Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  “THOSE PEOPLE IN NEW YORK ARE NOT GONNA CHANGE ME NONE”

  May–July 1956

  RUSSWOOD PARK, JULY 4, 1956.

  (ROBERT WILLIAMS)

  FOR HIS MAY 15 APPEARANCE on opening night of Memphis’ twenty-second annual Cotton Carnival, in which a king and queen were crowned and a midway set up on Front Street, both sides of Ellis Auditorium were opened up for a performance for the first time since Liberace had played the hall. The show was scheduled to begin as close to 7:30 as possible but had to await the landing of the Royal Barge at the foot of Monroe, where the reigning monarchs were to take part in opening ceremonies before traveling to the nearby auditorium to signal the start of the show. Bob Neal was master of ceremonies, and Hank Snow and the Jordanaires were featured, while Eddie Fisher appeared on the Royal Barge and the Carter Sisters, George Morgan, and a host of other country stars were headlining an all-star event at the festival tent on the midway. There was little question, though, that the hometown boy was the focus of this “new and open-to-the-public feature of the Carnival season [that] helps add excitement to its opening night.” Country comedian Minnie Pearl flew in for the occasion at the urging of her husband, Henry Cannon, a charter pilot who had recently been flying Elvis all around the country and who had flown him in from La Crosse, Wisconsin, early that morning. “Henry introduced me to him, and he was such a nice man. I always kidded him that he treated me like an old-maid schoolteacher, he was so overly polite—but he always was.”

  For Elvis, though, this homecoming was a chance to prove himself. “ ‘More than anything else,’ ” he had told the Press-Scimitar’s Bob Johnson earnestly in Las Vegas just two weeks before, “ ‘I want the folks back home to think right of me. Just because I managed to do a little something, I don’t want anyone back home to think I got the big head.’ He wants almost desperately,” added Johnson, perhaps not really needing to, “to be thought well of at home.”

  He arrived accompanied by a police escort to find the usual waiting throng in front of the auditorium. One girl said, “I grabbed his hand, and he grinned and he said, ‘Cut me loose,’ so I cut him loose. It was heavenly.” Vernon and Gladys were already present, seated in a box above the stage on the north side of the hall, eagerly anticipating their first opportunity in some months to see their son perform. In his role as MC Bob Neal whipped up the crowd with sly references to Elvis’ upcoming appearance, and one time he even put the spotlight on Elvis’ mother and dad, who smiled nervously and took a polite bow. The other acts had a good deal of trouble trying to figure out how to deal with both sides of the auditorium at once, a problem that Hank Snow solved to no one’s satisfaction by singing one song to one side, the next to the other. When Elvis came bounding out, however, in black pants, white shirt, and kelly green jacket, he seemed to give the matter no thought at all but, in the words of one thirteen-year-old spectator, simply “staggered all over the stage. Up until he came out I remember thinking, this is a lousy show,” recalled Fred Davis, an eighth-grade student at Messick High School where Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had appeared as part of Sonny Neal’s student council campaign the previous year. “Then I’d seen him at Ellis with Carl Perkins in November, and he was all over the stage, riding Bill’s bass, popping three or four strings, but there was no climax, it didn’t seem really practiced, there were just a few screams. This time it was solid noise from start to finish, there were girls in hysterics, I never heard a word he said. No one rushed the stage, no one stood in the aisle, but the flashbulbs were going from start to finish, and I just remember thinking, ‘What have I seen?!’ ”

