CHAPTER 3
BILLY SMITH: When we got to Memphis, we all moved into the same place, an old renovated house at 370 Washington Street. It had one apartment upstairs, and one downstairs, and a community bath. We lived up and them down. Elvis’s mama and my daddy were closer than a lot of brothers and sisters. So the living together worked out okay. This was in North Memphis, which isn’t the best part of town.
At first, it was real tough. We ate turnip greens, it seemed, like night and day. For a while, it looked like it was back to Tupelo for us. Then Aunt Gladys found a job in a drapery factory, Fashion Curtains, and Mama followed a few days later, at a laundry. Daddy and Vernon spent weeks looking for work. They had to put cardboard in their shoes to cover the holes. Then Daddy found a job. Eventually he worked at Precision Tool, where Elvis later worked. And Uncle Vernon hired on at United Paint in early ’49. He stayed there longer than anywhere. Usually, he’d get a couple of paychecks, and that would be about it. Anyway, at that time, the two families made a grand total of $120 a week. After a while, some of the other family come on up.
On Washington Street, we lived next to a vegetable stand. I still remember the name “Magollo.” What produce they couldn’t sell, they threw out in the trash cans. I remember going through there and finding bruised bananas to eat. When you’re that poor, you scavenge for what you can get. Elvis loved to tell about the time I fell into one of the fifty-five-gallon trash cans. I was so little that he had to pick me up by my legs and pull me out. But I wasn’t turning a-loose of them damn bananas.
Elvis was eight years older than me, and he kind of looked after me and my older brother, Bobby. There was this guy, Frankie, who was the son of the owner. He used to shoot Bobby and me in the back with a damn BB gun, pop us pretty good. And of course, Elvis confronted him about it. He took up for us.
LAMAR FIKE: Of all those Smith cousins, Billy’s the only one that came out worth a damn. Elvis felt like he raised him.
BILLY SMITH: We lived on Washington Street for only a few months. Then the Presleys lived on Adams Street for a while. All those streets are real close together, Jefferson, Washington, Adams. Well, the Presleys just moved over from Washington to Adams. And then a very short time after, Aunt Gladys applied for welfare assistance. They got into that Lauderdale Courts complex, at 185 Winchester, and we moved to Poplar Street, which was about a block away. Some books say they lived on Poplar Street, too, but that’s wrong. Anyway, I could go around the block and visit. And if I remember, we moved to Third Street, which is across the way. Then when they moved to 462 Alabama Street, we lived on High Street. We always lived right around the same area, until Elvis got into music in a big way and bought the Audubon Drive house in ’56.
Gladys was so thrilled with the Lauderdale Courts place. This was a pretty big housing project, like four hundred apartments. The Presleys’ apartment had two bedrooms on the ground floor. They paid $35 a month for it. They moved there in the fall of ’49 and stayed until early ’53. Because Gladys was photographed a lot in the last year or so of her life, when she was sick and sad about Elvis going to the army, people have the idea she was a down kind of person. But I remember her as very outgoing and high-strung. Fun-loving would be a better way of saying it. She could make you feel great just by being there.
I have this vivid memory of going over to Lauderdale Courts one summer when Elvis was at Humes [High School]. They were playing music, and Gladys was dancing around. And Elvis was dancing with her. They were having a ball. And Vernon and my mom were over there, and my brother, too. Of course, I was kind of small. And Gladys said, “Well, it don’t look like they’re having too much fun.” So she went in there and got all Elvis’s toys for us to play with while they played cards. She was always jolly. Always laughing and carrying on.
When they were getting ready to move to Alabama Street, Elvis give me all his toys. I’ve got about four or five of ’em left—a little metal dump truck, a car, a little wrecker truck, and a tractor, I know. Both Elvis and Gladys were pack rats. They kept everything. So I think she was surprised he give ’em to me. But she didn’t seem to mind. I guess they felt sorry for me. Or maybe they were just trying to keep me occupied because I was a little hellion.
LAMAR FIKE: Gladys always wanted the best for Elvis. And if there was a way to get it, she was going to find it.
BILLY SMITH: Aunt Gladys was a mover and shaker. I think that’s where Elvis got it. She told him, “Whatever you do, go after it hard, and grasp onto it.” And so Elvis started working at seventeen as an usher at Loews State Theater. That’s where he got fired for punching another usher. He told the manager that Elvis was getting free candy from the concession girl. Even back then, Elvis bought some of his own clothes. He didn’t have a lot, but what he had was nice and up-to-date.
In a little while, his tastes changed. He started going down to Lansky Brothers on Beale Street where the blacks hung out. I remember his first pink-and-black outfit. I thought, “My God Almighty!” But it also excited me, like, “Hell, let me do it!” I read that he wore clear plastic shoes, but I only remember some black-and-white ones. They had pointed toes, with the white laid in across the black. A lot of blacks still wear ’em nowadays.
My family thought, “Goddurn, why don’t he just go down there on Beale Street and live with ’em?” They said, “Somebody’s going to beat the hell out of him and peel them nigger outfits right off his hide!” Back then, “nigger” was a real loose term. And it was a complete switch for a white man to dress like that.
