Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Two months later, on July 28 and 29, Elvis was back at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, and yet another riot ensued. Fellow performer Marty Robbins, who had joined the bill as a way to repay Colonel Parker for a favor, remembered it vividly. “They really mobbed him. I couldn’t imagine that happening. They chased him in the dressing room, underneath the stands in a shower room. He was on top of the showers, trying to get away from people. Guys and girls, alike, were trying to grab a shoe, trying to grab just anything.”

  Robbins knew for certain that Elvis was going to be completely irresistible to women, because of what happened in the next town, Daytona Beach. “When we went out on the beach to go swimming, the girls were all looking at him like, ‘Boy, there is something!’ He had everything in his favor. He had youth, he had good looks, he had talent, he was single, and then when he got Colonel Tom Parker on his side, that was it. He was the best manager a person could get.”

  Mae Axton had also seen the reactions in Daytona Beach and Orlando. She’d worked all three cities after getting calls from Bob Neal and Sam Phillips, asking if she could help establish Elvis in the Florida markets. The daughter of a Texas rancher and confectionery shop owner, she was a big-hearted gal who dabbled in songwriting, freelance magazine writing, and promotion work to supplement her teaching job.

  As the mother of two sons, Johnny, eleven, and thirteen-year-old Hoyt (later a singer-songwriter on his own), Mae had a soft spot for young men trying to make their way in the world. She also wanted to help Bob Neal, throwing in fifty dollars of her PR money for Elvis’s fee, and arranging for a free motel room in each of the three cities. Elvis called her when he got to the edge of Daytona Beach, and when she met him, she found herself instantly charmed.

  “He had a quick, sensual smile that [made him seem] shy and vulnerable at the same time. And he was so sweet and polite and nice that you couldn’t help but love the kid. I wanted to make things easy for him.”

  They visited for awhile, and then she had to do a radio interview, she said, but she told him to wait, that she wouldn’t be gone long.

  “When I came back, the other guys were down at the beach, looking for the cute girls. But Elvis was leaning over the grillwork on the balcony, staring at the ocean. I said, ‘Hi, honey, are you okay?’ He said, ‘Mae, I can’t get over this ocean.’ Now, he grew up on the mighty Mississippi, but he said, ‘It’s so vast, just no end to it. I’d give anything in the world if I had enough money to bring my mama and daddy to Florida and let them see the ocean.’ ”

  It touched her that his priority was his parents, when most twenty-year-olds would think about having fun. Later that year, she and Tommy Durden would write Elvis’s breakthrough hit, “Heartbreak Hotel,” and she would let the Colonel cut Elvis in for a third of the writers’ credit. He hadn’t written one word, but just maybe Elvis would see enough royalties to make that Florida dream come true.

  More and more, Elvis relied on women behind the scenes such as Mae Boren Axton and Marion Keisker to create or advance some fundamental aspect of his career. Both Mae and Marion were mother figures, but not every woman who aided him would fall into that age group.

  On May 28, 1955, sixteen-year-old Kay Wheeler and her sister Linda huddled together in the darkness of their bedroom in Dallas, Texas. With their parents asleep, they turned their radio up as loud as they dared, hoping to pick up a rhythm-and-blues station that would let them hear something along the lines of Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love,” or the Penguins’ languid “Earth Angel.”

  The Wheeler girls were white and lived in a typical 1950s brick tract house in a respectable middle-class neighborhood. But after their cousin, Diana, played them “Little Mama” by the Clovers, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ more risqué “Work with Me, Annie,” they demanded more of their music than the vanilla hits of the day. And so they began making pilgrimages to buy rhythm-and-blues records at the “colored” record store, riding the bus downtown and “walking self-consciously along a street lined with pawnshops, run-down stores, and hip Negro bucks who examined [them] with frank stares and amused grins,” as Kay described in her book, Growing Up with the Memphis Flash.

  Fifty-five years later, she still remembers the thrill. “Here we were, these nice little suburb kids, smuggling these 78 rpm records into our room the way people would do drugs or something. And I guess we were—we were doing rock and roll.”

