SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2010
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E3 From Wesley Heights, they dreamed of Memphis elvis from E1
in the late 1920s had “effectively de- signed a subdivision attractive to Chris- tian, upper-middle-class whites of Wash- ington.” Deeds to lots in the neighbor- hood included “covenants” that forbade sales of the property to minorities. The neighbors were high-society: The Nixons and the Johnsons lived there before moving to the White House. The well-connected Church family had steeplechase races named after them and summered in Nantucket. Car- ol’s big sister had her debutante ball fea- tured in the social pages of The Washing- ton Post.
But Carol didn’t have a fancy coming-
out party. She describes her young self as a “bad kid.” Once, she pulled a false fire alarm at the emergency box at the corner of Garfield Street and Foxhall Road. She left a bragging note on the scene (“Lucky Strikes Again!”) — which she’d written on her sister’s monogrammed stationery. “I wasn’t a good criminal,” Carol ad- mits now. “We had a joke in our house, whenever I would do something [bad]: ‘What would the Grennans, the Walshes and the Tapskis say?’ ” she remembers. “Those were prominent families in the neighborhood whom my parents didn’t want to disappoint. But I disappointed.” Carol didn’t fit in at Woodrow Wilson
High School, but found company in a kid four years her junior who lived down the street. “Jeanne was much younger than me age-wise, but far more mature,” Carol says. “She was something.” Jeanne was similarly miserable after
transferring from the Maret School to Immaculata Preparatory School. “Carol, she really got me,” remembers Jeanne. “Nobody else in the neighborhood did. Carol and I were different from all the other kids.” The two outcasts and their families were among the 60 million viewers who watched Presley’s Sept. 9, 1956, debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” The New York Times’ write-up of the performance said Presley’s “overstimulation of youth’s physical impulses” constituted a “gross national disservice.” “Elvis was cool,” Jeanne says. “The swiveled hips! That was verboten. The parents didn’t like Elvis. We hadn’t had anybody like that before. Only hoodlums wore their hair like that.” An idea was born: The Wesley Heights black sheep, who between them had 46 Elvis records, would run away to Mem- phis to meet their idol, then start new lives as secretaries in Texas. What would the Walshes think?
OCT. 4, 1956: The Washington Post reports the disappearance.
Bumpy back roads Once they’d made it out of their neigh- borhood undetected, the girls set their sights on Tennessee. Or thought they did. They didn’t know where their music idol lived in Memphis — or if he was even in the city. Twitter wasn’t around yet to alert them to celebrities’ every move, and there was no GPS system to guide them there. In fact, there weren’t a lot of highways for them to drive on at all. The first paving on the Interstate Highway System had taken place Sept. 26, 1956 — just before the runaways took off. The America they headed into was a nation of back roads. By their first morning of freedom, Car- ol and Jeanne were hopelessly lost. “We spent a day in the mountains, driving, and after a whole day of driving, we were going by places we’d already been to,” Carol recalls. “I was 12!” Jeanne says with a laugh.
“What the hell. We thought we were heading somewhere south.” (Actually, they were in northwest North Carolina.) They stopped at a diner after a night of
driving. A suspicious waitress asked why they weren’t in school. They knew better than to mention Elvis. “We’re going to visit my cousin!” Carol
said. “We’re going to visit our aunt!” Jeanne
blurted out at the same moment. “I saw the waitress go back and start talking to co-workers, and then they were looking at our car,” Carol recalls. “I said to Jeanne, ‘Uh oh! We gotta get out of here!’ ” The pressure of being lost in the
mountains and away from the family got to Jeanne after only a day; she began thinking neither getting away from Im- maculata nor getting to Elvis was worth it. Carol told Jeanne she’d take her to a bus station when they got to a town and figured she’d forge ahead on her own. But they never made it to a bus sta-
tion. That night, Carol was behind the wheel while Jeanne napped in the back seat. Rain splattered down on the wind- ing mountain road. “I couldn’t really see anything, and this was before roads had white lines on the side,” Carol says. Suddenly, an oncoming car sideswiped the Beetle. Carol let go of the steering wheel. She screamed as the car started rolling. The Volkswagen didn’t have seat belts, so the girls rolled with it, until it settled in a roadside ditch. As they crawled from the wreckage with the help of the driver who had hit them, Carol and Jeanne were shocked to find they’d gotten through the accident with just a few bruises. The car, however, was totaled. So was their plan to meet the King in Memphis. The police from nearby Murphy, N.C., arrived on the scene. As it turned out, cops in the region were already on the lookout for a couple of kids driving south in an oddball Beetle. Carol and Jeanne had revealed their plan to only one person: Jeanne’s 9-year- old brother, Donnie. He’d thought it was very cool. So cool he couldn’t keep it to himself. Donnie had told parents, cops, reporters, neighbors and anyone else who asked where the runaways were
headed. “My sister’s still mad at me,” says a laughing Don DeGuibert, now 63 and liv- ing in Phoenix. The cops took Carol’s knife away, but
let her keep the rag doll. The girls we- ren’t charged with any crime, but spent the day in a jail cell, eating grits and bis- cuits and waiting for Carol’s parents to pick them up. The adventure was offi- cially over.
Friendly memories
Though they never got within a few hundred miles of Memphis, the news- paper accounts about their running away to meet Elvis had done consider- able damage. “For my family’s social set, what we had done, and having it broadcast the way it was, that was intolerable,” Jeanne says. “I was shunned by everybody when I came back, it was like nobody knew how to deal with me.”
