Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  “Elvis looked at me, and I looked at Elvis and Cliff,” said George Klein, who had gone to the rehearsal room with the others, “and—Alex Romero was a really nice guy, and he said, ‘Elvis, will you please try it?’ And Elvis got up to copy his steps, and, just from the first instant, you could tell it wasn’t going to work. And Elvis said, ‘Man, it’s not me.’ So Alex, being such a sharp guy, said, ‘Have you got any of your records in your dressing room?’ And we put the records on—‘Don’t Be Cruel’ and ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘All Shook Up.’ And Alex said, ‘Would you just show me what you do onstage?’ Well, Elvis would go along if he thought you knew what you were doing, so he went through about three songs, and Alex Romero said, ‘I got it. See you later, Elvis.’ And Elvis said, ‘What do you mean you got it?’ He said, ‘Elvis, what I’m going to do is I’m going to go home tonight and I’m going to take what you do and work it into the routine, and it’s going to be you, what you normally feel comfortable doing onstage, but I’m going to choreograph it.’ The next day we came back to that same little rehearsal hall, and Alex Romero’s choreographed the scene so it looks like you’re watching Elvis. He put ‘Jailhouse Rock’ on and put little markings on the floor, and said, ‘Elvis, just do what you feel comfortable doing.’ So Elvis whipped through it, and, man, he had it. And then he couldn’t wait to do the dance sequence!”

  He liked show people. He enjoyed being back in Hollywood. It was good running around with Nick again—there was always something happening, and the hotel suite was like a private clubhouse where you needed to know the secret password to get in and he got to change the password every day.

  On the weekend Nick called up his friend Russ Tamblyn, who had a small, one-bedroom beach house on the Pacific Coast Highway just south of Topanga Canyon, and asked if he could bring his friend Elvis over. Tamblyn, who at twenty-two had been in the business from early childhood on, both as an actor and as a dancer, and who saw Nick as something of a hustler, said sure, come on out.

  “I’ll never forget it. I mean, no one could forget it. First, because Elvis was so big at the time. And, second, when he came, they drove up in three limousines, and there were Elvis and all of his cousins and hangers-on and girls—it was like fifteen or twenty people pouring out of these limos, and then they came in. It was nuts—I thought Nick was just going to bring Elvis over, and it ended up like twenty people came pouring into the room. They brought in soft drinks, and I had a record on, it was a Josh White record, that Elvis just flipped over. I can’t remember the title, but it was a weird song, it was a good one with a real low, gutty guitar sound—I could never quite figure what it was about—and we played it about ten times in a row until Elvis finally asked if he could borrow it. Everybody else was sort of partying out on the porch, which was right out on the beach, and Elvis and I were over in front of the record player, and as he listened to the music, he started doing his dance with his knees like he does, and I said, ‘Great.’ I said, ‘Throw those knees.’ I guess just being a dancer, I could see where a couple of suggestions might help, so I said, ‘Throw those knees out more.’ So I showed him, and he said, ‘What did you do? Show me again.’ So the music was on, and we were standing there dancing in front of the record player, and I remember a girlfriend I had at that time was coming over that night and she told me later she came in and she couldn’t believe it, ‘There you were dancing with Elvis!’ But he was really interested. It wasn’t that I technically knew that much, but I was a street dancer, and I understood what he was doing, and I could see right away where with little exaggerated movements it would look better—it would just put it on another level and make it a little stronger, and he got some of that in Jailhouse Rock.”

