Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994

by David Hepworth

  He had rehearsed this special day in his head many times. Finally it was happening. The homecoming wasn’t just for Elvis’s sake. The two people in the back seat had also taken the same journey in the opposite direction in 1948. At the time their chariot was a ten-year-old Plymouth and the circumstances not quite so carefree. In 1948 Elvis’s parents, Vernon and Gladys, couldn’t wait to get out of Tupelo. Too many people knew Vernon had served time in Parchman Farm for trying to pass a dud cheque. They feared, with some justification, that they would never escape the stratum of society respectable folks called poor white trash.

  Every marriage requires at least one grown-up. In this marriage, Gladys was the adult. That wasn’t only because she was four years Vernon’s senior. It was also because she was a grafter, stitching shirts at the Tupelo Garment Company for $13 a week. Vernon, on the other hand, could never seem to find the job he considered worthy of his talents. She was dark-eyed, almost Spanish-looking; he was blond. She was homely; he was a rake. She was outgoing and gregarious; he was sullen and resentful. They married on the same day in 1933 that Pretty Boy Floyd killed four lawmen in the Kansas City Massacre. Unusually, Vernon was seventeen and Gladys was twenty-one.

  They started a family home in the only way open to poor people in the South in those days: they built it themselves. The following year Gladys became pregnant with twins. She was so sure they were going to be boys that she had already picked out their names, Elvis Aron and Jessie Garon. She felt it was important their names rhyme. On the night of 8 January 1935, Gladys went into labour. The first boy was stillborn. The second, who arrived half an hour later, survived. The Presleys couldn’t afford the $15 to pay the doctor.

  The first of millions of formal pictures of Elvis Presley was in a group with his mother and father. It was taken in the Lee County Jail immediately prior to Vernon’s move to Parchman. At the time it was just a standard family portrait, such as might be ordered by any mother wishing to record a precious, fleeting stage of family life. Regular publication over the years since has lent it an iconic status. It seems possible to read shame in Vernon’s expression, tight-lipped exasperation in Gladys’s and the shadow of perplexity across the beautiful face of the three-year-old twin who had survived.

  Through his formative years Elvis came to believe that the only person he could rely on in the world was his mother. Gladys returned the compliment by actively discouraging any sign of independence in her adored boy. She walked him to school every day, took him into her bed at night when Vernon was in prison, and rarely let him out of her sight. As a child Elvis was never lonesome, particularly at night. This was a state of affairs that was to continue throughout his life. He didn’t call her Mom, like the other kids did theirs. The two had an entire secret language of baby talk. His name for her was ‘Satnin’.

  Elvis began school in Tupelo. He was no trouble. In fact he made little impression on anyone. His first singing performance was at the age of ten when he warbled a sentimental song about a dog in front of a couple of hundred people at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. And now, a decade later, they were sitting in the back of a Lincoln Continental, a car so exclusive the dealers were instructed to sell them only to clients with the requisite prestige, returning in glory to the same event in the same town they’d had to slink out of ten years earlier with their tails between their legs. All this was because over the last couple of years Gladys’s boy had had a number of regional hit records on the Sun label. These had led to regular appearances on the Louisiana Hayride. Next thing she knew her boy was the one everybody wanted all across the South. And now that his contract had been sold to RCA Records he was going to New York City to make records and appear on national TV shows. For a woman who had been born into a world without radio and raised in a house without electricity, this was a dizzying transformation.

  Lolling across the front seat that day was Nick Adams, a twenty-two-year-old actor Elvis had befriended on the second day of shooting Love Me Tender in Hollywood. Elvis was impressed that Adams had played a small part in East of Eden, the James Dean picture that had been released after the actor died the previous year. Adams recognized that a friendship with Presley could be beneficial to his own career. He knew Hollywood people were quicker than music business people when it came to seeing how popular Elvis could be. ‘He’s Marlon Brando with a guitar,’ pronounced Jackie Gleason. Old hands who were bullied into the screening room to see Love Me Tender dailies detected a self-sufficiency in front of the camera nobody could coach.

