is up. And I don't think Elvis would consider making another request,
because I know how he feels personally about it." ''I'm glad for the
studio's sake," Elvis said. ''I'm glad they were nice enough to let me make
this picture because I think it will be the best one I've made."
Jimmie Rodgers Snow arrived on the afternoon of New Year's Day,
and Lamar picked him up at the airport. Snow had been undergoing
something of a spiritual crisis of late, brought on by his recognition of an
increasing dependence on pills and alcohol, but he and Elvis just picked
up where they had left off a year and a half before. "When I first arrived
there was somebody at the door getting his signature on a special delivery.
He just tossed it on the couch, didn't even open it until much later
when he said, 'Oh yeah, my gold record.'
"He introduced me to all his friends, and we ran around all night and
slept all day. When we would come downstairs probably at two or three
in the afternoon, his mother would always be there, sitting in the kitchen
drinking a beer. He'd go up and kiss her, and we'd go down and shoot
pool or sing at the piano, talk about what we were going to do that night,
which was either go see his movie, Jailhouse Rock, at the theater with a
bunch of girls or go roller-skating, things like that. When we went to the
movies, he rented the whole theater, and he'd sit beside me and say,
'What did you think of me in that scene? How'd I do? Was I flat on that
note? Did I hold it too long?' He was just the same. He used to love for me
to imitate Winston Churchill, put a cigar in my mouth and sound just like
Churchill - he'd want me to do that for everybody, and he loved it every
time. It was nothing for him to be driving down the street at night and all
of a sudden put his brakes on, open the car door up, jump out, make a
face back at the cars behind him, and get back in and drive off and laugh.
O C T O B E R 1 9 57-M A R C H 1 9 5 8 447
"Sometimes he'd get serious and sit down at that white piano, and
we'd sing gospel songs. And, of course, I'd been a Christian in 1950, '51, I
didn't stay with it very long but I was being tugged on at that time by God
to go into the ministry, get married and give up my career. So we'd get
serious, which I didn't really want to because I was fighting it then, but
we'd talk about the Lord and he would voice his feelings, and then we
would get off of it and go into fun things."
Cliff and Lamar got into a fight that week over a badminton game,
and Lamar finally egged Cliff to the point that Cliff hit him over the head
with his racket. Mr. Presley was pissed off, and Mrs. Presley got so upset
that Elvis had to fire the two of them. He apologized as they were packing,
trying to sort out what was theirs and what was his COh, just keep
it," he said of every item), and he told them he was sure that once things
had cooled down he could hire them back. It was just that his mama was
so nervous with everything that was going on that she couldn't have that
kind of uproar around the house. "She just couldn't cope with [the idea
of] him being gone," her sister Lillian said. Vernon was tight-lipped about
it, but Gladys' mood was increasingly somber, and her eyes were limpid
pools of sadness.
He asked George to accompany him once again to California, but
George had just started a new job deejaying at WHUY out in Millington,
so he couldn't go. He gave Jimmy Snow the script for King Creole, "because
he wanted to know if I'd be interested in going out to California
with him and maybe do a part in the film. And it was in the bedroom upstairs
as I was reading the script that I made my decision, which I told him
about the next day. I told him I really appreciated the opportunity. It was
something I had wanted to do all my life. 'But: I said, 'strange as it may
seem, I think I'm going to go back and quit the business and go into the
ministry.' Which he thought was wonderful, he was very complimentary
and wished me a lot of luck and anything he could do, just let him know.
So that's what I did."
He celebrated his twenty-third birthday on January 8 with a party at
home and asked Alan Fortas ifhe would accompany Gene and him to California.
