Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  More to the point for the Presleys, Orville Bean was the descendant of large landowners and slaveholders, and he and others like him might have lost extreme wealth with slavery, but they possessed the knowledge and the manners to rule. He had put Vernon into prison and then played a major role in getting him out. He had also put him and his family into two houses and took them out of both. In Lauderdale Courts, relations between landlord and tenant were formalized and depersonalized. Tenants had rights. They could petition and appeal. They also had certain responsibilities, the appearance of cleanliness and orderliness, and paying the rent—in the Presleys’ case $35 a month. The duties were clearly defined, and beyond those obligations they lived their private lives very much as they pleased.

  Lauderdale Courts, in effect, represented an extraordinary experiment in social engineering within Southern culture. It sought out and recognized worth among working-class whites, and it devoted substantial public resources to their elevation. It was totally fitting that this was a New Deal—an outside—idea. The Courts offered dignity, security, and upward mobility to people of the lower orders just as did other New Deal programs such as the WPA. The goal was obscured a bit during World War II when space in Lauderdale was often given to serving the war effort. After the war, however, scores of young people came out of the Courts to become, eventually, business people, teachers, nurses, and lawyers. Hundreds attended public schools and acquired skills that landed them solidly in the middle class. The usual progression was to go to school, get and keep a job, develop a trade, marry, rent a home, and then buy one of their own. Soon there would be children, but only two or three, not the half dozen or more that many of their grandparents had reared.

  In creating Lauderdale Courts, federal authorities in Memphis took a horizontal slice out of the Southern social pyramid, set it down as a whole piece on the northeastern edge of downtown, and gave it a significant measure of immunity from the informal and arbitrary sanctions that enforced the usual hierarchy. Economically speaking, in the Courts all whites looked alike. They were not poor, they were not on welfare, they earned their livelihood and paid their rent by working. Within the Courts, there was absolutely no pyramid of wealth, nor was there a social pyramid. For people who had suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous Southern white classism, as had Gladys, Vernon, and Elvis, it was a haven. Or it should have been, if Vernon had just kept working steadily and paid the rent.

  Humes High

  During the same month that the Presleys moved into Lauderdale Courts, September 1949, Elvis entered the ninth grade at Humes High School. At Humes, as in the Courts, the social pyramid was also truncated. It was a public school in a working-class neighborhood. Memphis city directories from 1949 to 1953 list household after household around Humes headed by house painters, delivery men, and drugstore clerks. A walk through the neighborhood at the end of the twentieth century showed many of their houses still standing, modest one-story wooden structures with wide front porches, screen doors, and swings hanging from chains.

  Very few Humes students came from affluent families, and some came from poor families or families whose economic security was impaired by the absence of a breadwinning father. The latter was the case with George Klein, who became a favorite with both teachers and fellow students at Humes and would become a close, lifelong friend of Elvis after Elvis became a star. According to the city directories, George lived alone with his mother, Bertha Klein, in a house on Manassas Street just across the street from Humes High. Mrs. Klein worked as a seamstress in the Mid-South’s premier men’s clothing store, Halle’s, on Main Street.

  At Humes High, a working-class boy or girl, even a poor boy or girl, could stand out as a student leader, a scholar, an athlete, or a musician. George Klein stood out as a gadfly. Small and slight, bright and energetic, he was into everything—sports writer, sports announcer, sports manager (armed on the field with towels and water buckets for the players), editor of the yearbook, and class president. He was everywhere, seemingly, at the same time. His peripatetic nature was recognized, tolerated, and even valued by fellow students. When he and Elvis graduated in the class of 1953, George was voted “the most likely to succeed.”

