by Alanna Nash
Though she studied acting and dance, Carolyn’s real ambition was to be a famous singer. After she belted out Hank Williams’s “Jambalaya” onstage with Jim Reeves at the Reo Palm Isle Club in Longview, Texas, the vivacious fifteen-year-old was hooked on both the applause and the attention. “When you come from a family of eleven . . . well, I don’t think they knew I was there until I was five years old.” Her manager, Fabor Robison, who ran his clients’ careers with a steel hand, signed her to his own Abbott label, recording her one Top Ten hit, “The Marriage of Mexican Joe,” an answer song to Reeves’s “Mexican Joe,” in 1953. That same year, at age sixteen, she joined the Hayride cast and went on to win the 1954 Louisiana state title of “Petite Miss Physical Culture.”
Her hit song, coupled with her good looks, promised a bright future. She did a tour of California with Reeves, trading her white-fringed cowgirl outfits for cocktail dresses and high heels, and landed a three-month stint on Cliffie Stone’s radio and television shows as a fill-in for pregnant girl singer Bucky Tibbs. She was still on Stone’s Hometown Jamboree when Elvis first came to the Hayride.
“When I left that show and came back to Shreveport, nobody knew I was coming, so I just went backstage to visit with all of the group. The girls were telling me about this new guy on the show, Elvis Presley, who’d been there two or three times by then. They were going on and on about him, and I was thinking, ‘Who is this upstart?’ And somebody said, ‘Well, you just wait and see.’ And then the following Saturday night, there he was, and I saw. And boy, did I see. He was magnetic, just awesome, even then.”
Carolyn was only an average talent—she relied on a strong regional twang and a fiery delivery to carry a song. But she tried hard and had a lot of guts, and “I had such fun doing it onstage that I don’t think people cared whether I could sing or not.” Her fresh-faced appeal made her popular with the boys, who greeted her with wolf whistles and queued up for her autograph.
Some of the female cast members were jealous of her, particularly since she’d been dating Tibby Edwards. “He was little, sweet, and cute, and all the girls went gaga over him,” says Nita Lynn, a girl her age and Carolyn’s best friend on the show. Carolyn knew how high-tempered women could be, so she didn’t let it bother her. But even that hadn’t prepared her for the female reaction to Elvis.
“We had our fans at personal appearances and at the Hayride, but they didn’t just absolutely lose their mind over any of us, and they did over Elvis. I think I was more in a state of mild shock than anything else. I’ve never seen anybody, man or woman, with that kind of magnetism.”
The first time they spoke, “He looked down at me with this little half-grin and those sleepy eyes, and I just loved it. He had a nervous way of standing, but he was easy to talk to, and he laughed a lot, and I thought, ‘Wow, I see what the ladies are talking about!’ He was just my type, really sexy. There’s just no other word for it.”
He kept company with her from that first night, when a group of the Hayride cast—Ginny Wright, the Rowley Trio, and his rival-to-be, Tibby Edwards—went over to Bossier City for a bite after the show. In the next few days, he’d start taking her to all the usual hangouts—Murrell Stansell’s Bantam Grill, where he played the pinball machine (and where steel guitar great Jimmy Day teased Elvis about how much Carolyn could eat), and Harry’s Barbecue, a favorite of George Jones and Faron Young. Of course, they went to the movies, Elvis, or “El,” as she called him, borrowing the Browns’ car for a date at the Strand Theatre.
“She really liked him,” remembers Shreveport radio personality Louise Alley, who lived across the hall from the Bradshaw family in the apartment house, and bumped into the polite young man (“Excuse me, ma’am”) on the stairs as he came to pick her up for a date.
Carolyn always found Elvis “extremely respectful,” though affectionate.
“He was an ideal date, almost, and the best kisser. The only thing is that he was very, very restless. There was one movie that I really wanted to see, and he kept getting up and going out. He couldn’t even sit still. Finally, I gave up and said, ‘Let’s just go. You’re not enjoying this.’ So we left. I’ve often wondered what created that. I think there was just an emptiness in his life.”
When he first took her out, Carolyn excitedly called her friend Nita Lynn. “You will never guess who I’m dating! Elvis!”
