Me and a Guy Named Elvis

by Jerry Schilling

  I assumed that, as part of Elvis’s team, and knowing how important the Colonel was, it was my duty to introduce myself to the man. On one of those first days, I walked straight up to him and said, “Hello, Colonel.”

  His teeth might have clenched a little tighter on the cigar, but other than that I got no response whatsoever. He just stared right through me with the coldest eyes I’d ever encountered. Then he simply moved away to talk to whomever it was he deemed worthy of speaking to. I tried a few more times throughout the shoot to make my introduction, but my attempts at friendliness were always met with the same cold, piercingly empty stare. I gave up, and, without any personal contact with the guy, started working up a pretty strong dislike for him. I’d spot him barreling off somewhere in that improbably fast manner of his, and a choice string of profanities would come to mind. Then one day, I came around a corner and found the Colonel barreling toward me. Before I even had time to think ill of him, the Colonel’s face lit up with a knowing smile and he shouted out, “Good morning, Jerry.”

  I stammered a hello back, and was surprised to find how happy I was to be recognized by someone I thought I was on my way to hating. Lesson number one from the Colonel: Keep everybody around you off balance, and you stay in charge.

  You couldn’t help but have a love/hate relationship with the Colonel. And you had to admit he was brilliant. I figured out quickly that it was very wise to understand that if you were stepping into Elvis’s world, you were stepping into the Colonel’s as well.

  I think probably anybody visiting a film set for the first time is struck by two things: how much waiting around there is, and how much hands-on labor is involved in every shot of a film. While the “talent” spends a lot of time in dressing rooms or trailers, the crew always has work to do. I found myself fascinated with the hands-on elements of filmmaking and spent a lot of time watching the way lights got set up, the way camera moves were worked out, the way sound was handled, the way sets went up or came down. The craft that had to go into a film, regardless of that film’s artistic merits, was very interesting to me, and I started to become a student of the process.

  I also quickly discovered that if you were one of Elvis’s guys, everybody took time to talk to you—cast, crew, cameramen, assistant directors. Elvis didn’t have to demand that we be allowed on set—the “Memphis Mafia” were simply part of the deal, and I never sensed any resentment or distrust from others around us. In fact, I discovered that as one of Elvis’s guys, there was a reputation to live up to—we needed to be sharp and responsible, and needed to get things done for Elvis before they were asked for. The crew appreciated the fact that we did everything we could to ensure that Elvis was always where he was supposed to be and ready to work. The Hollywood higher-ups may have been a little suspicious of our rough-around-the-edges Memphis ways, but the folks we dealt with day-to-day came to consider us important allies.

  I suppose we guys were simply following the cues from Elvis. He may have been disheartened over the way his film career was going, but he was always calm and professional on the set. He might let his temper flare in the privacy of the dressing room, but he never let cast, crew, or director see he was mad (I became pretty good at detecting a burn in his gaze that let us know he was very unhappy with something). These films were built entirely around Elvis, but he never acted like a spoiled, demanding superstar on the set. That’s one of the reasons why the crews loved him so much, although many of them were equally enamored of the personal interest he took in them. It took Elvis only a few days on a set before he knew everybody’s names, their hobbies, what was going on with their families. I think he always had a great connection with the crew on his sets because, in some ways, he never really stopped thinking of himself as a simple, working man. He was always more comfortable kidding around with a grip or a carpenter than trying to make small talk with a studio lawyer.

  Throughout my years with Elvis, every time I saw him tap his creative abilities to take on some new kind of artistic challenge, I came away amazed again at the breadth of his talent. And standing around on that first movie set, it happened again. I’d seen him looking good on screen, but it was a revelation to see him do the work that got him up on screen. He was just such a natural, making it look like it was the easiest thing in the world to be at the center of a film. Even to my untrained eye, it was pretty clear that a film like Tickle Me wasn’t giving Elvis the chance to do all he could—the script didn’t give him much to work with, and the shooting schedule was pretty clearly set to favor cost containment over artistic excellence. But once in a while there’d be a scene here or there where Elvis did some great stuff—little stuff like a perfectly timed comic expression, or a fitting throwaway line.