"I was working for my father in the junk business, and Elvis asked
me if I thought I could get off for a little while. I said, 'You know how that
is, Elvis. You work for your father, you can do what you want to.' He
said, 'Good, we leave for California in two days.' " At the last minute he
took Cliff back, but Lamar remained in the doghouse for the time being,
4 4 8 '" W A L K I N G I N A D RE A M
s o when they embarked o n January 10 it was just Gene, Cliff, and Alan,
plus the Colonel, "security chief" Bitsy Mott, Freddy Bienstock, and Tom
Diskin. There were huge crowds at every stop, alerted, Alan felt sure, by
an intentional leak from the Colonel's organization. "That was the first
time r d been around the Colonel, and I thought, 'Man, this guy is tough.'
He was just - he didn't trust anybody. Didn't like anybody. At least that
was the impression he gave. You didn't know if he was serious or kidding
- of course he was just looking out for one person: Elvis. He just
didn't want people taking advantage."
They arrived in California on January 13 and reported immediately to
the studio, with soundtrack recording scheduled to begin at Radio Recorders
two days later. This time there was no question of where they
were going to record. Hal Wallis was finally convinced that Elvis knew
what he was doing, and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, at Elvis' request,
were in charge. Leiber and Stoller had been hired by RCA the previous
fall as perhaps the first independent a&r men in the business (while they
were on salary with RCA, they also continued to maintain a profitable relationship
with Atlantic, producing the Coasters, along with numerous
other side ventures). Elvis was clearly their primary responsibility at the
label, and it had been suggested that they would have a relatively free
hand, but so far it hadn't worked out the way they had hoped.
Jerry was living in New York at this point and going out with former
MGM board chairman Nick Schenck's daughter, Marty Page, whose best
friend was divorced from the well-known agent Charlie Feldman.
"Charlie was very much connected to people like Moss Hart and Cole
Porter, and he took a shine to me and was going to try to groom us as
Broadway writers. He liked what we did, but he thought it was kind of kid
stuff and now we were ready for the big time, which was Broadway and
film. He said to me, 'You know what would be marvelous? I have a property
that would make an incredible musical motion picture. It's called A
Walk on the Wild Side [the celebrated novel by Nelson Algren], and it
would be great for Elvis Presley.' He said, 'I'm sure I can get Elia Kazan to
direct, and I think we might get Budd Schulberg to write the screenplay,
and you two guys would write the book.' He said, 'It's perfect. He's handsome,
he's innocent, and he's a victim.'
"I took the idea to the Aberbachs, who were the closest to Colonel
Parker. They watched me in complete silence as I spun this story for
about twenty minutes and made the pitch, and finally Jean said in his
O C T O B E R 1 9 5 7 - M A R C H 1 9 5 8...... 449
Viennese accent, 'If you ever try to interfere with the business or artistic
workings of the process known as Elvis Presley, if you ever start thinking
in this direction again, you will never work for us again. '
"It wasn't long after that, t o be very frank, that w e both got bored,
because we knew there were no possibilities left. It was just going to be
another one like the last one, every movie the same. I mean, you had
three ballads, one medium-tempo, one up-tempo, and one break blues
boogie, usually for a production number. It was too fucking boring. I told
Stoller, 'If I have to write another song like "King Creole," I'll cut my
fucking throat - maybe theirs first.' We talked about - you know,
maybe we're burning up a license to print money. I said, 'You know
what? Bum it up.' 'Cause we could have made fucking history, and those
assholes only wanted to make another nickel the same way."
The sessions proceeded without incident. Leiber and Stoller contributed
three songs, plus a fourth that wasn't used, and for the first time experienced
session players were employed to create a semiauthentic Dixieland
sound. Perhaps the two most interesting songs were "Crawfish," a
duet with rhythm and blues singer Kitty White, which was written by
songwriters Ben Weisman and Fred Wise as a street vendor's cry, and Leiber
and Stoller's "Trouble," a Muddy Waters-styled blues intended
somewhat tongue in cheek but delivered by Elvis with untempered ferocity.
