Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  “I said, ‘I want him to sing, and I want him to be successful, but I want him to go to work at nine o’clock and come home at five. I don’t want him to be out all hours of the night in all these clubs.’ ”

  Looking back, she sees that was the dividing line. “After his records got so popular, life was never the same for us.”

  Carolyn Bradshaw and Elvis, backstage at the Louisiana Hayride, June 25, 1955. “He was just madly in love with her,” says fellow Hayride performer Nita Lynn. (Courtesy of Carolyn Bradshaw Shanahan)

  Chapter Five

  “You Need to Be Kissed”

  Dixie was too young to go into some of the little bars and clubs Elvis was playing around town, but he continued to spend all his free time with her, taking her wherever he could—to a radio appearance over in West Memphis, Arkansas, and to his performance at the Katz’s Drug Store opening, where he sang for a huge crowd of teenagers from the back of a flatbed truck. His high school chum George Klein, by now a gofer for Dewey Phillips, emceed the event.

  On September 11, 1954, two days after the Katz opening, Elvis was back in the studio, laying down covers of Dean Martin’s “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine,” and on the flip side of the dial, bluesman Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight.”

  Marion remembered he never came to a session ready, and when he started “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine,” he knew only one verse and the chorus, which wasn’t enough for a record. Sam was eager to get something down, though, because the Disc Jockey Convention was about to take place in Nashville, and he wanted to be able to promote Elvis’s second single. So during a break, Marion sat down and wrote some additional lyrics: “I don’t care if it’s rain or snow / Driving’s cozy when the lights are low.”

  When the record came out, Marion got a call from the music publisher, saying he’d noticed Elvis’s version contained an added verse. Marion said yes, she’d written it, and told him why. (“It’s the middle of the night and we’ve got to get a record out.”) That was fine, he told her, but she couldn’t put her name on it, or collect any royalties as a writer.

  “Every time I turned on the radio I heard someone singing my lyrics, and I was so mad and upset. I wouldn’t care if we had gotten some benefit. But that was just indicative of the way the sessions went. If we needed more hamburgers, somebody went out and got them. If we needed more lyrics, somebody wrote them. With what we lacked in money and resources, we had to be inventive, but I think that’s what made the music so exciting and creative.”

  Sometimes Dixie would go with Elvis to the recording studio—Elvis often dirty and grimy from work at Crown Electric—and Marion found her to be “a very dear girl, quiet and religious, and his number one booster.”

  Marion was struck by how much in love Elvis and Dixie were, and how genuine their feelings were for each other. Elvis would talk about her and quite often show Marion her picture, which he’d tucked inside his gold wristwatch.

  “After Elvis’s first record came out, Bob Neal staged a contest asking young ladies to write in to say, ‘I would like to be the president of Elvis’s fan club because,’ in twenty-five words or less. I kept Dixie’s letter for years, because it was the most glowing and loving tribute. It meant so much to her for Elvis to succeed and be accepted. But when he started spending so much time away from home, it was inevitable something would change in their relationship.”

  It was during this time, the fall of 1954, that Elvis first played outside of Memphis, in a high school gym in Bethel Springs, Tennessee, not far from Jackson. In the audience was musician Carl Perkins, who was amazed at the “electric effect” Elvis had on his audience, “particularly the girls.”

  Bob Neal was booking the trio now, at some point calling Scotty and Bill the “Blue Moon Boys” and Elvis the “Hillbilly Cat.” His early morning radio show “just boomed right down the Delta,” Scotty recalled, so they started working a lot of schoolhouse shows down through that area, traveling 150 to 200 miles around Memphis in Arkansas and Mississippi. Scotty was Elvis’s de facto manager, but Bob would help out and officially assume managerial duties in early 1955. He’d try to get Elvis engagements, help promote him, start the fan club (the stationery was pink and black), advise him on business dealings, and promote his records. It wasn’t always an easy thing to do.

