Back in the fall of 1957, Elvis Presley was the most talked-about young man in America. He was 22 years old and everywhere you looked, and plenty of grown-ups were sure his dance moves spelled trouble. So when the newspapers reported that the Los Angeles police had ordered him to “clean up” his show, it matched what a lot of people already believed.
The police never gave that order.
The whole story came from a young press agent named Gene Schwam. Schwam built his career in Hollywood public relations, with clients that included Elvis, Judy Garland and Julie Andrews, and he’d co-founded his own firm, Hanson & Schwam, back in 1955. He passed away on Friday, October 16, in Los Angeles. He was 96.
Years later he explained exactly how the Elvis trick worked. In October 1957 Elvis was booked for two nights at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles, and Schwam wanted a full house. So he picked up the phone.
“I got the idea to call the police and tell them I was hearing people saying the Elvis show was getting too risqué,” he said.
Then he told the press what the police had supposedly said. On October 30, 1957, the show-business paper Variety ran the headline “L.A. Police Order Presley ‘Clean Up’ His Pan-Pac Show.” No officer had actually watched the show, and no real order ever came down. Schwam had invented the whole thing and let the papers run with it.
People had plenty of reason to believe it, too. Earlier that same year Elvis had turned up on America’s biggest Sunday night program, and the cameras famously kept him in frame only from the waist up, because so many grown-ups were rattled by the way he moved.
Watch that night and you’ll see why a “clean up your act” headline was so easy to sell.
Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show in January 1957, the night the cameras showed him only from the waist up
Schwam didn’t come up with the timing on his own, though. He ran the idea past Colonel Tom Parker, the shrewd manager who steered Elvis’s whole career and never met a stunt he didn’t like. Parker had one small note, and it made all the difference.
“Don’t do it for the first show, do it for the second show,” he told him.
So that’s what they did. The story hit the papers after opening night, every teenager in town read it, and the second show sold out.
Schwam held on to that secret for decades. When he finally told it in 2022, he got a real kick out of being found out.
“Who would think that 65 years later I would get caught being a press agent!” he said.
He leaves behind a career full of famous names. But the one that still makes people grin is a phone call about Elvis that no officer ever made.