Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  At night they would frequently sit around listening to gospel music: the Blackwood Brothers, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Clara Ward Singers, the Statesmen Quartet—Elvis would always point to the singing of Jake Hess as they listened. Often he would sit at the organ and sing the songs himself, as Mr. and Mrs. Presley nodded appreciatively. For Cliff it was something of an education, because though he considered himself a “spiritual” person, he had never heard this kind of music before. For Cliff it was something of a trial, too. There was no smoking or drinking allowed in the house, and Cliff was not by nature an abstemious person, but he abided by house rules. “Elvis did not want to be around people when they were drinking. He had tremendous willpower, and he just felt like people who were out of control—how many times did he say, ‘Cliff, I just can’t afford being around people who are not in control of themselves.’ ”

  One night they were invited over for “cocktails” by a wealthy young couple with “old Memphis” roots who lived up the street. Frank Pidgeon, whose family owned the Pidgeon-Thomas Iron Company, had written the insurance on the house, and Betty Pidgeon was the granddaughter of E. H. “Boss” Crump, who had virtually ruled Memphis from his election as mayor in 1910 until his death in 1954. Elvis was reluctant to go at first—the neighbors had been unremitting in their rejection, he felt, not just of him and his family but of his fans. He could understand their being upset at the disruption which his presence had caused the once-quiet little street, and he had done everything he could to accommodate their concerns, but there had even been public discussion of buying the Presleys out, which Elvis had countered by offering to buy the neighbors out in turn. As one Memphian wrote to Elvis biographer Elaine Dundy, “From the point of view of the world I was born and raised in, the world of the country club etc., he was referred to… as an embarrassment.”

  Cliff recalled the social occasion vividly. “Elvis said, ‘Mama, I don’t want to go, these people got a lot of money, and I don’t fit in, I don’t feel comfortable, I just don’t want to do it.’ She said, ‘Son, these people don’t want anything from you. They’ve already made their mark in the world, and they are prominent people from two prominent families here—you know that she’s a Crump. What they are doing is welcoming you to the neighborhood, that’s all. You can’t give them anything, they are just proud of you, another Memphian who is making his own mark in the world.’ ”

  They drove the short distance up the street, arrived a little late, and declined the bourbon and sodas they were offered, taking Cokes instead to wash down their Cheez Whiz crackers. Elvis seemed “a little nervous at first” to Pallas Pidgeon, who was eight at the time, “but he was very nice, very friendly and accommodating. Daddy asked if he would mind calling my father’s first cousin, who lived in Plainfield, New Jersey, and she was a great fan of his. So we put the long-distance call through to her. Then we called my aunt, the youngest daughter of my grandparents, who were also there—she was at St. Catherine’s School in Richmond, and her whole dorm went crazy. Then I asked him if he would mind calling my best friend, Louise, and he did the same thing. ‘Louise, this is Elvis.’ It was just incredible. Then we went on a tour of the house, and we went in the bedroom, he and Cliff and my mother and I, and I had a lot of stuffed animals on the bed, and he asked me when my birthday was, and he said he would send me a teddy bear, which he never did, but at least I could dream about it for a few months.”

  He was hurt that people judged him without knowing him, he told Marion Keisker one day when he stopped off at Sun. Mr. Phillips was busy a lot of the time—Johnny Cash was really hot now, and he was trying to get Carl back on track, and he had some new boys he was excited about—but Elvis always felt comfortable just stopping by and talking to Marion with the sun beating down on the blinds and the sights and sounds of a recording session coming through the window cut into the partition wall. He was still upset by that Jacksonville preacher who had been written up in Life magazine, he told her. “The only thing I can say is they don’t know me.”

  As the date of the movie opening approached, he became more and more nervous, he felt increasingly on display, even in his own hometown. He finally took the Colonel’s advice and got out of town for a little while, taking a vacation in Las Vegas, which saved him from having to make excuses when the reporters inevitably asked for his reaction to the reviews. It was all in keeping with the new management strategy of removing him from the public eye (the Colonel indicated that he might have to start charging reporters for interviews with Elvis soon), but at the same time it suited the very impulse that had led him to duck into the Suzore No. 2 the night that Dewey played his record for the first time.