  And sometimes, despite the weakness of the script, he’d still be able to pull some real drama or nuanced emotion out of his lines. In his first few films, he comes across as a fine, developing Method actor learning his craft, and while publicly he shied away from comparisons to James Dean, I know he would have relished the chance to prove himself worthy of those comparisons. We can’t know what he was truly capable of, but certainly the guy had some solid acting ability, and the material rarely gave his talents a chance to shine. If the films had been as good as Elvis, they’d be remembered a lot differently these days.

  A week or so into the Tickle Me shooting schedule, I had a strange sort of Guthrie Park flashback when Red West turned up on the lot to stage a fight scene with Elvis (Red’s uncredited role in the film was, aptly enough, “Bully in the Saloon”). I thought about some of the well-executed football plays the three of us had run as I watched Red and Elvis carefully choreograph the big brawl. It had never occurred to me that movie fights had to be worked out as precisely as dance numbers, and I was intrigued watching the two of them work. Red and Elvis had a great physical chemistry together—they knew how to read each other and how to move together and trusted each other enough to cut loose with confidence.

  Between takes I noticed that Elvis, as a result of the all-out physical exertion, was flushed and sweaty. He drank a lot of water whenever he worked, and while he may not have had mountain air piped into his dressing room, he did insist on a ready supply of his favorite brand of bottled water: Mountain Valley Spring Water, from Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas. I took it upon myself to make sure that between scenes he always had a fresh, cool bottle of water ready. Not only did that keep the star from getting thirsty, but it gave me a chance to talk some more with him. These on-set talks weren’t quite as deep as some we’d had on the ride out—most often we compared notes on which of the female dude ranchers were looking the prettiest that day. (In Elvis’s films, there was a strange, inverse ratio between the quality of the scripts and the number of girls on the set—I guess the studio figured that if it wasn’t paying for decent writing, the least it could do was fill the scenes with attractive extras.)

  If Elvis had asked me to come to California to be his water boy, I would have turned him down. My experience with and without Elvis had given me confidence and pride, and as much as I loved the guy, I had no interest in a future as a servant. But he hadn’t asked that. He had just asked me to come with him, and to be a part of his team. I understood that my job vaguely had something to do with security—I was, after all, the ex–Golden Glover who, after Red, was probably the physically strongest of the bunch. But Elvis hadn’t even been that explicit about my role. Working for Elvis meant that you were becoming not only a part of his support system but a part of his circle of trusted friends. For better or worse, we were everything for him: his staff, his pals, and, in a personal guy-to-guy way, his peers. In that spirit, I had no trouble bringing the star his water. I didn’t feel like the kid in the basement outside the Chickasaw Ballroom, mooning over the chance to bring Elvis a Pepsi. I was a friend, doing what I could for an overheated buddy.

  After one of the fight scenes, somebody in the crew commented that they liked a fight move Elvis had made, and he responded that it w
as based on a karate move. When they asked how much Elvis knew about karate, his eyes lit up. He squinted out at those of us standing on the other side of the lights and called to me.

  “Jerry—c’mere. Let’s show these people something.”

  We squared off and started going through some karate demonstrations, just like in the living room at Graceland—though by now I was quick enough to avoid any crotch-kicks. We worked out hard, building up speed and force, until Elvis backed away and stood in a relaxed stance.

  “I taught him everything he knows, folks,” he said to our small audience. “But not everything I know.”

  He wheeled around, made a sudden lunge, and tried to clip me with an open hand, but I managed to block him away.

  “Ahh…the old North Memphis knife-hand block,” laughed Elvis. “He’s learning.”

  My new Los Angeles career included one responsibility that I didn’t enjoy at all—grocery shopping with Marty Lacker. As foreman, Marty had decided that the Perugia Way housekeeper was spending too much on food, and figured Elvis could save a hundred bucks a week if we kept the pantry stocked ourselves. I highly doubted that Elvis cared much about getting a good deal on eggs and butter. But on some shoot days I’d get the signal from Marty and would soon find myself at a market, pushing a grocery cart down aisle after aisle. Back on the lot, the other guys were with Elvis, surrounded by attractive women in Western-wear. I was in front of frozen foods, watching Marty Lacker hunt for a good price on bulk chicken legs.