  He opened with “Heartbreak Hotel,” introduced “Long Tall Sally” as a song by a friend of his whom he had never met (Little Richard), brought the Jordanaires out for “I Was the One,” called out to Scotty to “go wild” on “Money Honey,” pretended to burp as he introduced “I Got a Woman,” on which Bill joined in with a high-pitched call, introduced “Blue Suede Shoes” to wild applause, and then announced that he would be back in just a few weeks in a benefit performance for the Press-Scimitar’s Cynthia Milk Fund. And for anyone who wasn’t planning to be there, “just remember this one thing, friends, if you’re not there, friends, just remember this one thing…” At which point he launched into the opening bars of his final song, the still unrecorded “(You Ain’t Nothin’ But a) Hound Dog.” When he got to the end there was even more wild applause, and he looked back at D.J., repeated slyly, “Ladies and gentlemen, remember this one thing,” and kicked into a half-time coda, declaring over and over again to the audience the simple one-line message of the song. It was a curious performance, far removed from the loose spontaneity of his Hayride shows of just six months before, but after twenty minutes both he and his fans were exhausted. The last time he had appeared at Ellis he had come out onstage afterward and patiently signed autographs, but with that no longer a possibility, this time he was whisked away into the night before the applause had even died down.

  The next day he played Little Rock, then Springfield, Missouri; Des Moines; Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska. In Kansas City there was a riot: the band was overrun, D.J.’s drums and Bill’s bass were smashed, and D.J. was thrown into the orchestra pit, but everyone escaped with their lives and aplomb intact. In Detroit he was billed as “the atomic explosion,” but back home in Memphis the review of the Cotton Pickin’ Jamboree appearance declared more meaningfully, “Only a few times previously (Billy Sunday, Eddy Arnold, Liberace at his height) have so many persons gathered under one roof in Memphis for one attraction, and the reception had a fire and enthusiasm never in memorable history granted a native son.”

  Hank Snow meanwhile was finally beginning to accept the conclusion he had long since come to: he was never going to see any money from this deal. It had been six months now since they had signed the contract with RCA, and while some tour money had come to him initially through the Hank Snow Enterprises–Jamboree Attractions booking agency, he had seen not a penny from the RCA deal or the phenomenal RCA sales. He had been to his attorney some months before, who was shocked to discover that there were no formal papers of incorporation and urged Snow to insist on this at least as a first step toward straightening out the partnership’s tangled affairs. But when he had approached his partner and pressed him on this point, “Parker immediately flew into a rage. Pacing up and down my office floor, he told me he thought we should dissolve our relationship in every aspect of our business…. I thought for several minutes and then asked him, ‘If we do, what happens to our contract with Elvis Presley?’ He twirled his big cigar back and forth in his mouth, pointed his finger at his chest, and said, ‘You don’t have any contract with Elvis Presley, Elvis is signed exclusively to the colonel.’ ”

  ELVIS WAS DUE to make his return appearance on The Milton Berle Show on June 5. He spent most of the previous week at home for what amounted to the longest extended period of time off he had had (six days) since the beginning of the year. He was too jittery to stay home—after all this time on the road he couldn’t really sleep more than three or four hours a night, and Gladys was worried almost constantly that he was just going to burn himself up. “I’m so proud of my boy,” she said over and over again, and she would get up early in the morning to run off the fans so Elvis could sleep. Still, there was no escaping them: they lined up politely by the carport from morning till night in the manicured residential neighborhood that the Presleys had moved into at the end of March. All they wanted was a glimpse of Elvis, or any of the family, for that matter. Mrs. Presley answered the doorbell in her housecoat and slippers every time it rang, and sometimes she let them borrow the phone if they said they needed to call their mama and daddy. On a hot day she might even have the new maid, Alberta, bring them a glass of ice water—after all, she said, “they like my boy.” Sometimes, she would confide to a friend, she just wished that Elvis would quit right now. He could have a good living, buy himself “a furniture store… marry some good girl and have a child—where she would se
e it and be with it. And she’d be the happiest person in the world,” she told Mrs. Faye Harris, an old Tupelo neighbor, “if he would [just] quit and come home and stay with them there in Memphis.”

