Screening Room (9 page)
Authors: Alan Lightman
Among the first to record and produce B.B. King was an out-of-the-box white music man named Sam Phillips. Appearance-wise, Phillips progressed from skinny ties and a clean-cut look in the 1950s to long bushy hair, scraggly beard, and dark glasses in the 1960s. He was what one might call an establishment hippie. He could get down and dirty when the situation warranted it, yet he could also wear a suit and nice shoes. Phillips hung out with black musicians, yet he was part of white society. And he had an ear for new sounds. In January 1950, Phillips opened what would become one of the legendary studios in music history, Sun Studio, located in a rented building on Union Avenue. In addition to B.B. King, Sam Phillips and Sun recorded Howlin’ Wolf, Little Milton, and Rufus Thomas, all black. This sound was called “race music.” People in Nashville had their own music, “country music.” People in Nashville wouldn’t get within a hundred miles of race music.
In 1951, Sun recorded “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats. This tune was considered the beginning of rock and roll. The tools included a couple of electric guitars, one lead and one rhythm, keyboards, a stringed bass, and a drum set.
Rock and roll had a boogie-woogie beat, with a backbeat slyly slipped in by a snare drum. An early devotee of rock and roll was my mother. For most of the 1950s and 1960s, she taught a dance class to teenagers and stayed current with the latest “Memphis sound,” as well as with the older waltzes, tangos, and fox trots. I remember watching her with her students, laughing and swaying as if she were sixteen years old, barefoot and with a ribbon in her hair. If the record player stopped, she would sing the rest of the song.
Sometimes on Saturday mornings, Joel and I would make a pilgrimage to Sun Studio, just to stand outside quietly and pay tribute. White guys and black guys went in and out carrying guitars and saxophones. It was a modest two-story red-brick building with green awnings over the second-floor windows, a semicircle of neon letters spelling “SUN” above the front door, and a painted sign on the side of the building reading “Free Parking in the Rear.” From looking at the building, there was no way to know the tidal waves of music set moving there.
One Saturday morning in the summer of 1953, an eighteen-year-old kid named Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studio with a cheap guitar and sang for Sam Phillips. At the time, Elvis was living with his family in Lauderdale Courts, a federally subsidized housing project in Memphis. Although Sam Phillips needed a year to digest the new sound he’d heard, he was impressed. For some time, he had been looking for a white man who could sing black. Phillips later commented that “
Elvis had sex written all over him from the day he walked in the door.”
In 1954, Phillips decided that Elvis was what he was looking for and recorded Elvis’s first song, “That’s All Right, Mama.”
At the time Elvis first performed for Sam Phillips, he was working as an usher at the Loew’s Palace movie house, a few blocks away from Malco Theater.
Malco Theater, the flagship movie house in M.A. Lightman’s empire, was a grand establishment on the corner of Main Street and Beale. Its interior—with plush carpets, a terrazzo tile floor in the lobby, ornate carved moldings on the ceilings, crystal chandeliers, and sweeping banisters leading up to the gilded balconies—resembled a nineteenth-century German opera house more than an American cinema. The theater proper was an enormous cavern with 2,500 seats and majestic walls rising thirty feet up to the balconies and another twenty to the filigreed ceiling. Standing inside the space felt like lying on your back in the basin of the Grand Canyon. At this time, in the 1950s, a grand Wurlitzer organ played for fifteen minutes between the two films of a double feature. Until the intermission, the organ hid in the orchestra pit near the stage. Then, at the appointed moment, the magnificent instrument, along with the organist, would slowly rise on a platform, illuminated by a spotlight.
During his breaks as an usher at the Palace, Elvis would sometimes wander through the doors of Malco. There, he befriended Paul Schaffer, who worked in Malco’s booking department. Schaffer was a friendly, husky former football player. He also had a mischievous bent. When my grandfather and father played
horror movies at one of their Memphis cinemas, Schaffer would don a Dracula costume and entertain crowds in front of the theater from a flatbed truck. On one occasion, Schaffer scared some of the local residents so badly that they went screaming down the street calling for the archangel St. Michael. On another, a badly frightened woman, not having a wooden stake handy, fired a pistol in Schaffer’s direction. Fortunately, she was a terrible shot, and the bullet only shattered the window of an unoccupied room in the Chisca Hotel.
“Elvis was generous to his friends,” says Lennie. “After he was making money faster than a boll weevil could munch through a cotton bud, he began giving Paul Schaffer a new Cadillac every year for his birthday. Paul would drive up in his sparkling Caddy to the corner of Main and Beale looking shamefaced and offer to take people to lunch. Any year that Paul didn’t adore the color, Elvis would give the car to someone else and buy Paul another one.”
After his success cutting grooves at Sun Studio, Elvis began making movies. His first film was
Love Me Tender
in 1956, followed by
Loving You
and
Jailhouse Rock
. Elvis enjoyed seeing his own movies, but not in public theaters, where he was always mobbed by fans. So he would come to private showings at a mini movie theater, a “screening room,”
built by my grandfather M.A. and attached to his house on Cherry Road. It was there that I met Elvis myself, in 1960. The movie was
G.I. Blues
, one of the films Elvis made while serving in the armed forces.
