After Viva Las Vegas, Elvis became increasingly chagrined at the quality of both his movies and his records. Although his pictures are sometimes kindly referred to as “the last great series of Hollywood star vehicles,” as critic Dave Marsh put it, nearly all the movies made after 1960 were assembled around Elvis’s personality—or the Hollywood moguls’ perception of it—the way larger movies were once fashioned around female stars such as Shirley Temple or Mae West. Presley pictures were guaranteed to pull a certain bankable gross just because he was in them.
Therefore, Colonel and the studios figured it wasn’t important who the costars were or how transparent the plot. Elvis always played a “man’s man,” such as a crop duster or a stock car racer—an honest, do-right fellow saddled with a troublemaking sidekick. In the end, the two are routinely pulled out of their jam by Elvis’s take-charge gumption and the goodwill of a beautiful woman somehow involved in their predicament. With story lines like those, it didn’t much matter the quality of director, cameraman, or film editor—everything was going to look dated, anyway. As such, the budgets got skimpier ($800,000 for Kissin’ Cousins, compared with $4 million for Blue Hawaii) to allow a bigger profit.
The songs in these movies were equally formulaic, as was their use. One—usually sung over the opening credits—was always up-tempo and full of optimistic attitude. The remainder can be found sprinkled throughout the film every ten or fifteen minutes. Almost without exception, these supplementary tunes are instantly forgettable. If the sixties movies boasted a couple of worthwhile songs (“Can’t Help Falling in Love” from Blue Hawaii, “Return to Sender” from Girls! Girls! Girls!), the raw rock ’n’ roll—the guttural sound of a class of people never granted even the slightest privilege—was long gone.
Instead, the bland pop songs that made up the soundtracks were too often along the pathetic lines of “Song of the Shrimp” (Girls! Girls! Girls!), “Cotton Candy Land” (It Happened at the World’s Fair), “(There’s) No Room to Rumba in a Sports Car” (Fun in Acapulco), and “Petunia, the Gardener’s Daughter” (Frankie and Johnny). Elvis’s singles, for the most part, also came from the movies, and the soundtracks were often recorded in one day, with minimal retakes.
On Girl Happy, director Boris Sagal, who’d sensed Elvis’s disillusionment, heard him complaining about the manure he was asked to turn into music. The director allegedly took Elvis aside and encouraged him to give up the hackneyed pictures and to go east to study the craft of acting at Actors Studio or the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York.
Elvis supposedly said he’d love to do that, but he didn’t see how, given his schedule. “I’m looking forward to finally doing a picture where I can just act and not have to sing,” he told Sagal. But that day was a long time coming.
“I wish I could make just one good picture,” Elvis confided to a leading lady of the era. “I know people in this town laugh at me.”
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis had heard this suggestion about going to acting school before. He said in one of those early press conferences that he was sure school wouldn’t hurt him any, but he never did too well in school. He certainly knew enough to be embarrassed by most of the pictures he did because they were just empty-headed star vehicles. He did a movie called Stay Away, Joe, which actually was a little bit better than most. But in one scene, he’d been sleeping under a house, and he came up from under it with his hair combed, every hair in place.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis was ruined by the Colonel and by Hal Wallis. They didn’t let him develop. If they had only let him continue in the same vein as King Creole—the way he delivered that scene where he broke that bottle and said, “Now, you know what I do for an encore . . . ” But they kept putting him in crap.
Hal Wallis made a statement in that documentary Elvis: The Echo Will Never Die, that really upset me. A film critic and author from England, Stephen Phillips, said that Parker and Wallis and the other movie producers were to blame for castrating Elvis’s acting career. He said Elvis could have been in the same league as James Dean or Marlon Brando. And Wallis said, “The idea of tailoring Elvis for dramatic roles is something that we never attempted. Because we didn’t sign Elvis as a second Jimmy Dean. We signed him as a number one Elvis Presley.” In other words, to sing his songs.
When you hear stuff like that, you see it’s no wonder Elvis died at forty-two. He has to bear some responsibility for what he got involved in. But the people who ruined his career should have been made to pay for it—in particular Colonel Parker. They just killed him.