  The fifth person in the car was Barbara Hearn, a pretty nineteen-year-old girl the fan magazines had taken to calling ‘Elvis’s Memphis girlfriend’. The conditionality of this description recognized what was apparent to anyone in Elvis’s circle at the time: that the rough equality of family life was slowly being replaced by something that operated more like a royal court, and in a royal court everything revolves around just one sovereign. Elvis was now being asked the same questions any twenty-one-year-old was being asked. His new status meant he was free to answer in a way they never would. When he was asked who he was dating at the time he would mention Barbara but also seventeen-year-old June Juanico, who lived in Biloxi. Then he would grin and tell the truth: ‘I’m dating about a hundred girls.’

  Barbara had few illusions about how she figured in his life. She knew that like everyone else in his social circle the events of the last year – the hit records, the TV appearances, the screaming crowds, the sudden geyser of cash, the frenzy of renown – had relegated her to the status of supporting player. During the drive that day Elvis turned to her and asked if she’d brought the shirts he’d given her to hold back at the house. She said she hadn’t. They found a payphone and made sure that somebody back at North Audubon Drive brought along the two shirts, the blue and the red velvet blouses. He didn’t tell Barbara that he’d been given these shirts by his new Hollywood girlfriend Natalie Wood; Natalie had had her dressmaker run them up. Barbara already knew she wasn’t the only one, but these shirts were an indication of the new competition she could expect to face. Girls with their own dressmakers.

  The Mississippi-Alabama Fair generally had a theme. In September 1956 the theme was Elvis Presley. The city fathers had been hoping that the boy they had taken no notice of when he was growing up in the town would be the main attraction of a motorcade down Main Street. Colonel Tom Parker, who had recently taken over Elvis’s management, had told them that would simply be too dangerous so they’d had to settle for him doing two shows, one a matinee and one in the evening, in the amphitheatre of the show ground, within sniffing distance of the new swine barn in which so much local money and pride had been invested.

  It was a hot day and the Presley family were dressed more for formality than comfort, Vernon in a dark suit and tie, Gladys in a heavy brocade dress with an Elvis button, the star of the show in his heavy velvet Hollywood shirt. For Elvis this whole day was the culmination of a wish-fulfilment fantasy. In the breast of every adolescent boy burns the hope that one fine day he will get the opportunity to return to the playing field where nobody picked him, to the dance floor where the scars of his minor humiliations were first sustained, to climb the school platform to which he was never summoned to receive a prize, there to extend his wings to their fullest span and, like a butterfly in the sun, soak up the full measure of the adoration, sexual desire and throbbing envy of those who considered he would never amount to anything.

  26 September 1956 was truly the day of reckoning. Little Richard may have been the first rock star but Elvis was the first rock idol, the first to take that curious, unprecedented journey from the back of the class to the cynosure of all eyes, from an existence as that boy who dressed a little strange to being the one everybody else wished to emulate, from whispered mockery to open adoration, all in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

  To his new fans he had always been attractive, but those who’d grown up with him knew that in his adolescent years Elvis’s looks didn’t
fit. As he grew into a young man he accentuated this difference by adopting the frilly shirts and tight pants of the gigolo, as if daring the good old boys in town to take exception to him. This revolution in his appearance came before any revolution in music. From early on his hair was a statement, a form of expression every bit as vital to him as music. His hair was the one non-negotiable. He lost two jobs for not getting it cut. He devoted hours to arranging it. He loved looking at himself. This wasn’t mere narcissism. Narcissism is a shallow infatuation with one’s own appearance. With Elvis it was far from shallow. It was the real thing.

