Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Byron Raphael had the best view of anyone, and in 2005, he wrote about it for Playboy magazine:

  The Colonel had put me on Nipper Control that night, which meant he positioned me beneath the stage and charged me with the safety of a three-foot-high, plaster of Paris canine—the infamous cocked-ear, Jack Russell mascot of RCA, Elvis’s recording label. Elvis was going to use the pup as a prop during “Hound Dog.” “Whatever you do, don’t let that dog fall off the stage,” Parker snapped. “And tell Mr. Presley you’re going to hold Nipper up, so he doesn’t have to worry, he can just be free.”

  The Colonel often said, “Elvis has stardust,” meaning that it was remarkable how such a shy person could change himself into a creature of infinite magnetism onstage. But the old hustler never dreamed what Elvis was planning to do with man’s best friend.

  Elvis came out onstage with his now-famous gold-lamé jacket topping a pair of loose-fitting, black dress slacks. During his fifty-minute, eighteen-song set, he “wiggled, bumped, and twisted,” according to Jack O’Brian of the New York Journal-American, one of many out-of-town papers that covered the event. But it was the finish of “Hound Dog” that prompted another paper’s headline, “Elvis Presley Will Have to Clean Up His Show—Or Go to Jail.” I don’t know exactly what got into him, but as he launched into that song, he was vastly different from the Elvis I knew at the studio—his eyes were dilated, as if he were taking his direction from someplace far, far away. Then he did the unthinkable. Pumped up by either adrenaline or libido, he began to unfasten his pants and slowly pull his zipper down, which prompted wild screaming from an audience that was already frenzied at the sexual surge Elvis sent out through the auditorium.

  With his pants now open, but not down, Elvis reached for Nipper, which I still held tight from below the stage. Suddenly, Elvis pressed the dog against his crotch, and I could feel him pushing it back on me as he rode the pooch back and forth in a masturbatory glide. As the crowd noise grew to a furious roar, Elvis continued to dry hump poor Nipper as if he were a teenage girl at a drive-in.

  Then all of a sudden, Elvis pulled the dog out of my grip, and then began rolling around on the floor with him in full simulation of bestial bliss. It was one of the most shockingly erotic things I’d ever seen. There’s no question that Elvis was truly trying to have sex, because when he finally gave the dog back to me, I could see a huge hard-on through his pants. The next night the L.A. Vice Squad came, armed with warnings, and the police filmed the show. But Elvis toned it down, and Nipper made it through without undue violation.

  When the Playboy article was published, Elvis aficionados challenged Raphael’s account. Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires, who performed with him that night, insists he saw nothing inappropriate in Elvis’s actions. “Elvis did not do anything onstage with Nipper that was suggestive or off-color. We were standing very close to him onstage as we always were. We would have seen him.”

  Photographs, however, show Elvis draped across the dog, and the New York Journal-American reported his performance was “far too indecent to mention in every detail.”

  “He was on the floor, he put his arm around the dog lying flat next to it, and he had his leg around it,” offers Kevin Eggers in explanation. “That’s what was happening. Now, in the context of what he was doing, it was outrageously provocative. But it wasn’t Jim Morrison.” Byron had made it clear that Elvis had not actually exposed himself, as the lead singer of the Doors was arrested for doing in an infamous 1969 incident in Miami. Still, Eggers says, “Elvis Presley would never have pulled down his fly.”

  But Eggers was not in the audience that night. And the Jordanaires did not have Byron’s proximity from beneath the stage. Even if Byron embellished his story, or if his memory was faulty after nearly fifty years, others had the same interpretation of the singer’s intent. Albert Goldman’s 1981 controversial biography, Elvis, refers to adults leaving the theater with the idea that “Elvis had capped an obscene performance by pretending to bugger the dog.”

  Dick Williams, the entertainment editor of the Los Angeles Mirror-News, was clearly outraged at what he saw, calling Elvis a “Sexhibitionist,” and going on for a dozen paragraphs: “If any further proof were needed that what Elvis offers is not basically music but a sex show, it was proved last night. . . . The madness reached its peak at the finish with ‘Hound Dog.’ Elvis writhed in complete abandon, hair hanging over his face. He got down on the floor with a huge replica of the RCA singing dog and made love to it as if it were a girl.”

