Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  “It got so hard on him,” Gladys remembered, “he was so beat all the time, we made him quit.” She went back to work at St. Joseph’s Hospital. In November 1952, the Housing Authority projected the Presley family yearly income at $4,133, or about $344 a month, the highest yet. By common calculation, they should have been able easily to pay up to $86 a month in rent. Their projected income got them yet another eviction notice on November 17, 1952. They were to move out by February 28, 1953, more than three months later. Yet again, at least for the moment, the Presleys were too prosperous to enjoy the shelter of public housing. They would have to make room for some less fortunate family.

  This time, they determined, seemingly with bitterness, to leave Lauderdale Courts. They left seven weeks before they were required to leave. After all, with a projected income of $80 a week, surely they could make it on their own. On January 7, 1953, the day before Elvis turned eighteen, they moved out of the Courts. Perhaps they stayed for a short time with kinfolk on Cypress Street in the lumber yards north of town. Soon, however, they were rooming at 698 Saffarans Avenue, just north of the Humes High campus.

  By April, they were more permanently located at 462 Alabama Avenue, sharing a house with Rabbi Alfred Fruchter and his wife, Jeanette. Their landlord was a widow whose husband had been a kosher butcher. The rent was $50 a month. Elvis turned on electricity and gas for the Fruchters on the Sabbath when they as Orthodox Jews could not do so for themselves. The Fruchters and the landlady sometimes helped the Presleys with their finances. “They never had much,” Mrs. Fruchter said, but every Saturday morning Vernon and Elvis would “polish that old Lincoln like it was a Cadillac.”

  Gladys—Trouble in Mind

  The Presleys seemed comfortable in their new home on Alabama Avenue, but the years of strain, struggle, and anxiety had taken its toll on Gladys. Her decline had already become apparent in Lauderdale Courts. Farley Guy remembered her as “a sort of sickly woman.” He recalled that “she walked around a lot dressing only in her housecoat and gown.” Minnie Mae stayed with them often. “Mister Presley was always real quiet and smiling all the time. No matter what mood he may have been in at the time, he was always smiling.” In April 1952, when Gladys turned forty, the family was behind in their rent, and she began to brood about her life and its losses. She had lost two babies, but she dwelled specially on the death of Elvis’s twin.

  Gladys began to worry about her looks. She was several years Vernon’s senior, though later she usually would claim that she was the same age as her husband. Trying to look younger, she blackened her hair more deeply. She altered the color of her lipstick. She used eye shadow and a bit of mascara to emphasize her dark eyes. She began to take diet pills, hoping to lose weight. She and Vernon often went to the movies and stopped off for a beer on the way home. Now Gladys began to drink more than one or two beers on such occasions. In time, she did not need to be in a bar to drink them.

  Coming home at night, Elvis would find his mother in moods that must have frightened him. She was either very happy, very excited, or she was sad and tearful, remembering him in his childhood. He would try to calm her down, petting her, calling her “baby,” and using the especially intimate loving language they had developed in his childhood.

  Increasingly it became apparent to Elvis that his father would never steadily support or take care of his mother financially or emotionally. That duty would fall to him, and he was ready and eager to begin. Nothing was more important to him. Buzzy Forbess remembered that Elvis, Farley Guy, and he would sit around and talk about what they wanted to do with their lives. Farley wanted to be a baseball player. Buzzy wanted to be a football player. And “Elvis always said he wanted a job where he could provide for his mother and father.”

  During the summer of 1952, the problem reached a crisis point. It was then that Elvis began to pay the grocery bills without telling either parent. He might have connected Gladys’s extreme moods, her drinking, and other disturbing signs in her behavior to Vernon’s inability to earn a steady income and save them from recurrent threats of eviction and other humiliating circumstances. Quietly paying the grocery bills was a way of helping his mother without embarrassing his father.

  As an adult looking back, Elvis would say to his friends with emphasis, “We were poor, man!” Vernon’s federal tax returns show that the Presleys earned enough money to live comfortably. They were definitely not poor. Friends and neighbors were sometimes amazed at the things that the Presleys had—a telephone, a record player, a radio, a car. Yet they were recurrently in dire financial straits.

