The Books: The Crack-Up, ‘The Crack-Up’, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Posted on January 10, 2013 by sheila

On the essays shelf:

The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The essay “The Crack-Up” was originally posted in three parts in Esquire magazine in 1936. It caused much consternation among Fitzgerald’s friends, many of whom felt that there are some things that should not be revealed (and most of his friends were writers!) It seemed self-indulgent, “not done”, and for those who cared about him it seemed a very bad sign. It was a revealing essay, and perhaps it gave his friends glimpses that they had not received. Cracking up is often a very private affair. People may sense something is wrong, but they have no idea how bad it really is, behind closed doors.

Recently, I’m not sure if you’ve heard, Elizabeth Wurtzel of Prozac Nation fame, published an essay in New York Magazine that got everyone talking. Fitzgerald’s friends could have no way of knowing that self-revelation would become not only the wave of the future, but a neverending trend from which we all would yearn to escape. He was way ahead of the curve! He clearly is a better writer than Wurtzel, but the topic is the same: the way depression works, the way it operates, and how it impacts a life. Wurtzel has less self-awareness than Fitzgerald does (she is, perhaps, sicker, which impacts her perspective: Depression is a closed circle with its own logic), and that certainly makes her stuff more alienating (to some). I read that Wurtzel piece and felt a chill of recognition, but also a sympathetic sense of frustration that her friends and family must have when dealing with her. Depressives are not easy, and there is a lot of misinformation out there about what it actually LOOKS like.

Comments about “whining” I dismiss out of hand (I usually stop listening to the speaker when that word comes up, unless said speaker is describing a toddler’s behavior), because “whining” has come to mean “anyone who shares anything about themselves” in this day and age. People who throw the word “whining” about all the time are also the people who place a high high premium on the phrase “TMI”. I’ve written about this before. “TMI” should be put to rest. It represents one of the worst qualities in human nature. The people who love to crow “TMI” and do so 10 times a day have no curiosity about the inner workings of other people. There are certain degrees, of course. If you share a picture of your child’s first poop in the potty on Facebook, that is certainly something I do not want to see (although congrats, kid! Yay for poop!), and I think some people need to learn boundaries about what to share on social media and all that.

HOWEVER. The “TMI Brigade” is more serious than that. They find vulnerability expressed to be disturbing and offensive and they don’t want to hear about it. I have experienced it myself when I write a personal essay. And, duh, it’s a personal essay. Therefore, I will be personal in it. So no, I do not think Elizabeth Wurtzel is “whining” and anyone who throws that claim at her has never experienced one minute of serious depression in their lives. I’m an artist, I’m a writer, I’m in the business of sharing shit about myself all day every day. Even if I’m writing about a book I read, I’m sharing myself. And please understand: I have struggled with depression since I was a teenager. I had a crack-up in 2009 and another bad one in 2002. I am currently cracking up again. I write from the middle of the whirlwind. My response to Wurtzel is one of dismayed connection and recognition. I know that Loop she’s in that she describes in that piece. It is a loop with its own rigid rigorous logic (depressives can be very logical, but I’m not sure I want to say more about that: let’s just say that I know that first-hand and I know that Logic can sometimes be a very very bad sign for me).

Wurtzel lives in an austere polarized place: On the one side you can live like THIS, on the other side, you have how I live. There is no middle ground. This is the sickness in plain view. Fitzgerald actually covers something along these lines in his “Crack-Up” essay, only he doesn’t feel as IN it as Wurtzel does. He has recovered somewhat, enough to be able to write about it. The Wurtzel piece does not have that, and it is tough to get through, but I think it’s worth it, if only to participate in all of the discussions going on about it. Lindsay Beyerstein wrote this piece in response to the Wurtzel essay and I think it is spot-on. (I thank the Siren for alerting me to it.)

What is dismaying (and also interesting) about the Wurtzel piece is that she is writing with no distance about her own chaos. It’s a natural response to think, “God, girl, get on some good meds, get a good night’s sleep, drink some tea, and CALM DOWN.” I thought the same thing. But I felt guilty as I thought it, knowing that I have put my family and friends through the same thing at different times in my life. So let’s just say I relate. But it’s not a GOOD relate when I read Wurtzel, it’s not “Oh, I don’t feel so alone anymore”. It’s “Oh God, I know that, I don’t want to be like that, please God let me do the work so that I won’t be like that anymore.” People with better equilibrium are totally baffled by the sheer craziness on display in Wurtzel’s piece. And it DOES sound crazy, although I know that word is a painful one and I use it deliberately. “My God, she sounds NUTS.” is the general response. Well, yes. And, for better or worse, she doesn’t give a shit.

Do people honestly think mental illness “presents” as sympathetic?

It occurs to me that Wurtzel romanticizes her depression, and she doesn’t seem to know she is doing it. This shows up in the rigidity of the piece: “Most people live THIS way, but I live THIS way”. She makes it sound like everybody else in the world, protected as they are by mental health and domestic arrangements, are somehow missing out on the dangerous clarity of her freedom. Now, again, this is a thought I relate to, although I do recognize the danger and toxicity of the thought, when taken too far. It never does to have a superior attitude about your own troubles. But it’s also a natural response, if you feel you have been through too much pain (“Nobody else can understand what it’s like for me”), but it’s a response that must be fought against, counteracted against. It will take all your strength to do so and it will also take support. You must ask for help (“If I start to get superior towards you, please call me on it. I need that.”), you must start to notice it yourself when you do it, and re-rout those impulses. Tough work, as I said. Superiority is toxic, and it helps the depression re-group itself and entrench itself even further. I speak from painful experience.

What I think is interesting about the Wurtzel piece (and I’m not sure this was her intent) is that you can SEE her re-trenching herself in her sickness. You can SEE her hold onto it with fists. For me, it was really disturbing. I am currently struggling and currently trying to recover from something. But it is as though I can actually FEEL the way my brain/heart wants to go in response to this bad thing that just happened to me: I can FEEL the deep grooves of habit/sickness saying, “Come. Let us find the most self-destructive and soul-destroying interpretation of these recent events. You know you want to, Sheila. Come on. You already know the way.” It’s seductive. Even better, it’s known. I know that way, I know how to do that way. But it’s been killing me. Literally. I need a better way.

And perhaps Wurtzel would have contempt for me, and a former Me would also have had contempt, but I want to be happy. Depression is a disease. When you are in it, you cannot see it. Because how can you actually fight with your own mind? How can you fix your own mind?

Even though I am as frustrated by Wurtzel as everyone else (and sometimes frustrated by her writing style), I am grateful to her for putting that essay out there. It is the clearest example, with no retrospect, of what it sometimes feels like, and it’s a pretty horrifying mirror, I’ll say that.

Fitzgerald’s three-part essay “The Crack-Up” got a similar response. His friends scolded him. His friends were worried. Everyone was embarrassed. It just “wasn’t done”, to have an established writer of fiction to come out with such a blatant expression of despair. It was so …. personal. People seemed offended. It was the 1930s version of the TMI Brigade. It was also 1936, so of course he got a lot of the, “With the world approaching war again, why are you going on and on about your personal problems?” reaction, which is something that Stupid people say when they are trying to be Helpful and show how Smart they are. In the middle of a crack-up, reminding yourself of the orphans in the Sudan does nothing but to re-entrench the disease and make you feel like a Worthless Piece of Shit for being so Selfish.

There are lines in “The Crack-Up” which are so fine, so perfectly rendered, so cold and clear in their articulation, that they provide deep comfort to me. Unlike Wurtzel, who is still in the Closed System of her Sickness, a system so rigid and perfect that nobody else could ever get in, Fitzgerald has opened his out to us in a way that is still startling, and so that leaves me room to respond in a different way, a way of feeling “seen”, of having the nameless named. “Yes. Yes. That is just what it is like. Thank you for saying it so perfectly.” This is what a great writer can do. It takes courage and honesty, which Fitzgerald had in spades.

