Baby, Let's Play House Part 8

The light never blinked, but June knew her mother kept an eye out to see what they were doing. She didn't care. She just wanted to talk to him. It was 6 A.M. A.M. when she finally got out of the car, an eight-hour date. By that time, they'd talked about everything. He was shocked that her parents were divorced. He thought of marriage as a lifelong commitment, he said, and when he got married, it was going to last forever. And he told her all about his twin, who died at birth. when she finally got out of the car, an eight-hour date. By that time, they'd talked about everything. He was shocked that her parents were divorced. He thought of marriage as a lifelong commitment, he said, and when he got married, it was going to last forever. And he told her all about his twin, who died at birth.

"By the way," she said, "what's your real name?"

"What do you mean my real name? My name is Elvis Aaron Presley."

She'd never met anybody quite like him.

Now she couldn't sleep. She kept thinking about his face, the way it looked the first time she saw it up close. She wasn't sure what she was feeling, but it was wonderful, and she wished she could keep it forever.

He said he had shows in Mobile, but he would phone her when he got back to Memphis. But each time he placed his person-to-person call, some guy answered the phone, and Elvis didn't know what was up, didn't realize it was June's brother, Jerry, who didn't tell her that she'd gotten a call and that she was supposed to phone the operator back to be connected. June prided herself on being feisty and independent ("I wasn't staying home monitoring the phone"), and she didn't tell a soul about her date with Elvis. It was too surreal, and deep down, she wanted it all to have meant as much to him as it did to her. She didn't want to make a fool of herself.

Over and over, lying in bed, she heard what he'd said when she asked him what it felt like to perform like that, to walk out onstage and have the entire place go wild, to shake all over and have all the girls screaming with just a toss of his head. "I can't explain it," he said. "Maybe something like s.e.x, but not exactly." Gosh, she thought. That many o.r.g.a.s.ms would kill a person!

In July 1955 seventeen-year-old country singer Wanda Jackson had just graduated from high school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and already she'd had her own radio show and enjoyed a national hit, "You Can't Have My Love," a duet with Billy Gray, the bandleader for western-swing king Hank Thompson. Her father, Tom, who watched his dreams of becoming a singer crumble during the Depression, managed her, and her mother designed and sewed her stage outfits, which in time went to gold lame and s.h.i.+mmering sequins. "I was the first one to put some glamour in the country music-fringe dresses, high heels, long earrings," she says. from high school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and already she'd had her own radio show and enjoyed a national hit, "You Can't Have My Love," a duet with Billy Gray, the bandleader for western-swing king Hank Thompson. Her father, Tom, who watched his dreams of becoming a singer crumble during the Depression, managed her, and her mother designed and sewed her stage outfits, which in time went to gold lame and s.h.i.+mmering sequins. "I was the first one to put some glamour in the country music-fringe dresses, high heels, long earrings," she says.

With a bewitching beauty and a surplus of sa.s.s, she was turning heads all across the Southwest. Bob Neal had had his eye on the dark-haired teen for some time, and that summer, he tapped her for a two-day package show with Elvis. When her father accepted the booking-one night in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and a second in Newport, Arkansas-Wanda had no idea who Elvis Presley was, since Oklahoma City wasn't playing his records. But Tom Jackson, going by what Bob Neal had reported, told her Elvis was "getting popular real fast."

She met him at a Cape Girardeau radio station on the afternoon of July 20, and "I was quite impressed-a real handsome guy." He dressed a little flas.h.i.+er than the guys back home in Oklahoma-yellow coat, for example-and when he left the station, she saw him get into a pink car. "I had never seen a pink car, so I knew that he was different."

The first night, Wanda and her father were in her dressing room when Elvis went on. "All of a sudden, my dad and I started hearing this screaming. I mean really screaming, just constant. My dad said, 'Well, gollee, I wonder if there's a fire or something? Let me go look.'

"I started getting my coat and my purse, and he came back and said, 'No, relax. But you've got to see this for yourself. You'll never believe it.' He took me to the wings, and there was Elvis singing and moving and gyrating, and all these girls standing at the foot of the stage, screaming and reaching for him. We had never seen anything like that. It seemed s.e.xy, but I don't think he was trying to be vulgar, because he was flirty with the girls down front. He'd look at them and they'd scream, and he'd shake at them, and then they'd squeal. He was just having fun."

They worked together again for four days in August, through Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas, and then went out on a weeklong tour in October, swinging through Texas and Oklahoma with Johnny Cash, now one of Sam's Sun artists, and newcomer Porter Wagoner. Wanda found Elvis fun to be around. "On those tours, all us artists would keep something going to make each other laugh, and he laughed all the time. He didn't take himself seriously." Somewhere along the miles, they started dating, finding they had the same appreciation for simple pleasures.

