by Alanna Nash
Al was in a quandary. “Do I leave them their privacy or should I be a good reporter? If I shoot this, Elvis may have me fired.” Then he took the chance, seeing they were so absorbed. He started shooting, keeping his distance at first, and then moved closer, closer, and closer still, until he was up on the railing of the stairway. He snapped a shot from above, looking down just as Elvis nuzzled the girl’s cheek, his arms spread wide, one above her against the wall, the other anchoring him on the railing. It was so sensual, and their bodies so eager, that if the photo were rotated, it would seem as if the two were in bed.
The photographer scarcely breathed. He asked to pass them (“May I get by?”), but they were so focused they didn’t even care. Al pivoted so that the window was behind him, illuminating his subjects with front-end sunlight and fill lighting from the dangling bulb.
“Betcha can’t kiss me, Elvis,” the girl said, sticking out her tongue.
“Betcha I can,” he teased back. And then he made his move, sticking out his own tongue until the two were pressed together, tongues and noses, his waist pushing up against hers. By now, the girl was leaning back on the stair rail, and anything could happen. Al snapped the shutter, capturing the famous image, a distillation of the rock-and-roll road show, and Elvis at his uninhibited best.
The whole thing took a tenth of a second, and then all Al heard was, “We want Elvis! We want Elvis!” A minute later, Elvis sprinted onstage to give four thousand people, mostly women and girls, the performance they had paid to see.
Just who Elvis’s date was that day remains a mystery. Since the image appears on commercial products, several women have approached Wertheimer through the years, each insisting she was the one. But whenever the photographer asks them questions about the day before or the day after, their stories never gel. “I think Elvis kissed thousands of girls. He loved kissing girls.”
After his shows that night, Elvis climbed back on board a northbound train—flying scared him—for his live appearance with Steve Allen the next evening. It was a Sunday. The show went as planned, Elvis wearing his prom-night blue suede shoes with his tuxedo and performing “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” along with “Hound Dog.”
He would record the latter song the next day at the RCA studios on New York’s East Twenty-fourth Street, along with “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Any Way You Want Me.” Meticulous at getting what he wanted on tape, though, as in his Sun days, still arriving unprepared, Elvis took control of the recording session. (“Try a little more space,” he told Scotty at one point.) After several takes of “Don’t Be Cruel,” he squatted on the floor so his ears were at the same level as the huge speakers in the corner. No, he said. They would need to do it again.
By the end of the day, he had insisted on twenty-eight takes of “Don’t Be Cruel,” and thirty-one of “Hound Dog.” It was excessive, but no one was going to argue with him, because he was an idiot savant in the studio, knowing what would work, even if he couldn’t always articulate it quickly. Beforehand, he’d spoken again to the press, saying that “Barbara Hearn of Memphis and June Juanico of Biloxi, Mississippi,” were the two girls he dated, Barbara being a good motorcycle date, he threw in. Meanwhile, outside the RCA building, fans held up signs saying, WE WANT THE REAL ELVIS, and WE WANT THE GYRATIN’ ELVIS, not the restrained and sanitized one who appeared on The Steve Allen Show.
But New Yorkers had seen two very different aspects of Elvis’s personality in an exceedingly short time. At eleven-thirty that Sunday night, little more than three hours after the Allen show signed on, Elvis appeared live on the WRCA-TV interview program, Hy Gardner Calling! Gardner, a popular syndicated newspaper columnist, asked his guest the increasingly familiar questions about his critics, his music, and his effect on teenagers. Elvis, on camera at the Warwick Hotel, but holding a telephone to speak with Gardner, took it in good humor, answering a question about his four Cadillacs (“I’m planning for seven”) as well as a ridiculous rumor that he had once shot his mother. (“Well, I think that one takes the cake. That’s about the funniest one I’ve ever heard.”)
The show was memorable for two reasons—the shot of Elvis on the telephone exposed an ugly and prominent wart on his right wrist, which he would have removed in 1958. (A Georgia fan named Joni Mabe would acquire it and keep it in a jar of formaldehyde, selling T-shirts proclaiming, THE KING IS GONE, BUT THE WART LIVES ON.) What got people talking, though, was Elvis’s sleepy eyes and druggy speech.