He starts with “Of course all life is a process of breaking down”. He takes us through his crack-up, step by devastating step. He says that he had “prematurely cracked”, and he describes it like a plate cracking, which is a terrible image in this context. He writes, and boy is this the truth: “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” This is what Wurtzel cannot yet do. And of course there is an ebb and flow with such things. There have been times when I certainly CAN do that, and other times when I lose that ability (those are the Bad Times). But it is an exquisite observation.

Fitzgerald describes how he lived his life, how he saw things, how it worked for him. He describes hearing a “grave sentence” from a doctor. He “pillow-hugged” for a while. He consumed himself with making lists. He felt stronger.

“– And then suddenly, surprisingly, I got better.
— And cracked like an old plate as soon as I heard the news.”

He describes this process as one of having his illusions about himself and life itself stripped away. He was left with no resources available to him, no fantasy of past or future was left intact. He was left, alone, a cracked man, not knowing which way to turn. He had been revealed to himself, as a fraud, a shallow man, and he could not escape from it. He breaks this all down with devastating clarity. He is highly self-aware. He knows all of the arguments against cracking up, he knows that he is not actually a bad person, that his life has amounted to something, etc., etc., but when you are in full blown Crack-Up Mode, those comforting thoughts no longer become available. You cannot think your way out of a Crack-Up.

One of the most hauntingly perfect paragraphs in this essay is as follows:

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering – this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work – and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

Fitzgerald has done us all a great service by being bold enough to put that into words. It is one of the greatest descriptions of depression ever put on paper. In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning. Such sentiments certainly comfort me, because “yes, yes, that is what it is like”, but it would also be helpful to those who do NOT understand, who have never suffered in that way: He writes so well about it that you cannot help but empathize (well, I suppose the TMI Brigade wouldn’t, but we don’t need to care about what they think: they are usually anti-art in their attitudes.) Fitzgerald clearly wrote this essay for himself: there is no other reason to put such stuff down, it’s one of the reasons why it works so well, it is so breathtakingly personal. But a byproduct is that understanding does open up. The essay is a masterpiece: deeply specific to this one man’s life, but transcending the personal and becoming universal. This is something, again, that Wurtzel has not yet accomplished. She is still trapped in the Bell Jar (and there is certainly something to be said for that kind of writing, too, although it probably won’t last as long as Fitzgerald’s work).

I tread carefully here because I feel somewhat protective of Wurtzel, due to my own identification. I know that people have thought I was nuts, too. I know that I have frustrated people when I am trapped in the bell jar. And, like her, I am good with words: I can describe to you what it is like for me, and I do so in a way that can be forbidding in its perfect Logic. “Listen. I have thought about this harder than you, and here are my conclusions.” Logic can shut others out. I alluded to this earlier and honestly I am sharing more about myself than I originally set out to, but that’s what Fitzgerald’s essay seems to demand.

I first picked up the book in 2009 as I was starting my own “process of breaking down”. I read a couple of essays and put the book down immediately. Nope, not ready for THAT. Talk about a terrifying mirror. But I was ready to read it in 2010, because I was out of the Bell Jar, and I was starting to piece together my own narrative again, trying to make sense of what seemed like chaos. Interpretations were changing. It was very stressful. I felt like I was being left with no devices of survival at hand. But there is also a strange comfort when illusions are finally stripped away, once and for all. You have the strength to face the truth. Of course it has to be the right truth, and who can say what that is? In the sickness, I will always pick the most self-destructive and hurtful interpretation. And make no mistake, it will feel like truth.

These are all questions that are still important that will always have value. Fitzgerald’s three-part essay is an essential piece of understanding. I wonder if Wurtzel has read it. She could perhaps learn something from it, and I say that with the deepest respect and concern. I look at her and I cannot say we are any different. I wish her well, I wish her healing. In that wish, is hope for myself in the middle of what feels like a landscape of doomed prospects and dead dreams.

I don’t know what to do. I’m at a loss. The mood inside my head is so frightening. I’m so frightened.

So writing this essay got me through today.

The Crack-Up, ‘The Crack-Up’, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is the real end of the story. What was to be done about it will have to rest in what used to be called the “womb of time”. Suffice it to say that after about an hour of solitary pillow-hugging, I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt. What was the small gift of life given back in comparison to that? – when there had once been a pride of direction and a confidence in enduring independence.

I realized that in those two years, in order to preserve something – an inner hush maybe, maybe not – I had weaned myself from all the things I used to love – that every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at dinner had become an effort. I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me was become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations – with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country – contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness – hating the night when I couldn’t sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.

There were certain spots, certain faces I could look at. Like most Middle Westerners, I have never had any but the vaguest race prejudice – I always had a secret yen for the lovely Scandinavian blondes who sat on porches in St. Paul but hadn’t emerged enough economically to be part of what was then society. They were too nice to be “chickens” and too quickly off the farmlands to seize a place in the sun, but I remember going round blocks to catch a single glimpse of shining hair – the bright shock of a girl I’d never know. This is urban, unpopular talk. It strays afield from the fact that in those latter days I couldn’t stand the sight of Celts, English, Politicians, Strangers, Virginians, Negroes (light or dark), Hunting People, or retail clerks, and middlemen in general, all writers (I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can) – and all the classes as classes and most of them as members of their class …

Trying to cling to something, I liked doctors and girl children up to the age of about thirteen and well-brought-up boy children from about eight years old on. I could have peace and happiness with these few categories of people. I forgot to add that I liked old men – men over seventy, sometimes over sixty if their faces looked seasoned. I liked Katharine Hepburn’s face on the screen, no matter what was said about her pretentiousness, and Miriam Hopkins’ faces, and old friends if I only saw them once a year and could remember their ghosts.

All rather human and undernourished, isn’t it? Well, that, children, is the true sign of cracking up.

It is not a pretty picture. Inevitably it was carted here and th ere within its frame and exposed to various critics. One of them can only be described as a person whose life makes other people’s lives seem like death – — even this time when she was cast in the unusually unappealing role of Job’s comforter. In spite of the fact that this story is over, let me append our conversation as a sort of postscript:

“Instead of being so sorry for yourself, listen — “she said. (She always says “Listen,” because she thinks while she talks — really thinks.) So she said: “Listen. Suppose this wasn’t a crack in you — suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon.”

“The crack’s in me,” I said heroically.

“Listen! The world only exists in your eyes — your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you’re trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked — it’s the Grand Canyon.”

“Baby, et up all her Spinoza?”

“I don’t know anything about Spinoza. I know — “ She spoke, then, of old woes of her own, that seemed, in telling, to have been more dolorous than mine, and how she had met them, overridden them, beaten them.

I felt a certain reaction to what she said, but I am a slow-thinking man, and it occurred to me simultaneously that of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one. In days when juice came into one as an article without duty, one tried to distribute it — but always without success; to further mix metaphors, vitality never “takes.” You have it or you haven’t it, like health or brown eyes or honor or a baritone voice. I might have asked some of it from her, neatly wrapped and ready for home cooking and digestion, but I could never have got it — not if I’d waited around for a thousand hours with the tin cup of self-pity. I could walk from her door, holding myself very carefully like cracked crockery, and go away into the world of bitterness, where I was making a home with such materials as are found there — and quote to myself after I left her door:

“Ye are the salt of the earth. But if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?”

