Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [77]
Besides, tension had been mounting been Sun and the Elvis camp for several months, ever since Colonel Parker’s involvement. The Colonel had completely won Vernon over to his side, telling him money would rain from the sky once Parker got Elvis moved to RCA, and Vernon had become antagonistic with Sam and Marion both.
Marion remembered back to the beginning, when Elvis’s first release came out, and he stood there with a record in his hand and his eyes full of tears. He was so happy and humble, saying, “To think this has happened to me. This is what I’ve always wanted all my life, my very own record with my very own name on it.” Now, under the suggestions of Colonel Tom, Vernon had become very difficult. And, of course, Elvis didn’t want to do anything his father disapproved of, which put him under great stress.
There were other good reasons to let him go, too. Elvis, being young and full of piss and vinegar, seemed accident-prone. He’d already had several wrecks in his Cadillacs, and the 1954 model, which he’d had painted pink, caught fire and burned near Hope, Arkansas, after a rear wheel bearing locked up. Elvis was in the Caddy with a date, and when Bill and Scotty caught up with him, the latter remembers, “He was on the side of the road, frantically emptying the trunk, throwing guitars and amplifiers and clothes.”
And now he was riding motorcycles, partly in emulation of Marlon Brando and James Dean, though he’d picked up the habit from Jimmie Rodgers Snow, Hank’s son, with whom he often went riding in Nashville, where people tended not to recognize him. “I had two motorcycles, and he really loved just taking off and going riding a lot,” says Snow. But to Sam’s point of view, it meant that one day he could have a multimillion-dollar property, and the next day he could have nothing. Once, during a terrible storm, Marion heard someone calling her name. There was Elvis, careening down Union Avenue on a motorcycle with a girl on the back. Didn’t the boy have enough sense not to take that thing out in the rain?
Even through the transition, though, Elvis and Marion remained friends. He seemed loath to cut his ties with her and just happened to be in the neighborhood all too often.
Marion was busier than she’d ever been, since Sam planned to use part of his buyout money to realize another of his dreams—to establish an all-girl radio station, WHER. It signed on almost immediately, at the end of October 1955, and Marion oversaw nearly all the operations, helping Sam set it up and making its first announcement on the air. Now she had three jobs and often she fell asleep at her desk. One morning about three o’clock, she faintly heard someone yelling, “Marion! Marion!”
“I looked up and Elvis was standing there absolutely white as a ghost. He was passing by on his motorcycle and had seen me through the blinds, and he was really upset and shaky. He said, ‘Marion, I thought you were dead!’ ” She was going to miss that boy.
On November 21, 1955, all the parties, even Bob Neal, met at Sun and signed the final contract, the Colonel patting Gladys on the back as she gave her son a kiss.
But Gladys didn’t trust the Colonel, and he knew it. That’s why he sent Hank Snow, his business partner, to sweet-talk Gladys into letting Elvis sign the management contract, having already used Jimmie Rodgers Snow to bond with Elvis for the same goal. “Basically, we were about the same age, and I carried the first good intention contract to Lubbock, Texas, where I met Elvis and was put on the same show with him to discuss the idea of him signing with Jamboree Attractions. I didn’t know enough about what was going on to honestly know what was happening, if you know what I mean. I was just a teenager.”
The elder Snow assumed, of course, that Presley would be signed to the agency he jointly owned with Parker. But when the Colonel traveled to Memphis, he took two contracts