In Jerry Leiber's view, " 'Trouble' was the same kind of song as 'Black
Denim Trousers.' They're both send-ups, and the only people who are
going to take them seriously are Hell's Angels and Elvis Presley. I suppose
there was a bit of contempt on our part. You know, when the guy sang,
Ba boom ba ba boom, 'If you're looking for trouble: you know, 'just
come looking for me' - there's something laughable there. I mean, if you
get Memphis Slim or John Lee Hooker singing it, it sounds right, but Elvis
did not sound right to us. But I would be tolerant. Just like [rhythm and
blues bandleader-arrangerJ Maxwell Davis was tolerant of me when I first
walked in, this little white kid with a twelve-bar blues, and he said, 'That's
nice.' He said, 'I think that's nice.' He didn't say, 'That's full of shit, you
don't know what you're doing.' He said, 'That's nice.' It's a sort of tolerant
attitude with a little bit of tongue in cheek. So in the early days that's
where we were coming from. It sounded sort of comical to us, but
strangely enough to the mass market it wasn't. It was somewhat generational
and somewhat cultural, but they bought it."
They wound up the session in two days. In reality, the score was inde4
5 0 c-... W A L K I N G I N A D R EAM
pendent of the picture; the character that Elvis played was a singer, it was
true, but the story was up-from-poverty, and the protagonist might better
have remained the boxer that he was in the novel in terms of the dramatic
impact of the story.
Elvis had read the book in preparation for making the film. He was
determined to do his very best, because, he told Alan Fortas, this could be
it for him. He got together with his new friend Kitty Dolan to run lines
with him and spoke with concern of what his absence from the scene for
two years might mean. The director, Michael Curtiz, was a sixty-nineyear-
old Hungarian emigre who had been directing films since 1919 and
had made such notable pictures as Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, and Young
Man with a Horn. Elvis was a little taken aback at first when Curtiz told
him he would have to cut his sideburns and lose fifteen pounds for the
role, and he had a great deal of trouble initially understanding Curtiz's accent.
"You just didn't have a lot of fooling around with Curtiz - I mean,
he would embarrass the hell out of you," said Jan Shepard, who played
Elvis' sister in the movie. "But no matter what Curtiz would ask of Elvis,
he would say, 'Okay, you're the boss.' Curtiz said he thought Elvis was
going to be a very conceited boy, but when he started working with him,
he said, 'No, this is a lovely boy, and he's going to be a wonderful actor.'
"The first time I met Elvis was when we went to the doctor's office
for the insurance. I was sitting there, and he walked in with his little group
from Memphis, and then we worked together alone for about a week, because
we did the opening of the show. He was just really young, carefree
- it was like letting a kid loose in a candy store, he was just a lot of
fun and buoyant, not guarded at all. There was a five-and-dime store on
our set, and in the morning I would find earrings and little bracelets, little
five-and-dime stuff on my dressing room table. I used to call him the last
of the big-time spenders!
"He was very concentrated, very focused on playing Danny. For a kid
coming in and just beginning his career he had a great sense of timing;
there was great honesty in his acting. He was a very good listener, and he
just became that young boy, he became Danny in the show. Just like in his
music, he really got involved in his acting, you'd look in his eyes and, boy,
they were really going."
With Walter Matthau as the heavy, Dolores Hart once again as the
fresh-faced ingenue, Carolyn Jones as the offbeat vamp, and Dean Jagger
as the weak, ineffectual father (a stock-in-trade for every teen picture
O C T O B E R 1 9 5 7- M A R C H 1 9 5 8 '" 4 5 1
since Rebel Without a Cause), the cast that Wallis had assembled was a uniformly
good one, and there was a uniformly positive spirit on the set. "I
almost hesitate, I creep up to the sentence," Walter Matthau told a BBC
interviewer, "he was an instinctive actor. Because that almost is a derogation
of his talents. That's saying, 'Well, you know, he's just a dumb animal
who does it well by instinct.' No, he was quite bright, too. He was
very intelligent. Also, he was intelligent enough to understand what a
character was and how to play the character simply by being himself
through the means of the story. Michael Curtiz used to call him Elvy, and
he'd call me Valty. He'd say, 'Now Elvy and Valty, come here, now,
Valty, this is not Academy Award scene. Don't act so much. You are highprice
actor. Make believe you are low-price actor. Let Elvy act.' But Elvy
didn't overact. He was not a punk. He was very elegant, sedate... refined
and sophisticated."