"If we could get in a town early, and it was large enough to have a movie theater, we'd go to a matinee, and then after a show, we'd go out to eat, usually with Scotty and Bill and my daddy. Then sometimes we'd get a hamburger and just drive around the town and talk." Then, after the tour, she'd go home to Oklahoma City, and he to Memphis. But they talked on the phone almost every day. "Being able to know him and know his heart made me admire him a lot. And certainly his entertaining and music abilities knocked me out."

In a sense, they recognized themselves in each other. She had the same sultry eyes and full lips, and "his career was just beginning to blossom, and mine was, too. He was just a fine person. And he was never out of the way at all with me. Treated me just like a lady."

What impressed Wanda most was the fact that Elvis took such an interest in advancing her career. He kept telling her that a lot of girls could sing country-not that she wasn't great at it-but no girl was doing rockabilly, and she should give it a try.

"He was just really eager that I try this kind of music like he was doing. I'd say, 'But Elvis, I'm just a country singer. I can't sing songs like that.' He said, 'You can, too. I know you can. You've just got to try.' So he took me to his home, and we played old black blues records, and he sang to me and tried to show me the feel for it."

Few performers of either gender ever got such specific musical advice from Elvis. The following year, Wanda signed with Capitol Records and took his advice, writing her own spitfire songs ("Mean, Mean Man," "Rock Your Baby") because "no other girls were singing rockabilly. I was the first one."

In time, Wanda would become the preeminent woman of the genre, the Queen of Rockabilly. She fearlessly explored the cracks between country and rock and roll, and in such songs as "Let's Have a Party," she snarled with low-cla.s.s abandon about female l.u.s.t ("The meat is on the stove/The bread's a gettin' hot/Everybody run they got the possum in the pot . . ."). Like Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Elvis's early hero back in Tupelo, she was ahead of her time, carving out a niche as "the first [white] girl to do raunchy rock and roll like the guys did." Her "Fujiyama Mama" even hit number one in j.a.pan.

However, not everyone was ready for such a femme fatale. On her one Grand Ole Opry performance, Ernest Tubb found her bombsh.e.l.l appearance so provocative he forced her to wear a coat over her spaghetti-strap dress.

"I didn't consider myself a rebel at all," she says. "I wasn't even very familiar with the term."

But Elvis, who saw her as his musical peer, if also another replacement for his lost twin, understood it perfectly. She would soon be known as "the female Elvis."

Within a few months of meeting, he gave her one of his rings. "A man's ring. It had little chipped diamonds. He wasn't very rich at that point. We were in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he asked me if I'd step outside with him. We went over and stood by his car, and he asked me if I'd be his girl. I had a crush on him, so I said yes, of course, and I wore the ring for about a year. It was a precious time."

But things were happening so fast for both of them, and by then, there were so many girls-and so many rings-it was almost hard for Elvis to keep them straight.

In the fall of 1955 Elvis was back in Biloxi, playing three nights there, two shows at the Biloxi Community House on November 6, and return engagements at the Airmen's Club on November 7 and 8. He'd kept trying to get in touch with June Juanico, but without success-that same guy kept answering the phone, and Elvis kept leaving messages, but June never called back. the Biloxi Community House on November 6, and return engagements at the Airmen's Club on November 7 and 8. He'd kept trying to get in touch with June Juanico, but without success-that same guy kept answering the phone, and Elvis kept leaving messages, but June never called back.

Elvis was not the only performer to be playing Biloxi twice that year. Over at the Biloxi Beach Club, a sticky strip joint, seventeen-year-old Tura Satana entertained the men-mostly sailors and winter tourists-with her exotic dance routine. "I had so much fun with those navy men," Tura remembers. "I'd slide up to the end of the stage and say, 'Okay, who's first?' "

Her specialty was ta.s.sel twirling. She had such good muscle control she could twirl while lying flat on her back, and even twirl in opposite directions, one at a time, switching off. Sometimes she'd s.n.a.t.c.h the blus.h.i.+ng sailors' hats right off their heads and twirl them, too, and the whole place would go nuts. "Someday I'm gonna fly if I can get enough rpm's!" she'd yell to whoops and hollers. She would eventually be rated the top ta.s.sel twirler in the world.

Tura may have been young, but she had already lived a lifetime. Born Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi in 1938, she was the daughter of a silent film actor of j.a.panese and Filipino heritage and a Native American circus performer. She spent her childhood in Manzanar, a j.a.panese internment camp near Lone Pine, California, and after World War II, the family relocated to the west side of Chicago. Unlike most Asians, Tura developed a voluptuous figure and blossomed early.

