Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  Sonny West, who eventually became one of Elvis’s bodyguards, captured the phenomenon perfectly. Sonny was a young enlisted man in the air force stationed in the Southwest. He was large, dark, and handsome with, it seems, a ready appetite for young women. He met a local girl and went with her to an Elvis performance at the rodeo grounds. As Sonny described her in the so-called bodyguard book—Elvis: What Happened?—she “was a quiet, corn-fed Southwestern girl whose demeanor and looks suggested that when someone invented virginity and apple pie, they must have had her in mind.” He recalled that “the dainty face and the Sunday-best dress she was wearing told him immediately to resist cursing in her presence and scrap any thoughts of ever scoring.”

  A half hour later, this young woman was, in Sonny’s limited understanding, “behaving totally out of character.” She acted “like a sex-starved little nymphet,” he declared. “Believe me,” Sonny insisted, “this gal changed right before my eyes.” Sonny’s perception was that Elvis had caused the girl to become something that she was not. Like some wizard, he had waved a magic wand and created a miracle in defiance of nature. Sonny continued: “If someone had grabbed that lady right there and then and dragged her off to bed, it would have happened there and then. Every time he moved, it seemed like a couple of hundred gals were getting it off.”

  Sonny never did, as he delicately worded his ambition, “score with the lady.” Indeed, he said, “after the show my gal just went back to what she was like before. It was as if all that carrying on was for Elvis and nobody else.” It never occurred to Sonny that his date’s “carrying on” was not for Elvis, but for herself. He saw her as a nice girl, and he could only make sense of her behavior by describing it as “totally out of character.”

  Sonny’s limited universe, restricted by a sort of testosterone-driven tunnel vision, was not rare among American males in the 1950s. Women were to be passive, not active, in sexual and all other relations, submissive and undemanding. In the broad round of life, women were not to be the creators and controllers of their sexual pleasures. Men certainly did not exist to be used sexually by women as they pleased. Men worthy of the name could not imagine a male stripper for a female audience—a male Gypsy Rose Lee or Tempest Storm. Men who sold their bodies for sex were gigolos, Italians in tight pants, or effete Europeans, and something less than real men. Most men—like most women—could not imagine themselves as “sex objects.” What women saw as their role in life during the week was confirmed in church on Sunday. Their lot was God-given—as Paul had tried to teach those amazingly slow learners, the Corinthians—“For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man,” he preached.

  In the eyes of young people in the South, there were two groups: good girls and bad girls. Good girls were not to be pressed aggressively into sex. Bad girls (theoretically) hardly had to be pressed at all. The trick was to “sex” the girl in question: Was she a good girl … or a bad girl? Sonny West thought he could tell.

  Offstage, Elvis offered himself as a male replica of Sonny’s prim and proper date, a “good girl.” He was a convincing angel, a perfectly mannered, seemingly pure and even virginal Southern boy. Onstage he was a devil, pumped up with carnal knowledge and a predatory attitude, a satyr ready to ravish whichever young maiden might venture near. Both Elvises seemed real, yet they were incompatible. For some years, the teddy bear denied all knowledge of the tiger.

  On February 16, 1955, the singer and disc jockey Roy Orbison first saw Elvis come onstage in the high school field house in Odessa, Texas. “First thing he came out and spat out a piece of gum,” Roy recalled. Elvis spit on the floor and was not genteel in his remarks to the audience. “His diction was real coarse, like a truck driver’s,” Roy said. “I can’t overemphasize how shocking he looked and seemed that night.” Swiveling his hips, bumping and grinding suggestively, curling his upper lip and snarling, he was raw and outrageous. Yet he had a voice, a talent, an unmatchable feel for the music that vibrated through his audiences. “Just a real raw cat singing like a bird,” Roy said. “His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing.”

  Roy stretched for an analogy and came to David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet. “Actually it affected me exactly the same way as when I first saw that David Lynch film,” he said. “I just didn’t know what to make of it. There was just no reference point in the culture to compare it.” It was outrageous and irresistible.