  “I had problems trying to get his records played. I knew a lot of people in the business, but the country deejays would say, ‘We can’t play that. He sounds too much like a nigger.’ I tried it the other way, sent them to rhythm-and-blues stations. They said, ‘No, he sounds like a damn hillbilly.’ ”

  Bob had never managed an artist before, and “it was pretty much a mom-and-pop operation. Helen went along to the shows many times to sell tickets.” Because he had a 5 A.M. sign-on time at the radio station, Bob would get in the backseat and go to sleep on the way home. Elvis would drive, and he and Helen would talk. She was amazed that he was always seeking reassurance and expressing his ambition to become a big movie star.

  “Do you think I can make it?” he’d ask. “I’ve got to make it.” As Bob recalled, it seemed to be more about Gladys than his own desire to be big. “He wanted to be able to provide things for his mother, to buy her a nice home and keep her from having to work, because he adored her more than anything.” Pretty soon, Elvis was “just like one of our kids,” popping in their house anytime he wanted and buddying with the Neals’ oldest child, Sonny, who went on the shows and taught Elvis to water-ski on the weekends.

  “When Elvis started along, I would emcee the show and tell jokes, and do my act with my little ukulele. Then I’d bring on the headliner. It’s rather amusing, but in a lot of towns, Elvis was not the big draw. I was. Uncle Bob was the hero, and people would gather around to talk to me afterward. They regarded Elvis as sort of a strange new creation. Instead of the record building him, he built the record when he made an appearance.”

  Often when Elvis first came onstage and started performing, audiences didn’t know how to react. “They were in shock,” as Scotty put it. Bill, the clown of the group, would try anything to get the crowd loosened up—ride the bass, or get a pair of bloomers and put them on. “If we really had to attribute concert success to anyone in the very early days, it would have to be to Bill.”

  Elvis ran into such a wall on his next big appearance, his one shot on WSM’s revered country radio broadcast, the Grand Ole Opry. Sam had set it up with Opry manager Jim Denny, based on Elvis’s good showing on the regional Billboard charts, and on October 2, 1954, Elvis, Scotty, and Bill drove over to Nashville and appeared on Hank Snow’s portion of the program. Backstage, Elvis wandered around, shaking his head at the run-down condition of the Ryman Auditorium, expecting something much nicer. (“Is this what I’ve looked forward to all my life?”)

  Marion had high hopes for her protégé’s appearance, and slipped over to Nashville on her own to see him. She sat in the audience for a while, and a woman in front of her asked who she’d come to see. “Elvis Presley,” Marion said. “Who?” “After the show,” Marion replied, “you won’t ask me again.”

  Just before Elvis went on, Hank Snow walked up to him. “Well, kid, you ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” Elvis said.

  The diminutive star looked down at his paper and asked, “What was your name again?”

  “Elvis, Elvis Presley.”

  “No, what’s the name you used on your record?”

  “Elvis Presley.”

  Snow went out and introduced him as a bright, new, exciting star, but in Scotty’s view, “It was earth-shattering for all involved. They wouldn’t let us do but one song, and we had to do ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky,’ because it was a country song. The audience reaction was very light, and in total, it was a bomb.” Elvis was so upset, he left his stage costume in a gas station bathroom and cried all the way back to Memphis.

  He had a better shot two weeks later at the Louisiana Hayride, the Opry’s upstart cousin, broadcast out of Sh
reveport’s Municipal Auditorium over KWKH, another powerful, 50,000-watt station that beamed its signal across the wide expanse of the South. Known as “the Cradle of the Stars,” the Hayride had launched the careers of Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, Slim Whitman, and Faron Young, boosting Williams, in fact, near the end of his life when the Opry shut him out.

  Sam had again negotiated the tryout, but Elvis had an ally there already in booker/manager/musician Tillman Franks, who brought Elvis’s first single to the attention of Horace Logan, the Hayride’s producer. Tillman set up a phone call with Sam and Elvis (“Mr. Franks, I understand that you might get me on the Louisiana Hayride?”), and they settled on a fee of $125. Sam made the seven-hour drive to Shreveport with Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, and Elvis was so nervous he could hardly sit still—twitching, drumming, shaking his foot. Their car broke down on the way in, which didn’t help matters, and none of them had any money.

