Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [81]
Elvis was all over the television that year, beginning on January 28, when he made his first of six appearances on Stage Show, a variety hour produced by Jackie Gleason and hosted by big-band legends Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. He flew into New York a few days earlier with the Colonel to meet the top brass at RCA, including Anne Fulchino, the Boston-bred national publicity director who had upgraded RCA’s pop and country coverage, but always hoped the label would break a big new pop artist. Elvis had been to New York once before, in 1955, when he and Scotty and Bill auditioned for Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, where a woman (possibly Godfrey vocalist Janette Davis, who hailed from Memphis and became a full member of the production staff in 1956), turned them down. But it was still all so new to Elvis, meeting all these people who didn’t talk like he did, and who didn’t seem to share his sense of humor. He didn’t really know how to act. When Fulchino extended her hand, she was horrified to find that Elvis grasped it wearing an electric buzzer on his finger.
“My attitude was to make a total star out of Elvis. Not a kid with a one-hit record, but a broad, overall star. So I said to him, ‘You know, that may be big in Nashville, but it will never go in New York. Don’t ever do it again.’ Now, he was a smart kid, and if you caught him doing something that was dumb for the occasion, he absorbed it and he didn’t repeat it.
“For example, I took him to Klube’s, a German restaurant on Twenty-third Street, just a block across the street from where the RCA office was at that time. I ordered pork chops, and he started to pick his up with his hands. Then suddenly he noticed that I was eating mine with a fork. And he paid attention to where the forks were and what I did with them. This is where I give him great credit. He wanted to get somewhere and he knew he had to do certain things to get there. He was very intelligent. Not the Harvard-type intelligence—the instinctive intelligence.”
But it was still a lot to deal with in a short span of time. A few days later, Fulchino and RCA hosted a press reception for Elvis, and reporters, amused by the flash in the pan with the funny clothes and the suggestive stage moves, asked about his reaction to his success. “It scares me,” Elvis said. “You know, it just scares me.”
By spring, his anxiety about fame seemed just as strong. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, British reporter Lionel Crane, of the London Daily Mirror, asked about the audience reception, “a scream that I thought would split the roof,” as Crane put it. “It makes me want to cry,” Elvis said. “How does all this happen to me?” Five days later, it was the same in Waco, Texas. His fame “happened so fast,” Elvis told a local reporter. “I could go out like a light, just like I came on.” By then, the press was calling him “the most talked-about new personality in the last ten years of recorded music.”
It was all snowballing now. The Colonel, putting pressure on Harry Kalcheim at the William Morris Agency in New York, got him booked on The Milton Berle Show for April, and after a Hollywood screen test at Paramount Studios in late March, producer Hal Wallis signed him to a contract for one motion picture with an option for six more, the money starting at $15,000 for the first film, up to $100,000 for the seventh.
Elvis’s acting experience, however, consisted almost entirely of the Christmas pageants in the Assembly of God church in Tupelo as a child. He was understandably nervous, then, for his tryout, especially as he was given the material—two dramatic scenes from The Rainmaker, which Wallis was about to begin filming with Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn