Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [97]
But New Yorkers had seen two very different aspects of Elvis’s personality in an exceedingly short time. At eleven-thirty that Sunday night, little more than three hours after the Allen show signed on, Elvis appeared live on the WRCA-TV interview program, Hy Gardner Calling! Gardner, a popular syndicated newspaper columnist, asked his guest the increasingly familiar questions about his critics, his music, and his effect on teenagers. Elvis, on camera at the Warwick Hotel, but holding a telephone to speak with Gardner, took it in good humor, answering a question about his four Cadillacs (“I’m planning for seven”) as well as a ridiculous rumor that he had once shot his mother. (“Well, I think that one takes the cake. That’s about the funniest one I’ve ever heard.”)
The show was memorable for two reasons—the shot of Elvis on the telephone exposed an ugly and prominent wart on his right wrist, which he would have removed in 1958. (A Georgia fan named Joni Mabe would acquire it and keep it in a jar of formaldehyde, selling T-shirts proclaiming, THE KING IS GONE, BUT THE WART LIVES ON.) What got people talking, though, was Elvis’s sleepy eyes and druggy speech.
Two weeks earlier, he had stopped by Wink Martindale’s WHBQ-TV “Top 10 Dance Party” to promote his upcoming concert at Memphis’s Russwood Stadium, a charity benefit for the Press-Scimitar’s Cynthia Milk Fund, and his behavior on the show had also seemed somehow altered. He stuttered more than usual and was nervous in the company of the kids in the studio that afternoon. Then, with a lock of hair meandering on his forehead, he leaned on the jukebox for most of his brief interview, and nearly fell off of it when he went to shake Wink’s hand. Elvis had initially resisted coming on the show, saying he didn’t feel comfortable doing a live interview, even on local TV. Wink asked Dewey Phillips to speak with him about it, and then Elvis agreed, but only if Dewey appeared with him on camera. Had Dewey, who used Benzedrine to keep himself awake and sedatives to bring himself down, plied Elvis with pills?
Wink later tried to explain it away as growing pains.
“He was very awkward in that era. He didn’t seem to know how to act around people. He just didn’t know how to be interviewed at that stage of his career.”
And maybe that was part of it, along with sleep deprivation. He told Hy Gardner he slept only four or five hours a night, but some of the audience thought it was more than that. Hy apparently did, too, saying, “Several newspaper stories hinted that you smoked marijuana . . . in order to work yourself into a frenzy while singing.” (“Well, I don’t know,” Elvis replied with a laugh.) In 1956, drug use was mostly relegated to the underground, to bowery dwellers, jazz musicians, and the criminally insane, and mainstream America found it both horrifying and scandalous. In billboarding the guests on the show, Gardner’s secretary, Marilyn, announced, “We’ll talk with veteran bandleader Ted Lewis; Egyptian dancer Nedula Ace; and the unidentified author of the shocking book titled I Was a Dope Addict. And to get right into action immediately with the most controversial entertainer of the year . . . well, you’ll hear who.”
On July 3, Elvis took a cab to New York’s Pennsylvania Station and once more boarded a train, this time for a twenty-seven-hour trip to Memphis. There he would enjoy a few hours of Fourth of July celebration with his parents, cousins Junior, Bobby, and Billy Smith, his aunt and uncle Travis and Lorraine Smith, his Memphis girlfriend, Barbara Hearn, and a growing entourage that now included Red West and an overgrown Memphis boy named Arthur Hooten, whose mother had worked with Gladys at Britling’s Cafeteria. On the train, he listened to the