Fifties (77 page)

He also hired out his studio to any person who wanted to record. It was a good way of hearing new talent and making a little money on the side. The price was three dollars a shot. He sensed, long before the major record companies located far away in New York did, that the traditional musical barriers that had always separated the musician constituencies no longer held. He often told his assistant, Marion Kreisker, “If I could find a white man with a Negro sound I could make a billion dollars.” In addition, he said, “I knew that for black music to come to its rightful place in this country we had to have some white singers come over and do black music—not copy it, not change, not sweeten it. Just
do
it.”

It would turn out that he would engineer an entire musical migration of whites into black music. In addition to Elvis, he discovered Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis, all major talents and all, in different ways, American originals.

Even as Sam Phillips was inventing himself as a producer, the musical world was changing dramatically. The old order was fragmenting. The traditional giants, RCA, Columbia, and Decca, had dominated in the past. They had the big names, the crooners. But they were hardly entrepreneurial; the bigger they were, the more conservative they inevitably were as well. They watched the world of country-and-western and rhythm-and-blues with disdain, bordering on disapproval. It was music that came from the wrong side of the tracks. Some companies in fact even referred to black music as the “sepia market.” It was not an important slice of the market, obviously, because sepia people did not have very much money. Recorded music, in fact, until the fifties bore the label of class. People from the upper middle class and upper class had the money for phonographs with which they listened to classical and high pop, the crooners and the big bands. The people who liked country and black listened to the radio. But the forces of change were far more powerful than anyone at the big companies realized. Technology was democratizing
the business of music—phonographs and records alike were becoming much cheaper. It was only a matter of time before the artists began to cross over on the traditionally racially segregated charts. In 1954 a white musician named Bill Haley did a version of “Shake Rattle and Roll.” By February 1955 it sold 1 million copies; by the summer of 1955 it was number one on the white chart and number four on the rhythm and blues (or black) chart. In that same year Chuck Berry brought out “Maybellene,” which was the first successful assault on the main chart by a black musician; “Maybellene” went to the top of the rhythm and blues chart and went to number five on the white chart. Soon there was “Tutti Frutti,” by Little Richard.

After Elvis Presley’s sensational debut on Dewey Phillips’s show, his career skyrocketed. He was what first the region and then the nation wanted: a white boy to explode into the beat, to capture it for the whites. The success spread steadily: Deejays in Texas soon picked up on it, and soon after that Elvis was making regular appearances on the Louisiana Hayride, which was second only to the Grand Ole Opry as a showcase of country white talent. He began traveling the South with a company of country musicians, headlined by Hank Snow. But almost overnight he became the star of the touring group, something that did not escape the attention of Snow’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Parker, it appeared, though he did not own Presley’s contract, was encouraging the large companies to move in and buy it from Sam Phillips. In the beginning Phillips probably would have sold it for $5,000 or $10,000, for he lacked the resources to promote and sustain a major success. But interest constantly escalated. Mitch Miller at Columbia called. Phillips asked $20,000. Miller replied, “Forget it. No artist is worth that kind of money.” Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic, a label that was coming on quickly because of its owners’ exceptional early awareness of rock and roll, was probably the one record executive who personally knew how valuable Presley was. He made an offer of $25,000, which, as Ertegun told Phillips, was everything Atlantic had, including the desk he was using. It was too low, said Phillips. By then Colonel Parker was in on the game, and the Colonel had friends at RCA, the traditional recording powerhouse. Phillips was fairly sure he ought to sell Elvis’s contract, but just to be sure he was doing the right thing he had called his friend Kemmons Wilson, the local contractor who was just beginning to enjoy success in his own amazing career as the builder of America’s first great motel chain, Holiday Inns. Sam Phillips had been smart enough to be an early investor, and he would
eventually become a millionaire from his investments with Wilson. Phillips asked whether he should sell Elvis’s contract. “I wouldn’t hesitate,” Wilson said. “That boy isn’t even a professional.” So Phillips went ahead. When the negotiations were over, Sam Phillips had $35,000 and Elvis was the property of RCA.

Presley’s timing was nearly perfect. The crossover, led by Bill Haley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, was in full force. Parents might disapprove of the beat and of their children listening to what they
knew
was black music. But their disapproval only added to Presley’s popularity and made him more of a hero among the young. Local ministers might get up in their churches (almost always well covered by local newspapers) and attack demon rock as jungle music and threaten to lead a crusade to have this Presley boy arrested if he dared set foot in their community (generally, there was no problem, their towns were too small for him to play). It did not matter: Elvis Presley and rock music were
happening.

A new young generation of Americans was breaking away from the habits of its parents and defining itself by its music. There was nothing the parents could do: This new generation was armed with both money and the new inexpensive appliances with which to listen to it. This was the new, wealthier America. Elvis Presley began to make it in 1955, after ten years of rare broad-based middle-class prosperity. Among the principal beneficiaries of that prosperity were the teenagers. They had almost no memory of a Depression and the great war that followed it. There was no instinct on their part to save money. In the past when American teenagers had made money, their earnings, more often than not, had gone to help support their parents or had been saved for one treasured and long-desired purchase, like a baseball glove or a bike, or it had been set aside for college.

But now, as the new middle class emerged in the country, it was creating as a byproduct a brand-new consuming class: the young.
Scholastic
magazine’s Institute of Student Opinion showed that by early 1956 there were 13 million teenagers in the country, with a total income of $7 billion a year, which was 26 percent more than only three years earlier. The average teenager, the magazine said, had an income of $10.55 a week. That figure seemed remarkable at the time; it was close to what the average American family had had in disposable income, after all essential bills were paid, fifteen years earlier.