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The Books: The Crack-Up, ‘Sleeping and Waking’, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Posted on January 9, 2013 by sheila

On the essays shelf:

The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have only struggled with insomnia once in my life, during the summer of 2002. It was just a brief bout, but it was enough to make me dread it for all time. My sleep patterns are, in general, very regular, and I rely on it. I value it. I don’t need that much sleep. I normally get around 6 hours a night and that’s fine. I am a “morning person”, most definitely. I prefer to go to bed early so I can have hours in the morning to write and linger and take my time with things. But sleep is something that has always been there for me. In the summer of 2002, I did not sleep (literally) for five days. It was one of the most horrifying experiences of my life, and much of it is blotted out, thankfully. The insomnia ratcheted up my anxiety. I could feel it intensifying as the day came to its end, the question being: Will I get some sleep tonight?? And of course, as any insomniac will know, that anxiety is death to the sleep process. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle of doom. Marilyn Monroe had insomnia, and her entire household staff would tiptoe around her bedroom, draped in heavy curtains, fearful that they would disturb her. Monroe never believed she could get to sleep on her own. She would call up one of her many friends, and many of them report that they would talk to her until she would fall asleep holding the phone. She had chronic insomnia, something which must be horrifying, and I sympathize. Five days of that nonsense and I was going out of my mind.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a harrowing description of his own insomnia in this 1934 essay. It is impossible to read without aching for the man. He starts the essay by describing something Ernest Hemingway had written on the topic, and thinking at the time that it was the last word in insomnia. But then Fitzgerald experienced it himself and realized that every insomniac is different, everyone has their own struggles, it manifests in different ways. He realized that he had something to say about it too.

And boy does he.

It’s a short essay, but brutal to read. Fitzgerald was not afraid to lay himself out there. This can’t have been easy to write. But it is a gift to have his words.

Here is a section I love. It’s difficult to get through, the pain is so stark. He starts off by describing how he will try to lull himself to sleep by telling himself stories from his own life. Perhaps not the best plan, Scott. But then, insomnia makes people nuts.

The Crack-Up, ‘Sleeping and Waking’, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Once upon a time” (I tell myself) “they needed a quarterback at Princeton, and they had nobody and were in despair. The head coach noticed me kicking and passing on the side of the field, and he cried: ‘Who is that man—why haven’t we noticed him before?’ The under coach answered, ‘He hasn’t been out,’ and the response was: ‘Bring him to me.’”

“…we go to the day of the Yale game. I weigh only one hundred and thirty-five, so they save me until the third quarter, with the score—”

— But it’s no use—I have used that dream of a defeated dream to induce sleep for almost twenty years, but it has worn thin at last. I can no longer count on it—though even now on easier nights it has a certain lull…

The war dream then: the Japanese are everywhere victorious—my division is cut to rags and stands on the defensive in a part of Minnesota where I know every bit of the ground. The headquarters staff and the regimental battalion commanders who were in conference with them at the time have been killed by one shell. The command devolved upon Captain Fitzgerald. With superb presence…

— but enough; this also is worn thin with years of usage. The character who bears my name has become blurred. In the dead of the night I am only one of the dark millions riding forward in black buses toward the unknown.

Back again now to the rear porch, and conditioned by intense fatigue of mind and perverse alertness of the nervous system—like a broken-stringed bow upon a throbbing fiddle —I see the real horror develop over the roof-tops, and in the strident horns of night-owl taxis and the shrill monody of revelers’ arrival over the way. Horror and waste –

— Waste and horror—what I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable. I could have acted thus, refrained from this, been bold where I was timid, cautious where I was rash.

I need not have hurt her like that.

Nor said this to him.

Nor broken myself trying to break what was unbreakable.

The horror has come now like a storm—what if this night prefigured the night after death—what if all thereafter was an eternal quivering on the edge of an abyss, with everything base and vicious in oneself urging one forward and the baseness and viciousness of the world just ahead. No choice, no road, no hope—only the endless repetition of the sordid and the semi-tragic. Or to stand forever, perhaps, on the threshold of life unable to pass it and return to it. I am a ghost now as the clock strikes four.

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Memphis Flash: Elvis’ Duds

Posted on January 8, 2013 by sheila


Private Presley


This belt might be my favorite Vegas clothing item.


Worn at his Madison Square Garden press conference, 1972


The white suit, white shoes, Elvis wore to sing “If I Can Dream” at the end of the NBC special


Blue and white


Preacher man. Elvis wore this red suit for the “Saved” production number in the NBC special


Black and white


Boxing robe from “Kid Galahad”


The American Eagle jumpsuit, “Aloha From Hawaii”, 1973


Bell bottoms


The black leather suit worn by Elvis in the sit-down jam sessions in the NBC special.


Sunburst


He wore this in “Viva Las Vegas”


The American Eagle cape, worn during the “Aloha From Hawaii” concert in 1973


Those (male) critics who express dismay and embarrassment about the jeweled jumpsuits in the 1970s clearly don’t remember that Elvis chose to wear this at the age of 22.

Posted in Music | Tagged , | 4 Comments

“Well, I’m not your run-of-the-mill lady from the Valley, am I?” – Shirley MacLaine

Posted on January 7, 2013 by sheila

I am always behind the curve with TV trends. The Downton Abbey mania has been so bad that even virtual strangers are stopping me on the street telling me how much I will love it. When people find out I haven’t been watching, they are shocked. “YOU, of ALL PEOPLE, will love it.” I take my own sweet time jumping on board a Trend Train. Every night in Memphis, I watched a couple episodes of Downton Abbey, season 1, on my laptop, sprawled across my glorious bed which felt king-size. It’s, of course, as addictive as they say. It’s fantastic. My friend Kate says, “For actors, it’s like porn”, and that is the truth. Every character, every tiny glance, every potent pause … is so filled, so fully realized. Actors at their very best. It’s so much fun. So I am now fully on board, although I am still catching up with Season 2.

This weekend in The New York Times is a very entertaining interview with Shirley MacLaine, who is going to appear in Season 3 as Elizabeth McGovern’s American mother. The picture alone accompanying the article is enough to send me into a tizzy of anticipation. I have always loved Shirley MacLaine, as much for her zany honesty (which was in evidence when she came and spoke at my school) as her acting. She’s a hoofer, a gypsy, those Broadway dancers who know how to survive, who make things happen, who never miss a night, whose work ethic is carved in stone.

Additionally, if you haven’t seen this year’s Bernie, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine, all I can say is: do so. It’s in my Top 5 of the year.

I think my favorite snippet from MacLaine’s interview in the Times is the following exchange:

Q. You must come with some ideas.

A. Yeah, it’s called the script.

Posted in Actors, Television | Tagged | 45 Comments

Road Trip to Horn Lake, Mississippi

Posted on January 7, 2013 by sheila

It was a Sunday morning. I woke up early, grabbed a quick breakfast, and then took off in my car for Mississippi. It was so cold that I had to find the damn ice scraper in my rental car and go to town on the frost covering my car. I loved the cold. It was dark and quiet. My gentle GPS lady led the way. I was headed to Tupelo first, to see Elvis’ birthplace and I wanted to find the old fairgrounds too, where 1. Elvis sang in a talent show when he was 10 years old and came in 5th and 2. Elvis returned triumphant in 1956 to perform at the big fair, and it was a “welcome home, Elvis” type of day. He wore the blue velvet shirt given to him by Natalie Wood. His parents joined him. There was a parade in his honor. Nick Adams, his slightly sketchy friend from Hollywood, accompanied him. So that was my Tupelo agenda. I knew nothing would be open. I didn’t care. Like a lot of my trip, I wanted to sneak up on these places, and spy on them when no one else was around.

