Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  Something Had to Be Done

  As Elvis rose, the counterrevolution gathered strength. Something had to be done. He was corrupting the moral fiber of the young women in America. The opposition won a victory when the girls of Notre Dame High School in St. Louis were persuaded to recant their sins. Publicly and ceremoniously, they burned an Elvis effigy and their Elvis icons—photographs, records, and teddy bears—in a “bonfire of the vanities.” St. Louis was one of the cities in America where the Elvis girls broke out in amazing numbers. On October 21, 22, and 23, 1955, he played three shows in the Missouri Theater. On January 1, 1956, only two months later, he filled the Civic Auditorium with girls. On Thursday, March 29, 1957, the 10,800 seats in the Auditorium were sold out to Elvis enthusiasts.

  Even the FBI took notice of the Elvis phenomenon and swung into action. It eventually gathered more than a thousand pages in its “Elvis File,” the FBI file most often requested by the public. One FBI informant in La Crosse, Wisconsin, declared that an Elvis performance in May 1956 was “the filthiest and most harmful production that ever came to La Crosse for exhibition to teenagers.” It was “sexual gratification on stage” and “a strip-tease with clothes on.” He thought that Elvis “may possibly be a drug addict and sexual pervert.” J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, knew all about “sexual perverts,” and his agency was already well aware of Elvis’s subversive potential. Hoover saw Communists everywhere and knew that they often worked their insidious ways through “fellow travelers” and unwitting human tools. Elvis was a good candidate to become a Communist dupe and needed watching. Ironically, authorities in Communist Russia did not like Elvis either and wanted to exclude him from the country, along with other evidence of decadence in the capitalist West.

  Television and Film—Bursting the Bubble

  The revolution of the Elvis girls was not crushed by the police. It was not squelched by irate parents rising up and refusing to allow their daughters to attend an Elvis concert, late night or otherwise. Ironically, it was killed by Tom Parker’s ambition to win Elvis an audience of millions rather than thousands and thus gain a huge increase in revenue. Parker changed the venue of Elvis’s performance first from stage to television and then from television to film. As the venue changed, the audience changed radically both in numbers and composition. As it grew to millions, the girls no longer dominated.

  In 1955, Elvis appeared live onstage more than 230 times. During the first half of 1956, counting 28 performances in the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, he came onstage 122 times. In the last half of 1956, including his television appearances, he came onstage only 22 times. For all of 1957, the number was 20. In 1958, before he went into the army in March, he didn’t perform onstage at all.

  In 1956, television became Elvis’s medium. In the first ten months of that year, he was on national television ten times, watched by an audience of well over two hundred million. In 1957, he did only one television show, appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show in January, and then no more. He was going into movies. His first movie came out in the fall of 1956. In 1957, he did three more films.

  Television destroyed the assembly of girls, the actual palpable meeting place where they could openly express their deepest feelings and experience by their numbers and share rituals giving them a heady sense of power and liberation. Television, in effect, burned their churches and dispersed the faithful.

  Film continued and deepened the process. The movie house brought them together again, but in more limited numbers and venues, a confined and darkened space to view images closely prescribed and controlled, prefabricated, and literally canned by men. There was no piece of the living Elvis here, no performance shaped creatively to the expression of their own deep feelings and immediate desires. Beginning with television and ending with film, the girls lost control.

  Even so, the passions that women felt for Elvis did not die. His early fans were as ardent as ever, probably even more ardent at a deeper level, more reflective as each communed with Elvis in the privacy of her own bedroom. Paradoxically, as Elvis became more remote and mechanical, ecstasies became deeper, more individual and personal. Girls and women bought and played Elvis records and lived whatever fantasies they wanted to live. They bought the photographs and read the magazine stories. They saw the movies over and over. Now and again, they made the pilgrimage to the gates of Graceland, perhaps to see Elvis flash by in his car or simply to gaze up at the blacked-out windows of his bedroom on the second floor of the mansion. The passion that women felt for the idea of Elvis did not go underground; it was not hidden, or secretive. It was simply diffused.