  It must have seemed to Elvis that his family had little or no power in the world, and neither did he. He was frustrated, angry, and rebellious. His rebellions assumed forms that were strikingly apparent. He began to cultivate differences that appeared bizarre to his schoolmates and were bound to excite animosities, especially from other boys. It was as if he were asking for a fight. He may have been a rebel with a compelling cause, but the cause was exceedingly unclear.

  In the fall of 1952, when Elvis decided to return to school for his senior year instead of going to work full-time, his clothes, hair, and demeanor seemed to explode in a riot of difference. Nobody else in school looked like him. He would wear dress pants when other boys would wear ordinary pants. He would wear loafers when they wore shoes. He acquired a chest-hugging black bolero jacket and a pink and black sports coat. Sometimes, he wore his coat and tied a scarf around his neck like an ascot. He continued to wear trousers with colored stripes down the sides. He treated his hair as his crowning glory, letting it grow long, pouring on the stickum, and combing it often and carefully. One day, he showed up at school having given himself a permanent wave. All of this came from the movies, from Lansky’s clothing store on Beale Street, and from Elvis’s fertile imagination in matters of dress and appearance.

  The goal was to look different, to stand out by assaulting the eye with objects that were out of place. The disjunction compelled attention and sent a message. Ultimately, it was a play for attention, for audience, a cry for recognition of looks, talent, and worth. First it demanded attention; then it invited rejection; then, hopefully, consideration and acceptance.

  Elvis got attention, but not always the kind he would have liked. He stood out in a manner that some students, themselves adolescent and vulnerable, took as defiant and insulting. Elvis was weird, “queer,” a target for would-be lynchers, and he brought it upon himself. Later in life, he recalled with great bitterness that in this stage of his life it was as if some people said, “Hey, look at that squirrel up there in the trees—let’s get him!” He was never physically attacked, but the threats were real. His friends from the Courts, both girls and boys, defended him always.

  Senior Year

  At the very same time that Elvis was presenting an image of generalized and bold rebellion to the world, he was offering every sign of deference to the authorities in his life, and they responded accordingly. As always, he answered his elders with “yes, sir” and “yes, ma’am.” His homeroom teacher, Mildred Scrivener, was highly sympathetic to Elvis, and so too were other teachers. When he finished Humes High, the yearbook picked Elvis and two others out of a class of a couple hundred to label as “teacher’s pet.” He obviously felt the need to advertise his distress in his provocative appearance and at the same time plead to sympathetic authorities for protection and relief, working hard for it with the tools that his mother had taught him to use.

  Recognition came much too late at Humes High for Elvis’s overall happiness there, but it came just in time to begin the revolution that would change his life. As it happened, Miss Scrivener was in charge of managing the school’s annual “Minstrel Show,” scheduled for Thursday evening, April 9, 1953. Such productions were typical in high schools all over the South. A school band provided the music. More than a dozen students in blackface, seated onstage in a long row of chairs, sang and swayed. “End men” on either side of the singers, also in blackface, shook tamb
ourines, talked loudly back and forth, and made jokes, while “Mr. Interlocutor,” a white-faced, elegantly suited white student seated in the middle of the group, acted as the master of ceremonies. Schools could easily buy packets from music publishers that laid everything out—music, words, costumes—for the players.

  At Humes that year, the Minstrel Show was combined with a talent contest. After the “Grand Opening,” little five-year-old Helen Pittman did her baton twirling act. Later in the program, the Arwood twin girls did their baton twirling act. A quartet sang, three girls played the xylophone, and individuals sang, danced, did acrobatics, and played various instruments. Joanna Massarano, for instance, did a solo on her accordion.

  At appropriate times all through the show, the band played, the singers sang, and the tambourines rang. One of their songs, “Kentucky Babe,” was a required number in any high school minstrel show. “Fly away, Kentucky babe,” it went. “Fly away to rest. Fly a-wayyyy … a-wayyyy … a-wayyyy … ” They would sing lustily, heads up, mouths open wide, young voices charming and delightful, but not quite in harmony.

