a former navy man, Moore knew how to protect himself. “It was a pretty good fight,” recalled Neal Matthews of the Jordanaires. “It didn’t last very long. Scotty was a pretty good fighter.”
After everything Bill Black and Scotty Moore had done to provide the foundation for Elvis Presley’s ascent in contemporary music, both were sick and tired, with no motel room in the middle of an arduous tour; Parker left them all stranded like hobos. Now they were duking it out in the middle of the night.
Ironically, June Juanico found out, the hotel they thought they had booked was jammed with numerous guests in town specifically to see Presley’s shows. “We drove for miles down the beach, seeing the ‘no vacancy’ signs,” Juanico remembered. After all the drama and hysteria she’d witnessed to this point in the tour, Juanico suggested she spend some time relaxing at the beach and skipping Presley’s two Daytona Beach concerts. With Parker watching his young star like an overbearing den mother, Presley agreed that a little distance was a good idea.
Vintage Copacabana Motel postcard. From author’s personal collection.
“The colonel’s been on my ass about you again,” Presley told her. “So I’ll see you in Jacksonville.”
After hours of searching and fighting, the entourage finally found a place to stay. Locals Chuck and Jane Hansen, owners of the beachside Copacabana Motel at 1201 South Atlantic Avenue, welcomed them. By early the next morning, fans started getting word that the young star was staying in room eleven. After some decent sleep, when Presley emerged and walked over to La Casita motel and restaurant next door, plenty of attractive girls and curious young men started to congregate. The miserable all-night ride was giving way to a relaxing morning on the ocean.
In a series of photos
taken outside the Copacabana, Presley appears very much at ease with fame and fans, signing autographs and—thanks to his distance from Juanico—flirting with the girls. Like scenes from photographer Robert Frank’s landmark 1950s book The Americans, Presley looks like any other young ducktailed guy enjoying the surf, sun, and sights on a warm August day.
For a few precious hours Presley walked the motel’s expansive grass courtyard; even taking time to have a seat near the Copacabana’s oceanside pool, with its high retaining wall on one end, the only thing separating it from cars cruising by on the sand and from the ocean’s pounding surf in the distance. A black and white photo captures Presley, relaxed and with shirt unbuttoned, reading the morning paper with a new young lady friend at his side—one of several he flirted with while Juanico was elsewhere. The innocent man-child who had started his Florida journey here in 1955 was now a world-weary performer on his biggest, most lucrative tour to date.
Presley flirting with fan outside Copacabana Motel, Daytona Beach, August 1956. Courtesy of scottymoore.net.
“We had a nice picture of Elvis signed from him to ‘the Hansens’ hanging on the motel office wall for many years,” recalled their granddaughter Joy Keener-Borresen. “But it was stolen when I was a child.” After three hurricanes pounded it in 2004, the Copacabana Motel was demolished.
Presley’s appearances have become a part of Daytona Beach lore alongside Fireball Roberts blazing down the hard sand track prior to the construction of Daytona International Speedway; gangster John Dillinger firing his tommy gun in the air to ring in 1934 beachside; Jackie Robinson playing the first integrated spring training baseball game in the stadium that now bears his name; local teens Duane and Gregg Allman honing their chops at Club Martinique along the boardwalk; and Sinatra performing at the Ocean Center in 1994, his final year of touring. In 1999 a large section of the Daytona Beach pier was torn off during Hurricane Floyd and shown on NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, floating into the Gulf Stream with light posts still erect.
Elvis Ignited Page 13
