can still reel off Lincoln's Gettysburg speech from when I memorized it in
school." He met his costars, Richard Egan and Debra Paget (to Egan he
confided that he had never acted before and that he was "plenty scared"),
as well as director Robert Webb, a fifty-three-year-old veteran of the system
who was understandably concerned that, with Elvis' late entry, the
film, a modest B western, might be turned into a sideshow. To Mildred
Dunnock, who was to play his mother in the film, he was a nice boy
whose extremely polite and deferential manner indicated an obvious willingness
to learn. The person he was most excited about meeting, though,
was forty-one-year-old producer David Weisbart, who had produced
James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause the previous year. Weisbart was talking
about filming a documentary-style James Dean Story, something, Elvis
blurted out to Weisbart, he would like to do "more than anything else."
He sat with his legs tucked under him, chewing gum and stroking his chin
nervously. ''I'd sure like to take a crack at it," he said. "I think I could do it
easy."
3 2 8 c-., L O V E ME T E N D E R
I t was like a magical kingdom, with famous stars constantly strolling
by, cowboys and Indians making casual conversation in the commissary,
and everyone sneaking a peek out of the comer of their eye to get a look
at the latest arrival on the lot. Gene seemed a little bit overwhelmed by it
all and took to whittling or retreating to the big dressing room where the
Colonel conducted business while Elvis was on the set. For his part Elvis
couldn't seem to get enough - it was like the playing out of a childhood
fantasy, he just didn't want to reveal by an inadvertent glance or blurtedout
words how excited he really was.
On his second day on the set he met twenty-five-year-old Nick Adams,
a Hollywood hustler who had originally brazened his way into the cast of
Mister Roberts two years before by doing impressions of the star, Jimmy
Cagney, for director John Ford. Adams, a coal miner's son from Nanticoke,
Pennsylvania, had had a supporting role in Rebel Without a Cause
and was, he announced to all and sundry, currently writing a book about
his "best friend," Jimmy Dean. Desperate for success and recognition, he
was known to keep meticulous notebooks on Hollywood social life and
never failed to send thank-you notes and congratulatory messages to producers,
directors, and people of influence in the industry. On this particular
day he was roaming the lot, looking to make a connection for the "bad
guy" role in The Reno Brothers that Cameron Mitchell had just dropped
out of. That was when he ran into Elvis. "It's no secret around town that
Nick's a go-getter," wrote Army Archerd in Photoplay, but "before Nick
knew what had hit him, Elvis was saying, 'Gee, I think you're a swell
actor.' It didn't take Nick long to tell Elvis how much he'd like to be in his
film. He told Elvis how he'd played a 'heavy' in 'The Last Wagon: 'Gee,'
said Elvis, 'I'll tell Mr. Weisbart to look at "The Last Wagon.", " Though
nothing came of it, the point was made, and when Nick offered to introduce
Elvis to some more of his, andJimmy's, friends, their friendship was
sealed. Had Elvis met Natalie Wood? He had to meet Natalie. And, of
course, this being Hollywood, there were always lots of girls...
It was hard to keep track of everything, it was all happening so fast.
Every night he called home to tell his mother the latest news. Almost
every night he called June. Three songs were now set for the picture, and
Colonel was making deals for their delivery to RCA, working out the publishing,
and making sure that Elvis got coauthorship. Colonel Parker was
staying up nights, Elvis told a reporter, "thinking up ways to promote
A U G U S T- O C T O B E R 1 9 5 6 <-.... 3 2 9
me." In the midst of it all, Scotty and Bill and DJ. showed up after driving
cross-country from Memphis. They had been promised a tryout for the
picture, and there was an RCA recording session with Mr. Sholes scheduled
for the following weekend.
The tryout was held in the music bungalow on the west end of the lot
where Elvis was rehearsing his three songs with Mr. Darby, the musical
director. They were asked to play their regular show, but when they got
done they were told they were not "hillbilly" enough for the picture.
Scotty was furious - if they had known the musical director wanted "hillbilly,"
he fumed, they would have given him banjos and jugs and Roy
Acuff music, that was what they had grown up on, after all. Elvis' mind
was somewhere else, though, and the Colonel was certainly not going to
stick up for them. As far as the Colonel was concerned, Scotty knew, they
might just as well never have showed up.
It was a minor setback - the next picture, Elvis promised them, he
would make sure that they were used. He had finally gotten to renew his
brief acquaintance with Debra Paget, he told June on the telephone. She
was even more beautiful than he had first thought, she was really nice,
and... Well, who else had he met? June wondered. When Elvis didn't
answer, June asked, Well, what did you talk about with Debra? After a
long silence he finally said he didn't remember, but he had met Richard
Egan. "Oh, I love Richard Egan," June simpered. "Oh, really? And just
how much do you love Richard Egan?" About as much as he loved Debra
Paget, she supposed. Now who else had he met?