  Elvis signed himself up for Miss Scrivener’s show. He was number sixteen on the bill of twenty-two acts. He came after a student sang “Old Man River” (no doubt in blackface) and the band and singers did “Beautiful Ohio,” another staple of a minstrel show.

  When Elvis’s turn came, he strung his guitar around his neck and slouched out onto the stage. For a few moments, he affected the manner of a shy and surly youth, looking sideways at the audience of more than fifteen hundred students and teachers. Then he swung his body around and plunged into “Till I Waltz Again with You,” a song recently made very popular by “the little girl with the big voice,” Teresa Brewer. The audience was briefly aghast, then highly responsive, making a great clamor and ending with loud applause. It was said that one eighth-grade girl actually fainted.

  Audience response determined the winner, and it was Miss Scrivener who made the call. “It’s you, Elvis,” she said. “Go on out there.” Elvis went out for his encore and again received tumultuous applause. “They really liked me, Miss Scrivener,” he exclaimed ecstatically to her as he came offstage again. “They really liked me.”

  Recalling the scene years later, Elvis saw the occasion as one in which his performance onstage radically changed the way his peers saw him. “I wasn’t popular in school,” he said. “I wasn’t dating anybody [there]. I failed music—only thing I ever failed. And then they entered me in this talent show … It was amazing how popular I became after that.” In fact, Elvis had dated girls in Lauderdale Courts, and he never failed a music class. In Elvis’s mind “they,” not “I,” entered “me” in the talent show. It was as if some authority must give him a stage and an audience, and only then would he become someone really worth knowing.

  Emotionally, Gladys and Vernon were the two most important people in Elvis’s life. Yet it was three female teachers in the public schools in Tupelo and Memphis who first gave Elvis the opportunity to develop his powerful talent for entertaining and, in the process, a feeling of self-worth in the broad world.

  Jobs

  On Wednesday evening, June 3, Elvis graduated from Humes High. Two months earlier, on March 26, he had walked into the Tennessee Employment Security Office and put his occupational future in their hands. In filling out his part of the application form, he wrote that he was five feet eleven inches in height and weighed 150 pounds. For recreation, he liked “sing[ing], playing ball, working on car, going to movies.” In answer to the question of how he had prepared himself for the workforce, he wrote that he would finish Humes High and had taken two years each of English, wood shop, ROTC, and science. In addition, he had belonged to the speech and biology clubs. The woman who interviewed him said that he “wants factory work at once—must help father work off financial obligations.” He also indicated that he “owns an automobile.”

  Elvis took a battery of tests, which led the interviewer to conclude that he “was mechanically inclined, but should avoid fine work with fingers.” Elvis himself had said that he would not want to be a machine operator, “but thought [he] might like industrial maint. [maintenance] + repair.” The woman who interviewed Elvis read him well. “Rather flashily dressed—‘playboy’ type,” she wrote, but immediately noted that his appearance was belied “by fact [that he] has worked hard past 3 summers.” With all of the talk about mechanical skills, she nevertheless wrote that he “wants a job dealing with people.”

  On May 6 Elvis was in the employment office again, but no entry was made in his record. The office called on July 1 and referred him to the M. B. Parker Company, a machine shop, for a temporary job as an “assembler.” He began work the same day at 90 cents an hour. His take-home pay was about $33 a week. Each week, he took a few dollars out for himself and gave the rest to his father, not his mother. Vernon took it.

  Elvis’s job with Parker ended on Wednesday, July 29, and the next Monday, August 3, he was back in the employment office again. He was not happy with work in a factory and “expressed [a] desire for a job where he could keep clean.” The people in the office tried to oblige. On August 5, they put him in touch with Sears, Roebuck, but Elvis could not get an interview. The next day, he got two interviews, one to work as a “delivery boy” for $35 a week and another at Kroger’s, a grocery chain, but neither hired him. Six weeks later, having garnered no other leads from the employment office, Elvis went back to Precision Tool. He had only worked one month out of three since finishing high school.

  Elvis worked for Precision Tool for six and a half months, quitting on March 19, 1954. His tax return for 1953 showed that his taxable income from Parker was about $130 and from Precision $786. His total taxable income from July 1 to the end of the year was $916. A pay slip for March 1956 indicated that he was then getting $62 for a forty-hour workweek and that his pay after deductions would amount to about $40. As far as we know, Elvis, unlike his father, never missed a day of work once he had a job.

