Frank Sinatra Called Elvis’s Music “Degenerate” — Then Paid Him $125,000 to Sing With Him D

Saturday, March 26th, 1960. The grand ballroom of the Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami Beach, Florida. Frank Sinatra had spent nearly 3 years telling any reporter who would print it that Elvis Presley’s music was degenerate. Elvis had spent two of those years driving a Jeep for the Third Armored Division in Friedberg, Germany.

And Colonel Tom Parker, who was taking money from one side of that argument and about to take a great deal more from the other, had already decided how the night would end before either singer walked into the building. Nobody who was in that ballroom remembers the tuxedos. Nobody remembers the chandeliers or the cameras or the $800,000 worth of television equipment they trucked down Collins Avenue to make 6 minutes of film.

They remember a sound. Frank Sinatra wore a pinky ring. And when he wanted the room to stop talking, he did not raise his voice. He tapped that ring twice against the chrome of a microphone stand. Two small clicks. 400 people heard it and went silent like somebody had shut a door on them. My name is Raymond Teague.

In March of 1960, I was 34 years old and I copied music by hand for the orchestras that came through Miami Beach. I worked out of a back office behind the Fontainebleau’s banquet kitchen. A room with one window and one desk. And I had been copying parts for Frank Sinatra’s arrangers on and off for 6 years.

I knew the man’s tempos. I knew what he crossed out. I thought I knew every mood he had. I was wrong. A copyist is not an artist. A copyist is a man with a bottle of India ink and a ruling pen who takes what the arranger writes and turns it into 24 separate pages so that 24 separate musicians can each read their own part without squinting.

You sit at the edge of the room. You are furniture that can spell. And because you are furniture people forget you are there and they say things in front of you they would never say into a microphone. Here is what that room held. 400 invited guests seated at round tables with white cloths, ashtrays already full by 7:00.

A 24-piece orchestra on a riser. Six television cameras on rolling pedestals hot enough that the men pushing them had towels around their necks. Outside on Collins Avenue behind wooden police barricades 1,200 people who did not have tickets and were not leaving. And a contract that paid Elvis Presley $125,000 for one appearance.

That was the largest sum anybody had ever paid a single guest to walk onto a television stage. For that money he sang two songs and part of a third. Six minutes. I heard the number on Wednesday afternoon and I heard it from a trombone player named Ellis Dunmore who had a copy of a trade paper folded in his back pocket and no discretion at all.

125,000 Ellis said loud to the whole brass section. For a boy Frank called degenerate in print Nelson Riddle was standing 8 ft away with a pencil behind his ear. Put it away. Riddle said. Ellis did not put it away. He read it out loud instead the 1957 piece the one everybody in the business could quote by then.

Sinatra had written that rock and roll was a brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression. And that it was sung and played and written for the most part by cretinous goons. Ellis got as far as cretinous goons before Riddle took the paper out of his hand. Nobody laughed.

The fan in the corner of the ballroom was the only thing making noise. I want you to understand what a strange piece of business this was because if you were alive in 1960, you already know how the country was split down the middle on this exact question. There were houses where the radio played Sinatra and houses where the radio played Elvis.

And in a lot of houses, the argument between those two stations was really an argument between a father and his daughter. And now the man who wrote cretinous goons was paying the goon $125,000 to stand next to him. Colonel Tom Parker came through the ballroom Thursday morning in a wrinkled white shirt with a cigar he never lit.

He was born Andreas Cornelius van Kuijk in Breda, Holland. Though it would be years before I learned that. And he moved through a room like a man taking inventory of it. He counted the tables. He counted the cameras. He asked a stage hand how many seats were being held for press. And when the boy said 40, Parker said make it 60 and walked off before anybody could argue.

Riddle watched him go and said quietly, “That man has never heard a note of music in his life.” Thursday afternoon was the first full rehearsal and Elvis was not there. He was still in Nashville. Six days earlier, on the 20th and 21st of March, he had been in RCA Studio B cutting Stuck on You and Fame and Fortune.

His first session since the army let him go and the word coming down the wire was that he had worked until 4:00 in the morning both nights and slept on a couch in the control room. He had been a civilian for 3 weeks, discharged March 5th, 1960, serial number 53310761. Sinatra ran the rehearsal without him.

