Elvis & Leiber & Stoller

WHEN JERRY Leiber and Mike Stoller submitted the sickly ballad 'Love Me' to Elvis Presley in the late summer of 1956, they thought the boy was a joke, a honky impostor. A month earlier, Stoller had survived the sinking of the Andrea Doria off Nantucket Island, only to be greeted on the New York dockside by Leiber with the news that Presley had covered 'Hound Dog', the cantankerous blues they’d written for Big Mama Thornton in 1952. Both men thought Elvis’ version stank.