On Wednesday the picture started shooting, but Elvis was getting
ready for the soundtrack session the following day. On the day of the session
Elvis was eager to perform the ballad that would provide a running
theme for the movie (and was even then under discussion as a new title
for the picture) for Army Archerd, who was on assignment for Photoplay.
He took Archerd back to the music bungalow, where Ken Darby accompanied
him on the grand piano, and Elvis stood "erect, as if he were in a
choir," in front of a tall stained-glass window and sang "Love Me Tender."
Archerd was astonished both at the stillness of his manner and the
straightforwardness of his treatment of the song, which was a rewrite of
the Civil War ballad "Aura Lee." "When he finished," wrote Archerd, "it
seemed only normal to express our amazement. 'People think all I can do
is belt: he said. 'I used to sing nothing but ballads before I went profes330
'" L O V E M E T E N D E R
sional. I love ballads: " h e insisted to the Hollywood columnist with utter
sincerity. He was going to start introducing them more into his live act.
This was the kind of music he had grown up singing in church.
The session itself went off without a hitch. The film-studio setting may
have been a little intimidating at first, with the distinguished conductororchestrator
Lionel Newman counting off the beat for the little combo
and the Ken Darby vocal trio not really up to the kind of support on
Brother Claude Ely's "There's a Leak in This Old Building" (retitled, and
recopyrighted, as "We're Gonna Move") that the Jordanaires would have
provided. Elvis poured himself into "Love Me Tender," though, and
when the session was over went off happily with his new pals, Nick
Adams and Nick's roommate, Dennis Hopper.
It was a relief once the real work of acting finally began. It was a job
like any other - he was up at 5:30 every morning, he told Dewey on the
phone, and sometimes he fell asleep talking to June on the phone at night.
"This place isn't anything but a workshop," Elvis declared to the Memphis
DJ. "I spent one whole day plowing mules. Man, that was rough'"
Richard Egan told him that the trick was to just be yourself, and David
Weisbart insisted that acting lessons would probably ruin him, because
his greatest asset was his natural ability. The director, Robert Webb, was
very patient, taking him aside before the start of each scene and going
over it with him so that he could visualize the action and emotion. Webb
would break down the lines, too, giving the fledgling actor points of emphasis
and breathing points, talking to Elvis in private and showing him
the kind of respect that always allowed him to take direction. Everyone
liked the kid - they had all thought he would be some kind of hillbilly
freak, but he had won them over with the same combination of humility
and deferential charm that had worked for him in every other situation in
which he had found himself in his twenty-one-year-old life. "I had a nice
talk with him one day," Mildred Dunnock recounted to writer Jerry Hopkins,
"and he told me a little bit about how he got started. He evidently
played the guitar and was very anxious to get on a recording - this was in
Memphis. So he kept approaching the man that had the [studio] and just
simply couldn't get on it. One night this man took pity on him, or got
bored with his asking, and felt finally he'd give him a try.... [The night
that the disc jockey played the recording] Elvis told me he was so nervous
he went to the movie house. He said to his mother, 'I can't listen to this, I
just can't listen to it.' So he went down to see the movie, and at about
A U G U S T- O C T O B E R 1 9 5 6 '" 3 3 1
twenty minutes after eleven his mother came rushing down t o the movie,
to the aisle seat where he was sitting, and said, 'Elvis, come on home, the
telephone is ringing like crazy.' And that was the start of his real popularity."
"Before I met him, I figured he must be some sort of moron," said
Debra Paget, voicing what she said was a commonly held assumption on
the set, but once she got to know him, she, too, came to find him "very
sweet, very simple," just not the kind of boy she would care to date.
Trude Forsher, a Viennese emigree, mother of two, and distant relative of
the Aberbachs, who had just gone to work for the Colonel as his West
Coast secretary, hosted informal meetings in his dressing room in which
the Colonel and Abe Lastfogel, the head of William Morris, talked business
and Elvis drank milk and fooled around with Gene. Between takes
Gene and Elvis would pester her to teach them German and reminisce
about their childhood when they played underneath the house in Tupelo
with a little toy car. "Gene was just so happy to be with Elvis." The two
of them followed her around the lot singing "Trude Frutti."
He was constantly busy with visitors and reporters on the set. He
flirted openly with the women reporters and trusted them to see through
his bravura facade. "I could make you like me if I tried," he told one reporter.