  CHAPTER SIX

  DIXIE LOCKE AND SAM PHILLIPS

  Dixie Locke

  In the fall and winter of 1953–54 Elvis worked steadily. In the normal course of events, he would have a time of youthful bachelorhood in which there would be a number of girls, then one girl, and soon marriage and children. He passed through the first stage, and in January 1954, when he was nineteen years old, he found that one girl. Her name was Dixie Locke. He loved her, it seems, virtually on first sight. And she him.

  Before Dixie, Elvis was not marvelously successful in his courtships. It was not for lack of trying. Even as a young boy back in Tupelo, he had been interested in girls, but his choices were less interested in him. Magdalene Morgan was a tall, handsome girl the same age as Elvis. At age ten, they were photographed together, charmingly standing side by side, she taller than he, in the church yard in East Tupelo. When he was thirteen years old, several weeks before the Presleys left for Memphis, Elvis took his parents’ marriage license and wrote his name in the space with his father’s and Magdalene’s name in the space with his mother’s. Interviewed decades later, Magdalene was amazed that he had done that. They were friends and they had held hands, she said, but she never thought of their relationship as a romance

  Elvis’s first love in the Courts was Betty McMahan. Betty lived on the third floor above him. When she first moved in she talked to him from the open window of her apartment while he stood in the yard below. She would not come down, she said, because she felt she didn’t have anything decent to wear. Soon there was a knock on her door. It was Elvis; he had brought her a pair of blue jeans.

  Betty began dating a boy from Arkansas, but already Elvis was courting fourteen-year-old Billie Wardlaw, who lived just across the hall from Betty. “Elvis was a great kisser,” Billie later recalled, but he was very shy. Happily for Elvis, when they played the kissing game “spin the bottle,” they did so in the dark. Also, when Elvis played his guitar and sang at teenage parties in the Courts, he insisted on hav
ing the lights turned out. Often he performed especially for the girls. His aunt Lillian thought that he preferred the company of girls much more than that of boys. “He was different with the girls,” she remembered.

  Elvis definitely needed female attention. He worked hard to get it, and when he got it he was very possessive. When he lost it, he suffered acutely. Billie Wardlaw experienced this cycle. She met a sailor at the USO Club on Third Street and began to date him while she was still seeing Elvis. He was very upset. One day he happened to see a young man’s picture in her wallet and responded violently. “He grabbed it out of my purse and began stomping and grinding it into the ground with the heel of his shoe,” she recalled. One night she finally announced to Elvis that she was ending their relationship, and “he started crying.” She had never before seen “a man, or a boy, cry,” she said.

  Elvis’s popularity in high school came a bit too late for him to find a new girlfriend there. He probably continued to date girls from the Courts, and certainly he began a long and close friendship with his cousin Gene Smith, with whom he double-dated. Gene also worked at Precision Tool. Using code words, Elvis and Gene had created a way of communicating with each other that other people had difficulty understanding. No doubt, the girls they were with found them more than a little strange as the four of them drove around in the old 1941 Lincoln to the movies, the drive-ins, and the parks with the boys gibbering away in their own language.

  Dixie

  In January 1954, Elvis began attending the Assembly of God Church on McLemore Avenue, some two miles south of downtown. His cousin Gene came with him. Perhaps they went there to meet girls, but for Elvis there was much more to it than that. He wanted to sing in a gospel quartet. For years, he had attended Saturday all-night gospel sings at Ellis Auditorium, two blocks from the Courts. Recently, those events had been organized by the Blackwood Brothers gospel quartet, which had moved its “home church” from Shenandoah, Iowa, to this much more suitable church in Memphis. Elvis could not hope, of course, to sing with the Blackwood Brothers, but there were also amateur quartets around, one of which had been spawned by the Blackwoods out of the church on McLemore. As he had learned to do, without demanding attention, he was putting himself in the eye of those who had the power to do something with his talent, to put him on a stage in front of an audience and let him sing.