Me and a Guy Named Elvis

by Jerry Schilling

  …And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

  The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,

  Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

  The image on the TV switched over to the classic Indian-head logo and a test-tone began to come through the speaker. Elvis had his eyes closed and stayed quiet and still for a moment more. Then he looked over at me with a tired smile.

  “That’s a pretty good way to call it a night.”

  I had to agree.

  And I think it was as I left his room that night that I had my first Elvis epiphany: What I loved about him so much was no longer an image, but the real guy behind the image. The more I got to know him, the more he was turning out to be exactly the person I had hoped he would be. As an insecure twelve-year-old, I suppose I’d created my own sort of fantasy about the Elvis I was friends with. But now, as a slightly more discerning twenty-one-year-old, I was discovering that the real Elvis was an even better friend.

  525 Perugia Way, Bel Air. Even the addresses in California seemed beautiful—so much more exotic and promising than any address I’d ever been around. And as we stood in front of the gorgeous, modern, white-walled home in the hills above Beverly Hills—crickets chirping, the scent of lemon in the air—you could have told me that I’d traveled not just across country but to some better planet and I wouldn’t have put up an argument. The house seemed to be a small, single-level structure from the street, but once you got in, the space opened and flowed down the hill. It was decorated in a style that was spare and elegant—like nothing I’d ever seen before. Graceland had the dignified, comfortable look of the Old South. This place couldn’t be mistaken for anything but West Coast. To me, it looked like a whole new life. It looked like freedom.

  It was probably two A.M. on a mid-October morning. We’d made it to L.A., and the guys, desperately tired after all those miles on the road, quickly worked through all their arrival tasks before heading off to various sleeping quarters. I think it was Marty who told me that I’d be sharing a room with Billy Smith, and for the first time since leaving Memphis, I felt a touch of disappointment. I didn’t know Billy all that well, but I hadn’t been all that fond of some of the cousins I had met back in Memphis, and I would have much preferred to room with a guy I knew I could get along with, like Richard Davis. (As it turned out, Billy was quiet, friendly, and accommodating, and, even sharing close quarters, we never had a single cross word between us.) I didn’t feel the need to make friendly with a roommate that night, however. In fact, I didn’t actually feel the need for a room at all. Everyone else seemed ready to crash hard in a familiar bed, but the house, the hills, and the air seemed so unfamiliar and intoxicating that even though the dexedrine had worn off, I was far too buzzed with sheer adrenaline to even consider lying down.

  I walked the grounds several times, marveling at the beautiful swimming pool that seemed designed for Greek gods to splash in. I looked up at the stars over Bel Air, which, in that crisp night air, seemed to twinkle with the same sense of excitement that I was feeling. Eventually I settled down on a couch in a small TV room off the house’s huge central circular den. The room was full of soft indirect lighting, subtle shades of green and red, and just sitting on the couch in there I felt like I was already living inside a movie.

  Nobody had explicitly gone over any particular security measures for the Bel Air house with me, but I knew that keeping Elvis safe was a part of my unofficial job. Which is why I immediately tensed up when I heard the click of a key in the front door. The door creaked open and shut again, and I didn’t hear any familiar voices. In fact, I heard nothing. Somebody, it seemed, was trying to be very quiet about coming in. I was about to get up and investigate, when a shadowy figure crept right past the alcove my couch was set in, past the room’s big TV, and over to the far wall. In the darkness I could just about make out some long hair down this stranger’s back, and I knew that Elvis had occasionally had trouble with fans—especially females—finding their way to his homes and acting crazy.

  Sure enough, this girl began knocking on the wall, looking for Elvis’s bedroom. This was my moment to take action.

  “Miss—” I called out in a firm, sharp voice.

  The woman spun around and let loose a bloodcurdling scream.

  And at that very moment, the wall behind her opened up to reveal Elvis. He flicked on the lights in the room. There was a huge smile on his face. The girl being there didn’t seem to bother him at all. In fact, he seemed to know her.

