Last Train to Memphis Read online

  Sam and Dewey Phillips went on to become closer than brothers; they propped each other up in times of trouble and undoubtedly dragged each other down on some occasions as well. They became business partners for the briefest of moments, within just a month or two of that initial meeting, when Sam launched a label called The Phillips, which put out one official release (“Boogie in the Park,” by Joe Hill Louis, with three hundred copies pressed), and then dissolved it for reasons never fully specified. For all of their shared values, however, for all of their shared dreams and schemes and the fact that they were laboring in the same field (Sam continued to record blues singers like Howlin’ Wolf and B. B. King for some time for various labels and then started up a label of his own; Daddy-O-Dewey just got bigger and bigger on the radio), they were not destined to come together in business or in the history books for another four years, one year after the unheralded and altogether unanticipated arrival of an eighteen-year-old Elvis Presley in Sam Phillips’ Sun recording studio.

  THE PRESLEYS were themselves relatively recent arrivals in Memphis in 1950, having picked up stakes in their native Tupelo, Mississippi, in the fall of 1948, when their only child was thirteen years old. Their adjustment to city life was difficult at first. Although the husband, Vernon, had worked in a munitions plant in Memphis for much of the war, good, steady peacetime work was not easy to come by, and the three of them were crammed into a single room in one boardinghouse or another for the first few months after their arrival. Wary, watchful, shy almost to the point of reclusiveness, the boy was obviously frightened by his new surroundings, and on his first day of school at sixteen-hundred-student Humes High (which went from seventh to twelfth grade) he was back at the rooming house almost before his father had finished dropping him off. Vernon found him “so nervous he was bug-eyed. When I asked what was the matter, he said he didn’t know where the office was and classes had started and there were so many kids. He was afraid they’d laugh at him.” His father, a taciturn, suspicious man, understood: in some ways the Presleys gave the impression to both relatives and neighbors that they lived in their own private world. “I thought about it a minute,” said Vernon, “and I knew what he meant. So I said, ‘Son, that’s all right for today, but tomorrow you be there, nine o’clock, and no foolin’!’ ”

  In February 1949, Vernon finally landed a regular job, at United Paint Company, just a few blocks away from the rooming house on Poplar they had moved into, and on June 17 he applied for admission to Lauderdale Courts, a neat public assistance housing project administered by the Memphis Housing Authority. In September their application was finally approved, and they moved to 185 Winchester, Apartment 328, just around the corner from where they were presently living. The rent was thirty-five dollars a month for a two-bedroom ground-floor apartment in a well-maintained neighborly complex. Everyone in Lauderdale Courts felt as if they were on their way somewhere. If only in terms of aspirations, for the Presley family it was a big step up.

  TUPELO: ABOVE THE HIGHWAY

  January 1935–November 1948

  TUPELO CIRCA 1942.

  (COURTESY OF THE ESTATE OF ELVIS PRESLEY)

  VERNON PRESLEY was never particularly well regarded in Tupelo. He was a man of few words and little evident ambition, and even in the separate municipality of East Tupelo, where he lived with his family “above the highway,” a tiny warren of houses clustered together on five unpaved streets running off the Old Saltillo Road, he was seen as something of a vacant if hardworking soul, good-looking, handsome even, but unlikely ever to go anywhere. East Tupelo itself was separated by more than just the geographical barrier of two small creeks, corn and cotton fields, and the Mobile & Ohio and St. Louis & San Francisco railroad tracks from the life of a parent city which was hailed in the 1938 WPA Guide as “perhaps Mississippi’s best example of what contemporary commentators call the ‘New South.’ ” East Tupelo, on the other hand, was a part of the New South that tended to get glossed over, the home of many of the “poor white” factory workers and sharecroppers who could fuel a vision of “industry rising in the midst of agriculture and agricultural customs” so long as the social particulars of that vision were not scrutinized too closely. “Over the years of its existence and even after its merger with Tupelo [in 1946],” wrote a local historian, “East Tupelo had the reputation of being an extremely rough town. Some citizens doubt that it was worse than other small towns, but others declare it to have been the roughest town in North Mississippi. The town had its red light district called ‘Goosehollow.’… By 1940 the tiny community of East Tupelo was known to have at least nine bootleggers.”

