Gary James' Interview With The Founder Of The First And Largest Elvis Presley Fan Club In The United States
Kay Wheeler



To say Kay Wheeler liked Elvis Presley would be an understatement. She loved Elvis Presley! She met Elvis for the first time at the Municipal Auditorium in San Antonio, Texas on April 15th, 1956, and again after his appearance at the Cotton Bowl on October 12th, 1956. Kay would go on to start the first and largest Elvis Presley Fan Club in the United States! So, what was it like to see and meet Elvis Presley in 1956? We asked Kay Wheeler about that and a whole lot more, including her appearance in the films Rock Baby - Rock It and Hot Rod Gang, as well as what she did and continues to do after her Rock 'n' Roll days.

Q - Kay, how did you first hear about Elvis?

A - On radio, Big D Jamboree in Dallas, Texas.

Q - I was surprised to read that Colonel Parker gave you the green light to start and Elvis fan club. He was known to threaten to sue people in order to stop that kind of thing from happening. Did the Colonel make any money off of your fan club?

A - At that time there were no organized fan clubs for Elvis. Parker had just signed Elvis from Bob Neal. Parker's office informed me there were no fan club facilities for Elvis and that I could do anything I wanted in regard to a fan club for Elvis.

Q - And speaking of Colonel Parker, you didn't like him, did you? What didn't you like about him?

A - Gary, if we look at Parker's history, it turns out that nobody really "liked" Colonel Parker. They tolerated Colonel Parker. Gladys Presley (Elvis' mother) didn't like him. His fans didn't like him. Underneath it all, Elvis probably didn't like him, albeit he felt the Colonel gave him a big national push when he got him the network television on the Dorsey brothers' show in 1956. So I think Parker was a hustler and he was a go-getter and he was a talker and I think he just talked himself into Elvis' life. But I don't think his mother bought it.

Q - Elvis was also a very loyal person. He stuck with the Colonel and William Morris for his whole career. When I interviewed Larry Geller (Elvis' hair stylist), he told me Elvis had made plans to change his life. He was going to pursue a serious acting career.

A - That was his goal, but as I look back on it, wanting that actor concept kind of kept him away from the Rock 'n' Roll and I think that was really his groove. It was like a singer that wants to be a drummer or a drummer that wants to be a singer. You need to get in your flow and do what your natural thing is, and I think clearly the Rock 'n' Roll and singing and the audience participation with Elvis was the forever love affair of his life. To me, I think that the movies, wanting to be James Dean for example, was I think, at the end of the day kind of a distraction. I think it caused him some frustration and hurt that he was never able to reach those goals in film. And of course again, James Dean couldn't sing a note. So James Dean didn't try to be Elvis, right? I think it probably wasn't the wisest thing, but when we're young we don't always do the wisent thing, do we? Elvis loved James Dean and Marlon Brando, and of course these were incredible actors who had the Actor Studios training. Really, that was their thing. It's like Eric Clapton or Scotty Moore. Guitar was their thing. It was for Scotty, still is for Eric Clapton. I think it's important to find your groove and stay in it. That's just my take on it, looking back on all of it. Of course I'm glad we have some Elvis movies. It's always good to see Elvis anywhere, alive, being cute and doing his thing. When the music came in with The Beatles and the U.K. revolution, Elvis was kind of left behind there for awhile. I've heard it myself from the Hippie set, "Well, Elvis is old hat. We have The Beatles, Led Zeppelin." All of those cool guys. "He's kind of yesterday." I think if he had not gotten so involved in making those kooky movies, some of 'em were good. Jailhouse Rock was good. King Creole was good. Even Live Me Tender was good. But most of 'em had the same theme and they just made Elvis get up and rock-a-hula and sing these second rate songs just to get a soundtrack! (laughs)

Q - Couldn't Elvis just walked away from it all?

A - Well, he was listening to Parker. He was listening to money. At the same time, underneath Elvis as far as I'm concerned, I think he was a bit insecure. We're talking poverty, upbringing. We're talking extreme poverty. We're not talking a little bit. They really went through it. Born in a house like that. Barely seeing a doctor. Vernon had to resort to writing bad checks to feed the family. I mean, that is poverty to a level that not everybody has to deal with. Remember, he always had those memories etched in his mind even though he got plenty of money and the rest of it, there's always that perception of how you grew up that stays with you. I think he had that and always thought it was going to go away. He just went along with the show, so to speak.

