Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  “We said, ‘Cliff, Colonel Parker is going to have a fit, Elvis has never endorsed anything.’ Cliff said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and next day, man, everyone has a brand-new blazer, and the guy even has one for Colonel Parker. So Cliff tells him, ‘There’s Colonel Parker, you just go over there and say, “Colonel Parker, I’m so-and-so, and I’d like to present you with this blazer as a gift.”‘ Well, he goes over and presents the blazer, and Colonel immediately picks up something is wrong, and he comes over and says, ‘Cliff, what the hell are you doing? You know Elvis doesn’t endorse anything. He never has, and we don’t intend to start now.’ And Cliff says, ‘Wait a minute, Colonel, look, Elvis wanted us to have these blue blazers, and Elvis wanted one, so if Elvis went down and bought one, Colonel, and he bought one for all of the guys, the guy is going to say the same thing anyway, so we might as well just get them for free.’ The Colonel said, ‘That makes sense,’ and he just kind of shook his head and walked away. But we all got blue blazers.”

  They took the train back to Hollywood, and Hal Wallis threw a breakup party at the studio commissary. He wasn’t worried about the army, Elvis told columnist Vernon Scott, who was present. It couldn’t be any worse than the merry-go-round he’d been on for the past two years, and he certainly knew what hard work was—he’d been working since he was fourteen. “Had to. Got a job at Loew’s State Theatre in Memphis as an usher. They fired me for fighting in the lobby…. I’ve worked in factories, drove a truck, cut grass for a living, and did a hitch in a defense plant. I’ll do whatever they tell me, and I won’t be asking no special favors.” It was going to be harder on his folks, he said, than it would be on him.

  Just to get everyone in the spirit of his usual “pull-out-all-stops” promotion campaign, the Colonel had a big bunch of balloons made up with “King Creole” written on them, and he led Trude Forsher, the William Morris agents, and everyone else he could commandeer around the lot carrying the balloons before marching into the commissary and releasing them to the ceiling. Elvis posed politely for pictures, showed off the prop Civil War blunderbuss that he had been given as a gift, and ate a little bit of cake decorated with the figure of an army private peeling potatoes.

  Then he was off to Memphis, with less than two weeks until his formal induction. He was so impatient to get home that, once again, he got off the train, this time renting a fleet of Cadillacs in Dallas. He was met by a Commercial Appeal reporter when he arrived at Graceland at 6:30 on Friday night, March 14. The questions were all about his new movie and the army. How did his parents feel about his going in? “Well, my mother hates to see her son go in service,” he said candidly, but added: “My mother is no different from millions of other mothers who hated to see their sons go, though.” As far as the movie went, he had reason to be proud. “It was quite a challenge for me because it was written for a more experienced actor,” he said. It was, he felt without false modesty, his best performance to date, one in which he had acquitted himself well in truly distinguished company. But what about his popularity? asked the reporter. Did he think it would slip while he was in the army? “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question,” replied Elvis plaintively. “I wish I knew.”

  “PRECIOUS MEMORIES”

  March–September 1958

  ON THE STEPS OF GRACELAND, AUGUST 14, 1958.

  (JAMES REID)

  THE TEN DAYS that he had left before going in were a blur of activity. On Monday he met Dewey down at Poplar Tunes, and a lot of misunderstandings, reported Bob Johnson, seemed to just fall away. Elvis bought Dean Martin’s “Return to Me,” Nat King Cole’s “Looking Back,” Pat Boone’s “Too Soon to Know,” Jo Stafford’s “Sweet Little Darling,” Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” and “Maybe” by the Chantels. He got a haircut at Jim’s Barber Shop, his second in less than a month, and declared that he liked the new crew cut style so much he intended to get it cut even shorter before induction.

  On Wednesday he looked at cars with Anita, who was now customarily described in the national press as both a “Hollywood starlet” and a “frequent companion,” but it was also reported in the papers that he was entertaining a parade of women, “no fewer than twelve beautiful girls,” by one count. “I screwed everything in sight,” he told a friend years later in an uncharacteristic, and perhaps inaccurate, display of sexual bravura, while to reporters he simply commented, “I’d be crazy to get married now. I like to play the field.”