BILLY SMITH: The producers of these movies would say to Elvis, “Let me put you in a boat! You’ll be a boat pilot who moonlights as a singer. Next, you’ll be a race car driver. Then you’re going to fly a plane at the World’s Fair.” And all this silly shit.
LAMAR FIKE: Some of Elvis’s pictures are so camp they’re considered classics today. They’re like a kaleidoscope. One picture changes into another, and sometimes you barely notice it.
I think all the guys agree that Elvis died of terminal apathy. He got bored with being Elvis, and he became a parody of himself. He wanted to be who he was so bad, but he was locked into this shroud that he had to put on like a damn suit, and he couldn’t get out of it. He tried his best to get out of it. Except when it came to bucking Colonel.
BILLY SMITH: It wasn’t until about ’64, when the movies and the songs got really terrible, that Elvis started to question what the old Colonel was doing for him. Colonel said, “You’re getting paid a million dollars! As long as the pictures make money, why worry about it?” So for several years, Elvis didn’t try to buck him again. Colonel always said, “Don’t make waves!” And I heard Vernon say to Elvis one time, “Don’t offend the Colonel. Just remember how much the Colonel’s done for you.” Hell, if the Colonel had hollered “Boo!” Vernon would have jumped through the wall.
MARTY LACKER: The only thing that kept Elvis going after the early years was a new challenge. But Parker kept running everything into the ground. He couldn’t see the forest for the trees because he was a hustler and a con artist. He was only interested in “now money”—get the buck and get gone.
About ’64 or ’65, Elvis started saying, “Colonel, I’m tired of doing the same old damn movies.” The turning point was Girl Happy, when the script was so lame and the songs, like “Do the Clam,” were so obnoxious. When he had to film the scene where he sings “Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce,” he went around the whole day ranting.
LAMAR FIKE: It isn’t fair to say Elvis hated all the pictures. He liked Roustabout because he got to work with Barbara Stanwyck. She helped him as an actor.
MARTY LACKER: Even though most of the later pictures hurt his reputation as an actor, they hadn’t tarnished his star quality. Everybody still wanted to meet him and be around him, and that included other stars. On Girl Happy, he had all kinds of visitors, starting with President Johnson’s daughter, Lynda Bird, and her friend, George Hamilton, the actor, who was from Memphis. Probably Colonel set that up. Because Hamilton somehow knew the Colonel and Colonel had known Johnson when he was running for the Senate, down in Texas. Colonel was also a friend of one of Johnson’s staff members—Walter W. Jenkins, the one who got arrested for making a pass at a guy in a men’s room. The point is, Colonel had friends in high places in both the Kennedy and the Johnson administrations. He was real tight with all of their assistants. The chief of staff and all these other people. Which may explain why he was never deported.
Lynda Bird and Hamilton wanted to come over to MGM, where we were filming, and Elvis agreed to meet them in this big green field just behind the swimming pool. They started walking towards us, and they were flanked by all these Secret Service agents with these real serious looks on their faces. And when Elvis saw them marching across this field to come see him, he said, “Okay, you guys are my security team. Let’s meet ’em halfway.” He had us flank him just like the Secret Service flanked Lynda Bird and Hamilton. And he said, “Keep your eyes on them and stare them down.” So we did. And it looked like some big summit meeting, with all this formality. The Secret Service agents looked a little confused. They thought they were there to protect Lynda Bird from us, and we were standing ready to protect Elvis from them. Elvis talked to ’em for a couple of minutes, and then we all turned in formation and walked away. We stood it as long as we could, and then we broke up and laughed like hell.
Elvis was in the small portable dressing room on the set one day, before he had his big trailer. I stepped out for a minute to smoke a cigarette, and behind these stacks of boxes I saw a figure walking from one stack to the other.
I couldn’t make out who it was. And then finally, out came a young Paul Anka. He was about twenty-three then. I think he was wanting to see Elvis, but he didn’t have the nerve to knock on the door.
