Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  The Bubble

  By the fall of 1955, Elvis and the Blue Moon Boys were often the only act on the bill. Elvis was the show and the crowds were getting larger. Overwhelmingly, they were dominated by young women. Sometimes there were thousands of teenage girls, and they knew just how to behave on an Elvis occasion. What had been a curious performance before now became an incredible spectacle. It was as if each girl and Elvis had created a magic space, a huge bubble in which they existed alone together, isolated, ecstatic, and exclusive of the dreary world. Increasingly, the girls sent up such a roar that Elvis’s voice and the music could not even be heard. His performances became totally visual, and the girls responded to his every move as he sang—audibly, visibly, physically, and without inhibition. Their performance became the dominant performance. The girls might as well have been on the bill. It was a collaboration.

  Scotty Moore was there every time, and he described the phenomenon perfectly. At the first note of the first song the din from the girls rose to a fever pitch, and it stayed there at a steady roar. “The only way I could describe the sound is that it was like, you know, if you dive into a swimming pool—that rush of noise that you get,” Scotty said. “It would be so loud that all you could hear in your ears was that sound.” The band could hear neither Elvis’s voice nor their own instruments. They played by watching Elvis’s movements.

  Elvis, of course, could not even hear himself. Scotty was amazed at Elvis’s control in the midst of it all. “I never saw him break meter,” he said. Once the song started, the musicians all watched Elvis. They would use eye movements to communicate while watching Elvis’s arms and legs to see where he was in the song. Scotty later joked that it was the only time in his life as a musician that he had been “directed by an ass.”

  During 1955, Elvis performed live on stage at least 234 times, but in only two cities outside the South: Indianapolis, Indiana, and Cleveland, Ohio. The 1955 performances were not only Southern, they were black belt Southern, areas where the proportion of blacks to whites ran high. Virtually all of Elvis’s performances in 1955—and all of those in 1954—occurred in states where slavery had been a central cultural institution less than a century before, where lynching by hanging and burning and race rioting had been rampant only fifty years before—the alleged result of the rape, or attempt to rape, or the desire to rape white women by black men, and, most immediately, where tension over the integration of the races in the public schools was then rising to white-hot intensity. In January and February 1956, with Colonel Parker in charge, “Elvis mania” exploded out of the South.

  On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that the public schools in America were to be desegregated. Ten weeks later, Elvis performed in the Overton Shell. The Court said that it would rule on how the decision was to be enforced in its May term a year later. In that year, all during the time of Elvis’s meteoric rise in the black belt South, the white South waited in dread. Its girls and boys were to be forced into close association with huge numbers of black boys and girls—especially they feared the closeness of black boys to white girls. In May 1955, the Court said that the decision would be enforced by federal district courts on a case-by-case basis. The white South breathed a collective sigh of relief. Southern white judges would rule on suits for desegregation in Southern communities. Being Southerners, they would presumably rule against such suits.

  Soon, however, the South was again thrown into turmoil. Southern-born federal judges in the South ruled for desegregation, some because they thought it was right, all because they recognized that it was and would inevitably become the law of the land. Those teenage white girls who were so vigorously demonstrating their sexuality before Elvis in school auditoriums were about to be virtually thrown into the arms of young black males, supposedly notorious for their lack of inhibition in such matters. The hopefully innate virtue and purity of young white women was about to be severely tested in the very places where Elvis often performed. Not everyone was sure they would pass the test.

  Elvis Outside the South and Everywhere

  In 1956, only New England and the Great Northwest were spared the Elvis onslaught. In 1957, only New England remained inviolate. Wherever Elvis went outside the South, girls in his audiences behaved exactly like their Southern sisters. The “Elvis mania,” as critics liked to call it, was totally exportable.

