Me and a Guy Named Elvis

by Jerry Schilling

  By the end of our audience with the President, he and Elvis were talking like old friends, and exchanging thoughts on how Elvis’s offer of service might be put into action. Here were two great men, but great men who had found their success to be extremely complicated, and as different as they were, I think there was a mutual understanding between them. From some of their conversation, it also became evident to me that President Nixon had overridden Deputy Director Finlator: Elvis was going to get his badge.

  As our time in the Oval Office came to an end, the President made what was probably the customary gesture of goodwill for visitors: He gave us each a pair of Presidential cuff links. To Sonny and me, these were as good as our own badge, and we thanked the President. But Elvis was thinking that we shouldn’t go back to our families empty-handed.

  “You know, sir, these men have wives,” he said.

  “Of course,” said the President. “Let’s see what we can find for the ladies.”

  The President went to his desk at the end of the room and pulled open a drawer. Elvis stood right at his side, and when the President began rummaging through the drawer for more gifts, Elvis stuck his hands in and rummaged right along with him. By the time they were done, they’d come up with gold pins bearing the Presidential seal—a perfect gift for Priscilla, Sandy, and Sonny’s wife, Judy.

  “Thanks for coming by, fellas.” said the President as we moved through a final round of handshakes. We all thanked him, then exited the Oval Office, guided again by Bud Krogh.

  Sonny and I were awestruck by what had just happened. The lesson for me was to never doubt what my friend Elvis could accomplish. He was beaming, extremely satisfied with the way things had worked out, but I had the feeling he wasn’t going to leave the White House until he had his promised badge and its accompanying credentials in hand. When Bud suggested that we could have lunch in the White House mess hall, Elvis quickly took him up on the offer.

  On the way to lunch, Krogh gave us a private White House tour. We started in the Roosevelt Room across from the Oval Office—which featured a striking portrait of Teddy Roosevelt in his “Rough Rider” uniform—and then down hallways past all kinds of offices. Apparently word was out that Elvis was in the building, because I think every secretary on duty came to their door to get a look at him—one even ran up and gave him a kiss (what visiting head of state would get that reaction?). We made our way to the basement of the West Wing, past some stunned special-duty police officers and some Secret Service agents trying not to look stunned. Elvis hadn’t been too impressed with the plates, portraits, and White House trivia Bud pointed out along the way, but he was very excited when Bud showed us the door that led to the actual “Situation Room”—where global crises of all sorts were regularly taken care of.

  “No fighting in the War Room,” Elvis said—referring to a favorite moment from Dr. Strangelove.

  We went down a few more basement hallways to get to our lunch destination. The White House mess was officially run by the navy, and had the look of a grand dining room: dark-wood paneling, heavy, dark-wood tables and chairs, and a thick carpet on the floor. Just the kind of formal place that usually made Elvis uncomfortable. But this day he didn’t mind the formal setting or the attention he drew. We took a table right in the middle of the dining area, and saw turning heads and amazed stares from all over the room—princes, presidents, and power players of all kinds walked into that room every day, but an Elvis Presley sighting was obviously a bigger deal than that. We had our lunch, and afterwards, back at Krogh’s office, Elvis got his BNDD badge and his credentials appointing him a “Special Assistant.” He was happy that he’d gotten what he was after, but I could see he was also quite sincere about trying to do something positive with his position.

  After we left the White House, we drove straight to the airport to catch our respective flights. I wanted to catch the first flight back to L.A. to make it to work on Tuesday, if Paramount still had me on the payroll. As we drove along, Elvis made it pretty clear that he wanted one other thing out of this weekend: He wanted me back working full-time for him. Elvis didn’t ever have to put himself in the position of pitching someone a job with him, but I think he really liked the way I’d handled his escape to L.A. and our White House adventure. I’d passed some kind of a deep loyalty test that he hadn’t even realized he’d been putting me through. And he knew I wanted work that felt like a career—work that made use of my own abilities. So he pitched me.

  “Jerry, how’d you feel about being my personal public relations man?”

  “I don’t know, E—what would that entail?”

  “Well, I was talking with GK, and he had an idea about helping to get my records to sell. RCA doesn’t give them enough push, so George said maybe I could use somebody like you as a personal PR man. Have you meet with radio program directors, make sure they get the records. Set up some interviews. All that type of stuff. What do you think?”

  If it were just between Elvis and me, I thought it sounded great. But there was somebody else to consider.

  “Elvis, I’d love that job. But I don’t think the Colonel would let it happen.”

  “Hmm. You’d be interested, though?”

  “It’d be a great job, Elvis.”

  We left it at that. I made it back to L.A., where I discovered I was still employed at Paramount. A couple weeks later, though, when I got home from work, Sandy handed me a large package from Memphis. I opened it to find stacks of hundreds of shiny red business cards, lettered in black with my name and a new title: “Jerry Schilling—Personal Public Relations to Elvis Presley.” I had every reason to believe that once the Colonel heard about this, these cards would be a waste of paper. But if Elvis was working this hard to get me back, what exactly was I doing splicing German Coke commercials out of Paramount features? I made up my mind. Whether the new title held or not, I was heading back to Memphis.