  In Vegas he was a celebrity among celebrities, and while his comings and goings were duly noted, it was from a distance, and with a casual disinterest, that left him pretty much on his own. He stayed at the New Frontier with his cousin Gene and attended all the shows. At the outset of his visit he dated Marilyn Evans, a dancer at the New Frontier, and invited her to come see him in Memphis in December. Then he met Dottie Harmony, a blond eighteen-year-old dancer from Brooklyn who had come to town to do a show at the Thunderbird and who had a girlfriend at the Frontier who was getting married. He kept sending emissaries over to her table to see if she would join him, but she told them to get lost “until all of a sudden I looked over, and there was Elvis on his knee, saying, ‘Ma’am, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. Would you have a drink with me?’ ” They started seeing each other almost exclusively, he came to see her show, “we spent almost every single day and evening together, except for when I worked.” On November 14, the night before the Love Me Tender premiere in New York, he attended Liberace’s opening at the Riviera and was introduced from the front row by the flamboyant entertainer, who was dressed in gold-sequined cutaway and matching pants. Afterward they exchanged jackets and instruments, cutting up for the cameras and singing and playing songs like “Girl of My Dreams” and “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” “Elvis and I may be characters,” commented Liberace, “but we can afford to be.”

  He and Dottie were totally caught up in each other. “He was just the nicest guy. He used to call his mother every night, and he made me call mine. He would tell me stories about how his family had all lived together in this one room and how his father used to pray every night that things would get better and how happy he was now that he could make it better for his parents. It’s a little hard to believe, but we mainly just hung around. We would go out to the airport and watch the planes take off. One night we stopped and helped an old man change a tire. You know, we were just kids.” They would fight on occasion, usually about the attention Dottie got from other men (“I knew everybody in town, and I think that bothered Elvis, but I said, ‘What’s good for the goose is good for the gander’ ”). Sometimes when they fought, Elvis would rip the phone out of the wall, “but next thing I knew it was always fixed again.” One night they went to see Billy Ward and His Dominoes, one of Elvis’ favorite r&b groups, whose young lead singer, an unbilled Jackie Wilson, in addition to reprising the various Dominoes hits (“The Bells,” “Rags to Riches,” “Have Mercy Baby”), also did an Elvis Presley medley in his act. He did “Hound Dog” and one or two other numbers that didn’t impress their originator all that much, but then he did “Don’t Be Cruel,” slower and with more dramatic impact than the record, and Elvis went back to see him four nights running. Nick came into town to visit, and a couple of other Hollywood pals, too, but mostly it was just the two of them double-dating with Gene, and before Elvis left he made Dottie promise that she would spend Christmas with him in Memphis.

  June had read about Natalie and him in the Memphis papers. He had telephoned her the day that Natalie left, but by the time she called back, Gladys said he was in Las Vegas and she wasn’t sure when he’d be home. The two of them had a nice long chat anyway, but Elvis didn’t call when the movie opened, he missed her birthday on November 19, and she was less and less incline
d to blame it on the Colonel.

  The movie premiered with great hoopla on the fifteenth. There were fifteen hundred teenagers lined up when the doors opened at the New York Paramount at 8:00 A.M. for the first show, and there would have been more in attendance if truant officers hadn’t combed the lines. When the film opened on November 21 at Memphis’ Loew’s State and 550 other theaters across the country, it did record-breaking business and by the end of the month was reported by Variety to be enjoying “sock grosses,” which “underscored the need for the industry to develop players and subject matter to bring out the juvenile audience sector.” It outperformed Marilyn Monroe’s earlier Bus Stop and The Seven Year Itch in the same or similar locations, was running neck and neck with Giant and The Ten Commandments, which opened around the same time, and, it was reported, the concession business was “astounding.”