Two weeks earlier, he had stopped by Wink Martindale’s WHBQ-TV “Top 10 Dance Party” to promote his upcoming concert at Memphis’s Russwood Stadium, a charity benefit for the Press-Scimitar’s Cynthia Milk Fund, and his behavior on the show had also seemed somehow altered. He stuttered more than usual and was nervous in the company of the kids in the studio that afternoon. Then, with a lock of hair meandering on his forehead, he leaned on the jukebox for most of his brief interview, and nearly fell off of it when he went to shake Wink’s hand. Elvis had initially resisted coming on the show, saying he didn’t feel comfortable doing a live interview, even on local TV. Wink asked Dewey Phillips to speak with him about it, and then Elvis agreed, but only if Dewey appeared with him on camera. Had Dewey, who used Benzedrine to keep himself awake and sedatives to bring himself down, plied Elvis with pills?
Wink later tried to explain it away as growing pains.
“He was very awkward in that era. He didn’t seem to know how to act around people. He just didn’t know how to be interviewed at that stage of his career.”
And maybe that was part of it, along with sleep deprivation. He told Hy Gardner he slept only four or five hours a night, but some of the audience thought it was more than that. Hy apparently did, too, saying, “Several newspaper stories hinted that you smoked marijuana . . . in order to work yourself into a frenzy while singing.” (“Well, I don’t know,” Elvis replied with a laugh.) In 1956, drug use was mostly relegated to the underground, to bowery dwellers, jazz musicians, and the criminally insane, and mainstream America found it both horrifying and scandalous. In billboarding the guests on the show, Gardner’s secretary, Marilyn, announced, “We’ll talk with veteran bandleader Ted Lewis; Egyptian dancer Nedula Ace; and the unidentified author of the shocking book titled I Was a Dope Addict. And to get right into action immediately with the most controversial entertainer of the year . . . well, you’ll hear who.”
On July 3, Elvis took a cab to New York’s Pennsylvania Station and once more boarded a train, this time for a twenty-seven-hour trip to Memphis. There he would enjoy a few hours of Fourth of July celebration with his parents, cousins Junior, Bobby, and Billy Smith, his aunt and uncle Travis and Lorraine Smith, his Memphis girlfriend, Barbara Hearn, and a growing entourage that now included Red West and an overgrown Memphis boy named Arthur Hooten, whose mother had worked with Gladys at Britling’s Cafeteria. On the train, he listened to the quick-cut acetates of his three new songs on a portable record player, second-guessing himself, rethinking his vocals, wondering if his voice was too out front from the instruments.
When the coach arrived in Memphis, it slowed just long enough for Elvis to disembark at a small signal stop called White Station. From there, the star of Sunday night’s Steve Allen Show and Hy Gardner Calling! walked home to Audubon Drive with his alcoholic and perpetually shell-shocked cousin Junior. Everybody wondered how he’d do with the fireworks that night, since Junior, a wild and unpredictable personality, had gone berserk and shot a group of civilians in a Korean village.
As usual, the yard was abuzz with fans, who normally contained themselves to the carport, except when Gladys or Vernon invited them inside, which the Presleys did quite frequently, accepting them with calm resolve. The house was especially active on this day, however, and not just for the holiday. A number of fans had traveled to Memphis for Elvis’s Russwood Stadium show that night, some of them getting up the nerve to come see where he lived.
Vernon was already in something of a state when Elvis walked in. The f
amily had just had a swimming pool installed in the backyard, but the pool wouldn’t fill. Now Vernon was running a hose from the kitchen sink. Elvis hurried to put on his trunks, and then jumped into all of three feet of water, horseplaying with his cousins for Al’s camera.
Inside, Barbara, dressed for the evening event, sat in a taffeta, scoop-neck black-on-white polka-dot dress. Like the girl in Richmond, she, too, wore cluster pearl earrings, with a smart pair of black pumps setting it all off. She waited for Elvis to take his shower, and then half-naked, clad only in his pants and socks, his hair still tousled, he beckoned her into the living room to hear his acetates.