  My eyes adjusted to the light. Now I recognized the girl, too. It was Ann-Margret.

  Elvis put an arm around her and grinned in my direction. “It’s OK, Jerry. It’s just Ammo. She’s not gonna hurt anybody.”

  Ann calmed down, collected herself, and giggled. Elvis and she stepped back into Elvis’s bedroom, and the secret sliding-wall entrance closed up again. When the shock wore off enough that I could move, I headed back outside to take another look at that pool, and those stars. I’d just met my first woman in California, and it was Ann-Margret.

  Yeah, I’m a long way from home.

  Just a few hours later, after some minimal sleep, I began my first proper day in Los Angeles. Alan Fortas, who took care of all of Elvis’s cars and motorcycles, wanted to tune up the massive Harley-Davidson Elvis kept in the Perugia Way garage. It hadn’t been ridden for months, and might sit for several more, but Alan wanted it to be ready whenever Elvis decided to go for a ride. Alan told me he was going to take it out himself for a long test ride, and wanted to know if I wanted to come along. I did.

  I hopped on the back of the bike and we zoomed down the Bel Air hills out onto the Sunset Strip. And maybe it’s just the haze of a romanticized memory, but I think it was on that first Harley ride that I fell in love with Los Angeles. The sunlight seemed brighter than any place I’d ever been to. The colors crisper. The people more attractive. And as much as I felt part of a vibrant and sophisticated city, I was also thrilled at the natural beauty of the place—the hills and canyons and ocean breezes.

  Alan and I toured for hours, eventually working our way down the PCH to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, where some kind of large-scale musical event was taking place. Alan had been invited down there by a friend of his, a tour manager, to check out something called the Teenage Music International show, or TAMI, a massive, multi-artist concert that was being filmed as a theatrical feature. The bill was made up of a mix of R & B acts and British and American pop and rock acts, including the Beach Boys, James Brown, Leslie Gore, Jan & Dean, Bo Diddley, the Supremes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and many others.

  Alan and I didn’t have much desire to go inside the auditorium, though—we were just checking out the scene before heading back to Perugia Way. After drifting around for a while, we found Alan’s tour-manager friend standing in front of a beat-up, rickety-looking bus—I remember it as a kind of converted school bus, quite a few comfort-and-style notches down from the Elvis Dodge mobile home. We had just made introductions all around and had started to chat, when a scraggly group of odd-looking guys ran out the back of the auditorium and onto the bus. I offered a general hello as they passed, but didn’t get a response from any of them—not even a nod. As I learned a few moments later, that was my not-so-chummy introduction to the Rolling Stones.

  We were back in Bel Air by sunset, and when I wandered into the small den where I’d sat the night before, I found Elvis and Ann-Margret on the same couch, joking around with a couple of the guys. I took the only remaining spot on the couch, on the other side of Ann. Right away, Elvis busted out laughing again. “Careful, now, Jerry. We’ve got a dangerous intruder here.”

  I laughed along with everybody else. I suppose I could have been embarrassed about the whole thing, but I was actually too nervous about sitting next to Ann-Margret to think of anything else. Hanging around with Elvis had come to feel completely natural, but being so close to this gorgeous redheaded actress threw me. I didn’t see how it was humanly pos
sible, but she was even more beautiful in person than she was in the movies. I poured myself a glass of water and proceeded to spill it all over myself every time I tried to take a sip—my hands were shaking so badly.

  Within a few days, I would understand the situation with Elvis and Ann. They’d met on set while making Viva Las Vegas the year before, and had hit it off as kindred spirits almost immediately. Elvis called her “Ammo”—for Ann-Margret Olsson—and had been having her up at the house as much as their schedules would allow. You didn’t have to be around them long to see that they brought out an energetic, fun-loving side of each other.

  Elvis started telling the story of “the intruder” all over again, teasing me about how panicked I looked. He began laughing, and the more he laughed, the more she laughed. The more they both laughed, the more comfortable I started to feel sitting on that couch in Bel Air.