  In 1936 the mayor of East Tupelo was Vernon Presley’s uncle, Noah, who lived on Kelly Street above the highway, owned a small grocery store, and drove the school bus. Noah’s brother, Jessie, Vernon’s father, was relatively comfortable as well, if not as upstanding a member of the community. He owned his own home on Old Saltillo Road, just above Kelly Street, and he worked fairly steadily, even if he had a reputation as a hard drinker and a “rogue.” Vernon, by way of contrast, showed little drive or direction. Though he worked hard to maintain a succession of Depression-limited jobs (milkman, sharecropper, handyman, WPA laborer), he never really seemed to make a go of it, and he never seemed to particularly care about making a go of it either. Closemouthed, recessive, almost brooding at times, “dry” in the description of his friends, Vernon did appear to care deeply about his little family: his wife, Gladys Smith, whom he married in 1933; his son, Elvis Aron Presley, who was born on January 8, 1935; the twin, Jesse Garon, whom they had lost. He built a home in preparation for the birth, a two-room shotgun shack next to his parents’ four-room “big house,” with the help of his father and his older brother, Vester (who in September 1935 would marry Gladys’ sister Clettes). He took out what amounted to a mortgage of $180 from Orville Bean, on whose dairy farm he and his father occasionally worked, with the property remaining Bean’s until the loan was paid off. There was a pump and an outhouse in the back, and although East Tupelo was one of the first beneficiaries of the TVA rural electrification program, the new home was lit with oil lamps when he and Gladys moved in in December 1934.

  Gladys Presley, everyone agreed, was the spark of that marriage. Where Vernon was taciturn to the point of sullenness, she was voluble, lively, full of spunk. They had both dropped out of school at an early age, but Gladys—who had grown up on a succession of farms in the area with seven brothers and sisters—took a backseat to no one. When she was twenty, her father died, and she heard of a job at the Tupelo Garment Plant that paid two dollars a day for a twelve-hour workday. There was a bus to pick up the girls who lived out in the country, but not long after starting work she decided to move to town, and she settled herself and her family on Kelly Street in the little community above the highway, in East Tupelo, where her uncles Sims and Gains Mansell already lived and Gains copastored the tiny new First Assembly of God Church that had sprung up in a tent on a vacant lot. That was where she met Vernon Presley. She saw him on the street, and then she met him at a typically charismatic, “Holy Roller”–type church service. In June 1933 they ran off with another couple and got married in Pontotoc, Mississippi, where Vernon, still a minor, added five years to his age and claimed to be twenty-two, while Gladys reduced hers by two, to nineteen. They borrowed the three dollars for the license from their friends Marshall and Vona Mae Brown, with whom they moved in for a short time after the marriage.

  Gladys had a difficult pregnancy and toward the end had to quit her job at the Garment Plant. When she came to term, Vernon’s mother, Minnie, a midwife named Edna Martin, and one other woman attended her until the midwife called the doctor, sixty-eight-year-old William Robert Hunt. At about four in the morning of January 8, he delivered a baby, stillborn, then thirty-five minutes later another boy. The twins were named Jesse Garon and Elvis Aron, with the rhyming middle names intended to match. Aron (pronounced with a long a and the emphasis on the first syllable) was for Verno
n’s friend Aaron Kennedy, Elvis was Vernon’s middle name, and Jesse, of course, was for his father. The dead twin was buried in an unmarked grave in Priceville Cemetery, just below Old Saltillo Road, and was never forgotten either in the legend that accompanied his celebrated younger brother or in family memory. As a child Elvis was said to have frequently visited his brother’s grave; as an adult he referred to his twin again and again, reinforced by Gladys’ belief that “when one twin died, the one that lived got all the strength of both.” Shortly after the birth both mother and child were taken to the hospital, and Gladys was never able to have another baby. The physician’s fifteen-dollar fee was paid by welfare.

