Authors: Alanna Nash
“The Colonel demanded everything to be squeaky clean,” says one former RCA employee, “But it would have been impossible for him to do some of the things that he did without the
Mafia—in the music business, in television, and in the movies—because until the early ’70s, it was as important to have a working relationship with the mob as it was to have a
lawyer and accountant.”
Elvis had gone back to Las Vegas immediately after completing
G.I. Blues
with Juliet Prowse in June 1960. Prowse, a sometime girlfriend of Sinatra, pursued a
career as a dancer in European nightclubs before coming to Hollywood, and her brief sexual trysts with Elvis stirred his fantasies of wicked nights in Paris.
Parker had succeeded in emasculating Elvis’s dangerous hooligan image of 1956, but underneath it all, the seemingly conservative, sanitized Elvis had come home from Europe a more
licentious man than the boy who’d left. The showgirls of the Lido and the Moulin Rouge in Paris were far more decadent than the Vegas dancers he’d known, and his familiarity with pills,
especially uppers, was so educated and obsessive that he talked seriously of buying his own drugstore for a steady supply.
Furthermore, other members of his entourage, especially Lamar Fike, who’d accompanied him to Germany, also shared his fondness and encouraged his indulgence. “He got just wild as a
goat in ’60, because he was loose from the army, which he hated with a passion,” says Fike. “After the service, the biggest change, other than becoming harder, was that he became
much more what people thought he should be.”
That included playing the good soldier, ad infinitum, beginning with
G.I. Blues,
the first of several pictures in which he wore a military uniform, a plot device that deeply pleased the
Colonel. A musical comedy,
G.I. Blues
was light, semiautobiographical fare aimed straight at his hardcore fan base. With Elvis romancing a fräulein, baby-sitting an infant, and
crooning “Wooden Heart” to a group of children gathered at a puppet show, the picture would prove a “howling success,” in the words of Paul Nathan, ranking the fourteenth
highest-grossing film of 1960. Until those numbers came in, the studio would consider Elvis for a version of
The Three Penny Opera
and a remake of
The Rainmaker,
but never again
would Paramount put him in a gritty drama like
King Creole.
To promote Presley’s return to Hollywood, Parker rolled out the snow machinery as never before. First he reprised the triumphant cross-country trek—so reminiscent of the great
political campaigns—setting Elvis up in a private car of the Southern Pacific’s Sunset Limited with a gaggle of reporters, who also witnessed the massive fan turnout on the fifty stops
of the three-day trip.
“We feel sure that by the time
G.I. Blues
appears on the screens through the world, some of this effort surely will pay off,” Parker wrote Wallis, enclosing a list of plugs
he’d secured on TV shows, journalists he’d personally contacted, and even foreign rulers visiting the film set.
But it already had paid off: Elvis’s arrival in Los Angeles was the lead story on radio and TV, with newspapers shoving Charles de Gaulle’s Canadian visit and
the Humphrey-Kennedy debate below the fold on page one. Reporters noted Elvis’s attire, which took a nod from his European stay and reflected what he thought was his new level of
sophistication—a black silk mohair tux, ruffled white shirt, black silk ascot, and black suede shoes topped with silver buckles. “His be-rhinestoned cuff links,” said
Billboard,
“were the size of 50-cent pieces.”
With a change of studios, Elvis was optimistic that his next film roles would also present him as a changed man. He had barely a month off before he reported to Twentieth Century–Fox in
August to begin work on
Flaming Star,
a dramatic Western in which he played the son of a white father and a Kiowa Indian mother torn between the cultures.
Producer David Weisbart saw the picture as a showcase for Presley’s acting skills, and appealed to studio head Buddy Adler to keep the musical numbers to a minimum. Unlike Paramount, which
presented Elvis primarily as an entertainer, Twentieth Century–Fox believed that selling Elvis as a dramatic actor could attract an even wider audience.
“I have sweated over the script for the past couple of days trying to find places for Presley to sing,” Weisbart wrote two months before filming began. “I cannot see how it is
possible for Elvis to break into song without destroying a very good script. . . . Instead of presenting a gimmicked up picture with Elvis Presley, we’d be offering a pretty legitimate
picture that represents growth in Presley’s career and therefore should be fresh and exciting as far as his fans are concerned.”