Q - You first met Elvis backstage at the Municipal Auditorium in San Antonio on April 15th, 1956. What was that first meeting like? It's one thing to see him onstage. It's another thing to see him offstage. Or, to quote Elvis himself at his Madison Square Garden press conference in 1972, "The image is one thing, and the human being is another. It's very hard to live up to an image."

A - He lived up to it big time for me! Plus tax!

Q - While you were not Elvis' girlfriend, did you ever go out on a date with Elvis?

A - Yeah, in Shreveport, December 15th, 1956. I was his date for that night. For awhile I stayed at the hotel and then just decided I'd scoot out of there as fast as I could at some point. From Day One I saw Elvis and the girl thing was just something out of another world. Him being that good looking really set me back because I thought Oh, my! He's got to be something we haven't seen. Nobody's seen anything this cute since Alexander The Great maybe, or statues of Apollo. I understood he was going to be something for the girls, as many as possible, and I saw right away that every girl loved Elvis in the '50s, most every girl. I adored him and just knew not to go there. I was not a one night stand type of girl. Ever. And so, I didn't want to go down that route. At the end of the day I had a more lasting relationship with him because an ex-girlfriend just becomes an ex-girlfriend with a story. I'm glad that I had a historical association as part of his career. I had no feelings of he did me wrong. (laughs) I don't want any of that. So, this means that I don't think there are any memories stuck together in my pages. I just made the choice that I wasn't going down that road.

Q - You're referring to the time you saw him at The Louisiana Hayride in 1956?

A - Right.

Q - And you went to see him after the show at his hotel room and something happened that made you uncomfortable, right?

A - This goes to real personal stuff that you really can't put into words everything that happened. One of his guys, Cliff Gleaves, that hung around him back in those days, and he came over to me and said, "Elvis wants you to meet him at the hotel after the show and I'm going to take you up there." So, he showed me where it was and put me into a room by myself. There was nobody there. (laughs) I felt like, oh, I'm a call girl. (laughs) It was not a good feeling for me 'cause that was not my persona at all. There was a giant bed in there. It was a real nice bed and I'm thinking whatever is getting ready to happen is not going to happen.

Q - He was looking for more than what you were willing to give.

A - Oh, yeah. I think he hit on all the girls. He was something for the girls. There was nothing wrong with Elvis. Then I left that hotel room. I was walking out and saw some of the guys outside of the room and so I knew that Elvis must be in there. So, I walked in there and they were all there. It was all the guys. He had his green coat that was soaking wet after the concert, over a chair. He was sitting on a bed. Everybody was just laughing at his jokes. He was just acting crazy. I stayed in there with him and the guys for probably half an hour. They ordered food. Sandwiches. I got up and put on his green coat. I was more into Elvis the performer, the musician, even though he was awfully cute, don't get me wrong. I guess you could say I represented fandom. I wanted to put on the green coat. (laughs) Sweaty or not. And I was in this gorgeous dress and he looked at me and smiled as I was walking around in the coat. He got a kick out of me wanting to put on that coat. I'm glad I did that. Probably not every girl put on his coat, especially after a concert, wet with sweat. So they said, "Elvis, what do want on your sandwich?" He listed mustard, mayonnaise, lettuce and tomatoes and then he said said a naughty word he wanted on there and I gave him a look and he gave me a look to see what I was going to think about that. But I thought it was crude. I didn't like it. He looked at me and he knew I didn't (like it).

Q - I guess you'll tell that story in a book someday.

A - I had a book that was published in the Netherlands called Growing Up With The Memphis Flash. It was just a small, tiny, little printing of about 5,000 copies. The guy didn't want to reprint it again. So, okay. It's been done and you can get it on E-bay for a hundred bucks a piece or a hundred fifty, if you can find one. But it was a pretty detailed story. It was done with an English author, Alan Harbinson, who wrote The Illustrated Elvis. Before he died it was in the New York Times Bestsellers list. It was done with a real top grade writer. It's a really great little book.

Q - You met Elvis, Gene Vincent and most likely many of the other recording stars of the day. Then you became bored with Hollywood? Or was is showbiz? What didn't you like?