But the families remained close in Memphis. My daddy and Elvis’s mama both thought, “If I’ve got it, and you need it, you can have it.”
I remember when Elvis got his driver’s license. My daddy was working for Precision Tool. He was making fairly good money, and he had just bought a ’51 Chevrolet, with a sun visor and all. Elvis wanted to borrow it to take his driver’s test, and my daddy let him have it.
When he went to take his test, we all went. Elvis was sitting in the front with Daddy and Vernon. Very seldom did he ever say anything dirty in front of them. But a guy pulled out in front of Daddy, and Elvis yelled, “Watch where you’re going, you son of a bitch!” We were all shocked, you know. The car got real quiet. That year, Elvis won the Safe Driving Award at school.
By the way, the story about Aunt Gladys walking Elvis to high school until he got a car is the honest truth. Until Elvis was a senior, Vernon and Gladys just had only one car, a ’39 Lincoln. So like most kids, Elvis had to walk more than he got to ride. And Aunt Gladys didn’t walk him all the time. But if there was something bothering him, or if he come in and confided to her that “so-and-so at school is picking on me,” she would walk him to school. And a lot of times, she would hide behind a bush and follow him home without him seeing her.
Actually, Aunt Gladys looked after all of us. I was riding a horse one day, and it bucked and kicked. And she flew mad, and she said, “Get the hell off that horse, you big-eyed rascal!”
Both Bobby and me got treated good, but especially me. It wasn’t just because I was the youngest because there were other cousins my age.
Now, Elvis and Gene Smith got pretty close after Gene moved up to Memphis. Gene was another first cousin, and he was Elvis’s age. His mama was Levalle Smith, Gladys’s sister. She was a Smith, and she married a Smith, Edward Smith. Which I don’t think was any relation, but who knows? Hell, back then, cousins married cousins. Maybe that’s why we’re all warped. Anyway, Elvis and Gene worked together at Precision Tool until they threatened to cut Elvis’s hair. Actually, I’ve heard that’s a myth. They just found out he was younger than they thought.
There’s a picture of Gene and Elvis with their prom dates. Gene is with a girl named Bessie Wolverton, and Elvis is with Dixie Locke. He has on a white tuxedo jacket. Somehow the story got started that Elvis wouldn’t dance in high school. That’s not so. He went to several proms. One with a fourteen-year-old girl named Regis Wilson. Well, now, I take part of that back. She give an interview to People magazine once in which she said they went to Elvis’s senior prom, but Elvis told her he didn’t know how to dance, so they sat and drank Cokes all night. Maybe he just couldn’t dance very well, which is funny, considering what he did onstage later on. But I remember him dancing with a lot of girls in high school.
Dixie was his serious interest. He went with her about two years, from about ’53 to ’55. She was three or four years younger than Elvis. You always hear that he wanted to marry her, and expected to, but that she dumped him when he went on the road ’cause he was gone all the time. But Dixie just thought he was too possessive. And Elvis was always jealous of what she might be doing while he was away. I don’t know that they would have married because everything did a 180-degree turn when Elvis realized the effect he had on women.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis said his social life in high school was practically nonexistent. Kids made fun of him—an only child, very poor background. He had a lot of girls around him, but as pals. He could relate to them in some way. And he had younger friends that he liked and trusted because he could direct them and have more fun. He was a person who got intimidated very easily by somebody with more intelligence or ability. As a result, a situation developed where he had to have people around him all the time. That’s why he later assembled the entourage, the Memphis Mafia.
BILLY SMITH: When Elvis got to Lauderdale Courts, he made friends with Buzzy Forbess, and Paul Dougher, and Farley Guy. But even though they hung out together, they probably weren’t all that close. Even in high school, Elvis had mostly female friends. George Klein was a friend, but they really got closer after they graduated and Elvis went into music and George went into radio.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis liked George because in school George was one of the very few people who were supposedly “in.” George was senior class president, and he paid attention to Elvis. Elvis didn’t forget stuff like that.
BILLY SMITH: One reason Elvis didn’t have a lot of male friends in high school was because of his ducktail hairdo. And then, of course, he had those sideburns. Before the ducktail, I think he had a permanent. There are pictures of him, age seventeen or eighteen, with his hair real curly. Aunt Gladys would have given it to him. She used to give herself those Toni home permanents back then.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis’s main friend in those days was Red West. Red protected him one time in school. A bunch of guys had Elvis cornered in the restroom and were going to cut his hair, and Red stepped in and took care of them. Red was a big football player, the badass. He’d just drop you. Elvis never forgot favors.
The hair-cutting incident had to be real traumatic. You’re talking about a guy who’d been having vivid nightmares on a regular basis since he was a tiny kid. Mostly they were about people attacking him, trying to kill him. Elvis told us that when he was three, Vernon dreamed that the house was on fire, and he tried to throw Elvis out the window to save his life. But he missed, and he threw him ass-first against the wall.
The most amazing thing to me was that Elvis and his mother and father all had the same nightmare one night when Elvis was little. They thought the house was flooded. So they got up out of bed and took the mattress and put it out on the roof.
