stars, but Kim Novak was a good-looking girl with a good figure, and Rita
Moreno really knocked him out), saw Dewey and George at their respective
radio stations, and briefly dropped by the place that Dixie worked.
She was married now, she told him. She had gotten married not long after
the last time she had seen him with Nick. "Well, I'll see you around," he
said, and then he was on the train to California with Cliff and Gene,
stocked up with Reese's peanut butter cups and comic books and movie
magazines, and looking forward to making what he felt would amount to
his real movie debut, his first chance at a genuine starring role.
W I T H Y V O N N E L I M E, IN F R O N T O F G R A C E L A N D, E A S T E R W E E K E N D, 1 9 5 7.
(R O B E R T W I L L I A M S)
LOVI N G YOU
TH E M O V I E H A D B E E N R E T I T L E D Loving You (after a new Leiber
and Stoller ballad of that name, expressly written for the
picture) by the time that Elvis arrived in Los Angeles by train
on January I I. It had been planned with all the characteristic
care and attention to detail of a typical Hal Wallis production, with the
casting of seasoned stars (Wendell Corey and Lizabeth Scott) who were
unlikely to overwhelm the new "singing sensation," the secondary interest
of another Hal Wallis discovery (eighteen-year-old Dolores Hart, nee
Hicks, whom Wallis was said to have found in a campus production of
Joan of Lorraine just weeks before), colorful contract players like James
Gleason in significant minor roles, a carefully prepared script, and an experienced
studio crew. It was, in short, the kind of lighthearted, freshfaced
picture with which a major studio might have introduced an exciting
new star twenty, or even five, years before, but it was worlds away
from the flurry of rock 'n' roll exploitation features that had sprung up in
the previous year to fill the void that Variety had pointed to in its review
of Love Me Tender.
With a customary two-month studio shooting time and its newly
commissioned score alone, Loving You would have differed substantially
from Rock Around the Clock or Don't Knock the Rock, for example, the two
1956 quickie productions by exploitation master Sam Katzman which set a
rock 'n' roll movie trend for even more rudimentary filmic exercises like
Rock, Rock, Rock (filmed in less than two weeks) to follow. Each of these
movies presented stars like Bill Haley and OJ Alan Freed who, in the face
of adult opposition, conspire to put on a show that inevitably includes a
panoply of rock 'n' rollers - from Little Richard, the Platters, and Fats
Domino to such Las Vegas staples as the Treniers and Freddie Bell and
the Bellboys - trotted out on a soundstage to lip-synch their latest hits.
What the Colonel and Hal Wallis had in mind was something quite
different. Their idea, linked by a partnership of convenience and a shared
3 8 3
3 8 4 c-.... L O V I N G Y O U
canniness which had approached similar challenges and similar partnerships
in the past, was to build a career that would last, a career that could
survive musical trends, which inevitably come and go, while permitting
an incandescent talent to continue to shine. In keeping with that goal, the
Colonel knew, it was necessary to distance his boy from the hurly-burly;
he was becoming increasingly concerned that the very controversy that
had originally fueled Elvis' fame was now serving to limit it. He had
worked hard to get his boy on Ed Sullivan and pointed with pride not
only to the ratings, which clearly reflected a substantial, and substantially
growing, adult audience, but to Sullivan's public endorsement and embrace
- and he was now determined to work just as hard to achieve success
in the movies.
The Colonel had always paid close attention to newspaper accounts
and never failed to note criticism. In Elvis' case he had exploited it for a
time, assuring RCA that he knew what he was doing and that, if they
didn't like it, they could just step off the merry-go-round. Now it was time
for them all to step off the merry-go-round. The criticism had simply
become too intense, and it was becoming all too clear that rock 'n' roll
now served as a lightning rod for a more and more sharply divided society.