  All of the kids in the eighth grade or above who lived in Lauderdale Courts attended Humes High. The democratic synergy of the two institutions was impressive. The Courts offered decent living space for the working poor, while Humes offered a way up to the comforts of middle-class life. Public housing was for the fortunate few; public education was for everyone. Thanks to Gladys, Elvis had both.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, the controlling elite in the Southern states created public school systems out of whole cloth as a part of the effort to integrate the mass of white people into the culture they ruled, even as they pushed black people further away. Every child was required by law to attend school, and for white kids, the law was enforced with surprising consistency. One result was that talented children of the lower classes often developed the prospect, ambition, and means to rise into the middle orders and sometimes higher. The elite adopted the most talented of those who arose from the masses—even though it often took three generations to do so. The great mass entered the working class and earned relatively comfortable livings.

  Such was the case with three teenage boys who became Elvis’s closest friends. All three attended Humes High and lived in the Courts, two in Elvis’s building. Farley Guy’s father, who had worked for a railroad, died in 1949, and his mother moved into Lauderdale Courts. He loved horses and spent most of his adult life managing the stable at Shelby Farms in Memphis. Farley lived in the apartment just above Elvis, and their friend Paul Dougher lived directly above Farley. Evan “Buzzy” Forbess lived in an apartment nearby. Everyone recognized that he was one of Elvis’s best friends during his high school years. Buzzy, though slight of build, was a football star. He spent the rest of his life working for Memphis’s Light, Gas, and Water Division and came to live in a comfortable home in a white working-class neighborhood on the north side of town.

  Living in the Courts

  Elvis lived in the Presley apartment in Lauderdale Courts for more than three years, longer than anywhere else in his life other than Graceland. These were critical years for Elvis, years in which he moved through puberty to young manhood. Everything should have gone smoothly for the Presleys. Vernon’s job at the paint company meshed well with living in the Courts. Not only was it just down the street, his earnings there should have supported the family well. The Housing Authority had worked out the numbers carefully. With his salary, a family of three could occupy the two-bedroom apartment for $35 a month and live securely and comfortably. Hundreds of other tenants in Lauderdale managed just fine over the years, but within a year the Presleys were falling behind in their rent and were in danger of eviction. In the crisis, Gladys went back to work, first at Fashion Curtains, and later—for about ten days—tending the large coffee urn at Britling Cafeteria a few blocks over on Main Street.

  Also during the summer of 1950, Vernon got a great idea for increasing the family income: he bought a push lawn mower for Elvis. Elvis and his friends started mowing lawns in the neighborhood. Vernon later liked to tell the story of how Elvis came home after his first day in the business. He put 50 cents on the table, as if that were the total return. Then he laughed and pulled $7 out of his pocket. Vernon was delighted. This was income that would not be reported to the housing authorities—or to the IRS.

  In the fall of 1950, Elvis got a steady job working from 5 to 10 p.m. as an usher at Loew’s State Theater on Main Street. In those days, movies ran continuously in an always darkened theater. The movie programs included a weekly news film and usually a cartoon. In an upscale theater, teenage ushers dressed in smart uniforms and equipped with flashlights escorted newcomers to their seats. When Gladys learned that Elvis was falling asleep in class, she made him quit this job. That fall, Elvis also got another uniform in which he showed pride. He joined the ROTC (R
eserve Officer Training Corps) at Humes High. Photographs in the yearbook for the 1950–51 school year show him fitting into the student body neatly and not conspicuously.

  As soon as school was out in June 1951, Elvis went to work at Precision Tool, by that time practically a family workplace for the Smith and Presley men in Memphis. His uncles Travis and Johnny Smith worked there, as did a cousin or two. The Korean War was raging then, and the company was producing casings for artillery shells at a high rate. Workers were in great demand, and Elvis was soon doing his part for the war effort by operating a drill press making rocket shells. He earned $27 a week.

  Also in June, Vernon received a $10-a-month raise at United Paint. That raise was a curse in disguise. The paint company duly reported the increase to the Housing Authority, which raised the rent on the Presley apartment. Vernon felt the pressure. In September, he ceased making payments on furniture he had bought in Tupelo in November 1947. Elvis was now sixteen and no longer required by law to attend school. Vernon wanted him to quit school, take a regular job, and bring home some money. Gladys would not hear of it.