Then I was going to find Horn Lake, Mississippi. In the mid-60s, Elvis was driving around in that area, saw a huge cross in a field, was drawn to it, started up a conversation with the man who owned the property, and asked him if he could buy the whole damn ranch. Elvis paid cash. It was a spontaneous decision. He fell in love with the place. Graceland was great, but this place was really out of the way, a ranch surrounded by farmland, in the middle of nowhere. It would be great to have another getaway where he could get privacy. He called the ranch the Circle G. He then began a spending spree that was extreme even for him. He met with horse traders, bought horses, bought cows, bought tractors and trucks, he bought a bunch of trailers so that he and his buddies and their wives could stay there (the house on the property was very small). Elvis’ spending got him in trouble with his father, who managed the accounts, and there was a lot of tension. Elvis kept saying, “I’m HAPPY, though. I’m HAPPY right now. Please don’t ruin that.” He bought saddles and cowboy gear, he had a vision of having a real cattle ranch for himself. When Elvis did anything, he did it 100%. He married Priscilla in 1967 and they had their honeymoon at the Circle G. Everyone remembers it as a very happy time, and the most “normal” of any of the times with Elvis. Elvis and Priscilla, Jerry Schilling and his girlfriend, Elvis’ cousins and their wives, would hang out in their respective trailers, get together for breakfast, ride horses, hang out, and it was all very normal. Except for the hundreds of thousands of dollars Elvis spent in a one-year period.

It was like Elvis went into a fugue state. He was unhappy with his career at that point, he was deeply embedded in Hollywood and still had a couple of years on his contract. He was doing no live performing. Going on a spending spree made him happy. In 1968 some changes came. Lisa Marie was born. And negotiations began for his “Christmas special” on NBC, and it would be that special that would resurrect Elvis from the dead, and get him hungry and ferocious again. The Circle G lessened in importance once his career started picking up again. He kept the property (and, as a matter of fact, Vernon died there). But the spending spree stopped abruptly, he sold off a lot of the equipment and animals, and turned his focus to other things.

I know that the Circle G is not on any tourist map. You have to know where to find it. There is no plaque, nothing that says “Elvis lived here”. It’s for sale, and there are definitely some campaigns to have it made into a memorial of some kind, because of the importance it had in Elvis’ life. I didn’t know what I would find when I got there. Were people living there?

I was surprised at how close Horn Lake was to Memphis. It’s right over the state line, and really only about 20 miles from downtown Memphis. For some reason, I had pictured it much further away. Elvis could get there from Graceland in 15 minutes. That gave me some perspective. I drove through Horn Lake on a road that was dominated by McDonalds, Wal Marts, Home Depots, and a couple of mega-churches. Services were getting out and the post-church traffic was so bad that cops had to direct it. I’m Catholic. This is a whole other world to me, Southerners and their giant giant churches. The road that supposedly took me to the Circle G was a long one, and very very built up in the worst way. But I imagine back in the 60s it was all farmland down there. You can feel the farmland pushing up against the development. Eventually, the “strip” ended, and the road cleared out a bit. There were little houses and mailboxes along the road, and bit patches of forest, and I felt I was getting close, to whatever it was. Finally, I saw what I recognized as the small brick house that was “the house” on the Circle G, and the nice GPS lady told me that the “destination was on the left”. The house is right on the road. Next to it is some abandoned building with a big empty parking lot. There’s an intersection there. I pulled into the parking lot. No other cars. At this spot of road, the traffic was sparse. Nobody bothered me. I had the place to myself.

It was only 10 in the morning or so. I had already been to Tupelo. I had already had a full day. It was still cold out. One of the things I loved best about Mississippi, or what I saw of it at least, was that the frost was on the grass, turning it white. Even with the sun in the sky, that frost wasn’t melting. It gave the farmland a shimmer, a beauty. It was a crisp cold morning. Mississippi also has great radio stations. It was a wealth of choices.

There were signs saying NO TRESPASSING in front of the little Circle G house. I ignored the signs. No one was around. It was just a derelict little house on a patch of land, with fields launching off into the distance. It was beautiful. There was a little shed behind the house. There was a barn off at the end of one of the fields. The back porch of the little house had workers’ equipment out there, buckets and ladders and cement bricks. Clearly some work is being done there. But it was Sunday morning. Nobody working there now.

It was beautiful, quiet, and peaceful. I had the time and space to tramp around on the property, looking at everything. When you have that space, when you are not surrounded by a crush of tourists, it is easier to picture the old inhabitants, who used to live there, the bustle of activity, the horses, the trailers, the clotheslines. It was rustic. Elvis loved it because it was rustic. No frills. He and Priscilla “played house”, and she remembers it as one of the happiest times in their marriage because she had him to herself (almost). She could cook for him, clean his socks, put out his clothes. He had a staff at Graceland, cooks and everything, so she never could DO anything for him there. And he didn’t want her to do anything at Graceland. She loved being a housewife, and the Circle G gave her that opportunity. Lisa Marie was probably conceived at the Circle G. She was born 9 months to the day of Elvis and Priscilla’s marriage. (I am in the same boat.) So the Circle G is soaked in good memories. It was a happy place.

It’s falling apart now, but it retains the charm and peace that I am sure was the main draw for Elvis, splitting his time between Memphis and Hollywood. Life could feel real here.

I spent about an hour wandering around the property. The frosty grass crunched under my boots. I was happy. It was a good day.

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The Books: The Crack-Up, ‘Auction – Model, 1934’, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Posted on January 6, 2013 by sheila

On the essays shelf:

The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The byline here again, like with ‘Show Mr. and Mrs. F–‘ is “F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald”, dated July of 1934.

This is an interesting piece. A couple auctions off their belongings, which actually (of course) detail the entire emotional history of their marriage. There’s a cold-bloodedness to the atmosphere, with objects labeled “Lot such-and-such”, and of course each object launches a memory, a connection, an association. So much of Method acting training has to do with objects, how objects can launch us into an entire past life, a memory can erect itself around us in 3-D if we connect to a certain object in a sensory way. We know this from our own lives. It’s one of the reasons why silly families sometimes fight over objects when a family member passes: it seems that the object HOLDS the memory of that person. And in some cases it very well might. Objects are powerful. They can act as talismans, symbols. If you connect to one, then it is always more than what it actually is. A teddy bear you had when you were 5 is never just a teddy bear as you look upon it as an old woman. It holds your childhood, it holds the memory of the You you once were. Seen in this light, it’s not a surprise that some people become hoarders. They cannot separate the object from the association. Very few of us can.

While “Show Mr. and Mrs. F–” ends up taking on an almost eerie elegiac tone, “Auction – Model, 1934” remains a bit insouciant, humorous, self-involved. Look at the ridiculous possessions we have acquired. What a crazy life we have led. Look at all the scrapbooks devoted to US we used to keep! That self-involvement was part of the celebrity of the Fitzgeralds, wrapped up in one another while the world watched, wrapped up in their age. Here, they do their best to auction off all of the “Lots” that make up their marriage, describing each object and how they came about owning it. However, none of the objects gets a bidder, so one by one, each object has to be stored in the attic by “Essie”, who is certainly kept busy during the length of the essay.

There are multiple ways you could look at all of this, and part of the fun of the piece is contemplating the implications (which are left out of the language). I recently went through a pretty big “purge” of objects, donating 7 boxes of books to a second-hand store, and cleaning out my closet and drawers to its barest bones. I found myself looking around my beautiful study, a room that gives me great pleasure, and thinking, cold-bloodedly: “Okay. What WON’T I miss in this room?”

