Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  In July 1955 seventeen-year-old country singer Wanda Jackson had just graduated from high school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and already she’d had her own radio show and enjoyed a national hit, “You Can’t Have My Love,” a duet with Billy Gray, the bandleader for western-swing king Hank Thompson. Her father, Tom, who watched his dreams of becoming a singer crumble during the Depression, managed her, and her mother designed and sewed her stage outfits, which in time went to gold lamé and shimmering sequins. “I was the first one to put some glamour in the country music—fringe dresses, high heels, long earrings,” she says.

  With a bewitching beauty and a surplus of sass, she was turning heads all across the Southwest. Bob Neal had had his eye on the dark-haired teen for some time, and that summer, he tapped her for a two-day package show with Elvis. When her father accepted the booking—one night in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and a second in Newport, Arkansas—Wanda had no idea who Elvis Presley was, since Oklahoma City wasn’t playing his records. But Tom Jackson, going by what Bob Neal had reported, told her Elvis was “getting popular real fast.”

  She met him at a Cape Girardeau radio station on the afternoon of July 20, and “I was quite impressed—a real handsome guy.” He dressed a little flashier than the guys back home in Oklahoma—yellow coat, for example—and when he left the station, she saw him get into a pink car. “I had never seen a pink car, so I knew that he was different.”

  The first night, Wanda and her father were in her dressing room when Elvis went on. “All of a sudden, my dad and I started hearing this screaming. I mean really screaming, just constant. My dad said, ‘Well, gollee, I wonder if there’s a fire or something? Let me go look.’

  “I started getting my coat and my purse, and he came back and said, ‘No, relax. But you’ve got to see this for yourself. You’ll never believe it.’ He took me to the wings, and there was Elvis singing and moving and gyrating, and all these girls standing at the foot of the stage, screaming and reaching for him. We had never seen anything like that. It seemed sexy, but I don’t think he was trying to be vulgar, because he was flirty with the girls down front. He’d look at them and they’d scream, and he’d shake at them, and then they’d squeal. He was just having fun.”

  They worked together again for four days in August, through Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas, and then went out on a weeklong tour in October, swinging through Texas and Oklahoma with Johnny Cash, now one of Sam’s Sun artists, and newcomer Porter Wagoner. Wanda found Elvis fun to be around. “On those tours, all us artists would keep something going to make each other laugh, and he laughed all the time. He didn’t take himself seriously.” Somewhere along the miles, they started dating, finding they had the same appreciation for simple pleasures.

  “If we could get in a town early, and it was large enough to have a movie theater, we’d go to a matinee, and then after a show, we’d go out to eat, usually with Scotty and Bill and my daddy. Then sometimes we’d get a hamburger and just drive around the town and talk.” Then, after the tour, she’d go home to Oklahoma City, and he to Memphis. But they talked on the phone almost every day. “Being able to know him and know his heart made me admire him a lot. And certainly his entertaining and music abilities knocked me out.”

  In a sense, they recognized themselves in each other. She had the same sultry eyes and full lips, and “his career was just beginning to blossom, and mine was, too. He was just a fine person. And he was never out of the way at all with me. Treated me just like a lady.”

  What impressed Wanda most was the fact that Elvis took such an interest in advancing her career. He kept telling her that a lot of girls could sing country—not that she wasn’t great at it—but no girl was doing rockabilly, and she should give it a try.

  “He was just really eager that I try this kind of music like he was doing. I’d say, ‘But Elvis, I’m just a country singer. I can’t sing songs like that.’ He said, ‘You can, too. I know you can. You’ve just got to try.’ So he took me to his home, and we played old black blues records, and he sang to me and tried to show me the feel for it.”

  Few performers of either gender ever got such specific musical advice from Elvis. The following year, Wanda signed with Capitol Records and took his advice, writing her own spitfire songs (“Mean, Mean Man,” “Rock Your Baby”) because “no other girls were singing rockabilly. I was the first one.”

