Marion Keisker: “My Total Image of Elvis …”

Sam Phillips, Elvis Presley, Marion Keisker

Marion Keisker was Sam Phillips’ partner and assistant in the Sun Records enterprise. She was already a well-known Memphis personality, having hosted a popular radio program herself. She was a Memphian by birth, and was devoted to Sam Phillips’ messianic idea of promoting and recording black music. She worked her ass off, often in thankless tasks, keeping the business going while Sam drove around the South and Southwest, his car full of singles that he would try to get DJs to play. She was the one who first met Elvis Presley, in 1953, when he peeked his head in the door and shyly asked if anyone was looking for a singer. She was strangely taken with him, although he was like a deer in the headlights, his behavior incongrous with his slicked-up greasy hair and loud flashy clothes. He was only 18. She interviewed him a bit, and, in an exchange that is now famous she asked him who he sounded like when he sang, and he replied, “I don’t sing like nobody.” Elvis recorded two songs that day, “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartache Begins”, and she gave him his little record and sent him on his way. Then came a year of nothing (for Elvis, anyway). He dated Dixie Locke, went to church, drove a truck, and kept stopping by Sun Records to say hi and hang around, aimlessly. He stuck in Marion Keisker’s mind, so that when Sam Phillips was looking for someone to record a song he had heard and liked from another singer, she remembered the stuttering acne-ridden boy with the greasy pompadour and suggested that he might be right for it. The rest is history.

I like to find good in-the-moment female responses to Elvis. Males have dominated how we talk about Elvis. Nothing against men (although it bums me out that I always have to say that when I make such observations: To me, it should be understood). I’ll read whatever anyone writes about Elvis. There are more male rock critics than female, that’s just the way it goes. But with someone like Elvis, whose appeal was so broad and yet began with such a mass of female frenzy, I think it’s important to listen to the women. The women who knew him, and the women who saw him in action. He certainly had male fans (although in the beginning there was always a lot of trouble after shows with boyfriends who hated that their girlfriends loved this hillbilly – Elvis got punched in the face many a time by angry boyfriends), and he certainly had a huge influence on up-and-coming male singers, who totally got the revolution of what he was doing, but the response to his male charisma, his Elvis-ness, his sex appeal … It was an undeniable fact of life and I still think that some male critics/writers get it all wrong. I wonder if it’s partly jealousy because of Elvis’ success with women. I wonder if it’s that screaming-girls are not seen as WORTHY an audience to serious rock critics. (The rise of Taylor Swift is a current-day example. A friend of mine, who is a male, and who also makes his living writing about music, said to me once, “Everyone should be paying attention to what is happening in Taylor Swift’s career right now. It is one of the biggest stories in music and nobody is covering it. Yet.” That has since changed, but his take on it was very interesting.) And there is also the fact that some men (some, not all) seem unable to deal with their OWN sexual response to Elvis. Lester Bangs had no problem admitting it in his famous Elvis obituary. He went “wild with desire” when he saw Elvis live. He was straight. I have come across a resistance in men from time to time on my site to admit that an actor is handsome, hot, sexy. It doesn’t mean you’re GAY to admit that Gary Cooper was sexy. This is more common with men than with women. Women seem fine with admitting, “Wow, Anna Magnani was a hot babe” without finding themselves in a pit of homosexual panic. Please notice I said “some, not all”. Generalizations are not always helpful, but sometimes, with a star of Elvis’ magnitude, they are indicative of how he is talked about. There are certainly many men in Elvis’ life who had no problem admitting the affect he had on them. But women have a different response, either due to an organic maternal instinct or a desire to fuck that young man in the gold lame suit.

A desire to fuck that young man in the gold lame suit is so much a part of Elvis’ success that to discount it is to discount almost the entirety of his extraordinary and improbable career.

Here is just one example of the subtle ways that a male writer can get it wrong. Now, I am a fan of Peter Guralnick’s two-volume Elvis biography and I think he has done us all an enormous service with these books. I am not throwing out the baby with the bathwater. But in subtle ways, he shows that on a very deep level he doesn’t get it. In his section on Elvis’ appearance on the Milton Berle Show (the one broadcast from the aircraft carrier in San Diego), Guralnick talks about the mainly military audience, sailors and their dates.

It’s a fascinating clip, because of the environment, first of all, Elvis on the deck of an aircraft carrier, and also the audience is not his normal audience. It’s all sailors in their dress blues with their dates, many of whom are in dress blues as well. They are not a screaming heaving mass of teenage girls. But he wins them over. You can hear the guys and the girls start screaming at different points in approval. Guralnick writes:

The song was greeted by an audience made up predominantly of sailors and their dates with an appropriate mixture of screams and laughter – because it is clear by now that the performer is playing with them. It may not be as clear to the little girls, but there is no aggression in this act, he is teasing them, fooling with them, his laughter is their laughter, for the first time in his life he is one of them.

Mr. Guralnick, I beg your pardon, but the “little girls” ALWAYS understood that about Elvis. That was why the frenzy erupted in the first place. Girls ALWAYS know sincerity when they see it, and they know friendliness when they see it, even when it comes in the form of a sweaty gyrating boy up onstage. Girls were “in on the joke” long before any guys were. That was why they fell in love with Elvis Presley. That was why they went batshit insane to begin with.

