In May 1957, Elvis Presley was filming what would become the most famous dance sequence of his career. The song was “Jailhouse Rock.” The scene required him to slide down a pole — and he threw himself into it exactly the way he threw himself into everything. He hit the pole so hard that he smashed his own face. When he got up, the porcelain cap on one of his teeth was gone. Elvis assumed he had swallowed it. He hadn’t. He had breathed it in.
Nobody realized at first. A studio nurse noticed something odd when he showed her his teeth and worked out that a crown was missing. Filming carried on. But the next morning Elvis woke up with serious pain in his chest, and he was rushed to hospital. An examination found exactly where the cap had gone. It was lodged in his lung.
How Jailhouse Rock Almost Killed Elvis
Now think about what that meant for a 22-year-old whose entire life depended on one thing. To get the cap out, a surgeon had to go down through his throat — and that meant parting Elvis Presley’s vocal cords to reach it. One slip, and the most valuable voice in America would have been permanently damaged. According to one account, the procedure became even more nerve-wracking when the cap broke into two pieces, and the doctor had to go back in a second time.
Colonel Tom Parker reportedly went almost out of his mind when he heard what the doctors were about to do. And you can see his point. Elvis had been famous for barely a year. He had “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog” and “Love Me Tender” behind him and everything else still ahead. All of it now depended on a surgeon’s steady hand around his vocal cords. The whole thing was serious enough that when it was over, the New York Times ran a story about it.
Elvis Presley – Jailhouse Rock (Music Video)
The surgery worked. Both pieces came out. Elvis’s voice was hoarse for a few days and then came back completely, with no lasting damage at all. He was released from the hospital on May 16, 1957 — which happened to be one of the biggest days of his life for another reason entirely. That same day, his parents were moving into their brand new home in Memphis: Graceland. When filming finally wrapped, he took a train home, got so impatient to see the house that he got off in Louisiana and hired a car to drive the rest of the way, and spent his first night there on June 26.
There’s a strange little footnote hiding in the finished film. If you watch Jailhouse Rock to the end, Elvis’s character Vince Everett takes a blow to the throat and injures his vocal cords, and his friends spend the final act worrying whether he’ll ever sing again. That storyline was influenced by what had actually happened to Elvis during filming.
The film also carries a genuinely sad postscript: his co-star Judy Tyler, a newlywed in her early twenties, was killed in a car crash on July 3, 1957, weeks after the shoot ended. Elvis was so shaken he reportedly could never bring himself to watch the movie.