  In time, Wanda would become the preeminent woman of the genre, the Queen of Rockabilly. She fearlessly explored the cracks between country and rock and roll, and in such songs as “Let’s Have a Party,” she snarled with low-class abandon about female lust (“The meat is on the stove/The bread’s a gettin’ hot/Everybody run they got the possum in the pot . . .”). Like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Elvis’s early hero back in Tupelo, she was ahead of her time, carving out a niche as “the first [white] girl to do raunchy rock and roll like the guys did.” Her “Fujiyama Mama” even hit number one in Japan.

  However, not everyone was ready for such a femme fatale. On her one Grand Ole Opry performance, Ernest Tubb found her bombshell appearance so provocative he forced her to wear a coat over her spaghetti-strap dress.

  “I didn’t consider myself a rebel at all,” she says. “I wasn’t even very familiar with the term.”

  But Elvis, who saw her as his musical peer, if also another replacement for his lost twin, understood it perfectly. She would soon be known as “the female Elvis.”

  Within a few months of meeting, he gave her one of his rings. “A man’s ring. It had little chipped diamonds. He wasn’t very rich at that point. We were in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he asked me if I’d step outside with him. We went over and stood by his car, and he asked me if I’d be his girl. I had a crush on him, so I said yes, of course, and I wore the ring for about a year. It was a precious time.”

  But things were happening so fast for both of them, and by then, there were so many girls—and so many rings—it was almost hard for Elvis to keep them straight.

  In the fall of 1955 Elvis was back in Biloxi, playing three nights there, two shows at the Biloxi Community House on November 6, and return engagements at the Airmen’s Club on November 7 and 8. He’d kept trying to get in touch with June Juanico, but without success—that same guy kept answering the phone, and Elvis kept leaving messages, but June never called back.

  Elvis was not the only performer to be playing Biloxi twice that year. Over at the Biloxi Beach Club, a sticky strip joint, seventeen-year-old Tura Satana entertained the men—mostly sailors and winter tourists—with her exotic dance routine. “I had so much fun with those navy men,” Tura remembers. “I’d slide up to the end of the stage and say, ‘Okay, who’s first?’ ”

  Her specialty was tassel twirling. She had such good muscle control she could twirl while lying flat on her back, and even twirl in opposite directions, one at a time, switching off. Sometimes she’d snatch the blushing sailors’ hats right off their heads and twirl them, too, and the whole place would go nuts. “Someday I’m gonna fly if I can get enough rpm’s!” she’d yell to whoops and hollers. She would eventually be rated the top tassel twirler in the world.

  Tura may have been young, but she had already lived a lifetime. Born Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi in 1938, she was the daughter of a silent film actor of Japanese and Filipino heritage and a Native American circus performer. She spent her childhood in Manzanar, a Japanese internment camp near Lone Pine, California, and after World War II, the family relocated to the west side of Chicago. Unlike most Asians, Tura developed a voluptuous figure and blossomed early.

  At ten, while walking home from school, she was attacked and gang-raped by five boys in an alley, probably as a hate crime toward the Japanese. One of them, she says, was a cousin of the policeman sent to investigate, and the judge looked the other way. She ended up in reform school “for tempting those boys into raping me” and was classified as a juvenile delinquent.

  Afterward, her father taught her martial arts as a way to protect herself,
but her anger still festered. She became the leader of a vigilante girl gang (“We had leather motorcycle jackets, jeans, and boots, and we kicked butt”), and patrolled the neighborhood to make sure the streets were safe for women.

  At thirteen, and already five foot seven, the geisha beauty married seventeen-year-old John Satana in a union arranged by her parents. Nine months later, she took off for Los Angeles. There, she filled her days modeling bathing suits and posing nude for silent screen comic and 3-D photographer Harold Lloyd, and by night she worked as a cigarette girl at the Trocadero, the famed Sunset Strip celebrity hangout.

  Before long, she was back in Chicago, living with her parents and dancing in clubs, first as an interpretive dancer, and then, once she was offered more money to take off her clothes, as a stripper. She quickly perfected her exotic dancing, learning some of her shimmies from her mother, who taught her to fast hula to “The Hawaiian War Chant.” Soon she was traveling the club circuit with her elaborately beaded costumes and hand-painted kimonos, all of which eventually came off to reveal a string and pasties. And things got hotter: She carried a prop Buddha whose hands burst into flames when she brushed against his palms.