  Ricky Nelson, who met Elvis at a party in his hotel suite after the second night, never got over the performance, telling friends for years how Elvis “group-fucked 10,000 people.”

  Whatever happened on the first night—whether Elvis’s eyes were “dilated,” as Raphael wrote, because he was taking pills, which might have affected his behavior—Elvis was far less flamboyant the following evening. When the police showed up with a movie camera, he poked fun at it all, just as he had in the Jacksonville incident. Using hand gestures, he repeatedly indicated to the audience that the censorious camera was on him, even holding his arms out and binding his wrists together, suggesting that he had been handcuffed. At one point, he announced to the crowd, “You should have been here last night!”

  But there was plenty to captivate on October 29, too, at least for one young girl, eleven-year-old Cherilyn Sarkisian, who grew up to be a singer herself. Like Elvis, she would be famous for just one name: Cher.

  The child had already seen Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show, and it was as if a thunderbolt had hit her: “I was a goner. I loved the way he sang and the way he looked. In some strange way, I felt he expressed who I was.”

  It was weird for an eleven-year-old girl to feel that way, she thought. She was a tomboy, but a girlie girl, too, though definitely more of a tomboy in a lot of ways. She liked to sing, but she had a really low voice, and she didn’t even get into a singing group in her school. Not even a play. She was always in the chorus, but her voice was too high for guys and too low for girls, so she just sang for herself. She didn’t seem to neatly fit into any category, and that was part of what she got from watching the gyrating image on TV: Elvis didn’t either. “When I saw him, I thought, ‘Well, this is kind of who I am.’ ”

  Part of it was his bad-boy vibe, the way he went against the grain and defied authority, because as a younger child, Cher did, too. “I got in trouble a lot. Not really big trouble, but when I was ten or eleven, my friend and I ran away from home—took a horse and went out to San Bernardino and hopped a train—just for the adventure of it. I ran away from home once on my tricycle, too. I was always this strange child that wanted more adventure than there was.”

  When she saw Elvis on TV, then, “I thought, ‘This is perfect. I’m going in the right direction.’ He just validated where I was going.”

  It helped that her mother, Georgia Holt, a backwoods beauty from Sharp County, Arkansas, not all that far from Memphis, was also into early rock and roll. She thought it was good music, and she wasn’t threatened by it. When Cherilyn’s friends’ mothers saw Elvis, they shrank in revulsion and forbade their children from buying his records. But Georgia watched The Ed Sullivan Show with her daughter, and then when Elvis came to town, she bought tickets for the two of them. Cherilyn was ecstatic, she said in an interview for this book.

  “I was so crazy. I got my hair cut for it, because I hoped he would notice it. I was in such heaven. I almost didn’t walk on the ground.”

  Inside the auditorium, she saw him in the gold suit that Nudie, her mom’s friend, made. “He’s really shiny,” she thought. Then all of a sudden, “All the girls were on their chairs screaming. I didn’t understand why exactly—I wasn’t completely sure about the sexual part of it—but I was just fascinated with it. I remember saying, ‘Mom, can we stand on our chairs and scream, too?’ And so we did. My mom was yelling and laughing, and I projected myself up there. It didn’t make much difference what sex he was.”


  Cherilyn had seen Dumbo as a little kid, and sitting in the dark, watching the big screen, she was so transfixed that she’d peed her pants rather than get up and miss anything. The die had been cast for her future that day. But when she saw Elvis, “It was cemented in stone.”

  The Pan Pacific shows, among the greatest Elvis ever played, were meant to be the last of the tour, until promoter Lee Gordon convinced the Colonel to let him book two Hawaiian dates in November, just as Jailhouse Rock opened in theaters. Those concerts, in Honolulu and at Schofield Barracks, Pearl Harbor, would be Elvis’s last public performances before entering the military.

