CHAPTER 9
When Colonel Parker took Elvis to Hollywood in the spring of ’56 fresh from his Stage Show appearances (“He can’t last,” proclaimed Jackie Gleason, the producer. “I tell you flatly, he can’t last.”), he was the hottest unproven actor in the world. Still, every movie producer instinctively realized that as the new emotional target of the youth generation, Elvis could inherit the audience James Dean left behind when he died in a car crash in late ’55. All they had to do was get him on the screen.
On April 6, Colonel sat down with producer Hal Wallis at Paramount and hammered out a deal for three pictures at $450,000, later to swell to $2.3 million for seven movies in seven years.
“People asked me if I’m going to sing in the movies,” Elvis, who hoped to separate his music and acting careers, told a reporter. “I’m not, as far as I know. ’Cause I took strictly an acting test. Actually, I wouldn’t care too much about singing in the movies. . . . I want to be the kind of actor that stays around for a long time.”
The test had been for The Rainmaker, which Wallis planned to make with Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn. Elvis had believed that the N. Richard Nash classic would be his first picture. But the role of Jimmy Curry went to Earl Holliman, instead.
Immediately, Wallis loaned Elvis out to Twentieth Century-Fox for a post–Civil War drama to be called The Reno Brothers, starring Richard Egan and Debra Paget. The third-billed Elvis was upset to learn that he would be singing in one scene, after all.
Yet when advance orders for the single of “Love Me Tender” rolled in at more than a million copies, the film itself was retitled and the producer added three more songs to take advantage of the singer’s popularity. Elvis, dubbed a “howling hillbilly” by Life magazine, was inconsolable. The movie made back its cost within three days, which told Wallis that Elvis could carry a picture—as long as he toted a guitar.
Before his second movie, Loving You, went into production, the star met with writer/director Hal Kanter and immediately got to the point. “He said, ‘Do I have to smile very much in the picture?’” Kanter recalls. “He said, ‘I’ve been watching Bogart, and Dean, and Brando, and they don’t smile very much. I don’t want to do that, either. If I don’t smile, I’m gonna get ’em.’” But since Loving You was written around Elvis’s perceived persona—a country boy finds overnight success in the music business—he had little choice.
After his first two films, Elvis told the press, “I went to Hollywood [because] that’s how it works. You get a record, and then you get on television, and then they take you to Hollywood to make a picture. . . . I wasn’t ready for that town, and it wasn’t ready for me.”
Yet both were fairly prepared for Jailhouse Rock. Like Loving You, Elvis’s third picture was a semiautobiographical story, chosen purely as Presley product, to sell tickets and records and not to a build his profile as an actor—even as Elvis worked on his technique to make sure it did. Colonel wangled $250,000 plus a piece of the profits from MGM for Elvis’s time, but the star took it all in stride: “Tomorrow I may not be worth a nickel.”
Such modesty placed Elvis in good stead with his fellow cast and crew members, who noticed that he arrived on the set focused and prepared and that he brought them coffee in the mornings himself, even before he got his own.
They also appreciated his humor. When a hair-cutting scene called for a barber to shear a specially fitted wig, and not Elvis’s real hair underneath, a hush came over the room as locks began to fall on Elvis’s shoulders. Suddenly, the whirring of the shears stopped short. “Oh, God, I think I cut his hair,” came the barber’s shaken voice. Elvis quickly spoke up: “Man, there’s Frankie Avalon fans everywhere!”
Afterward, Elvis would make King Creole, a gritty picture set in the New Orleans underworld, based on Harold Robbins’s novel A Stone for Danny Fisher. Here, Elvis, who had begun to show a natural ease before the camera, would do the finest acting of his career. But for the most part, the direction of Elvis’s films had already been set. “He was just too famous, too fast,” says screenwriter Allan Weiss (Girls! Girls! Girls! and Fun in Acapulco). “The snowball was already rolling, and there was no way for it not to continue down the hill.”
LAMAR FIKE: Hal Wallis had the biggest role in shaping Elvis’s movie career. Of course, as soon as he bought him, he loaned him out to Twentieth Century-Fox for Love Me Tender. But that was to test the waters, I think. Wallis made Elvis in Hollywood. And Wallis eventually ruined him. Wallis and Colonel had a kind of strange relationship. They were next-door neighbors in Palm Springs. But the Colonel wore Wallis out. Just beat him up, day and night. The Colonel was rough on everybody. He had “the property.”