It’s not just about traveling light, although that was part of my consideration. I have deep emotional roots, with family and friends, and definitely have strong ties to certain areas. Rhode Island. Chicago. And certain aspects of New York, although I probably will not realize how attached I am to this place until I no longer live here. Such is life! I have lived here longer than any other place (well, not Rhode Island, although I am approaching that mark here as well). I cannot even be sure the overall effect it has had on me. It is my chosen home (for the time being). In November and December, as things started to shift, I found myself paring down the objects in my life. Like the Fitzgeralds, there would probably be no bidders for my objects – they hold value only to me.

There’s a sadness behind the light tone taken here, although that may be just my retrospective attitude. It’s 1934. Things were already going south for the Fitzgeralds. Zelda had had her first breakdown. So had Scott. He would be (unbelievably) dead in a mere 6 years. These objects speak to their glory days in the 20s, when they traveled and acquired crazy things along the way, symbolic of their free spirits, and symbolic of the fizzy energy of the 1920s. Dark days were coming. You can feel that in this piece. Lost youth, lost hope. It’s lovely, and sad.

Here’s an excerpt.

The Crack-Up, ‘Auction – Model, 1934’, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Lot 5. A barrel. Contents cost us something like a thousand dollars during the boom. Chipped pottery tea-set that was worth the trip to Venice—it had seemed such a pity not to buy something from that cluttered bazaar fanned by the plumy shade of the white plane trees. We didn’t know what we wanted to drink; the white haunted countryside was hot; the hillsides smelled of jasmine and the hot backs of men digging the roads.

Two glass automobiles for salt and pepper stolen from the cafe in Saint-Paul (Alpes-Maritimes). Nobody was looking because Isadora Duncan was giving one of her last parties at the next table. She had got too old and fat to care whether people accepted her theories of life and art, and she gallantly toasted the world’s obliviousness in lukewarm champagne. There were village dogs baying at a premature white exhausted August moon and there were long dark shadows folded accordion-like along the steps of the steep streets of Saint-Paul. We autographed the guest-book.

Fifty-two ash trays—all very simple because Hergesheimer warned us against pretentiousness in furnishing a house without money. A set of cocktail glasses with the roosters now washed off the sides. Carl Van Vechten brought us a shaker to go with them but nobody had opened the letter announcing his arrival—nobody knew where the mail was kept, there were so many rooms, twenty or twenty-one. Two curious vases we won in the amusement park. The fortune teller came back with us and drank too much and repeated a stanza of Vachel Lindsay to exorcise the mansion ghost. China, China, China, set of four, set of five, set of nine, set of thirteen. Any bids? Thank God! The kitchen, Essie.

Lot 5. Plaid Shawl donated by Carmel Myers. Slightly fatigued after long use as a table cover and packing wrapper for china pigs and dogs which held pennies turned out of the pockets of last year’s coats. Once a beautiful Viennese affair, with memories of Carmel in Rome filming Ben Hur in bigger and grander papier-mache arenas than the real ones. One gong. No memory of what it was for or why we had bought it. Stick missing. Looks, however, like a Chinese pagoda and gives an impression of wide travel. Bits of brass: wobbly colonial candle-sticks with stems encircling little bells which ring when walked with a la Beatrix Esmond or Lady Macbeth. Two phallic symbols bought from an archeologist. One German helmet found in the trenches of Verdun. One chess set. We played it every evening before we began to quarrel about our respective mental capacities. Two china priests from Vevey. The figures are strung on springs and wag their heads lasciviously over bottles of wine and hampers of food. A whole lot of broken glass and china good for the tops of walls. All right, Essie. Go on—there’s plenty of space up there, if you know how to use it.

Lot 6. Contents of an old army trunk. Nobody has ever explained where moth-balls go; moths thrive best on irreplaceable things such as old army uniforms. Then there was a pair of white flannels bought with the first money ever earned by writing—thirty dollars from Mencken’s and Nathan’s old Smart Set. The moths had also dined upon a blue feather fan paid for out of a first Saturday Evening Post story; it was an engagement present—that together with a southern girl’s first corsage of orchids. The remains of the fan are not for sale. All right, Essie.

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Memphis Collage

Posted on January 6, 2013 by sheila


Dawn, Confederate Park


Beale Street on a rainy night


A door to nowhere, somewhere in Memphis


Barge on the Mississippi


The old Ambassador Hotel ghost sign, Main Street


Reserved. For a legend.


I kept being drawn to this building off Main Street. It is clearly derelict, with vines crawling up the main staircase, and windows boarded up. BUT. The “Hotel” sign was lit up, and there was a Christmas wreath on the main door. It was all very Tennessee Williams.


On Beale


Front Street, sky threatening snow or rain, something


Two street names with powerful connotations in the Elvis Lexicon


Memphis Belle memorial, Veterans Park in Overton Park. I love how she is clearly just conquering the Nazi menace by her sheer fabulousness


Home base


They look freshly vacated


I had to go find the building that once upon a time was The Memphian, the movie theatre in Memphis that Elvis used to rent out and watch “Dr. Strangelove” 5 times in a row with 150 of his closest friends. It’s a bit out of the downtown area, on a side street, and is now the home of the Circuit Playhouse, a little Memphis repertory company. They just finished a run of “Santaland Diaries”. They kept the old art deco feel to the building, the chunky glass, the signage. I was there at around 8 in the morning, so I didn’t go inside, but that was okay. I just wanted to see it. You know me and old signage. It’s one of my favorite things.


Sometimes I would walk on Beale Street, looking around me at the sights. Other times, i would walk with my head to the ground, for obvious reasons. Every couple of steps, another legend.


The Arcade. Jen and I went there a couple of times during our trip. The first time I tried to go, it was so busy there was an hour wait. The next time I went, it was me and another guy, and that was it for customers. I love it there.


Keith Richards and a Bloody Mary at the Peabody Hotel


I will have nightmares about this Beale St. sign


Nerd alert! Here I am looking through the window at the old Lansky Brothers clothing store on Beale Street, just where Elvis as a teenager used to press his nose up against the glass, dreaming of the day when he could wear pink pegged pants and a “chartreuse fucking shirt” (to quote Sam Phillips). Nice dovetail: the Elvis banner in the background. In Memphis you always get those time-travel moments of blending.


Sitting on the banks of the Mississippi, with my coffee, and Keith Richards, and my writing notebook.


Memphis does appear prepared for the zombie apocalypse


Hello, American icon!


Everywhere you look, you see music. These are the doors to a drug rehab center.


I will never ever get enough of S. Main Street.


The rising sun hitting the trees in beautiful peaceful Court Park


Overton Park, one of my favorite places in Memphis. I spent a lot of time there.


The ubiquitous Pyramid. I can’t help but think of this.


God bless America.

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“I’d Have Died and Gone to Heaven Just to Play Like That.” – Keith Richards on Scotty Moore

Posted on January 6, 2013 by sheila

Another excerpt from Keith Richards’ Life, which I finished yesterday. It’s SUCH a good book. He is hilarious. I was crying with laughter at his description of the animals he saw on a safari in Africa. You can hear his voice. It’s so fantastic.I want to get the audio book, which was highly acclaimed as well, and (name-drop), Joe Hurley is one of the readers. Joe Hurley is huge here in New York, and I’ve seen him perform a number of times (and went to his annual St. Patrick’s Day rock revue a couple years ago), but I have a fondness for him mainly because he is the star of this event in my life (he is the “scruffy Irish dude”), one of my most memorable New York moments EVER, and I didn’t even know who he was at that point. I will love him forever for that memory. And he’s one of the Keith Richards readers!