  Every branch of the military service made bids for Elvis to join their ranks, offering perks of one kind or another. Elvis and the Colonel decided on the army, which offered a two-year enlistment with a 120-day deferment so he could complete his new movie, Paramount’s King Creole. He’d begin shooting it in January with Hungarian director Michael Curtiz, most famous for Casablanca.

  On December 20, 1957, he went down to the Memphis draft board to pick up the dreaded notice in person. The Colonel told him to do it, saying it made him look more patriotic, and that mothers and fathers all across the nation would respect him for it. It was good publicity. When reporters asked how he liked trading his blue suede shoes for army boots, he bit his tongue and followed the drill. “It’s a duty I’ve got to fill, and I’m going to do it,” he said.

  In private, it was a different story, according to Barbara Pittman, who Elvis had planned on taking on the road with him. “Elvis cried in my lap because he had to go into the service. Parker had said, ‘Look, son, you play the hero. If you start battling it and try to get out of it to support your mother, it’s going to make you look bad. Just be the all-American kid type.’ ”

  Milton Bowers, the draft board chairman, had sent him informal word that his induction notice had been drawn up and was waiting for him.

  Anita remembers the day. His parents were devastated. “They could not believe that he was going to have to leave them. He didn’t mind going and serving, but he really didn’t want to leave his family. And his mother was so worried about what would happen to him. She did not see another happy day after they received that notice.”

  The newspaper came out and took pictures. Elvis held his draft notice up in one while the others captured the splendor of Graceland and the white nylon Christmas tree festooned with red ornaments. Cliff and Elvis then posed with a huge pile of presents, but neither could resist some attitude—Cliff holding a cigarette, and Elvis, wearing gloves indoors, offering a half-sneer.

  Otherwise, he pretended everything was fine. Elvis bought his mother a mink coat, his father a diamond ring, and the Colonel a snazzy Isetta sports car. Even Billy and Bobby got hundred-dollar bills.

  “That whole Christmas was like a kid’s dream,” Billy remembers. A couple of Christmases before, the Smith children had gone to the Goodfellows dinner for underprivileged kids. Now Aunt Gladys had “all kinds of good things to eat for the holidays,” and the house was decorated with holly and berries. “It was a fun time,” Anita confirms, and Gladys made herself get in the spirit for her first Christmas at Graceland. “She would look at Elvis, and grit her teeth and talk this baby talk, and he would do it back to her. They were gritting their teeth at each other.”

  By the time next Christmas rolled around, Gladys told Elvis, she hoped he and Anita would be married with a blond-headed baby on the way. They talked about it, Anita says. If it were a girl, they’d call her Alisa Marie. But Gladys wanted a boy, Elvis Jr. “She said, ‘I can just see him running up and down the driveway in his little bare feet.’ She was trying to plan Elvis’s future, not having any idea of things that were going down.’ ”

  At twenty-three, the most famous man in the world was in no hurry to marry, especially since his military service was upon him. The younger Elvis proposed marriage quickly and often, but he was now past such impetuous actions. Lamar understood the changes.

  “As kids, we were taught that you grow up, get married, and smoke cigarettes. That’s just what you did. But he really didn’t want to get married. Because we’d go on the coast, and he’d get loose and chase everything that was moving.”

  In early 1958, Anita went with Elvis to New Orleans for location shooting on King Creole, his fourth and best film. But she stayed back at the hotel on Parker’s orders, as she did in Los Angeles: Anita ensconced at the Knickerbocker, and Elvis at the Beverly Wilshire.

  On the set, he took a shine to seventeen-year-old June Wilkinson, who had just come over from England at the invitation of Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine. (Hef dubbed her “The Bosom.”) The amply endowed cheesecake model (43-22-37) had been trained as a ballerina, but began her career as a topless dancer at age fifteen, joining London’s Windmill Theatre as a fan dancer in 1957. June would later gain fame as a platinum-haired vixen in the mode of Jayne Mansfield. But at the time Elvis met her, she was a stunning brunette and merely a young friend of the choreographer on the picture.

  “Elvis came over and started talking to me,” June recalls of their meeting, “and he said, ‘Would you like to have dinner?’ A seventeen-year-old girl, of course, I would like to have dinner!”