  Elvis was scheduled to appear after Hayride star Ginny Wright, whose duet with Jim Reeves, “I Love You,” spent twenty-two weeks on the Billboard country charts. The attractive blonde was sitting on a stool in the wings watching Johnny Horton’s performance when Elvis first walked by, a pacing blur in his pink shirt and black pants. She called him over and welcomed him to the Hayride.

  “Ginny,” he said, biting his fingernails, “how in the world can you be so calm?” She felt sorry for the kid, and he brought out her maternal instincts, even though they were about the same age. “Well,” she told him, “you take a deep breath, and if you love it, you just go out there and sing.” He gave out a little laugh then and asked her if she’d like one of his new promotional pictures. It was dull and cheap-looking, not glossy like the real stars had, but he was proud of it, and signed it “To Ginny, love Elvis.” She put it in her guitar case so she wouldn’t bruise his ego.

  Finally, after Ginny’s demure rendition of “Tell Me How to Get Married,” announcer Frank Page brought him on, building him as an artist whose record “has skyrocketed up the charts.” But the Hayride audience—an older, married crowd who needed a place to go on a Saturday night—couldn’t get past his outfit. With Scotty and Bill anchoring him on either side, and house drummer D. J. Fontana holding down the backbeat behind the curtain, Elvis stuttered when he talked, rocked forward on his feet, and “looked like he was about to leap right out into the audience,” as Page recalls. He shook his leg a little, more out of nerves than anything, and “showed restraint . . . he seemed at times pinned in, like he was struggling to contain this enormous kinetic force.”

  Before he knew it, he’d moved through both “That’s All Right (Mama)” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” the audience connecting more with the latter tune, already knowing it from the Father of Bluegrass. And then he was offstage, staff fiddler Dobber Johnson and his “splinter-bustin” hoedown, “Black Mountain Rag,” in his place.

  Ginny Wright had been watching from the wings.

  “I thought he was going to get booed off the stage. Because he didn’t even hardly get any applause at all, and he was real worried. They didn’t ask him to come back out or anything.”

  He saw the look on her face.

  “Ginny,” he said, “is there anyplace we could go get some coffee?”

  “Yeah, we got a little restaurant down here. You’ve got to go down the back steps of the building.”

  They were on their way when Tillman Franks stopped him and took him by the arm, seeing how nervous he was.

  “He really didn’t get much of a hand, and I know he and Scotty and Bill talked it over. But I told him, ‘Don’t worry about what you’re doing. They ain’t hired you yet. You do anything you want to. Just relax and get with it.’ ”

  Down in the restaurant, Ginny bought him a hamburger and a cup of coffee. He was awful humble and sweet, she thought, and he talked about his mother. “He said, ‘Ginny, do you miss your mama and daddy?’ Because my mother and father were still in Georgia, running a grocery store. And I said, ‘Yeah, I really do. I try to call them once or twice a week.’ Then he fidgeted with the spoon, shaking his foot all the while.

  “ ‘Ginny, I didn’t get no applause like you got,’ he said, his voice downcast. ‘Well, Elvis, the Louisiana Hayride is a country show. Why don’t you get out there sometime and do a country song?’ He said, ‘Well, I can do that. I can sing “Old Shep,” ’ and he sang for me there at the table, starting off in whisper: ‘When I was a lad and old Shep was a pup. . . .’ ”

  Elvis didn’t realize it, but the audience that had given him such a light hand at first wanted more. “The acts they’d come to know as family now seemed distant and boring,” Frank Page wrote. “Slowly, they built their enthusiasm for the young trio from Memphis, and when Elvis, Scotty, and Bill were called back out later in the show, the reception was very different.”

  Taking the stage for the second time, Bill primed the audience, jumping around, being silly, and egging Elvis on to move, to shake that leg and loosen up. The crowd seemed younger now, but whether that was true, as Scotty remembers, “They reacted. I mean they reacted!”

  “On the second appearance, when Elvis started doing that, the roof come in,” said Tillman Franks. “They just went completely wild. After the show, Sam, Elvis, Horace Logan, and Pappy Covington, the Hayride’s booking agent, went in a room and started talking.”

