Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  With his own Jamboree Attractions, the Colonel began booking Grand Ole Opry stars, placing many of them on New York radio and television shows through his association with the William Morris Agency. He also managed the 1954 “RCA Victor Country Caravan,” showcasing Chet Atkins, Minnie Pearl, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and the Davis Sisters. Headlining was Hank Snow, already a star but soon to become bigger with the network television appearances that Parker arranged for him. The two made a deal to expand Jamboree Attractions to give Snow part ownership, rechristening the business Hank Snow Enterprises—Jamboree Attractions.

  All along, however, Parker saw it as a temporary arrangement. He was always looking beyond country music for the Next Big Thing, someone he could call, in carnival parlance, “my attraction.” He found him in 1955.

  “When Tom was driving to New York to finalize what he needed to do about Elvis,” recalls David Wilds, whose father, Honey Wilds, made up half of the blackface comedy duo Jamup and Honey, “he and [his wife] Marie stopped and spent time with us. I was about eleven, and I remember sitting in our living room and hearing Marie tell Mother, ‘Tom’s found this wonderful boy, just the most remarkable thing. Honey, he sings sexy hillbilly.’ My mother looked kind of bug-eyed, and Daddy thought Tom had lost his mind, being gone over Elvis Presley. He thought it was the biggest mistake Tom ever made.”

  By the time he hooked up with Elvis, Parker could brag that he was one of country music’s premier booking agents and advance men, even as many still saw him as a carny operator out for a quick buck. In addition to Pee Wee King, Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, and Jamup and Honey, at one time or another his stable included Ernest Tubb, Benny Martin, Rod Brasfield, the Duke of Paducah, Clyde Moody, George Morgan, Slim Whitman, and the Carter Family. For a short spell, he also managed June Carter on her own. Now he was only too happy to get as many clients as possible on the Hank Snow Enterprises—Jamboree Attractions tours.

  In February 1955, Elvis went back into the recording studio to cut his fourth Sun single, “Baby, Let’s Play House.” The Arthur Gunter song, heavy on playful innuendo and full of pent-up sexual energy, would be the first Elvis record ever to chart, climbing to number ten on the Billboard country and western chart, and number five on the country disc jockey chart, hanging on for a surprising fifteen weeks.

  On February 6, three days after his recording session, Elvis realized a lifelong dream when he performed two shows at Ellis Auditorium, where he had taken his fantasy curtain calls only a few years before. He was at the bottom of a bill that included hillbilly star Faron Young and gospel great Martha Carson, but the posters boasted “Memphis’ Own Elvis Presley,” and he was proud to make good in his hometown.

  After the first show, he looked up in the autograph line, and there stood Billie Wardlaw. A flood of emotions came over them both, and they laughed to cover them up. Elvis took one of his new Sun Records promotional pictures and thought a minute, finally writing across it, “To Billie, My Little Ex-.”

  Between shows, Bob Neal arranged a meeting between Sam Phillips and the Colonel across the street at Palumbo’s Restaurant. Parker brought his right-hand man, Tom Diskin, and things started off friendly enough with the four of them as they discussed how to further the career of the act that brought them together. Then the Colonel looked at Phillips and dropped the bomb: The boy could not realize his dreams on a small-time label like Sun. In fact, Parker had already met with RCA Victor, where he’d done business for Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow, to see about purchasing Elvis’s contract. When Phillips protested, the Colonel turned a deaf ear. The papers might not be signed yet, but it made no difference whether Phillips wanted to sell Elvis’s contract. The Colonel was now in control, and Elvis was changing labels.

  On February 16, 1955, Elvis played the Odessa Senior High School Field House in Odessa, Texas, where fifteen-year-old Roy Orbison could hardly believe what he saw onstage. “His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing. . . . There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it.”

  Four days later, Parker sent Elvis out on his second Hank Snow–Jamboree tour of the month, billed as a “WSM Grand Ole Opry” show, with the added attractions of the Duke of Paducah, and Nashville music legend Mother Maybelle Carter and the Carter Sisters, Helen, June, and Anita. They would tour together again for three weeks in May, but Anita never got over his fevered gyrations, or the crowd’s reactions to them.