A - Well, the Hollywood thing was so superficial. I was the kind of a person that was a rebel. In my own right I would say I was a Rock 'n' Roll rebel. I was on the Rock 'n' Roll wave. I thought that Hollywood didn't have the feeling of Rock 'n' Roll like the South did. The West Coast did not get the Memphis and Texas and Louisiana that the original Rock 'n' Roll started with. Rock 'n' Roll started more in the South than it did on the West Coast. Most music things go from the West to the rest of the world. But Rock 'n' Roll's roots were in the South. And so, when I got to Hollywood, I'd already made the movie Rock Baby - Rock It in Dallas. I was writing for Dig magazine. A lot of these screen magazines wanted me to write articles. I already had a foot into Hollywood a little bit. The owners of Dig magazine were founding a movie company called American International that was going to make teen exploitation movies. They had seen the Rock Baby - Rock It movie. It was the second Rock 'n' Roll movie ever made and the first Rock-a-billy movie. They gave me a movie contract before I ever came out to Hollywood. I already had that in my hand. I almost didn't go, but I got out there and it wasn't as cool as Elvis was, and what we were doing as teenagers. I was only 17. I just felt like it was very superficial and phony baloney. Then when I went to the press premier of Jailhouse Rock with Elvis, he looked so like a little boy lost in the crowd. He wasn't having the fun that he was having on the Texas tours. I had been with him in Dallas, San Antonio and Fort Worth. He just seemed like he was disillusioned. There was a disillusioned look on his face, like a little boy lost in the crowd. I thought, Wow! If he's not happy with all this, and look at everything he's got, this must not necessarily be the route. I started questioning the whole kit and caboodle. I've always been a thinker like that, ever since I was a young person. I was always looking around for what's real and what's happening. What's it all about Alfie?

Q - So, when Elvis went to Hollywood, he had changed. How had he changed? He did want to be in the movies, didn't he? He was an usher in a movie theatre as a teenager and had ambitions of being on the silver screen. But you're saying he was unhappy with with the films he was making and didn't feel like he fit into that crowd?

A - I felt like he didn't fit into the Hollywood crowd. I would say that's understandable, given that he was from Memphis and Tupelo, Mississippi. A Southern boy, and into deep Rock 'n' Roll. He was into the Black Rock 'n' Roll. That's where he got a lot of his music. He loved that. So, being out there with all that commercialism and the pressure, Parker and the phony baloney that is so prevalent in the entertainment world, not everybody. But generally speaking I think there's a certain amount of facade about the Hollywood situation. I have a heart for Hollywood and a heart for artists and actors. But there is a certain superficiality about it. I think that's probably fair to say. I don't think it really suited Elvis. He was a down home guy. It's probably one of the reasons he wanted all the guys from down home around him, most of 'em, because it gave him a sense of stability. That's just my guess. I don't know.

Q - Because you saw the phoniness in Hollywood, is that why you started a ministry and started writing books?

A - This the best part. That was the world changer for me. That was the warp speed to another orbit. You don't go from Rock Baby - Rock It to Sister Sara, (laughs) without an explanation.

Q - Something shook you up!