  Elvis grew up a loved and precious child. He was, everyone agreed, unusually close to his mother. Vernon spoke of it after his son became famous, almost as if it were a source of wonder that anyone could be that close. Throughout her life the son would call her by pet names, they would communicate by baby talk, “she worshiped him,” said a neighbor, “from the day he was born.” He was attached to his father as well. “When we went swimming, Elvis would have fits if he saw me dive,” Vernon recalled. “He was so afraid something would happen to me.” And Gladys told of a house fire in East Tupelo, when Vernon ran in and out of the burning building trying to salvage a neighbor’s belongings. “Elvis was so sure that his daddy was going to get hurt that he screamed and cried. I had to hold him to keep him from running in after Vernon. I said right sharp, ‘Elvis, you just stop that. Your daddy knows what he’s doing.’ ” Elvis’ own view of his growing up was more prosaic. “My mama never let me out of her sight. I couldn’t go down to the creek with the other kids. Sometimes when I was little, I used to run off. Mama would whip me, and I thought she didn’t love me.”

  In that respect, and in every other, there was not much out of the ordinary about the young Presley family. They were a little peculiar, perhaps, in their insularity, but they were active in church and community, and they had realistic hopes and expectations for their only child. Vernon was, in his own view, a “common laborer,” but Gladys was determined that her son would graduate from high school.

  In 1937 Gladys’ uncle Gains became sole preacher at the Assembly of God Church, which was now housed in a modest wood-framed structure on Adams Street built primarily by Gains. Many in the tiny congregation later recalled a very young Elvis Presley throwing himself into the hymn singing with abandon, and Gladys liked to tell how “when Elvis was just a little fellow, not more than two years old, he would slide down off my lap, run into the aisle and scramble up to the platform. There he would stand looking at the choir and trying to sing with them. He was too little to know the words… but he could carry the tune and he would watch their faces and try to do as they did.”

  It was shortly thereafter that the life of the Presley family was forever changed, or at least diverted from what might have been a more predictable course. Vernon, Gladys’ brother Travis, and a man named Lether Gable were charged on November 16, 1937, with “uttering a forged instrument”—altering, and then cashing, a four-dollar check of Orville Bean’s made out to Vernon to pay for a hog. On May 25, 1938, Vernon and his two companions were sentenced to three years in Parchman Farm.

  In fact, he remained in prison for only eight months, but this was a shaping event in the young family’s life. In later years Elvis would often say of his father, “My daddy may seem hard, but you don’t know what he’s been through,” and though it was never a secret, it was always a source of shame. “It was no big disgrace,” said Corene Randle Smith, a childhood neighbor. “Everyone realized that Mr. Bean just made an example of him, and that he was on the up-and-up, except maybe that one little time.” But it seemed to mark, in a more permanent way, Vernon’s view of himself; it reinforced his mistrust of the world and, while he remained dedicated to his little family, led him to show less and less of himself to others.

  During the brief time that he was in prison, Gladys lost the house and moved in briefly with her in-laws next door. There was no love lost between Gladys and Jessie, though, and soon mother and child moved to Tupelo, where Gladys lived with her cousins Frank and Leona Richards on Maple Street and got a job at the Mid-South Laundry. The Richards’ daughter, Corinne, retained vivid memories of the forlorn mother and son. When Elvis played ball with the other children out in the street, Corinne said, Gladys was “afraid that he would get run over. She didn’t want him out of her sight. She had always been lively, but after [Vernon] went to prison she was awful nervous.” To writer Elaine Dundy, Leona recalled Elvis sitting on the porch “crying his eyes out because his daddy was away.” On weekends Gladys and her son frequently rode the Greyhound five hours each way to visit Vernon at Parchman.