  On that late spring night, glued to the radio, the Wheeler girls stumbled on a broadcast of the Big D Jamboree, a country radio hoedown show much like the Louisiana Hayride and the Grand Ole Opry. There, they heard an unknown song from an unknown singer, who delivered a stuttering, hiccuping vocal of sexual threat: “I’d rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man.”

  The Wheelers caught their breath. That knifepoint guitar! That doghouse bass! It wasn’t quite blues, and it wasn’t entirely hillbilly, but it sure got them way down deep. Kay turned up the volume to find out who and what it was: “Elvis Presley,” with “Baby, Let’s Play House.”

  Kay looked at her sister.

  “I think I’m going to faint.”

  She didn’t, but she and Linda talked about him all night, wondering about his name. Had they heard it right? Was he colored, or was he white? Then two weeks later, a girl at school started telling Kay all about how a guy named Elvis played in Gladewater, Texas, and nobody could hear a word he said. He was so good-looking and sexy the girls screamed every single second.

  Five months passed before Kay actually saw what he looked like, on a poster at the Melody Record Shop. He was leaning back with his pelvis tilted forward and his mouth wide open. Was he in pain? It was hard to tell. A lock of greasy hair fell on his forehead, and that cinched it. She had to have it. Kay felt her cheeks burn, but she was a tiny thing, size four, so who would notice? She quickly removed the poster from the wall, put it in her bag, and walked out the door. At home, she and Linda shrieked with delight. God, he was a dream! “I’m going to meet him,” Kay announced, and that was that.

  Her opportunity came a few days later, though it was indirect, unplanned, and would take some time. She was visiting her Aunt Billie, secretary to the president of KLIF, the popular Top Forty radio station in Dallas. They were in Billie’s office when deejay Bruce Hayes stopped by with a record in his hand.

  “Listen to this name, ‘Elvis Presley,’ ” he said. “Have you ever heard anything so corny in your life?”

  Kay couldn’t stand it.

  “It was like making fun of him. I’d just gotten the poster, and we were flipping out over him, so I just blurted out in my antagonistic teenage way, ‘Well, he’s going to be big! I’ve already got a fan club for him.’ ”

  It wasn’t true, of course, but when Hayes asked her for her address on that Saturday afternoon, she gave it to him without thinking. And she never heard him announce, “If you want to join the Elvis Presley Fan Club, write to Kay Wheeler. . . .”

  The following Tuesday, she wasn’t feeling well (“I was good at playing hooky—if I had the least bit of cramps I wouldn’t go to school”), and she was in the den lazing around in her robe when her mother called her.

  “Kay! There are all these letters on the front porch in stacks, and they’re all to you!”

  “What?”

  There were hundreds of them, bundled together and tied with string, all of them asking about how to join the fan club, or wanting a card or a photo.

  “I laid these letters on the floor all across the room, and I just couldn’t believe it. I was flabbergasted. It was a crazy moment. A crazy moment, especially since I didn’t have a fan club.”

  But soon she would, sanctioned by Colonel Parker’s office in Tennessee. (“It was like they courted me.”) Bob and Helen Neal had started the first regional fan club, but they didn’t have the pink-and-black passion of a teenage girl with a poster of a prominent pelvis. Within weeks, Kay Wheeler would be the president of the first national Elvis Presley fan club. And no one could
have guessed at the power of a sixteen-year-old Texas girl to muster the troops, which would soon be growing by the thousands every day.

  Elvis joins June Juanico on horseback, Gulf Hills Dude Ranch, July 1956. Gladys considered her part of the family. “I still love Elvis,” June says today. “He’s never been replaced.” (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

  Chapter Seven

  Biloxi Bliss

  On June 26, 1955, Elvis and the Blue Moon Boys played the Slavonian Lodge in Biloxi, Mississippi. The previous February, Elvis had appeared in two shows at the Jesuit High School Auditorium in New Orleans, on a bill with fifteen-year-old Martha Ann Barhanovich, who briefly recorded for Decca under the name of Ann Raye. Her father, Frank “Yankie” Barhanovich, a district manager for the American National Insurance Company, moonlighted as a talent booker, mostly because Martha hoped to make a career out of singing.