Denounced from the pulpit, derided in the press, increasingly linked
to the race issue, and even subject to congressional hearings, the music
was being used to stigmatize a generation. N ew York congressman Emanuel
Celler, chairman of the Antitrust Subcommittee of the House Judiciary
Committee, which was looking into the issue of "payola," declared
that while "rock 'n' roll has its place [and has given] great impetus to talent,
particularly among the colored people," the music of Elvis Presley
and his "animal gyrations... are violative of all that I know to be in good
taste."
To the Colonel it was all business. The attacks, the whipped-up emotion,
the moral outrage - these were simply the actions of concerned
businessmen, secular and ecclesiastic, determined to protect their investment
in society. But the Colonel was determined to protect his investment,
too, and to that end, without ever announcing his policy or spelling
it out in specific detail, he was prepared to remove Elvis from the fray, he
was committed to the idea of getting him off the road and out of the glare
of needless, negative publicity. Elvis' business was communication, after
all, and what better way to communicate with his audience all around the
world than from the silver screen, where the image always flickered, the
J A N U ARY-A P R I L 1 9 5 7 '" 3 8 5
candle burned but never flamed - and fame, carefully nurtured, need
never go away?
Meanwhile, Wallis, a veteran of seven of the first eight Martin and
Lewis pictures and one of the most careful polishers of image and fame,
however unlikely the source, was not about to overlook his own investment.
He recognized in the Colonel a kindred spirit. "He was a genius,"
he said of Parker in a quote that might well have been applied to himself,
"at getting every possible inch of financial mileage out of his astonishing
protege," and he was somewhat taken aback by Hal Kanter's rather cavalier
take on the whole phenomenon. When Kanter, in recount4lg his experiences
on the road, mentioned the girl he thought had swallowed her
hand and suggested that perhaps they could find an attractive amputee
from central casting, Wallis, who had thoroughly enjoyed the recitation
up to that point, reacted with horror. "Oh God, you can't put that in the
picture," he said. Leave the satire to Frank Tashlin, whose The Girl Can 't
Help It at Twentieth Century Fox was a clever takeoff on rock 'n' roll,
with Edmond O'Brien, as a love-struck gangster, warbling songs like
"Rock Around the Rock Pile" and Jayne Mansfield competing for attention
with Gene Vincent and Little Richard. Hal Wallis was not simply in
the business of exploiting fads, and he was as determined as Tom Parker
to see to it that Elvis Presley's career was a long, and mutually profitable,
one. As far as he was concerned, Loving You was going to be good entertainment,
a typical name-above-the-title Hollywood production, with the
best of the "new music," a clever (but not too clever) script, and a wholesome
Hollywood patina to spread over any recognizable real-life details.
It would be a picture you could take the whole family to.
NO T D U E A T T H E P A RA M O U N T S T U D I O until the beginning of the
week, Elvis reported to Radio Recorders at noon on Saturday, January
12, the day after his Hollywood arrival, for his first RCA session since
September. He might more easily have recorded in Nashville during his
time off in November and December, but he was adamantly opposed to
working anymore under such uninspired conditions, unless he absolutely
had to. With the second album out and nothing of any substance left in
the can, Steve Sholes had been begging the Colonel for more studio time,
and Parker had at last grudgingly conceded it to him on the two weekends
that framed the start of the picture - unless Paramount should happen to
3 8 6 c-.. L O V I N G Y O U
change its plans. The principal purpose o f the session was to record an
extended-play "inspirational" album of four or five titles, something Elvis
had publicly stated to be his ambition since his start in show business,
along with a follow-up single to "Too Much," which was currently number
two on the charts. In addition, it appeared that he would cut studio
versions of several of the songs intended for the motion picture, so as to
avoid the problem they had run into with Love Me Tender and be able to
offer recording-quality sound on at least some of his RCA movie soundtrack
releases.
