Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [146]
But there she was, right behind him, smiling like a newlywed backstage at the Tupelo Fair in late September. The Colonel chomped hard on his cigar. But nobody seemed to notice. They were talking about those big pelvic thrusts that Elvis did onstage. Wow, where did he learn to do that?
On October 28, 1957, a who’s who of show business celebrities were among the nine thousand in attendance on the first of Elvis’s two nights at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles. That evening, Elvis not only gave the most incendiary performance of his career, but he also scandalized himself in a lascivious display that surpassed anything the majority of his audience had ever seen. Harnessing all his power as a sexual revolutionist, he went far beyond his inflammatory appearance on The Milton Berle Show, and even his recent act at the Tupelo Fair.
Byron Raphael had the best view of anyone, and in 2005, he wrote about it for Playboy magazine:
The Colonel had put me on Nipper Control that night, which meant he positioned me beneath the stage and charged me with the safety of a three-foot-high, plaster of Paris canine—the infamous cocked-ear, Jack Russell mascot of RCA, Elvis’s recording label. Elvis was going to use the pup as a prop during “Hound Dog.” “Whatever you do, don’t let that dog fall off the stage,” Parker snapped. “And tell Mr. Presley you’re going to hold Nipper up, so he doesn’t have to worry, he can just be free.”
The Colonel often said, “Elvis has stardust,” meaning that it was remarkable how such a shy person could change himself into a creature of infinite magnetism onstage. But the old hustler never dreamed what Elvis was planning to do with man’s best friend.
Elvis came out onstage with his now-famous gold-lamé jacket topping a pair of loose-fitting, black dress slacks. During his fifty-minute, eighteen-song set, he “wiggled, bumped, and twisted,” according to Jack O’Brian of the New York Journal-American, one of many out-of-town papers that covered the event. But it was the finish of “Hound Dog” that prompted another paper’s headline, “Elvis Presley Will Have to Clean Up His Show—Or Go to Jail.” I don’t know exactly what got into him, but as he launched into that song, he was vastly different from the Elvis I knew at the studio—his eyes were dilated, as if he were taking his direction from someplace far, far away. Then he did the unthinkable. Pumped up by either adrenaline or libido, he began to unfasten his pants and slowly pull his zipper down, which prompted wild screaming from an audience that was already frenzied at the sexual surge Elvis sent out through the auditorium.
With his pants now open, but not down, Elvis reached for Nipper, which I still held tight from below the stage. Suddenly, Elvis pressed the dog against his crotch, and I could feel him pushing it back on me as he rode the pooch back and forth in a masturbatory glide. As the crowd noise grew to a furious roar, Elvis continued to dry hump poor Nipper as if he were a teenage girl at a drive-in.
Then all of a sudden, Elvis pulled the dog out of my grip, and then began rolling around on the floor with him in full simulation of bestial bliss. It was one of the most shockingly erotic things I’d ever seen. There’s no question that Elvis was truly trying to have sex, because when he finally gave the dog back to me, I could see a huge hard-on through his pants. The next night the L.A. Vice Squad came, armed with warnings, and the police filmed the show. But Elvis toned it down, and Nipper made it through without undue violation.
When the Playboy article was published, Elvis aficionados challenged Raphael’s account. Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires, who performed with him that night, insists he saw nothing inappropriate in Elvis’s actions. “Elvis did not do anything onstage with Nipper that was suggestive or off-color. We were standing very close to him onstage as we always were. We would have seen him.”
Photographs, however,