Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [82]
The results of the screen test surprised nearly everyone. Steve Sholes, head of RCA’s country and R & B divisions, and Chick Crumpacker of the label’s promotion staff, viewed the test in New York along with other Victor people, and Crumpacker recalls they could barely believe what they saw. Elvis suggested he had the power to legitimately follow Marlon Brando or his hero, James Dean.
“We went back to the office, and it was the talk of the place, like, ‘My God, this guy has all of that natural quality that these other actors have become famous for, because he has that same directness and ability to be himself on the screen.’ It looked like he wasn’t acting at all. We were stunned.”
Screenwriter Allan Weiss, who would later write five Presley pictures, also saw it. In his view, Elvis seemed amateurish in the dramatic scenes, looking like “the lead in a high school play.” But once the music was added, “the transformation was incredible . . . electricity bounced off the walls of the sound stage. [It was] like an earthquake in progress, only without the implicit threat.”
Elvis was too in demand to have to give up the majority of his Saturday nights for the Hayride now, so the Colonel sent Horace Logan a cashier’s check for $10,000 to buy out his contract, with the promise to appear on a special Hayride charity show in December. Logan was getting a bargain, the Colonel told him. By then, Elvis would be so big they’d have to hold that show someplace other than KWKH—the girls would tear the place down.
The swirl of it all “appears to be a dream to me,” Elvis told reporters in Lexington, Kentucky. He was sounding more optimistic now, in part because he had a new ally. Joe Hazen, Hal Wallis’s business partner, was excited about Elvis’s potential as an actor. He sent a memo to Wallis saying Elvis’s “meteoric rise is unquestionably a freak situation, but that still does not detract from the fact that as a straight actor the guy has great potentialities.” Elvis, who hoped he wouldn’t have to sing in his movies, was beside himself with joy. The former movie theater usher told Wallis, “My ambition has always been to become a motion picture actor—a good one, sir.”
In March Elvis, buoyed by a future in films and the Colonel’s promise of turning a million dollars’ worth of talent into a million dollars, paid $40,000 for a single-story, ranch-style house for himself and his parents at 1034 Audubon Drive, located in a fashionable, upscale neighborhood of doctors and lawyers east of downtown Memphis near Memphis State University. A typical American dream home with pastel green board-and-batten siding, slate gray tiled roof, red brick trim, and black shutters framing white windows, it was the first house the Presleys had owned since leaving Tupelo. Elvis was proud that he could provide it, and he particularly liked the double carport: he and Vernon were constantly jockeying automobiles in the driveway.
The home had three bedrooms, and Elvis used one for his huge collection of stuffed animals, many of them gifts from fans. For his primary bedroom, Gladys chose a remarkably girlish motif, decorating twin beds with pink taffeta dust ruffles and white quilted bedspreads with pink-and-blue flowers. From there, she hung pale yellow wallpaper flecked with blue and orange—white ceramic figures, caught in midleap on black oval plaques, dotted the walls—and installed a dark pink telephone that matched a selection of his pink stuffed animals. In truth, his room looked like something his fans would have wanted themselves, but Elvis seemed not to mind.
That spring, he began seeing Barbara Hearn, a friend of Dixie Locke he had known casually for several years. A dark-haired beauty who bore more than a passing resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara exuded sophistication and intelligence. Soon, she would be first runner-up in the Miss Memphis contest, the other contestants voting her “Miss Personality