Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [88]
Afterward, he kept her close, and while waiting for the crowd to thin (“He couldn’t get out of the auditorium for the throng of fans outside”), he asked for the house organ in the auditorium to be turned on. Then he took off his coat, lit a small cigar, and in a poignant moment, began playing “Harbor Lights,” singing just to Kay. Like most teenagers in the thrill of early love, she was transported, feeling a connection to him that seemed to come from some unearthly place. “It was almost like we knew each other from somewhere else, you know?”
Perhaps there was destiny involved after all. Before Kay left that night, sleeping at her friend Teena’s house, Elvis asked her more about her “Rock & Bop.”
“He asked me to show him the steps, and then Scotty picked up his guitar, and we did a little number together there, the three of us, backstage. Up to that point, all he was doing was the Hillbilly Cat stuff—just shaking both of his legs and vibrating, not really doing any footwork. I taught him a few of the bop steps that the black people were doing back then and told him to go crazy with it.”
Later, she was surprised to see that he had worked it into his stage act. “I don’t know if he saw the bop somewhere else, but I do know that he incorporated some of the heel-toe moves after that, because I went back and looked at what he was doing before and after that time.”
Teaching him that, being able to give something back to the man who had given her so much enjoyment, was “a nice thing, a nice moment,” she says. “We were like crazy kids, just having a ball.” It was one of the best days of her life.
And, in retrospect, one of Elvis’s. The boy who couldn’t dance in high school had just picked up a signature stage move, one that would help define his early style. Somehow, the fact that he learned it from a teenage girl seemed fitting.
Near the end of April, Elvis opened a two-week run in the Venus Room at the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas. The Colonel had booked Eddy Arnold into Vegas on numerous occasions and considered it his playground. He counted many friends there, some of whom were heavy in the underworld. His connections, coupled with his growing love of gambling, made Vegas seem like a perfect showcase for his new client, especially as he commanded $7,500 a week for Elvis, in advance, and in cash. “They got an atom-bomb testing place out there in the desert,” he explained. “What if some feller pressed the wrong button?”
But Parker miscalculated. Elvis was still too immature and unpolished for Vegas. (He introduced his first number one hit as “Heartburn Motel.”) And the New Frontier audience was not made up of hormonal teenagers, but an older, jaded crowd, most of whom had come to see bandleader Freddy Martin, whose forte was pop arrangements of the classics. Elvis was scared stiff. Everything about the engagement was wrong—it was his first sit-down gig, and no matter what clothes he wore, even loafers and dress pants and a western-cut jacket, he seemed out of place.
T. W. Richardson, the New Frontier’s vice president and part owner, had heard about the singer in Richardson’s hometown of Biloxi, and called the Colonel about the booking only a month before. The first night, Richardson invited a clutch of friends to gamble and take in the show, and among the guests was a Houston doctor, Tom Van Zant. According to Gabe Tucker, one of Parker’s cronies, when Elvis took the stage, Dr. Van Zant “jumped up from their ringside table and shouted, ‘Goddamn it, shit! What is all this yelling and screaming? I can’t take this. Let’s go to the tables and gamble.’ ”
It was a rough debut, attended by only a smattering of applause, and Elvis was devastated. “After that first night,” he said in 1959, “I went outside and just walked around in the dark. It was awful . . . I wasn’t getting across to the audience.”
The Colonel quickly suggested that the hotel add a special matinee on Saturday for teenagers, where, for a dollar, they would see the performance and be served one soft drink. That afternoon, at a reserved