Why Elvis Never Watched Jailhouse Rock Again — His Secret Vow D

There’s one page in this old diary, I always turn past too fast because I don’t like sitting with it. But tonight, you asked. So, we’re staying right here. July of 1957. The summer he buried a promise and kept it for the rest of his life. His handwriting gets small on this page, like he was trying not to be heard writing it.

So, I’ll step aside now and let him say it in his own words. July the 6th, 1957. Memphis. Late. I’ve started this page four times already and torn out three of them because my hand won’t hold steady long enough to make the letters straight. I keep hearing a telephone ring in my head over and over even though it already rang.

Even though I already know what the voice on the other end said. I keep thinking if I don’t write it down, maybe it stays a rumor. Maybe it stays something somebody got wrong. But I know better. I’ve known better since the moment I picked up that phone and heard the Colonel’s man say her name and then go quiet. The kind of quiet that tells you everything before another word gets said.

Judy. Judy Tyler. 24 years old. Gone. I want to start this the right way, from the beginning. Because if I only write down the end, that’s all that’ll be true about her on this page, and that’s not fair. Not to her. So, let me go back a few months. Back to the sound stage at MGM. Back before any of this had a shadow on it.

I remember the first day I saw her on set for Jailhouse Rock. She came in like she owned the room. This red-headed girl from Broadway, quick tongue, quicker laugh. Not the least bit starstruck by me, which I liked more than I let on. She’d been Miss Rheingold. She’d been on the stage in New York in a show called Pipe Dream.

And she carried herself like a woman who’d already proved herself somewhere that mattered. So, Hollywood didn’t scare her. And neither did I. She was playing Peggy Van Alden, my leading lady in the picture. And the first thing she ever said to me, first thing, before hello even, was, “Well, they finally found somebody in this town who can actually move.

” I laughed so hard I had to sit down. Nobody talked to me like that. Everybody around me by then was so careful, so polite, waiting to see what I’d say before they said anything themselves. Judy wasn’t careful with me one single day I knew her. She teased me about my hair, about my Memphis drawl, about how serious I got when the cameras rolled.

She called me honey like she’d known me her whole life instead of a few weeks. And somehow that made the work easier. Made me less afraid of the camera. I didn’t have many friends on a movie set in those days. I had people who worked for me, people who worked around me. Judy was just my friend. That’s a rare thing to find out there.

And I didn’t know yet how rare or how short a time I’d get to keep it. We shot that title number together, the one they built the whole picture’s poster around, the cell block, the bars, the chorus line of boys in stripes. Take after take, and between every one of them Judy would crack some joke to keep the whole company loose.

Because the director ran a tight set, and everybody’s nerves got frayed by the afternoon. She’d catch my eye across the sound stage during a lighting reset, and mouth something ridiculous just to see if she could break my straight face on camera. Twice she did. We had to reshoot because I was grinning like a fool in a scene where I wasn’t supposed to be grinning at all.

Between setups, we’d sit on the edge of that fake cell block set, drinking coffee out of paper cups, and she’d tell me stories about New York, about the stage, about a fellow named Greg she was sweet on, an actor, tall, easy laugh. The kind of man she lit up talking about. I liked hearing her talk about him. I liked that somebody that alive had found somebody to be that happy with.

And then, right near the end of shooting, she did it. She married him. Gregory Lafayette Ashcroft, that was his full name, though everybody called him Greg. Quiet little ceremony out in Los Angeles just before the picture wrapped. And when she came back to the lot the next day, she couldn’t stop smiling long enough to finish a sentence.

I told her congratulations. Told her Hollywood better watch out now that there were two of her kind of trouble loose in the world instead of one. She laughed that laugh of hers, threw her arms around my neck right there in front of the crew, didn’t care who saw, and said, “Elvis, honey, I am the happiest girl in the state of California.

I believed her. Anybody standing near her that day would have believed her. She was glowing the way people only glow a few times in a whole life. We wrapped the picture not long after that, right at the end of June. Last day on set, everybody was tired and glad and a little sad the way you get when something you built together is finished and about to scatter to the wind.

Judy came and found me before she left the lot. Said she and Greg were driving back east together, taking their time, seeing the country on the way, heading for New York where she had stage work waiting on her. Said she’d see me at the premiere, whenever that turned out to be, and that I’d better save her a good seat.

I told her I would. I told her Hollywood’s loss was Broadway’s gain, but only if she promised to come back out and make another picture with me sometime. She said she promised. She hugged me one more time, quick, easy, like it was nothing, like there’d be a hundred more hugs where that one came from. Then she got in the car with her husband and they drove east.

And that was the last time on this earth I ever saw Judy Tyler smiling. I went back to Memphis, went back to my own life, my own house, my own noise. I wasn’t thinking about the picture much, wasn’t thinking about anybody on that set. I was thinking about the next session, the next tour date, the ordinary business of being 22 years old and busy.

And then the 4th of July came and went, some quiet holiday at Graceland, and 2 days after that, the phone rang. I remember exactly where I was standing when I picked it up, right by the kitchen doorway, still chewing on something my mother had put in front of me. And I remember exactly how my legs felt when the voice on the other end got done talking, like somebody had reached down and pulled the bones clean out of them.

I didn’t say much of anything back. I just set the receiver down so soft and so careful you’d have thought it was made of glass. And I went and found my mother out on the back steps, and I sat down next to her without a word. And she must have seen something on my face because she put her arm around me before I’d even managed to tell her why.