  11

  PROMISED LAND CALLIN’

  In January 1971, I was sitting in Ellis Auditorium, just like I did back in 1956, watching Elvis Presley headline. Except this time, Elvis wasn’t sharing the bill with country and western stars, but with a cancer researcher, a civil rights activist, a highly decorated army captain, and, from the Nixon White House, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler.

  Elvis had been named one of the Top Ten Outstanding Young Americans by the national Junior Chambers of Commerce (the Jaycees)—an award that over the years had gone to such notables as Orson Welles, Jesse Jackson, Leonard Bernstein, Ted Kennedy, Howard Hughes, and Richard Nixon. As one of those outstanding Americans, he was required to make a speech. For all the stages he’d been on, and for all the press conferences he’d handled, he’d never appeared anywhere as a public speaker, and was incredibly nervous about doing so at this event. But when Elvis got up to accept his award, he delivered a humbly eloquent speech that, in a few brief lines, managed to say everything about how he saw himself. I could hear the nervousness—his voice was soft and his delivery halting. But his message still rang out in that auditorium: “When I was a child, ladies and gentlemen, I was a dreamer. I read comic books and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I ever dreamed has come true a hundred times.”

  He took a moment to graciously recognize the achievements of the other nominees, then finished with some lines from a favorite song of his childhood—one he knew best as a 1955 hit record for R & B singer Roy Hamilton—that, in this context, sounded simple and insightful: “‘Without a song, the day would never end; without a song, a man ain’t got no friend; without a song, the road would never bend. Without a song.’ So I keep singing a song. Good-night. Thank you.”

  Yes, I was back with Elvis and back with the guys (which at this point included included Red and Sonny, Joe Esposito, Marty Lacker, Charlie Hodge, Billy Smith, and Dick Grob, a former Palm Springs policeman now assisting with Elvis security). It felt good to be back in that circle, not having to worry about jetting back to L.A.
to punch a time clock every Monday morning. As much as I’d enjoyed my editing work, I’d been watching Elvis’s career pick up momentum and excitement, and if he was willing to look for ways to give me more to do, it seemed an easy call to step away from the Moviola editing machines and get back with him. My beautiful wife was, again, completely supportive of the career change, which turned out to be not quite what Elvis had pitched. Just as I had suspected, the Colonel, in his indirect, nonconfrontational, but absolutely final manner, had shot down any chance that I’d be working as an independent, personal record promoter for Elvis. No matter how ready I was for a promotion, the Colonel was not going to let me get between him and RCA. That was disappointing to me, but I understood that the Colonel was doing his job as a manager.

  The circle of guys had been particularly tight lately. Elvis’s interest in badges and credentials had spread to the rest of us, and we’d all done the required work to earn official Palm Springs police badges and Memphis deputy sheriff badges, taking all the required courses and written exams for both, and proving our abilities on the respective firing ranges. We’d also all been together for George Klein’s wedding in Las Vegas, and for Sonny West’s wedding in Memphis (Elvis was the best man at both).

  The Jaycees award meant a great deal to Elvis. It honored him as an entertainer, but it also recognized his years of often unheralded generosity of time and money to so many charities. I think this humanitarian aspect of the award made it more meaningful to Elvis than any musical award he ever received. A gold record or even a Grammy was a “win” that satisfied his competitive spirit, but to be honored as a person of substance and good works was what he’d always been after. He actually carried that Jaycees award around with him for years, proudly showing it off (sort of the way he’d carried my gift gun around years before, though the gun couldn’t exactly be considered a symbol of humanitarianism).

  It was a little strange that Elvis was now being honored by the sort of people who, years before, had been afraid of him, even disgusted by him (although he’d been nominated for the Jaycees honor by former Memphis Sheriff and future Shelby County Mayor Bill Morris—one of the very few local politicians who had always approached Elvis as a friend rather than a threat). Elvis had reached a point where both the politicians and the good ol’ boys appreciated him. In light of that fact, I found it a little curious that our recent trip to the White House had managed to stay secret—Sandy and I sat at a small table with Mr. Ziegler at a dinner Elvis hosted at the Four Flames restaurant before the Ellis event, and the press secretary didn’t say a word about it. The biggest summit meeting between the worlds of politics and rock and roll wouldn’t be reported on at all until it turned up in a Washington Post column almost a full year after it happened. And though the government never put Elvis to any use as an agent, a representative of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs would call him every six months to make sure that he still had the federal badge in his possession.

  Elvis had once been seen as a dangerous rebel, and was now a respected, if very flashily dressed, member of the establishment. But a lot of what was at the core of Elvis hadn’t changed so much. I got to see that as Sandy and I walked with him into a Jaycees luncheon at the Rivermont Hotel before the awards ceremony. One of the first guests Elvis recognized was Marion Keisker—who had served for years as Sam Phillips’s right-hand woman at Sun Studios. It was Marion who had first met with Elvis at Sun, and she gave him some very important early encouragement. Marion had left Sun in 1957 to join the Air Force, and she was in full dress uniform at the Rivermont event. Elvis hadn’t seen her in more than ten years, but when he spotted her on the way into the luncheon, his eyes lit up and he looked like the thrilled kid he must have been after many of those Sun sessions. When he turned to Sandy and me to introduce Marion, he explained who she was by simply saying, “This woman was there when it all started.”