  After the Jesuit shows, for which both performers were paid $150, the teenaged Martha begged her father to bring Elvis to Biloxi, where the Barhanoviches lived. “Daddy was booking all these people not as young as Elvis, and well, I just knew he needed to book him for people my age.” And so the elder Barhanovich brought Elvis to the area for three nights that summer, the first at the Slavonian Lodge, named for the people of South Slavic origin, the Croatians who populated the region and dominated the oyster and shrimp trade.

  The local newspaper, running a story in advance of the show, reported that it was expected to be a sellout, given Elvis’s popularity on the Hayride, and since “the teenagers just love him.”

  Salvadore “Penue” Taranto, a member of Johnny Ellmer’s Rockets, which often brought 300 to 400 kids into the Lodge, was there that night, and he was blown away. He’d heard Elvis on the jukebox, but he was unprepared for a full show of music that would soon be termed rockabilly. “It was so different from any type of music that you couldn’t even relate to it at the time. Here was everybody making fun of this guy shaking like he had something wrong with him. But what he did, he did good. When he popped that first hit, he really took off.”

  The following day, seventeen-year-old June Juanico had just gotten home from work when she got a call from her girlfriend Glenda Manduffy, who had attended the show at the tiny lodge. She was practically screaming into the phone about this guy Elvis Presley and the way he moved, and how it was wall-to-wall females in the place, and she couldn’t get close enough to him to really see him. But he was going to be at the Airmen’s Club at Keesler Air Force Base that night and the next, and c’mon, June, let’s go!

  June thought about it a minute. She had a steady boyfriend, the six-foot-four Norbie Ronsonet, and you were supposed to be eighteen years old to get into this place, but reluctantly she went. She’d already heard other people say “You need to go and see him!” And so she caved. She called Norbie and told him she had to go somewhere with her friend, and that they’d be late getting in.

  The first time she’d ever heard of Elvis, she was listening to the radio. “That’s All Right (Mama)” came on, and then later, “Good Rockin’ Tonight.”

  “My first thought was that he was a nervous old man, an elderly hillbilly.”

  When June and her friend got to the club, they saw maybe thirty-five women in a sea of airmen. They picked a table right by the stage, because Glenda kept saying, “Wait ’til you see this guy! He’s so good-looking!” To really get a good look at him, June realized they needed to be on the dance floor, since the couples would block their view between the table and the stage. She was skeptical about him—this nervous old guy—but when he finally came out, her jaw dropped. “I thought he was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen.”

  Elvis noticed her, too. He picked her out of the crowd, her suntan showing off her white dress as she danced. Still, she didn’t go over to him during intermission, when he stood and talked to a clutch of folks, mostly airmen. “Come on, Glenda,” she said, orchestrating a game of cat and mouse. “Let’s go to the ladies’ room.”

  When they passed by him, he and June exchanged brief eye contact. Then as the girls made their way back to the table, Elvis reached through the swarm and grabbed her by the arm.

  “Where are you going? You’re not leaving, are you?”

  It was the first time she’d really looked into his face, and she just about died. He had those big dreamy eyes, but he didn’t look like anyone she had ever seen, either. His voice, laced with Memphis twang, was playful and seductive, a mix of little boy charm and adult sensuality. But he also seemed like a gentleman.

  “No,” she said. “I’m going back to my table.”

  “I get through here in about an hour. Will you stay until I get off? Then you can show me the town.”

  She felt herself getting goose bumps, but she didn’t want to show it. She’d never even kissed on a first date, and she didn’t want to send the wrong message. She hadn’t screamed at his performance like the other girls.

  “Well,” she said, “Biloxi is such a small town, there’s really nothing to see.”

  “Oh, really. Well, show me what there is to see.”

  He promised he’d take good care of her, and he could see by the look on her face that she thought it was all happening too quickly. He said, “In this business, if I meet somebody and I don’t make a fast move, I’m not going to make a move at all. I may never see you again.”