LAMAR FIKE: As far as the movie years were concerned—and by that I mean the sixties—they might have been years of incredible frustration, on the whole, but they were also years of incredible money. And when you’ve already been paid for the pictures, and you’ve already spent half the money, you’ve got to do them. All of those pictures were presigned. So Elvis had no choice.
This isn’t a very popular view, but Colonel’s formula was correct. The serious stuff—the movies that didn’t have many songs in them—flopped. That’s a pretty good argument. On the other hand, by the time Elvis figured out he was being screwed around, it was too late. He signed too many contracts. If the Colonel handed him a contract, he’d sign it and never look at it. That’s what you get for signing contracts that you don’t read.
MARTY LACKER: The thing Parker harped on about the movies was the money. He always used to brag, “They never lost one penny.” Well, big deal. Each film after Blue Hawaii made less and less money. Towards the end, Elvis really just gave up.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis wanted to get back to doing live concerts and personal appearances, but Colonel wouldn’t listen. One time during the movie days, Elvis said, “Damn if it don’t seem like Colonel is trying to hold me back!” I think Colonel was a little bit scared of what might happen, too—that he might have to do some heavy-duty promoting in case Elvis bombed out on the road. That, and the fact that the money was still coming in from the movies, meant that Colonel was going to ride that horse until it dropped.
One of those times when Elvis was really agitated at Colonel, he said, “I hate that old man. I wish he’d just go on and quit.” I said, “You really want that?” And he said, “It would be nice.”
MARTY LACKER: When Elvis would go to Colonel and say, “I don’t want to do any more of these crappy movies,” Colonel would say, “I deal with these executives all day long, and they’ll ruin your career if you don’t go along with them.” And then he pulled that stuff again about Elvis having to go back and drive a truck. I think Elvis realized that wasn’t true, but he understood that he had a hell of a lot to lose.
The tension and the stress of all this got so bad that Elvis started having severe nosebleeds. We’d be on the movie set, and he’d just start gushing blood. Sometimes the director would have to hold up a shot because he’d be in the dressing room and we’d be putting ice on his nose and stuffing it with cotton to get it to quit bleeding. And, of course, when the tension got bad he’d dig deeper in his makeup case of pain pills—Empirin [with] codeine, Demerol, Percodan, all in pill form. That was his way of coping.
As time went on, he started stepping up the dosage. Because where two work for you today, next week you may need three to get the same effect. And then you need something stronger, or a combination of things. So it kept going that way. And when someone put pressure on him, whether it was the Colonel or his father or Priscilla, he took more.
LAMAR FIKE: I think the nosebleeds could have been from drugs. Either way, they were nosebleeds like you would not believe. Shit, they’d last an eternity. We’d run and get towels and everything else.
BILLY SMITH: I’d love to know exactly what Colonel hung over Elvis to get him to do what he wanted. Colonel inspired fear in him. He built that over the years, and now it was paying off.
Maybe it was the drugs, although Elvis never said this. You’d have to have been deaf, dumb, and blind not to see what was going on. And Colonel was quite capable of exposing that. Or of exposing Priscilla living at Graceland. Elvis might have thought, “If I piss Colonel off, would he use something against me?” Colonel had Elvis and Vernon both believing, “Without me, you won’t get the benefits you’re getting now. You’ll never get the kind of deals I get for you.” It was a kind of blackmail, really.
MARTY LACKER: We sit around and wonder just exactly what Colonel had on Elvis. Maybe he held Vernon’s prison record over him. A couple of years ago, a story came out in the Star, the tabloid, that said that when Elvis was in the army, he met some English guy, a reporter named Derek Johnson, in Germany. The story said Elvis and Johnson became friends and that Elvis told him he’d been involved in a hit-and-run accident in the fifties while he was working at Crown Electric—that he’d killed a man and panicked and left the scene in his truck. I don’t think that’s true. But say it was true and Elvis had told Colonel?
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis’s main problem was that he hated confrontation. He’d say, “I’m going to take care of this shit!” And he never would. Not with Colonel. Elvis was scared to rip into Colonel. He had the hammer.
BILLY SMITH: Right around ’66, Elvis mentioned that Colonel said the studio was complaining about Elvis slurring his words a lot and speeding up his speech so much that they weren’t catching a lot of what he said. They were having to do a lot of looping—redoing the dialogue after the shooting was finished. Colonel got on him bad about that.