Steve Sholes would be present, of course, but with Freddy Bienstock
serving as de facto a&r man, he had been virtually relegated to a timekeeper's
role, and he was fed up with being the constant butt of the Colonel's
jokes. On principle he refused to address Parker by any other title
than his Christian name. Still, he was a good company man, and that was
the limit of his personal rebellion, until, on the second or third day of his
visit, he told the Colonel that he wouldn't be able to join him and Bienstock
and Tom Diskin for their daily breakfast meeting, due to an unavoidable
early meeting at RCA. "That sonofabitch just doesn't want to
have breakfast with us," declared the Colonel indignantly to Freddy Bienstock.
The next morning Colonel had everyone there an hour and a half
early, and they caught Sholes sneaking into the dining room. "Must have
been a short meeting, Steve," remarked the Colonel caustically. "And, of
course, Steve had to sit down at the table," recalled Bienstock, "and he
hated all of it. He felt perhaps that he was too important an executive to
play along with Colonel Parker. You know, the Colonel knew a lot of
practical j okes and so forth, and he was a difficult man and had, always, all
kinds of demands and requests, and Steve was just too impatient a man to
put up with all of this."
The sessions themselves went smoothly enough. In addition to the religious
and movie titles, Elvis recorded "That's When Your Heartaches
Begin," the Ink Spots number which he had spoken of at the "MillionDollar
Quartet" session in December, as well as Otis Blackwell's latest,
"All Shook Up," which Elvis thought was a good phrase for a refrain. For
this he received a co-writing credit, his last (after the one third Mae Axton
had given him for "Heartbreak Hotel" and the songwriter's share Hill and
Range had insisted on for "Don't Be Cruel" and the Love Me Tender soundtrack)
for a long while.
Hill and Range had its own deal in place by now, which got around
J A N U A RY-A P R I L 1 9 5 7 <-... 3 8 7
the question of credit by simply getting a one-third cut-in from every
songwriter who wanted to have his song recorded by Elvis Presley. What
this meant was that the songwriter signed a document surrendering one
third of his songwriter's royalties, which were paid by the record company
to the song publisher. Once the publisher received them, they were
split, under ordinary circumstances, 50-50 with the writer(s), but in this
case one third was to be reserved out, to be "paid to Elvis Presley personally."
As a result the writer, or writers, ended up getting 33 percent, instead
of 50 percent, of these "mechanical royalties." The performance
royalties, on the other hand (which were calculated on the basis of live
performance and jukebox and air play) were not affected. They were collected
by the performing-rights societies ASCAP and BMI and paid directly
to songwriter and publisher alike. The understanding was that this
agreement would apply only to songs first recorded by Elvis Presley and
only in their original version. This got around Elvis' embarrassment at
taking credit for something he didn't do (,Tve never written a song in my
life," Elvis insisted vociferously on a number of public occasions, going
on to declare in one interview, "It's all a big hoax... I get one third of the
credit for recording it. It makes me look smarter than I am") while at the
same time neatly sidestepping his contractual agreement with RCA to
give the record company a reduced publishing rate on all songs authored,
or coauthored, by him.
It would be virtually impossible at this point for a non-Hill and Range
song to find its way to a session - unless, of course, Elvis introduced it,
and then Hill and Range was bound to secure a substantial piece of the
publishing before RCA might see fit to clear it for release. Still, the publishing
house liked to cover all bets, and on the second day of the session,
after Elvis had recorded "Peace in the Valley" and "Precious Lord, Take
My Hand" - two staples of the Hill and Range religious catalogue by
Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of modem black gospel music - there was
a suggestion from Jean Aberbach, the younger of the two brothers who
had founded the firm. Since Elvis was recording religious music anyway,
offered the debonair forty-five-year-old Aberbach, why not try a holiday
release like "Here Comes Peter Cottontail," with which the firm had had
great success? Freddy, somewhat more attuned to the likes and dislikes of
their successful young partner-client, was horrified, but Jean, for the first
and only time in what would tum out to be a very long association, persisted.