  I managed not to hold a grocery-grudge, though. When work was done on the lot, Elvis and all of us guys headed home to Perugia Way, where we became the unified membership of the world’s most exclusive fraternity. The guys—Billy Smith, Alan Fortas, Richard Davis, Mike Keaton, Marty, Red, and sometimes a visiting George Klein or Lamar Fike—would all have a late, family-style dinner around the big dining-room table, with Elvis sitting at the head.

  I think at those dinnertimes everybody there felt privileged to have a seat at the table, including Elvis. The vibe was a mix of rock-and-roll backstage, football locker room, and White House situation room, and you couldn’t help but feel that by pulling up a chair, you were part of something amazing. Some of the details of our responsibilities and arrangements got hashed out over dinner, but it was pretty rare for a meal to go by without a good laugh over something. And the best laugh was usually at the expense of one of us. Elvis loved to tease—the voice that could expertly mimic Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove could also perfectly imitate anybody around him, and he had a way of finding the one inflection or mannerism in your speech you didn’t want anyone to focus on and turn it into a whole routine. Of course, we enjoyed going right back at him. Everything was fair game for a well-delivered gibe: Elvis’s neck (he thought it was too long), Lamar’s weight, Alan’s ears, my romantic “inexperience,” or the way Marty looked in the Fred Segal black stretch pants that he insisted on squeezing into. There was a brutal honesty among us that was a real key to the relationship.

  And there were some plain old brutal backhands that figured in, too—Elvis loved to smack somebody when they least expected it, and he always expected that he’d get smacked right back. This was some highly charged male bonding, and you couldn’t have gotten away with being a slow-on-the-uptake country bumpkin. These guys were fast with the cutting one-liners, and if you couldn’t keep up, you probably didn’t belong there. Lamar was so fast with his deadpan put-downs that sometimes it took even Elvis a minute to realize he’d been put down—and then he’d crack up. Billy Smith became an expert at timing his lines with a dash from the table (he was usually sitting within Elvis’s smacking range). I tried to hold my own when I had to (reminding the guys of Elvis’s running style always worked), and otherwise kept out of the way as much as possible.

  Around the house we loved talking in movie lingo (“All right—one hour lunch, forty-five for crew, thirty for stand-ins”). But away from the Paramount lot we weren’t really living what most would consider a Hollywood social life and didn’t go out on the town much. As at Graceland, Elvis and the guys had a small circle of female friends who they were comfortable hanging out with, and they’d come up to the house from time to time. There was Pat Parry, an L.A. teenager with a great sense of humor who was accepted as one of the guys. And there were Bonnie, Sherry, and Alan’s friend Sandy Hovey, all local girls who were equally comfortable being a part of things at the house. Living in Los Angeles might have been more of a culture shock if I’d come out on my own, but I really didn’t have to get used to L.A. because we lived in our own little world around Elvis.

  For all our locker-room-style bonding, Elvis ran a tight organization and wanted everything around him—house, cars, guys—to make a good appearance. We probably spent as much time keeping the place clean and washing the cars as we did “partying.” In fact, there was very little alcohol around Elvis, and the only drugs were the ones we still considered medicine—the stimulants and sleeping pills that helped keep everybody running on schedule. Maybe it sounds self-serving or naive, but in the days before rehab was an accepted part of a career path, we really didn’t see how using drugs prescribed to us could hurt us.

  The film moved along very quickly. And while Tickle Me may not stand tall as a significant event in Elvis’s life, I must admit that it brought about a significant change in mine. One of the beautiful women filling out the cast of the film was an actress named Paula Tyden, a spirited, gorgeous redhead who drove around town in a Cadillac convertible. Red West pointed her out to me on the set as an example of the kind of girl you just didn’t see back in Memphis. I had to agree, and I was more than a little flustered when I found myself talking to Paula one day and realized that we had just made a date to get together. I would readily admit that Paula Tyden was out of my league, but if she wanted to see me, I wasn’t going to fight it.