Elvis liked women. He liked hanging around with them, flirting, talking, teasing, opening up, playing around. He felt more comfortable with women, although he was always surrounded by his group of guys. But he got a woman alone, and suddenly he was opening up to her about his dead twin, his feelings about God, and his love for his mother, before he even tried to make a pass. This was true up to the end, in the 70s, when he had clearly had sex with probably thousands of women at that point. But his MO was the same. He liked the intimacy, closeness, and understanding of women. He freakin’ needed it. He was no choir boy, and he let his sex drive out of the bag, thereby clearing the way for the “little girls” to admit (in the words of my friend Mitchell) that “that guy up there makes my vagina wet”, a revolution stronger than any musical revolution ever could be. It changed the world. But Elvis’ persona was also sweet, in a very sincere way. He presented both, and to him there was no contradiction: I am a good boy, I revere my mama, and I will also dry-hump you for 4 hours until you beg for mercy. There is no contradiction in those two stances. Teenage girls already understood this, that was the world in which they lived, but Elvis brought it to the forefront. He made it visible, and okay to admit to. The lack of contradiction with which he presented those two elements (good boy/sex hound), and the inherent message that Both are true, y’all, both are true was powerful, radical, and seen as dangerous. It trembled the pillars of society. But the girls weren’t afraid. They knew his intent. They knew he wasn’t dangerous. And although the fanatical throngs of girls who first propelled him to notoriety didn’t know Elvis personally, they sensed the sweetness about him. Elvis was arrogant onstage and fearless, but he had a way of making it seem like he and the girls were in their own private space together, and THEY knew what they were doing, even though the boyfriends were punching him in the face after shows, and even though the male preachers were condemning him from the pulpit. I love that when he first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and performed his first number, to the screams of the studio audience, when he finished, what did he say? “Thank you, ladies.” There were men in that audience, too. Elvis only thanked the girls. It got a laugh, but I think the comment was sincere.

In 1956, he said

I watch the audience and we are getting something out of our system and no one knows what it is. The important thing is we are getting it out of our system and no one is getting hurt.

So, Mr. Guralnick, the girls always understood what Elvis was doing. They always understood that he was teasing them, that he wasn’t aggressive sexually, that he wouldn’t HURT them. He loved his mother, he talked about Jesus in interviews, and he didn’t drink. He laughed when they screamed, because he thought it was funny, and also because it feels good to let off some steam, and obviously the girls needed it. BAD. So did he. He understood their mania because he had it, too. He offered sex, but he offered friendly sex. (I mentioned this in my review of Girl Happy.) A potent mixture: sex and friendliness. Hostility to women actually has a scent, like ozone. I myself can clock it in someone within a minute of talking to them. Elvis didn’t have that. And, Mr. Guarlnick, if you think girls – who at that time were out there dating boys, and dealing with guys in the back seats of cars, and kissing guys on the front porch – if you think they didn’t know the difference between out-and-out aggression and a friendly tease, then you don’t know girls at all. Girls know men. They’re the ones who date them, they’re the ones who fall in love with them, who try to negotiate boundaries as they’re in some marathon makeout session, they’re the ones who deal with men at their most vulnerable. It’s just the way of the world. This is sex, Mr. Guralnick, of the teenage variety, and the girls always knew what Elvis was doing.

It was the MEN who didn’t get it at first. Who is this guy making our women writhe and scream and weep? What the hell is he DOING to them?

I will now reluctantly climb down off of my soapbox but this is a point I have wanted to make (and have made, in other ways) for some time.

Marion Keisker had a sense about Elvis Presley from her first meeting with the teenager. Certainly his singing didn’t blow her away, although there was … something … about him. She thought he would be good for ballads (ironic, considering what eventually happened). But more than that she sensed that he was somehow, as a person, so “ingenuous that there was no way he could go wrong.”

Elvis was always, to the end of his days, thankful to Marion Keisker for giving him his first break. Any time he came back to Memphis, he would stop by Sun to say Hi and catch up with her. She was captivated by him. There may have been a bit of a motherly response on her part, but she also felt that his essence would protect him. It’s that “innocence” that people always remark upon when they talk about Elvis. It was his inability to lie. A rather scary quality because it makes one vulnerable, but somehow, with Elvis, it made him impenetrable. Grounded. When you met him, you knew you were meeting him. That vulnerability is probably one of the reasons why he holed himself up in isolation when fame hit, surrounding himself with people he knew he could trust, old friends and relatives. It’s a big bad world out there. You can’t survive if you’re that open.

I love the following quote from Marion Keisker about Elvis (and she is very eloquent on him in general).

My total image of Elvis was as a child. His attitude towards people was the equivalent of tipping your hat as you walk down the street – ‘Good evening, ma’am, good evening, sir’ – but not showing off. He never said a wrong thing from the very first night he appeared on the Dewey Phillips show – he was like a mirror in a way: whatever you were looking for, you were going to find in him. It was not in him to lie or say anything malicious. He had all the intricacy of the very simple.

I will have more to say about this because I think it’s very important in terms of not only Elvis Presley’s star quality, but other stars’ essences. These are the stars that not only last, but expand in impact once the star dies. Not everyone is a mirror. My word for it is “blank”, which may seem contradictory, like it means “dull” but I don’t mean that at all. I mean a blankness like an empty canvas, which then serves as a projector screen for the fantasies of the audience. You cannot cultivate such blankness. You either have it or you don’t and it is that very “blankness” that makes certain stars reach the stratosphere, but again, I’ll leave that for another day.