  Roy’s analogy was marvelously insightful, given the movie’s plot, specifically the attempt by an exceedingly unlovely and violent homosexual man to seduce a handsome and virginal young man. The Elvis that Roy saw onstage was not a nice man. Rather, he was “raw,” spitting out his gum, talking in a “real coarse” manner, curling his lip and snarling. He was ready and eager to take each girl in the audience sexually, by force if need be, “then and there,” to use Sonny West’s phrase. In the bubble with Elvis, the girl would seemingly have sex emotionally, but she would only dance—in plain sight in the auditorium of the high school she attended, or in a public arena in the community in which she lived. There was indeed no conventional reference point to which the performance of the girls could be compared, as they amazingly rebelled against Southern social conventions.

  Just as the girls were “prim and proper” before and after the performance, so too, it seemed, was Elvis. He didn’t curse, smoke, or drink. He loved his mother and gospel music. He was unfailingly mannerly and exceedingly deferential to his elders. “Yes, ma’am,” he would respond, and “Yes, sir.”

  Elvis deferred offstage, but onstage he had no qualms at all when it came to competing with older performers as well as his contemporaries for attention. Talented and ruthless, he wanted to win totally and exclusively the love and adoration of every audience he met. He had an uncanny ability for finding his audience, feeling out its desires, and playing to them. Tillman Franks, a veteran showman who organized tours for Louisiana Hayride performers, described Elvis in action: “He would study a crowd. He would look at them, see that he’s gotten through to them, and then give them a little bit more. He had electricity between him and the audience. Elvis masterminded the situation. He was a genius at it.” Elvis himself gloried in his talent, and he used it aggressively. He also adjusted quickly to the fact that his audiences too gloried in his talent, and he used that adoration aggressively. Moreover, he adjusted quickly to the fact that his audiences had become distinctly female and very young. He did not intend that result and rued that young men often resented him, but he did nothing to pander to male audiences.

  Forbidden Fruit

  In May 1955, the Elvis comet flamed across the Southern sky for all America to see. Elvis was included in a Hank Snow All-Star Jamboree tour that began in New Orleans, traveled for seven days through Alabama and Florida, then moved northward into North Carolina and Virginia for six more days. The show was purely country and gospel—except for Elvis. Star performers Hank Snow, Slim Whitman, Faron Young, and Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters drew the crowds, but the bill also included youngsters such as Elvis and Jimmie Rodgers Snow, Hank Snow’s twenty-year-old son. The newcomers came on first, then, after an intermission, the stars. Already no young performer dared follow Elvis, so he ended the opening set. After the first night, the manager put him at the end of the whole show. Nobody, not even Hank Snow, wanted to follow Elvis. After Elvis and the girls had met, no sensible professional dared enter the steaming hot and churning waters.

  During this tour, Jimmie Rodgers Snow was Elvis’s roommate. Jimmie had first met Elvis in February in Lubbock, Texas, where the Colonel had booked him to share the stage with “the hillbilly cat.” He was shocked by Elvis’s attire, “a chartreuse jacket and black pants with a white stripe down the side.” Bad enough offstage, in Jimmie’s eyes, Elvis was worse onstage. Elvis’s gyrations were outrageous, and yet “the kids were just going wild.”

  Talking to Elvis, Jimmie quickly got over his shock. Elvis expressed great admir
ation for Jimmie’s father and sang favorite passages from Hank Snow’s more obscure numbers. Jimmie was amazed at his knowledge and persuaded by his sincerity. Soon, he not only liked Elvis, he wanted to be Elvis.

  On the tour, Jimmie focused on Elvis like the eye of a movie camera. In Mobile, he watched the girls chase Elvis across a football field. In the tour cities, he would catch shots of Elvis cruising about in his new pink and white Cadillac with girls all around. As Elvis’s roommate, he was an especially intimate witness.

  “He would run the women,” Jimmie said. “He’d run two or three of them in one night.” Jimmie was not sure whether he was having sex with each one. Elvis did not say and Jimmie did not ask. He gave Elvis plenty of freedom for his activities. “If I thought he was going to run some women in the room with him, I didn’t stay,” he said. Thoughtfully, he concluded, “I just think he wanted them around. It was a sense of insecurity, I guess, because I don’t think he was a user. He just loved women, and I think they knew that.”

