Fifties (78 page)

In 1956, he was at the height of his power. He was making about $200,000 a year from CBS and another $50,000 from the
News.
He was most assuredly not a man to cross. His show was at the exact center of American mass culture. And he wanted no part of Elvis Presley, who was now in the process of enraging endless ministers and parent groups by dint of his onstage gyrations and the overt sexuality of his music. Nor did Sullivan like rockers in general. There had been a somewhat unpleasant incident earlier with the great black rocker Bo Diddley. Sullivan’s people had heard that Diddley was hot, that his records were rising on the charts, and they booked him without knowing very much about his music or the strength of his personality. Diddley was raw and original, and there was a lot of movement in his act. When Sullivan saw it, he was not pleased. According to his biographer, Jerry Bowles, Sullivan wandered over to the orchestra area, thumbed through some sheet music, picked out “Some Enchanted Evening,” and handed it to Diddley. “Sing this,” he said. That night Diddley started by singing “Some Enchanted Evening,” but the audience began to giggle. Suddenly, Bo Diddley
switched over to his song about the heroic Bo Diddley, and he went straight to the beat. The orchestra stayed with Rodgers and Hammerstein. Sullivan was furious. Rockers, he decided, were different from other people and did not keep their word. He wanted nothing to do with them.

Earlier, as Elvis conquered the South with regional appearances, he had begun to perfect his act. Some of it was natural instinct—he had to carry a beat, and it was hard to carry a beat while standing still. So he began to gyrate as he had seen endless gospel singers gyrate. The first time he had done it, he had been driven by pure instinct and the crowd began to shout. Later he asked a friend what had happened. The friend explained that Elvis had started jumping around on the stage and using his body and the crowd had loved it. From then it became part of his act; if you were going to do a live show, he explained, you had to have an act. That’s what people came to see. Otherwise, they could just as well stay at home and play records. A country singer named Bob Luman once said of an early Elvis concert: “This cat came out in a coat and a pink shirt and socks and he had this sneer on his face and he stood behind the mike for five minutes, I’ll bet, before he made a move. Then he hit his guitar a lick and he broke two strings. I’d been playing for ten years and I hadn’t broken a total of two strings. So there he was, these two strings dangling, and he hadn’t done anything yet, and these high school girls were screaming and fainting and running up to the stage and then he started to move his hips real slow like he had a thing for his guitar ...”

The teeny-boppers started to maul him. They did not mean him any harm, he explained. What they wanted “was pieces of you for souvenirs.” By the end of 1955 RCA was ready to push his records nationally, and he had signed to do four Saturday-night shows on a show produced by Jackie Gleason called
Stage Show.
He got $1,250 a show for the Gleason appearances plus, of course, national exposure. Gleason knew exactly what was happening. “He’s a guitar-playing Marlon Brando,” he said. Only part of what worked for Elvis was the music, Gleason knew. Certainly, that was important, but it was more than just the music. It was also the movement and the style. And a great deal of it was the look: sultry, alienated, a little misunderstood, the rebel who wanted to rebel without ever leaving home. He was perfect because he was the safe rebel. He never intended to cause trouble: He was a classic mama’s boy, and Gladys Presley had barely let him out of her sight until he was in high school; now finally on the threshold of great success, he used his royalties in
that first year to buy three new homes, each larger than the last, for his parents. He also gave each of his parents a new Cadillac, though the one he gave his mother never got license plates, since she did not drive.

By 1956 he had become both a national celebrity and a national issue. His success, amplified as it was by the newfound wealth of the nation and the new technology of radio, record players and, finally, television, defied the imagination. He quickly made a three-picture deal with Hal Wallis for $450,000. “Hound Dog” sold 2 million copies and “Don’t Be Cruel,” sold 3 million. His singles were not merely taking off, they were defying traditional musical categories: “Heartbreak Hotel” was number one on the white chart, number one on the country chart, and number five on the rhythm-and-blues chart; “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog” became number one on all three charts. In April 1956 he already had six of RCA’s all-time top twenty-five records and was selling $75,000 worth of records a day.

