CHAPTER 11

LAMAR

LAMAR FIKE: The first time I met Elvis, I’d never seen anything like him in my life. I was raised in a Southern middle-class family. And we were taught that you didn’t fool around with people with sideburns, because they were bad, or at least they came from the other side of the tracks. It didn’t bother me, but it would have bothered my mother.

I had a Christian upbringing. We lived in Cleveland, Mississippi, when I was little, and I was a Presbyterian there. Then we moved to Memphis, and my whole family, with the exception of my father, became Episcopalian. Everybody always thought I was Jewish. I might be. Depends on how you look at it. My mother is Jewish. But Mother liked the Episcopal religion, so we went to the Episcopalian church. I sang in the St. John’s Boys’ Choir. I was a soprano for three years. We made some recordings, and I loved that because that was show business.

My dad made $75 to $80 a week back in the thirties and forties, as a farm implement salesman. A traveling salesman. I didn’t want to do that. See, I’m a character. It’s not a case of being proud of it, or not being proud. I just believe that people expected me to be a character, so I became one. I’ve never been a normal person.

I was just always fooling around with some part of the business. I took singing lessons when I was a kid. Did little recitals. Sang “Stardust.” But I was more interested in the behind-the-scenes, where the maneuvering is. I figured you lasted longer if you were in the back. One of my uncles, a dentist, called me “Promoter” because I was always getting something going—booking bands when I was fourteen years old. One summer, I told everybody I represented Lamar Fike because I didn’t want anybody to know how young I was. And I made more money in one summer than my dad did all year. I always enjoyed stirring things up, and I was always very independent.

Basically, I’m a loner. I have a sister who’s five years younger. I’ve never forgiven her for being born because she cut into my loner territory. I’ve had to learn how to share things, and that’s difficult. Part of my personality has to do with my size. Obesity runs on both sides of my family. And I was self-conscious of it. But I believe you could parachute me out in the middle of the Mojave Desert naked, and I would come out with a suit of clothes and a Cadillac.

I first met Elvis in 1954. George Klein was teaching me how to be a disc jockey, and he and Sam Phillips showed me how to run a board. He introduced me to Elvis over at Sun Records. Elvis was just a kid, nineteen. He was ten months older than I was. I said, “Are you going to be country or what?” He said, “I’m just singing.” I didn’t know what he was. But I said, “This is going to be different.” And when it started happening for him, I’d see him different places and we’d talk. I still couldn’t get over the way he looked.

My father died that same year. We took him down to Texas and buried him in Mart, a town eighteen miles southeast of Waco. All my life, I’d spent every other summer and Christmas in Mart with my cousin. So when Dad died, the insurance paid the house off, and we moved to Texas.

I went to Texas Christian University for about a semester. They asked me to leave. I was just so bad—cut English five times. I set all kind of records. We lived in Austin for a while. Then Mother decided she wanted to move back to Waco. And I got tired of the whole thing.

The summer of 1956, I was at loose ends, so I went back to Memphis and stayed at the YMCA. That’s where I met Cliff Gleaves.

Cliff was just an unbelievable character. He was a disc jockey, of sorts. He had a little fright while we were living there. He knew the guy who lived next door, and he hadn’t seen him in a few days, so he went over to check it out. Cliff knocked on the door, and nobody answered. So Cliff went downstairs and got a key. And the guy was dead.

I heard this shouting, and I said, “What is it?” Cliff was out in the middle of the hall, and he yelled, “That son of a bitch has been dead for twelve hours, and nobody cares! He could have laid there ’til he stunk the building up, and still nobody would care!” He was an unusual cat.

Cliff had gone to California with Elvis on Love Me Tender. Now he was going to New York for The Ed Sullivan Show. He would knock on my door and say, “Come on, let’s go out to Elvis’s house,” which was on Audubon Drive. I went out three or four times and spent the afternoon. And Elvis and I would talk.

