In September 1957, while Presley was in Hollywood shooting a movie, back in Memphis his frustrated bandmates finally turned in letters of resignation. Presley fumed about Moore and Black being disloyal, while the ever-conniving Parker made no attempt to play peacemaker. “Tom Parker had us right where he wanted us,” Moore wrote.
To make ends meet, Bill Black took a job at a Memphis appliance store. He told the local newspaper he was “embarrassed.” Moore told reporters Elvis had always promised that as his income rose, so would theirs. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In response to Moore’s request for a fifty-dollar raise, a pittance given the money Presley was raking in, on September 18, 1957, Presley’s father, Vernon, who was now working for his son, wrote Scotty and Bill perfunctory letters to notify them their services were no longer needed.
After a short cooling-off period, Scotty and Bill agreed to accompany Presley as independent contractors for another month of dates in Texas, California, and Hawaii. The last concert the original trio performed during this remarkable era came at the Conroy Bowl in Hawaii on November 11, 1957.
Moore had held on to the notion that Presley would come to his senses and recognize Parker for what he really was. They didn’t want to quit Elvis; both men still held on to hope Presley would think about things, come to realize all that Scotty and Bill had meant to him, and bump them up to a decent living wage.
As usual Parker prevailed and, by alienating Scotty and Bill, cut out a sizable chunk of Presley’s rock and roll soul. From the distant Sun Records days and all those timeless recordings by the three who altered the course of modern music history, the darkening twilight gave way to night. Parker’s plan to soften Presley’s image did not include rock and roll or high profile roles for Scotty and Bill. The departure of these two quintessential musicians sounded the death knell for Presley’s soul-shouting rebellion; the jailhouse rocker was gone.
Never was the hand of Tom Parker more evident than in the repeatedly cruel and dismissive way he marginalized Presley’s musical brothers-in-arms from the early days. Every time they tried to figure out a promotion or idea to augment their earnings, if it had to do with Elvis, Parker slammed the door; no one was going to horn in on his specialty of profiting off all things Presley. When it came to any form of hucksterism or merchandising to generate more money from his client-cum-commodity, Tom Parker was shameless. Hocking Elvis Presley photos and wearing an Elvis straw hat festooned with Elvis buttons appealed to Parker’s carny nature. He never had a care in the world about the effect it had on Presley’s credibility as an artist.
D. J. Fontana was in a different position; he had been brought on as a salaried side man from the beginning. Starting out, Presley, Scotty, and Bill made a verbal pact to be equal partners. Moore and Black were told they would share in the royalties of Presley’s recordings on which they played key roles. That never happened. By the middle of 1957 Presley was rich, while his bandmates struggled on. Tom Parker was the hatchet man, but Presley was well aware of what was happening and did nothing to stop it. The same would hold true for the generally lousy career choices Parker made for Presley during the coming decade.
Parker’s plan for Presley’s future was to make him more palatable to all those adults who still held mistrust and resentment for him. In the end it was all about money; Parker didn’t want to alienate anyone who could contribute to Presley’s box office draw. Freewheeling singles like “Jailhouse Rock” gave way to “Stuck on You,” among other ballads. Moore was mystified: “It was like Elvis had been kidnapped and taken off to a side show of a circus.” Make that a carnival. Television producer Steve Binder knew the trench warfare that accompanied a battle of wills with Tom Parker. When things got really heated, Binder said the former carny had a kind of death stare that convinced him Parker was trying to hypnotize him.
By far the most traumatizing event during this transition period of Presley’s life came on August 14, 1958, when his first love, the person Presley was closest to in the world, forty-six-year-old Gladys Presley, died of a heart attack brought on by acute hepatitis. It’s impossible to overstate the impact on Presley of losing such an important friend, confidante, and champion. Gladys was the person Presley could depend on most for unconditional love, honest advice, and understanding.