  Principal shooting started the following Monday, May 13, and began with the dance sequence that Alex Romero had worked on with Elvis the previous week. The set was a skeletal scaffolding with barred doors suggesting cells on two levels. There was a fireman’s pole for the inmates on the upper level to slide down, and a cast of professional dancers was outlined in silhouette behind bars at the start of the number. The dancers then swing out on the cell doors in their striped prison shirts and whitestitched denims and jackets. Miming the song’s story line, they escape, only to return in the end to their cells, because the party that the warden has thrown—the “Jailhouse Rock” of the title—is so much fun that who would ever want to leave? Elvis flung himself into the number with utter abandon (“He couldn’t wait to do it,” said George Klein), so much abandon, in fact, that on Tuesday he swallowed one of the temporary caps for his teeth as he was sliding down a pole. He told the assistant director, Bob Relyea, that he thought he could feel something rattling around in his chest, and Relyea called a doctor to the set, but after examining him the doctor reassured Elvis and Relyea that it was just Elvis’ imagination, no more than a scratch. “So now we get the entire crew and all the dancers down on their hands and knees looking for the [cap], ’cause it’s very very small and it must be on the floor someplace, and we decide it’s all in his mind. About an hour later he comes up after a take and says to me, ‘You know that scratch that I think I feel? It’s moved. It’s over to the left now.’ And I said, ‘No, no, it’s all in your mind.’ So about an hour later, after a take he came up and said, ‘Ah, it’s in my mind? Listen to this.’ And then, when he was breathing, you could hear a whistling sound!”

  Elvis called George Klein from the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. It turned out that he had aspirated the cap, which had lodged in his lung, so the next day a surgeon went in and got it out. Oddly enough, there was a scene just like this in the movie, where Vince Everett, the character Elvis played, is punched in the throat by his former cellmate, Hunk Hogan, and everyone is gathered around him toward the end of the picture anxiously waiting to see if he will ever sing again. In this case, according to Relyea, the scene in the recovery room was not much different, with Colonel Parker present and the doctor coming in to announce that everything was fine. “ ‘We got it,’ he said, ‘we just had to, we had to part the vocal cords and put the tool through and get in the lung.’ And he said, ‘Then the darn thing broke in two, and we had to get one piece out and then—it’s like arthroscopic surgery—get the other piece out.’ When he got to the part about separating the vocal cords to put the instrument through, it got Colonel Parker’s attention!”

  Elvis was a little hoarse for a couple of days, and when he got back on the set he ran into Russ Tamblyn, who was getting ready to go out on location for Peyton Place. “I remember they were rehearsing, and I watched a little bit. When he got done with what he was doing, he came over and got me and said, ‘I want to show you something.’ And he took me back to his dressing room, and we went inside and he shut the door and said, ‘I’ve been working on this,’ and he started going into this dance, and sure enough he had really gotten his knees out further and gotten his elbows back and was doing more with his arms. He wanted to show me how he had been practicing, but he didn’t want anybody else to see.”

  Meanwhile the retinue had grown by the addition of one. Lamar Fike, who had been hanging around with George and Cliff in Memphis the previous fall in hopes of an introduction, was down in Texas visiting his mother when he read in the newspaper that Elvis was in the hospital. He had been calling George regularly for the past couple of weeks suggesting that he might like to come out, and George had been telling him things were kind of tight, everybody was busy, “in other words I didn’t want to be responsible for him.” At this point Lamar took matters into his own hands, jumped into his ’56 Chevy, and drove straight to the Beverly Wilshire, without asking permission of anybody. When he showed up, all three hundred pounds of him in chartreuse shorts and yellow cowboy boots, George wasn’t there, but according to his understanding, Cliff met Lamar at the door. “He went into his con, and Cliff went into his con, and Lamar said, ‘Man, can I come in?’ And Cliff said, ‘Man, it’s kind of tight. I mean, Elvis is real particular here in Hollywood.’ So, finally, Cliff goes
and tells Elvis, he says, ‘Elvis, there’s a guy here from Memphis. He’s hung out with me and George, and he’s kind of jolly and he’s kind of funny and he drove all the way from Texas. Can he come in tonight and party with us?’ So Elvis said yeah, and Lamar made an impression like he always does and that’s how he worked his way into the group.”