I remember Elvis walking in with two beautiful young women, one on each arm, and installing himself and his girlfriends on the couch in front. Apparently shy, Elvis hardly said a word for two hours. I was only eleven or twelve years old and not acquainted with the music of Elvis Presley, but I had begun to get wind of the excitement and mystery of the opposite sex, and one guy with two girls made an enormous impression on me.
M.A.’s screening room was a family treasure. Although my grandfather built it in the 1940s to preview new films, and it was indeed used for that purpose, the screening room also became the preferred venue for parties, small musical events, and illicit romantic liaisons. About the size of a large living room, it had a little glass case with chocolate mints and other candies, M.A.’s many bridge trophies on a shelf, and photographs of M.A. with Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and Gary Cooper. For seating, there were twenty plush seats in the back and a small couch in front. The screening room had its own bar, stocked with bourbon, absinthe, and gin; a little refrigerator; and a bathroom with a shower and clean towels. M.A.’s maid Hattie Mae, who cleaned the place, died with a thousand secrets.
The screening room was also the site of my mother’s high-adrenaline dancing lessons. These she taught twice a week, in the afternoons; she would have taught more, except that her students had no more spare time or energy. Under Mother’s tutelage, an entire generation of Memphis teenagers in the fifties and sixties learned the Viennese waltz, the fox trot, the cha-cha, the jitterbug, and various modern dances. The space wasn’t really big enough, but the demand was large, and the young people were willing to bump into each other as they thrashed about in
close quarters. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I attended the dance classes myself, and I have vivid memories of my mother flying about like a beautiful bird—barefoot, gorgeous, and light, yet in complete command. I felt proud, even though I myself was awkward on the dance floor. Mother had far more stamina than any of her students. She could swing, twirl, and shake for three hours or more with an almost demonic energy. In a given session, she would use up a half-dozen male partners, strapping young men who were reduced to panting and slumping in chairs. Mother had an extraordinary metabolism. She burned up a colossal number of calories during the day, then ate all through the night. She slept very little. She once went to a sleep clinic in Maryland to discover the reason for her insomnia. Upon entering the clinic, she announced to the doctors that she slept only three hours per night. The doctors replied that she must be mistaken; even insomniacs slept more than three hours per night. They wired her up with electrodes. After a few days, the MDs told her that yep, she was right, she slept only three hours a night. For the rest of each night, she would pace around the house, make to-do lists for the next day, and eat ravenously to power her high rate of biochemical reactions.
In the late 1950s, Mother began taking classes and performing at KD Dance Studio, an offshoot of the all-black Katherine Dunham Dance Company, which had played Memphis in the mid-1940s. Katherine Dunham was a sultry and immensely talented black choreographer from Chicago. Drawing on her anthropological visits to Haiti, Cuba, and other islands, she combined American jazz and modern dance with Caribbean dance to create performances with titles like
Tropics and le Jazz Hot: From Haiti to Harlem
. KD wanted to do in dance what Elvis and Tom Jones had done in music: imitate the black artists. Although KD was more a workshop than a professional company,
its members had to audition for admission and were all excellent dancers.
As in everything Mother put her mind to, she became obsessed with learning Katherine Dunham’s new steps. But something about these rhythms eluded her. She would come home from KD, sullen and jittery, and lock herself in her bedroom. Soon, we heard strange music and unusual thumping sounds coming through her door. At dinner, she barked at Blanche in the kitchen and harassed my father about his various shortcomings. One evening, she abruptly leaped from the table, put on an absurd headdress of feathers, and began flying about the kitchen. As the music poured out of her record player, she explained that Katherine Dunham wore such outfits, and perhaps they could “put her body in the groove.” My mother had mastered dance steps from all over the world, she inhaled dance steps, and she was determined not to let Miss Dunham defeat her.
The artistic director of KD Dance Studio was an overweight chain smoker named Phil. Phil had to suffer through Mother’s anxieties. He had blown into Memphis one day from Chicago, borrowed money, and leased space in a warehouse on Felix Street with high ceilings and a picture window overlooking the rail yards. At first he was worried about Memphis. He’d heard that people in the South didn’t read anything beyond comic books and carried shotguns in their pickups. But they could sing and dance. After sitting through a hundred auditions, he accepted fifteen dancers into the studio.
Unlike Lennie, Mother cared a great deal about what people thought of her. Consequently, she was mortified when she had to stumble over a new Dunhamesque step in front of the other dancers. She laughed nervously. She frowned. She jittered her legs. She tossed off her wristwatch and leg warmers, thinking they might be throwing her body out of balance. Phil would
shout over to Ursula the pianist to back it up, and, while the other dancers waited, he would go over and over the step with my mother. “I’m sorry, y’all,” she’d whisper, unable to look at her colleagues. “I’ll kill myself if I don’t get this.”