He was in gray slacks and a cardigan and he was, I have to say it plainly, in a foul humor. He stopped the orchestra four times in the first number. He did not shout. He got quieter, which everybody who worked for him understood was worse. Then, around 3:00, he did something nobody expected. He put his coffee down on the edge of the riser, turned to Riddle, and said, “What if we swap?” Riddle said, “Swap what, Frank? The songs?” Sinatra said, “He sings mine. I sing his.

” There was a pause you could have parked a car in. Riddle said, “You want to sing Love Me Tender?” “I want to sing Love Me Tender,” Sinatra said. “And I want him to sing Witchcraft and I want it built as one number so nobody can cut it in the edit.” Then, he looked over at the corner where I was sitting with my ink and my straight edge and he said, “Where’s the pen man?” That is how I got the only assignment of my life that I am still telling about 60 some years later.

He wanted Witchcraft transposed for Elvis and Love Me Tender transposed for himself and he wanted the two of them stitched together with an eight-bar modulation in the middle so they could trade lines. Riddle would write it. I would copy it. 24 parts plus two vocal sheets plus a conductor’s score. And I said the only intelligent thing I said that whole week.

Mr. Riddle, what key does Presley sing Witchcraft in? Riddle took the pencil out from behind his ear, looked at it, and put it back. “Nobody knows.” He said. “He’s never sung it. So, we could not write the thing until Elvis stood in that room and opened his mouth.” 24 parts one night, and I could not put ink on paper until Friday.

He came in Friday at 11:00 in the morning through the loading entrance by the kitchen, which is how I happened to be 12 ft from him because the loading entrance was next to my office door. He was 6 ft tall and thinner than his pictures. The army had taken weight off him. His hair was black, dyed.

Everybody knew it was dyed. He had been born light brown, and it was cut shorter than the fans were going to like. He was wearing a tuxedo at 11:00 in the morning because Parker had told him to arrive in it, and he looked faintly embarrassed about that. The way a man looks in a good suit at the wrong hour. He shook hands with the two men pushing a camera pedestal before he shook hands with anybody who mattered.

Sinatra came down off the riser. Everything in that ballroom stopped, and I mean the coffee cup stopped, and the two of them stood in the middle of the floor about 4 ft apart. Sinatra put his hand out and said, “Welcome home, kid.” And Elvis said, “Thank you, sir. It’s an honor.” That was it. That was the whole thing.

Three years of newspaper columns and two sentences settled it in front of 40 people, except it did not settle it. Not for me, and not for the band. Because you could feel the question still sitting in the room like a piece of furniture nobody wanted to move. Somebody was going to have to say the word out loud.

Nancy Sinatra was 19 years old and she got to it first. Though not the way I expected. She came across the floor with a flat white box and handed it to Elvis and said her father wanted him to have it. He opened it. Two dress shirts, French cuffs still in the tissue. “Ma’am,” he said, “you didn’t have to do that.

” “I didn’t,” she said, “he did.” Sammy Davis Jr. was standing by the piano and he said, “Son, in this outfit that’s a peace treaty, you just don’t sign anything.” That got the first real laugh of the week and it broke something loose in the room and for about 20 minutes it was just musicians and singers standing around a piano the way musicians and singers have always stood around a piano.

Then Riddle got to work and I got my key. They put Elvis at the piano microphone and Riddle played the first eight bars of Witchcraft in Sinatra’s key and Elvis sang along under his breath and shook his head. “Too high for me, sir.” Riddle dropped it a whole step. Elvis sang it again, still quiet, and shook his head again.

“One more.” Riddle dropped it again and on that third try Elvis let it out at full voice for four bars and I stopped writing and the two trumpet players who had been talking stopped talking. It did not sound like Sinatra. It sounded like a young man in Mississippi who had learned to phrase in church.

Elvis was born January 8th, 1935 in a two-room shotgun house in Tupelo. And there was a piece of that house in the way he came off the end of a line, and it did not belong in witchcraft at all. And that was exactly what made it work. Riddle wrote the key on the top of the page. B flat.

I had my ink open before he finished writing it. Now, here is the part I have never seen printed anywhere, and it is the reason I am telling you this at all. Around 4:00 that afternoon, there was a break, and Elvis came into my office. Not sent. He just came in, ducked his head under the doorframe, and stood there looking at the parts spread across my desk.