"I mean, you had to be mad to think Elvis is going to record 'Peter
3 8 8 ", L O V I N G Y O U
Cottontail: " recalled Freddy, "and I told him that, but Jean had no sense
for songs and he insisted. So he brought a lead sheet down to Radio Recorders,
and he put it on Elvis' stand while Elvis was having something to
eat, and Elvis comes back and looks at it and said, 'Who brought that
Bre'r Rabbit shit in here?' '' Whereupon Jean conceded defeat CJean
could laugh at himself, and when he saw Elvis' reaction, he died laughing
- he just disappeared"), but he got the last laugh anyway when he
snuck an instrumental version of the song onto the motion picture soundtrack.
On Monday Elvis reported to the studio for makeup and wardrobe
tests. This would be his first Technicolor film, and he'd always thought
that actors with dark hair, like Tony Curtis, lasted the longest and looked
the best. The makeup man said that with his eyes he should photograph
well with black hair, so they dyed it and Mr. Wallis liked the way it
looked, and they went with the darker coloring. From the start he felt
more comfortable on the Paramount lot than he had ever felt at Fox. Mr.
Wallis treated him with affectionate respect, and it was clear he was not
being seen as just the latest freak, to be trotted out and eyed suspiciously
by the rest of the cast and crew until he had proved himself. Hal Kanter
greeted him with the fond familiarity that only shared experience can
bring, and he immediately took to the music director, an easygoing guy
with a pencil-thin mustache named Charlie O'Curran, who was married
to Patti Page (he had previously been married to Betty Hutton) and who
rolled up his sleeves and went to work with Scotty, D.]., and Bill.
They spent the week first rehearsing, and then recording, the film
soundtrack on the Paramount soundstage. It quickly became evident that
Elvis was uncomfortable in the big open space, with people wandering in
and out, but whether because Radio Recorders was all booked up or because
Hal Wallis truly believed that he had the best facilities for motion
picture recording, with a two-track 35-millimeter sound system that allowed
you easily to bring up the vocal, tone down the instrumentation,
and introduce ambient sound, they persisted at Paramount throughout
the week. There were moments of exasperation when, for example, sultry
Lizabeth Scott, the thirty-four-year-old smoky-voiced heroine of countless
films noirs, strolled in during a take, perhaps to get a closer look at her
costar. Songwriter Ben Weisman, too, showed up unannounced at a session.
Weisman, a protege of Jean Aberbach's who had gotten his first
Elvis cut a few months earlier with "First in Line" and had then written
J A N U ARY-A P R I L 1 9 5 7 '" 3 8 9
"Got a Lot 0 ' Livin' to Do" for the film, was tipped off to the recording
session by Aberbach and flew in from New York with his songwriting
partner, Aaron Schroeder - at their own expense - to make sure that
the song got cut. On the afternoon that Weisman and Schroeder arrived,
Elvis was struggling with the movie's title cut, and it didn't seem like he
would ever get to their song. He had already recorded a version of it at
Radio Recorders, but Weisman was getting increasingly worried that the
number wouldn't make it into the movie.
"So 1 do things sometimes that are very unorthodox, I've learned
sometimes you've got to do things that are a little off-the-wall. Aaron and
1 were sitting in the control booth waiting for our song to be recorded,
and 1 told Aaron during an intermission that 1 was going out there to meet
him. Aaron says, 'Don't go. You don't belong out there.' But 1 went anyway,
and it happened that Elvis was sitting in the comer of this big studio
with nobody around him, playing guitar, and there was a piano right next
to him. So 1 sat down at the piano - he was playing the blues - and 1
jammed with him. He didn't look up. After a chorus or two, he looks up
and says, 'Who are you?' 1 said, 'My name is Ben Weisman. ' He said, 'Ben
Weisman. Didn't you write...' He said, 'Wow.' He was so impressed. He
liked the way 1 was jamming with him. He got up, and he yelled out,
'Guys, get out here: and on the spot they all got together again, and 1 was
there watching, and 1 went back in the control room, and they did the
tune."