  Mr. Presley on the whole was less sanguine about it all. “I wish,” he said to a contractor friend named Carl Nichols who was doing some work around the house, “they would all go away.” “You wouldn’t be here if they did,” said his friend. But he still felt like they were all taking advantage of him—of him and his family. He enjoyed playing skill pool in the game room with his son or his brother, Vester, or the various in-laws and cousins, who had virtually moved into the house since they had come up in the world, and he was in the process of having Nichols build him a pool out back because Elvis thought they would all enjoy the chance to cool off in the hot Memphis summertime. But he watched every nickel, and he regarded every newcomer with glowering suspicion, and Elvis had to explain to his friends sometimes that that was just the way his father was.

  It wasn’t that it didn’t feel like home—Gladys had filled the house with what Elvis called “a museum of me,” and bought so much furniture that they’d had to pile up a lot of their old things out on the sunporch. When he surveyed his life, he liked what he saw. He liked the pale green, seven-room ranch house that sat here “out east” in the kind of affluent tract development that he could never have imagined living in back when he was going to Humes High. He was proud of his mama and his daddy—his mama would never change, she never wanted anything for herself, and she was just happy with her kennel and vegetable garden in the backyard. And if the people who lived out here in this nose-up-in-the-air neighborhood didn’t think she was as good as any of them, well, they could just kiss his ass. They were all right, though, he supposed. It was just that there was increasingly little differentiation between his public and private lives. Bob Neal had told him it was going to get like this. He hadn’t really believed him, but now he didn’t know if he cared. It wasn’t all that different, as he pointed out to Mr. Johnson at the paper, than the way it had been all along. “It didn’t happen all at once,” he explained. “Since the beginning, when I first began, it was just the same. The only difference, the crowds are bigger now.”

  He liked it in a way. The fans were the living representation of his success. Other stars, he read in the movie magazines, resented the demands that were made on them, but he couldn’t understand that. The fans, he said over and over again, were his life’s blood. Sometimes he stood out in the driveway for hours signing autographs—they were polite for the most part, and besides, he told Seventeen magazine reporter Edwin Miller, who was researching a story on him in Memphis that week, “you say no to one person because you had a hundred autographs to sign, they just know you’re saying no to them. I never refuse to do anything like that, no matter how tired I am.” Sometimes Gladys would have to call him two or three times to get him to come in for supper.

  ON THE SECOND DAY that he was home, almost on a whim, he stopped by Dixie’s house on Lucy Street. She had just come from rehearsal for her high school graduation that night and was wearing her graduation dress, but when he suggested that they go for a ride she pulled on a pair of jeans, hopped on his motorcycle, and left her parents to explain her absence to her boyfriend when he arrived. That evening he attended her graduation, and on Friday he went out to the Overton Park Shell to catch the show that Sam Phillips and Bob Neal were putting on, under the banner of their newly formed partnership, Stars, Inc., with Sun artists Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Warren Smith, and the recently signed Roy Orbison. Elvis was called upon to take two bows from the audience and signed autographs afterward with Carl, who was by now fully recovered from his automobile accident.

  Then on Saturday, June 2, he flew out to California with his cousin Gene, where he met Scotty and D.J. and Bill, who had driven out earlier in the week. On the way they had heard a song called “Be Bop A Lula” on the radio for the first time, and they were sure that Elvis had recorded it behind their back. As soon as they saw him, they jumped all over him for going into the studio without them, but he assured them that it wasn’t his record, it was by a cat named Gene Vincent. There were shows scheduled in Oakland at 3:00 and 8:00 on Sunday, and then they flew into the Inglewood airport at 4:00 in the morning, leaving little time for sleep before a Berle show rehearsal called for 10:30 A.M.

  Elvis felt considerably more at ease with Mr. Berle this time and ran through the material confidently, lounging in the orchestra seats between takes with Irish McCallah, the exotic-looking star of the popular TV series Sheenah Queen of the Jungle and meeting the beautiful film star Debra Paget for the first time. There was an opportunity to catch up on business with the Colonel—there was to be a formal presentation of the double Triple Crown Award from Billboard for “Heartbreak Hotel” (this meant that the record had topped sales, jukebox, and disc jockey lists in both the pop and c&w categories), he had been signed for Steve Allen’s newly announced Sunday-night show, opposite Ed Sullivan, in just a month’s time, and an Elvis Presley record was currently number one on each of the three in-store charts, pop (“I Want You, I Need You, I Love You”), r&b (“Heartbreak Hotel”), and country (still “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”).