  “We went out there and watched him, and I said, ‘My Lord!’ The boy had talent, but I couldn’t believe the audience! It was not just young girls—there were people with gray hair out there screaming. Every night, the girls would try to tear his clothes off of him. His buttons were always gone, and Mama would take the buttons off of all our clothes and put them on his. So we were always buttonless!”

  Elvis had a huge crush on Anita, who played stand-up bass and sang soprano. Whenever Anita was around, said Red West, Elvis was like “a kid with six pair of feet.” He did anything he could to get her attention.

  Meanwhile, Elvis’s relationship with Dixie was still limping along, and he had promised to take her to her junior prom on May 6. But he had shows right up until then—the night before, in fact, a pack of girls chased him across a football field in Mobile, Alabama.

  “I was so afraid he was not going to get back in town for my prom, and his mom and I had been shopping, and she had bought my dress.” However, Dixie was more fearful that they would never realize their plans for the future. One day he was unknown, and then “just overnight he was there. It was phenomenal.”

  He showed up at her door not in the dark blue suit of his own senior prom, but in a handsome white tuxedo jacket, and in Bob and Helen’s brand-new Lincoln, which he’d borrowed for the evening. They double-dated with Dixie’s best friend, Bessie Wolverton, and Elvis’s cousin, Gene Smith.

  It was a storybook evening—he looked like a movie star, and Dixie was proud to show him off to her friends. But she was troubled by the changes in Elvis. She knew in her heart that he had been unfaithful to her, which went against all the teachings of their church. And she didn’t like his new friends, especially Red West, and a crowd of guys who had begun to hang around when Elvis was in town. They all smoked and drank and used offensive language, and the surprising thing was that Elvis seemed to want them around.

  Why did he need them? It used to be that all Elvis and Dixie needed was each other, and they were hardly ever alone anymore. And what kind of future were they going to have if he was running around the country all the time?

  They argued about it, but they had argued before over his possessiveness. Elvis was always jealous of what she might be doing while he was away, though she had more cause to worry than he did. Yes, she went to Busy Betty on Lamar and danced, but she wasn’t dating anyone. Was she just supposed to sit home for three weeks while he was away? She wanted to have some fun, too.

  Friends on both sides had begun to doubt that they would marry, because “neither one would accept the other’s terms,” in the words of Barbara Hearn, who went to school with Dixie at South Side and worked with her at Goldsmith’s department store.

  But each time Dixie gave Elvis back his class ring—once or twice he even asked for it back—they’d both cry and want to make up. Sometimes he would angrily speed off in his car, and before she could even get back in the house, he was there again, and they’d sit on the porch and hold each other, both in agony over their decision. What were they going to do?

  “It was kind of a mutual thing. His career was going in one direction, and I didn’t feel that I could be a part of it. [It] consumed him, and there wasn’t much time for anything else.”

  They kept patching it up, saying they could work it out, but by the end of the summer, they both knew it was over. She had wanted him to stop at the top and go back to a simpler life. But he said, “No, I’m in too deeply.” He was already swallowed up by the myth, by something he couldn’t control.

  “He felt like there were too many peop
le depending on him, and he couldn’t do what he wanted to do. He was told to go here, and go there, and these people can come, and these can’t. . . . I knew that it was not ever going to go into anything.”

  She and Gladys cried about it together, but they would always be friends. They were family almost. And that would never change. Whenever he was back in Memphis, they would see each other, and the respect and love would always be there. Even if Dixie married someone else and Elvis decided to quit the business and stay home and have children with her, well, she would just get a divorce. That’s how much he meant to her.

  Less than a week after Dixie’s junior prom, Elvis continued his pursuit of Anita Carter. On May 12 they were at the Gator Bowl Stadium in Jacksonville, Florida. Elvis went on first, and when he came offstage, the Carter Sisters were ready to follow. As usual, Elvis had worked up a sweat—he could literally lose several pounds in one performance—and as he passed by the Carters, he started stumbling and tottering around, finally collapsing in Anita’s arms.