  ONCE THE DANCE SEQUENCE was finished, the picture moved along at a brisk pace. There were none of the relatively complicated setups of Loving You, and Richard Thorpe worked fast anyway. For George, just being on the lot was like a fantasy come true. “Cliff, Arthur, and I were on the payroll now—of course Gene was already on the payroll. I’ll never forget, he said, ‘I’ll pay all you guys’ expenses, if you need any money you know you can always come to me. But Colonel says we’re making a movie so I’ve got to put you on salary for tax purposes.’ So he put us on salary at fifty dollars a week. Gene and Cliff and Arthur, they’d get bored on the set and would just lay down and go to sleep in the dressing room, but I was all over that lot like crazy, I didn’t want to miss a thing. The first day we got there Glenn Ford was there, he’d just finished a picture for MGM. And he was talking to Elvis, he was telling Elvis something—he was a real nice guy—and he was going through these motions just like he did in movies, and I said, ‘God, he acts just like he does in the movies, Elvis!’ And Elvis says, ‘Shut up, shut up.’ He didn’t want me to sound like I was starstruck, but me and Cliff were, you know.

  “Whenever there was a break in the action, I’d jump off this soundstage and run over to another soundstage and watch Yul Brynner work or John Ford or Kim Novak—she was unloading some stuff from her car, and I told Cliff, I said, ‘Shit, I’m going to go over and talk to her. She might not say a word to me, but I got to talk to Kim Novak!’ I remember, they were making Saddle the Wind with Robert Taylor and Julie London, and one day I go over to the set ’cause Anne Francis was on the set and I wanted to see what she looked like. So I’m on the set standing in the background watching—it was an open set—and Vince Edwards walks over to me and starts talking. He said, ‘Hey, man, ain’t you with Presley?’ ’Cause I guess everybody on the lot noticed who was with Elvis. And I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he introduced himself, and we start talking and he said, ‘Man, I’m a big fan.’ Now he was just starting out in Hollywood, but he’d been a big swimming champion at Ohio State, and he said, ‘You want to meet Anne Francis?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ So when they took a break, he said, ‘This is Elvis’ buddy.’ And he said, ‘I’d like to meet Elvis,’ so I said, ‘Come over to the set.’ Well, Vince came over, and immediately Cliff liked him and Elvis liked him and I liked him, so Elvis invited him up to the Beverly Wilshire and he started coming every now and then.”

  Edwards became a regular member of the group, and he introduced them to an actor named Billy Murphy, who had been in Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne, and to Sammy Davis, Jr., too, who came up one night and scared the hell out of Elvis with his impression of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Murphy was a Hollywood character, a few years older than the others, who walked up and down Hollywood Boulevard dressed in black—black pants, black shirt, black hat, black gloves—and carrying an unproduced screenplay that he had written about Billy the Kid in a bold, illegible script. “Elvis was just infatuated with him,” according to George, “we all were, because he was just so colorful and interesting. Some directors were scared of him, I think, because he was very physical, even threatened one or two of them. He was friends with Robert Mitchum and Rory Calhoun on a first-name basis, he had a certain way of walking, kind of like Mitchum, and he had a pet phrase that we all picked up: ‘You bet your life, mister, and you may have to.’ It came out of an old Clark Gable movie, really, but we picked it up from Murphy. Nick Adams would tell us wild stories about him. I think he just became a little too erratic for Hollywood.”

  Mitchum himself stopped by one afternoon, because he wanted Elvis to play the part of his brother in the upcoming production of Thunder Road, a moonshiner’s tale which he was producing and for which he had written the story. Elvis was thrilled at the visit, and at the offer—Mitchum had gotten him “all shook up,” he told Russ Tamblyn, who arrived just after Mitchum’s departure—and listened enthralled to Mitchum’s real-life tales of growing up hard in the South and doing time on a Georgia chain gang.

  In the evenings they would go to the movies sometimes, the whole gang of them; it was, according to Vince Edwards, like “The Clan of Elvis Presley,” with the limos pulling out of the Beverly Wilshire full of cousins and kin. “When we got to the theater,” said Russ Tamblyn, “we all got out and bought our tickets and formed a line. Now by this time a crowd has formed, you know, they’d see all these strange-looking characters get out of the cars and wonder, who the hell is this, so if there wasn’t a problem before, there is now. Anyway, there would be two lines right up to the ticket taker, and Elvis would be the last one, or if he had a girlfriend, the girlfriend would come out with him, and Elvis would go right between the two lines, and everybody would be so blown away they’d just move back. I always thought Elvis loved the entourage, and he loved playing the part—he seemed to have an instinct for entrances.”

