A Handle for Harold

Don Seat, veteran fleshpeddler and music lover, was sore. The singer whose contract he wanted to buy had everything--a real rock 'n' roll talent and a real gone name. But Seat only had $25,000 to offer, and the kid's record contract alone was worth $40,000. So Elvis Presley stayed with Colonel Tom Parker back there in the fall of 1955 (RCA Victor got the record contract), and all Agent Seat could do was to try to latch onto a suitable substitute. He promptly chased down to Memphis after some cornball named Harold Jenkins.

"Harold Jenkins!" says Seat now, with reminiscent horror. "What can you do with a handle like that? God knows, my middle name, Sanford, is bad enough. But Harold Jenkins!" Then it turned out that hazel-eyed Harold twanged a neat country guitar and his voice could bounce from flat rock 'n' roll to a high-pitched sexy whisper. There was only one thing, Don decided--that name had to go. "I thought of Twitty. I tried Johnny Twitty, Freddie Twitty, but it just didn't work. Then we got to talking about towns in Arkansas, and I looked at a map, and there was this Conway, Ark. That was it. Conway Twitty. The kid really shuddered."

On the Ferry. Still, Harold was willing. He was 23 and had been looking for a good break in the music business ever since his daddy, who piloted a Mississippi River ferry out of Helena, Ark., taught him how to play the guitar. Some records he had out were bombs, so he was happy to let Agent Seat call the shots, even if it meant a handle like Twitty.

Not the least of Conway Twitty's talents, Seat soon discovered, was his ability to compose new songs without straining a tonsil. "Down in Fort Lauderdale," Conway recalls, "I went to sleep one night and dreamed of a song. I jumped out of bed and jotted down the words. Then I hummed the tune." Result: a song he called Not for Me, which he has yet to record. "I was at the Flamingo Lounge in Hamilton, Ont. last February," Conway says, "and I went up to the office during intermission and wrote It's Only Make Believe in seven minutes."

On the Charts. Twitty waxed Make Believe for M-G-M Records last May. It started selling slowly, but by last week it was strongly entrenched at the top of the charts. The moon-faced young man who used to pull no more than $750 a week on the road now draws as much as $1,000 for a single performance. He will really crash the big time on the Perry Como TV show this week (NBC, Nov. 29, 8 p.m. E.S.T.). From the sales of Make Believe alone, he expects to clear $400,000.

But Don Sanford Seat has seen the far-out monikers come and go. Just in case Conway Twitty ever begins to sound silly in the music stores, Don Seat is prepared. "I have a real gasser," he hints darkly. "A name so good that if I find a guy for it he'll be a star overnight."

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