Minnie Mae sat on the couch, craning her neck forward, trying to make out the words to “Don’t Be Cruel.” But Elvis wanted to know what Barbara thought of all the songs, wanted her compliments and reassurance that he would have a hit. In the end, he needn’t have worried. The double-sided single, “Hound Dog/Don’t Be Cruel,” sat at the top of the charts for three months and became the most-played jukebox record of the year.
They made an odd pair, Elvis and Barbara. Al Wertheimer, taking note, found her to be “a model of gentility . . . pert, prim, and polite” as a schoolmistress, while Elvis, shirtless, with boils on his back, “looked like the unruly student who spent most of his time leering at the teacher.” She sat next to Minnie Mae for a while, just on the edge of the couch, holding her purse on her knees.
“Let’s dance,” Elvis said. But Barbara didn’t want to dance. “No, not now,” she answered. She was concentrating hard on the music. But Elvis persisted, pulling her to her feet and then hugging her, moving in for a kiss. Barbara complied, but “I didn’t want him to be kissing me in front of his grandmother.”
Minnie Mae took the hint, saying she had to get ready for the concert that night. Elvis took Barbara’s hand again, and they began dancing in the narrow space between the coffee table and the couch. Her heart wasn’t in it, though, and Elvis could tell. Finally she said she just wanted to listen.
“He shrugged, plopped down on the plush chair and sulked,” Wertheimer wrote in his book, Elvis ’56: In the Beginning. “She sat on the edge of the ottoman next to the hi-fi, picked at her pearl-clustered earrings and stared at the carpet. Elvis stared at her, clamped his lips in a pout and glared at a different patch of the carpet. His record filled the room, ‘Don’t make me feel this way / Come on over here and love me . . .’
“ ‘How do you like it?’ ” he asked.
“ ‘I think it’s very good,’ she said. She liked all of his music except for ‘Old Shep.’ ”
Then he asked if she wanted to hear the new ballad, “Any Way You Want Me.” She stood, and Elvis folded his arms around her and pulled her to his bare chest. It was an awkward embrace—she was shy with Al there—and Wertheimer knew it was time to explore the rest of the house.
That night Elvis, dressed entirely in black, rode in a police car to nearby Russwood Stadium. Barbara sat with Vernon and Gladys, Minnie Mae, and Elvis’s aunt and uncle in a VIP section near the stage. The hometown fans, so proud to have seen him on The Steve Allen Show, were already on their feet in the dilapidated old baseball park, and the noise was deafening as Elvis took the stage. “You know those people in New York aren’t going to change me none,” Elvis told them. “I’m gonna show you what the real Elvis is like tonight.”
It was a sentimental and emotional evening all around. Elvis saluted his family from the edge of the stage. And Bob and Helen Neal had come back afterward, bringing their new employee, Carolyn Bradshaw, Elvis’s little sweetheart from the Hayride. She and Elvis had never really said good-bye, and now he spotted her. They waved and started toward each other, but it was not to be.
“We didn’t get to say anything, because all of a sudden, he was just inundated with people. I don’t know where all these people came from, but it looked like he’d never get away, so I just gave up and went on home. That was the last time I ever saw him.”
Sitting just a few rows from the stage that night was another young girl with stars in her eyes, this one just at the beginning of her relationship with Elvis. Jackie Rowland, the 190-pound “blueberry” from the Jacksonville, Florida, show, had made good on her promise to lose weight, and even though “my mother kept me almost in a bubble,” Marguerite had held up her end of the bargain, too, bringing Jackie, now fourteen years old and eighty pounds lighter, to Memphis.
They arrived at the Audubon Drive house on July 3 while Elvis was still in New York. Vernon saw them standing on the sidewalk, watching all the fans milling about, and came out and struck up a conversation. Marguerite explained how they happened to be there, and that Jackie had worked so hard to lose her weight, and just wanted to see Elvis so much. Vernon listened sympathetically.
“He said if Mrs. Presley would let us in, he would come to the side door, and that’s what happened,” Jackie vividly recalls.
Gladys, whose own weight continued to balloon, liked the personable mother-daughter, even inviting them to spend the night. They politely declined—they had a motel already—but said they would like to come back the next day, when Elvis was home. So on the Fourth of July, in the afternoon, before the Russwood show, the Rowlands returned to the house to visit.