  Over the previous year in the spotlight it had slowly, miraculously dawned on Presley that he was beautiful; so beautiful indeed that it seemed to cause many women actual pain to behold him. Fortunately he loved the company of females, whether they were adolescents smelling of Spray Net who just wanted his autograph, marriageable Eisenhower girls in rustling petticoats and white gloves who wanted to introduce him to their mothers, feather-bedecked showgirls ready to show him a good time in the dressing room next door, or even neatly ironed show-business professionals who weren’t sure whether they wished to mother him or shove him into the nearest cupboard and kiss his face off. The kissability of Elvis was more important than his vibrato. All his early girlfriends report that he was a master of the oscular art. Since this is an activity most young men are too impatient to spend time on, he was on to something here.

  Even by September 1956 Elvis was the biggest male sex symbol since Rudolph Valentino. But whereas Valentino had to get into costume in order to embody the full fantasy package and was only available on the big screen, the whole point about the new rock-star celebrity as embodied by Elvis was that while he might apparently live in the clouds he was still available in the normal world if you knew where to find him. This September Wednesday in Tupelo was one of the last such occasions. Here he was, walking among the humans, in the same Tupelo fairground he’d had to con his way into as a child, only this time almost incinerating in the famished gaze of every female in the fairground.

  When he mounted the stage for the 2.30 show in front of a few thousand over-stimulated girls who had flocked there from all over the South (one of them, the fourteen-year-old Wynette Pugh, would later get on stage herself as Tammy Wynette) he just toyed with them like one who took amusement from dangling himself out like a piece of raw meat before hounds. He dawdled down to the front of the stage, planted his feet where experience had already taught him it was safe to be, and then leaned over towards the girls as if he genuinely wanted to be among them. Then, as soon as they reached out to drag him into their midst he did his relieved white-shoe totter back towards the safety of the band, who duly gave him their ‘What did you just do now, El?’ look.

  Musically it wasn’t up to much. Scotty Moore and Bill Black, the boys he’d made his first records with back in Memphis, were there, Scotty’s amp balanced on a garden chair. They had only recently been joined by a drummer. The Jordanaires jostled in their plaid jackets and clicked their fingers around one microphone. They played not one but two songs by Little Richard. They plugged the movie Love Me Tender, as the Colonel had instructed. Mainly it was about personal appearance rather than performance. Frankly the girls were at least as interested in looking at him as listening to him. Elvis was fine with this and had developed a very simple act to cater to their interest. ‘I did a little more, and the more I did, the wilder they went,’ is how he explained it.

  One New York journalist, seeking a fresh vantage point from which to patronize Presley, said he was simply offering a new variation on an old showbiz tradition, ‘the hootchie kootchie’. In a way he was. He moved like a man who had to keep tight control of his loins lest they run away and fornicate of their own free will. The throaty timbre of the girls’ screams that day strongly suggested their loins wished to reciprocate. During the first Tupelo show Judy Hopper from Alamo, Tennessee was dragged from the crush at the front of the stage and got to embrace Elvis before the cordon of tubby, perspiring policemen conducted her off the stage. She met him later and had her picture taken. ‘What do I like about him?’ she said in a voice no longer like a teenager’s; suddenly it was as carnal as Barbara Stanwyck’s. ‘I like all of him.’ Judy was fourteen.

  Elvis changed his shirt for the evening show. That show was sweatier and more adult but not a great deal longer. Nine numbers and then off into the car and back on the road to Memphis. Somewhere along that long road back the hood of the Lincoln snapped upright, making it impossible to see the road ahead. There were no seat belts and it was only Elvis’s arm that prevented Barbara going through the windscreen. The Lincoln was almost a wonder of the world at the time, particularly in Mississippi. Somebody’s curiosity must have got the better of them back there in the fairground; they’d taken a look under the hood and neglected to close it properly afterwards. It was another sign that Elvis could no longer walk among his people in safety. Gladys was already sick with worry at what the fans might do to her beloved boy. Tom Parker was planning to withdraw him from personal appearances and make him a figure you could only engage with for the price of a movie ticket.