''I'mjust teasin' now, but I'd be sweet, and you'd like me because I
was sweet, wouldn't you?" With the men he was equally forthright, and he
was open about his hopes and fears with one and all. ''I'm so nervous," he
said in response to a question about biting his fingernails. ' 'I've always
been nervous, ever since I was a kid." "From the time I was a kid, well, I
knew something was going to happen to me," he told another interviewer.
"Didn't know exactly what." To True Story staff writer Jules Archer he confessed
his genuine disturbance at the reaction to his Jacksonville shows and
the preacher who asked his congregation to pray for Elvis' salvation. "I
think that hurt me more than anything else at first. This man was supposed
to be a religious leader, yet he acted that way without ever knowing who I
was or what I was like. I believe in the Bible. I believe that all good things
come from God.... I don't believe I'd sing the way I do if God hadn't
wanted me to. My voice is God's will, not mine."
He signed autographs willingly and met with studio executives'
daughters. He and Gene spent $750 on a Saturday night at a Long Beach
amusement park. Meanwhile, the Colonel was working without letup to
promote his boy, to make sure that the film's title was changed and that
332 '" L O V E ME T E N D E R
the title song, with Elvis' name on the copyright, would run all the way
through the picture, to solidify his merchandising deal with marketing
king Hank Saperstein, to earn his own newly conferred title (and salary)
as "Technical Adviser" to the film. He wore his pink Elvis Presley button
everywhere he went on the set and, when asked by a reporter how to obtain
one, said, "We'll have to check you over. It's not that easy, you
know."
Back at the hotel Elvis was exhausted, frequently by 8:30 or 9:00 at
night. Sometimes he and Nick went out together. Mostly he and Gene ordered
in room service. He kept June up-to-date on how the movie was
going. One night he told her in some wonderment how William Campbell,
who played his brother, Brett, had refused the director's orders to
wear a hat, because he was so vain about his hair. "He combs his hair
even more than I do," he told her - if she could believe that. He was
lonely, he missed her, he wanted her to come out. He would arrange for a
screen test. What was she up to back home in Biloxi, what was she doing
without him?
Everything was going pretty much according to plan. He put himself
into the scenes the same way he put himself into the music. He listened
intently to the other actors saying their lines, and then he reacted - the
character that he played was an innocent, almost a child as he portrayed
him, full of hurt and rage and indignation. The only thing that gave him
away was his hands. Ifhe didn't have something to do, his hands betrayed
him. You could see it in the rushes: his fingers fluttering, just as they did
when he was onstage, as he waited for the other actor to get through with
his lines, revealing the same lack of training that Mr. Weisbart told reporters
was a virtue. "Presley has the same smoldering appeal for teenagers,
and the same impulsive nature [as James Dean did]. In his singing style
Elvis often expresses the loneliness and yearning of all teenage kids as
they break away from childhood and become adults.... Elvis is simply a
kid who is emotionally honest, and honestly emotional."
On the Friday before Labor Day weekend, Mr. Sholes visited the set,
and Colonel got him into a broad-brimmed straw hat while donning a
fake goatee and mustache himself for a photograph with other RCA executives
to commemorate the occasion. Sholes had flown out the day
before with Bill Bullock, manager of RCA's singles division, for the recording
session he had been importuning the Colonel for ever since the
spring. It was imperative, he argued, that they have material for the second
A U G U S T-O C T O B E R 1 9 5 6 ", 333
album, which was scheduled for November, and Colonel had finally,
grudgingly, conceded the point and scheduled a session for Saturday, Sunday,
and Monday of the holiday weekend. Also flying out for the session
was Freddy Bienstock, and the three men, plus the Colonel's assistant
Tom Diskin, met for breakfast each morning in the hotel dining room,
with Sholes dressed in his somber suit and tie while the Colonel was suitably
decked out for the California sunshine in a colorful western or Hawaiian
shirt that barely tucked into his ample waistband.
Sholes had sent out a bunch of songs and arranged with Henri Rene,
an arranger-producer at RCA's West Coast office, to make sure that Elvis
was supplied with a phonograph player, but every time he made inquiries
as to whether or not Elvis had selected material, he was rebuffed with a
corny joke or enigmatic double-talk. Freddy Bienstock, the junior member
of the trio and the Hill and Range representative who had brought
"Don't Be Cruel" to the last session, had arrived with material of his own,
and Sholes grew impatient as Bienstock and the Colonel bantered back
and forth and spoke with evident good humor of Freddy's cousins the
Aberbachs, with whom Steve had been doing business for years. It was a
most uncomfortable situation but one he was going to have to get used
to: no matter how much bullshit there was to get through, he was the one
who was responsible in the end for delivery of the product, and he was
going to make sure that he delivered.