The five of them—Elvis, his parents, and the Rowlands—sat in the living room, Gladys already in her dress for the concert. While Elvis sat between his parents on the couch, intently reading a story about himself in the newspaper, Jackie snapped his picture. Then Vernon scooted over, seeming even more the outsider, and Jackie sat down beside her idol, who draped his arm around her and held her close, his mouth so near her ear.
Jackie’s mother captured the moment in a snapshot. But Elvis does not appear to be a pop star greeting a fan he had met only briefly once before. Instead, both Jackie and Elvis look as natural and relaxed as if they were longtime sweethearts. Though Jackie was an only child “and I had never had a boyfriend and the only males that came near me were my family,” neither she nor Elvis seem self-conscious at being so physically affectionate in the presence of their parents. Elvis had a way of putting people at ease, but this was extraordinary.
Yet Jackie says it was not precisely as it seemed.
“I think one of the reasons Elvis and his mother liked me was due to my reaction to his first attempt to kiss me. I was totally innocent and naïve. I told him to stop it and pushed him away. You can see by my expression in the photo.”
Though Elvis was told no, it didn’t faze or deter him. “He didn’t care, he just put his arm around me again and started nibbling my ears.” In a lighthearted tone, “He told my mother she needed to take me to a doctor because I wasn’t normal. I’m sure he had never met a girl who wasn’t all over him.”
Elvis demanded complete control in his relationships, but perhaps another reason he persisted was because Jackie looked a bit like him. Their hair color was the same, they had those light eyes, and they were the only surviving children of their parents, their mothers both having lost a baby at birth. For a brief moment, it might have seemed like Jessie and Elvis, reunited. Even Jackie’s name, like June’s, started with the right letter.
By the time Jackie left the house, “There was definitely some romantic chemistry going on between the two of us. I didn’t think about Elvis being a big, famous entertainer. He was just the sweet boy that I was in love with.”
Of course, her familiarity with the family had begun the day before. Gladys admired a stick rhinestone pin that Marguerite wore, and Mrs. Rowland “sold” it to her for a penny, and then showed Gladys how to store a set of sterling silverware Elvis had just bought her. After that, Gladys led Jackie through the house. “I took pictures of Elvis’s bedroom, his clothes closet, his messy bathroom—anything that a little fourteen-year-old girl would think to do.”
However, twenty-one-year-old Elvis did not treat Jackie as the child she was. He sang his new song, “Hound Dog,” and started tickling her (“You know how boys love to tease and pinch girls”), call
ing her Goosey. From there, it grew more intense. “He said, ‘You’ve got the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen,’ and he was really tickling me, kissing me on the cheek and the ears. Something just clicked between us, and that was it.”
Gladys, already guessing how Elvis would react to Jackie, had taken her alone that first day, auditioning her, as she did the older girls in whom Elvis took an interest. “She sat me down and asked me if I had a boyfriend, and what kind of grades I made in school, and did I believe in Jesus. She really asked me very personal questions, but, of course, at the time, I didn’t think those were personal questions. I answered them, and I was happy to answer them, because I was proud of what I’d done in school and in my church.”
Even at fourteen, Jackie had the sense that she was being interviewed to see if she measured up. It was almost as if Gladys were screening Jackie in an attempt to find a younger version of herself for her son. And Gladys was direct with her about her competition.
“She knew about the ‘traveling girls,’ as I call them, and she explained to me that Elvis hadn’t sown all of his wild oats yet. It didn’t bother me, because she said I still had time to grow up.”
In fact, when Jackie returned to Jacksonville, she was convinced that she would see Elvis again soon, and that he wanted it as much as she did.
In a few weeks, an envelope arrived at Jackie’s home. Elvis, who wrote few letters, had invited her and her mother to his show at Jacksonville’s Florida Theatre the following month. “This letter was written to Mrs. Rowland and Jackie, and it’s signed with Mrs. Presley’s name. But it’s Elvis’s handwriting. He started to sign his own name, but he knew that was improper. You just didn’t do things with an underage girl.”