A - By the time I was 19 I had seen Hollywood, made a couple of movies. This is all on a microscopic scale, but nevertheless I experienced the publicity, doing this and doing that, people thinking you were special because you did a movie. I saw the superficiality of it and I married. I met a guy out there in Hollywood. He looked like Rudolph Valentino. I thought this guy, not a big, famous person, I'll take Valentino. (laughs) We went off to Mexico and got married. I was married at 18. So, we were out in Hollywood. It just seemed like that was not the world I wanted. I felt like there was not a lot that was appealing to me and I also got a little bit of everybody can know who you are or certain groups can know who you are, but when you go home you're just yourself and people around you are maybe not all that real and have a perception of you. Again, we get back to Elvis saying "There's an artist and then there's a human being." The artist is out there onstage, engaging in a real fun way, but when all those lights go out and everything is silent, there's the human being and I think that's why they don't have anything to hold onto. Nothing really matches what goes on on the stage. Nobody can compete with what happened with Elvis and his fans. Forget about that. I had a chance at a very young age to observe things that maybe people never get to see or experience. I really felt myself, I'm not really having that much fun. (laughs) So what? It was easy for me. Of course the marriage didn't last but a couple of years. So, I came back to Dallas and I had a son about two years into the marriage. He's a great blessing to me beyond belief. I decided, well, I can't just be Rock 'n' Roll hoochie koo. Who am I really? You're 18, 19. What do you do for an encore after all that? I just thought I should get serious about things and so I took my SAT test at S.M.U. (Southern Methodist University), which is a really good, top-rated school. And I go to college. So now I'm gonna be smart. Let me try being smart. (laughs) See who I really am here. I really was a searcher, looking for truth. Studying philosophies. All kinds of stuff. I even got involved in political things there in Dallas. We were going through the '60s and the Civil Rights thing and Martin Luther King. I got really involved in all of that. I got involved politically. I was just kind of, "What's real?" I was there the day Kennedy got shot in Dallas. I just saw him pass. It was early on in the motorcade, not where he actually got shot. I'd just gotten back to my office. The speech that he was going to give that day had a Scripture at the end of it. It said, "Unless the Lord keep the city, watchmen waketh in vain." And I had this notion that I wanted to be a political speech writer. That was kind of the take on it I had. I was doing a little bit of speech writing for the mayor candidate. Nothing big. But I thought, Hey! I'm going to get a Bible, 'cause I need to need to get these quotes. I want to find some quotes I can use in speeches like that speech. So that really pushed me. That's the first time I really seriously opened the Bible to try and read it. But I was looking at the social issues. Everything was going on in the '60s. I felt bad for people who live in poverty. Those things bother me. I was looking to more than just Rock 'n' Roll. I knew Rock 'n' Roll could not save the soul and it didn't save the soul of Elvis. So, I just opened the book. I thought I would pull some things out of this and make some notes. I had everything going. I had all these reference books. When I came to the part on King Solomon, he said, "I had me big houses, servants, and I had gold and it was all vanity and vexation of spirit." I said, "Yeah, that guy's got it right.!" (laughs) This was something I was not getting in other books. I wasn't seeing that in philosophies. I wasn't seeing it in Bartlett's Famous Quotations. I thought this guy, whoever he is, got it. Because I saw, even with Elvis in Hollywood, it looked like to me he had the fame. He had the money. He had all the recognition and there was kind of a vexation with it. It parallels that in my mind. I though yeah, I saw that with Elvis. I thought what else is in here? There might be something else in here. So, I decided to read the New Testament. That was the Old Testament. So, I started reading about Jesus. If you have two coats and your neighbor has none, give one to him. Love is better than hate. Forgiveness is better than bitterness. I'm thinking, Wow! He says all the right words for me based on everything I have looked at in society and seen all the inequalities, the rich and the poor, the good and the bad, and I'm thinking this guy has something going. And I read some more. I felt like I was really communicating through just books and reading through the book itself. I said, "If this is true, I'm going with this." (laughs) I'm going on this train and getting on the truth train." I'm thinking, who do I know that's a Christian? I hadn't put my foot in a church for a hundred years. So, I made a big change. I decided if I really want to change the world I'm going to go to the world changer, somebody that really made an impact. I just decided I was going to start studying the Bible and that's how it started. It totally changed me as a person. So I'm the most unlikely church lady you'll ever meet. (laughs)

Q - As a kid you would have something called Bop parties, where you'd invite your friends over and play the records of the day. I've never heard that term, Bop parties before. Tell me about it.

A - I would say Rock 'n' Roll started in the South more than the East or West Coast. When we started listening to Hank Ballard And The Midnighters, The Clovers, Big Joe Turner and Fats Domino, before we ever heard of Elvis, there was already an underground Rock 'n' Roll movement among White kids in the suburbs that nobody talked about that much. They thought it was just Elvis. We were already dancing the Bop and having parties, which is kind of a dance that is not as extreme as I did in Rock Baby - Rock It and Hot Rod Gang, but more like Hot Rod Gang. One of my dreams is to make a film, a couple of people are talking to me about it; I'd like to see the real dances from the original Rock 'n' Roll just because we like it. I want it just like it was. We don't have to embellish it. We've never really seen it. In Grease it was shown with dresses on. That really wasn't what the Bop was, not the real, down home, Southern roots of Rock 'n' Roll, and what the White teens were doing to the Black music, the Black, Rhythm And Blues and Rock 'n' Roll. We had to go buy our records down at the record store in the Black areas of downtown Dallas 'cause we couldn't get the records. And we would listen to the Black radio stations. And that's how I happened to flip the switch and hear Elvis. It was an exciting dance style and Elvis used a lot of it in his dancing and his performances and it was a real part of it. The dance was a real part of Rock 'n' Roll.

Q - You were in the movie Hot Rod Gang with Gene Vincent. What was Gene Vincent like?

