Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [147]
“He was on the floor, he put his arm around the dog lying flat next to it, and he had his leg around it,” offers Kevin Eggers in explanation. “That’s what was happening. Now, in the context of what he was doing, it was outrageously provocative. But it wasn’t Jim Morrison.” Byron had made it clear that Elvis had not actually exposed himself, as the lead singer of the Doors was arrested for doing in an infamous 1969 incident in Miami. Still, Eggers says, “Elvis Presley would never have pulled down his fly.”
But Eggers was not in the audience that night. And the Jordanaires did not have Byron’s proximity from beneath the stage. Even if Byron embellished his story, or if his memory was faulty after nearly fifty years, others had the same interpretation of the singer’s intent. Albert Goldman’s 1981 controversial biography, Elvis, refers to adults leaving the theater with the idea that “Elvis had capped an obscene performance by pretending to bugger the dog.”
Dick Williams, the entertainment editor of the Los Angeles Mirror-News, was clearly outraged at what he saw, calling Elvis a “Sexhibitionist,” and going on for a dozen paragraphs: “If any further proof were needed that what Elvis offers is not basically music but a sex show, it was proved last night. . . . The madness reached its peak at the finish with ‘Hound Dog.’ Elvis writhed in complete abandon, hair hanging over his face. He got down on the floor with a huge replica of the RCA singing dog and made love to it as if it were a girl.”
Ricky Nelson, who met Elvis at a party in his hotel suite after the second night, never got over the performance, telling friends for years how Elvis “group-fucked 10,000 people.”
Whatever happened on the first night—whether Elvis’s eyes were “dilated,” as Raphael wrote, because he was taking pills, which might have affected his behavior—Elvis was far less flamboyant the following evening. When the police showed up with a movie camera, he poked fun at it all, just as he had in the Jacksonville incident. Using hand gestures, he repeatedly indicated to the audience that the censorious camera was on him, even holding his arms out and binding his wrists together, suggesting that he had been handcuffed. At one point, he announced to the crowd, “You should have been here last night!”
But there was plenty to captivate on October 29, too, at least for one young girl, eleven-year-old Cherilyn Sarkisian, who grew up to be a singer herself. Like Elvis, she would be famous for just one name: Cher.
The child had already seen Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show, and it was as if a thunderbolt had hit her: “I was a goner. I loved the way he sang and the way he looked. In some strange way, I felt he expressed who I was.”
It was weird for an eleven-year-old girl to feel that way, she thought. She was a tomboy, but a girlie girl, too, though definitely more of a tomboy in a lot of ways. She liked to sing, but she had a really low voice, and she didn’t even get into a singing group in her school. Not even a play. She was always in the chorus, but her voice was too high for guys and too low for girls, so she just sang for herself. She didn’t seem to neatly fit into any category, and that was part of what she got from watching the gyrating image on TV: Elvis didn’t either. “When I saw him, I thought, ‘Well, this is kind of who I am.’ ”
Part of it was his bad-boy vibe, the way he went against the grain and defied authority, because as a younger child, Cher did, too. “I got in trouble a lot. Not really big trouble, but when I was ten or eleven, my friend and I ran away from home—took a horse and went out to San Bernardino and hopped a train—just for the adventure of it. I ran away from home once on my tricycle, too. I was always this strange child that wanted more adventure than there was.”
When she saw Elvis on TV, then, “I thought, ‘This is perfect. I’m going in the right direction.’ He just validated where I was going.