At ten, while walking home from school, she was attacked and gang-raped by five boys in an alley, probably as a hate crime toward the j.a.panese. One of them, she says, was a cousin of the policeman sent to investigate, and the judge looked the other way. She ended up in reform school "for tempting those boys into raping me" and was cla.s.sified as a juvenile delinquent.

Afterward, her father taught her martial arts as a way to protect herself, but her anger still festered. She became the leader of a vigilante girl gang ("We had leather motorcycle jackets, jeans, and boots, and we kicked b.u.t.t"), and patrolled the neighborhood to make sure the streets were safe for women.

At thirteen, and already five foot seven, the geisha beauty married seventeen-year-old John Satana in a union arranged by her parents. Nine months later, she took off for Los Angeles. There, she filled her days modeling bathing suits and posing nude for silent screen comic and 3-D photographer Harold Lloyd, and by night she worked as a cigarette girl at the Trocadero, the famed Sunset Strip celebrity hangout.

Before long, she was back in Chicago, living with her parents and dancing in clubs, first as an interpretive dancer, and then, once she was offered more money to take off her clothes, as a stripper. She quickly perfected her exotic dancing, learning some of her s.h.i.+mmies from her mother, who taught her to fast hula to "The Hawaiian War Chant." Soon she was traveling the club circuit with her elaborately beaded costumes and hand-painted kimonos, all of which eventually came off to reveal a string and pasties. And things got hotter: She carried a prop Buddha whose hands burst into flames when she brushed against his palms.

"When I was dancing," she says, "burlesque was an art-cla.s.sy and elegant and requiring talent." In time, she would be voted one of the best burlesque dancers of the century and parlay her talents into a film career, most memorably as the leather-clad Varla in Russ Meyer's 1965 cult cla.s.sic, Faster p.u.s.s.ycat! Kill Kill!, Faster p.u.s.s.ycat! Kill Kill!, an homage to female violence. Film critic Richard Corliss described her performance, for which she did all her own stunts and fight scenes, as "the most honest, maybe the one honest portrayal in the Meyer canon, and certainly the scariest." Not surprising, the butch villain was a character she helped to create. an homage to female violence. Film critic Richard Corliss described her performance, for which she did all her own stunts and fight scenes, as "the most honest, maybe the one honest portrayal in the Meyer canon, and certainly the scariest." Not surprising, the butch villain was a character she helped to create.

The night that twenty-year-old Elvis first returned to Biloxi, he was too keyed up after his shows to sleep and wandered into the rough-and-tumble Biloxi Beach Club. There, he watched the young hootchy-kootchy dancer onstage. Remembering the time he saw Gypsy Rose Lee at the Cotton Carnival in Memphis, Elvis was fascinated by the way Tura moved her body, the way she held the lubricated sailors as s.e.xual hostages. He saw how she tantalized them with each suggestion of undress, and how they lost their minds when she rolled her b.r.e.a.s.t.s around in her hands, spinning the little twirlers at the nipples.

Sultry, sa.s.sy, and exotic, Tura Satana was nothing like any girl Elvis had known. The Hayride girls were either shy virgins who hoped for a kiss, or hungry country girls who'd had plenty of quick s.e.x out behind the barn. But Tura was a mistress of seduction. And she was gorgeous, her dark hair piled high on her head.

He went backstage to see her and introduce himself, saying he was a performer himself just up the road, in town for only a few days. She was smoking and drinking too freely from a paper cup, and my G.o.d, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were still pretty much hanging out, and her derriere, too. She looked like a hooker.

"My mama wouldn't want me in a place like this," he said later. But she seemed like a lady underneath all that, and he wanted to ask some questions about the way she moved. And so, as he had done with June Juanico, he asked if they could take a walk on the beach. Tura sized him up. She liked his features-his beautiful blue eyes and blond hair, greased dark-and he seemed harmless. Besides, she could take care of herself, and so she said yes. He flirted with her along the way.

"It's dangerous for a beautiful lady like you to walk out here alone," he said.

"Oh, it is?" she flirted back.

"Yes, ma'am," he said. "You shouldn't do this alone. Somebody might ha.s.sle you."

"Well," she countered. "What about you?"

They were both into it now, though she'd never been called "ma'am" before.

"n.o.body will ha.s.sle me," he insisted.

"Really?"

"No, n.o.body will ha.s.sle me."

They walked for a long time, and eventually he made his move, some light kissing and touching, but it never got out of hand. Mostly, they sat on the beach and talked until long after the sun came up. He told her about his mother, and said he'd been traveling a lot the last year, meeting a lot of different people. He could hardly believe where a song and a guitar had taken him. Then he asked her about her life, and she told him about all of it, even the nightmare parts. He wanted to know about Hollywood, too, and what it was like out there. And then he asked about her work, about dancing.