  That was the plan for Elvis as a business. The plan for Elvis as a person wasn’t quite so clear-cut. The Colonel had very little interest in the latter. He didn’t think he would need one. There were no maps for the journey that twenty-one-year-old Elvis had taken so swiftly in 1956. Like most Americans born in the early part of the twentieth century he had arrived in a world where electric light was a rarity, where dreams didn’t extend far beyond those things you were able to see, touch and run your hands along the chrome trim of, where the primary form of entertainment open to decent people was some kind of church. He came of age to find that not only could he buy a car, he could even buy a new one. And not only could he buy a new one, he could have more than one, and he could also afford to buy one for everybody in his extended family as thoughtlessly as most people bestowed candy on their children. Elvis was not troubled by the thought of this. In fact he wanted it to continue. Elvis got up each morning wishing for nothing more than to be made to feel like a lottery winner all over again.

  One arena in which this seemed perfectly achievable was the sexual one. For Elvis in 1956 the world was divided into nice girls, road girls and show-business girls. He was good at kissing them but he was never quite committed to the follow-through. This was less surprising then than it would be now. There was little or no contraception. The Memphis girls might have been thrilled to be seen on the arm of this god among men but they weren’t about to give it away. Elvis felt that his mother was perpetually looking over his shoulder, which she probably was, and hovering above it all there was the tumescence-defeating fact that no matter how attractive the company he was in, he was generally the most beautiful one there.

  By late 1956 there was no longer such a thing as a private life, had he wanted one. The next time Elvis came back to Memphis he was accompanied by Natalie Wood, his Hollywood girlfriend during the Love Me Tender publicity cycle. Wood expected more of Elvis sexually than his Memphis girlfriends. She complained that when he took her into the other room to show her the dailies, the only thing he showed her was the dailies.

  For Elvis, that day in September 1956 was a unique interlude between normal life and the star life. This was a truce that couldn’t possibly hold for long. A month or so later he gave Gladys and Vernon a budget to start looking at bigger properties where it might be possible to keep the world on the other side of the garden wall. They found Graceland. A year after they had moved in he was drafted into the army. A few months after that Gladys died. She had never had good health and was drinking. She was forty-six.

  As Barbara Hearn put it, ‘he was never happy again’.

  1956 PLAYLIST

  Elvis Presley, ‘Hound Dog’

  Gene Vincent, ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’

  Carl Perkins, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’

  Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, ‘True Love’

&nbs
p; Chuck Berry, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’

  Guy Mitchell, ‘Singing The Blues’

  Doris Day, ‘Que Sera, Sera’

  Bill Evans, New Jazz Conceptions

  Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry, ‘Ain’t Got No Home’

  Johnny Cash, ‘I Walk The Line’

  6 JULY 1957

  WOOLTON VILLAGE FETE, LIVERPOOL

  The first rock fans start a group

  LITTLE RICHARD WAS made by the radio. Elvis Presley was the creature of television. By 1957 this new medium had outstripped radio and the box in the corner was now the most important item of furniture in the house. TV began in the US in cities where its effect on the population’s habits could be detected in the number of toilets being flushed all over town the minute certain shows ended. Movie attendances dived. Theatres closed. As the decade progressed, TV spread to the rural areas. The producers of the big variety shows that dominated the networks suddenly realized the importance of including acts with heartland appeal alongside the Jewish comedians and nightclub singers. In this respect Elvis Presley was manna from heaven.

  A performance from Elvis had something of the unknown about it. TV likes to catch moments of disclosure on faces in close-up and there was always the possibility with Elvis that something might happen. TV is at its best when it flirts with the things it fears. The producers of the Dorsey brothers’ Stage Show certainly feared what might be going on in Elvis’s trousers when he made his first appearance. Worried that not everything was stopping when the music did they urged his agent to take him to the Army & Navy on Broadway and buy him an athletic support. Further appearances on The Steve Allen Show and The Ed Sullivan Show were similarly laced with dangerous possibilities, even though the boy himself appeared as biddable as a Bible scholar and divided all adults into sirs and ma’ams.