In Carolyn Jones' observation "he was always asking a lot of questions.
God, he was young! I didn't think anybody could be that young! He was
always talking about his folks and about the house he'd just bought them."
Jones suggested that in order to really learn his craft he should consider taking
acting lessons, and the guys picked up one of her lines in the film, "Take
a day out of your life and love me," as a kind of sardonic commentary, to be
trotted out on any number of occasions, in a wide variety of social settings.
One Sunday when he was feeling blue, he told Jan, he spent most of the
day just talking to his mother on the phone, and he was both saddened and
amused as he and the guys retold the story over and over again of how
Dewey had been fired from his new midnight television show on the eve of
their departure from California. The show had commanded a number-one
rating in its afternoon slot, until it had been forced off the air to make room
for Dick Clark's network-syndicated American Bandstand. It was in the
fourth night of its present incarnation when Harry Fritzius, a noted young
abstract painter who appeared in an ape suit on the air, explicitly fondled a
life-size cutout of Jayne Mansfield in an altogether human way. "He embarrassed
the station, and he embarrassed me personally," said station
manager Bill Grumbles. Dewey would continue on the air with a Saturdayevening
show and his nightly radio spot, but his sidekick Harry Fritzius
was finished, "probably the best thing that ever happened to me," declared
Fritzius. 'Tm twenty-five, and it's time I found something to do with
my life."
Crazy old Dewey, the guys all said, and Elvis was tempted to join
452 c,.,. W A L K I N G IN A D REAM
them. He thought about giving Dewey a call, but he knew the complications
that could cause, and he wasn't sure that he wanted to deal with
them now, when everything seemed to be spinning out of control. And
yet, for all of his worries, he had probably never felt more relaxed or at
home on a set. He saw Pat Boone on the Paramount lot one day and
greeted him smilingly with an impromptu rendition of "April Love"; on
the soundstage he serenaded cast and crew alike; and he even got to meet
Marlon Brando, after a fashion. He and Jan Shepard were in the commissary.
"Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti were sitting at a table next to us, and
I remember Cornel Wilde came over and asked for an autograph for his
daughter. Elvis said, 'Can you believe that Cornel Wilde wanted my autograph?'
He was stunned by it. Then I said, 'Elvis, did you know Marlon
Brando is sitting right behind you?' He had his back to him, and he almost
started shaking, and I said, 'You know, he keeps looking over.' He was
just like, you know, 'I couldn't, oh I couldn't, you know, it's Marlon
Brando' - like that. So I said, 'Well, when we get up, all you have to do is
push your chair back and you're going to go right into him.' So as we got
up to go, he bumped into Brando, and Brando got up, of course, and then
they shook hands, and when we went out he said, 'Oh my God, I shook
hands with Marlon Brando!' "
February I was the only day open for RCA recording, and with his induction
date rapidly approaching, Steve Sholes was desperate to get a
final studio session in. Elvis had rehearsed two numbers for the upcoming
date at a January 23 soundtrack session, but he was insistent that Leiber
and Stoller, who had returned to New York after the initial session the
previous week, be there. Dutifully, the Colonel had Tom Diskin inform
Sholes that their presence was required - Elvis by now considered them
a kind of "good-luck charm." Sholes wrote, telegrammed, and attempted
to call, but all to no avail, because Stoller was unable to locate his partner,
who was lying incommunicado in the emergency ward of a Harlem hospital
with pneumonia. "Nobody knew where I was, I didn't know where I
was for a couple of days. When I came to my senses, I started calling
around. I called Mike, and I got out of the hospital, and when I got home
there was a stack of telegrams jammed under my door, and they were all
about the same thing: 'You must come to L.A. immediately. '
"I called the Aberbachs, and I got Julian on the phone. H e said, 'You
must come to California immediately. Presley is ready to record, and he
will not go in the studio without you.' I said, 'I don't think I can come
O C T O B E R 1 9 5 7 - M A R C H 1 95 8 453
immediately, but I'll see.' So I called my doctor, and he told me absolutely
not to go anywhere for two weeks, and I called them back and they
started to get real nasty. Finally, Parker got on the phone and said, 'Boy,
you better get your ass out here or else.' He said, 'By the way, did you get
my contract for the new projects?' I said, 'No, it might have slipped by. I
opened up about eight telegrams, and they were all the same, so I figured
the rest weren't any different.' He said, 'You better open up the rest.'