MARTY LACKER: Parker got Wallis to do what he wanted. And the reason Parker kept the house close to where Wallis lived is he wanted to know what was going on. Colonel committed Elvis to a long-term agreement at essentially fixed prices. That was basically to get his foot in the door. But who knows what kind of deal he had with Wallis? We know Colonel got credit as “technical adviser” on all of the movies. That must have been a salaried perk.
BILLY SMITH: When Elvis first went out to Hollywood, he was green as a gourd. I don’t think he’d ever even been in a class play. So he was uncomfortable being around his costars. It’s obvious in Elvis’s Love Me Tender that he overacted. But he didn’t have much direction. And he was distracted a lot because he fell in love with Debra Paget.
Elvis would always be bad about romancing his costars, and it started on the very first movie. Before he got real famous and went to Hollywood, he’d pull all kinds of tricks to get a woman he was interested in to pay attention to him. He even faked a fainting spell with Anita Carter [of the Carter Family] when they were on the road together in ’55. He went so far as to go to the hospital on that deal. Elvis was totally captivated by her singing and by her looks. And now he really had this desire to be with Debra Paget. But she was a mama’s girl, and striving to be a big star, and to her, Elvis was just another actor. He thought she was beautiful, and he searched for that look in almost every woman after that. Even Priscilla was a variation on Debra Paget. Look at the strong jawline and the eyes.
I heard that he proposed to Debra Paget, and she turned him down. I don’t think he ever proposed to her, but hell, he may have.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis proposed to a lot of girls in the early years, but I think he thought that was what he was supposed to do. We were taught as kids that you grow up, smoke cigarettes, and get married. But he didn’t really want to get married. He chased everything in skirts. Especially in California.
MARTY LACKER: You’ve got to remember that this was Elvis’s first picture. All of a sudden, he was looking at this movie star, who was so much different than the girls he had known. But she wouldn’t have anything to do with him romantically off the set. Supposedly, she was going out with Howard Hughes.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis would go over to Debbie’s house. She lived with her family. And there would always be some car out there following Elvis and Debbie around. The assumption was that it was Hughes’s people. And later on, we found out it was. Elvis was fascinated by Hughes, but contrary to what you might read elsewhere, Elvis never met him and he never talked to Hughes on the telephone, especially not on a regular basis.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis wasn’t big on talking on the phone to begin with. People thought he just picked up the phone and called whoever he wanted. He didn’t. The guys in the group kept numbers for him. If Elvis wanted to make a phone call, the guys made it, and then when they got the party he wanted, Elvis got on the phone.
MARTY LACKER: About Elvis falling for his costars . . . there’s some guy making the rounds of the tabloid TV shows saying he’s the love child of Elvis and Dolores Hart, who played his girlfriend in Loving You and King Creole. She left show business in 1963 and became a nun, and this guy claims she dropped out because she was pregnant and that she kept quiet about it for the love of Elvis and his career. All of us were around all the time then, and if something like that had happened, Elvis would have talked about it. He would have been scared as hell. This guy calls himself Elvis Aaron Presley, Jr. And get this—he’s an Elvis impersonator, cape and all.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis was bound and determined that Hollywood wasn’t going to change him. But it started in little ways. He had his teeth capped in ’56, I believe. Some of the Alfred Wertheimer pictures of his early RCA recording sessions show him with his natural teeth. But somebody decided he had to have new ones. Nobody teased him about getting all dandified because his teeth looked so good before that it was hard to tell the difference, except for the whiteness. And for a little gap he had. He also had the warts removed from his hands. You can see them in that piece of film where he’s on the phone doing an interview with Hy Gardner for his TV show [Hy Gardner Calling!].
MARTY LACKER: When he was a kid, Elvis liked Tony Curtis a lot. He saw him on the screen in Son of Ali Baba, when he worked as an usher at Loews in ’52. Elvis thought he had the ideal masculine look. He had that shiny black hair and blue eyes. Some people say Elvis copied his ducktail haircut. I don’t know, because he liked Rudolph Valentino, too. But from then on, Elvis wanted the black hair.
BILLY SMITH: Right after Love Me Tender, Elvis made the most dramatic change in his looks. That’s when he realized what makeup and color could do. For Loving You, he dyed his hair black, like his mama colored hers. She did that because she was getting gray. But as best I remember, it was Aunt Gladys’s idea for him to dye his. She said, “I think it would bring out the blue in your eyes.” His natural hair was blond to brown, but he dyed it bright blond for a real short spell. There’s an early publicity picture of that. When he dyed it black, Gladys said, “You got that Tony Curtis look now.”