She told him she'd been doing it only about a year, working out of New Orleans, but she'd seen some things, too, that was for sure. If the owners of the clubs knew she was underage, they'd have a heart attack. He asked about the men who came to see her, and how she felt about that. She told him she made them part of her routine, that she joked with them, saying, "Okay, where have you got your hands right now?" Of course, there was always one who yelled out, "I wish you were my mother!" And she'd predictably say, "Yeah, and you'd still be a breast baby, wouldn't you?" It always drew a laugh.

Finally she told him, "I have to go. I've got shows tonight." And he said, "I do, too." Then he told her he was in Shreveport most Sat.u.r.day nights appearing on the Hayride. He asked how to get in touch with her and said he'd invite her to one of the shows. His mom came down sometimes, and he wanted them to meet, though already he was thinking he didn't want Gladys to see Tura as some little tramp. Tura said that she played in Shreveport, too, and it would be great to meet his mother. She sounded like a lovely lady. And he was such a good-looking guy, she thought, and so nice. So, yeah, maybe they would get together. Maybe they would.

The fall of 1955 brought so many big changes that Elvis seemed to be in a daze half the time. The Presleys had moved to another rental house, this one at 1414 Getwell, where they paid eighty-five dollars a month. It was right around the corner from where they'd been on Lamar, but Elvis was on the road so much that Vernon and Gladys had to pack the boxes and wrestle with the furniture without him. the time. The Presleys had moved to another rental house, this one at 1414 Getwell, where they paid eighty-five dollars a month. It was right around the corner from where they'd been on Lamar, but Elvis was on the road so much that Vernon and Gladys had to pack the boxes and wrestle with the furniture without him.

The biggest s.h.i.+fts were in his professional life, and Elvis was torn about some of them. His Hayride contract was renewed at $200 an appearance, a jump of more than 1,000 percent. The Colonel didn't want him in that deal and advised against it. But Vernon insisted-who knew how long this gravy train would run? And Scotty and Bill had convinced him to add drummer D. J. Fontana full-time, and Elvis wasn't sure that was the right thing to do, either, especially since the Colonel hammered him to drop Scotty and Bill altogether.

Even more troubling, Parker had steamrollered everybody in moving Elvis's career forward. The cigar-chomping impresario had pretty much squeezed Bob Neal out of the picture now, though Bob and Helen loved Elvis so much they continued to cosign for what was becoming Elvis's fleet of Cadillacs-some pink, some yellow. And Sam Phillips, too, was about to be left in the dust, the Colonel finalizing his deal to get Elvis off of Sun Records and on to RCA.

Sam was philosophical about it. With a buyout of $35,000-an astronomical and unheard of price at the time-he could sign and promote a number of new artists. He already had several in the wings. Carl Perkins's "Blue Suede Shoes" was about to be released, and Sam was also giving more attention to developing Johnny Cash. He hadn't planned on turning a hundred percent of his talents over to Elvis, especially since every Elvis session was arduous and took a great deal of time.

Besides, tension had been mounting been Sun and the Elvis camp for several months, ever since Colonel Parker's involvement. The Colonel had completely won Vernon over to his side, telling him money would rain from the sky once Parker got Elvis moved to RCA, and Vernon had become antagonistic with Sam and Marion both.

Marion remembered back to the beginning, when Elvis's first release came out, and he stood there with a record in his hand and his eyes full of tears. He was so happy and humble, saying, "To think this has happened to me. This is what I've always wanted all my life, my very own record with my very own name on it." Now, under the suggestions of Colonel Tom, Vernon had become very difficult. And, of course, Elvis didn't want to do anything his father disapproved of, which put him under great stress.

There were other good reasons to let him go, too. Elvis, being young and full of p.i.s.s and vinegar, seemed accident-p.r.o.ne. He'd already had several wrecks in his Cadillacs, and the 1954 model, which he'd had painted pink, caught fire and burned near Hope, Arkansas, after a rear wheel bearing locked up. Elvis was in the Caddy with a date, and when Bill and Scotty caught up with him, the latter remembers, "He was on the side of the road, frantically emptying the trunk, throwing guitars and amplifiers and clothes."

And now he was riding motorcycles, partly in emulation of Marlon Brando and James Dean, though he'd picked up the habit from Jimmie Rodgers Snow, Hank's son, with whom he often went riding in Nashville, where people tended not to recognize him. "I had two motorcycles, and he really loved just taking off and going riding a lot," says Snow. But to Sam's point of view, it meant that one day he could have a multimillion-dollar property, and the next day he could have nothing. Once, during a terrible storm, Marion heard someone calling her name. There was Elvis, careening down Union Avenue on a motorcycle with a girl on the back. Didn't the boy have enough sense not to take that thing out in the rain?