  He sent a car to bring her to his hotel, and then in his usual approach, he offered to show her the luxurious suite. When they got to his bedroom, “He started kissing me, which was okay with me, and then he wanted to make love.” But June was a virgin and intended to stay that way.

  She thought Elvis would surely cut the evening short when she told him. But instead, “He said, ‘Oh, okay,’ and sat me on his bed, got out his guitar, and sang to me for a couple of hours. I was so impressed. He knew he wasn’t going to get anyplace with me, and it didn’t matter.”

  Even Sophia Loren flipped for him during a chance meeting on the Paramount lot while filming Desire Under the Elms. A studio photographer captured the meeting of the two international sex symbols, her arms around his neck, flirty smiles all around.

  King Creole, based on Harold Robbins’s gritty novel A Stone for Danny Fisher, offered Elvis a magnificent role as a young singer navigating the mob-controlled New Orleans club scene. His work reflects his close study of Brando and Dean, and finds him worthy of leading a first-rate cast, including Walter Matthau (as Maxie, the crime boss) and Carolyn Jones (Maxie’s jaded mistress, who also has a soft spot for Danny).

  Elvis’s scenes with the exotic Jones proved powerful and poignant. (“He was always asking a lot of questions,” she remembered. “God, he was young! He was always talking about his folks and the house he’d just bought them.”) But he took more pleasure in reuniting with Dolores Hart, as the straight-arrow dime-store clerk Nellie.

  Again, Elvis showed interest in her (he nicknamed her “Whistle Britches”), and again, Dolores demurred. She played with his pompadour on the set, but she might as well have been his sister.

  Elvis didn’t push himself on her, because it wasn’t right to do so. It was the same with their characters’ relationship, too. He understood this so innately that in a rare display of assertiveness, he challenged director Curtiz about a scene in which Danny tricks Nellie into going to a hotel. Still shots remain in which the two sit together on the bed, with Nellie about to unfasten her dress.

  As the actress remembers, the scene wasn’t effective. “It was Elvis who finally called a halt to it. He said, ‘I just don’t see how Nellie would even come this far. She wouldn’t have me take her dress down and then say no.’ I agreed with him.”

  After King Creole wrapped in March 1958, Dolores never saw Elvis again, though he wrote her postcards from his military service in Germany, asking, “What’s doing, hot lips?” It was a private joke, since they’d been forced to do one of their kissing scenes in 104-degree temperature. Elvis was “like a young animal,” she told a British reporter. “He doesn’t have much refinement, but this is part of his charm.”

  Still, stories swirled that she left show business and became
a nun because she was pregnant with his child. Today, Mother Dolores is, indeed, a Benedictine nun at the Convent of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut. But she didn’t enter the order until 1963—five years after making King Creole.

  Philip Stanic, an entertainer who calls himself Elvis Presley Jr. (born December 24, 1961, in Gary, Indiana), initially said he believed that he was the actors’ illegitimate son. Now, however, he claims his birth mother was the late actress Angelique Pettijohn, an extra in Elvis’s 1961 film Blue Hawaii.

  Elvis was always a business associate and not a close friend, Dolores insisted. Yet she spent enough time around him to make some observations. In 1959, a movie magazine quoted her as saying, “Elvis is a young man with an enormous capacity of love . . . but I don’t think he has found his happiness. I think he is terribly lonely.”

  In 2003, she spoke of her most abiding memory of him, which occurred during the making of Loving You. They were out in the country, and they’d finished filming for the day.

  “There were some horses around . . . and we were just laughing and enjoying being out there. He was standing by a rail, and he had his arms reaching out each side of it. He put his head back . . . he was looking up to the sky, and he was so beautiful and real. And for a moment, he just looked so peaceful.”

  Elvis had finally found some footing in a world he, himself, had turned upside down. Now the army was about to separate him from everything that mattered: his fame, his career, and most of all, his deathly ill mother.

  On leave from the army, Elvis posed for this formal portrait with his parents at Graceland, June 1958. Gladys would die before the summer was out. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)