The emotional ties between Presley and his father, Vernon, were nowhere near as close as the unmovable bond Presley had with his mother, his anchor, and she for her only surviving child. As another member of Presley’s growing roster of employees, Vernon was not about to question who was the boss. Adding more tension in the father-son relationship, by 1960 Vernon was on the verge of remarrying. His fiancée Dee Stanley had three young boys of her own from a previous marriage. Presley came to love his younger half-brothers.
In 1957 Presley’s longtime girlfriend June Juanico, who accompanied him on his final Florida tour, got tired of waiting around and reading reports of her former paramour in Hollywood with one starlet after another. On a train ride home from Hollywood to Memphis, Juanico got on board in New Orleans only long enough to let him know she was engaged to another man. That meant another close emotional bond from Presley’s touring days was severed.
From 1958 to 1960 Presley traveled to Germany, not to perform but to serve a required two-year stint in the U.S. Army. While serving overseas Presley met and was immediately smitten with an officer’s daughter, fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu. During his two years in the army Presley’s relationship with the dark-haired young beauty deepened to the point where he was pushing Priscilla’s father to let her live with him back home at Graceland after his discharge. This time Tom Parker was stateside and in no position to throw cold water on Presley’s budding romance. Eventually Presley got his way.
A dark legacy from the military was the beginning of Presley’s descent down the rabbit hole of using and abusing prescription drugs. As a way to stay awake during long, monotonous hours on maneuvers, a sergeant introduced Presley to amphetamines. He started popping pills and washing them down with coffee. “He was so full of energy he never had to slow down,” wrote his biographer Peter Guralnick. “They all took them, if only to keep up with Presley, who was practically evangelical about their benefits.”
Soon Presley was buying amphetamines in large supply, telling friends it was a safe way to keep weight down and energy boundless. He knew, however, that it would not be safe to be caught with them coming back home to the United States. When it was time to return, the honorably discharged Presley did something decidedly dishonorable; he put his young assistant and sometime lover Elisabeth Stefaniak in charge of smuggling a half-gallon jar of amphetamines in her luggage.
Had this selfish request of a trusted assistant been discovered, it would have left Stefaniak little choice but to take all the blame and consequences. More than once during interviews about his time in the army, Presley gave the slightest hint of what he’d done, remarking: “I made it just like everybody … I mean I tried to play it straight just like everybody else.”
During Presley’s absence overseas, rock and roll faded from popular culture due to a series of dramatic developments. In February 1959 the prolific young songwriter Buddy Holly, who once shared a 1955 concert bill with Presley, died in an Iowa plane crash. Jerry Lee Lewis was ostracized for marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin, and another early pillar of rock and roll, Chuck Berry, was arrested for transporting a fourteen-year-old girl across state lines for alleged immoral purposes.
For his part, Tom Parker developed a love of locking horns with Hollywood big shots like producer Hal Wallace to make the best money possible for himself and Presley. Being a Hollywood power broker was the realization of a dream Parker had hatched way back during his days at Tampa’s Humane Society, when he provided animal actors and kowtowed to filmmakers working in the area. Presley’s films were formulaic and churned out quickly, providing solid box office receipts and a princely leading man income for Presley. In return he paid a steep price by losin
g the artistic fulfillment, adrenaline rush, and unconditional love he received while performing live.
After Presley’s return from the army, previous rivals who had held the most mistrust for Tom Parker—Gladys Presley, Scotty Moore, and June Juanico—were no longer in the picture. It was during the 1960s that many fans believe Tom Parker turned from star maker to slave driver and Presley from the epitome of rock and roll rebellion to the indentured actor-crooner content to cloister himself in the highly lucrative world of mediocre films, forgettable songs, and his new preoccupation with pharmaceuticals.
After his less-than-amicable parting of the ways with Scotty and Bill in 1957, upon his return to the United States in March 1960 Presley tried to reconcile with them by inviting the boys to be part of the Sinatra special. As was typical of their on-again off-again professional relationship with Presley, Moore and drummer D. J. Fontana accepted. Bill Black had moved on, citing commitments with his new and successful jazz group, the Bill Black Combo. The bass-slapping good-time Charlie who had provided so much rhythm on the Sun recordings and the comic relief on Presley’s early concert tours would never work with him again. Black died of a brain tumor in 1965 at age thirty-nine.