The heat really started out there on Audubon Drive. I mean, it started rolling, back in ’56. Elvis started picking up steam, and pretty soon, holy moley! Everybody wanted him. He had that whole James Dean crowd—Rafael Campos, Nick Adams, Jack Simmons, Natalie Wood—courting him, which he loved, because Dean was his favorite actor after Tony Curtis. Pretty soon, Nick Adams and Natalie Wood, who’d both been in Rebel Without a Cause, were following him home to Memphis. An amateur photographer, a guy named Robert Dye, took some terrific pictures of Elvis riding around on his Harley-Davidson at the Mid-South Fair with Nick Adams on the back. That was in September of ’56, when Elvis came home to do the Tupelo homecoming concert—the Mississippi-Alabama Fair show. Adams was an odd guy. But Elvis really liked him.

Natalie Wood was another story. Elvis was dating Natalie about the time he was doing Love Me Tender. Nick introduced them. And when Elvis did a screen test for the film version of the Broadway play Girls of Summer, Natalie did the test with him. She came out and stayed at the house in October ’56. Nick Adams was there, too. They just hung out in Memphis for a few days. Elvis had this spider monkey named Jayhew. Elvis would play the piano, and the monkey would sit there, screeching. Elvis laughed like hell. Natalie hated it.

God Almighty, I was in love with Natalie Wood. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I just stared at her, she got me so. Finally, after she’d been at the house a while I just couldn’t stand it. I went up to Elvis and said, “What’s it like with her?” And he smiled and made an extremely graphic and very funny remark about her feminine hygiene. I thought, “Oh, God.” I was crushed. He ruined it for me. Years later, her sister, Lana, wrote a book [Natalie: A Memoir by Her Sister]. She quoted Natalie as saying, “Elvis can sing, but he can’t do much else.” He would have died.

When you get down to it, I guess you could say I went after him. I wanted to be around him. It was one of those situations where we just liked each other. I have a very left-handed sort of humor, and Elvis always thought I was funny, even when I didn’t mean to be. I got that from my mother. She just died in ’94. She always used to say, “Have me cremated, Lamar. Just don’t let me get close to a vacuum cleaner.” So I look at things with a pretty jaundiced eye. Elvis and I laughed a lot.

One day in early ’57, he said, “Hey, what’s going on with you?” I said, “Nothing much.” He said, “I’m going to the coast to do Jailhouse Rock soon. Give me a call sometime.”

I said okay and went on back to Texas and bluffed my way into a radio station, KEBE, in Jacksonville. I told them that I’d been a disc jockey before. It was a total lie, but I did an aircheck and got on. I used the name of “Don Lamar” because Lamar Fike has no rhythm at all. And I found out I didn’t want to be a disc jockey. The Teletype machine ran paper all over the floor, and I’d go in and try to clear that damn thing, and go back and change the record, and run out and read the barometer. I had preset turntables, and I’d put the wrong commercials on. It was like an Abbott and Costello picture.

After about three or four months, I said, “Fuck this, man. I don’t want to do this shit anymore.” I had a Sunday afternoon show, and one day I just put an LP on, locked the doors, and got in the car. I heard the record going “chick, chick, chick” on my way out of town. That was my way of signing off.

I went back to Waco and read in the paper that Elvis had just started Jailhouse Rock, and that he’d swallowed a cap off his tooth. The cap lodged close to his lung, and the doctors were afraid it would cause an abscess or pneumonia, so they put him in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. I called him and just by sheer luck got straight into the room. He picked up the phone.

I said, “How you doing?” He said, “Lamar? Where are you?”

I said, “I’m in Waco.” I told him about my little exit from the radio station. He laughed and said, “What are you going to do?” I told him I didn’t know, and he said, “Get your ass out here.” He had Suite 850 at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. It was one whole wing of the hotel. It was four bedrooms, a living room, a big dining room, and a den. It was enormous. To this day I can still draw that suite because it left such an impression on me. The dining room was on the left, and I’d say the hall was twenty-five or thirty feet long. A suite like that today would cost you $1,500 to $2,000 a day.

I came lumbering in, all three hundred pounds of me, in a pair of yellow cowboy boots, which is what I always wore. And George Klein was there. He’d been there about a week. He’d just had his nose done by Dr. Maury Parks. He had a nose that, well, you could write a book about his nose. And probably put the book in his nose. It was an abominable nose, and Elvis felt sorry for him. He said, “George, I think this operation will change your life.” And Elvis paid for it.