Carol was sent to boarding school in
Vermont. Jeanne stayed in Washington and graduated from Maret. Their par- ents forbade the girls to see each other, an order they obeyed. The two haven’t talked in the 54 years since their adventure, but they
ALFRED WERTHEIMER
GOING HOME: Elvis on the Southern Railroad between Chattanooga and Memphis in 1956.
Before he was King still
speak fondly of each other. Separately, however, they both say they remember that period as mostly unhappy, no mat- ter how cool running away for Elvis looks on paper. Jeanne, 66, now lives in Huntingtown, Md., and goes by her mar- ried name of Jeanne Von Schwerdtner; though she retains some vestiges of her rock-and-roll youth (she runs a custom motorcycle business), she says she might never think about her pre-teen excursion and all the trouble it caused, if only her brother would stop bringing up the tale at every family gathering.
Carol, who still lives in the District,
says she hadn’t dwelled on the trip for decades until contacted by this reporter. “I can laugh a little at what we did, the silliness of telling people we were going to run away to see Elvis. Good God,” Car- ol says. “But I also think about a young girl, carrying a rag doll to hold on to childhood and a knife for protection, who was miserable and probably wasn’t getting the help she needed.” Carol, 70, is now retired after a career in the mortgage business. She still has some of the keepsakes from her runaway days, including her Elvis records. “I’ve gotten very conservative as I’ve
gotten older,” she says. “But when I listen to Elvis, hear the young Elvis, I can still translate the feelings I had back then when I first listened to him.”
style@washpost.com
The Elvis Presley that Carol Church and Jeanne DeGuibert were chasing on their runaway adventure wasn’t yet a legend. In 1956, he was a 21-year-old up-and-comer only just beginning to taste success. Photographer Alfred Wertheimer chronicled Presley that year, capturing him in moments both public and private: alone at a lunch counter; posing before a sea of fans; locked in a backstage embrace. Dozens of the intimate images are featured in “Elvis at 21, Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer,” an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. The King would have turned 75 this
year; Wertheimer’s work reveals a young man unaware that he would soon become an American icon.
Elvis at 21, Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer
runs through Jan. 23 at the National Portrait Gallery, Eighth and F streets NW. 202-633-1000.
www.npg.si.edu. Free.
on
washingtonpost.com
MORE PHOTOS Photographer Alfred Wertheimer shares some of his most intimate photos of the King during Elvis’s 1956 tour at
washingtonpost.com/style.
The Kennedy Center welcomes patrons with disabilities.
“Too distinctive, too juicy, too fabulously fearless to miss” –The Washington Post
“Run, don’t walk, to see Companhia de Dança Deborah Colker.” —The Globe and Mail
Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra Emil de Cou, Conductor
PROGRAM A:
Nov. 17, 18, & 20 at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 21 at 1:30 p.m.
La Source (BALANCHINE/DELIBES) Sonate No. 5 (BÉJART/BACH)
In Memory of… (ROBBINS/BERG)
PROGRAM B:
Nov. 19 & 21 at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 20 at 1:30 p.m.
La Sonnambula (BALANCHINE/RIETI)
Monumentum
Pro Gesualdo (BALANCHINE/STRAVINSKY)
Movements forPiano
andOrchestra (BALANCHINE/STRAVINSKY)
Eight by Adler (MEJIA/ADLER)
November 17–21 Eisenhower Theater Tickets from $29
Deborah Colker Mix
Thu.-Sat., Oct. 28–30 at 8 p.m. Eisenhower Theater Tickets from $22
International Programming at the Kennedy Center is supported through the generosity of the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts.
Part of the Kennedy Center’s ON THE FRINGE: Eye on Edinburgh Bette Bourne in A Life in Three Acts
Oct. 28–30 at 8:30 p.m. Terrace Theater | Tickets $25
ON THE FRINGE: Eye on Edinburgh is presented in association with the British Council.
International Programming at the Kennedy Center is made possible through the generosity of the Kennedy Center International Commit tee on the Arts.
Recommended for mature audiences.
A Date with IdinaMenzel -winning star of Wicked
Marvin Hamlisch, conductor The Tony®
and favorite of fans of the hit show Glee, Idina Menzel brings her compelling, humorous, and talented presence to an NSO Pops performance of her favorite songs.
“
Generous support for The Suzanne Farrell Ballet is provided by The Shen Family Foundation and Emily Williams Kelly.
Major support is provided by The Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation, the Monica and Hermen Greenberg and The Suzanne Farrell Ballet Advancement Committee.
The Kennedy Center Ballet Season is sponsored by Altria Group. Additional support is provided by Elizabeth and Michael Kojaian.
Tickets at the Box Office or charge by phone
(202) 467-4600 Thu., Oct. 28 at 7 p.m.
Fri. & Sat., Oct. 29 & 30 at 8 p.m. Concert Hall
Tickets from $20
HAIR is made possible through the generosity of The Adrienne Arsht Musical Theater Fund. Please note: this performance contains strong language, mature content, and brief nudity.
Order online at
kennedy-center.org TTY (202) 416-8524 Groups call (202) 416-8400
THRILLING, INTENSE, UNADULTERATED JOY.”
–THENEWYORKTIMES
Companhia de Dança
DEBORAH COLKER, FOUNDER AND ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Amy Brandt, Lauren Stewart, and Violeta Angelova in Movements for Piano and Orchestra Photo: Carol Pratt
Photo: Flavio Colker
ART BY AMY GUIP
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