  They went out to Russ’ beach house one or two more times, and with Russ on the verge of leaving to shoot his new movie in Maine, Elvis asked if he could rent it for the next couple of months. He was still seeing Yvonne Lime occasionally, but he was dating Anne Neyland, a former Miss Texas whom he had met on the MGM lot, and Venetia Stevenson, too, when a rumor that he was about to marry Yvonne in Acapulco broke at the end of May. “When I get married,” he told the press, after the Colonel’s official denials, “it’ll be no secret. I’ll get married in my hometown of Memphis, and the whole town’ll be there.”

  He wasn’t really serious about anyone for the time being, though. He was enjoying the single life, and when he got bored he just had to tell the guys to hunt up some girls in the lobby of the hotel. He would have them brought up to the suite, offered one observer, “and Elvis would go in the other room, he’d go in the bedroom or somewhere, and then when they came back with the girls, the girls would sit there for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and finally one of the cousins would go in the bedroom and come out himself and another ten minutes would go by—and then in would come Elvis. And there would be like a silence, and then the cousins would say, ‘Oh, Mary Jane, this is Elvis,’ and the girls would be totally gone.” For the more experienced girls it wasn’t like with other Hollywood stars or even with other more sophisticated boys they knew. They offered to do things for him, but he wasn’t really interested. What he liked to do was to lie in bed and watch television and eat and talk all night—the companionship seemed as important for him as the sex—and then in the early-morning hours they would make love. “He had an innocence at that time,” said one of them. “I’m sure it didn’t last. But what he really wanted was to have a relationship, to have company. He was very clean-cut about it. There were a lot of things that he didn’t like. And another thing that you could not do around him was mention drugs, he was dead set against it. There was a lot of grass around in Hollywood at that time, and what the cousins said was, ‘If you got any dope, don’t bring it out around Elvis.’ If anyone wanted to turn on, they had to go away and not do it around Elvis.”

  In a wholly unlikely turn of events, one of the newcomers to the scene was songwriter Mike Stoller. Stoller had gotten a part in the movie when Jerry Leiber, who, in the eyes of the film’s casting director, looked more like a piano player than his piano-playing partner, begged off film work for a dentist’s appointment. Stoller shaved off his goatee to play the part, looking exceedingly uncomfortable on-screen without it. He found film work boring but, to his surprise, enjoyed the opportunity it gave him to get to know Presley a little better. “He was very comfortable in the recording studio, but not so much on the set. I remember one time a couple of extras were sitting around, and I witnessed this whole thing—these two guys were playing cards and talking about t
heir families, you know, the baby, the car payments, that kind of stuff. And one of them said something to the other, and they started laughing. Elvis came through at that moment, and he turned around and zap, right on them, and he said, ‘Boy, you think you’re so hot, huh?’ They didn’t know what he was talking about, and he was already in a sense omnipotent—but he thought they were laughing at him.

  “I know he was very insecure, and I think that he used the Colonel in this as protection in a different way than the Colonel was using him. My own feeling was that he felt comfortable surrounded by his friends, and I think that also worked to the Colonel’s idea of keeping him exclusive, keeping him isolated and insulated so that no one could get to him and he could never become too commonplace. I felt a little sorry for him because he didn’t have a shot at becoming a whole person: in twenty minutes he would go from being arrogant and high-handed to frightened. He would order people about, and the next minute he would be saying, ‘Can I get you a sandwich? Do you want some pie?’

  “I used to hang out in the dressing room with the entourage, and one day we were horsing around, and Elvis said, ‘You know, Mike, I’d really like you to write a ballad, a real pretty ballad, for me,’ and that week Jerry and I wrote a song called ‘Don’t,’ and we made a demo of it up at Hollywood Recorders with [rhythm and blues singer] Young Jessie singing, and I came back to the set and gave him the record and he loved it and eventually recorded it. But we caught hell for not going through the proper channels. I was supposed to tell Jean and Julian [Aberbach] and to play it for Freddy—and then Freddy was supposed to play it for Elvis. The Colonel was very upset—it was supposed to work the way it always worked, they didn’t want any loose cannons around.