Incidentally: if you want to have strangers come up to you and start to talk to you about what you are reading, carrying Keith Richards’ memoir is a great way to make that happen. I can’t even count how many people have just struck up conversations with me. The waitress at the Arcade Restaurant in Memphis. A guy in Confederate Park. A lady at the Memphis airport. Some have read it, others haven’t but want to. Everyone wants to talk about it.

Certainly one of the best memoirs from an entertainment legend I have ever read.

I’ve only been excerpting here the bits that have to do with Elvis, but there’s so much more in the book, of course. It’s so good. I highly recommend it. There’s a great interview here with Richards, about those Sun recordings, with Elvis and Scotty and Bill, which leads into the excerpt I wanted to share today.

That Elvis LP had all the Sun stuff, with a couple of RCA jobs on it too. It was everything from “That’s All Right,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, “Milk Cow Blues Boogie.” I mean, for a guitar player, or a budding guitar player, heaven. But on the other hand, what the hell’s going on there? I might not have wanted to be Elvis, but I wasn’t so sure about Scotty Moore. Scotty Moore was my icon. He was Elvis’s guitar player on all the Sun Records stuff. He’s on “Mystery Train”, he’s on “Baby Let’s Play House”. Now I know the man, I’ve played with him. I know the band. But back then, just being able to get through “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”, that was the epitome of guitar playing. And then “Mystery Train” and “Money Honey”. I’d have died and gone to heaven just to play like that.” How the hell was that done? That’s the stuff I first brought to the johns at Sidcup, playing a borrowed f-hole archtop Höfner. That was before the music led me back into the roots of Elvis and Buddy – back to the blues.

To this day there’s a Scotty Moore lick I still can’t get down and he won’t tell me. Forty-nine years it’s eluded me. He claims he can’t remember the one I’m talking about. It’s not that he won’t show me; he says, “I don’t know which one you mean.” It’s on “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.” I think it’s in E major. He has a rundown when it hits the 5 chord, the B down to the A down to the E, which is like a yodeling sort of thing, which I’ve never been quite able to figure. It’s also on “Baby Let’s Play House.” When you get to “But don’t you be nobody’s fool / Now baby, come back, baby …” and right at that last line, the lick is in there. It’s probably some simple trick. But it goes too fast, and also there’s a bunch of notes involved: which finger moves and which one doesn’t? I’ve never heard anybody else pull it off. Creedence Clearwater got a version of this song down, but when it comes to that move, no. And Scotty’s a sly dog. He’s very dry. “Hey, youngster, you’ve got time to figure it out.” Every time I see him, it’s “Learnt that lick yet?”

Posted in Music | Tagged | 2 Comments

Past/Present/Future: The Hotel Chisca

Posted on January 5, 2013 by sheila

“That building you were just takin’ pictures of … that was the Hotel Chisca. Ol’ Dewey Phillips used to broadcast from there.”

The man, who walked with a cane, came up beside me on Main Street and offered this information. I loved that he said “ol’ Dewey Phillips”, which seemed to imply a personal relationship, a sense of ownership, which of course anyone who remembers Memphis back in the day would have. “Ol’ Dewey Phillips” was a DJ in Memphis, whose broadcast style has to be heard to be believed (you can hear some of his stylings on Youtube). He would shriek and holler, and misprounounce sponsor’s names on purpose, jabber along at ninety miles an hour, talk over the records he was playing (you can hear him clapping and murmuring in some of the clips) and, in general, give Memphis a really good show. His show was called “Red Hot and Blue” and it was on every night from 10 to midnight.

Radio, like everything else, was segregated. There was a black-run radio station in town as well, WDIA, with black DJs (some very famous names: Rufus Thomas was one of them), but Dewey Phillips, on his show, crossed the color line. He was partly responsible for white kids becoming aware of the vibrancy and awesomeness of black music, happening right in their home town. Dewey Phillips would play Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Muddy Waters, and he also had a close relationship with Sam Phillips (no relation), who would feed him the singles he was putting out down the road at Sun Records. Sam Phillips was no dummy. Although he was devoted to recording the black musicians he admired so much in Memphis and the surrounding areas, he always had the dream of reaching a white (ie: mainstream) audience. He was looking to cross over. Not just because the whites were a more lucrative market, although I’m sure that was part of it. But because he had a messianic belief that whites and blacks could come together, through music. That America was ready to start blending, dammit. Politically perhaps not, socially perhaps not, but artistically? Sam Phillips felt that that day had come.


Elvis and Dewey, Memphis, 1956

I said to the man with the cane, staring up at the big red Hotel Chisca, covered in ghost signs, and totally derelict: “I know! Where did Dewey Phillips broadcast from?”

The grizzled guy, wearing a baseball hat, pointed to the upper floors. “On the mezzanine. Ol’ Dewey called it the Magazine Floor.”

“Amazing,” I said. “Did you used to listen to him?”

“Oh, hell yes. Every night. Memphis was alive back then. There were whorehouses and casinos over on Beale. I work over there now. Beale is now run by the city. That’s why you see so many cops. They tried to turn the place around.”

I stared up at the upper floors of the Hotel Chisca. There were broken windows and wooden boards covering some of the jagged spaces.

“Are they going to renovate the building, you think?” I asked.

“Yeah, there’s some such plans afoot, I guess. The place is a damn eyesore.”

“I think it’s kind of beautiful.”

He went silent, staring up at the giant derelict building, maybe trying to see it through my outsider eyes. Memphis is embarrassed by the Hotel Chisca. It is so dangerous, pieces falling off the roof and the sides, that the entire sidewalk has to be barricaded off around it. It is abandoned, filled with empty space and rats. Right in the middle of downtown Memphis.

Property values have dropped all around that area, because of the Hotel Chisca. You can’t get away from it. It’s enormous and it dominates the landscape. It’s right across the street from the Orpheum Theatre, which still has touring companies of Broadway shows, and a full schedule of productions that draws tourists from all over the place. Memphis feels badly that these tourists come to their city and have to see, right there in front of them, a giant abandoned building. Civic leaders and city leaders have been calling for either a renovation or a demolition for a long time. Because of the hotel’s history, because of the connection to “ol’ Dewey Phillips”, and therefore, to Elvis, the Hotel Chisca could certainly be a draw for tourists as well. It sure was a draw for me. It was one of the places I wanted to see when I first came to Memphis.

It stands right on Main Street, and behind it is a cavernous parking lot. The Hotel Chisca, unlike the Peabody, was not a hotel catering to the elite. It was an affordable downtown spot for middle-class folks who were looking for a place to stay, part of the democratization of America and American travel. Families could stay there affordably. I would love to get a look at the inside, although right now it is probably horrifying and dangerous. There are no windows along the first floor. There are no windows at all, actually – everything boarded up.

But back in the day, every teenager in town knew that ol’ Dewey Phillips was up there, night after night, on the Magazine, playing music that thrilled them.

On July 5, 1954, a young truck driver named Elvis Presley recorded a song at Sun Records called “That’s All Right.” Sam Phillips had put together the teenage hopeful with two more experienced musicians, Scotty Moore and Bill Black, to see if they could come up with something. During a long and not-fruitful evening of experimenting, Elvis, messing around to let off steam, started singing “That’s All Right”, an old blues song by Arthur Crudup. Phillips later expressed amazement that Elvis, a white boy who had come into Sun Records a year earlier to record two songs for his mother (two quavery ballads), even had heard of Arthur Crudup. He was on the other side of the color line. Elvis was basically fooling around on July 5 with “That’s All Right”, but Phillips knew he had something, and got the trio on tape. They only did three takes. So what happened in that studio is what was recorded. There was no monkeying with controls, no post-editing, that was not what Sam Phillips was about, and also not what recording was about in those days. It was about capturing the feel of the room, between the guys in that room, and Sun Records was genius at that.

