The basset hound was wearing a little tuxedo, and Elvis was in white tie and tails.
It was Sunday night, July 1, 1956, on The Steve Allen Show in New York. Elvis Presley was 21 years old and the most talked-about singer in America. A few weeks earlier, his swiveling hips on Milton Berle’s show had parents and preachers up in arms.
So Steve Allen, the clever host of a live comedy and variety hour, came up with a plan to tame him. Elvis would dress formally, and he’d sing “Hound Dog” to a real hound dog named Sherlock, perched on a stool.
Elvis stood there and sang to the dog. He barely moved.
He later called it one of the most embarrassing moments of his career. Millions of people tuned in anyway, and Allen beat Ed Sullivan in the ratings that night.
If you’ve never seen it, it’s as awkward as it sounds.
Elvis Presley – Hound Dog (The Steve Allen Show)
Watching all of it was a skinny photographer named Alfred Wertheimer.
He was 26 and working freelance. Elvis’s record label, RCA, had hired him earlier that year to take some publicity pictures, though Wertheimer had never heard of Elvis. But he kept tagging along long after the job was done, and nobody told him to leave.
The next day, July 2, Elvis walked into RCA’s studio in New York with his band.
He ran through “Hound Dog” 31 times. After that, he did “Don’t Be Cruel” 28 times, until it sounded exactly the way he heard it in his head, with Wertheimer clicking away the whole time.
Both songs ended up on the same record, and it became one of the biggest hits of his life. Give it a listen.
Elvis Presley – Don’t Be Cruel (Official Lyric Video)
Then Elvis wanted to go home.
He skipped the plane and took the train instead, a ride of about 27 hours from New York down to Memphis, Tennessee. Wertheimer climbed aboard too.
What he caught on that trip is almost hard to believe now. In one shot, Elvis sits by the window with copies of the songs he’d just recorded, listening to them over and over. Later he’s stretched out in a sleeper bunk, or horsing around with a new friend he’d met on board.
Most passengers had no idea who he was. One young woman reportedly had to be convinced it was really him.
At a stop in Chattanooga, Elvis ate breakfast at a lunch counter while the train waited. It was still the segregated South, and Wertheimer photographed a woman standing nearby as she waited on a sandwich because she wasn’t allowed to sit at the counter.
On July 4, the train rolled into the outskirts of Memphis.
It stopped near his neighborhood, in an area Memphians knew as White Station. Elvis grabbed his things and stepped off. The house on Audubon Drive that he’d just bought for his parents, Gladys and Vernon, wasn’t far.
He didn’t bother calling a car or waiting around for anyone to pick him up.
So Elvis Presley, the young man every TV network in America wanted, started walking.
Wertheimer raised his camera one more time. Decades later, a fan went looking for the exact spot where it happened.