  The Colonel’s steely gaze bore in on him; it was as if he could read his mind. “If you ever do anything to make me ashamed of you, you’re through,” the Colonel had said to him more than once already, and he worried that the Colonel might bring up the pretty blond dancer who had promised to go on the road with him for the rest of the week. Hearing about the success they were having, though, and feeling the Colonel’s reassuring hand on his shoulder, he cast his doubts aside—he knew the difference between a good girl and a bad girl, and the way you treated each. The Colonel was just a cranky old man who worried too much sometimes, things had been going so smoothly lately nothing could seriously go wrong.

  HE OPENED WITH “Hound Dog,” the song with which he had been closing his act ever since Las Vegas. He was wearing a light-color checked jacket, dark pants, a two-tone polo shirt, and white socks, and for the first time, surprisingly, he was not even cradling a guitar. Perhaps to make up for its absence he seemed to have carefully worked out new moves, wrists splayed out almost limply in seeming contrast to the ferocity of his vocal attack, fingers fluttering, arms outspread. With Scotty’s solo he lurches backward in what might be interpreted as an upbeat adaptation of the shrugging, stuttering, existential hopelessness of a James Dean, there is a jittery fiddling with his mouth and nose, and as the song comes to an end he is dragging the microphone down to the floor, staggering almost to his knees. Scotty and D.J. and Bill keep their eyes glued on him, there is only the slightest flicker of surprise as he points at the audience and declares emphatically, You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, then goes into his patented half-time ending, gripping the mike, circling it sensuously, jackknifing his legs out as the audience half-screams, half-laughs, and he laughs, too—it is clearly all in good fun.

  “How about my boy?” says Milton Berle with obvious pride and affection as he musses up his hair. “How about him?” Elvis is clearly pleased but does his best not to show it: he yawns, grimaces, rolls his tongue around in his mouth, touches his ear, mugs, and ducks his head as if to say, Who is this guy?, doing everything that he can not to laugh at Berle’s nonstop clowning. Before this part of the show is over, Berle, playing the part of the Dutch uncle, seeks to dissuade Elvis from thinking that he could ever get an “ultrasophisticated” movie star like Debra Paget with his sex appeal (“She’s not in your league. Stick to Heartbreak Hotel, and stay away from the Waldorf”), then calls Debra out onstage and “introduces” her to Elvis Presley. Whereupon, to Berle’s delighted double take, Debra screams, flings her arms around the new teenage idol, and bends him backward in a kiss.

  The Milton Berle Show topped Phil Silvers’ Sergeant Bilko in the ratings for the first time all season, and Variety reported that “it was a relaxed and therefore more effective Milt
on Berle who signed off his program for the season last week with one of his better NBC-TV efforts.” But while the immediate response was for the most part favorable and Elvis went on to wildly successful appearances in San Diego, Long Beach, and the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, another reaction was setting in, a reaction that had been building for some time and that culminated now in personal attacks and cries of moral outrage unlike anything that Elvis had encountered to date. “Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability,” declared Jack Gould in the New York Times. “The sight of young (21) Mr. Presley caterwauling his unintelligible lyrics in an inadequate voice, during a display of primitive physical movement difficult to describe in terms suitable to a family newspaper, has caused the most heated reaction since the stone-age days of TV when Dagmar and Faysie’s necklines were plunging to oblivion,” wrote Jack O’Brian in the New York Journal-American. “[Popular music] has reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley,” fulminated Ben Gross in the Daily News. “The TV audience had a noxious sampling of it on the Milton Berle show the other evening. Elvis, who rotates his pelvis, was appalling musically. Also, he gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos. What amazes me is that Berle and NBC-TV should have permitted this affront.” And, under the banner “Beware Elvis Presley,” the Catholic weekly America suggested that