  She was excited and scared, but she heard herself say okay, and after his second set was over and he loaded up the equipment, he pulled around front in his parents’ pink-and-black Crown Victoria with a bass strapped on the top. She’d never seen anything like that—it made the car look like a tank with a gun turret.

  “I have to go back to the motel real quick to change clothes,” he said, and when they got there, he didn’t invite her in (“the room’s a mess”). She sat there a few minutes, wondering if she’d done the right thing in even coming, and then Scotty and Bill came out of the room and stood on either side of the car. It frightened her—she didn’t know they were just getting the bass down—and then finally Elvis came out and they went to Gus Stevens’s restaurant to see comedian Dave Gardner do the floor show. They stayed a long time, just listening to music, but they were both underage—Elvis was still just twenty—so they left before anybody found out, and went and parked at the pier at the White House Hotel.

  They talked in the car for a while, and then he wanted to go for a walk. He took her hand, and there was just enough moonlight that she could watch for the cracks in the pier’s old boards so her high heels wouldn’t get stuck. Suddenly, he stopped. He turned her around so he was behind her and slipped his hands around her waist and kissed her neck. She felt a shock of electricity, and squirmed, but he promised he wouldn’t hurt her. He kissed her tenderly, first her forehead, and each eye, then her nose, and finally her lips. She kissed him back in a way that had a future in it.

  “Where did you learn to kiss?” he asked, surprised at her passion.

  “I was just getting ready to ask you the same thing!” she said, and she still remembers what it was like: “Soft, full lips. Nothing too sloppy. Oh! It was just marvelous, a little pecking here and there, a nibble, and then a serious bite. It started small, and then got bigger, and then went little again before ending up with a lot of eye contact.”

  They sat on the end of the pier and talked and smooched and talked and smooched, and said the usual things that young lovers do, about not wanting to be any other place in the world in that minute. Then she thought about what her mother always told her about being in a compromised position, and got her wits about her and asked what time it was. Elvis tried to look at his watch, but the moon was so pale he couldn’t tell if it was 1:15 or 3:05. It was definitely past her curfew, though, and she said, “Oh, my God, my mother’s going to kill me! I’m always home by midnight!”

  They parked outside her mother’s house, and it was just supposed to be for a minute. “Do you have to go in?” he asked, his voice saying he hoped she didn’t. “Well, not
yet,” she told him, “but if that light comes on right there in the corner of the house, I’ve got to run.”

  The light never blinked, but June knew her mother kept an eye out to see what they were doing. She didn’t care. She just wanted to talk to him. It was 6 A.M. when she finally got out of the car, an eight-hour date. By that time, they’d talked about everything. He was shocked that her parents were divorced. He thought of marriage as a lifelong commitment, he said, and when he got married, it was going to last forever. And he told her all about his twin, who died at birth.

  “By the way,” she said, “what’s your real name?”

  “What do you mean my real name? My name is Elvis Aaron Presley.”

  She’d never met anybody quite like him.

  Now she couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking about his face, the way it looked the first time she saw it up close. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling, but it was wonderful, and she wished she could keep it forever.

  He said he had shows in Mobile, but he would phone her when he got back to Memphis. But each time he placed his person-to-person call, some guy answered the phone, and Elvis didn’t know what was up, didn’t realize it was June’s brother, Jerry, who didn’t tell her that she’d gotten a call and that she was supposed to phone the operator back to be connected. June prided herself on being feisty and independent (“I wasn’t staying home monitoring the phone”), and she didn’t tell a soul about her date with Elvis. It was too surreal, and deep down, she wanted it all to have meant as much to him as it did to her. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself.

  Over and over, lying in bed, she heard what he’d said when she asked him what it felt like to perform like that, to walk out onstage and have the entire place go wild, to shake all over and have all the girls screaming with just a toss of his head. “I can’t explain it,” he said. “Maybe something like sex, but not exactly.” Gosh, she thought. That many orgasms would kill a person!