MARTY LACKER: The uppers Elvis took had a lot of undesirable side effects. They made him grind his teeth, for example. I’ve lost a couple of teeth myself that way. In Elvis’s case, it was a real shame because otherwise, he took perfect care of his teeth. If he ate a cracker, he’d go up and brush. And he was constantly going to the dentist. Both to have his teeth worked on and to get pills. But his teeth were beautiful. When he smiled, he lit up a room.
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel got on Elvis about a lot of things besides talking too fast. Like about what he was eating. For the two or three months between movies, Elvis would eat whatever he wanted. Then about three or four weeks before he had to be back in California to go into wardrobe, he’d start a crash diet. That made him irritable as hell. And he was already irritable from the diet pills—the uppers. After we’d finish the movie, he’d eat his ass off again. He’d go up in his room for four days to a week and never come down. He didn’t want to see anybody. He’d have his food sent up, and he wouldn’t do anything but stay in bed.
MARTY LACKER: Colonel knew Elvis’s vulnerable spot. He’d couch everything in terms of Elvis losing his career.
For example, Colonel used to check Elvis out before the movies. Not only for the drugs but for his weight. And, boy, that used to aggravate him. Elvis would get so mad he’d sputter. He’d say, “Goddamn, two pounds overweight! Who gives a shit?” But Colonel would come back and say that the camera picks up every ounce. He’d tell Elvis, “If you look fat, your fans aren’t going to love you, and neither are the producers.” And Colonel and Hal Wallis were not above using little tricks on him.
One day we were finishing up a picture at Samuel Goldwyn Studios, and we were standing outside the soundstage in the studio street. There were about four or five of us. Elvis was in that perennial army uniform, and we were talking. Just then Mina Wallis walked up. She was Hal Wallis’s sister. She said, “Oh, Elvis, honey, how are you? I was at the studio today and I just thought I’d come over because I knew you were shooting.” Elvis greeted her warmly, and everything was nice and cordial. And in the course of this, Mina put her arm around Elvis’s back and his waist, the way people put their arm around your shoulder. Well, she kept it around his waist, and she was saying things like “We can’t wait for you to do this next picture.” And we just stood there for what seemed like a nice conversation.
Finally, she left, and as soon as she got out of earshot, Elvis started calling her every name in the book. He said, “That goddamn old fucking bitch! That Colonel cocksucker!” We were all bewildered because she’d been so nice. Somebody finally said, “What’s wrong with you?” And Elvis said, “You know why that bitch had her damn arm around me? She was feeling to see how much fat I had around my waist!” Colonel used to do that all the time. Elvis said, “Hal Wallis and that fucking Colonel sent her over here to find out.”
BILLY SMITH: Elvis liked sweets, and he loved to eat, period. In the final years, his weight gain was more from illness than it was from food. But in the sixties, he gained because he liked to eat too much, and the wrong things, like a pound of bacon and a six-egg omelet. Away from Hollywood, man, he ate like a stevedore.
MARTY LACKER: One night, we went to Radio Recorders, the recording studio Elvis used in Hollywood for the movie soundtracks. He was in no mood to do anything that night, but he was trying. Colonel was there, sitting in a glass booth with a table and some chairs, and he had the two producers of the movie with him. We hadn’t been there very long, when Colonel called me in and said, “What the hell has Elvis been eating?”
We’d just come from Memphis a couple of weeks before, so I knew what he meant, but I pretended not to. I said, “What are you talking about, Colonel?” And Parker banged his cane down on the floor, and he said, “Goddamnit, he’s gained weight!” The two producers were hearing every word of this. So I said, “Well, he’s just been eating what he always eats.” And Colonel raised his cane in the air and started yelling at the top of his voice. He said, “Goddamnit, don’t lie to me! Tell me!” It made me mad, and I flew off the handle. I said, “Look, if you want to know what Elvis has been eating, get your fat ass in there and ask him.”