"So I opened them up, and there was in fact another piece of mail
from Colonel Parker's office, and it said, 'Enclosed you'll find the contract.
Please execute and return. ' And I looked at the piece of paper, and it
had nothing on either side, but it had a line at the bottom with a space for
my signature. And on the right-hand side was a line for Tom Parker that
was signed by him. So I got on the phone and said, 'There must be some
kind of mistake, Tom. There's just a blank piece of paper here with a
place for my name.' He said, 'There's no mistake, boy, just sign it and return
it.' I said, There's nothing on the paper.' He said, 'Don't worry, we'll
fill it in later.'
"We never worked with him again. That was it. We never talked to
each other again."
The session was a disaster. They spent eight hours in the studio and
got two barely usable tracks. Elvis was a wreck - it was as if the magic
had worn off, and for the first time the Colonel was embarrassed both for
his boy and for the waste of RCA's (and Elvis' and his own) time and
money. Two weeks later Elvis wanted to go back into the studio to repair
the damage, and there was some talk among all the parties about arranging
another session, but that would have meant Colonel acknowledging
some degree of failure to Steve Sholes, and he was not prepared to do
that. So in the end Sholes had to make do with what he had. For the Colonel
the whole experience underlined one fundamental point: never let
anyone, let alone a songwriter, get in the middle of your business. In future,
he stressed emphatically to his brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott, keep
those people away from Elvis, watch very carefully anyone who got anywhere
near him, and, for God's sake, keep them away from the suite.
Toward the end of February, just before most of the cast and crew
were scheduled to depart for New Orleans for a week of location shoots,
Dolores Hart staged a surprise birthday party for Jan Shepard at her
home. Although Elvis was invited, no one expected him to show up, and
Jan was surprised enough just to discover most of her fellow cast mem4
5 4 '" W A L K I N G I N A D REAM
bers, along with young Paramount contract players like Ty Hardin and
Edith Head's assistant, Pat Richards. "But I was really shocked when Elvis
walked in, and he had this big stuffed tiger cat on his shoulders. We
named it 'Danny Boy: because he always used to sing that song on the
set. The other thing was, I had all these little kids in the neighborhood
who wanted pictures of him, and we had this running gag, where I kept
saying, 'Elvis, bring some pictures in for my birthday. ' So his second gift to
me was a movie camera with a light bar and, I think, three rolls of film,
and he said, 'Go ahead, take your pictures now.' Which I did, even
though 1'd never used a movie camera before!
"It was wonderful. Everyone was cooking and helping out in the
kitchen, and we all had dinner, and Ty Hardin, who had studied to be an
engineer, made a cake that looked like a theater, with a marquee and everything.
Then after dinner we sat in the living room, and Elvis sat down
at the piano and Ty had brought his guitar and started playing, and then
Elvis took the guitar and Dolores had her clarinet, and Dolores' mother
was dressed up like Topsy and was doing a number from Topsy. It was
kind of a free-for-all, just, you know, just a very relaxing time, and he
stayed till the end, which was really amazing, but there was nobody there
that was going to interfere with him. It was really nice."
Red West showed up the next week on a two-week leave from the
Marines. He had stopped by Graceland to pay his respects, and Mrs. Presley
called Elvis on the phone, and Elvis invited him to fly out the next day.