Nita was currently on tour with Johnny Horton and Paul Howard and His Arkansas Cotton Pickers, and she hadn’t kept up with the news. “Who?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of Elvis Presley?”
“I’m afraid not, but the name is enough to choke a horse.”
“He’s a cat!” Carolyn said, meaning he was a cool cat. “He played the kind of music that wasn’t the three-chord Hank Williams songs we played, and he moved on stage,” as Nita later wrote.
Soon, he asked Carolyn to go steady. In her view, “El and I were well-matched. We had a lot of interests in common, and shared things, and talked.” Nita believes Elvis would have married Carolyn, “because he was just madly in love with her. You could tell when he was around her.” But they didn’t have deep conversations, and Carolyn didn’t know anything about Dixie Locke, or even about his romance with Bonnie Brown. Confusion arose at the end of 1954 when Carolyn, a one-man woman, heard from Pappy Covington that Elvis was not honoring his promise to her. “That was the one time I was really upset. Pappy was like my own father, and he said, ‘I don’t want you to get your heart broken, so just understand that Elvis is going to be seeing a lot of women.’ ”
“All of his romances were short,” says Hayride announcer Frank Page. “Carolyn’s name kept coming up as being his girlfriend, and I thought maybe she might be something special to him.”
But he couldn’t seem to change his ways. In fact, once Carolyn’s friend Nita got back to Shreveport, Elvis would discreetly try to put his arm around her shoulders, but she’d have none of it. “After a few times, I threw his arm from around me and told him, ‘Listen, Elvis. You keep your hands to yourself!’ ” That brought guffaws from the musicians, since most girls encouraged Elvis’s affections. But Nita found him cocky, and she didn’t like some of his language, either, especially when he took the Lord’s name in vain. It wouldn’t be long before a high school principal in Mobile, Alabama, stopped Elvis’s show because he told an off-color joke.
Carolyn never confronted Elvis about the others, but she wondered what his parents thought about his sexual behavior. She met Gladys and Vernon only once, backstage, and her heart sank when she realized Elvis had never told them about her, that they reacted as if she were just another singer on the Hayride. But she saw how Elvis’s dynamic attraction for women troubled his mother. “She was very quiet and reserved and didn’t smile very much. His father smiled a little bit more, but neither of them had much to say. If I had been his mother, I would have been very afraid of where it all was leading.”
Still, Carolyn forgave him for keeping company with the other girls, because she still wanted to see him. She’d have to be sure that he was dedicated and faithful before she completely gave her heart, though. And coming from a family of “pretty devout Presbyterians, I had some strong moral values.” But she tried to keep a positive attitude. She was an independent girl, and if things didn’t work out, they could both go on to greener pastures.
“She was very sharp and spunky,” offers Ginny Wright. “And her mother watched her real close. Carolyn was still going to school at that time, so her mother wouldn’t let her book too much. She told Fabor, ‘My daughter’s too young to be going out on the road and keeping those hours.’ ”
But Carolyn did go over to East Texas on the package shows sometimes, and at least one photograph, taken at the Hawkins (Texas) High School gym in December 1954, attests to their few appearances together. The next day, she was either still on the road, or couldn’t raise her head off the pillow to go to school. That prompted the truant officer to visit her mother a time or two (“I g
ave that poor lady such grief”), but she still insisted on being part of it all. With Bill or Scotty behind the wheel, Elvis and Carolyn would harmonize in the backseat, working up gospel songs like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Elvis would sing bass, and something about the way he looked when he sang it tickled her, and they’d tumble with laughter.
“The Memphis Flash,” as Horace Logan called Elvis in his Hayride introductions, was still green in his stage prattle (“Friends, I’m too pooped to pop!”), replying he was, “Sick, sober, and sorry,” when Logan asked him how he was getting along. But he was already outgrowing the radio show, and soon Elvis would be too big for its package shows, too, particularly after Bob Neal’s management contract took effect in January 1955, and the records charted higher, and he toured nearly every day of the year.
Elvis would let Carolyn know when his shows were close enough for her to attend, and he and Scotty and Bill would swing through and pick her up. That posed a problem.