  Television

  Elvis’s first foray into television came on January 28, 1956, with his appearance on CBS’s Stage Show. The hosts, big band leaders Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, had been giants in music in the 1940s, but they and their show were losing audience in the 1950s while NBC’s mellow-voiced Perry Como was crooning his way into the hearts of affluent Americans hungry for order, peace, and complacency. Both shows appeared at the same time every week. Como enjoyed 34.7 percent of the national TV audience, while the Dorseys at 18.4 percent had only about half as much. Notwithstanding the Dorseys’ low market share, Elvis performed for thirteen million Americans that first evening. After he returned for five more performances, ending on March 24, Como was down to 30.1 percent and Stage Show was up to 20.9 percent. Eighteen months into his career, Elvis had the power to take huge chunks of the national audience away from one of America’s most popular singers.

  In July 1956, Elvis discarded his flashy clothes and donned formal attire, a tuxedo, for his appearance on The Steve Allen Show. Allen’s attempt to make fun of Elvis by having him dress so and sing “you ain’t nothing but a hound dog” to a real live “hound dog” on national television accrued to Elvis’s benefit, as he bore the ordeal with dignity. Allen became the shallow, vapid teenager, relishing humor where there really was none. Elvis became, ironically, the gracious adult. A Newsweek writer pronounced Allen’s ethics “questionable.”

  The most popular variety TV program in America in the mid-1950s was The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan was deeply conservative and hated the provocative sexual displays that brought Elvis such wildly demonstrative female audiences. But he hated more the prospect of a loss in his ratings. Finally, and reluctantly, he booked Elvis for Sunday night, September 9, 1956. Sullivan himself did not preside over the engagement. The show was filmed in Los Angeles, and Sullivan, amazingly, sent in the Hollywood actor Charles Laughton, an Englishman, to host. That evening, the Sullivan show—without Sullivan—drew an astounding rating of 82.6 percent and an audience of some fifty million people, the largest ever for a variety show in America.

  One month later, Sullivan himself reluctantly consented to host Elvis’s second appearance on his show. This was the famous occasion on which he did not allow the camera to reveal Elvis below the waist. This minor measure of censorship advertised the lower half of Elvis’s body in a degree unmatched for the lower half of any body, male or female, in the twentieth century. Far from taking offense, Elvis seemed to see the humor in this. His audience seemed to agree with him.

  Meanwhile, in the spring of 1956 Elvis’s new record “Heartbreak Hotel”—written by Mae Boren Axton, who had done such good work advertising his tour in Florida the previous year—had hit the top of all three charts: country and western, rhythm and blues, and popular music. This was a triple score across categories that was unprecedented and another indicator that cultural fragmentation in America was diminishing. In July, his record “Hound Dog,” backed by “Don’t Be Cruel,” sold one million copies in eighteen days.

  On November 21, Elvis made his film debut in 550 movie theaters across America. Love Me Tender was a low-budget film for which he got only $100,000, but it repaid its total cost at the box office in only three days. Elvis was moving into the third medium of his entertainment career—movies.

  Killing Off the First Elvis

  Elvis was rapidly rising, b
ut there was a drag on his ascent. Ironically, it was the very image that he had labored so hard to construct after the revelation in the Overton Shell in July 1954. The image that Elvis had cultivated so successfully with teenage white girls was absolutely offensive to many Americans. Elvis fans were devoted, but they represented a relatively narrow band in the total population. Across the gender line, white boys might like Elvis’s music and admire his rebellious style to some degree, but they might also see him as a rival for female attention. The great mass of adult Americans, if they deigned to notice Elvis at all, hated him and feared his influence. Thus, to increase his audience, he needed to virtually destroy his hard-won public persona and create another with broad appeal. Brilliantly managed by Colonel Parker, Elvis did precisely that.