  “When I was dancing,” she says, “burlesque was an art—classy and elegant and requiring talent.” In time, she would be voted one of the best burlesque dancers of the century and parlay her talents into a film career, most memorably as the leather-clad Varla in Russ Meyer’s 1965 cult classic, Faster Pussycat! Kill Kill!, an homage to female violence. Film critic Richard Corliss described her performance, for which she did all her own stunts and fight scenes, as “the most honest, maybe the one honest portrayal in the Meyer canon, and certainly the scariest.” Not surprising, the butch villain was a character she helped to create.

  The night that twenty-year-old Elvis first returned to Biloxi, he was too keyed up after his shows to sleep and wandered into the rough-and-tumble Biloxi Beach Club. There, he watched the young hootchy-kootchy dancer onstage. Remembering the time he saw Gypsy Rose Lee at the Cotton Carnival in Memphis, Elvis was fascinated by the way Tura moved her body, the way she held the lubricated sailors as sexual hostages. He saw how she tantalized them with each suggestion of undress, and how they lost their minds when she rolled her breasts around in her hands, spinning the little twirlers at the nipples.

  Sultry, sassy, and exotic, Tura Satana was nothing like any girl Elvis had known. The Hayride girls were either shy virgins who hoped for a kiss, or hungry country girls who’d had plenty of quick sex out behind the barn. But Tura was a mistress of seduction. And she was gorgeous, her dark hair piled high on her head.

  He went backstage to see her and introduce himself, saying he was a performer himself just up the road, in town for only a few days. She was smoking and drinking too freely from a paper cup, and my God, her breasts were still pretty much hanging out, and her derriere, too. She looked like a hooker.

  “My mama wouldn’t want me in a place like this,” he said later. But she seemed like a lady underneath all that, and he wanted to ask some questions about the way she moved. And so, as he had done with June Juanico, he asked if they could take a walk on the beach. Tura sized him up. She liked his features—his beautiful blue eyes and blond hair, greased dark—and he seemed harmless. Besides, she could take care of herself, and so she said yes. He flirted with her along the way.

  “It’s dangerous for a beautiful lady like you to walk out here alone,” he said.

  “Oh, it is?” she flirted back.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “You shouldn’t do this alone. Somebody might hassle you.”

  “Well,” she countered. “What about you?”

  They were both into it now, though she’d never been called “ma’am” before.

  “Nobody will hassle me,” he insisted.

  “Really?”

  “No, nobody will hassle me.”

  They walked for a long time, and eventually he made his move, some light kissing and touching, but it never got out of hand. Mostly, they sat on the beach and talked until long after the sun came up. He told her about his mother, and said he’d been traveling a lot the last year, meeting a lot of different people. He could hardly believe where a song and a guitar had taken him. Then he asked her about her life, and she told him about all of it, even the nightmare parts. He wanted to know about Hollywood, too, and what it was like out there. And then he asked about her work, about dancing.

  She told him she’d been doing it only about a year, working out of New Orleans, but she’d seen some things, too, that was for sure. If the owners of the clubs knew she was underage, they’d have a heart attack. He asked about the men who came to see her, and how she felt about that. She told him she made them part of her routine, that she joked with them, saying, “Okay, where have you got your hands right now?” Of course, there was always one who yelled out, “I wish you were my mother!” And she’d predictably say, “Yeah, and you’d still be a breast baby, wouldn’t you?” It always drew a laugh.

  Finally she told him, “I have to go. I’ve got shows tonight.” And he said, “I do, too.” Then he told her he was in Shreveport most Saturday nights appearing on the Hayride. He asked how to get in touch with her and said he’d invite her to one of the shows. His mom came down sometimes, and he wanted them to meet, though already he was thinking he didn’t want Gladys to see Tura as some little tramp. Tura said that she played in Shreveport, too, and it would be great to meet his mother. She sounded like a lovely lady. And he was such a good-looking guy, she thought, and so nice. So, yeah, maybe they would get together. Maybe they would.