Because Wallis had so little faith in Elvis' musicians ("I need them like
1 need a hole in the head," Wallis told Elvis, who insisted that he needed
his boys behind him), he made sure to have a couple of experienced studio
musicians for the session. Hilmer J. "Tiny" Timbrell, an affable native
of British Columbia in his mid thirties, played rhythm guitar, while Dudley
Brooks, forty-three-year-old assistant music director at Paramount and
an alumnus of the Lionel Hampton band, played piano and served as de
facto arranger of the sessions. "Dudley was a little, short, heavyset guy,
black as the ace of spades," said Radio Recorders engineer Thome Nogar,
who met him at the recording studio just a few days later. "For some reason
Elvis took a liking to him, and he would sit there at the piano, and
Dudley would say, 'Well, El, you play it this way - no, use that finger.'
He kind of taught Elvis. "
The band gelled, but the sessions didn't, and even Wallis was forced
to admit that the studio soundstage was not the ideal setting for an Elvis
3 9 0 c-.. L O V I N G YOU
Presley recording. They went back to Radio Recorders the following week to
fix up the soundtrack (in the end they wound up using a judicious mix of studio
and soundstage recordings), but Wallis was hooked by now and even
attended some of the sessions. "I was fascinated by the way Elvis recorded,"
he wrote in his autobiography. "Never bothering with arrangements, he and
his boys noodled around, improvised, ad-libbed, and worked out numbers
for hours. Finally, he would rehearse a number straight through. Night after
long night I watched and listened, fascinated." What he did not put into his
autobiography was the almost daily pressure to which the Colonel was subjecting
him to bring Elvis' pay up to a more suitable level. In the end Wallis
reluctantly came up with a bonus of S50,000 on top of the agreed-upon
SI5,000, which did not quite equal Elvis' Twentieth Century Fox salary but
certainly bore out the Colonel's belief that everything was negotiable.
By then production had started up, and some of Wallis' genuine faith
and fascination with his star carried over into the actual filming. Hal
Kanter had adapted what might have been a conventional Hollywood
musical ("Hey, kids, let's put on a show") into a witty treatment of fame
and disaffection. Here the wily manager was transformed from a cigarchewing
carny into a beautiful, if inaccessible, woman (Lizabeth Scott); the
faithful musicians, who might have been left behind but in the end were
warmly reembraced, became, in this version, Wendell Corey alone; and
Elvis' character was rendered with faithful perplexity as a pained innocent
in a Technicolor world. The music was incorporated into the script in a
way that celebrated its wholesome joyousness, the very "spirituality" that
Sam Phillips had spoken of from the start, without confronting any of its
troublesome social, or generational, implications. Ben Weisman and Aaron
Schroeder's "Got a Lot 0' Livin' to Do" ran like a trouble-free theme
throughout the film, and there was lots of snappy repartee playing off its
audience's, or its author's, knowledge of the real-life drama. The Trouble in
Jacksonville, for example, is put up on the screen in the form of a campaign
to ban Deke Rivers' music, while The Gas-Station Fight in Memphis - or
perhaps it is The Hotel Fight in Toledo - here is transformed into a cafe
fight in which Elvis is goaded into performing a wonderful version of
"Mean Woman Blues," then knocks his tormentor into the jukebox which
has, miraculously, provided his musical accompaniment.
Elvis was seemingly attuned throughout, in character in a way that he
had been able only fitfully to achieve in his debut film, and his musical perJ
A N U A RY-A P R I L 1 9 5 7 c-.. 3 9 1
formances were marvelous representations of his stage act, not the real
thing exactly but close enough to leave no one in the audience in any doubt
as to what the fuss was all about. What was most striking, however, was
not his energy, which was considerable, nor his very convincing representation
of emotion (mostly inner turmoil and wounded pride, in the manner
of James Dean) but the occasional indication of a stillness at the center,
those rare moments of true ease which gave promise of the kind of longterm
career that a Spencer Tracy, or even a Bing Crosby, could enjoy and
that Hal Wallis could well envision for his latest discovery.
