Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [92]
In the next months, Elvis would begin to make national headlines, with both Time and Newsweek running stories on his phenomenal rise, and other publications hurrying to follow suit. Elvis was now firmly in the national spotlight. But criticism over what some considered his lewd behavior began to mount. In May, after his performance in Lacrosse, Wisconsin, the editor of the local newspaper notified FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that Elvis’s act included “sexual self-gratification on stage.” Ten days later, there was another riot, this one twenty minutes into Elvis’s show in Kansas City, Missouri, where D. J.’s drums and Bill’s bass were smashed, and D. J. was thrown into the orchestra pit.
Then on June 5, Elvis made his second appearance on The Milton Berle Show, singing “Hound Dog,” and making the most of the beat that D. J. had picked up drumming in strip clubs. It was the performance that would come to define him both as a cultural threat, and as an innovative creative phenomenon.
Most critics rushed to thrash him, Jack Gould of the New York Times writing, “Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability,” and Jack O’Brian of the New York Journal-American deriding his “display of primitive physical movement [that is] difficult to describe in terms suitable to a family newspaper.”
Interestingly, it was a woman, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who added the vitriol. “I applaud parents of teenagers who work to get the blood and horror gangster stories off TV. They should work harder against the new alleged singer, Elvis Presley. I caught him on Milton Berle’s show and was revolted. Dressed like a zoot-suiter, he acted as though he had St. Vitus dance and indulged in bumps and grinds that wouldn’t be permitted in the lowest burlesque houses.”
Two days later, a nervous Harry Kalcheim at William Morris suggested to the Colonel that perhaps Elvis should do less shaking.
Also on the show that night was twenty-two-year-old actress Debra Paget, a contract player for Twentieth Century-Fox. Elvis took note of her for two reasons: The petite, five-foot-two redhead was just his physical type, going back to Carolyn Bradshaw, and she was talked about to play the female lead in his first motion picture, a western tentatively titled The Reno Brothers, set to start filming in August. Producer Hal Wallis had loaned him out to the rival studio as a kind of test, to see how audiences would respond to him. Even Wallis was concerned about Elvis’s negative publicity, but he held fast to the memory of that fine screen test and decided he’d made the right choice in signing him.
In defending his performance on the Berle show, Elvis told the Charlotte Observer that he hadn’t been any sexier than Debra Paget, who came out in a “tight thing with feathers on the behind where they wigggle the most [and who] bumped and pooshed out all over the place.”
Already, she was on his mind. But he’d never forgotten about Dixie, either, and at the end of May, he’d stopped by her house as she returned from a dress rehearsal for her high school graduation. He told her he was seeing her friend Barbara Hearn now. Dixie was fine with it. She was moving on, too. The next night, Elvis was in the seats at Ellis Auditorium to watch her graduate.
He might have tried to resurrect the romance had it not been for an event that came out of the blue. On June 11, 1956, he flew home off the road to attend the funeral of his cousin Lee Edward Smith, who had drowned.
As Elvis and his parents returned home from the service, he spotted a gal in the crowd surrounding the house. It was June Juanico, the Biloxi girl he’d met a year earlier. She was eighteen now and prettier than she’d been when he met her.
Weeks after Elvis repeatedly tried calling her from the road, only to leave messages with her brother, Jerry, June finally found out Elvis had made good on his promise. “Oh, by the way,” Jerry said, “some guy with a hillbilly accent called you on the phone.” By the time she