  The reviews were for the most part extremely condescending, if occasionally granting Elvis a certain measure of grudging respect. Time was particularly derisive, asking, “Is it a sausage?” of the new, sleekly packaged Hollywood image, while the New York Times gave Elvis backhanded credit for failing to recognize the film’s limitations and providing an animated performance in the midst of a lusterless vehicle. “Richard Egan is virtually lethargic as the brother who comes home from war,” Bosley Crowther wrote, “and Debra Paget is bathed in melancholia,” while “Mr. Presley… goes at it as though it were ‘Gone With the Wind.’ ” Perhaps the most interesting review appeared in The Reporter, which led an all-out assault on popular culture with a vilification of Elvis Presley (“Presley resembles an obscene child”) and his so-called “music” (a “vacillation between a shout and a whine”) but posed the pertinent question: “Who is the new hero? How does he look, move, talk and dress?” And went on to answer it by comparing Elvis with Brando and James Dean, and characterizing the new hero as possessing

  mannerisms by Brando out of the Actor’s Studio…. First of all he does not walk: he slouches, ambles, almost minces. His hand gestures are all tentative, incomplete, with arms out in front as though he were feeling his way along a wet-walled underground passageway, or folded back against the body as though he were warding off a blow…. The new hero is an adolescent. Whether he is twenty or thirty or forty, he is fifteen and excessively sorry for himself. He is essentially a lone wolf who wants to belong.

  The Colonel’s only public comment was his advice to theater operators to be sure to empty the house after every matinee showing. Otherwise, the Colonel said, Elvis’ fans would stock up on food and camp out in the theater all day, thereby depriving theater owners of a valuable source of revenue.

  Elvis himself was embarrassed, according to Cliff, both by the inadequacy of his own performance and by the reaction of his fans. “ ‘I’ll never make it,’ he said, ‘it will never happen, because they’re never going to hear me ’cause they’re screaming all the time.’ He really meant that.” At the same time he was what he had always wanted to be: a movie star. Critics might tear him apart, he told reporters at the Ed Sullivan news conference just two and a half weeks before the movie’s opening, and if they did he might have to rethink his approach, but he could see a lifetime career in the movies, long after he had stopped singing. “I’m not going to quit,” he said, “and I’m not going to take lessons because I want to be me.”

  THE END OF SOMETHING

  December 1956–January 1957

  WITH B. B. KING AT THE WDIA GOODWILL REVUE, DECEMBER 7, 1956.

  (ERNEST WITHERS. MIMOSA RECORDS PRODUCTIONS INC. / MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES)

  IT WAS A TUESDAY AFTERNOON in early December. Cliff and Elvis were cruising down Union Avenue with Marilyn Evans, the dark-eyed dancer from Las Vegas whom he had dated before meeting Dottie Harmony. As they drove by 706, it looked, in the words of Marion Keisker, like a “chicken coop nested in Cadillacs.” There was obviously a session going on, and on an impulse Elvis wheeled the car around and parked out in front of the studio. Once inside, he found Carl Perkins and his brothers Jay and Clayton, with “Fluke” Holland on drums and a new blond-haired boy on piano, working on a couple of Carl’s new tunes. The session quickly broke up—they were just listening to play-backs at this point anyway—and, after general greetings all around, Mr. Phillips introduced him to the piano player. His name was Jerry Lee Lewis, he was from Ferriday, Louisiana, and he had a new single just out, his first on the Sun label—but, it turned out, he didn’t really need much of an introduction, he wasn’t shy in the least. As a matter of fact, he would have talked Elvis’ ear off if Elvis hadn’t already been talking with Carl and Mr. Phillips about Hollywood and Las Vegas and the new RCA single that was coming out in January: the B side would definitely be Stan’s song “Playing for Keeps,” on which Mr. Phillips had the publishing. Sam was pleased to hear that, and Elvis and Carl were enjoying catching up on old times, but the piano player was getting impatient with all this small talk—he just wanted to get back to the piano.