  Back in school during the fall of 1951 for his junior year, Elvis at sixteen seemed a more self-confident young man. He was growing sideburns, so thin still that he was using hair coloring to prove that the sideburns were truly there. He also let his hair grow long and tortured it in several ways with applications that gave it a stuck-down look. He probably got his tonsorial ideas from the movies. In particular, he idolized the actor Tony Curtis, whose head was usually crowned with black, shiny, slicked-back hair. During the school day, everyone noticed that Elvis paid a lot of attention to his hair. His voice was changing, and his acne was on the rise.

  Elvis also began to wear unusual clothes. As the school year progressed, other students raised eyebrows at his two-toned western-style shirts and stared unbelievingly at his black pants with pink stripes down the sides. The striped-pants concept might have come from his usher’s uniform, though fellow students thought the effect made him look like a carhop in a drive-in restaurant or a bellboy at the Peabody Hotel. He had probably begun to acquire some of his clothes from Lansky Brothers, a store on Beale Street that catered to style-conscious young black men.

  Elvis stood out in the student body for his style, but in no other way. His grades were a marvel of modesty. He belonged to a lot of clubs just as other kids did, but held no offices. That fall he did make an attempt to gain some masculine distinction. Elvis went out for football, but the coach said he would have to cut his hair to join the team. He declined, saying that he had to work anyway.

  Actually, it appears Elvis did not work during the fall of 1951, but Gladys did. She took a job as a nurse’s aide at St. Joseph’s Hospital, just down the hill from her front door. It was the most gratifying work that she had ever done. Naturally outgoing and nurturing, she came to be respected, valued, and very much liked by patients and staff. Further, she earned $24 a week, more than she had ever made. In February 1952, however, she had to quit. The Housing Authority notified the Presleys that they were now making too much money to remain in their apartment under the present contract and threatened eviction. The Presleys apparently felt that they needed more spending money than the housing authorities allowed.

  Vernon petitioned the Housing Authority for relief. He explained their excess income even as he pointed out that they did not have income enough. Again, he was the blameless victim of circumstances. The trouble began some time before when he had not been able to work. There had been “illness in family,” he wrote. It was Vernon who was ill. He had hurt his back. Hence, Gladys had gone to work of necessity, but now had quit. “Wife is working,” he declared, “to help pay out of debt. Bills are pressing—and don’t want to be sued.” Vernon’s illness, presumably, was unavoidable, and the family was struggling in good faith to make things right.

  With seemingly infinite institutional patience, the Housing Authority gave the Presleys a new lease that would, presumably, fit their circumstances as described by Vernon. Rent would be reduced to $43 a month and maximum income would be set at $3,000 a year. By that time, if he were working full-time, Vernon’s annual income might approach $2,400, or $200 a month. The new figure left a good margin for occasional earnings for Gladys. Also, Elvis might pick up a dollar or two here and there that would not be reported.

  But Gladys and Elvis were not working, and in the early spring of 1952 the Presleys were broke again. About this time, Elvis’s shop teacher saw that he lingered in the shop when the other students had gone to the cafeteria for lunch. He found that Elvis did not even have the price of the meal. The teacher gave Elvis lunch money then and continued to do so as needed. Vernon later confessed that some days he could not give his son more than a quarter for his lunch at school. It seems likely that some days he could not even give him a quarter.

  The Presleys were again behind in their rent during that spring of 1952. They owed $43.74 in back rent and were being charged $1 a day penalty until the bill was paid. Once more, they faced eviction. Elvis went back to ushering at Loew’s Theater. Five weeks into the job the manager caught him scuffling with another usher. The girl at the concession stand had been passing free candy to Elvis, the other young man had ratted on her, and Elvis wanted to hurt him.

