Elvis Presley was never the same after stint in army 60 years ago
WHILE Elvis Presley was the King, he was also a sergeant.
Elvis’ stint in the US Army began 60 years ago this week. His service didn’t last long, but it forever changed him. He served dutifully but also passed his time like any good rock star, escaping crazed groupies and taking his fellow soldiers on rollicking, drunken adventures — some that even turned rowdy.
But it was also a dark period in his life during which he lost his mother and began the grim journey of drug addiction that likely ended his life.
When Elvis was drafted into the Army in 1957, questions abounded: Could the most famous person in the United States be useful or would he just get in the way? What if he travelled and entertained the troops instead? Would he have to lose his ducktail haircut that stole the hearts of so many young women?
Various branches of the armed services actually offered him cushy jobs. The Navy suggested creating an “Elvis Presley company” comprised of his friends from Memphis, and the Air Force wanted to use him as a recruiting model rather than sending him into combat, according to Military. The Army offered to have him only play concerts for the troops. Presley chose to serve. “People were expecting me to mess up, to goof up in one way or another. They thought I couldn’t take it and so forth, and I was determined to go to any limits to prove otherwise. Not only to the people who were wondering but to myself,” he later said of his decision.
Oh, and his hair? Despite efforts from Senator Clifford P. Case to save the iconic hairdo, it had to go, according to Time. So he sat down and his pompadour was shaved off.
“Well, hair today, gone tomorrow,” Elvis said as his hair fell to the floor, according to a 1958 Post article. But, as Time reported at the time, even though the barber “shortened his sideburns a good inch,” the haircut still “left him still looking much too dreamy for the Army.”
His service began at what was arguably the height of his career on Mar 24, 1958, a day dubbed by the media as “Black Monday.”
He was soon deployed with an armoured division near Frankfurt, Germany, as a truck
People were expecting me to mess up, to goof up in one way or another. They thought I couldn’t take it and so forth, and I was determined to go to any limits to prove otherwise. Not only to the people who were wondering but to myself. Elvis Presley on his decision to join the army
driver for an Captain Russell.
Having begun his working life as a truck driver, he was back where he started.
Russell reportedly hated the rocker’s fame. Women tailed Elvis wherever he went. The company’s mail went from one bag a day to 15, and German girls were trying to climb the base’s fence to lay their eyes on the singer, the BBC reported.
So he transferred Elvis to a scout platoon led by Sgt. Ira Jones.
“Sgt. Jones didn’t take any junk from anybody,” William Taylor, a lieutenant at the time, told the BBC. “If he wanted to keep the media away from Presley, he’s the guy who could do it.”
In August 1958, Elvis’ mother Gladys Presley died of a heart attack, and he went home to Memphis for the funeral. He would later call her death “the great tragedy of his life.”
“She was without question the most important person in officer named his life. At her funeral, he cried out, ‘ You know how much I lived my whole life just for you,’ words that were both true in the moment and prophetic, for the absence of Gladys, and his love for her, seemed to have never really left his mind,” Rolling Stone wrote.
When he returned to Germany from her funeral, Elvis served dutifully alongside his fellow soldiers, eventually being promoted to sergeant — but he was partying as well, bringing his Army buddies on wild, debaucherous trips across Europe.
During one such trip to Munich, a German man started a fi ght with Rex Mansfield, who served with Elvis.
“He was a great big German guy, much bigger than me. He hit me fi rst,” Mansfield recalled to the BBC. “Elvis actually knocked the guy out. He slid down the wall. He deserved to get whipped, and he did.” Presley had briefly competed as a boxer. — WP-Bloomberg