I stayed out there for the rest of the picture, which was about two and a half months. That was one of the few movies Elvis enjoyed. He got me a little job as an extra and just let me hang out. He paid for everything. Bought me clothes. And whenever I needed money, he’d just hand it to me.

It was an incredible experience. In ’57, everybody wanted to see Elvis because he was a total, outright phenomenon—I guess the biggest thing since Sinatra. He was even a curiosity in Hollywood. All these big stars were coming around. I’d open the door and people like Robert Mitchum would be standing there with a fifth of scotch, asking Elvis to be in his next picture, Thunder Road. He wanted him to play his son, a guy who ran moonshine.

Mitchum was the type of guy who’d just say to the star, “Here’s the fuckin’ script. Let’s get together and do it.” Elvis told him he had to talk to his manager. And Mitchum said, “Fuck, I’m talking to you. I don’t need to talk to your manager. Let’s do the picture.” And Elvis said, “Well, I can’t. Not unless the Colonel says I can.”

Elvis didn’t like being around other stars, but I loved it. I was crazy about being able to meet all these people I’d seen only in the movies, like Clark Gable and Robert Taylor. I thought their heads were ten feet tall and eight feet wide because I’d sat in the theater and watched them. So when they came around, it made a wreck of me. I said, “Jesus God, man!” Elvis just fell out laughing.

One time on Jailhouse Rock we were in what they call the permanent dressing room at MGM. We were having lunch. That was when the star system was dissipating, and it was doing the same thing at Twentieth Century-Fox and at Paramount, too. But MGM still had as many stars under contract as there were stars in heaven. Gable was on the last part of his contract. And Yul Brynner was there. Richard Thorpe, who was a legend, as far as I was concerned, since he’d done The Student Prince and The Prisoner of Zenda, was the director on that picture, and Pandro S. Berman produced it.

We were sitting there eating, and there was a knock on the door. I answered it, and there stood Glenn Ford. I was just dumbfounded. I didn’t know what to do, so I slammed the door in his face. I turned around to Elvis and I said, “Glenn Ford’s at the door.” And Elvis said, “Why did you slam the door?” I said, “I didn’t know what to say to him.” I was in shock. He said, “Ask him in.”

Things like that happened constantly. When I met John Wayne, I told him, “I thought you won World War II single-handedly.” And I saw Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor one day. I said, “Holy Jesus!” I broke out in a run to get to her. I said, “My name is . . . ” And I forgot my name, I was so knocked out to see her. She was just a raving beauty.

I also saw some strange shit. Natalie Wood came over to the suite a couple of times. We started calling her the Mad Nat. By now I knew that Natalie was a good person, but she was nuttier than a fruitcake. She wasn’t very sure of herself, and you never knew what she was going to do. One day, she got out on the window ledge at the Beverly Wilshire. Apparently, she’d decided she liked Elvis better than she did in Memphis because she said she was going to commit suicide over him.

I came running in to Elvis, and I said, “Elvis, she’s out on that thing! She’s going to jump!” And he said, “Fuck it, she won’t jump.” I said, “I’m telling you, she’s going to do it!” She crouched out there about half an hour—promising, swearing—she was going to jump. We finally talked her back in. I just collapsed in a chair. But Elvis was real nonchalant. He said, “I told you she wouldn’t do it.”

He finished the picture, and he and his cousins Junior and Gene Smith, and George and Arthur Hooten, who was an early member of the entourage, came back to Memphis on the train. Back then, Elvis was afraid to fly. He’d had a near crash in ’56, and he promised Gladys he’d take a train or a car or a bus after that. I didn’t take the train. I climbed in my Chevrolet, and made it back to Memphis in thirty-some hours.

He’d just moved into Graceland, only bought it a few months before. I drove up and parked my car back in the back because he’d said, “Just come on home with me.” I thought he meant permanently. After a little while, he said, “Lamar, you’re going to have to go.” I said, “Why is that?” He didn’t have an answer, so I just stayed. I was the first member of the group to live there. I had the brown bedroom, upstairs. I was twenty-one years old.