  The fall of 1955 brought so many big changes that Elvis seemed to be in a daze half the time. The Presleys had moved to another rental house, this one at 1414 Getwell, where they paid eighty-five dollars a month. It was right around the corner from where they’d been on Lamar, but Elvis was on the road so much that Vernon and Gladys had to pack the boxes and wrestle with the furniture without him.

  The biggest shifts were in his professional life, and Elvis was torn about some of them. His Hayride contract was renewed at $200 an appearance, a jump of more than 1,000 percent. The Colonel didn’t want him in that deal and advised against it. But Vernon insisted—who knew how long this gravy train would run? And Scotty and Bill had convinced him to add drummer D. J. Fontana full-time, and Elvis wasn’t sure that was the right thing to do, either, especially since the Colonel hammered him to drop Scotty and Bill altogether.

  Even more troubling, Parker had steamrollered everybody in moving Elvis’s career forward. The cigar-chomping impresario had pretty much squeezed Bob Neal out of the picture now, though Bob and Helen loved Elvis so much they continued to cosign for what was becoming Elvis’s fleet of Cadillacs—some pink, some yellow. And Sam Phillips, too, was about to be left in the dust, the Colonel finalizing his deal to get Elvis off of Sun Records and on to RCA.

  Sam was philosophical about it. With a buyout of $35,000—an astronomical and unheard of price at the time—he could sign and promote a number of new artists. He already had several in the wings. Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” was about to be released, and Sam was also giving more attention to developing Johnny Cash. He hadn’t planned on turning a hundred percent of his talents over to Elvis, especially since every Elvis session was arduous and took a great deal of time.

  Besides, tension had been mounting been Sun and the Elvis camp for several months, ever since Colonel Parker’s involvement. The Colonel had completely won Vernon over to his side, telling him money would rain from the sky once Parker got Elvis moved to RCA, and Vernon had become antagonistic with Sam and Marion both.

  Marion remembered back to the beginning, when Elvis’s first release came out, and he stood there with a record in his hand and his eyes full of tears. He was so happy and humble, saying, “To think this has happened to me. This is what I’ve always wanted all my life, my very own record with my very own name on it.” Now, under the suggestions of Colonel Tom, Vernon had beco
me very difficult. And, of course, Elvis didn’t want to do anything his father disapproved of, which put him under great stress.

  There were other good reasons to let him go, too. Elvis, being young and full of piss and vinegar, seemed accident-prone. He’d already had several wrecks in his Cadillacs, and the 1954 model, which he’d had painted pink, caught fire and burned near Hope, Arkansas, after a rear wheel bearing locked up. Elvis was in the Caddy with a date, and when Bill and Scotty caught up with him, the latter remembers, “He was on the side of the road, frantically emptying the trunk, throwing guitars and amplifiers and clothes.”

  And now he was riding motorcycles, partly in emulation of Marlon Brando and James Dean, though he’d picked up the habit from Jimmie Rodgers Snow, Hank’s son, with whom he often went riding in Nashville, where people tended not to recognize him. “I had two motorcycles, and he really loved just taking off and going riding a lot,” says Snow. But to Sam’s point of view, it meant that one day he could have a multimillion-dollar property, and the next day he could have nothing. Once, during a terrible storm, Marion heard someone calling her name. There was Elvis, careening down Union Avenue on a motorcycle with a girl on the back. Didn’t the boy have enough sense not to take that thing out in the rain?

  Even through the transition, though, Elvis and Marion remained friends. He seemed loath to cut his ties with her and just happened to be in the neighborhood all too often.

  Marion was busier than she’d ever been, since Sam planned to use part of his buyout money to realize another of his dreams—to establish an all-girl radio station, WHER. It signed on almost immediately, at the end of October 1955, and Marion oversaw nearly all the operations, helping Sam set it up and making its first announcement on the air. Now she had three jobs and often she fell asleep at her desk. One morning about three o’clock, she faintly heard someone yelling, “Marion! Marion!”