“Mom didn’t care a lot about my seeing musicians, and a lot of our dates were en route to and from his appearances. Boy, this almost drove her crazy.”
It all made Carolyn’s head spin, too. Everything was happening so fast—Elvis was like a comet streaking across the sky. By March, he was headlining, and by May, he created riots wherever he went. By June, he’d outgrown Neal as his solo manager, and by July, he’d hit the national charts. Come October, he would be too big for the little Sun label, and that meant he’d be ready for a national launch in 1956. And where would that leave them?
“I think the potential was there for us to fall in love, but the pull of fame, and the reality of how popular he was becoming meant the relationship didn’t have a chance to develop. He was getting so busy that I never knew from one time to the other how long it would be until I would see him again.”
Finally, she concluded that any time might be the last time. And after a few months, the romance flamed out.
“It wasn’t like we broke up or said good-bye. We didn’t even get to say good-bye. He was just whisked away and out of my life.”
And just as Elvis’s career was in its stratospheric rise, Carolyn’s stalled.
“She was a beautiful young lady,” in the view of Tom Bearden of the Hayride’s Rhythm Harmoneers. “She had some projection, and she presented a good entertainer appearance.” But she never found the right songs that fit her style, and she was said to rebuff the sexual advances of her manager, who lost interest in the female singers who refused to sleep with him. Without a competent manager, and with her mother limiting her personal appearances on the road, she was never able to advance to the next level.
“At the time, all I wanted to do was sing,” she says. But then, after her professional and personal disappointments, she just wanted out. In late 1955, at the age of eighteen, she left the show and her recording career, and moved to Memphis, working at first for Bob Neal.
In recent years, an amateur singer who uses the surname Presley has said that he is one of twin sons of Carolyn Bradshaw and Elvis Presley. But his birth date suggests otherwise, and he has provided no proof of his parentage. Carolyn dismisses his claims in two words: “He’s crazy.”
According to Shirley Dieu, a friend of Priscilla Presley since the 1970s, “Anybody who’s ever claimed that Elvis fathered her child has been tested, and they’ve all come out negative.” Shirley was surprised, and told Priscilla so. “She laughed and she said, ‘Can you believe it? I’m just as shocked as you are. You would think there’s got to be more children out there. But nope. Never. Not a one.’ ”
However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a child who hasn’t come forward. Horace Logan wrote in his book that he knew of at least one woman in Houston who had a daughter by Elvis during the Hayride days. Houston was one of the first big cities to embrace Elvis, and he appeared around the area frequently on package shows with other of the Hayride stars during that time.
“You’re bound to remember me, Mr. Logan,” the woman said when she called him twenty years later for help with concert tickets. “Elvis and I were always together when he was playing in Houston in ’55.” Logan didn’t remember the woman, but he didn’t doubt her story. And when she told him that her daughter was unaware that Elvis was her father (“I thought maybe if she could see him I might be able to get up my nerve”), he advised her to let sleeping dogs lie.
“I could hear her crying softly,” he wrote, “as I hung up the phone.”
Ann Raye (left), Elvis, and Mae Axton, at the third annual Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Celebration, Meridian, Mississippi, May 25, 1955. Ann, who turned sixteen the following day, tried to get her father to manage Elvis. “I knew just his looks were going to get him somewhere.” (Courtesy of James V. Roy)
Chapter Six
“A Great, Big, Beautiful Hunk of Forbidden Fruit”
On a mild October night in 1954, Bob Neal invited country music promoter Oscar Davis to the Eagle’s Nest in Memphis to see his new act. Davis, a short, silver-haired man who dressed to the nines, was in town promoting an Eddy Arnold show at Ellis Auditorium on behalf of Colonel Tom Parker, Eddy’s former manager, who still did some of Arnold’s booking. Like Parker, Davis was an old carny who’d seen everything. As a vaudeville promoter, he once even toured a girl “frozen alive” in ice. But the faded impresario hadn’t seen anything like Elvis, and he told Neal, “Bob, this guy is incredible. I’d like to meet him.” Two nights later, Bob brought Elvis backstage, where Davis told the young singer how impressed he’d been, and that he hoped they could work together.