  Florida was the Colonel’s very special domain. He had lived there during much of his adult life, and he prepared the ground thoroughly for Elvis’s arrival. His public relations person for the Florida portion of the tour was Mae Axton, journalist, country songwriter, and English teacher at Paxon High School in Jacksonville. Mae was born in Texas and reared in Oklahoma, the daughter of a U.S. congressman. Writing an article for a magazine had led her to an interest in country music and a number of publicity projects in Florida for Colonel Parker and Hank Snow. She interviewed Elvis on radio before the May 7 performance in Daytona Beach. He called her “Miz Axton” so many times that she pressed him to use her first name. Elvis persisted in addressing her as “ma’am.”

  Mae was superb at her work, but nobody could have prepared Florida for Elvis. An Orlando reporter, a woman who preferred the annual spring performances of the Metropolitan Opera in Atlanta, was amazed by the rawness of the whole show but especially by the physicality of the “hillbilly fan” who whistled shrilly through his teeth, barked like a dog, and stomped the floor over the performances of such singers as Faron Young and Martha Carson. “But what really stole the show,” she wrote, “was this 20-year-old sensation, Elvis Presley, a real sex box as far as the teenage girls are concerned.” The girls “squealed themselves silly over this fellow in orange coat and sideburns.” Afterward, the “girlies” surrounded him asking for his autograph. “He would give each a long, slow look with drooped eyelids and comply. They ate it up.”

  The crescendo event came at the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville on May 13 with a crowd of fourteen thousand. Elvis’s act was the last, and as he left the stage he made a serious mistake. “Girls,” he said flirtatiously, “I’ll see you all backstage.” Then came the stampede. Elvis made it to the locker room with a screaming herd of teenage girls in hot pursuit. By the time help arrived, he was perched on top of one of the stalls in the toilet. Mae Axton and other staff members rushed in to save him. He looked “sheepish and scared,” she said, “like ‘wat’d I do?’ ” His coat was torn and his shirt was shredded. The girls had already reached up to take his ankle boots, his socks, and his belt. He was down to his pants, and the girls were stretching up and pulling at those when more defenders arrived. Mae saw one small girl with what looked like a hump on her back. When Faron Young kicked at her in a valiant attempt to keep Elvis’s pants on his body, Elvis’s boots fell out of her clothes and the hump disappeared. The girls were determined, it seemed, to strip Elvis bare.

  In the parking lot, Elvis’s new Cadillac fared no better. It was covered with lipstick, scratches made with fingernail files, and writings with various instruments as girls attempted to leave their names, love notes, and phone numbers. Parts of his car were even ripped off and taken away. The Cadillac was a wreck. Adults were horrified. The girls were out of control. Another view, a more accurate one, was that the girls were in control, at least in the time and place where Elvis was in performance.

  Mae saw one of her former high school students, then a student nurse, in the crowd. The young woman didn’t even know who Elvis was, had not heard of him before the show. But she was “just ahhh,” Mae said. “All of them were.”

  “Hey, honey, what is it about this kid?” she asked.

  “Awww, Miz Axton,” the girl replied, “he’s just a great big beautiful hunk of forbidden fruit.”

  “Elvis” Means Money

  In Jacksonville, Colonel Parker caught the vision of a prosperous future unfolding before him. Mae said that was when the Colonel “got dollar marks in his eyes.” Parker himself told an associate that this was “the real eye opener.” Soon he would become the man in total charge of Elvis’s career. Elvis would become his only client.

  The Florida tour and the “panty raid” on Elvis by the girls in Jacksonville in May 1955 marked the great divide between Elvis as a purely Southern performer, with a Southern recording company, a Southern audience, and a Southern manager, and his explosion onto the national scene. His rapid rise compelled attention from major recording companies in the music industry. By then, he had made two more records with Sun Studios, and Sam Phillips was finding that he could not keep up with the demand. The Colonel was well connected through Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow with RCA. It happened that RCA’s country and western promotion manager, Chick Crumpacker, was in Richmond on May 16 when the “All Star Jamboree” came to town. He saw Elvis perform at the Mosque Theater. A graduate of the Northwestern School of Music and a sophisticated musician, Chick was astounded. Later, he could not even remember what Elvis sang—perhaps “Ba-by, ba-by, ba-uh-by, let’s play house”—but he remembered the style and the response of the audience. Elvis belched into the mike, then took out his chewing gum and threw it into the crowd. This was wild enough, but what really got the audience, Chick recalled, “was his energy and the way he sang the songs.”