Sam Phillips gave the acetate of “That’s All Right” to Dewey Phillips. They listened to it together. Dewey was intrigued. “That’s All Right” doesn’t sound like anything else. It’s a rhythm and blues song, with a country feel, tinged with black gospel, sung by a rocking white boy.

Three days later, on July 8, 1954, ol’ Dewey Phillips played the record on “Red Hot & Blue”. The station was inundated with phone calls from teenagers, screaming, “WHO IS THAT?” “PLAY IT AGAIN.” “PLAY IT AGAIN.” Teenagers who lived close by started convening around the Hotel Chisca, wanting to get close to the Magazine Floor, wanting to get close to this new sound, this new voice. Dewey Phillips, overwhelmed, played “That’s All Right” 17 times in a row, or something like that. Nobody wanted to hear anything else. Now that’s extraordinary. How many recordings can one say that about? One song, one recording, making everything else pale in comparison, immediately. No wonder Elvis had a sneaking suspicion that he had been Chosen, by some Divine Being. Because who else does such a thing happen to?

Sam Phillips had told Elvis that Dewey Phillips would be playing his song that night. Elvis told his parents. They were all excited. Elvis was so nervous that he went to the movies, and basically hid in the darkness of the theatre, knowing that his song was being played, at that moment. But he couldn’t sit around and listen to it. He just couldn’t. That’s a very illuminating moment, something that says a lot about who Elvis was. While his Christian upbringing and his poverty-stricken past had given him a basis of humility being required of him, he had enough ambition to light up the entire world. That had to be a little bit uncomfortable, a little out of sync with his class, his status, and his overall character. You certainly can’t be arrogant. That would be forbidden. God is always watching. God forgives you and loves you but the only thing He needs of you is to be humble, and try to do your best. How do you reconcile that, which was quite serious to Elvis, with the desire to rise above and claim a spotlight and demand the attention of the world? How can those two things coexist? Elvis would struggle with that for his entire life, and that July evening in 1954, when he was still anonymous (but those days were numbered) he could not reconcile those two things. He could not sit with his parents and listen to himself on the radio. It was too much for him. He wanted it, whatever it was, too badly. (Plenty of people have talent. Plenty of people have ambition. To be an Elvis Presley, you flat out just have to want it more than anyone else does.) His ambition for himself, out of sync with the expectations he had grown up with (get a good job, get married, be good to people, live a good life), was so enormous that he had to keep it secret. It was not a secret to himself. He was dressing like a black blues singer in high school. The boy permed his hair, for God’s sake. This was not a person devoted to fitting in. By the same token, he was shy, he stuttered, and he was a God-fearing Christian boy with a nice Christian girlfriend at the time named Dixie Locke. He was devoted to her. (She happened to be on vacation with her family during this period, which, again, I don’t think was an accident. She came back to Memphis to absolute mayhem. Her boyfriend was a local star – overnight.) As far as Dixie Locke knew, he maybe wanted to be part of a white gospel quartet, along the lines of local stars The Blackwood Brothers. He had auditioned for a quartet. They turned him down. She knew he loved music. But what was going on inside his heart, when he bust out with “That’s All Right” on July 5, 1954, was closed to her. Besides, how could you say to someone, “I want to take over the whole world”? I believe Elvis always knew where he wanted to go. I believe he saw it before anyone else did. It’s the only explanation that satisfies me.

So of course Elvis hid in the movie theatre. Probably biting his nails. Probably not concentrating at what was going on up on the screen. In 1965, Elvis told The Saturday Evening Post, “I thought people would laugh at me. Some did, and some are still laughing, I guess.”

Meanwhile, all hell was breaking loose at the Hotel Chisca. Dewey Phillips was being inundated with phone calls and telegrams, demanding to know who that singer was. He made an emergency phone call to the Presley household, where Vernon, Gladys and Vernon’s mom, Minnie, were huddled around the radio, listening in amazement as their boy’s song was played over and over and over again. Gladys answered the phone and Dewey told her to get their son over to the Hotel Chisca immediately, he wanted to interview him. Panicked, Gladys and Vernon hurried to the movie theatre to find Elvis. Gladys went down one aisle on a search, Vernon went down another, and they pulled Elvis out, and brought him to the Hotel Chisca. Elvis was terrified.

Dewey sat him down, told him he wanted to interview him. Elvis said he had no idea how to be interviewed, and Dewey told him it would be fine, “Just don’t say nothing dirty.” Dewey turned the mike on, without Elvis knowing, and they started talking. Dewey knew that there was some race confusion going on amidst the mayhem. Dewey was known for playing “race music”, and it wasn’t immediately apparent that Elvis was white. The name, too, was strange. It could be a black name. Dewey was conscious of all of that. He asked Elvis where he went to high school, and Elvis said Humes High. Later, Dewey said, “I wanted to get that out, because a lot of people listening had thought he was colored.” Humes was a white high school. Elvis stuttered and stammered his way through the answers to Dewey’s questions and said at one point, “Aren’t you gone to interview me?” and Dewey said, “The mike’s been open the whole time.” Terror, fear, chaos.

The interview was over. The revolution had begun. Elvis couldn’t have known that, as he walked outside the Hotel Chisca, around midnight, and wandered the streets for a bit before heading home. How could he know? But he certainly knew that something had happened. He had always wanted to be ahead of the pack, although this was something he never would have expressed. But there is no other reason that he would dress in pink suits in high school and walk around with his guitar, playing for people. You can’t be a genius only in your own mind. You need to be recognized. You need to be pointed out, highlighted, brought forth.

Elvis’ first taste of what was to come happened at the Hotel Chisca on July 8, 1954.

On July 30, 1954, less than a month later, he played his first big show at the Overton Park Shell. He had played on a flatbed truck in a parking lot a week or so before, and had attracted a huge crowd, people who had been listening to “That’s All Right” on the radio. But July 30 was his real debut. He and Scotty and Bill only knew two songs. Vernon and Gladys and Dixie went to the show together. Elvis had a nervous breakdown beforehand (described by Sam Phillips), standing on the steps in the back of the shell, stuttering out his nerves to Sam, who reassured him he was going to be great (although Sam had no idea if that was actually going to be the case). Elvis trembled his way through his two numbers, and to let off some of that steam, he bounced around and jiggled his left leg, and the girls clustered around in the audience lost their ever-loving minds, shocking Dixie who stared up at her boyfriend wondering: “What on earth is happening??”

Elvis still had his day job at Crown Electric, but that wouldn’t last long. By the end of 1954, he had a contract with the Louisiana Hayride, and he was on his way.

It all started at the Hotel Chisca.

You cannot get away from the building, if you are in the downtown area. It is tall. It is bright red. It peeks over other buildings, it is insistent and domineering. A sad relic. But perhaps it is not yet over. Anyone who knows the history of Memphis or the history of Elvis knows well the story I just told. It’s moved into legend. It’s a story people tell time and time again. It exaggerates in the telling.

Along the chain-link fence barricading it off on Main Street is an art exhibit, done by the students at a local Catholic elementary school. Big banners hang along the fence. The name of the exhibit is MEMPHIS MUSIC ICONS. These are little kids. They clearly had done their research, bless the teacher who walked them through it. These kids were probably born after 9/11. And look at the stuff they came up with. Look at how awesome they are.


(I love how Elvis apparently sang “Stand By Me”. Who knew.)

Like I said, Memphis is brave enough to remember.

The ghost of ol’ Dewey Phillips still wanders those halls, I’m thinking. Perhaps the Hotel Chisca will rise again.