Even through the transition, though, Elvis and Marion remained friends. He seemed loath to cut his ties with her and just happened to be in the neighborhood all too often.

Marion was busier than she'd ever been, since Sam planned to use part of his buyout money to realize another of his dreams-to establish an all-girl radio station, WHER. It signed on almost immediately, at the end of October 1955, and Marion oversaw nearly all the operations, helping Sam set it up and making its first announcement on the air. Now she had three jobs and often she fell asleep at her desk. One morning about three o'clock, she faintly heard someone yelling, "Marion! Marion!"

"I looked up and Elvis was standing there absolutely white as a ghost. He was pa.s.sing by on his motorcycle and had seen me through the blinds, and he was really upset and shaky. He said, 'Marion, I thought you were dead!' " She was going to miss that boy.

On November 21, 1955, all the parties, even Bob Neal, met at Sun and signed the final contract, the Colonel patting Gladys on the back as she gave her son a kiss.

But Gladys didn't trust the Colonel, and he knew it. That's why he sent Hank Snow, his business partner, to sweet-talk Gladys into letting Elvis sign the management contract, having already used Jimmie Rodgers Snow to bond with Elvis for the same goal. "Basically, we were about the same age, and I carried the first good intention contract to Lubbock, Texas, where I met Elvis and was put on the same show with him to discuss the idea of him signing with Jamboree Attractions. I didn't know enough about what was going on to honestly know what was happening, if you know what I mean. I was just a teenager."

The elder Snow a.s.sumed, of course, that Presley would be signed to the agency he jointly owned with Parker. But when the Colonel traveled to Memphis, he took two contracts with him that day. One bound Elvis to Hank Snow EnterprisesJamboree Attractions, but the other exclusively to Parker. It was the second one the Colonel got the Presleys to sign, effectively swindling Snow out of half of Elvis's earnings for life.

Gladys had no knowledge of any such chicanery: She just wasn't sure which she feared most-what Parker was going to turn the boy into, or what might happen to him on his own. Her fears were not unjustified. Already, the floor had collapsed at a show in Bono, Arkansas, and more than one man had been overheard saying things like, "I'd better not see any girlfriend of mine going up after an autograph from that singer."

Things had gotten much rougher at Elvis's appearance at the Reo Palm Isle Club in Longview, Texas, in August 1955, when a trucker went to the parking lot to look for his wife, who had somehow disappeared after Elvis's performance. They'd been there with another couple, and Elvis had flirted with the women throughout his songs, giving them "that sizzling, sultry look from the stage," as Stanley Oberst and Lori Torrance wrote in Elvis in Texas: The Undiscovered King 19541958 Elvis in Texas: The Undiscovered King 19541958. They giggled like teenagers, their husbands just rolling their eyes.

The trucker thought that perhaps his wife had gotten sick afterward, but she wasn't in the women's room, so in Oberst and Torrance's account, he decided to check the car, his friend following him for a breath of air and a smoke. "As they approached the car, they noticed a stranger glancing out the window and then disappearing. The two increased their speed and ripped open the door. His wife screamed from the pa.s.senger side and dove for the petticoats in the floorboard. Elvis fell onto the dirt parking lot, struggling to zip up. The trucker reached down with huge, burly arms and grabbed the skinny frame, shaking the stuffing out of it and driving in a couple of well-placed right hooks.

" 'Not my face, not my face!' the singer yelled, covering the aforementioned location. 'I've gotta go back and play.' The truck driver got in a few more gut busters, then let his quarry flee back to the club."

Grover Lewis, the late master of New Journalism, witnessed a similar, if not the same, situation that year. He was in college at North Texas State and knew Elvis from the Big D Jamboree. As one of "the only serious writers at North Texas at the time" (the other was Larry McMurtry), he was "always looking for guys like [Marlon] Brando and [James] Dean, who spoke uniquely to people our age, our generation, and Elvis qualified. He had that dangerous sense." As such, Lewis became acutely attuned to Elvis's sensual, raw, and bluish music, having grown up with strict segregation in small towns around Dallas and Fort Worth. In 1955, then, he went to a number of Elvis's shows around the region.

Lewis could not precisely remember where he saw Elvis take a beating, though it might have been the M-B Corral in Wichita Falls in April 1955. Nearly forty years later, in 1994, Lewis described it as "a country place somewhere near Wichita Falls-it was one of those places that had . . . a barn dance ambiance, but it was an old World War II hangar that somebody had dragged out into a wet part of the county. If there was a headliner that night, it would have been him. He was dressed like a cowboy country singer, and already driving a Cadillac, [though] old and rusted-out."