  Eventually, I started to laugh, too.

  In the past twenty-four hours of my life, I’d scared the hell out of Ann-Margret, I’d been ignored by the Rolling Stones, and I’d made Elvis Presley laugh. Not bad for a Memphis kid’s first day in California.

  5

  TALES OF TWO CITIES

  I kept waking up to startlingly sunny California mornings, and I continued to feel like I was living in a dream. First of all, it was a little strange to be around Elvis and actually see mornings—or at least see them at the start of a day. Back in Memphis, Elvis was on his own distinctive, nocturnal schedule, but in Los Angeles he was strictly disciplined about his duties in the moviemaking process, and he was rarely even a minute late for the early call times we got during the week.

  “Six-seven for eight,” Marty Lacker or Alan Fortas would shout through the Perugia house at the end of a night—meaning a 6:00 A.M. wake-up time to leave the house by seven so that Elvis could be in makeup by eight. Elvis Presley was never at his best when you woke him up at six in the morning, but the rest of us were pretty grouchy, too. Still, there was something exciting about all of us shuffling about at that unlikely early hour, getting ready for a day on a movie set on the Paramount lot.

  Elvis was beginning work on his eighteenth film (in nine years!), a production called Tickle Me. And as we arrived for our first day of work, I remember thinking that I probably couldn’t feel happier rolling through the gates of Heaven than I did rolling through the famed Paramount archway in a limo with Elvis Presley. While Heaven might have had more angels, Paramount seemed pretty close—Tickle Me was set on a female dude ranch, and as I stepped on to my first soundstage and got a look at the extras for the first day’s shoot, I very quickly became aware of the fact that I had never seen so many drop-dead beautiful women collected in one place.

  I guess I felt a little like a wide-eyed kid from North Memphis, awed by my step into movieland. But in a strange way, despite the speed with which I’d thrown myself into this wild new world, I felt ready for anything. I was still on the shy side, willing to defer to those who were older or smarter than me. But I wasn’t the kid at Guthrie Park anymore, feeling like my happiness depended entirely on the whims of some bigger boys. I’d been a class president. I’d taken my share of hits on a college football field. I’d thrown myself at New York City and ended up not only surviving but thriving. I’d picked up some battle scars from falling in and out of love. And I’d just spent a cross-country ride with Elvis. Everything around me was new, but if all my bouncing around as a kid, all my attempts to find my way in life, and all my Elvis adventures had taught me one thing, it was this: I could take care of myself. True, I couldn’t sit on a couch next to Ann-Margret without spilling water on myself, but that didn’t trouble me much—or at least not enough to give up my spot on the couch. Or in the limo.

  Elvis was already extremely frustrated with the quality of his movies, and on top of that frustration, he was never in a good mood at the beginning of a film, when he had to spend a lot of time standing around for wardrobe fittings and publicity stills. For most of the other Elvis guys, movies had just become business as usual, and when they weren’t carrying out specific duties for Elvis they spent most of the time on set away from the action, playing cards. But I couldn’t help approaching the world of moviemaking with some fresh eyes and fresh energy, and I think Elvis appreciated having that around—it helped him laugh his way through some of the more tedious responsibilities of a leading man. I know Elvis seemed pleased when I was very impressed the first time I stepped into the dressing room that Paramount always had ready for him—a huge, well-appointed space with its own bar, makeup room and dressing area, designed for Jerry Lewis when he and Dean Martin were the hottest of Paramount stars. I would have been happy to have it as an apartment.

  Elvis gave a grand wave around the room. “All this for little old me,” he said with a shake of the head.

  “I guess they like you out here, Elvis,” I answered.

  “Yeah, well—don’t breathe too much of the air. They bring it in special for me from the mountains.”

  I was just about ready to start holding my breath when he laughed.

  “Man, they’ll tell you anything out here, Jerry.”

  Elvis could tease me as much as he did the other guys, but it didn’t escape my attention that in the weeks that followed, no matter how frustrated he got or how foul a mood might have been brewing, Elvis often went out of his way to give me a nod or a comment that would put me at ease in the new surroundings.