  Vernon, Travis, and Lether Gable were released from jail on February 6, 1939, in response to a community petition, and a letter from Orville Bean requesting sentence suspension. The Presleys continued to live with Gladys’ cousins for a brief time, and all three experienced what Leona Richards called “action nightmares,” sleepwalking episodes that none could recall in the morning. They soon moved back to East Tupelo, going from one small rented house to another.

  In 1940 Vernon purchased a six-horsepower 1930 Chevrolet truck for $50, and in the fall of 1941 Elvis started school at the seven-hundred-pupil East Tupelo Consolidated (grades 1 through 12), on Lake Street, across Highway 78, about half a mile away from the little village off Old Saltillo Road. Every day Gladys walked Elvis proudly to school, a small towheaded youngster accompanied by his dark-haired, flashing-eyed mother, the two of them clasping hands tightly when they got to the highway, a picture of apprehensive devotion.

  “Though we had friends and relatives, including my parents,” Vernon recalled, “the three of us formed our own private world.” The little boy was as insular in his way as his parents. Apart from family, his few friends from that period have painted him as separate from any crowd—there are no recollections of a “gang,” just isolated memories of making cars out of apple crates, playing out behind someone’s house, going fishing once in a while with James Ausborn, who lived over by the school. “Mrs. Presley would say to be back at two, and he’d get worried, keep looking at the sun, say, ‘I believe it’s about two o’clock. We better go.’ ” He was a gentle boy, his father said; “[one time] I asked him to go hunting with me, but when he answered, ‘Daddy, I don’t want to kill birds,’ I didn’t try to persuade him to go against his feelings.” Once he learned to read he loved comic books; they captured his imagination—he loved the brightly colored pages and the forceful images of power and success. “Elvis would hear us worrying about our debts, being out of work and sickness,” his mother recollected proudly, “and he’d say, ‘Don’t you worry none, Baby. When I grow up, I’m going to buy you a fine house and pay everything you owe at the grocery store and get two Cadillacs—one for you and Daddy, and one for me.’ ” “I [just] didn’t want him to have to steal one,” said Vernon.

  For the most part he failed to distinguish himself in any way. At school he was “an average student,” “sweet and average,” according to his teachers, and he himself rarely spoke of his childhood years, except to note that they had not been easy and, occasionally, to recall moments of rejection. With his father, toward the end of his life, he reminisced about the time Vernon had taken him to see his first movie, “and we couldn’t let the church know anything about it.” The picture that you see of him with his third-grade class shows a little boy standing apart, arms folded, hair neatly combed, his mouth inverted in that familiar pout. Everyone else—the Farrars, the Harrises, Odell Clark—seems connected somehow, grouped together, smiling, arms around each other’s shoulders. Elvis stands apart—not shunned, just apart. That is not the way any of his classmates ever remembered it, but it is how the picture looks.

  There are a multitude of semiapocryphal stories from these years, most based on the kind of homely memories of childhood that any of us is likely to possess: who focuses upon the classmate who is out o
f the picture, why should anyone have noticed Elvis Presley in particular or committed to memory his every utterance, noted his views on issues of the day, or even imagined that he would ever come to anything? The war was going on, but it seems never to have impinged upon memories of growing up in East Tupelo, except, perhaps, to have provided opportunities for employment. In late 1942, after working for a short period of time in Ozark, Alabama, some three hundred miles from home, Vernon got a job on the construction of a POW camp in Como, Mississippi. Shortly thereafter he went to work for the Dunn Construction Company in Millington, Tennessee, just outside of Memphis, living in company barracks and returning home on weekends because he was unable to find lodgings for his family. “I’d tramp all over town looking for so much as a single room. I’d find one, and first thing they would ask is, ‘You got any children?’ And I’d say I had a little boy. Then they’d shut… the door.”