  When they walked out, Elvis had a twelve-month contract as a member of the Hayride cast.

  From the beginning of his sixteen-month stint there, Elvis was a favorite of the women stars, though nearly each of them had a different relationship with him, from maternal to sisterly to romantic. Almost all of them found him strangely immature, if fun. Vocalist Jeanette Hicks, like so many women, noticed, “Those eyes! He liked to play peek-a-boo. He used to sneak up behind me backstage, cover my eyes and say, ‘Guess who?’ in a funny voice. Well, there was no mistaking who it was.”

  But Betty Amos, a singer-comedienne, found him harder to take. He was always breaking strings onstage and would run up to her and say, “Betty, quick, can I borrow your guitar?” One night he returned it “absolutely thrashed to death, just the whole front busted out,” and he didn’t do anything about it.

  “I was very fond of Elvis, but sometimes I didn’t like him very much. He could be sweet, gentle, kind, and thoughtful, but perplexing and aggravating, too. He was sexy, handsome, childish, and at times, downright cruel. He’d hit me and I’d hit him. Looking back, I suppose in all probability I was the closest he ever came to having a sister.”

  It started with the opposite approach, with flirtation. The first night he was at the Hayride, Amos was backstage, coming up the back steps, when Elvis was standing on the landing. “I was dressed up, and I had a really good figure—big boobies, little teeny waist. And I had my makeup and high heels on, and I guess I sashayed a little. And when we got face-to-face, he said, ‘You’re a little doll.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not. I’m a big doll.’ And I just went on, and I could feel his eyes boring into me as I continued up the steps.”

  Not long after, she was in her dressing room when he walked in, gave her a lethal Rudolph Valentino stare, and announced, “You need to be kissed.”

  He was totally serious, but it caught her so off guard she didn’t know whether to say “Hop to it,” or to double up her fist and hit him.

  “He came over and gave me his best shot, but it just wasn’t there. We looked at each other and I thought, ‘Ick! This ain’t gonna work!’ It was like kissing your brother! We both knew right then that we were better suited for something else. And that’s when we started laughing and carrying on with each other.”

  That humorous beginning set the pace for their whole relationship, one based on affectionate teasing, though their childish pushing and shoving sometimes turned bizarre, as when they visited a small-town radio station. While the deejay was interviewing another act, Elvis and Betty went out on the lawn, where their usual banter and smacking (“We more or less sparred with each other”) turned into a wres
tling match.

  “I was as strong as he was. And we were actually rolling over and over on the grass. I said, ‘Will you quit? If somebody sees us out here, this is not going to look good!’ We were laughing so hard we couldn’t really wrestle. But we just did all kinds of silly things like brothers and sisters do.”

  Yet Elvis was also establishing another pattern—that of compartmentalization. At home, he was the churchgoing and devoted boyfriend of Dixie Locke and the obedient son of Gladys and Vernon. But at the Hayride, and soon on its package shows on the road, where he traveled as part of a troupe with Maxine and Jim Ed Brown and other stars, he was Elvis Presley, the charming, charismatic performer and girl-teaser supreme. Sometimes three generations of women—a grandmother, her daughter, and granddaughter—sat in the front row with the same look of anticipation and awakening on their faces. The bolder ones in the crowd pawed at him offstage like hungry animals, sending a clear message that they were only too eager to receive his kisses and more.

  The boy who so many girls rebuffed in his youth was flattered beyond belief. He loved the attention, but he also loved the company of women, and when they surrounded him, asking for autographs or hugs, he was courteous enough to give them at least a minute of his time, no matter what hour of the day or night.

  There were times, though, when he seemed to exude such an exotic vibe that people seemed either afraid to approach him, or were too in awe to do so. Jim Ed Brown remembers such a date in Gilmer, Texas, before Elvis started incorporating his wilder gyrations or began drawing a lot of people on the road.

  After the show, as the boys were breaking down the equipment, “There was a piano over in one of the corners. Elvis went over and sat at it. He could play only a little bit, but he played and sang a few things, and the first thing I knew, people started to go over. But they didn’t get close. They stood back about ten or fifteen feet, because they didn’t know whether to get close or not.”