  At first, Elvis did not always play to full houses outside the South. For example, in May 1956, in St. Paul, Minnesota, only 3,000 fans attended an afternoon performance in an auditorium that could hold 17,000. Nevertheless, these 3,000 raised such a ruckus that local police had to surround Elvis to get him out, but not before the girls managed to get close enough to rip his coat in half. The next day in La Crosse, Wisconsin, the 7:00 p.m. show was sold out to an audience of 4,000. But the 9:30 show drew only 1,200. It was almost as if the best defense Midwestern parents could manage was to curfew their daughters out of a late-night Elvis show.

  The next year, 1957, Elvis shows everywhere were almost all sellouts, and the crowds were huge. In March, the Chicago show drew 13,000; in September, his audience numbered 15,000 in Seattle and Portland, and in Vancouver, British Columbia, it swelled to 26,500. In Vancouver, for about fifty minutes of a planned one-hour show, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police managed to hold the crowd back from the stage erected on the playing field of the Empire Stadium. Finally, the Colonel, fearing for the safety of “his boy,” pulled Elvis—a resistant Elvis—off the stage and fled. George Klein, one of Elvis’s Memphis friends, was traveling with the tour on this occasion. As George ran for safety, he looked back to see the entire wooden stage rise up in the air and turn over. Music stands, sheet music, and instruments flew in every direction as fans grabbed whatever they could get. The music critic for the Vancouver Province, Dr. Ida Halpern, denounced the whole thing as “subsidized sex.” It was, she said, “an artificial and unhealthy exploitation of the enthusiasm of youth’s mind and body.”

  Elvis ranged north and west, but he also maintained his bastion in the South, especially the Deep South. In October 1956, he performed in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas for some 26,500 wildly enthusiastic teenagers. They all seemed to have cameras with flashbulbs. “We went around the park on the back of that Cadillac,” D. J. Fontana recalled, “and all you could see was just thousands of bulbs going off. I thought, ‘What’s this guy done?’ ” Never before in Dallas had so many people paid to see a single performer. Onstage, the musicians again never even heard their own instruments nor a word that Elvis sang. The uproar, the “hysteria,” lasted through the whole show and continued as Elvis and the band leaped into the Cadillac and sped away.

  “Whatever was going on here didn’t seem to have much to do with music anymore,” concluded Michael Gray and Roger Osborne in their 1966 book, The Elvis Atlas. It did not, of course. It had everything to do with sex—female sex. The girls had made it that way.

  “I Hope I Never Wake Up”

  Observers were nonplused by the performance of these young women. Not the least of those puzzled was Elvis himself. “It never ceases to amaze me,” he said and shook his head. He struggled to understand the astonishing phenomenon of which he was a part. “I watch my audiences and I listen to them and I know we’re all getting something out of our system but none of us knows what it is,” he said. He insisted, however, that whatever it was, “it ain’t nasty.”

  Elvis’s assertion that neither he nor the girls knew what “it” was challenges belief. How could he not know? Even Sonny West saw at first sight that it was all about sex. Was Elvis really terribly naive or brilliantly disingenuous? He was always clever in projecting his “good boy” image offstage and in public, and perhaps he was dissembling. More likely, this new life was just too good to give up, and he was determined to brush past any threat to its continuance.

  Always, Elvis’s primary response to criticism was to make common cause with the girls
in his audiences. He was adamant in his defense of the young women. It was the one point where his compulsively deferential manner to anyone with any power seemed on the verge of shattering. What the girls did was okay, he insisted, even if it involved injury to his body. “I’ve been scratched and bitten,” he said. “I accept it with a broad mind because actually they don’t intend to hurt you. They just want pieces of you for souvenirs.”

  The romance between Elvis and the girls—or more accurately between Elvis and each girl—created millions of separate fantasies. The time and place where they met was their special and private space. Elvis described the feeling for himself and the girls just right. It is like a “dream,” he said, and “I hope I never wake up.”

  PART II

  Why Elvis?

  CHAPTER THREE

  VERNON AND GLADYS

  The Photograph

  One photograph of the small Presley family captures the essence of their lives then and thereafter. Elvis, about three years old, is posed with Gladys and Vernon. Elvis is standing, and his parents are sitting on either side of him.