The budding reporter was fascinated both by Elvis and by the phenomenon he represented, "because he virtually epitomized the southern high school hood. On this night, and I believe it was a weeknight, he got up and was doing his act, singing country songs, and he began to make eyes at a young woman who was sitting close to the front with her boyfriend. The boyfriend was a big, tough oilfield worker, a roughneck type. One of the guys seated at the table went to the restroom, and Elvis made goo-goo eyes at this girl, and then made signals, which I could follow, to meet him in the parking lot. I suspect he was feeling magically charmed around that time, and there was a recklessness about it. In other words, Elvis was full of his own s.e.xy charisma and thought he could get away with it. And the girl was more than willing."

Lewis trailed Elvis and the girl out to the parking lot just to see what would happen. "I knew very likely that there would be a fight, and, in fact, a fight is what happened. The roughneck came back to the table, discovered that his girlfriend was gone, waited around for her, and then went looking for her." He discovered them out in Elvis's Cadillac, smooching.

"I don't know if it went any further than that, because I didn't get close enough to see. But the guy hauled Elvis out of the car and just literally beat the h.e.l.l out of him. Just beat him b.l.o.o.d.y. In fact, he didn't play anymore for the rest of the evening. He got his b.u.t.t tromped."

Even without jealous husbands and boyfriends, Elvis was getting so big now that anything could happen at any time, even a repeat of the Jacksonville, Florida, riots. Without meaning to, the crowds could tear him apart like jackals on a rabbit. The fan reaction was so intense, so out of control, it was frightening to just be seen with him, even in Memphis. Marion had witnessed it herself.

WHER had a broadcast booth at the Mid-South Fair that fall, and Marion was on her way one day, walking from her home.

"All of a sudden this car pulls over to the curb, and there's Elvis, all s.h.i.+ning and resplendent. Since he never pa.s.sed up a gal walking down the street without some kind of greeting, he said, 'Hop in, Marion.' So I did. What girl could resist a 'Hop in' invitation from Elvis?

"We decided to go to the fair together, and we parked out in the back and started walking. Suddenly, I realized we weren't alone, and I began to hear these cries of 'It's him!' 'No, it's not him.' 'Oh, it is is him! I tell you it's him! I tell you it's him him!' Well, the crowd started to swell up like sugar candy on a cone. And this one strange little girl was clinging to him. I don't know what she was asking him, but she kept on, 'Will you please, Elvis? Will you please please?' And she wouldn't let go. Finally I took her hands and said, 'Okay, he promised.' Someone said, 'Who's she?' And Elvis said, 'This is my wife.' It was the wildest thing, and you never heard such a to-do and carrying on.

"As we moved through the Fairgrounds, we picked up a constantly growing entourage. We finally got to a booth where Elvis said he was going to win me a teddy bear. He started pitching b.a.l.l.s, and he won me a teddy bear the very first throw. The lady who was operating the stand handed it to me, and before my arms could close around it, the bear went whis.h.!.+ whis.h.!.+ All of a sudden it was gone. That little girl s.n.a.t.c.hed it. So Elvis said, 'Okay, I'll win you another bear,' and he did, and the same thing happened. I promptly lost three teddy bears. All of a sudden it was gone. That little girl s.n.a.t.c.hed it. So Elvis said, 'Okay, I'll win you another bear,' and he did, and the same thing happened. I promptly lost three teddy bears.

"By this time the crowd had closed in, and they were pressing me so hard against the booth that my s.h.i.+nbones were about to crack on the planks that ran across the front. We were in such peril that the owners helped us leap across the counter. We went under the canvas in the back and raced madly for the front gate, and got in a police car. They whisked us around the corner to where Elvis's car was parked, but the whole thing left me bruised and battered, and without any of the teddy bears."

It was certainly a horrible example of what can happen if you're out with a personality like Elvis and get caught up in a fan mob, Marion thought.

"After that, I never wanted to be seen with him in public again."

Elvis and Barbara Hearn, backstage at the Tupelo Fairgrounds, September 26, 1956. She had left his s.h.i.+rt, a gift from Natalie Wood, back in Memphis. Later, she gave him the gold vest he wore with it on The Ed Sullivan Show. (Courtesy of Barbara Hearn Smith The Ed Sullivan Show. (Courtesy of Barbara Hearn Smith)

Chapter Eight.

"An Earthquake in Progress"

As history would see it, 1956 would be year one, ground zero in the phenomenon known as Elvis Presley. So much metamorphosis would occur in both his personal and professional lives that 1956 could be seen as a reference point, a time when Elvis would go from being a regional performer to a national sensation, ending his age of innocence. By the end of the year, the shedding of his old skin would be both powerful and complete, and Elvis would be almost unrecognizable as the shy, una.s.suming boy that fame could never change. known as Elvis Presley. So much metamorphosis would occur in both his personal and professional lives that 1956 could be seen as a reference point, a time when Elvis would go from being a regional performer to a national sensation, ending his age of innocence. By the end of the year, the shedding of his old skin would be both powerful and complete, and Elvis would be almost unrecognizable as the shy, una.s.suming boy that fame could never change.