He felt at ease with his fellow actors as well. He liked Wendell Corey,
whose acting tips he appreciated (and for whom he later named a cat), and he
felt perfectly comfortable with Dolores Hart, who was younger and did not
have even his experience in the movies. His romance with Dottie seemed to
be cooling, helped along by the Colonel's obvious skepticism of her motives
("The Colonel never wanted anyone to get close," Dottie felt, though she
continued to remain in touch with Elvis' mother), and the Colonel stepped in
on one or two other occasions, too, when he felt that one of Elvis' Hollywood
acquaintances might be "unsuitable." But for all that, there was no
question he felt more at home in Hollywood, dating starlets like Rita
Moreno, with whom he went to see Dean Martin at a Hollywood nightclub,
and Yvonne Lime, a Paramount player who had a small part in the picture
and who was more like a hometown date, "a lot of fun to be with," Elvis told
Press-Scimitar reporter Bob Johnson. "Mostly we'd go to movies or just ride
around looking at things. Sometimes we would play records."
Less idyllic was the situation that seemed to be developing with Scotty
and Bill, and with OJ. to a lesser extent. They didn't like Hollywood, they
were bored just sitting around waiting to be called, and they couldn't
help but feel the slights, real or imagined, that they saw continually coming
their way. To relieve the boredom on the set they would jam with Elvis
between takes. An electrician would plug them in, and they always drew
a crowd, up to the point that Kanter had to beg, "Will you please stop?
We're trying to do some work here!" Off the set they hung around
with Charlie O'Curran, a man who enjoyed his liquor and could ask them
out to his house in Santa Monica without even calling his wife, Patti. For
the most part, though, they were on their own, seeing little of Elvis even
though they were only two or three floors below him at the Hollywood
Knickerbocker and, in Scotty and Bill's case in particular, hurt and resentful
at the separation. Aspiring rockabilly singer Glen Glenn (ne Troutman),
who had first met Elvis in San Diego in April i956 and had subse3
9 2 L O V I N G Y O U
quently become good friends with the band, came by often to see Scotty
and Bill, and Bill would frequently bring him up to see Elvis, who was his
main inspiration.
"Lots of times Bill would go up with us, knock on the door, and then
he would go back down. It wasn't that easy to get in, but he always made
sure. There were always a lot of girls sitting around on the couch and
stuff, talking. One night I remember Elvis had all the acetates for the
soundtrack from Loving You, and he had that old Smiley Lewis song, 'One
Night,' too - that wasn't in the movie, but he cut it at Radio Recorders at
the same time - and he was bragging on it 'cause he played guitar on
that. We sat there listening to every one of those songs, and the girls were
setting around and Black had already left - he kept playing 'One Night'
over and over. That's a good fuckin' record,' he said.
"Bill got real mad one time, 'cause they wouldn't let us in upstairs - I
think it was mainly the Colonel didn't want Elvis to see anybody that
night, but Bill said, 'I ought to go up there and just hit him right in the
nose.' He knew I loved Elvis, and it meant a lot to Bill that he could actually
take me up there to meet him. He was very bitter, because he
thought that Elvis could have put his foot down and done more. Scotty
never would say much, but Bill felt like him and Scotty was the band, they
should be with Elvis, these other guys were just along for the ride."
That was the only real cloud on the horizon, though. Cliff and Gene
CCuz") were getting to feel more at home in Hollywood, too, so much
so that Elvis was embarrassed at times and felt compelled to restrain their
more unencumbered speech and behavior, his cousin's in particular. His
father had shipped out his new white Cadillac so that he could cruise
around town in style. All in all, despite "a little homesick[ness]," he felt
like he was fitting in just fine.
About three weeks into filming, Vernon and Gladys Presley came out
with their friends the Nicholses for an extended stay. They had been
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