  The exact date of the picture is unknown. Decades later it showed up in the photograph collection of the Official Elvis Presley Fan Club in Leicester, England. Interviews with pediatricians, pediatric nurses, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers have estimated Elvis’s age.

  The blank, clean, slightly gray background is probably the concrete wall of the brand-new Lee County jail in Tupelo. Vernon is a prisoner, having been arrested on November 16, 1937, for forging a check. The county jail had recently been built by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal project to employ the unemployed. Previously, county prisoners had been lodged in the run-down town jail. Only the white prisoners were moved to the new jail.

  In the photograph, mother, child, and father are close, body to body as if huddled against a coming moment of separation. Gladys’s left arm reaches behind and across Elvis’s back to Vernon. Her open hand rests lightly on Vernon’s left shoulder, as if to hold him in gently, to affirm her presence with him. It is a hand that seeks to comfort, but its loose openness signals her powerlessness.

  Vernon had been charged with forging a check on Orville Bean, the dairy farmer who was his landlord and employer. He had been arrested and arraigned during the fall term of criminal court. He pled not guilty, but he would not get a speedy trial. His plea came too late for him to be tried in the fall term of court. His case would have to wait for the spring term, which began six months later on Monday, May 23, 1938. Before the court convened that spring, the local papers were full of suggestions that the docket was overfull and that justice in Lee County must be meted out more rapidly than before.

  Only days before Vernon’s case would have been tried, he changed his plea to guilty. Justice swiftly followed. On Wednesday, May 25, Judge Thomas H. Johnston sentenced Vernon to three years in the state penitentiary. He got no credit for the six months he had spent in the county jail. After sentencing came the anxious wait before the prison guards trucked him off to Parchman Farm.

  On Saturday, May 28, Circuit Court Clerk Joe J. Kilgo wrote out the papers committing Vernon and eleven other convicts to Parchman. The twelve men waited in the county jail for the dreaded arrival of “Long Chain Charley,” a sergeant on the guard force at Parchman who circulated through the state collecting convicts for transport to prison. He always brought a long chain to which he shackled his prisoners to prevent their escape.

  Six months in the county jail waiting for a trial had been bad enough, but there was always at least some hope for relief. Orville Bean might decide not to press charges against Vernon. Relatives and friends might somehow intervene. If it came to a trial, a good lawyer might rise to defend him and the jury might find him innocent. Having changed his plea to guilty, Vernon faced the certainty of serving at hard labor in a notoriously tough prison for three long years, years in which he could not come home every night to his wife and child in their little two-room wooden house in East Tupelo nor earn money to support them.

  Sensing the pathos in the photograph does not require knowledge of its history. The bodies of the man and woman are tense with anxiety and dread. The child is anxious and confused. Vernon has put his hat on his head as if making ready to leave. He faces the camera, but his eyes cut to his left as if watching fearfully for someone or something to appear that he already hears. Gladys also stares to the left, her body stiff.

  The little boy’s gaze is less focused, as if he were told to look at the camera but senses something he needs to see off to the left too. He wears bib overalls over a dark, long-sleeved shirt, charmingly trimmed with white cuffs and a white collar. Gladys is a talented seamstress. She wears a flower-print dress. Her dress, like Elvis’s shirt, is attractively set off by a collar of a different color. Elvis, like his father, wears a hat. His hat seems almost man-sized, cocked at a rakish angle on his round little head. His full cherubic lips are twisted down to the right as if he realizes that he should say something and set his jaw in some certain way to assert an attitude, but he doesn’t know what to say or how.

  This is the earliest photograph of Elvis. The photographer was most likely a friend or a relative who had driven Gladys and Elvis a couple of miles over from their home in East Tupelo. It was a defining moment in the lives of Elvis, Gladys, and Vernon Presley, individually and collectively. The very fact of the visit, the camera, and the one photograph that has been preserved indicates that they understood that they were at a critical juncture in their lives. The petty and foolish crime that Vernon committed in the fall of 1937, when he was twenty-one, Gladys twenty-five, and Elvis less than three, deeply marked their lives.