That month he made a rather sedate appearance on the Milton Berle Show and in June Berle had him back. This time he cut loose, causing an immense number of protests about the vulgarity of his act. Now Elvis Presley was working the American home, and suddenly the American home was a house divided. At this point Ed Sullivan lashed out against Presley. He announced that Presley’s act was so suggestive that it would never go on his show. This was Sullivan as a guardian of public morals, a man born in 1902, fifty-four years old that summer. Within three weeks Sullivan had to change his mind. His competition, the Steve Allen show, immediately called Colonel Parker and booked Presley for July 1. The problem for Allen, of course, was that, like everyone else, he wanted it both ways. He wanted Elvis on board, but he did not want a big protest on the part of the traditional segment of his audience. So he and his staff compromised: They would go high Elvis rather than low Elvis. They dressed Elvis in a tux, and they got him to limit his body movement. He did a dim-witted sketch with Allen, Imogene Coca, and Andy Griffith, in which he played a cowboy named Tumbleweed, and he sang “Hound Dog” to a live basset hound. The Presley fans hated it. After the show, Dewey Phillips called Elvis long-distance in New York: “You better call home and get straight, boy. What you doing in that monkey suit? Where’s your guitar?” When Elvis returned to Memphis for a concert in Phillips’s honor, he cut loose with a pure rock-a-billy performance. It was Presley at his best, and when he finished, he told the audience, “I just want to
tell y’all not to worry—them people in New York and Hollywood are not going to change me none.”

But the Steven Allen show had worked in one sense; it was the first time Steve Allen had beaten Ed Sullivan in the ratings. Sullivan surrendered almost immediately. His people called Colonel Parker and signed Elvis for $50,000 to do three shows. It was a figure then unheard of. It was one thing to guard public morals for the good of the nation and the good of your career; it was another thing to guard public morals at the cost of your career.

The battle was over: Ed Sullivan had conceded and the new music had entered the mainstream of American culture. Sullivan was not there for the first show; he was recuperating from an auto accident, and Charles Laughton was the host. The producers deliberately shot Elvis from the waist up. But soon he would be singing and dancing in full sweep. Sullivan was pleased; his ratings were extraordinary. He also wanted to make clear that he had not lowered America’s morals. “I want to say to Elvis Presley and the country that this is a real decent, fine boy,” Sullivan told his audience after the third show. “We’ve never had a pleasanter experience on our show with a big name than we’ve had with you. You’re thoroughly all right.” It was the deftest of surrenders; it appeared to be the generous speech of a man receiving a surrender while in fact it was the speech of a man who had just surrendered himself. Market economics had won. It augured a profound change in American taste: In the past, whites had picked up on black jazz, but that had largely been done by the elite. This was different; this was a visceral, democratic response by the masses. It was also a critical moment for the whole society: The old order had been challenged and had not held. New forces were at work, driven by technology. The young did not have to listen to their parents anymore.

Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley were only the first of the new rebels from the world of entertainment and art. Soon to come were many others. If there was a common thread, it was that they all projected the image of being misunderstood, more often than not by their parents’ generation, if not their own parents themselves. There was little overt political content in their rebellion; their public personae and the characters they played were not fighting against the sinister injustices of the McCarthy era or racial injustice. Only Brando came close to politics when he confronted the mob in
On the Waterfront.

Above all, they were young men with obvious emotional tensions—onstage, on screen, and in real life. After Brando finished in the Broadway production of
Streetcar,
he vowed that he hated Hollywood and would be back on the legitimate stage soon. In point of fact, he never returned. After a short run of remarkable films that included
Streetcar
and
On the Waterfront,
he seemed to become increasingly careless in his selection of roles and cynical about his art. If Brando was rebelling against anything, it seemed to be against the idea of his profession, of having to pursue the career, the achievements, and the honors that everyone expected of him.