A - He was the nicest guy. I think he had a serious crush on me 'cause he'd come down to my house in Dallas. He'd drive down from Virginia, him and The Blue Caps. Dickie Harrel, the drummer, is still alive and he's my Facebook friend. We still talk about it. We'd have Bop parties with Gene Vincent. How cool is that? Young people are so superficial. We look at the outside. Gene Vincent was not your hunky Elvis, Apollo, God-like guy. He always had the spindly legs. He was real thin. He just didn't have the movie star image, kind of like Roy Orbison. He had a fabulous voice though. Gene Vincent had a voice that was right up with Orbison as far as I'm concerned. As far as putting on a live show, Gene Vincent And The Blue Caps blew you away. I mean, they blew me away. They played at The Big D Jamboree where Elvis played earlier on in his career. You would sit there and say, "I don't believe I'm hearing this." Stray Cats picked up a lot of Gene Vincent's music and they captured some of it. It's really groovy. It's crazy good, but nothing was as exciting as a Gene Vincent concert. Maybe not even Elvis. So, I think I had a little love triangle going on with Gene Vincent, who I really wouldn't give that much attention to , and Elvis who I always had the connection to. And of course I had other boyfriends at school.

Q - Did your parents know you were seeing Elvis?

A - Of course. You don't get on a bus by yourself, a Greyhound bus, and go 200-plus miles to see Elvis without your parents. I'm the oldest child of four and I was always in charge of everything, watching kids. I was always trustworthy if you want to say that. My parents always trusted me a hundred per cent. I lived in San Antonio most of my growing up time and I had a good friend there that I could stay with, her and her parents, when I went to San Antonio. So that was all cool. My mother knew them. Everything was done with my Mom's consent. My Dad kind of traveled a lot. But at the same time he trusted me a hundred percent too. So, they let me do things. And my mother was cool.

Q - She liked Elvis too did she?

A - She did. She painted the first oil portrait of him and it hangs in Graceland today. We presented it to him at The Cotton Bowl Dallas press conference. And she met him. It was sweet. I got a real good picture of the two of them together. It was good. It was all working. It was like all the stars lined up really if you want to look at it. Even for Mother. It was just like I stepped out on a surfboard of Rock 'n' Roll and rode the wave. It was easy peasy. (laughs)

Q - Did you ever go to Graceland when Elvis was alive?

A - No. I went to the first house Elvis bought at 1034 Audubon Drive. It was like a long, ranch house in Memphis. I had two thirds of a day with Gladys Presley, which is wow! At the time I didn't really think that much about it. I was really mad that Elvis was on tour. But that would have ruined everything because I had a really great time with Gladys. She showed me through the whole house. I picked up all his Gold Records. They were laying on the floor. I picked 'em up. This was in November of 1956. I'm from Texas, so we were like two Southern gals. (laughs) At that point, before I left, she did mention something they were saying about Elvis, about the drugs, and that was in November of 1956. She had a worried look on her face. She wasn't sure about all of it. I didn't get this was the best thing that ever happened to her son. I felt she was worried about something and being a protective mother and having lost the other child, you don't get over that.

Q - What drugs might Elvis have been taking at the time that made his mother so worried?

A - She said, "It's not true." I just looked at her and said, "Don't worry." She wanted my feedback after that.

Q - Elvis never did hard drugs if what was what his mother was worried about.

A - Elvis never did hard drugs. He did prescription drugs. Diet pills. Dexedrines. Benzedrines that were prescribed.. He never did cocaine or heroin or any hard drugs. He had his own doctor, Dr. Nick, that wrote him out all these prescriptions. But even in 1956 he was taking his mother's diet pills, dexedrines, which were energy. Speed.

Q - To keep going with that hectic schedule.

A - Yeah.

Q - Do you believe that Elvis might have faked his death?

A - You can look at that last concert and you wonder how he made it on the stage, why he's not dead. Those last pictures of him; obviously he was very ill. He was not fit. He was overweight. He looked exhausted. You just have to wonder how he lasted as long as he did. I don't think Elvis would pull a shenanigan like that. I don't think that's his M.O. That's not his Modus Operandi. He's like a real, true blue kind of guy. I don't think he'd do that to his daughter or anybody that he was around. I don't think that would be Elvis. Somehow people are fascinated with that. It's the craziest thing I've ever heard. Obviously he would be very old. I don't think his health would generate long life just looking at him in the last concerts, and how tired and overweight he was. It was s miracle he lasted through the night as far as I'm concerned. That's just my take on it. As time goes on, you kind of become some of the last people standing on the field who knew Elvis. But I liked the fact that you wanted to know about the change in me. Nobody ever asks me about that. They don't want to talk about it. I felt there was a little more substance to what you were asking than the normal questions and I appreciate that Gary. Thanks for letting me share it.

Q - I always do my research. I want the reader to come away with what the person I'm interviewing is all about.

A - I think you did a good job. I like your questions.

Official Website: www.KayWheeler.com

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