But at a lunch with the Colonel the following day, Weisbart was overruled. “We want all the best possible results for this picture,” Parker said, “including the hundreds of
thousands of dollars worth of exploitation represented by a good record release by Elvis Presley.” The Colonel had no interest in reading the script, he added, and became paranoid when
Weisbart asked his input for selecting a director. “I would not know whether you would need a sensitive director or some other director, even if I had read the script,” he followed up
in writing, “as this is not one of my qualifications. If someone is using me as a scapegoat, I would like to know the reason. I do not wish to work under any unpleasant conditions over which
I have no control.”
Parker continued to fight the producer at every turn, even when Weisbart asked Freddy Bienstock to find a good title song and three or four others in keeping with the era. The most important
thing, Weisbart said,
is that the material be selected purely on Elvis’s singing and not be dependent on a modern arrangement and band. The Colonel was quick to balk at
those criteria, and at the studio’s selection for the title song, insisting it wouldn’t be a hit single. Weisbart needed to understand the formula: Elvis’s movies would promote
the soundtrack albums, and the single from the soundtrack would publicize the film. It was an ideal commercial equation.
“I think Parker is more interested in selling records than he is [in] building a motion picture career for Presley and making fortunes out of his picture reruns,” Charles Einfield,
Fox’s vice president of advertising and publicity, wrote to Weisbart. “It’s a helluva way for a partner to act. Too bad.”
In the end, only two of the four musical numbers remained in the final cut, which especially pleased Elvis, who found the songs embarrassingly lightweight and inappropriate. Director Don Siegel,
later to make his name with Clint Eastwood’s
Dirty Harry,
was so impressed with Elvis’s dramatic ability that he suggested the picture be advertised with the tag line
“Elvis Acts!”—a takeoff on the “Garbo Speaks” campaign for the - actress’s first talking picture.
Those issues were still being sorted out when the studio began planning its next Presley picture,
Wild in the Country,
with producer Jerry Wald and director Philip Dunne, who had won
acclaim for his screenplay of
How Green Was My Valley.
Already Parker was proving difficult, wanting to cut the forty-five-day shooting schedule in half and, over the objections of his
client, harping that the picture must have a minimum of four Elvis songs, preferably five or more. On that point, he had the backing of studio head Spyros Skouras.
Fox based the film on J. R. Salamanca’s novel
The Lost Country,
with its plot of an innocent farm boy enmeshed in a tragic affair with his older teacher. In casting Hope Lange,
with her icy blond beauty, director Dunne added yet another dimension of class discrepancy, though screenwriter Clifford Odets made the relationship even more taboo in altering the boy’s
character to that of an Appalachian delinquent and transforming the teacher into a court-appointed psychiatrist. Dunne found Elvis “an excellent dramatic actor, a natural actor,” and
perfect to portray, as Wald said in the story conference, “the gifted individual, the soul born with special wings . . . whose specialness is at once a thing of wonder and beauty and
compliment.”
Throughout filming, Parker, as before, seemed more preoccupied with
his record release schedule than with looking out for Elvis’s welfare. He busied himself writing
nasty letters complaining about a proposed title change in England—he’d already notified the fan club as to the original title—and about the importance of not leaking any
information about the music, as it confused fans about upcoming singles. “I have never advised a studio how to make a picture,” he wrote to Wald. “I am always willing to
cooperate, but we know our record business!” Indeed, the Colonel was negotiating a new amendment to Elvis’s RCA contract, which guaranteed Presley $1,000 per week from an earlier
contract, plus an annual payment of $300,000 against royalties. Parker instructed RCA to divert $100,000 of it to All Star Shows for promotion, as per his 75–25 split with Elvis.
Otherwise, the Colonel spent his time at the studio writing press releases, including one with an oddly defensive tone in which he denied being a “Svengali who has hypnotized a country boy
into becoming one of the great entertainers of our times.” Furthermore, he wrote, “Elvis picks his own songs for all occasions, including motion pictures. The Colonel’s control in
this area consists only of suggestion and . . . eliminating patently unsuitable songs.”