  She picked me up in her Caddy on a Saturday night and took me out for dinner in Malibu. I was hoping for a stroll on the beach after dessert, but we skipped the stroll (we may have even skipped dessert) and ended up checked into a motel right on the beach. There, to the sound of crashing surf, I finally became “experienced,” and I have to say that it was every bit as pleasurable as I’d been warned by the nuns at Holy Names. I didn’t have much time for any afterglow, however. When I got dropped off back at the Perugia house, Alan Fortas greeted me by saying, “Man, you really screwed up.”

  “What are you talking about, Alan?”

  “You don’t mess with Elvis’s girl,” he said.

  “I was out with Paula. From the movie.”

  “Who do you think he went out with last movie? That’s big trouble, man.”

  Alan was an easygoing guy who didn’t get unnecessarily upset about anything, so to see him worked up got me extremely worried. I knew from all those Graceland parties that Elvis did not take kindly to anybody flirting with his girlfriends, and could only imagine how he’d feel about a guy who’d slept with one. I started to think that maybe I’d managed to lose my old virginity and my new job in the same night.

  I found Elvis sitting by himself, reading in the den. I approached slowly, a little sheepishly.

  “Elvis?”

  He looked up, his expression cold, hard, dead serious. I knew right away that he knew where I’d been. I started talking away—“I had no idea who she was; she didn’t say anything; I would have never if I’d known…”

  When I finished, Elvis furrowed his brow slightly but kept his stare focused hard on me.

  “You’re talking about Paula Tyden?”

  “Yeah, Elvis. Paula. I didn’t know.”

  Elvis took a deep breath, let it out, and looked back down at his book. “That’s all over, Jerry. Don’t worry about it. She’s a nice girl.”

  He wasn’t happy. No guy likes hearing about another guy fooling around with an old girlfriend, and in those matters, Elvis was very much like any other guy. But he knew I wasn’t trying to sneak around him—there I was coming to confess to hi
m with my head hung down after the fact. He was going to let things slide this time.

  A wave of conflicted feelings came over me. Chief among them was relief. As intense and wonderful as the night with Paula had been, I certainly didn’t want that sort of thing to mess up my friendship with Elvis. He stayed focused on his book, and after a moment I left the room quietly, realizing for the first time just how complicated the mix of professional and personal lives could be around Elvis. I did see Paula Tyden a few more times, though—enough times to know that I really was in over my head with her. We parted as friends.

  By the end of November the film was done and we were getting ready to drive back to Memphis. On one of the days just before we left, a strange delivery was made to the Perugia Way house—a crumpled, twisted motorcycle. Some of the guys quickly recognized it as Sonny West’s. Sonny and Elvis had had a blow-out argument on one of the last films, and Sonny had left the group, moving in with a girlfriend in L.A. Looking at the wreck of a motorcycle, we were all worried about what might have happened to Sonny. Alan Fortas made some calls and found out that Sonny was alive but very banged up, and recuperating over at the girlfriend’s house.

  Whatever their disagreement had been, Elvis decided to put it behind them, and he sent Alan over to Sonny’s place with money to help Sonny with any medical bills. The next day Sonny turned up at Perugia Way, hobbling along on crutches, to thank Elvis personally. We had just finished loading up the Dodge mobile home and were about ready to hit the road, when Elvis told Sonny to get in the Dodge and make the trip with us. Sonny looked very surprised, and pointed out that he hadn’t packed up any of his things. All he had with him was his clothes and his crutches.

  “We’ll get you what you need along the way,” said Elvis. Sonny climbed aboard.

  Back in Memphis that fall, I moved into a new home: Graceland. As with most things around Elvis, this change—a huge, amazing one for me—came with little fanfare. There was no heart-to-heart talk about making me a part of the family, no grand invitation into his home. As I recall, somewhere during the trip back I mentioned to Alan Fortas that I’d be doing a lot of driving between my dad’s house and Graceland. Alan shrugged and said “I think Elvis wants you to stay at the house.” Sure enough, at one of our last meal stops before crossing the Mississippi River, Elvis was talking to Marty Lacker, who had been living at Graceland in a converted garage always referred to as “the annex.” And at some point, he turned to me and said, “Jerry—you’ll get the room downstairs.” That was it. I was living in the house.