  Whoever his companion for the evening, every night he would go in a group to the movies, to the skating rink after it was closed, back to Graceland after all other sources for fun were exhausted, in what seemed like an almost desperate attempt to pack in every last element of civilian experience, a vain effort to stave off the inevitable moment by hiding himself in the crowd.

  Over the course of the week he let the last of the boys go, wrote Bob Johnson, about to be without their company for the first time in more than two years. He had “fed them, clothed them, paid them in return for simple duties, but mostly their job was just to keep him company in a rather extraordinary world where new friends could have no understanding of a world he knew.” He said good-bye to Scotty and Bill: “It was just ‘So long, see you when I get out,’ ” said Scotty, who detected little nervousness. “We were just like two mules turned out to pasture.” Over the weekend he gave Anita a 1956 Ford. She felt he was dreading the army, “because it was something unknown to him, he didn’t know what to expect, but it was something that he had to do—he could have gotten out of it, but he wanted no part of that.” He told her that he had to do what was expected of him and reassured his mother that he was going to be all right. “I can make it,” he said. “I can do this.” To Barbara Pittman, who had known him from childhood, he was somewhat more unbuttoned. “He was very upset about it. He kept saying, ‘Why me, when I can stay here and make so much more money? My taxes would be more important than sticking me in the service.’ He was crying. He was hurt. He couldn’t understand why he had to go.” Judy Spreckels, who described herself as “like a sister” (“Girls come and go,” she said, “but sisters stay forever”), flew in from the Coast to provide support.

  On his last night of freedom he was up all night with his friends. He and Anita and some of the boys went to the drive-in to see Tommy Sands in Sing, Boy, Sing, the story of the rise and fall of a rock ’n’ roll star told in somewhat harder-hitting terms than any of Elvis’ movies. Sands, just twenty but a recording artist from the age of fourteen, and a longtime protégé of Colonel Parker’s, had gotten the role, originally written for Elvis, only through the intercession of the Colonel. “We pulled in to the drive-in in the Cadillac limousine,” said George Klein, “and Nick Adams was playing a combination of all of Elvis’ sidekicks in the movie—he played me and Gene and Cliff and Arthur, all rolled into one. It was kind of cold, and we all wanted to stay up with him until the last minute, you know, and keep his mind occupied so he wouldn’t have to think about leaving the next day. And I think he appreciated that, but we got quite a kick not so much out of Tommy Sands as out of Nick Adams playing all the other guys.” Afterward they went to the skating rink for the eighth night in a row, and when it finally came time to leave, “he got in and out of the panel truck three times,” the owners told writer Vince Staten. “He didn’t want to go.”

  He hadn’t eaten or slept when dawn came up. “Overnight,” he said, “it was all gone. It was like a dream.”

  HE SHOWED UP at the draft board in the M&M Building at 198 South Main at 6:35 the next morning and parked just south of the Malco Theatre. He was accompanied by several cars full of friends and relatives and was greeted by a couple of dozen photographers and reporters, including representatives of the British press. It was raining lightly, and he was half an hour early. He was wearing dark blue trousers, his loud gray-and-white-checked sports jacket, a striped shirt, and pink and black socks, and he was carrying a pigskin shaving kit. Gladys looked as if she were about to cry, while Vernon gripped
her hand tightly. Lamar gave everybody a laugh by pretending that he wanted to enlist, too, but at 270 pounds there was little likelihood that he would be taken. Anita looked prettily composed while Judy remained in the background and the Colonel hovered on the edge of the proceedings, making sure that everything went off without a hitch. Among the recruits was an old friend from Lauderdale Courts, Farley Guy, who told reporters it was “the same old Elvis.” “If I seem nervous,” said Elvis, “it’s because I am,” adding that he was looking forward to the army “as a great experience. The army can do anything it wants with me. Millions of other guys have been drafted, and I don’t want to be different from anyone else.” At 7:14 the thirteen inductees left the draft board in an olive drab army bus. They were bound for the Kennedy Veterans Hospital several miles away, where they would be examined and processed. The army of newsmen, friends, fans, and relatives all followed, but not before Anita got special permission from Recruiting Sergeant Walter Alden to visit Elvis at the induction station that afternoon in order to say a special good-bye.