  As compelling public displays by mass gatherings of orgiastic young women diminished in frequency in 1956, the image of Elvis as a menace to the morals of America began to fade. The powerful and spontaneous relationship that he and the girls had created was broken, as the girls lost the power to tell Elvis in person and onstage what they wanted him to do and how to do it. The Colonel took charge and cultivated an image of Elvis as a safe and sane young man. His performances came to be very carefully constructed and projected onto television and movie screens.

  As Elvis’s appearances on television fell from the menu after January 1957 and he moved only to film, control of the Elvis image by the Colonel and his associates became nearly total. They strove to adjust the image to take advantage of the broad new market, which was older, increasingly male as well as female, and international as well as national. Overall, they proved highly adept at fine-tuning their message—completing four movies over the two years before Elvis entered the army. Ironically, Elvis in the can became vastly more visible and valuable than Elvis in real life and onstage.

  The New Elvis

  Elvis gave up live audiences numbering thousands, but he gained television and movie audiences numbering millions, with commensurate increases in income. He gloried in his new celebrity, and he loved the money—or, more deeply, the things that money could buy. He was a person of gargantuan appetites for food, cars, clothes, houses, friends (mostly young males), and girls (one after another). The girls did not forget Elvis, Elvis did not forget the girls, and others came to know and became fans of the young Mississippi man who blended the black and white music of the Deep South.

  Elvis was rolling in money, and he rolled easily into projecting the new image of himself. Even early in 1956, there were signs that he was no longer entirely at ease performing as the girls wanted him to perform.

  In mid-February, after his third appearance on the Dorsey television show, Elvis was touring in North Carolina with a show put together by the Colonel. As usual, the music was country and gospel, not everyone in the troupe liked Elvis’s music, and many hated the way he took audiences away from them. One of these was Ira Louvin, who with his brother, Charlie, sang duets beautifully in seemingly impossibly high keys. Ira was short-tempered and irascible, and he despised Elvis. Elvis, on the other hand, loved the music the Louvin brothers made; they were his mother’s favorite singers. He would stand in the wings and relish their performances. On February 14, 1956, in Wilson, North Carolina, the Colonel had ordered the troupe to do a third show without pay because the local promoter had oversold the two shows scheduled, largely because so many girls wanted to see Elvis. Ira flew into a rage. In an interview years later, Charlie Louvin painted a scene in which Ira “went on and on about who did this Presley kid think he was, that no-talent sonofabitch, trying to take over their music—and fuck the Colonel anyway.”

  The Colonel finally agreed to pay the performers for the third show, but a couple of days later, just before Elvis and his band were to fly off from Winston-Salem to New York for his fourth TV appearance on the Dorseys’ Stage Show, Ira turned his guns on Elvis himself. As often happened while on tour, Elvis and others were backstage gathered around a piano singing gospel songs.

  “Boy, this is my favorite music,” Elvis exclaimed.

  Ira put himself in Elvis’s face, bristling. “Why, you white nigger, if that’s your favorite music, why don’t you do that out yonder?” he demanded furiously. “Why do you do that nigger trash out there?”

  “When I’m out there, I do what they want to hear,” Elvis responded. “When I’m back here, I can do what I want to do.” Ira did not accept his explanation.

  “Ira tried to strangle him,” Charlie said.

  Elvis was never one to back down from physical combat. On the contrary, past performances would lead one to expect Elvis to bash his fist into the mouth of anyone who called him a “white nigger.” It seems likely that his encounter with Ira Louvin shook him to his roots. Ira demanded to know what he was doing as a man—a white man—and as an artist. In effect, Ira offered to fight him man-to-man. Elvis didn’t know quite what to do—fight, fly, or faint. “What would a real man do?” was the question. A week later, after doing a show in Jacksonville, Florida, Elvis collapsed in the parking lot. The doctor diagnosed exhaustion and put him into the hospital for the night. The next morning, Elvis bragged about how the nurses would not leave him alone. Strangely, he also claimed privately that he had not passed out; he was just trying to get the attention of Anita Carter, a beauty and one of the highly respected singing Carter sisters.

