Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [103]
By the time Elvis roared into Jacksonville on August 10, he had cut a swath through Tampa, Lakeland, St. Petersburg, Orlando, and Daytona Beach. Colonel Parker, who’d started out in Florida first as a carny, and then as a young promoter, knew every inch of the state. And with the help of Mae Axton, his crack publicity contact, he turned the tour into the epicenter of the national Elvis Movement. Blanketing the region with promotions that framed Elvis just short of a sideshow attraction, he packed the auditoriums with ticket buyers who ranged from the merely curious to the intently carnal.
Based on the pandemonium Elvis generated the last two times he played Jacksonville, the Colonel booked him for six shows over two days, all at the Florida Theatre, a medium-size venue that held about 2,200 people. On assignment from Collier’s magazine was photographer Jay Leviton, who, like Al Wertheimer, had almost unrestricted access to the cresting star backstage, onstage, over dinner, even in bed at the Roosevelt Hotel. (“He was very casual, very unguarded . . . I was surprised Colonel Parker didn’t control things more.”) As Wertheimer before him, Leviton would put poetry in the pictures—particularly when Elvis would lie facedown onstage, stretching full out on the microphone, saying things every girl in the audience wanted to hear. June would try to stay out of Leviton’s lens, but he would still find her backstage, along with Red West and Junior and Bobby Smith.
Also on hand that day was Juvenile Court Judge Marion W. Gooding, a servant and crusader for all that was good and upright, and who was determined there would not be a repeat of Elvis’s last trips to Jacksonville, when “aroused fans ripped nearly all [of Elvis’s] clothes off.” Pressured by community leaders from Miami and Daytona Beach, who warned that the depraved singer was swinging his pelvis and heading north, and it was no laughing matter, Judge Gooding had met with them, as well as with the Optimists Club and the National Congress of the P.T.A. All of them were up in arms, “frozen stiff with outrage and bewilderment” at Elvis’s “bizarrely spasmodic and purely sexual” moves. They saw Elvis as arrogant, sneering, dangerous, and defiant—the very embodiment of the 1950s juvenile delinquent—and insisted the judge warn him to tone down his libidinous intensity.
“They really wanted Daddy to shut down his performance,” said the judge’s daughter, Marilyn Gooding. “Daddy’s heart wasn’t in that, but he did want Elvis to perform clean.”
“They had me convinced that no teenage girl was safe around Elvis Presley,” Judge Gooding said years later, chuckling at the times. “They wanted me to have him watched at the theater and they wanted his hotel room watched. They had him pictured to me as a real villain. . . . Looking back on it today, of course, it wouldn’t even stir a ripple. Not a single ripple.”
But in 1956 Judge Gooding took his task with the utmost seriousness and demanded to see the performer and his manager in his chambers before the show. Photographer Leviton went along, capturing the disdain on Gooding’s grumpy face, and the flushed emotion—part shame, part anger—on Elvis’s. The judge warned him he would be at the first show to make sure Elvis did as he was told, and that he had prepared warrants charging him with “impairing the morals of minors.” He would serve them, too, he said, if Elvis wiggled his hips and “put obscenity and vulgarity in front of our children.” As if for proof, deputies would be stationed in the wings.
Afterward, the singer told reporters, “I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong. I know my mother approves of what I’m doing.” And the judge called Elvis a sweet, gentle, kid, “with the sort of good manners that we associate with southern politeness.”
Still, the judge attended the first show at three-thirty. Onstage, Elvis opened with “Heartbreak