On January 8, he celebrated his twenty-first birthday, flying home to Memphis from a Hayride appearance in Shreveport, and then insuring his 1955 pink-and-black Cadillac Fleetwood. He was taking care of business and being responsible. No one could have known it, but he was precisely through the first half of his short life, destined to die at forty-two.

Though he was now officially a man, a grown-up, he would never reach an adult's maturity in his relations.h.i.+ps with women. His fun-loving pranks of handcuffing and wrestling would evolve into more acceptable forms of physical teasing, and he would begin to have more complex relations.h.i.+ps. But he would remain the puer aeternus, puer aeternus, a Latin term for "eternal boy," seen in mythology as a child-G.o.d of divine youth, an Adonis who stays forever young. a Latin term for "eternal boy," seen in mythology as a child-G.o.d of divine youth, an Adonis who stays forever young.

In pop psychology, the puer puer is seen as being a socially immature adult and suffers from what has entered the lexicon as the Peter Pan Syndrome. The reference is to J. M. Barrie's much-loved novel and play, as well as to Dan Kiley's 1983 book, is seen as being a socially immature adult and suffers from what has entered the lexicon as the Peter Pan Syndrome. The reference is to J. M. Barrie's much-loved novel and play, as well as to Dan Kiley's 1983 book, The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up. The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up. But in a.n.a.lytical, or Jungian, psychology, the But in a.n.a.lytical, or Jungian, psychology, the puer puer is defined as an older man whose emotional life remains arrested at the level of adolescence, and who is almost always enmeshed in too great a dependence on his mother. is defined as an older man whose emotional life remains arrested at the level of adolescence, and who is almost always enmeshed in too great a dependence on his mother.

The life of the puer puer is provisional, since he fears being caught in a situation from which he cannot escape, whether it is with a woman or a job. He fantasizes that he is simply marking time, and that in the future, the real woman, or the right career opportunity, will come along. What he dreads most is to be bound to anything at all, and so he refuses to grow up and face the challenges of life head-on. Instead, he waits for others or divine providence to do it for him. is provisional, since he fears being caught in a situation from which he cannot escape, whether it is with a woman or a job. He fantasizes that he is simply marking time, and that in the future, the real woman, or the right career opportunity, will come along. What he dreads most is to be bound to anything at all, and so he refuses to grow up and face the challenges of life head-on. Instead, he waits for others or divine providence to do it for him.

"He covets independence and freedom, chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable," writes Daryl Sharp in Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts. Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts. "Common symptoms of "Common symptoms of puer puer psychology are dreams of imprisonment and similar imagery: chains, bars, cages, entrapment, bondage. Life itself . . . is experienced as a prison." psychology are dreams of imprisonment and similar imagery: chains, bars, cages, entrapment, bondage. Life itself . . . is experienced as a prison."

On January 10, 1956, Elvis arrived at the RCA recording studio in Nashville, a small building at 1525 McGavock Street, not far from downtown. The label had not yet established its own Nashville facilities, and so the company built the studio with the Methodist TV, Radio and Film Commission. Chet Atkins, the country guitarist who was also RCA's Nashville studio chief, sat behind the console as Elvis recorded his first RCA sides. Yet some of the players were already familiar to Elvis. Both drummer D. J. Fontana and piano virtuoso Floyd Cramer from the Hayride were on the sessions. And among the three songs they cut that day was "Heartbreak Hotel," the morbid and oddly unsettling blues tune that Mae Axton had written with her friend Tommy Durden about a dwelling place for the lost and lovelorn. By April, the single, both eerie and menacing, would sell one million copies, earning Elvis his first gold record. small building at 1525 McGavock Street, not far from downtown. The label had not yet established its own Nashville facilities, and so the company built the studio with the Methodist TV, Radio and Film Commission. Chet Atkins, the country guitarist who was also RCA's Nashville studio chief, sat behind the console as Elvis recorded his first RCA sides. Yet some of the players were already familiar to Elvis. Both drummer D. J. Fontana and piano virtuoso Floyd Cramer from the Hayride were on the sessions. And among the three songs they cut that day was "Heartbreak Hotel," the morbid and oddly unsettling blues tune that Mae Axton had written with her friend Tommy Durden about a dwelling place for the lost and lovelorn. By April, the single, both eerie and menacing, would sell one million copies, earning Elvis his first gold record.