  A shout went up, and somebody laid Elvis out and said he was unconscious. Anita held his head in her lap and stroked his forehead, and the Colonel ordered an ambulance to take him to the hospital. Red was worried as hell, as were Scotty and Bill and D. J., who was now working the road with them. They sat around in Red’s hotel room, scared to death, wondering if he were dying from some mysterious disease, and awaiting word from the hospital.

  About 1 A.M., Red heard a knock on the door, and there stood Elvis, “healthier than a herd of cattle, grinning from ear to ear.” They pumped him full of questions, and he told them he was fine. Only when Scotty, Bill, and D. J. went on to their rooms did Elvis say he’d faked the collapse just to get his head on Anita’s lap.

  It wasn’t true. He really was ill, and running a fever from exhaustion. The emergency room doctor gave him a shot and suggested he take some time off. Instead, Elvis asked for a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich, and concocted the story about faking the collapse out of embarrassment. But clearly he was infatuated with Anita, who faked her own collapse with Elvis sometime later. However, their relationship never really moved beyond flirtation.

  Elvis then turned his attention to Anita’s older sister, June, whose marriage to country singer Carl Smith was in trouble. But June dismissed him out of hand. “Elvis got a crush on whoever was handy. It was just his thing. He liked women. I decided I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. Lord only knows where he’d been. He was a sexy man who really thought he could have any woman that he saw. But he couldn’t, and I think that was a big shock to his ego.”

  Elvis wasn’t one to give up, though, and on a trip to Nashville with Red, he decided to look her up. As Red recounted the story in Elvis: What Happened?, June was off at a gig, and so Elvis and Red simply forced a window in her Madison, Tennessee, house, and broke in to wait for her. They made themselves at home—fixing a meal in her copper pans and skillets (and ruining them in the process), and going to sleep, fully dressed and dirty, in the master bedroom.

  Carl came home the next morning, found the forced window and the messy kitchen, and like a scene from some hillbilly rendition of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” wondered, “Who’s been breaking into my house? Who’s been eating my food?” And finally, “Who the hell is that sleeping in my bed?”

  Elvis woke up and casually said, “Oh, hi, Carl.”

  “You would have thought he would have chewed us out,” Red wrote. “But he gave us a big hello and laughed. He showed us all around the big house.”

  Smith had seen far crazier behavior from Nashville’s honky-tonk crowd, and he took it all in stride. That night when June and her sisters came home, they had a big southern dinner and stayed up half the night talking and singing.

  “I kept praying that [story] would never get out,” June said. “I saw Red right after he wrote it, and he said, ‘June, I should never have put your name in there. I did everything I could so that people would know that you were really a good girl.’ And I appreciated Red doing that, but I didn’t think it was anybody’s business. Elvis was my friend. We had a lot of fun together. We sung late at night, playing the piano, but I wasn’t going to run and jump and play with him like the other women, and he knew that. But he also knew that we were just real good friends, and we stayed that way.”

  June and Carl Smith divorced in 1956, and June went out on the road doing shows with Elvis on her own. She was always sentimental about the experience—“I’ve got two or three little notes and pictures that Elvis gave me”—but she ended up with more than memories and souvenirs.

  “Elvis introduced me to Johnny Cash’s music. We would stop in all of the little restaurants down in the South to get something to eat, and he always played Johnny’s records on the jukebox. He loved to hear him sing. He tried to sing all of his songs right in my ear, and I heard them over and over and over. Then John walked up to me one night [in 1956] when I had come home from New York to do the Opry. He said, ‘I’m Johnny Cash. I know you work with Elvis Presley. He’s a friend of mine and I would like to meet you.’ And I said, ‘Well, I should know you already, and I believe I do. I’ve had to listen to you enough.’ ”

  Their son, John Carter Cash, says that his mother would get a mischievous twinkle in her eye whenever she mentioned Elvis and told him, “You know, son, your father was always jealous of Elvis.”

  And so was Carl. Underneath his good humor about the break-in, there was tension: June kept a billboard poster of Smith on which Elvis had drawn a silly mustache and goofy glasses. Below it, he scribbled, “Painting by Presley.”

  After Carl moved out of the house, June would sometimes let Elvis stay there “to rest” at the end of a tour.