  The next morning, while Chick was having breakfast with the Colonel and Hank Snow in the restaurant of the Thomas Jefferson Hotel, Elvis walked in. Again, Chick was amazed. “He was so unassuming,” he said. Elvis looked around nervously and then joined them. It was the split between devil and angel that everyone saw who knew Elvis. Chick thought Elvis was very smart. He flattered people, and they liked him. Chick certainly did. During the meeting, the Colonel acted as if Elvis were already “his boy.” This was just ten months after Elvis had first appeared in the Shell in Overton Park.

  All through the summer and fall of 1955, with Bob Neal as their manager, Elvis and the Blue Moon Boys continued to play the Southern circuits, mostly in the Lower South. Their well-traveled beats were in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The character of the venues was very much what they had been: the St. Francis County Fair and Livestock Show in Forrest City, Arkansas; the Boys Club Gymnasium in Paris, Texas; the high school auditorium in Midland, Texas; and the Slavonian Lodge Auditorium in Biloxi, Mississippi. In October, after another sweep into North Carolina and Virginia, they worked through the Deep South yet again. By now the rituals were set, the girls and Elvis each doing their parts.

  In August, they had added drummer D. J. Fontana to the group. D. J. had been the house drummer for the Hayride. He had first played with the Blue Moon Boys from behind a curtain. Country fans attending Hayride shows did not approve of drums in a band. Now D. J. came out from behind the curtain. He was an exceedingly valuable addition to the group, in part because of a special talent he had developed while playing for strippers in Shreveport nightclubs. He now adapted his skill for punctuating the bumps and grinds of female strippers to Elvis’s movements.

  Also in August, the band came out with their fifth and final record with Sam and Sun Studios. “Mystery Train” was a bluesy number that had to do with the singer putting his lover on a departing train. “It was the greatest thing I ever did on Elvis,” Sam later judged. “It was pure rhythm. At the end, Elvis was laughing, because he didn’t think it was a take, but I’m sorry, it was a fucking masterpiece!”

  Meanwhile, Co
lonel Parker was working his wiles to become Elvis’s manager. He was especially wooing Elvis’s parents, Vernon and Gladys. Elvis was only twenty years old; his parents were still his legal guardians and were obligated to sign any contract. Vernon was quickly persuaded. Gladys was skeptical and held back. The violence wreaked on her son during the Jacksonville riot had shaken her, and she did not trust the Colonel. Parker backed off, but shrewdly brought out his big guns. He had Grand Ole Opry stars Whitey Ford and Hank Snow talk to Gladys and Vernon on numerous occasions by phone and in person. Only with Parker, they insisted repeatedly, would Elvis realize the great success that his talent deserved. On August 15, 1955, Parker got their signatures on an agreement that labeled him “special adviser” to Elvis and Bob Neal for a year. The devil was in the detail. Effectively, it tied Elvis tightly to the Colonel. He won exclusive rights to manage a hundred of Elvis’s appearances during the next year. Elvis and his three musicians all together would be paid $200 for each performance, a very modest sum.

  Colonel Parker also gained the crucially important right to renegotiate all of Elvis’s contracts. Three months later, on November 21, 1955, he concluded intensive and not-very-open negotiations that generated a package of three new contracts that revolutionized Elvis’s career and lasted a lifetime. Sam Phillips was out. He got $35,000 in cash and release from the $5,000 that he owed Elvis in royalties. Elvis moved from Sun Records to RCA and thus gained instant exposure nationally and, within a year, internationally. His sheet music would be published by one of the most influential music publishing houses in the country, Hill and Range. And, at last, the Colonel would become Elvis’s exclusive manager when Bob Neal’s contact ran out in March 1956.