  Working as one of Elvis’s guys, I got my first look into the inner workings of his career.

  On one of the first shoot days on the lot, I was walking down a darkened corridor that ran between the scenery flats and the exterior wall of one of the huge soundstage buildings, when I became aware of a strange thumping ahead of me. I stopped in my tracks, squinted into the dim light before me, and realized that whatever was making the noise was coming straight toward me, and fast. As I stared down the corridor, I saw a small head-high dot of glowing orange appear and disappear, appear and disappear. The thumping continued, getting louder, and I began to hear a fair amount of shuffling along with the low chatter of subdued voices. A few more thumps, a few more orange glows, and I could just about make out the sizable shadow of a massive man, holding a cane, puffing a cigar, and moving toward me at alarming speed.

  I didn’t have to hear the name. Just like that first day at Guthrie, when I knew Elvis was Elvis without having to be told, I knew exactly who was doing the thumping and the puffing. The Colonel was on the set.

  I found a place to step through the flats out of the corridor, and watched as the imposing figure thundered by, followed by a bunch of younger, smaller guys, desperately trying to both keep up and satisfactorily answer the Colonel’s gruff queries.

  Colonel Tom Parker had been booking and then managing Elvis’s career since the Louisiana Hayride days back in 1955. To me, he had always been something of a mysterious figure—I occasionally heard his name, but he was certainly never around at football games or at Graceland. The Colonel had a strange business background that included work as a carnival barker, a dog catcher, a pet-cemetery owner, and a booker and promoter on the Southern country-music circuit. His rank was apparently the result of self-promotion rather than military promotion. But since he’d taken Elvis on as a sole client, his deal-making had become legendary. The Colonel was behind the early TV appearances that had given Elvis a national profile, the top-dollar deals with the RCA record label, and the movie deals that had made Elvis one of the highest-paid performers in Hollywood. To the Colonel, it didn’t matter much what ended up on screen—the challenge, and the triumph, was in wrangling the most lucrative contract he could for his star. I didn’t know any of these business details at the time, but just watching him walk I could see this much: The Colonel radiated power.

  Those who weren’t aware of the Colonel’s reputation might, for a moment, take him as some kind of clownish figure, with his tweed cap, out-of-style jackets and string ties, and trousers pulled high over his ample belly. But t
hat moment had better not last long. As I would witness many times over the years, those who underestimated the Colonel always made a terrible mistake. What I saw on the lot was that, whether this guy was a real colonel or not, he was a powerful, commanding presence, and he had a pronounced effect on the dynamic of any situation he walked into. People have often called him a P. T. Barnum, but the character he always reminded me of was one from the world of drama: Big Daddy from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. If the Colonel was in the room, everybody knew it.

  Of course, the same was true of Elvis, and watching him and the Colonel together was like watching a couple of forces of nature accommodate each other. Throughout Elvis’s career, you never heard about him sitting down with accountants and teams of lawyers and business managers—between the Colonel, Vernon, and the guys, everything got taken care of. Elvis deeply appreciated what the Colonel could do for him on a business level, but he didn’t want the Colonel involved in his personal affairs at all (the idea of the Colonel as some kind of Southern Rasputin, moving his “boy” around like a chess piece, is a grossly inaccurate cartoon of their relationship).

  When Elvis and the Colonel were together that first day on the Tickle Me set, there was no hugging or backslapping, and no loose, happy chitchat between them. The Colonel stopped his barreling around and carefully picked his moment to approach Elvis. There was a wary friendliness between them—some smiles, a bit of joking around, but, for all the work they’d done together and as closely aligned as they were, neither one seemed to let his guard down entirely. As I’d see again and again, Elvis and the Colonel entertained each other just enough to take care of whatever business was at hand. They were like a pair of high-tension lines—incredibly powerful when working together, but you hated to think what would happen if the lines crossed and started sparking.