Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [2]
“Any answer to that one?” Wilder asked.
“Well, I don’t roll my—what’d he call it—pelvic gyrations,” an indignant Elvis replied. “My pelvis had nothin’ to do with what I do. I just get kinda in rhythm with the music. I jump around to it because I enjoy what I’m doin’. I’m not tryin’ to be vulgar, I’m not tryin’ to sell any sex, I’m not tryin’ to look vulgar and nasty. I just enjoy what I’m doin’ and tryin’ to make the best of it.”
It was a fib, of course. Even then, he knew the power he had onstage and off, the way he could “charm the pants off a snake,” in novelist Bobbie Ann Mason’s Southern expression.
She touched my hand, what a chill I got
Her lips are like a volcano that’s hot
I’m proud to say she’s my buttercup
I’m in love
I’m all shook up
Mm, mm oh, oh, yeah, yeah!
For a man who was literally pawed, groped, scratched, and had his clothes ripped away by women for his entire twenty-three-year career, Presley demonstrated a remarkable tolerance for his audience. He rarely seemed to resent their overexuberant physical presence, their endless requests for autographs, or worse, the way their desire to possess him kept him a virtual prisoner in hotel rooms and at home in his beloved Graceland. In that regard, he stands almost alone in the pantheon of great rock stars, many of whom despise the very people who made them.
“He enjoyed the feel of being with fans,” remembers photographer Alfred Wertheimer, who gained unprecedented access to Presley in 1956 and captured some of the best-known images of young Elvis. “He loved being with girls. Later on, I found out whether the girls were eight years old or eighteen or sixty-five or seventy, he just liked women.”
Hank Saperstein, the merchandiser who plastered Elvis’s likeness on everything from panties to record players to lipstick in Tutti Frutti Red and Hound Dog Orange in 1956, noticed that both women and men responded equally to Elvis’s sneer. “His sneer was all-important. It was a good-looking, lovable sneer.” But if both sexes inherently embraced the cruelty and playfulness in that curl of the lip, why did only women faint at Presley’s concerts?
The word fan comes from fanatic, of course. But a more interesting focus is the origin of hysteria. A Greek medical term, hysterikos, it means dysfunctional or “wandering” uterus. Hippocrates coined the word, believing that madness overcame women who adhered to sexual abstinence, and that the uterus wandered upward, compressing the diaphragm, heart, and lungs.
There’s poetry in the fact, then, that Elvis learned certain of his stage moves from women, one of the surprises of this book. And it suggests that part of his potency was not just his ability to translate precisely what turned women on, but to mimic their actions back to them.
However, so much of what made Elvis Elvis sprang from his assimilation of black culture, both in his native Tupelo, Mississippi, and in his adopted hometown of Memphis.
This was true both of his music—a greasy, intense union of white and black in its mix of country and blues and gospel and pop—and in the fur-trimmed flamboyance of his personal style. His “sexual savagery” onstage challenged the traditional view of white masculinity, particularly as he arrived on the national consciousness in the staid, button-gloved Eisenhower era, dominated by the bland orchestras of Mantovani, Hugo Winterhalter, and Percy Faith. Everything about him—from his exotic looks (hooded eyes giving way to an impossibly pomaded ducktail) to his sound (the haunting spookiness of “Heartbreak Hotel”)—suggested an alien inexplicably fallen to earth.
“People wonder why everyone impersonates the old Elvis,” says Kevin Eggers, the founder of Tomato Records, who met Presley at a touch football game in