40-some pages of hand-ruled staves drying under the window. “You do all that by hand?” he said. “Every note.” He picked up the second alto part and held it the way you hold something that belongs to somebody else. “I can’t read a lick of this,” he said. “Never could. I hear it once, and I’ve got it, but I can’t read it.

” I told him that made him even with about half the men on that riser, which was a lie, but it was a kind one. He set the page down. And then he said something to me in a very level voice that I have carried around ever since. “I’ve never gotten over what they call stage fright.” 32,000 people had screamed at that man.

He had been on Ed Sullivan three times. 60 million people watching the first one. And here he was in a back office behind a hotel kitchen telling the copyist that he was scared. I asked him what he was scared of, exactly. It was not my place. He said, “16 months ago, I buried my mother.

She never got to see any of this part. Gladys Love Smith Presley died August 14th, 1958. He was 23 years old and they had to hold him up at the funeral. I did not know what to say to that, so I did not say anything, which I believe was correct. Then he tapped the edge of my desk twice with two fingers and said, “You ever eat a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich?” I said I had not.

“Then you ain’t been to Memphis.” He said and he went back out to the ballroom. Friday evening, the wheels came off. They ran the medley for the first time with both men on their feet and it fell apart in the modulation. Elvis came in a beat early. They reset. He came in early again. Third time, Sinatra stopped the band himself, one hand up.

And the room got very quiet. Parker was standing by the press tables with his cigar and he started to walk out onto the floor and Sinatra pointed at him without looking at him and said, “No.” Parker stopped. Sinatra walked over to Elvis and put his hand flat on the boy’s shoulder and said something that only about four people heard and I was one of them because I was crouched at the end of the riser collecting parts.

He said, “You’re counting. Don’t count. I’ll bring you in. Watch my hand and I will never leave you out there alone.” Elvis said, “Yes, sir.” They ran it again. It was clean. And then Sinatra did one more thing and this is the thing that changed my opinion of the man permanently. He turned around to the whole orchestra and said, loud enough for the press tables to hear it, “Anybody in this room who thinks this kid can’t sing can pick up his check at the door.

I worked until 10:00 past 3:00 in the morning finishing the parts. 24 of them plus the score. Plus two vocal sheets I ruled myself. My right hand cramped so badly around 2:00 that I had to run it under hot water in the banquet kitchen sink. When I came back to the desk, I noticed somebody had left a pot of coffee outside my door and a folded paper napkin on top of it.

Nobody ever told me who sent it up. I have a guess. Saturday. The day of the taping. If you have ever been in a Florida ballroom in late March with 6,000 watts of lighting and no working ventilation, you know what 400 people in evening clothes smell like by the third hour. Perfume, cigarette smoke, hair oil, and the sharp hot dust smell that stage lights make when they burn the polish off the floorboards.

Outside, the 1,200 had become something closer to 3,000. And the Miami Beach police had put two mounted officers at the corner. Elvis opened with Fame and Fortune and then Stuck on You. And the 400 invited guests, who were, remember, mostly adults, mostly people who had come to see Sinatra, came apart at the seams.

Grown women at those white tablecloths screamed until the boom operator winced. A man at table nine stood on his chair. And I watched Frank Sinatra in the wings watch that happen. He was not angry. That is the part I want to get right. He had his arms folded and his chin down and he was watching the audience, not the singer, the way a general watches weather.

Then came the medley. Sinatra walked out. Two clicks of that ring against the microphone stand. 400 people stopped like a switch had been thrown because whatever else was true in America in 1960, when that man wanted quiet, he got quiet. They stood shoulder to shoulder. Riddle raised his hands and Elvis Presley, 25 years old, 3 weeks out of the army in a tuxedo saying Witchcraft in B flat off a chart the ink was barely dry on.

He sang it straight. No hips, no curl of the lip, nothing thrown away. He sang it like a man who had decided that the only possible answer to being called degenerate in print was to be excellent in person. Then the modulation. Eight bars. Sinatra’s hand came up exactly like he promised and Elvis came in dead on it.