Just as Brando went from doing his best work to giving surprisingly ordinary performances in surprisingly ordinary movies, a new rebel star was ascending in Hollywood: James Dean. Brando was Dean’s personal hero, and like Brando, Dean was plucked from the edges of the New York theater crowd by the perceptive and vigilant Elia Kazan. Even more than Brando, Dean was a cult figure. Brando might have had a bigger career and done more distinguished work, but Dean’s legend was greater, because his life was so short. He was always remembered as young, always to be mourned—the ultimate, eternal rebel, whose promise had never been fulfilled. To serious fans of the era’s theater and movies, Dean’s legend would eventually surpass Brando’s, and that was almost heretical, because Brando was the original and Dean the imitation. In a book that was in no small part an open letter to Brando, the critic Richard Schickel wrote: “To tell you what may be a more awful truth, later generations are more interested in James Dean. Can you imagine? The kid who copied you! Who used to annoy you by calling up and trying to make friends!” For Dean had a puppy-dog infatuation with the older Brando. Kazan knew it, so one day he invited Brando on the set. Dean “was so adoring that he seemed shrunken and twisted in misery,” Kazan later wrote. On occasion Dean signed his name to letters in a way that showed he was conscious of the different influences on him: “Jimmy (Brando Clift) Dean.”

Dean was typecast as the rebel, and like Brando, in real life he was rebelling against an unhappy childhood and a father he had grown to hate. Even more than Brando, he came to symbolize the belief of the youth of that era that because they were young, they were misunderstood. He was good-looking, almost delicate, with a sulky, androgynous appearance that made him seem vulnerable. He was driven by his own pain and anguish. Dean was, wrote Steven Vineberg, “the most inward of actors: His performances were always about the beautiful chaos in his own soul.”

Dean’s life and his art were inseparable. Unlike Brando, who had considerable professional training and considerable range, Dean basically played himself—but brilliantly. Sullen and sulky, he was still worthy of redemption if only the properly tender girlfriend could be found to mother him. Either he got a part right instinctively, Kazan believed, or he didn’t get it at all. At a certain point the only way to get him to improve his performance was to get him liquored up.

His career was short. There were only three films before he met his death in a car accident. The end came at the height of his fame and in the very same year of his stunning debut in
East of Eden.
That early death ensured him a place in the pantheon of artists who lived fast and died young. His poster would grace the bedroom walls of future generations of young would-be rebels. Dick Schickel noted the advantages of dying young (Dean) and the disadvantages of not (Brando): “There is much to be said for dying young in circumstances melodramatically appropriate to your public image. There is very little to be said for living long and burying that image in silence, suet and apparent cynicism.”

Dean was born in small-town Indiana. His mother died of breast cancer when he was a young boy, and his father, weighted by debt, had been forced to sell the family car to pay for her final operation. The burden of rearing a family alone was too much for Winton Dean, and James was sent to live with an aunt and uncle. Both of his parents had let him down, he would sometimes say, his mother by dying so young, his father by being cold and distant. Once, when they were both young actors, Dennis Hopper asked Dean where his magic came from. Dean answered that it came from his anger: “Because I hate my mother and father. I wanted to get up onstage ... and I wanted to
show
them. I’ll tell you what made me want to become an actor, what gave me the drive to want to be the best. My mother died when I was almost nine. I used to sneak out of my uncle’s house and go to her grave, and I used to cry and cry on her grave—Mother, why did you leave me? I need you ... I want you.”

In 1949 he finished high school and headed for Hollywood, hoping to become an actor. His initial success was marginal, but gradually he learned to use his charm and looks to get ahead. In effect, he became a sexual hustler on both sides of the lines; he was, at once, both innocent and predatory. He was always ambitious, although his ambitions were a bit ill defined. When he was twenty he went east to study at the Actors Studio. He also tried his hand at
television. His talent, especially his ability to show profound vulnerability, was obvious from the start, but unlike Brando, who was a major force at the Studio, Dean never really committed himself to the workshops and was wary of having his work critiqued by his peers: “If I let them dissect me like a rabbit in a clinical research laboratory or something, I might not be able to produce again. For chrissake, they might sterilize me!” he told a friend at the time. Still, Rod Serling, one of the foremost of the new television playwrights, thought Dean’s move to New York was a critical break for so unusual a talent. Serling’s
A Long Time Till Dawn
was Dean’s first starring vehicle. In 1953 television’s theatrical productions were still experimental. There was no powerful network bureaucracy yet to tell directors and writers what they could not write. It was a rare time, when unexpected talent flourished and was discovered on television—particularly young talent.