The song found its genesis when Durden, who followed the ponies, picked up a copy of the Miami Herald Miami Herald. He looked at the horse-race entries, and then scanned the rest of the paper. "I just happened to catch a little small thing in there about a man who killed himself. I don't recall any names, but the only thing he left in the way of a suicide note was a sentence, 'I walk a lonely street.' "

Atkins recalled that on one of the livelier songs they recorded that day-either Ray Charles's rhythm-and-blues cla.s.sic "I Got a Woman," or the Drifters' "Money, Honey"-Elvis "started jumping around, and he split his pants right in the seat. I'll never forget them. They were pink with black piping on the sides. He asked somebody to go back to the motel and get him another pair, and he left his old ones lying around someplace. The next day, this girl who worked for the Methodists found them. She said, 'What am I supposed to do with these?' I said, 'Keep 'em. They'll be worth a lot of money one day.' She thought that was very funny. But six months later, I heard she was trying to get on I've Got a Secret I've Got a Secret. Her secret was going to be that she got Elvis Presley's pants."

Elvis was all over the television that year, beginning on January 28, when he made his first of six appearances on Stage Show, Stage Show, a variety hour produced by Jackie Gleason and hosted by big-band legends Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. He flew into New York a few days earlier with the Colonel to meet the top bra.s.s at RCA, including Anne Fulchino, the Boston-bred national publicity director who had upgraded RCA's pop and country coverage, but always hoped the label would break a big new pop artist. Elvis had been to New York once before, in 1955, when he and Scotty and Bill auditioned for a variety hour produced by Jackie Gleason and hosted by big-band legends Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. He flew into New York a few days earlier with the Colonel to meet the top bra.s.s at RCA, including Anne Fulchino, the Boston-bred national publicity director who had upgraded RCA's pop and country coverage, but always hoped the label would break a big new pop artist. Elvis had been to New York once before, in 1955, when he and Scotty and Bill auditioned for Arthur G.o.dfrey's Talent Scouts, Arthur G.o.dfrey's Talent Scouts, where a woman (possibly G.o.dfrey vocalist Janette Davis, who hailed from Memphis and became a full member of the production staff in 1956), turned them down. But it was still all so new to Elvis, meeting all these people who didn't talk like he did, and who didn't seem to share his sense of humor. He didn't really know how to act. When Fulchino extended her hand, she was horrified to find that Elvis grasped it wearing an electric buzzer on his finger. where a woman (possibly G.o.dfrey vocalist Janette Davis, who hailed from Memphis and became a full member of the production staff in 1956), turned them down. But it was still all so new to Elvis, meeting all these people who didn't talk like he did, and who didn't seem to share his sense of humor. He didn't really know how to act. When Fulchino extended her hand, she was horrified to find that Elvis grasped it wearing an electric buzzer on his finger.

"My att.i.tude was to make a total star out of Elvis. Not a kid with a one-hit record, but a broad, overall star. So I said to him, 'You know, that may be big in Nashville, but it will never go in New York. Don't ever do it again.' Now, he was a smart kid, and if you caught him doing something that was dumb for the occasion, he absorbed it and he didn't repeat it.

"For example, I took him to Klube's, a German restaurant on Twenty-third Street, just a block across the street from where the RCA office was at that time. I ordered pork chops, and he started to pick his up with his hands. Then suddenly he noticed that I was eating mine with a fork. And he paid attention to where the forks were and what I did with them. This is where I give him great credit. He wanted to get somewhere and he knew he had to do certain things to get there. He was very intelligent. Not the Harvard-type intelligence-the instinctive intelligence."

But it was still a lot to deal with in a short span of time. A few days later, Fulchino and RCA hosted a press reception for Elvis, and reporters, amused by the flash in the pan with the funny clothes and the suggestive stage moves, asked about his reaction to his success. "It scares me," Elvis said. "You know, it just scares me."

By spring, his anxiety about fame seemed just as strong. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, British reporter Lionel Crane, of the London Daily Mirror, Daily Mirror, asked about the audience reception, "a scream that I thought would split the roof," as Crane put it. "It makes me want to cry," Elvis said. "How does all this happen to me?" Five days later, it was the same in Waco, Texas. His fame "happened so fast," Elvis told a local reporter. "I could go out like a light, just like I came on." By then, the press was calling him "the most talked-about new personality in the last ten years of recorded music." asked about the audience reception, "a scream that I thought would split the roof," as Crane put it. "It makes me want to cry," Elvis said. "How does all this happen to me?" Five days later, it was the same in Waco, Texas. His fame "happened so fast," Elvis told a local reporter. "I could go out like a light, just like I came on." By then, the press was calling him "the most talked-about new personality in the last ten years of recorded music."