BILLY SMITH: The guys were the heavy for Elvis at times. If he was late to the studio—and some mornings, you couldn’t stir him with a flamethrower—Colonel would be mad as hell. And Elvis would turn to us and say, “You goddamn guys didn’t wake me up!”
MARTY LACKER: Elvis got along pretty well with all of his directors. He liked Norman Taurog, and he respected Fred De Cordova, who directed Frankie and Johnny, and later became producer of the Tonight show.
One of the few times Elvis really clashed with one of his directors was on Roustabout. Elvis had some kind of virus and a 104-degree fever. He didn’t feel like sitting up, much less make a movie. But the director, John Rich, was a no-good bastard, and the fact that Elvis was sick didn’t cut any ice with him. He kept making him do one particular scene over and over. Actually, it seemed like he was just pushing Elvis to see how far he could go. Elvis resented the hell out of it, but he’d just smile and do what Rich said.
Usually, when stuff like that happened, we’d play practical jokes on each other and on the cast and crew to make Elvis feel better. On Roustabout, we started doing stuff, and John Rich piped up, yelling, not at Elvis, but at the guys. He said, “If you don’t stop that and shut up, you’re going to have to leave the soundstage.” And, boy, Elvis came to life. He said, “Let me tell you something, Mr. Rich. When these fucking movies cease to be fun, I’ll stop doing them. And if my guys go, goddamnit, so do I.”
BILLY SMITH: It was bad enough that the movies were horrible. But the majority of the songs were, too. It just seemed like Elvis couldn’t find any satisfaction, and he didn’t know what to do about it.
MARTY LACKER: In about ’65, we were at Radio Recorders working on a soundtrack for a movie, and Elvis was just fed up with everything. That meant he was taking more pills.
I forget what the picture was, but it was like all the rest of them. He had this big damn orchestra in there. And he started singing, and he didn’t settle for the first take. They were getting ready to do it again, and in the middle of the session, Elvis reached his breaking point, and he started ranting. He said, “Goddamnit, I’m tired of all these fucking songs, and I’m tired of these damn movies! I get in a fight with somebody in one scene, and in the next one I’m kissing the dog. And these songs suck like donkeys.” He said, “What difference does it make how many times we do it? The song is a piece of shit!”
Somebody tried to calm him down, but nothing was right. And Elvis said, “I’ll tell you what. You just cut the tracks of the songs in this next movie, and I’ll come in later and put my voice on.”
BILLY SMITH: To really understand Elvis’s frustration during this time, you have to see what else was going on in music and in the movies. In ’64, the Beatles had hit in a big way over here, and that whole British invasion had started. The music was exciting, and it was different. It made Elvis look out of touch. Because he wasn’t having big hit records anymore and his records weren’t filled with new ways of doing the old stuff, like the Beatles’ records were. And pretty soon the Beatles started making movies, too. A Hard Day’s Night and Help! had a lot of wit to ’em. And here’s Elvis doing Girl Happy and Tickle Me. Elvis’s pictures were pretty old hat in comparison.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis used to get the Memphian to run the Beatles’ movies for us. They were a lot hipper than Elvis’s. Maybe secretly, he felt threatened by the Beatles. But he never talked about that, not even in unguarded moments.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis was very threatened by the Beatles, but he tried to hide it. When the Beatles were on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Colonel sent a telegram that Sullivan read on the air, a kind of “Welcome to America” thing. It made it seem like Elvis was a fan, but also like he wasn’t worried about their success and what it might do to his. Colonel wanted them to get together, and the Beatles did, too. Elvis was one of their idols. They wanted him to come to England. But Elvis said, “If they want to see me, they can come over here.” That’s why when they finally did get together, the Beatles had to come to the house in California. Elvis wanted to prove a point. It was pure ego.
The guys and I protected that ego. We hated to see Elvis hurt. Maybe we protected him too much. But we tried to warn him about things in a low-key way.
LAMAR FIKE: I went over to England in ’63 with Brenda Lee. The Beatles were her opening act. I took one look at them and went, “Jesus Christ!” I said, “The only time I’ve seen anything like this is with Elvis.” They just blew me away. Right after that, Elvis came to Nashville for that recording session where we made up. And I said, “Elvis, there’s a group coming out of England that’s going to be so hot. They’re getting ready to break wide open.” He couldn’t have cared less.