  At Kennedy he was examined, weighed, and pronounced fit, all under the scrutiny of reporters’ pencils and pads, microphones, and cameras. The picture of him in Life magazine the following week revealed a well-nourished white male, still showing some evidence of baby fat, standing on the scale in his underpants with his eyes on either side of the height-measuring extender. His gaze is distracted, his mouth is downcast, and you could imagine either that he was momentarily lost in thought or frozen in fear. To the Life reporter he simply said, “Heaven knows I want to live up to what people expect of me.” In conversations with other photographers and newsmen “Elvis recalled that in the days before he became famous, he pawned his old guitar for $3 ‘five or six times.’ Also, he remember[ed] that in 1952 he sold a pint of his blood to Baptist Hospital for $10. Elvis said his has always been a happy family and is happy today, but that money brings a lot of headaches….”

  The army provided a box lunch of a ham sandwich, a roast beef sandwich, a piece of apple pie, an apple, and a container of milk, which Elvis wolfed down, explaining that he hadn’t eaten since the previous night. “Man, I was hungry,” he said. Then he lay down on a rec room couch and took a nap for half an hour. More friends and relatives continued to show up, and a telegram from Governor Frank Clement arrived, declaring that “you have shown that you are an American citizen first, a Tennessee Volunteer, and a young man willing to serve his country when called upon to do so.”

  Outside, the Colonel was marching around handing out more balloons that advertised King Creole, while the crowd grew larger and larger and the Presleys looked increasingly stricken. The army brass were growing nervous that they would not fulfill the quota of twenty (including volunteers as well as draftees) necessary to requisition a bus and get out of Memphis today. Finally a draftee named Donald Rex Mansfield, who had just arrived on the bus from Dresden, Tennessee, and was not slated to go in until the following day, was rushed through processing, and Private Elvis Presley, serial number 53 310 761, was put in charge of the 150-mile bus trip to Fort Chaffee. He rapidly embraced his mother, who was virtually inconsolable by now, and his father, who was openly weeping. “Good-bye, baby,” he said to Anita as the bus was about to pull out. “Good-bye, you long black sonofabitch,” he said, referring to his black Cadillac limousine standing at the curb. The other recruits laughed nervously. That, reported Rex Mansfield, broke the ice. After that he was, at least nominally, “one of the boys.”

  A CARAVAN OF CARS containing newsmen and fans followed the army bus out of Memphis, and when it made its regular scheduled stop just across the Mississippi at the Coffee Cup restaurant in West Memphis, there was a crowd of close to two hundred already assembled, and the bus driver had to bring sandwiches and drinks back to the bus. At Fort Chaffee, the information officer, Captain Arlie Metheny, a native Arkansan and twenty-year vet, had been anticipating the arrival since January, but nothing in his previous experience (not even his stint as information officer during the Little Rock integration crisis) could have fully prepared him for the mob scene that erupted when the bus finally pulled in at 11:15 that night. More than a hundred civilian fans, forty or fifty newsmen, and another two hundred dependents of military personnel descended on the hapless new recruit, with the Colonel leading the greeting committee. The newsmen followed Elvis into a reception room for roll call and photographed him making his bed over and over again for the cameras, though when a photographer hid in the barracks to get a shot of a sleeping Private Presley, that was too much for even the army’s tolerance, and Captain Metheny had the photographer thrown out. Throughout it all Elvis bore up with extraordinary patience, presenting a bright, cheerful exterior, offering up quips and self-deprecating statements, entertaining all requests without demurral, refusing only to sign autographs while he was “in ranks.”