  There was probably much more to Elvis’s aggressive action than first meets the eye. His mother had been forced to quit the job she loved at St. Joseph’s, the family was broke and in danger of eviction, he was working as best he could while going to school, and it was all because Vernon could not manage to work steadily. In Elvis and Gladys Elaine Dundy made much out of Elvis’s attack on his fellow usher as “misdirected rage.” The real target, she insisted, was Vernon.

  Elvis was not able to confront his father directly. Nor could he confront his mother, who always sheltered his father. Instead, he assaulted a young man, ostensibly to defend the honor of a young woman passing out food and drink who might lose her job because of her kindness to him. Elaine Dundy argued persuasively that Elvis then and later showed himself “incapable of confronting his real enemies head on.” It was, she said, his “fatal flaw.”

  Again and again Elvis’s father had failed to take care of his wife and his son as any good man should. Vernon had a well-paying job at the paint company, and in Lauderdale Courts they should have been secure. But Vernon had developed that most mysterious, unaccountable, and debilitating of male ailments, the “bad back,” which recurrently threw him out of work and the family into desperate financial straits. Gladys and Elvis had taken jobs attempting to make up the difference, but Gladys’s very success in earning money at female labors—nursing, sewing, serving up coffee at Britling Cafeteria—brought threats of eviction from their home. Surely Vernon could have found another job that would not have strained his back, but he apparently made no effort to do so. There is no indication that he ever signed up with the state employment office to find suitable work, which Elvis himself did after he turned eighteen and even before he finished high school.

  Although Vernon could hardly find lunch money for Elvis in the spring of 1952, he found money in June 1952 to buy a 1941 Lincoln Coupe and encouraged Elvis to think of it as “his.” Elvis was thrilled. “My daddy was something wonderful to me,” he told an interviewer in 1956, recalling the purchase. Fellow students at Humes saw Elvis driving the car—with cardboard substituting for one window—so much that they thought it did belong to him. Using the car, seventeen-year-old Elvis could commute to any paying job in or around Memphis, which he promptly did.

  The Presley family finances here are puzzling, as always. In March 1953, they filed their federal tax form for 1952. It showed that Gladys earned $555.70 at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Vernon earned $2,781.13 from United Paint. The two of them earned $3,336.83, or about $278 a month. Vernon alone averaged about $231 a month. It seems that even without Gladys working they should have been able to pay the $35, $43, or even $50 monthly rent for their apartment, enjoy a comfortable life
style, and also save enough to tide the family over during Vernon’s illnesses. Yet he could not give his son more than 25 cents a day for his lunch at school. How could that be? Obviously, the Presleys were spenders, not savers. For them, paying the rent was clearly less important than buying or doing things. Their difficulties arose from a passion for consumption as well as inconsistency in earnings. They were simply unable to balance the family books. It was as if they could not count.

  In the summer of 1952, after his junior year in high school, Elvis went to work in an upholstery shop and in one month made $109. After that, he went to work full-time, from 3 to 11 p.m., at MARL Metal Products, a furniture assembling company on Georgia Street near the river. No doubt the ’41 Lincoln was very useful in getting Elvis the two miles to work and back every day. It was during that summer, Gladys later proudly remembered, that Elvis would take it upon himself to pay the bill at the grocery store, $25 to $30 a month. “We didn’t ask him to do it,” she added. “He’d just do it himself.”

  Elvis was eager to drop out of school and get permanent employment to help support the family. Vernon was totally supportive of Elvis’s ambition. Gladys was adamantly opposed, and Vernon backed down.

  In September 1952, Elvis went back to Humes to begin his senior year but kept his job at the metal shop. Again, he began to fall asleep in class. Mildred Scrivener, Elvis’s homeroom and history teacher for the twelfth grade, saw him wake up when the end-of-class bell sounded one day. “Elvis, like a little boy, raised his head, got to his feet, and wandered out like a sleepwalker,” she recalled. In applying for the job at the metal works, Elvis made himself exactly a year older than he was. In a penciled draft of their 1952 income tax form, the Presleys reported no income from Elvis.