And Frank Sinatra opened his mouth and sang Love Me Tender. I have thought about those next 40 seconds for a very long time. He sang the boy’s song with total respect for about half a chorus and then on the turnaround, he rolled his shoulders. Once, a little shrug of a thing, an old man’s imitation of a young man’s move and he did it with his eyebrow up.

The ballroom detonated. They traded lines after that back and forth and both of them were laughing by the end and trying not to let the cameras see it. Elvis snapped his fingers on the two and the four like a lounge singer. Sinatra pushed his shoulder into him coming off the last note. 400 people were on their feet and the sound in that room was not the sound of a crowd liking a song.

It was the sound of a whole argument ending. If you have ever sat in a room where two sides of something finally shook hands, you know it does not feel like victory for anybody. It feels like relief. They got it in one take. Afterward, while the crew was resetting, the two of them stood down at the end of the riser about 6 ft from where I was boxing up my parts, and Sinatra said something to him that I heard clearly and that has never appeared in any account of that night.

He said, “I said some things in the papers.” Elvis said, “Yes, sir, you did.” And Sinatra said, “I was talking about the noise. I hadn’t heard you.” Elvis looked at the floor for a second, and then he said, “My mama used to say you can’t hear a man over your own opinion of him.” Sinatra laughed.

Then he put out his hand, and this time it was not for the cameras, because the cameras were pointed at the floor and the operators were drinking Coca-Cola. The special aired May 12th, 1960, and something over 40 million people watched it. Better than four out of every 10 television sets in the United States that were switched on that night were switched to that ballroom.

Colonel Parker told a reporter the following week that he had known all along it would be the biggest night of the year, which was true in the sense that he had priced it that way. Elvis sang for 6 minutes and was paid $125,000, and Parker took his percentage of it, and the percentage went up in the years after.

Here is what it cost, and nobody talks about this part. That was very nearly the end of Elvis Presley standing in front of a live audience. He did one benefit in Honolulu the following March, and then Hollywood took him, and he did not walk out in front of a paying crowd again for 7 years. 27 pictures.

He said later that he lost his musical direction in Hollywood, and he said it about himself without being asked. So, the boy in the tuxedo in that ballroom who could not read a line of music and told a copyist he had never gotten over stage fright, that was one of the last times for a long while that anybody got to see what he actually was in a room with people in it.

Now, in the interest of being straight with you, there is a piece of this I never learned, and it has bothered me my whole life. I do not know whether Frank Sinatra ever said the words sorry. I know what I heard at the end of that riser, and I have given it to you exactly as I heard it. But I hadn’t heard you is not an apology, and both of those men knew it.

I also never found out who left the coffee outside my office door at 2:00 in the morning, and I never learned what Elvis said to Nancy Sinatra when he thanked her for the shirts because they were standing too far away, and she was smiling, and I have wondered about it for 60 years. This is a dramatized fictional story inspired by Elvis Presley’s life and career.

Events and dialogue depicted here have been fictionalized for storytelling and entertainment purposes. I kept one thing from that week. When I boxed up the parts, the conductor’s score went back to Riddle’s office, and the 24 orchestra parts went into the Fontainebleau’s music library, but the two vocal sheets, the ones I ruled by hand at 2:00 in the morning with a cramped right hand, nobody ever asked for.

They were useless. Neither man read them. Elvis could not, and Sinatra did not need to. They are in a flat cardboard box in my closet. B flat in my handwriting with a coffee ring on the corner. I have copied music for 41 years and I have sat in the corner of a great many rooms. I have never once before or since watched two men take a public fight and settle it in 3 minutes without either one of them losing anything.

I did not think it could be done. I still get a feeling in my chest about it. So, I want to know what you make of the one choice at the center of it. Not the whole night. That one decision. Sinatra swapping the songs. Was that a man making peace? Or a man protecting himself in front of 40 million people? Or is it possible that it was both at the same time and he never bothered to sort out which? Tell me what you think.

I read every comment that comes in. And if you lived through 1960, if you were one of the ones sitting on the floor in front of the set on May the 12th or one of the parents in the kitchen pretending not to listen, then you already know what that broadcast settled in your own house. There are more of these stories.

The small ones from the corners of rooms and I am telling them one at a time. Stay with me and I will tell you the next one.