After some recording in Nashville, Presley, Moore, Fontana and the entourage boarded a train bound for Miami. The trip was supposed to be secret, but Parker was never one to ignore an obvious chance for some free and easy publicity. He notified small town newspapers to watch for Presley’s train. Even at 2:00 a.m. girls lined the tracks to watch the Presley train roll by. When Elvis and Scotty crossed back into Florida together for the first time since 1956, ironically their first stop was the impressive and stately train terminal in Jacksonville, the town from which Gladys Presley had told her son to stay away.
Like inventor Thomas Edison, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt before him, returning hero Presley took time to appear on the back platform of the train at the Jacksonville terminal. On the train ride, Moore recalled, some of the ice was melting between his old bandmates and Presley. “Everybody would just get in his car and be kibitzing,” Moore recalled. When it got to be two or three in the morning, Moore said Presley offered him and Fontana “a couple of little white pills and said, ‘Here, these’ll keep you awake. It’s what they use in the army, driving tanks.”
Presley made it clear he was nervous at the thought of his first television appearance in two years coming beside the biggest singer–movie star in show business, Frank Sinatra. “I’m not exactly worried,” Presley told an interviewer. “But I’m not sure of myself either.” Presley said he hoped to take on more serious roles as an actor. Thanks to Parker’s paranoia about doing anything to damage the former rock and roller’s more wholesome image, he forbade Presley from accepting anything serious or the least bit controversial, one of Presley’s bitterest and most lingering disappointments.
“It was all about power, that’s why I was so in shock, people were so in awe of Colonel Parker,” said Steve Binder, who refused to acquiesce to some of the ridiculous ideas Parker had; formulaic clichés Binder knew instinctively would ruin the comeback special he produced. “What I saw was a con man the first time I met him.”
For his part, Sinatra never took back the awful things he had said about Presley and rock and roll. By this time it didn’t matter. Presley was looking and sounding far more like a Sinatra clone than the young rock and roll sex machine that blew through Florida like Hurricane Donna. “The kid’s been away two years,” Sinatra said before the taping in Miami. “I get the feeling he really believes in what he’s doing.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
In Hollywood, Florida, five thousand fans waited at the station for Presley’s train to pass through. He promised disc jockey Jerry Wichner he would step out of his car to say a few words. Some pranksters seized on the opportunity to pelt the train with eggs and tomatoes; that was enough to convince Presley to skip the greeting before his final destination. As a make-good gesture, Hollywood’s Mayor William Zinkil later sent an envoy down to Miami to present Presley with a key to the city.
If Presley harbored any unease about fans forgetting him, those thoughts were assuaged upon his arrival at Miami’s East Coast Railway station on March 22, 1960. In the shadow of the Dade County Courthouse, fans packed the downtown station. “You’d never know Elvis Presley had been away,” the Miami Herald reported. “Thousands of screaming, weeping teen-agers mobbed the downtown Miami FEC station to welcome back the singer-turned-sergeant-turned civilian.”
No longer sporting his trademark sideburns, the newspaper noted, Presley looked more Sinatra-esque in a fedora when he checked in at Fontainebleau Hotel on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. The special was to be shot in the hotel’s grand ballroom and aired on ABC weeks later. This was the same hotel where Parker had said he was too afraid to book Presley back at the start of his August 1956 tour for fear his young devotees would trash the place. Despite the fans who greeted Presley at the train station, by March 1960 many of those from his barnstorming years had already moved on.
“I loved him for the early years,” remembered Linda Moscato, who was among the screaming crowds at the Olympia Theater in 1956. “By the 1960s he was off my radar, I’d lost track of him.” Doris Tharp-Gurley, who skipped school to ride the bus and meet Elvis in Orlando in 1955, recognized that his films were “a cookie cutter thing” to make money. “Some of them were just silly,” she said. “I thought he did an okay job of acting.” Presley’s longtime Jacksonville fan Ardys Bell was more blunt about the Elvis films: “I didn’t like ’em. I thought if he was going to act he could have done well in other kinds of movies. Not those silly things.”