  Eventually a jam session did develop. They fooled around with “Blueberry Hill” and “My Isle of Golden Dreams,” and then someone provided an acoustic guitar out of the trunk of his car, and Elvis began to warble “You Belong to My Heart,” a 1945 Bing Crosby hit from the Disney animated feature The Three Caballeros, rolling his rs in the Latin manner with exaggerated, eye-rolling passion. Next they launched into a bunch of spiritual numbers with Carl and the band pitching in and the new boy echoing Elvis high-spiritedly on every number and taking the lead on some. “This is fun!” says Jerry Lee. “You ought to get up a quartet,” someone suggests, and a woman—maybe Marilyn—requests “Farther Along” from this “Rover Boys trio.” Elvis does imitations of Bill Monroe, and of Hank Snow singing an Ernest Tubb song. Has he heard the new Chuck Berry single? someone asks him. Yes, he likes “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” better than “Too Much Monkey Business,” and without further ado they are off and running on that. Carl has just gotten back from being out on tour with Berry, he says. Man, he just set out behind the stage and—he shrugs helplessly at Berry’s prolific genius and creativity. Which just sets them off again on another pass at “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.”

  Almost from the start Sam had the tape recorder turned on. He was all set up for a session anyway, and he realized immediately that this could be an historic occasion. “I told Jack Clement [who was in the control room, too], ‘Man, let’s just record this. This is the type of feel, and probably an occasion, that—who knows?—we may never have these people together again.’ ” He didn’t fail to recognize the potential for publicity either, and he called Johnny Cash, currently Sun’s biggest star, who showed up briefly with his wife, and Bob Johnson at the Press-Scimitar, who came by with a UP reporter and a photographer in tow. “I never had a better time than yesterday afternoon,” wrote Johnson, a little disingenuously, in the paper the next day, as he added: “If Sam Phillips had been on his toes, he’d have turned the recorder on when that very unrehearsed but talented bunch got to cutting up. That quartet could sell a million.” Phillips himself sent the write-up out to DJs with a note headlined “Our Only Regret!,” the regret being that “each and every one of you wonderful D.J.’s who are responsible for these boys being among the best known and liked in show business could not be here too!”

  If they had, they would have been amazed. “I heard this guy in Las Vegas,” Elvis reports to his captivated audience, “there was a guy out there [with Billy Ward and His Dominoes] that was doing a takeoff on me—‘Don’t Be Cruel.’ He tried so hard till he got much better, boy, much better than that record of mine.” There are polite murmurs of demurral. “No, wait now, I mean, he was real slender, he was a colored guy, he got up there and he’d say—” And here Elvis begins to perform the song in imitation of the singer imitating him. “He had it a little slower than me…. He got the backing, the whole quartet, they got the feeling on it, he was hitting it, boy. Grabbed that microphone, and on the last note he went all the way down to the floor, man, looking straight up at th
e ceiling. Man, he was cutting out. I was under the table when he got through singing…. And all the time he was singing, them feet was going in and out, both ways, sliding like this…. He’s a Yankee, you know,” said Elvis, remarking with bemusement upon the singer’s strange pronunciation of “tellyphone” and coming back to the song yet again, even trying “Paralyzed,” the Otis Blackwell song he had recorded in September, in similar fashion. “All he needed was a building or something to jump off of,” says someone, won over by the sheer enthusiasm of Elvis’ description. “That’s all he needed,” agrees the unknown singer’s foremost admirer, “that would have made a big ending.”

  They sang “No Place Like Home” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” with the blond-haired boy on piano (“The wrong man’s been sitting here at this piano,” said Elvis when Jerry Lee took his place. “Well, I been wanting to tell you that all along,” responded Jerry Lee without missing a beat. “Scoot over!”) and “Is It So Strange?,” the number Faron Young had given him some months ago which he and June had taken as a twisted symbol of their love. He didn’t know if he was going to record it, though, he said; Faron didn’t want to give him any of the publishing. When he sang “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” the song he had cut in this very studio the summer after his senior year, he told everyone, “I recorded the sonofabitch and lost the dub on it.” He thought it could still be a hit, he said. With the right arrangement and the same kind of deep baritone voice that had been featured in the background of the Ink Spots’ original, he thought it could still sell.