  Elvis changed willingly and eagerly. Driven by his obsession with pleasing whatever audience was before him, he revolutionized his stage manner and projected an image strikingly different from the one he had labored so hard to build with the girls. His biographer Peter Guralnick called it a “radical metamorphosis,” and he thought that it happened within a few days before Elvis’s television appearance with Milton Berle in San Diego on April 3, 1956. Berle was one of the creators of early American television, bringing to it a genius for manic slapstick humor. On this occasion, Berle was doing his show from the flight deck of the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carrier Hancock. The audience could hardly have been more unlike those of Elvis’s early career. It was significantly male—made up of young sailors, their officers, and invited guests. No venue could have been more masculine than a giant and powerful ship of war, an arena dedicated to defending America from Communist aggression. Berle dressed up comically as an Elvis look-alike and played out a skit with Elvis in which he was Elvis’s twin brother who had “taught him everything he knows.” Dressed like an exaggerated Elvis, Berle managed to parody brilliantly—as only he could—the image of Elvis that the girls loved.

  Elvis looked on in amazement. He became a fond and indulgent adult. Berle was the fool. No more bumps and grinds into the microphone by Elvis, no more spitting saliva-laden gum onto the deck or into an audience of girls, no more stripteases. His clothes were dark, neat, and unflashy. His hair was less greased. His very body—legs apart, feet firmly planted on the flight deck, arms in easy, comfortable motion—bespoke balance and unhaste. Elvis was at ease with the world, no rebel, no threat. Indeed, he was at one with this new and very broad audience. “It may not be as clear to the little girls,” Peter Guralnick explained, “but there is no aggression in the act.”

  In June, Elvis did another show with Berle in Los Angeles. The rating for the first show in San Diego was 30 percent. The second improved upon that number.

  In September 1956, with his initial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, Elvis reached his first really vast audience—fifty million people. During his visit to New York in October for his second appearance, he offered himself to America as a sane, sensible, and very appealing young man whose true character had previously been unrecognized. The New York Times was delighted to discover the real Elvis as he moved about the city before the show. It happily reported that “the idol of rock ’n’ roll juveniles also surprised an afternoon press interview by demonstrating to adult reporters that he is a polite, personable, quick-witted and charming young man.” Elvis was a “young man,” not a “boy,” and the girls were simply young, that is, “juveni
les.” “Adult reporters”—not young reporters—were highly approving of the “young man,” the Times said. The gap between Elvis and the older generations was rapidly closing as if it had never existed.

  During his run on the Sullivan show that evening, Elvis was a living model of great success folded into unshakable modesty. Pressed to tone down his by-then well-known and eagerly anticipated sex-laden signals, he did so with a youthful good humor that endeared him to his audience. There was no need for Sullivan to limit the focus of the cameras to the top half of his body. No one among the millions of viewers in his or her right mind could believe that this young man was a menace to society. His bad-boy behavior was nothing more than theater, good acting, and good-humored teasing. Milton Berle had parodied the earlier Elvis; now Elvis parodied himself, and delightfully so.

  Again, he ended his appearance with a public relations bull’s-eye. His closing line for the evening eviscerated the bad-boy Elvis image. “May God bless you as he has blessed me,” he said to his audience with a deferential bow and a sweeping gesture.

  Elvis quickly perfected his appealing persona for his interviewers. He was performing offstage now, and he manifested his marvelous talent for “reading” his audience and giving them exactly what they wanted. He was proud and humble. He knew that he was great, but his modesty was unshakable. “Teenagers are my life and triumph,” he asserted earnestly and honestly. “I’d be nowhere without them,” but their parents need not fear, he insisted. He wished he could sit down and talk with those who regarded him as a bad influence on their children. He was sure he could persuade them otherwise because he knew he had done nothing wrong. “I’ve examined my conscience and asked myself if I led anybody astray even indirectly, and I’m at peace with my conscience.” The Bible told him, he declared to the world, that one reaps what he sows. His own salvation was at stake, and he would not risk that. “If I did think I was bad for people, I would go back to driving a truck,” he declared, “and I really mean this.”