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Some Memphis Thoughts

Posted on January 4, 2013 by sheila

The thing about Memphis that takes some getting used to, for someone like me, who spends the majority of her time in New York City, is that no one is ever breathing down your neck. You can wander, you can meander, you can stop in the middle of the sidewalk and take a picture, nobody crashes into you. It’s the same with driving. There are certainly other cars on the road, but even during rush hour there’s not that insanity that you feel on approaching New York. And so what happens to me is that I calm down and relax. It’s physical. I got used to having space around me. I got used to not being bothered, hustled, bumped into. Even on Beale Street, where, in general, you see more people, it’s pretty quiet. Granted, this is a slow period (New Year’s Eve notwithstanding). Schools are shut down, lots of businesses are closed for the holidays, and except for the throngs of people from Iowa who poured into town for the Liberty Bowl, Memphis was closed into itself. There was no distance between me and it. I loved that. I was told by many people that Beale Street has a blues fest in the summer and the streets get so crowded that you can barely walk.

And I know that Elvis’ death anniversary in August draws people from all over the world. But I was seeing Memphis in a quiet period, and the space expanded around me. I could stop and sit on a bench and nobody sat down next to me. (Well, one time someone did, but he was clearly insane and looking for a friend so I moved on pretty quick.)

I have my morning coffee in the freezing air of Confederate Park, overlooking the Mississippi. I am looking west, at Arkansas, so as the sun rises, the landscape is half in shadow and half ablaze with sunlight.

The only people you see are joggers and people walking their dogs. Everyone says “good morning” or “Happy new year” as they pass, but they always pass. Solitude is respected. I imagine it’s because there’s just not as many people, you are not crushed up against your fellow man at all times here, and so it is assumed that if someone is alone, then they want to be alone. I love that about being here.

It seems to me that along with the fact that this was his hometown, Elvis liked it because of that respect for solitude, that Southern hospitality which is both warm but also distant. People leave you alone. I can imagine quite well that Elvis could breathe better here in Memphis. There was a space around him too. Even with his clamoring entourage who basically waited around downstairs in Graceland for Elvis to appear down the stairway. Even in that environment, here in Memphis Elvis could stretch out. It’s not about an escape. Elvis did plenty of that. He escaped in Las Vegas, he escaped in Hawaii. In Memphis, though, he was a hometown boy. This was the place that had nurtured him and recognized him first. They loved him unconditionally. They were proud of him. They were protective of him. None of that would need to be said out loud. It’s in the air. Elvis was obviously a prisoner at Graceland, with the fans lined up along the stone wall on the outskirts. He let the tension out by coming down and signing autographs, and letting fans he recognized come on up to the house and look around. It’s hard to imagine a star of his magnitude doing such a thing today. There’s a back driveway where Elvis would escape to drive around. He had an old beat-up pickup truck for that, and could exit his home without anyone knowing that it was him. Insanity. If he wanted to go to the movies or the zoo or the amusement park or roller skating, he would rent out the entire joint and do his thing afterhours. He did what he had to do to survive. But only in Memphis would any of that be possible. He knew everyone. He could pull strings. He knew if he went to The Memphian to watch a movie, he would be safe. He was the biggest star in the world and he chose to stay in Memphis as his home base. Memphis was (and is) rightly proud of that.

It’s not an accident. It’s not evidence of his lack of curiosity or his childish desire to keep things the same, although these things have been said about him. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: try to walk a mile in his shoes, try to imagine the crush of that level of fame, and try to imagine it coming to him so young. A year before he was living in public housing, now he has three Cadillacs. That type of fame turns people’s heads. We can see it happen time and time again. George Harrison said that the only way the Beatles survived the onslaught of fame, and what that type of fame does to the ego, is by relying on one another. That onslaught on the ego could be distributed between the four of them. Elvis didn’t have that. He also didn’t write his own stuff, so the love that people had for him wasn’t about his awesome lyrics, and his personal songwriting. They loved him because he was him. Try to imagine that, it’s very important. It’s also unique. Now, he came up in a time when the singer/songwriter thing was not the vogue. Frank Sinatra didn’t write his own stuff. Ella Fitzgerald didn’t write her own stuff. These people are not seen as somehow lesser because they aren’t Bob Dylan. But somehow Elvis gets that criticism all the time. “Well, but he didn’t write his own stuff ….” The singer/songwriter thing happened right after Elvis became famous, with the British invasion and the rise of folk singers like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Elvis was left out in the cold because songwriters suddenly weren’t offering him their best stuff. Regardless: his fame was truly personal, and it had to do with who he was, and the self he projected, and he never protected himself, he never held back. Okay, so they want all of me, apparently … so here it is.

That type of fame was, of course, very gratifying (you can see it in the flash of expression on his face in the back of the limo here), but it is also isolating and probably a little bit scary.

Memphis gave him a break. He wasn’t anonymous in Memphis, he was its most famous citizen, and everybody knew his schedule. “He should be arriving home from Hollywood soon …” “The Lisa Marie is taking off tomorrow, Elvis must be going to Vegas again …”

But again: there was a space around him, a forgiving and kind space. Time could stretch out for this man who was on the clock from the time he was 19 years old. He needed space. Not eternally: he couldn’t live without the wider world’s acceptance. He loved his fame. He respected it and gave it its due. He felt blessed. He was not a complainer.

Memphis shows its character best in the early morning and in the late afternoon. The shadows are long, and the air is still. The cars going by are not an insistent rush of traffic. There’s one, then a space of silence, then another goes by. Graceland is so clearly a private home when you drive by there off-hours, early in the morning or after supper. It’s wrapped up in itself: on display and yet also protected. The house is not hidden by trees. The drive is not so long that the house is not visible from the street. There it is. Elvis’ house.

A mansion, sure, with columns and a lot of land, but certainly not like, oh, The Breakers, or the Spelling mansion in Los Angeles. The house is relatable, somehow. (Well. When you see the Jungle Room or the Billiard Room, you know that the occupant was, shall we say, freakin’ OUT THERE.)

Dude. Relax.

I think I can be safe in guessing that had Elvis lived, he would have always kept Graceland. I cannot picture him giving up that house (he had bought it for his mother, really), or moving from Memphis. Memphis provided him too much. It launched his career. It was the type of place where the racial segregation of the South became meaningless once you started turning that radio dial. A revolution. Certainly devastated by what happened at the Lorraine Motel, which Memphis has still not recovered from. (I spoke to a musician at B.B. King’s, who was white, but played with an all-black band, and that was his theory. “We’ll never get over what happened at the Lorraine Motel, never. It still affects us,” he said.) Memphis remembers that too. Its shame, of being the place where that assassination took place, was turned into a memorial. They could have easily demolished the Lorraine Motel, to wipe out the memory of that horrible event and its aftermath. But they didn’t. It is a scar, from a wound that will never heal. Memphis can take it. America can take it. We can take the horrible events in our past. We can try to understand, try to heal, try to remember. That’s what I feel, when I come across the Lorraine Hotel, in my walks through the city. It always surprises me. “Oh, look, there it is again …”

Milan Kundera wrote a lot about “forgetting”. In a totalitarian society, there is a high premium placed on amnesia. The past is not acknowledged, and a heap of lies is unloaded on the public, giving them the correct interpretation of past events, even though everyone knows it is bullshit. Vaclav Havel spoke about that in his “moral contamination” speech in 1990. He told the Czech people that they were also responsible for the contamination: it would not do to just blame the Politburo. Because the only way a totalitarian society can continue is through the willing participation of its citizens. A tough thought. We all feel better when we are victims: “But he made me do it.” “But I had no choice.” When a society is devoted to forgetting, everyone is lost.

Memphis is wounded, and Memphis is obviously depressed. There are a lot of sad ghosts here. But Memphis does not forget. Memphis is brave enough to remember.

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