Gladys always could read me like that. I finally got the words out, and she just held on tighter, and neither one of us said anything else for a long while. The Memphis evening kept right on going around us, crickets and all, like the whole world hadn’t just tipped sideways. They told me it happened on the highway out in Wyoming, some place called Rock River, a stretch of road so empty you could drive an hour and not pass another car.

Judy and Greg were in his convertible, still making their way east, still on that same honeymoon drive she told me about with such joy in her voice. Another car came across the center line, head-on. No time for either driver to do a thing about it. Judy was thrown from the vehicle. She died right there on that lonesome road.

Greg held on a few hours longer before he was gone, too. Married 3 days. 3 days of being the happiest girl in California, and then nothing but a highway in Wyoming and a state trooper’s report. Four days after that, a postcard showed up forwarded on to me from the studio by a secretary who figured I’d want to see it before it got filed away somewhere.

Postmarked from some gas station town along their route, someplace I couldn’t have found on a map if you’d paid me. Judy’s handwriting covered the back of it, that loopy, laughing handwriting of hers, telling me the honeymoon was everything she’d dreamed, that Greg drove too fast and she loved him for it, that she’d write me again once they hit Chicago.

She signed it, “Your favorite jailbird, Judy.” I stood in my own kitchen holding that card, and I laughed out loud, one short, ugly laugh before it broke into something else entirely. She’d written those words before Wyoming, before any of it. That card is still in a drawer in this house. I’ve read it exactly once.

I couldn’t make myself believe it at first. I kept picturing her on that cell block set, coffee in a paper cup, laughing at something I hadn’t even said yet. I kept hearing “Elvis, honey.” in that voice of hers, and I could not make that voice match up with a word like gone. I didn’t go to the funeral. I was tied up with the pictures business, with the label, with all the machinery that never once in my life asked me if I had a broken heart that week or not.

I’ve regretted that more than I’ve regretted most things. I should have found a way. I should have stood there for her the way she stood by me on that sound stage every single day we worked together. They finished cutting the picture without her knowing what it looked like put together, without her ever seeing herself up on that screen the way the rest of the world was about to see her.

And somewhere in those weeks after I got the news, sitting alone in a room in this house, I made myself a promise. The kind you don’t say out loud to anybody. The kind you just decide in the quiet and carry from then on. I told myself I was never going to watch Jailhouse Rock. Not the premiere, not a private screening, not years down the road on some television set with my feet up like it was nothing.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t sit in a dark room and watch her move and laugh and tease me across that screen, alive as anything, knowing the whole time that she wasn’t alive anymore. I couldn’t watch Peggy Van Alden fall for the fellow I was playing, watch that whole story end happy when I already knew how the real story ended.

Out on a highway in Wyoming 3 days into a marriage. Some things a man just can’t sit through. That was one of mine. The Colonel didn’t understand it, not one bit. To him the picture was a picture, business was business, and a dead co-star was a terrible shame, but not a reason to slow down the machine. He came around not 2 weeks later talking premiere dates and magazine layouts and how I ought to say a few kind words to the press about Miss Tyler, get it behind us, keep the picture’s momentum going into the fall. I did what he asked, mostly. I gave the interviews. I said she was a wonderful girl and a fine talent and that the whole cast was heartbroken. And every word of it was true. And every word of it felt like chewing glass while I said it. Because underneath all that polite grief

talk was a calendar somebody else was keeping. A release date that didn’t care what I’d lost. That was the first time in my life I understood how this business could stand right next to your heart breaking and ask you to smile for a photographer anyway. I did the interviews. I did not do the screening room. That was the one thing I held back.

The one door the Colonel couldn’t talk me through. And to his credit, after a while, he quit trying. Folks have asked me about it plenty of times since. Why I’d never seen one of my own biggest pictures. And I never gave them the whole truth of it. Not really. I’d just say I don’t care for watching myself on film. Let it go at that.

Let them think it was vanity or nerves or nothing much at all. It was never that. It was her. It’s always been her. Every single time that picture’s title comes up in conversation, I see that cell block set again. I hear that laugh. And I think about a girl who called everybody honey and meant it. Who wasn’t afraid of me the way so many people were.

Who got 3 days of being the happiest girl in California before the world took it all back. I kept that promise by the way. Whatever else this life has scattered and broken along the way, I kept that one. Years later, up on a stage with the lights so hot you could barely see past the first few rows, I’d still sing that song.

Still do the moves everybody came to see because the crowd loved it and because I loved singing it, too. And it never once felt like a betrayal of what I’d promised myself. Singing the song was one thing. That was mine to give. Watching the finished picture was another thing entirely. Because in that dark room, I wouldn’t be the one singing.

I’d just be a boy on a screen next to a girl who wasn’t in this world anymore. And I was never brave enough for that particular kind of company. So, I sang the song a thousand times over the years, all the way up until near the end. And every single time, somewhere in the back of my mind, I’d think of a red-headed girl on a fake cell block set with a paper cup of coffee in her hand, laughing at me for taking it all so serious.

I never did watch it, not once, not to this day. And I don’t believe I ever will. Some doors you just leave closed out of respect for who’s on the other side of them. Judy, honey, wherever you are, I hope you know I never went in that room. I hope you know why.