  The Crime

  Vernon was barely seventeen in June 1933, when he married twenty-one-year-old Gladys. He gave his age to the registrar in the Pontotoc County courthouse as twenty-one. Gladys gave her age as nineteen, a minor fiction that she maintained and even improved upon in later years. Elvis only learned his mother’s true age after she died. Pontotoc was the next county west of Lee County. Vernon and Gladys were driven over by a couple, Marshall and Vona Mae Brown, who were close friends and who served as witnesses to what was, at first, a secret wedding. Marshall Brown lent Vernon the $3 for them to get married. Vernon was afraid to tell his father, Jessie Presley, that he was married and continued to live at home. Gladys continued to live with her family until Vernon finally gained the courage to announce the news. Then Gladys joined him in his father’s house.

  Jessie, like Vernon, worked for Orville Bean on the dairy farm, but he was not an ordinary laborer, nor an ordinary man. Born in 1896, Jessie D. McClowell Presley had grown up on tenant farms several miles east of Tupelo. His mother, Rosella Presley, was fiercely independent. She never married, had ten children by at least two men, and never identified the fathers of any of her children. She headed up her own household and reared her family on a sequence of small farms that she worked for a share of the crops.

  Rosella’s father, Dunnan Presley Jr., had deserted her, her mother, and her sister, Rosalinda, one Sunday morning while they were at church. They came home, and he was gone. He had decided to return to his previous wife and child. He had not bothered divorcing that wife before marrying Rosella’s mother. Indeed, he never divorced any of his four wives. One historian asserted that during the Civil War he enlisted in the Confederate Army twice and deserted twice. Each time he enlisted, he collected a substantial bounty. He signed up for the cavalry, where they gave him a large amount of money to buy a horse. He simply evaporated with the money. It was also said that many years later Dunnan attempted to collect a pension for having served—with honor—in the Confederate Army.

  Jessie’s father—Elvis’s great-grandfather—was probably John Steele, whom the census of 1900 shows to be Rosella’s neighbor. A tenant farmer with a separate and, presumably, legal family, John was said to be part Cherokee. If documents in the courthouse reliably prescribed who had sex with whom to produce a child,
Elvis’s name would have probably been Elvis Aron Steele. Instead, the Presley name comes down from that peripatetic polygamist and two-time deserter from the Confederate Army, Dunnan Presley Jr.

  Jessie Presley—Elvis’s grandfather, also known as “J. D.” or “Dee”—was bright, assertive, and strikingly handsome. At age seventeen he married a farm girl, Minnie Mae Hood, who was eight years his senior. Families in the Hood clan often owned their own farms, and Minnie Mae herself was not poor or totally dependent. Lee County Chancery Court records indicate that on September 28, 1948, she leased one hundred acres of farmland for a share of principal crops—a quarter of the cotton, a quarter of the hay, and a third of the corn. She also bought a one-acre lot in a Tupelo-area subdivision. She signified her agreement to that transaction by making an X (her mark) on the document, so she was possibly illiterate.

  Court records also show that Jessie was not poor, though some of his money might have come from his marriage to Minnie Mae. In 1923, he bought a house and lot, not in the less expensive, country-come-to-town appendage called East Tupelo where the Presley family first settled, but rather on Jackson Street in Tupelo itself. A year later, he traded his equity in that house for $400 in cash and a new 1924 Chevrolet touring car. One can easily imagine a dapper Jessie tooling over to East Tupelo showing off his new car to kinfolk and friends, top down, Minnie Mae by his side, and eight-year-old Vernon in the back. Jessie was a hell-raiser, a drinker, a womanizer, and a fighter, and he sometimes spent Saturday nights in jail, but he always had a job and money in his pocket.