MARTY LACKER: Elvis started dyeing his hair for the movies, but he’d worn makeup from time to time on his little shows around the Memphis area. A little eye shadow, maybe some mascara. There were times during the movie years when he went home and never bothered to wash it off. He just wore it the rest of the day. He liked the look it gave him. He even wore it to the recording sessions. Ray Walker, of the Jordanaires, tells a story about how Elvis got tickled about something and laughed until he cried. And then he said, “Man, I can’t afford to shed any tears or my mascara will run.”
Of course, in the seventies, when he went to visit President Nixon, he had on enough mascara for the Avon Lady. But he’d worn it some before the movie days, in the early fifties.
BILLY SMITH: I don’t remember right off when that started. I think seeing his mama try new things might have had something to do with it. Back when he started doing the movies, he got a makeup kit. He kept eyeliner and pancake makeup in it so that when he wasn’t at the studio, he could touch up if he wanted. He kept a lot of little things in it. He just liked the looks of it, and he liked saying, “This is my makeup kit.” It was a little black bag with drawers, and it had a little key, so all the drawers locked. It was a little-bitty thing, about six to eight inches wide and about ten inches high.
I remember he bought several containers of pancake makeup, different shades of it. Actually, he tried some on me. He wanted everybody to wear it. I thought he was doing some “guinea-pigging,” trying it on other people to see how it looked. And, yeah, he would use mascara on his lashes, especially after he dyed his hair. Then he dyed his eyebrows and eyelashes, so he wouldn’t need mascara anymore.
It was funny. When he had it all together, Elvis was proud of the way he looked. He’d tell you in a minute, “I’m the best-looking son of a bitch you’ve ever seen!”
MARTY LACKER: On those first two movies, Elvis stayed at the Hollywood Knickerbocker, on Ivar Avenue. His parents went, too. Elvis rented the whole eleventh floor. He’d sit up there and write his name in lighter fluid on the glass-top coffee table, and then set it on fire, watch it blaze. Girls remember stuff like that. Then, for Loving You, he moved to the Beverly Wilshire. That was his home in Hollywood until he started renting houses in the sixties.
BILLY SMITH: Vernon and Gladys ended up being extras in Loving You. They’re in the audience during the TV broadcast. Aunt Gladys is in the aisle seat in the fourth row. You can see her if you look real quick. Uncle Vernon is sitting next to her. She went out there not because she wanted to go to Hollywood but because she was afraid something would happen to Elvis. Eventually, when he started taking sleeping pills, it decreased his sleepwalking. But Gladys wanted somebody with him all the time. When he was making Loving You, he almost walked out the eleventh-floor window of the Beverly Wilshire. He got up one night, and the window was open, and Gene caught him just in time.
In ’57, he had this recurring dream that guys were trying to kill him. He’d get in a fight, and they’d have knives, and they’d try to stab him. Sometimes, he’d jump up and grab something and break it and gesture real wild with his fists clenched up.
Elvis had a lot of nightmares where somebody was trying to hurt him. The one about the knives started when him and Gene went down to Mexico after some shows in ’56. Elvis dreamed that these guys were trying to jump him and cut him up. In the dream, they were on a big rock and trying to back him up and surround him. Elvis was acting it out and fighting like mad. He jumped up in the bed, and he started swinging the pillow around, and then he started throwing glasses and pitchers of water all over Gene, who didn’t appreciate it too much.
One time I didn’t know he had been asleep, and I come up to the door, and he was just crazy. I got him calmed down, and he said, “I thought I got rid of you.” I said, “Got rid of me? What do you mean? I didn’t go nowhere.” And he said, “I thought I killed you. I had this dream that you were trying to stab me. I got the knife away and cut you, and you were dying. And you kept saying, ‘I’m not going to die,’ and I kept saying, ‘Hell, yes, you’re going to die.’ ” We laughed about it, but it was kind of disturbing, you might say.
Anyway, that, plus the sleepwalking, is why Aunt Gladys encouraged the first guys to hang around Elvis. Junior Smith, another of the cousins, went along in the early days. But Aunt Gladys always liked Red and Gene, especially. She thought Red could protect him and Gene could kind of watch him.