  He estimated that he slept no more than three hours and was up well before 5:30 reveille the next morning, dressing and shaving while the others were just waking up. The Colonel and twenty photographers joined him for breakfast at 6:00 (“It was good, but I was so hungry I’d eat anything this morning,” he was reported as saying), and then he was scheduled for five hours of aptitude tests, a two-hour postlunch lecture on a private’s rights and privileges, a brief classification interview, the issuance of seven dollars in partial pay (What are you going to do with all that money? reporters shouted. “Start a loan company,” Elvis replied good-humoredly), and, finally, the bestowal of the standard-issue GI haircut. There were fifty-five reporters and photographers standing around waiting to record this historic moment. “Hair today, gone tomorrow,” said Elvis, holding some of the hair in his hand and blowing it away for photographers, but he was flustered enough that he forgot to pay the barber the sixty-five-cent fee and, to his embarrassment, had to be called back. He spotted a phone booth and went off to telephone his mother. When reporters sprinted after him, Colonel Parker blocked their way. “I think a boy’s entitled to talk to his mother alone,” said the Colonel.

  On Wednesday he was issued his uniform, and the Colonel, clowning for the cameras, tried to get him to try on a western string tie with it. “No, sir. If I wore a string tie in here, I’d have to take the punishment, not you,” Elvis replied, as the Colonel declared to the photographers, “I wish you boys would stop taking pictures of yourselves.” That afternoon there was an announcement (surprising only because it came sooner than expected) that Elvis Presley would be assigned to the Second Armored Division—General George Patton’s famous “Hell on Wheels” outfit—at Fort Hood, just outside Killeen, Texas, for basic training and advanced tank instruction. He had been a good soldier so far, announced post commander General Ralph R. Mace; “at least in my opinion, he has conducted himself in a marvelous manner.” And Hy Gardner wrote a column in the form of a letter to Elvis’ fellow soldiers, proclaiming Elvis a credit to his country:

  Where else could a nobody become a somebody so quickly, and in what other nation in the world would such a rich and famous man serve alongside you other draftees without trying to use influence to buy his way out? In my book this is American democracy at its best—the blessed way of life for whose protection you and Elvis have been called upon to contribute eighteen to twenty-four months of your young lives…. I hope you go along with my sentiments.

  SIX OF THE THIRTEEN original Memphis draftees were assigned to Fort Hood, including Rex Mansfield and William Norvell, whom Elvis immediately dubbed “Nervous” Norvell. After being chased for more than two hundred miles by a convoy of devoted fans (“I’d hate to see anyone get hurt,” said Elvis worriedly. “Maybe if I wave…”), the chartered Greyhound bypassed the usual stops in Dallas and Waxahachie, where hundreds of people had already gathered, finally stopping for lunch in Hillsboro, Texas, at 1:30. Captain J. F. Dowling assigned two of his largest men to sit on either side of Elvis: “I think we must have set some kind of record. We went twenty-five minutes before anyone recognized him.” When they fina
lly did, there was a small riot, and it took at least another twenty-five minutes before they could make their way out of the restaurant. “Elvis was very nice about the whole thing,” said Captain Dowling. “Some of the men ordered meals that exceeded the allowance on the meal ticket, but Elvis said he’d pick up the check for the difference. And before we got him on the bus, he managed to buy cigarettes and candy, which he passed out to the boys. As we left Hillsboro, the girls were fighting over who would keep the chair that Elvis had sat in.”

  At Fort Hood things were under substantially more control from the start. The information officer, Lieutenant Colonel Marjorie Schulten, had already made the determination, before the bus arrived, that she was going to take a different approach than the one that had been tried at Fort Chaffee. “He was due in on [March] twenty-eighth about four P.M.,” she told writer Alan Levy. “Beginning at eleven A.M. the media people started to come in here. I’ve never seen so many people…. When I saw a Fort Worth editor with a reputation for never leaving his swivel chair, I knew this was an event.” Colonel Parker stopped by not long afterward to offer, Levy observed, “his services, advice, and moral support. Lieutenant Colonel Schulten turned to ‘Colonel’ Parker and, couching her words in the respect accorded a higher-ranking person—particularly one who made all his rank ‘on the outside’—she told him: ‘Colonel Parker, the Second Armored Division will not be able to train this boy at the rate these requests are coming in. You have an enormous investment, so you may not like what I’m about to do here and now.’ Parker, whose most detailed preinduction plans had never anticipated a woman officer,… surrendered to the inevitable with a meek, ‘Well, Colonel, you’re the boss.’ ”