Since RCA did not have studio facilities of its own in Hollywood, the
session was booked into Radio Recorders, an independent studio on Santa
Monica. There had been a problem with the Jordanaires' schedule, but
that was worked out, and when Elvis walked in the door shortly after 1:00,
everyone was there and all set up. The engineer in charge of the session
was a twenty-nine-year-old mixer from Dundee, Michigan, named
Thorne Nogar who had been assigned the RCA account a year or two
before. A quiet man of Scandinavian background and dour mien, he resembled
Scotty somewhat in temperament and was neither impressed
nor unimpressed by this kid from Memphis, "awful nice kid - he come in
there with no pretensions, just a kid off the street." Elvis in turn warmed
to the sound recordist's equally unpretentious manner from the start. He
liked Nogar's assistant, too, a soft-spoken young jazz drummer named
Bones Howe who had just gone to work for the studio and did everything
that needed doing, from getting Thorne coffee to cueing up the tape on
the reel.
334 '" L O V E ME T E N D E R
They started o ff with "Playing for Keeps, " a number that Elvis had
gotten from Stan Kesler in Memphis (Kesler had written "I Forgot to Remember
to Forget" and ''I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone" for him at
Sun), and then Bones played the acetate demos, as Freddy handed them
to him, over the PA that boomed into the studio. Freddy had a new song
"from the pencil of" Otis Blackwell, and, after the great success of
"Hound Dog," he had solicited a number from the songwriting team of
Leiber and Stoller, too. They had submitted an old tune called "Love
Me," which they had originally written as a kind of hillbilly send-up, to
their mind "what Homer and Jethro might have done to a legitimate
lyric." On this first day Elvis also responded favorably to both "How Do
You Think I Feel," which he already knew from Jimmie Rodgers Snow's
rhumbaized version (Snow had also recorded a perfectly sincere version
of "Love Me"), and a beautiful Eddy Arnold ballad, "How's the World
Treating You?" When he liked a song he touched the top of his head so as
to hear it again, from the top. When he didn't like a number, he simply
drew his finger across his throat. By the end of the day they had three
songs wrapped and a fourth (Blackwell's "Paralyzed") well in hand. More
significantly, there was an overall spirit of optimism and a new order of
ascendancy in the studio.
There was no longer any question of who was in charge. Mr. Sholes
might still call out the take numbers; he recorded all the session information
meticulously in his notebook; he might even request another take or
mildly interject a suggestion here and there - but the pace, the momentum,
the feel of the session, were all with the boy. Maybe it was his sense
of dislocation (Sholes did almost all of his recording at this point in Nashville
and New York), and certainly the presence of Freddy Bienstock in the
control room, and the central role that Bienstock had assumed, changed
things in a fundamental way. It could have been a combination of the Colonel's
constant needling and a recognition on his own part, without ever
really acknowledging the full truth of it to himself, of the limited, somewhat
peripheral and demeaning role of company watchdog into which he
had been thrust. Whatever the reason, Steve Sholes seemed at this point
to subside into a role of almost avuncular disinterest.
Meanwhile, Elvis ran through the material with the musicians the
same way that he always had, he worked out head arrangements for the
songs by having Freddy play the dub over and over again, he listened
carefully to the final mix with Thorne - whom he called "Stoney," either
A U G U S T- O C T O B E R I 9 5 6 '" 335
as a joke or because of a misunderstanding that no one wanted to bother
to correct in case it was a joke - but he did it all at a pace, and in a manner,
different from that of any other RCA session to date. As Bones Howe
remarked: "It was always about the music. He would keep working on a
song, and he would listen to it played back, and his criterion was always:
did it make him feel good? He didn't care if there were little mistakes, he
was interested in anything that would make magic out of the record. The
sessions were always fun, there was great energy, he was always doing
something that was innovative. It was always about whether you had a
feeling for music or not, whether you felt what he felt. That's why he
liked Thome so much. Thome was a very genuine, sincere person, and he
wanted Elvis to be completely happy with the records. The trick was that
there was no trick. Thome was there, and the studio was there - it was a
level playing field. So he could just come in and do what felt good."