Parker made sure there was no mention of Scotty Moore and D. J. Fontana in advertisements, no hint of the controversial persona that had drawn so many teens to Presley in the first place. As for Presley’s reunion with his old bandmates, Parker squelched any notion of that too, ordering that they be excluded from any social activities. They were to be kept far down the food chain when it came to access to Presley.
Artistically speaking, the cost of Parker transforming Presley for maximum profit and mass consumption was years of cultural irrelevance; the bland Elvis’s career slumped. In contrast, after the Beatles stopped touring, they were revered for their continued musical evolution into more complex themes and instrumentation. The same could not be said for Presley. His late ’60s renaissance came only when producers like Steve Binder stood up to Parker or when Presley himself circumvented Parker’s suffocating influence. Ultimately it was Presley’s own willingness to record more socially relevant songs in the late 1960s that resurrected his dormant mainstream popularity.
That fact was not lost on Scotty Moore: “It was fun going to Miami but musically it was a far cry from the good old days when our music was raw and bristling with energy.” The last time Presley had appeared on television wearing a tuxedo, Steve Allen had him singing to a real hound dog. This time Presley wore one and looked like a junior member of Sinatra’s rat pack, except for one big consideration: Parker secured Presley a pay day of half the show’s $250,000 budget—more than Sinatra, more than Sammy Davis Jr. and other established stars also on the bill.
As Moore moved toward the hotel elevator, another crucial figure in Presley’s early career, Mae Axton, was also getting on. After the friends exchanged hellos the elevator door opened and a girl in a cap and short matching skirt asked: ‘What floor please?’” When the door opened to the floor of Presley’s suite, the group found out why the uniformed girl was running a self-operating elevator; she darted in front of a guard and very nearly succeeded in getting into Presley’s room.
“It was just one of the many ruses I’ve seen people use to try to get close enough to touch Elvis,” Axton recalled. Compared to the rioting girls Axton saw in 1955 climbing through a window and ripping at Presley’s clothes back in the old Jacksonville baseball stadium, this incident was far more benign.
From her time dealing with Presley the green
horn performer, Axton could tell when he was nervous. Watching his rehearsal in the Fontainebleau’s grand ballroom, she was keenly aware that Presley was wound up tight for his return to network television after such a long absence. “I must give a lot of credit here to Sammy Davis Jr., because Elvis was under pressure even more than a little nervous,” said Axton. “Sammy took over, entertained the crowd a bit, with his arm on Elvis’s shoulder, until Elvis relaxed.”
Given his close friendship with Axton, Presley confided in her that he was insecure about the way his hair was piled high on his head with curls to which he was not accustomed. Those close to him knew how particular Presley was about his hair. “I reassured him that he was home—he was Elvis—he hadn’t changed, and no flaw in the nation’s idol would be seen,” recalled Axton, his champion, promoter, and songwriting partner, thanks to Axton giving Presley a one-third songwriting credit for “Heartbreak Hotel.”
When taping commenced, Presley made a brief appearance early on in his army uniform. His musical numbers started with abbreviated versions of “Fame and Fortune” and “Stuck on You,” slotted forty minutes into the hour-long special. Then the two tuxedoed American icons Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley shared the stage, with Sinatra singing Presley’s ballad “Love Me Tender” and Presley looking awkward snapping his fingers while performing Sinatra’s “Witchcraft.”
For better or worse, this was the new Elvis his fans would have to endure until his aforementioned comeback special eight long and momentous years later. From 1960 to 1968 Presley poured his most vulnerable and enduring vocal performances into the only work for which he was recognized with Grammy awards, his gospel records. Those who write off Presley’s career during this time forget to consider his soul-stirring renditions of songs like “Known Only to Him.”
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