The next day, Davis returned to Nashville and drove straight out to Madison, Tennessee, to see the Colonel, who was in the middle of lunch with yet another carny, Charlie Lamb, who’d gone legit as a country music journalist.
“It was really Oscar who found Elvis,” Lamb says. “He came over and said, ‘I saw the darndest act you ever imagined, this kid who does this twisting around and so forth.’ The Colonel’s eyes popped open, and he said, ‘Where was he? Who is he?’ And the Colonel got up from the table and pulled his car out and left. He still wasn’t back when I went out there the next day.”
D. J. Fontana, the staff drummer for the Hayride, sometimes went out on the road with Elvis, and he remembers Parker showing up in Texas and Arkansas. “We would see him walking around, hanging back in the shadows, but he never would say nothing. A lot of people just didn’t want to deal with him.”
However, Bob Neal, now Elvis’s official manager, jumped at the chance. He recognized Parker as a “razzle-dazzle character” but knew the Colonel had clout, and that he was an uneducated genius, a brilliant tactician. He also saw that Parker could put Elvis on the package tours that he took out to other parts of the country, into New Mexico, for example, beyond the Hayride’s reach.
On January 15, 1955, Parker and his lieutenant, Tom Diskin, traveled to Shreveport to watch Elvis—outfitted in a rust-colored suit, a black-dotted purple tie, and pink socks—captivate the Hayride audience. Afterward, at the Captain Shreve Hotel, they met with Neal and hammered out an arrangement by which Parker would work in partnership with Bob on Elvis’s bookings.
Already, Parker schemed to take total control of Bob’s new sensation. But until Bob’s management contract expired the following year, the Colonel was careful not to show his hand, even though it was obvious that Neal didn’t know what he had: “I always felt that Elvis was going to be a big artist, but I didn’t really realize the true scope. Nobody had ever been that big.” On the other hand, Parker, a shrewd dealer with uncanny knowledge of human nature, knew what brought people into the big tent.
Born in Holland as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, he had entered the United States illegally in 1929, and after a stint in the U.S. Army, folded into the carnivals at the height of the Depression. It was there, between hawking his now infamous foot-long hot dogs (a hint of meat at each end, with lots of slaw in the middle), that he honed the merchandising and marketing skills he would later apply to the recordi
ng industry.
His entrée into the music business was Gene Austin, the 1920s crooner (“My Blue Heaven”) who needed an advance man for his tent show, the Star-O-Rama Theater, in the late 1930s, the last hurrah of his career. Parker segued to booking country shows—particularly Pee Wee King and Roy Acuff—while employed as the field agent for the Hillsborough County (Florida) Humane Society in Tampa. Acuff later flirted with the idea of letting Parker manage him. But eventually, the bandleader thought better of it and told Parker to keep his eye on King’s young vocalist, Eddy Arnold.
The two teamed up in 1945 (“I was just a poor, hungry guy who owned a guitar,” Eddy said), and Parker worked around the clock on his behalf. While continuing to operate out of Tampa, he acted as Arnold’s booking agent and manager, using the two-fingered hunt-and-peck system to type letters on flamboyant stationery festooned with Arnold’s photograph. Soon the Colonel (his title was honorary, bestowed by Jimmie Davis, the singing governor of Louisiana, in 1948) was prosperous enough to move to a stone house outside of Nashville. Ever the showman, he kept a team of miniature ponies in the backyard.
Their association made Arnold one of the biggest stars ever to come out of Nashville, with a repertoire of number one records, radio shows, and two Hollywood movies. But Parker’s brash, rough-hewn style clashed with Arnold’s sophistication and polish. And in the early 1950s, Arnold learned that Parker, who took a 25 percent commission for exclusivity, was working with other artists on the side.
Both Arnold and Parker had encouraged Texas fireball Charline Arthur to come to town (Elvis would pay plenty of attention to her wild stage movements, allegedly borrowing a few), and Arnold wasn’t threatened by his interest in developing the teenage Tommy Sands. But when the Colonel began booking dates for Hank Snow, Arnold dissolved the majority of their business dealings in 1953, Parker still getting the best of him with a financial settlement.