Elvis had nightmares almost every night until he died. That’s why he wouldn’t sleep. And that’s one reason he did so many pills.
MARTY LACKER: Red ended up protecting Elvis most of his life. He was pretty tough, but he also had a lot of sensitivity. Red was poorer than most of the kids. He didn’t have many clothes, or much of anything else. And Harry Levitch, this Jewish jeweler, helped a lot of kids, including Red. Red was always thankful, and so was Elvis. That’s why he started trading at Mr. Levitch’s store. The first thing he bought was an electric mixer for his mother. Two days later, he walked back in and said, “Mr. Levitch, can you get me another electric mixer?” Harry said, “Certainly, who will this be for?” And Elvis said, “This is for Mama, too. I’m going to put one at each end of the kitchen so she won’t have to walk so much.” He bought jewelry from Harry for years.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis had just turned eighteen when they moved to Alabama Street. A rabbi, Alfred Fruchter, lived upstairs. I remember he had a little beard and goatee, and kind of gray hair, and he was bald on top. The Presleys didn’t know anything about the Jewish religion, especially about Orthodox Jews and about not turning on anything electrical or driving a car on the Sabbath. And the first Friday night they were there, the rabbi came to the door the same time Vernon did. It was dark, so the rabbi asked Vernon if he would turn on the light for him.
Vernon said, “The string’s hanging right there.” He said, “Reach up there and turn it on yourself.” The rabbi said, “I’d rather you turn it on.” So Vernon finally did it, but he was real suspicious.
This happened two or three times, and Vernon kept saying, “That guy’s strange.” He mentioned it to another neighbor, and the neighbor said, “Well, he’s Jewish.” And Vernon said, “I don’t care what he is. He’s not helpless.”
MARTY LACKER: George Klein tells a story about when the Presleys lived with the rabbi. Except he didn’t get it quite right. He says that Elvis was the one who turned on the light, and the rabbi scolded him, and that’s how Elvis learned about Judaism. He also says that when the Presleys first came to Memphis, they didn’t have any place to live and no money, and a rabbi let them live in his basement rent free. That’s supposedly why Elvis hired so many Jews.
That’s bull. The Presleys paid $50 a month rent, plus utilities, on Alabama Street. And they didn’t live in the basement—Minnie Mae slept on a cot in the dining room. And Elvis never talked about it.
I think he just happened to like us personally. There were actually only two of us—me and Alan Fortas—for any length of time. Larry Geller was there for a little while in the sixties, but Geller wasn’t a practicing Jew. And of course, George Klein. But he wasn’t around that much after the early years. Then there’s Lamar. Lamar’s Jewish depending on what day it is.
BILLY SMITH: When he was a kid, Elvis wouldn’t sing on the porch unless it was dark. But I read that he played little clubs and dances in town before his first record came out, like basement parties at the Hotel Chisca. I remember we got a piano for Christmas when Elvis was in high school. He came over one day and just started playing. I thought, “Well, boy, he can play the piano.” I don’t know how he learned. It was some piece of music that was fairly fast, and he got to moving around a lot. He only done it just for a few minutes, and then he upped and quit. I thought, “Wow, that’s weird to see him jump around like that while he’s singing!” If there were a lot of people around, he was too shy to do it.
LAMAR FIKE: Here was this bashful guy who stuttered a little, and yet he could get onstage and do all sorts of things. Well, Elvis was a gunslinger. You meet a gunslinger without his guns on, and he’s just as normal as everybody else. But when he puts his guns on, you better watch your ass! You’ve got to be schizophrenic to be in this business. In the early days, Elvis used to say he wasn’t aware his leg was shaking to the music, that it just happened. But he was no fool. He found out what worked and made it work again.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis always liked to sing. But I don’t remember him saying, “I want to be a singer.” Except after he got his guitar, it might have crossed his mind. But it wasn’t anything that he harped on or totally devoted his life to. In his teenage years, he would go listen to the gospel groups. But he also thought about becoming a policeman.
LAMAR FIKE: He tried to be an electrician’s apprentice for Crown Electric. Started work there in November of ’53, after going back to Precision Tool for two months, in September. When he got famous, everybody said he was a truck driver. But he was studying to be an electrician—pulling wire and hauling it to a job site in a Dodge panel truck. There’s a difference. Before that—right after he graduated high school, that summer of ’53—he worked at M. B. Parker Machinist’s Shop. That’s where he was working when he cut his first record—not Crown Electric as everybody says.
BILLY SMITH: June 13, ’53 is when Elvis walked into the Memphis Recording Service on a Saturday afternoon and plunked down his money to make a record. It was a ten-inch acetate. He recorded “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.”
Elvis told me he was saving it for Gladys’s Christmas present. But then Marion Keisker [Sam Phillips’s studio manager] contacted him about coming back and all, and it wasn’t like he could keep it a secret. Gladys said, “What were you doing down there?” So he had to confess. I don’t think Elvis had any thoughts of it going any further than that one record. If he did, he sure never talked about it.