On the second day he recorded two of the songs that Mr. Sholes had
brought to the "Hound Dog" session, "Too Much" and "Anyplace Is Paradise,"
as well as "Old Shep," the Red Foley tale of a boy and his dog with
which he had won his first public recognition, at the Mississippi-Alabama
Fair, in I945. At his own insistence he played the piano on this number for
the first time on an RCA session, and you can hear in the halting chords
and the somewhat stumbling rhythm both the unmistakable emotion and
the equally unmistakable valuing of emotion over technique. He nailed
down "Old Shep" on the first take, while "Too Much," an oddball piece
of pop construction that aimed to emulate "Don't Be Cruel" without either
the craft or the charm, took twelve takes and still failed to achieve a
satisfactory guitar solo Cit was in an odd key, and I got lost," Scotty confessed,
"but it felt good") and "Anyplace Is Paradise," a jaunty, upbeat
bluesy number, took twenty-two. He cut three songs by Little Richard
(for which Freddy had secured co-publishing), an old tune by Wiley
Walker and Gene Sullivan called "When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold
Again," which with its lilting country rhythms and easy, unforced fervor
would have been equally at home on Sun, and a new song by Aaron
Schroeder and Ben Weisman, two of Hill and Range's top young contract
writers. He fooled around with some gospel numbers with the Jordanaires
and sang "Love Me Tender" to everyone over and over again.
Time meant nothing to him in the studio. Ifhe felt like singing spirituals,
he would sing spirituals to his heart's content. It was his way of finding
his place; it was all part of the creative process as he had learned it in
336 c-.. L OVE M E T E N D E R
the Sun studio. I f the feeling wasn't there, you waited until it got there,
you didn't try to define it too precisely before it showed up - and if
something else happened to show up while you were waiting, well, then,
you took advantage of that. "He ran the session," said Thome. "He
would be right in the center of everything. Like with the Jordanaires,
when he sang, we would set it up with a unidirectional mike, so he would
be standing right in front of them, facing them, and they would have their
own directional microphone, and they would be singing to one another.
He could spend two hours on a tune and then just throw it away." If the
band wasn't able to do it the way he wanted, said Scotty, he'd just say,
"Well, do whatever you can do, then." "He was very loyal," observed
Thome. And he was a movie star.
On Tuesday he was back on the set, working first on the soundtrack,
then on the picture, which had now been officially renamed to accommodate
the Colonel's marketing plans. He had a number of difficult emotional
scenes, but he handled them in stride. When he had to beat up
Debra, to prepare the audience for his own obligatory death (the story
was a muddled Civil War drama in which Elvis, playing the youngest
of four sons and the only one left at home, marries his oldest brother
Vance's fiancee, thinking Vance dead. Naturally, when Vance comes
back...), Webb worked with him extensively on his motivation, and
when in another scene Mildred Dunnock as his mother said, "Put that
gun down, son," according to Dunnock he was so deep into his character
that he dropped the gun right away. "Oh my God, what in the world
were you doing?" said the director. "You were supposed to keep on
going." "Well, she told me to put it down," said Elvis, who may have
been fooling - but Dunnock didn't think so. To her: "For the first time in
the whole thing he had heard me, and he believed me. Before, he'd just
been thinking what he was doing and how he was going to do it. I think
it's a funny story. I also think it's a story about a beginner who had one of
the essentials of acting, which is to believe."
Meanwhile, he was growing more accustomed to the Hollywood life.
He changed hotels, moving to the Beverly Wilshire, along with the Colonel,
because his gang of fans had simply overwhelmed the Hollywood
Knickerbocker. He was hanging out more and more with Nick and his
friends and, through Nick, Natalie Wood, another in the "Rebel" crowd.
The gossip columnists reported it as a sizzling romance, and Natalie, who
presented him with matching red and blue velvet shirts from her dressA
U G U S T-O C T O B E R 1 95 6 ", 33 7
maker, was quoted by the wires as saying, "He's a real pixie and has a
wonderful little-boy quality." But while he continued to pester Debra
Paget fruitlessly for dates - and had to keep a careful eye (and ear) on his
cousin Gene, who was still gawking around like a tourist - with Natalie
and Nick, and sometimes Dennis Hopper, he felt more like he was part of
a real gang; they all went around together, shared innocent enthusiasms,
appreciated one another's work, and disdained pretentiousness and
"swank places." One night they descended en masse on the home of
Louella Parsons, who had been trying to get an interview with Elvis for
some time and who reported with agreeable surprise: "Finally met Elvis
Presley, who called on me accompanied by Natalie Wood, Nick Adams
and his cousin, Gene Smith, who is a character straight out of a book.
Elvis and his gang drink only soft drinks...." In an interview with Albert
Goldman years later Natalie described herself, a child of Hollywood, as
intrigued by his very conventionality. "He was the first person of my age
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