In addition, technology favored the young. The only possible family control was over a home’s one radio or record player. There, parental rule and edicts could still be exercised. But the young no longer needed to depend on the family’s appliances. In the early
fifties a series of technological breakthroughs brought small transistorized radios that sold for $25 to $50. Soon an Elvis Presley model record player was selling for $47.95. Teenagers were asked to put $1 down and pay only $1 a week. Credit buying had reached the young. By the late fifties, American companies sold 10 million portable record players a year.

In this new subculture of rock and roll the important figures of authority were no longer mayors and selectmen or parents; they were disc jockeys, who reaffirmed the right to youthful independence and guided teenagers to their new rock heroes. The young formed their own community. For the first time in American life they were becoming a separate, defined part of the culture: As they had money, they were a market, and as they were a market they were listened to and catered to. Elvis was the first beneficiary. In effect, he was entering millions of American homes on the sly; if the parents had had their way, he would most assuredly have been barred.

Certainly, Ed Sullivan would have liked to have kept him out. Ed Sullivan, in 1955 and 1956, hosted the most successful variety show in America on this strange new piece of turf called network television. The official title of his show was
The Toast of the Town.
Sullivan made his way to television from the world of print, where he’d worked as a Broadway gossip columnist, first on the old
New York Graphic
and eventually making his way to the
New York Daily News.
His column, in the city’s largest paper, was one of considerable influence. In 1947 he had served as master of ceremonies for an annual amateur dance contest sponsored by the
News
called the “Harvest Moon Ball.” Unbeknownst to Sullivan, CBS was televising the show. A CBS executive was impressed at how graciously Sullivan treated everyone he dealt with that evening and how natural his skills as an emcee were. He seemed completely comfortable with himself despite the fact that the show was being televised; the reason he was so comfortable was that he didn’t realize it was going on television: He thought all those cameras around the hall were simply movie cameras. CBS was in the process of putting together a Sunday-night variety program, and Sullivan was offered the show. The show opened a year later, and much to everyone’s surprise, it was a stunning success. Certainly, part of the reason was the leverage of Sullivan’s column. Those who went on his show were likely to get plugs in the column, and it was for that reason that on his opening broadcast, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis clowned, Eugene List played the piano, and Rodgers and Hammerstein happened to drop in just to say hello.

Eight years later, Ed Sullivan was the unofficial Minister of Culture in America. His was the great national variety theater where one could find the famous. Broadcast at 8
P.M.
on Sundays—an hour when families were likely to have gathered together—Sullivan’s show provided a pleasant, safe blend of acts, including some performers of exceptional talent. In addition there seemed to be a guarantee that nothing would happen that was at all threatening. Sullivan was, after all, involved in the most delicate business imaginable: selecting acts to perform live in millions of American living rooms, a place where no one had ever performed before. There was something there for everyone, and Sullivan made sure that there was always one act for the children. He stressed the importance of variety, and few acts got more than a couple of minutes. Mark Leddy, who did the booking for the show, once told Jim Bishop, the writer, “You want to know the day Christ died. It was on the Ed Sullivan Show and Ed gave him three minutes.” Sullivan himself was shrewd enough to minimize his own appearances, since his style was widely perceived as being exceptionally wooden. He would introduce a number, get off the stage, and reappear in time to lead the applause. “Let’s hear it ...” for he would say, and then give the name of the act. Once, after Sergio Franchi had sung the Lord’s Prayer, Sullivan turned to his audience and said, “Let’s hear it for the Lord’s Prayer.” A mimic named Will Jordan once went on and did an imitation of Sullivan, the idea for which, Jordan said, came from watching mechanical ducks in a shooting gallery. Jordan walked on and said: “Tonight on our really big show we have 702 Polish dentists who will be here in a few moments doing their marvelous extractions ...”

The popularity of Sullivan’s show was remarkable because the master of ceremonies was, on the screen and in real life, a stiff—a staid, humorless, rather puritanical man. As a print journalist he once attacked Marlene Dietrich because she had appeared in a Broadway show wearing slacks. His charm was at best marginal. His body language was that of someone frozen and not yet thawed out. He was almost completely expressionless. His voice was sharp and high-pitched, with what the rest of the country judged to be a New York accent. John Crosby, the best television critic in the country, wrote as early as December 1948, “One of the small but vexing questions confronting anyone in this area with a television set is: ‘Why is Ed Sullivan on it every Sunday night?’” The question, Crosby went on, “seems to baffle Mr. Sullivan as much as anyone else.” Later, Jack Paar said of him, “Who can bring to a simple English sentence suspense and mystery and drama? Who but Ed Sullivan can introduce
a basketball player with the reverence once reserved for Dr. (Albert) Schweitzer?” Slightly offended by all the criticism of her husband, Sylvia Sullivan once sought to write a piece answering all the criticism of his wooden manner. Unfortunately, the article was titled “I’m Married to the Great Stone Face.” In it she proceeded to deny rumors that he seemed so stiff because he had a serious war wound or that he had been hit on the head by a golf club. “They’re not true,” she wrote in
Collier’s.
“Nevertheless once in a while some kindly stranger will congratulate him on his courage in working despite his deformity!”

CBS, on whose network the show was carried and for whom he made a great deal of money, was never entirely happy with him. Yet miraculously, despite what the critics said, the show worked. Why, no one really knew. Perhaps it was the perfect hour for a variety show, 8
P.M.
on Sunday. Perhaps it was the sheer quality of the entertainers, since almost every entertainer in the world was desperate to be showcased on so prominent a platform. Perhaps it was the fact that television was still new and there was something comforting for ordinary Americans, tuning in their first television sets, to take this adventure with so stolid and careful a man. For his taste was conservative, cautious, and traditional. When some of the blacklisting groups criticized some of the performers he put on in the late forties, Sullivan backed down immediately and gave the blacklisters a veto power over any acts or performers who might have political liabilities.