BILLY SMITH: Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, was talking to Colonel one time, and he said, “The Beatles are as big as Elvis, and they draw a bigger crowd.” The Colonel told him, “I’ll tell you what. You put the Beatles in one coliseum. And if I can rent the land across from you, I’ll pitch a tent. We’ll see who draws the most, and we’ll go for broke.” I’d hated to have put that to a test. The Beatles were like early Elvis in that they were rebellious, with the long hair, and they had that hard-driving rock ’n’ roll going for them. And they were brand-spanking new.
LAMAR FIKE: When Elvis first came on the scene, the record-buying demographics shifted from the older generation to fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds. But back in the mid-sixties, he started losing the demographics because the kids weren’t buying single acts. All of a sudden, it was nothing but groups out there. A single act couldn’t get a record deal.
MARTY LACKER: In ’65, we went over to Hawaii to do Paradise, Hawaiian Style. Herman’s Hermits were big at that time with “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” and “I’m Henry VIII, I Am.” And they were over in Hawaii, and somehow arranged a meeting with Elvis through the Colonel. They came over to the Polynesian Cultural Center where we were shooting one day.
Some of those English groups were sort of smartasses. And Peter Noone, who was Herman, certainly was. We were in this big tent, and there was a whole group of us—Billy, Richard, Charlie, I think, and Joe. And Noone started joking around. There were these poles holding up the tent, and I was leaning against one, listening and thinking, “You little son of a bitch.”
Elvis talked to him for a little bit, and Noone figured he’d trap Elvis into giving him a compliment. He looked at him and he said, “Tell me, Elvis, who’s your favorite group?” And Elvis said, “Well, I sort of like them all.” Noone persisted, though, and he said, “But who’s your favorite group?” And I sort of under my breath whispered, “L.A.P.D.” This was long before Elvis got into collecting badges. But he thought it was funny. And without blinking an eye, he shot back, “Los Angeles Police Department.” Everybody broke up, and Noone just sat there frozen. He didn’t know what to say.
LAMAR FIKE: About the only single act that was happening at the time was Tom Jones. He came along in ’65 with “It’s Not Unusual” and “What’s New, Pussycat?” Now, Elvis was threatened by Tom Jones.
BILLY SMITH: Tom Jones . . . It’s kind of funny. Elvis called him “Sock Dick.” He thought Jones put a rolled-up sock in his pants to make himself look more well endowed. He said, “That son of a bitch come along after my fans, and he’s hot.”
MARTY LACKER: Elvis really liked “It’s Not Unusual.” He thought it was a great record. We didn’t know that Tom was from Wales because of the way he sang. As a matter of fact, at first, Elvis thought Tom was black.
Tom’s first two records had just come out when we were doing Paradise Hawaiian Style. One day we were at Paramount, and I got a call from Tom Diskin in the Colonel’s office. He said that Tom Jones was going to be on the lot, and Jones wondered if he could come by and say hello to Elvis. Jones had said that Elvis was his idol. And because Elvis liked Tom’s record, I went and asked him, and he said, “Okay, let him come over.”
Tom came over to the set with a guy who was, I think, his agent. He was a bald-headed guy, with a big mouth. We came outside, and as they started talking, I got up on the first or second rung of a big ladder that was leaning there, and just held on, listening. Jones was telling Elvis how much he’d been influenced by his music, how much he loved what he did, and what it meant to meet him. He had this look of awe on his face, like he was talking to God. He was literally shaking. And Elvis surprised him, I think, when he told him how much he liked his record. Which was the truth.
Then all of a sudden, this agent guy popped up and said, “Listen, Elvis, I can book you in England’s Wembley Stadium with a guarantee of a million dollars for one show. What do you say?” Well, Elvis kind of ignored him, but the guy kept on. I guess that was his reason for being there. Finally, I turned to him and I said, “Hey, look, why don’t you just let ’em talk? Elvis wanted to meet Tom because he liked his record. If you’ve got some offer you want to make, go call Colonel Parker. Elvis doesn’t discuss business with anybody.”