  “Like most children,” John Carter wrote in Anchored in Love, a memoir of his mother, “when I was young, I thought my mother was capable of doing no wrong. . . . I know without a doubt that she was a good person of high standards and solid morals. On the other hand, she was being charmed by one of the greatest sex symbols of our time. The temptation to give in to his advances, at least in some small way, would have been tremendous. I have a hard time blaming her.”

  On May 13 the Hank Snow–Jamboree tour was back at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville for a second night, with fourteen thousand screaming fans in attendance, nearly all of them there for Elvis. Two nights earlier, in Orlando, headliner Hank Snow found Elvis a hard act to follow, the girls yelling for Elvis to come back out onstage.

  Parker always denied that, insisting, “Hank Snow could follow anybody. He was a great artist.” But Charlie Louvin, who with his brother, Ira, played Elvis dates on the Snow shows, remembers it being true. Unlike Bob Neal, who never planted screamers, Parker wasn’t just banking on throngs of hormonal teenagers—he helped orchestrate them.

  “The Colonel sent Tom Diskin to Woolworth’s to give kids free tickets to the shows. The only thing they had to do was scream ‘We want Elvis.’ A professional act like Hank Snow or the Louvin Brothers couldn’t work with a hundred kids hollering ‘We want Elvis.’ Hank would sing two or three songs and then just say, ‘Hell, you can have Elvis.’ ”

  Faron Young, also on the Orlando bill, remembered that the announcer tried to subdue the crowd, telling the audience that Elvis was out back signing autographs, only to have the auditorium empty out.

  Possibly in deference to Snow, whose ego outsized his small frame, Elvis, sporting a pink lace shirt that looked like a woman’s blouse, closed his Jacksonville set with the crack “Girls, I’ll see you all backstage.” Before anyone knew how to stop it, a swath of frenzied teenagers broke through the police barricade and chased Elvis into the dugout locker room. Mae Boren Axton, a forty-year-old Jacksonville schoolteacher who handled publicity on the show for her old friend Tom Parker, was sitting with the Colonel as he counted the money from the night’s take.

  “All of a sudden I heard Elvis’s voice shouting, ‘Mae! Mae! Mae!’ I jumped up and ran down there, and so help me, about five hundred kid
s had crawled under those pull-up doors. Elvis had climbed on top of the showers, and he was hanging there darn near naked. They’d torn his lace shirt apart, and everybody had pieces of his coat, and they even had his boots and socks off.”

  By the time the police got things under control, Elvis, clad only in his pants, looked sheepish and scared. The police helped him down, but Mae found that quieting the crowd was another matter.

  “I heard all this screaming, and I went up out of the dugout and saw this girl I had taught. I said, ‘Hey, honey, what’s the matter?’ ‘Oh, hi, Miz Axton, boo hoo, hoo, hoo . . .’ I said, ‘Wait a minute. What is it about this kid Elvis?’ And she gave one of the best definitions I’ve ever heard. She said, ‘Oh, Miz Axton, he’s just a great, big, beautiful hunk of forbidden fruit.’ ”

  The Jacksonville riot marked the first time the Colonel knew precisely what a gold mine he had in his new client. It also marked a turning point in the young life of thirteen-year-old Jackie Rowland, an Elvis fan who got backstage through the efforts of her grandfather, a policeman.

  Lying transfixed on the floor, eating a bowl of peanut butter and jelly mixed together, Jackie had watched Elvis on television. Weight had always been an issue for the five-foot-tall teenager, and when she arrived at the Gator Bowl that night, she weighed 190 pounds. Wearing her blue Kirby Smith High School band sweater and a pair of blue suede shoes, “I’m sure I must have looked like a giant blueberry. Or maybe a grape.”

  Backstage, Elvis signed her program and introduced her to the Carter Sisters, and then talked to her longer than he did most of the girls. When it was time for her to go, he kissed her on the cheek, “and, of course, I was in love. He was so handsome, and so nice to me, and not condescending about my weight.”

  It got her thinking, fantasizing about what it would be like to see him again, especially if she could diet herself down to the size of the other girls. If she lost weight, she asked her mother, Marguerite, could she go to Tennessee to see Elvis? “Sure,” her mother said. “If you lose the weight, I will take you to Memphis.”