"When I got up to say goodbye," Red wrote in Elvis: What Happened?,
"she just sort of called me back, and I heard her say what she had said a
hundred times: 'Bob, look after my boy.' " Red arrived in Hollywood, "a
crew-cut hick sonofabitch in a Marine uniform on a Paramount movie
set," they had their first extended reunion in more than a year, and Elvis
asked him if he wanted to go to New Orleans with the troupe two days
later.
While most of the film company flew, Elvis and his friends rode the
train. Red, Cliff, Gene, and Alan all accompanied him, along with Carolyn,
her husband, Aaron Spelling, and Nick Adams, whom Red met for
the first time and who amused everyone with his impressions on the long
trip. In New Orleans, the Colonel, who had argued bitterly against a location
shoot for security reasons, was, not surprisingly, proved right. "Hal
Wallis loved locations," said Alan Portas, whose opinion of the Colonel
was considerably higher than it had been at the start. "He said, 'I had
O C T O B E R 1 9 57-MA R C H 1 9 5 8 4 5 5
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in their prime. I had this star and that
star..: Colonel said, 'I don't care who you had, Wallis, you never had
Elvis Presley: "
Cliff was given a line in the picture ("See you next week, baby," he
said to a prostitute while dressed up in a sailor's uniform), and the guys
got a big kick out of kidding Alan that he would soon be making his
movie debut as well. They had him walking around in makeup all day
with Kleenex stuck into the collar of his shirt, convinced that his scene
would be coming up any minute. Meanwhile, Cliff met a kid whose father
owned a clothing store and conned him out of blazers for the whole gang.
According to George, who joined the group in New Orleans, "Cliff said
we worked for Elvis, and it would be real sharp if all of Elvis' guys wore
blazers, uniform-style. The guy said, 'Yeah?' Cliff said, 'Man, I'll tell you
what, what do those blazers sell for?' The guy says, 'About fifty dollars
apiece: Cliff said, There are five guys that work for Elvis, there's Elvis
and Colonel Parker. We need seven blazers, but we ain't gonna pay for
them. Here's what we are going to do for you. You give us the jackets,
and you can advertise that Elvis' traveling companions and Elvis Presley
are wearing clothes from your clothing store:
"We said, 'Cliff, Colonel Parker is going to have a fit, Elvis has never
endorsed anything: Cliff said, 'Don't worry about it,' and next day, man,
everyone has a brand-new blazer, and the guy even has one for Colonel
Parker. So Cliff tells him, 'There's Colonel Parker, you just go over there
and say, "Colonel Parker, I'm so-and-so, and I'd like to present you with
this blazer as a gift.", Well, he goes over and presents the blazer, and Colonel
immediately picks up something is wrong, and he comes over and
says, 'Cliff, what the hell are you doing? You know Elvis doesn't endorse
anything. He never has, and we don't intend to start now: And Cliff says,
'Wait a minute, Colonel, look, Elvis wanted us to have these blue blazers,
and Elvis wanted one, so if Elvis went down and bought one, Colonel,
and he bought one for all of the guys, the guy is going to say the same
thing anyway, so we might as well just get them for free: The Colonel
said, 'That makes sense,' and he just kind of shook his head and walked
away. But we all got blue blazers."
They took the train back to Hollywood, and Hal Wallis threw a
breakup party at the studio commissary. He wasn't worried about the
army, Elvis told columnist Vernon Scott, who was present. It couldn't be
any worse than the merry-go-round he'd been on for the past two years,
456 '" W A L K I N G I N A D R EAM
and he certainly knew what hard work was - he'd been working since he
was fourteen. "Had to. Got a job at Loew's State Theatre in Memphis as
an usher. They fired me for fighting in the lobby.... I've worked in factories,
drove a truck, cut grass for a living, and did a hitch in a defense plant.
I'll do whatever they tell me, and I won't be asking no special favors." It
was going to be harder on his folks, he said, than it would be on him.
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