It still didn’t deter him. He wouldn’t quit. So I got a little testy, and I said, “Look, sport, don’t bring this up again.” And then Tom told him, “You’d better stop.” Because Elvis was getting agitated. He felt like he’d been used.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis sort of liked Tom. Because Tom was a singer who moved, and he did a lot of Elvis’s moves. And Elvis liked to go see his shows. We saw him in Vegas, and then we met him over in Hawaii, when Elvis was on vacation in ’68.
MARTY LACKER: Tom was a nice enough guy, but Elvis didn’t think of him as some big pal. And I’m sure Tom didn’t really consider himself such. Not really. One time in Vegas, in the seventies, Tom came backstage to the dressing room after one of Elvis’s shows. There were a lot of other people there, some entertainers, like James Brolin, the actor, and his wife, who were nice people. Elvis was in the back changing his clothes, and Tom sat there running his loud mouth, being Mr. Macho, Mr. Cocky, Mr. Everything. He was like the Big Star.
After a little while, the doors opened and Elvis walked in. And Tom got dead silent. He wasn’t Mr. Macho anymore.
Tom Jones is one of these entertainers who became Elvis’s big friend after he died. You know what I’m saying? He was part of that documentary I worked on, Elvis: The Echo Will Never Die. We went out to Vegas to interview him for it, and his public relations guy, John Moran, told me that Jones said he could have straightened Elvis out and gotten him off pills if he’d had the opportunity. I looked at Moran and I said, “You tell Tom he’s full of shit.” Jones would never have opened up his mouth in front of Elvis.
During the interview, Jones had the nerve to say something like “If Elvis had had a few more friends around”—intimating himself—“he wouldn’t have died when he did.” I just shook my head. Elvis would have kicked Tom Jones’s ass so far out the door he couldn’t find it. These people talk, but they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Elvis was the same way with Tom Jones as he was with the Beatles. He liked their music. And that was about it.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis didn’t understand what the Beatles were about. He liked some of their songs, like “Hey Jude,” and he loved “Yesterday.” But he never understood the wave.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis couldn’t stand the psychedelic stuff, like Jimi Hendrix. And he didn’t particularly like Mick Jagger. He didn’t like looking at him. He thought Jagger’s antics were sort of fake and effeminate. And he didn’t like the attitude that the Rolling Stones and a lot of these English groups had. So many of them came off as a bunch of arrogant jerks. Elvis believed that if you had talent, you just went out and demonstrated it without all this extracurricular crap.
I’m not sure Elvis understood what the sixties were about, politically and culturally. Colonel always drummed it in his head not to take sides on politics or religion because he said it was bound to offend somebody, no matter which side Elvis took. He said, “Don’t speak out on anything. Half of your fans won’t like you anymore.” And most managers would tell their stars that. So that’s why Elvis never talked politics. And he never voted.
LAMAR FIKE: I think Elvis didn’t like to see any kind of injustice, but if it didn’t directly affect him, he was a little bit indifferent. And in that sense, he wasn’t the big humanitarian people make him out to be. He cared more about helping individuals than helping masses of people or a cause.
MARTY LACKER: Now, in private, he would express his opinion. He supported civil rights, for example. This was the time of all the uprising[s] by the blacks, especially in the South. Television news was full of the civil rights marches and demonstrations, with film of black people all over Alabama and elsewhere getting beaten to a pulp. He didn’t like to see anybody beat on. But he didn’t speak out about it because of what Colonel had told him. He could have been a force in that regard because Southern people, particularly, liked him. But he never tried.
He also didn’t like the whole idea of “Tune in, Turn On, Drop Out,” which came along later, because it was too closely related to the counterculture, to opposing the war in Vietnam. Something like the Yippie movement made no sense to him.
