CHAPTER 4
MARTY LACKER: This term “Memphis Mafia” is kind of funny. You know how it started, don’t you? Somebody yelled it out in a crowd one time—said we looked like the Mafia because we wore black mohair suits.
Some people have thought we were part of the real Mafia. I wasn’t, but my father worked for them as a bookie in New York. They used to come to my house to collect money. In a way, I’m thankful for that childhood because it’s allowed me to survive.
My socioeconomic situation wasn’t that different from Elvis’s. Contrary to the belief that all Jewish people are wealthy, we’d always been poor. We never wanted for food, but we lived in a tenement in the South Bronx, which is a pretty rough area.
We moved to Memphis in 1952, when I was fifteen, because my sister, Anne, married and moved there. My mother and father wanted to be near her, and they also wanted to get me out of New York before I ended up in jail or dead. Of the six thousand kids in Morris High School, I had the fourth-highest average. But I didn’t have the patience to sit in class. So I started hanging out with the gangs.
Actually, I didn’t have that much time to get in trouble. I delivered papers when I was twelve years old. At fourteen, I was working in the New York garment district, pushing racks and loading trucks. That’s no easy thing, but I liked working better than going to school. It gave me a sense of responsibility. My parents still worried about me. They thought the move to Memphis would be a good thing.
In the fall of ’52, I enrolled at Central High School. Of course, I still had my New York ways about me. I dressed the way I had at home—loud pants and shirts, my shirt collar turned up, and my hair piled up in the front. Kids didn’t dress that way in Memphis. Guys wore T-shirts and jeans and had crew cuts.
I really wanted to play football. Rufner Murray was a heck of a football coach, but he was a total redneck. He hated “Yankees.” And he wouldn’t let me go out for the team.
I’d go watch them play, and I’d see this guy just walking around by himself. He stood out like a sore thumb because he dressed like I did, in flashy pegged pants with saddle stitching and pistol pockets. His hair was slicked back, and he had sideburns. Nobody knew him—he didn’t go to Central. Everybody used to point at him and sort of laugh.
You’d never see him talk to anybody. He’d just walk around and look up in the stands. It was like he was parading, looking for girls. And he’d watch Alan Fortas, who was an All-Memphis football player.
I never did get to play football, so I started getting in a lot of trouble. Finally, I was sent to the principal’s office for probably the fifth or sixth time. He told me to bend over because he was going to paddle me. Well, I wasn’t going to let anybody hit me. And I certainly wasn’t going to voluntarily bend over so he could do it.
The next day, my father came to school. He looked at this guy and said, “If you ever lay a hand on my son, we’re going to have a problem.” And the principal got upset and said, “Your son can no longer go to school here.” So I transferred to Humes. I was in the tenth grade.
About a month after I got to Humes, spring practice started, so I went out for the team. The coach’s name was Rube Boyce. He called me “The Brooklyn Demon,” even though I was from the Bronx.
One day, I saw this kid who dressed like I did. He’d wear a pair of black pants with chartreuse pistol pockets and chartreuse saddle stitching down the sides of his legs. And he’d wear a shiny black shirt or a pink shirt. The first time I saw him, I knew he was the same guy who used to come over to the games at Central. Somebody told me his name was Elvis Presley. He was a senior.
Pretty soon, everybody at school started kidding us. They’d say, “Who’s going to outdress who tomorrow?” But the honest fact is that Elvis and I probably never had a fifteen-minute conversation. But every time we passed in the halls, we acknowledged each other. He was a library worker, by the way. That’s probably the last thing you’d think he’d be.
Every once in a while I’d see Elvis on the sidelines, watching. He wanted to play so bad. But his mother didn’t want him to play, and Coach Boyce told Elvis that the only way he would let him come out for the team was if he would cut his hair. And Elvis wouldn’t do it. Coach Boyce always denied that, by the way. He said Elvis did go to practice, for two weeks, and they moved him around because he wasn’t worth a shit in any position.
There was one other place I used to see him. Shortly after I moved to Memphis, I got to be friends with Terry Shainberg, whose family owned a big department store. Terry was Jewish, like me, but he liked to go to these black Baptist churches.
One Sunday night, he asked me to go to East Trigg Baptist to listen to the gospel music. The music was fantastic. It didn’t matter what religion you were—it really moved you when the choir started singing and the people in the audience jumped up and danced in the aisles. The preacher, Reverend W. Herbert Brewster, was well known for his broadcasts over WHBQ, and he could really talk that talk.
A couple of times, I saw Elvis sitting alone, riveted by it all. Because on Sunday nights, they got more into the singing than the preaching. Years later, I talked to Dr. Brewster, and he told me Elvis had come back and said how much he enjoyed the services.
I don’t remember much else about Elvis in high school, except the talent contest that April. Red West played the trumpet. And Elvis sang “Keep Them Cold Icy Fingers Off of Me” and encored with “Till I Waltz Again with You,” that Teresa Brewer song. The girls went nuts.
If you looked at Elvis back then, you never would have thought he’d amount to anything. He was not what you’d call “book smart.” You could have put five guys in a lineup and said, “Which one do you think is going to be successful?” and Elvis would have been the last one picked.
In July ’54, a year after Elvis graduated, I was driving down Vollintine Avenue one night with my buddy, Monte Wener. We had the radio on, and we heard Dewey Phillips [disc jockey] say, “We have a young man here from Humes High School,” and he played “That’s All Right (Mama).”
Monte and I looked at each other, wondering who the hell it was. When Dewey said “Elvis Presley,” it shocked us, even though Monte’s mother put shows together for the veterans at Kennedy Hospital and used Elvis on some of them. But this was a totally different style.
Three months later, I was in a manager’s training program at Shainberg’s Department Store in the Lamar-Airways Shopping Center. Katz Drugs opened up their first Memphis store there, with a big cat’s face on the front that swayed back and forth and blinked. The shopping center promoted the opening with “Fun on a Grand Scale.” I went out to the back parking lot, and there was Elvis on a flatbed truck, jumping around and singing. I walked up to the stage, and he looked at me and smiled and made a little pistol with his fingers and pointed in my direction.
After that, he came out with record after record. I’d go to see him perform until I went into the army in December of ’54. I didn’t really get to know him until I got out of the service, in ’57, right after he moved to Graceland.
A couple of years ago, Sonny West told me that when I started running around with Elvis, they were talking about all the guys one day. Somebody asked him, “How come you took Marty on?”
Elvis said he remembered that I was always alone in school, that I didn’t have any close friends. He said I kept to myself. I never knew he saw that, but it was true.