But for whom? Like
Flaming Star,
which initially flopped, appearing only one week on the National Box Office Survey,
Wild in the Country
never found its niche. One faction of
the audience came for Elvis’s glitz and grind, another for the pathos of Odets. Both were disappointed. “When we previewed,” Dunne remembered, the audience laughed when we came to
the songs . . . they were going with the story. I shot them so they could be dropped out, and I wish they would drop them out of the prints now. They’d see a good movie.”
Without significant box office,
Wild in the Country
would be Elvis’s last challenging dramatic role and his final alliance with a serious director. He seemed to sense it, asking
Dunne if they might work together again after his next picture for Paramount,
Blue Hawaii.
Dunne declined, knowing the future would hold only more typical vehicles, “the usual
bikinis, you know.”
Elvis started principal photography on
Blue Hawaii
two days after his much-ballyhooed U.S.S.
Arizona
concert. Apart from a pair of Memphis charity shows in which he warmed up
the old magic using elements of “Negro cotton field harmony, camp meeting fervor, Hollywood showmanship, beatnik nonchalance, and some of the manipulations of mass psychology,” as the
hometown paper raved, the Hawaii concert, produced,
like the Memphis charity shows, by Parker’s old friend Al Dvorin, would be Elvis’s first real return to the
stage in more than three years.
While Hawaii always nurtured the Colonel’s jovial side—he did a hula dance for Bob Moore when the bass player brought his home movie camera out on the beach—he positively
reveled in his opportunity to lord it over the admirals and generals who came to a meeting in Parker’s suite at the Hawaiian Village Hotel, and invited two of Hawaii’s top radio
deejays, Ron Jacobs and Tom Moffatt, to witness his fun. As Parker predicted, the brass arrived full of skepticism about this Tennessee Colonel, whose suite resembled a carnival booth, with
Elvis’s promotional pictures and movie posters plastered on the walls and RCA Nipper dogs peering out from behind the furniture.
“He started snowing them,” recalls Jacobs, “telling them how important they were to the security of the world. After that, he said if they’d just line up, why, he’d
give them a little something from Elvis. So all these guys in charge of the military in the Pacific and Asia got in line and stood there anxiously, and Parker went over to a trunk that was full of
Elvis memorabilia. Then the Colonel reached in very carefully, almost secretly, and stingily started handing out these tiny Elvis pocket calendars, one to each admiral and general.”
As they left, “one of the admirals saluted him!” Moffatt adds. “It was ‘yes, sir’ to the Colonel.”
Yet not everyone was awed. When one high-ranking officer had the temerity to ask for a complimentary pass to the show, Parker refused, barking that ticket sales were to tally nearly $52,000,
and, “every penny . . . must go to the fund!” Why, even he and Elvis were buying their own way in. But then the Colonel got a glint in his eye and reconsidered, purposely seating the
admiral between the black chauffeur he’d been assigned and a navy seaman who had just joined up. To have such authority figures under his thumb, aggrandizing him and soiling themselves in
public in one fell swoop, apparently brought the Colonel supreme joy.
Parker had booked his old friend Minnie Pearl on the bill, and until the moment they arrived at the Honolulu International Airport, she hadn’t realized “how encapsulated Elvis was in
his fame.” With three thousand screaming women scurrying to get to the plane, “I began to get these chilling feelings that maybe I didn’t want to be all that close to
Elvis—the fans were all along the route he was taking to the hotel, and my husband was afraid that we’d be trampled trying to get inside. I felt myself being lifted completely off my
feet by all these people.
“We did the show on a Saturday, and Sunday afternoon, a bunch of us were down on Waikiki Beach, cavorting and kidding and having a big time. We got to talking about
how we wished Elvis could come down and be with us, and we turned and looked up at his penthouse, which was facing the ocean. He was standing on the balcony, looking down at us, this solitary
figure, lonely looking, watching us have such a good time. He was just getting ready to start making the film, and he literally was a prisoner because of the fans. We sat there on the beach and
talked about how it would be—what a price you pay for that sort of fame.”
In preparation for
Blue Hawaii,
Wallis wrote Parker with strict orders for Elvis to get into shape. “It is very important that [he] look lean and hard, and well-tanned . . . he
should have a good overall coat of tan on his body as well as his face. I will appreciate it if you will talk to him about watching his weight.” At the end, Wallis recommended a good sun
lamp.