Elvis was gung ho on military matters. He could quote [General Douglas] MacArthur’s farewell speech verbatim. The part that really stuck in his mind was the ending. Not, “Old soldiers never die.” But, “With that, I bid you a fond, affectionate farewell.” When Elvis would get upset at somebody, he would change it. He’d say, “I bid you a fond, affectionate, fuckin’ farewell.” And with that, he would turn around and walk out of the room. He loved to shock people.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis liked heroes. He liked people who were bigger than life. The trappings meant a lot to him. He thought [General Omar] Bradley hung the moon, for example. In the seventies, we went up to the Memphian to see the movie Patton. Elvis loved it. He saw the movie about four times. And we got to talking about Bradley, and somebody we knew found out where Bradley lived. And we got in the 600 Mercedes limousine and drove to his house. A full colonel, who was his aide, met us at the door. Elvis introduced himself and said he wanted to meet the general. This aide ushered us in, and we sat there and talked to the general for quite a while. Elvis went up and saw him two or three different times. Lord only knows what Bradley thought of Elvis. And why he was there.
The fascination, I think, was just that Bradley was a legendary hero. He was the last surviving five-star general. Elvis thought that was big stuff. But I don’t think he cared about being a military hero himself. I think he would have been happy being the president and absolute despotic monarch of the United States. Elvis wanted to do things, but he didn’t want to put up with the problems of getting there. He wanted everything Johnny-on-the-spot. With Elvis, it was instant gratification all the way.
MARTY LACKER: Somebody like Bradley would have been much more of a hero to Elvis than counterculture leaders like Jerry Rubin or Timothy Leary. He was pretty predictable there. But he could also be unpredictable. The only time Elvis stopped liking the Beatles, for example, was when they got involved with the Maharishi. Which is kind of ironic, seeing what he got into as far as religion was concerned. And this was what was funny—when the Beatles started talking publicly about smoking marijuana, Elvis thought it was terrible. He felt they were a bad influence on kids. In the meantime, he was getting blown out of his skull on pills.
BILLY SMITH: I think Elvis felt out of touch with the sixties, but not with the early Beatles. He thought the early Beatles were real similar to his early music. He loved the loud, hard-driving sound that they had. He wanted that himself. Elvis was always fighting for his records to sound some other way than how they did. Especially when he was making the movies. Not all of them because he liked that more sophisticated ballad sound, too. But occasionally, he wanted his records to sound raw.
For example, he’d ask for the bass to be brought forward a little more in places. And he wanted his voice mixed down, and the music brought up louder, even if it overrode his voice sometimes. He thought RCA was bringing his voice out too much. And it pissed Elvis off.
He’d say, “Those New York sons of bitches! They’re screwing with my music!” Because a lot of times they took the tapes from the recording sessions up there to mix ’em. And he’d explain again. He’d play a Beatles record, and he’d say, “This is what I’m looking for right here. I want that drive back. And I don’t want my voice to be brought out front. If it’s there, I want the background singers brought out with me.”
MARTY LACKER: Before RCA could release any of Elvis’s records, the final mix had to be sent to the Colonel. And the Colonel would call up RCA and say, “No, I want my boy’s voice up a little bit more.”
The funny thing is, they used to cut these acetates for Elvis after the sessions, and we’d take ’em back and listen to ’em. The acetates sounded better than the actual records did after the Colonel finished screwing with them.
When you look at how Colonel controlled absolutely everything, you just can’t believe it. I read an interview with Bones Howe, who engineered a lot of the early records, in Musician magazine. Bones said Colonel told him, “I designed all these album covers. People say they’re in poor taste, but we’re selling millions of records. These guys at RCA want to do fancy artistic stuff, but they, don’t know who the audience is.”
Well, Lamar and I found out a few years ago that Colonel charged RCA for the pictures they used on the record jackets. Colonel denies this, I hear. But two of the top guys at RCA told us that they don’t have many pictures of Elvis for that reason.
Now, most record companies would demand that their artists sit for photo sessions. But Colonel refused. Every still picture that was taken for a movie, or on a movie set or on location—even if they were taken by the studio photographers—had to be handed over to Colonel. With the negatives. He controlled them all. And he sold RCA one picture at a time. He’d say, “This is what the cover is going to be, and this is what it’s going to cost you.” What I don’t know is how or if Elvis and the Colonel shared the proceeds. But I have a guess.