  By the end of January, Elvis was back in Las Vegas, beginning another monthlong run at the International Hotel—the first engagement of several, during a year in which Elvis would also continue to record and tour. I quickly discovered that even though the business cards Elvis had printed up for me weren’t going to get used, I did have some new responsibilities.

  Elvis liked to take the stage the way a prizefighter steps into the boxing ring—physically pumped and with a single-minded intensity. Part of what helped him do this was his timing before a show—he didn’t like to be at a venue more than fifteen minutes before he was scheduled to go on. He sometimes enjoyed socializing after a show, but never before. Once he was in his stage wardrobe he wanted to stay strictly focused on the performance at hand—putting on those clothes was the equivalent of the fighter getting his hands wrapped and his gloves on just before the fight. And those clothes had been designed to hold up throughout a fighter’s workout—after his return to live performance, Elvis had quickly discovered that he couldn’t move as freely and energetically as he wanted to wearing shirts and pants. Beginning with his second run at the International, he began wearing karate-influenced one-piece jumpsuits created by designer Bill Belew.

  To get him in a state of maximum physical and mental readiness, he and I had worked out a move that was a cross between a karate exercise and some old-fashioned Indian wrestling. Just moments before he took the stage, he and I would stand sideways facing each other, arms locked and front legs pushed against each other’s, and we’d try to pull each other off balance, slowly applying more force until we were pulling as hard as we could. We’d build up the intensity, as, behind a closed curtain, the band played its “Thus Spake Zarathustra” intro. The curtain would sweep open, and just as it got to the place where we were standing, the music would shift into Elvis’s powerful vamp and he’d break away, and storm out on stage pumped-up like a weightlifter who’s just done his top bench press. There were some nights when we pulled at each other so hard I thought he might pull me out on stage with him, and frankly, the music and our move got my adrenaline so pumped up that I felt like I was ready to do the show, too.

  Along the same lines, Elvis began to use me as what would today be called a personal trainer. His weight had been up and down over the years—his diet and the hours he kept had always made it easy to pick up pounds, while his metabolism, sometimes kicked along with diet pills, had made it easy to get the weight off. Now, at thirty-six, Elvis knew he didn’t have the same frame he’d had when he was eighteen—who ever does? It was more of a battle to keep the pounds off, but it was a battle he was winning. He was still a very physically active performer, and his performance schedule—two shows a night, seven days a week—kept him strong and lean. But he also wanted to develop an exercise regimen to keep him in top shape. So I became his exercise partner.

  In so many other areas, when Elvis said he wanted to do something, he did it in a big way, ignoring limits and pushing further than anyone thought possible. That wasn’t quite his approach to exercise. For all his success, Elvis had a fierce competitive streak, but he generally liked to compete at things he knew he was good at. Exercise presented two problems: first, by nature, it wasn’t competition. And, second, Elvis just wasn’t a very good exerciser.

  We were supposed to get in a good session before the first show each night, so every day, after I heard that he was awake and had ordered his breakfast—usually in the late afternoon—I’d go up to his suite. Elvis started his days slowly and quietly—you didn’t push him to do anything before he’d had some food and coffee. So, once he’d had his meal and the time seemed right, I’d ask if he was ready for a workout. More often than not, the answer was no, he wasn’t ready. Or he’d tell me flat out that he wasn’t going to exercise that day—he didn’t have time. I’d sit with him awhile to talk and sometimes take one more try at it: “You sure you don’t want to exercise, E?” The look in his eyes when he said, “Are you kidding?” meant that the discussion was over.

  Sometimes, I’d go ahead and do my own workout in my room—I think I may have done some
pioneering work turning desks and chairs into personal gym equipment. Then I’d go about my day, helping the guys take care of whatever needed to be taken care of before a performance. Finally, I’d change out of my casual clothes and get cleaned up and dressed for the night. I’d go down to the hotel restaurant and hang out with Joe Esposito, Dr. Nick (who now traveled with us as Elvis’s personal physician), promoter Tom Hulett, and Joe Guercio—the fast-talking, fast-witted music director for Elvis’s band. Many times we’d be seated, with our food ordered and on the way, when I’d get a call from Charlie Hodge upstairs: Elvis wants to exercise.

  I’d go up to his room, often to find that even though I was in my evening clothes, Elvis was still in his pajamas. I’d try to give him the best workout I could for a trainer in British designer jeans and leather boots. I’d put on some music and we’d run in place, I’d do some sit-ups with him holding my legs, and then he’d do sit-ups with me holding his legs. But it seemed that whenever it was his turn to do sit-ups, he’d always come up with just the right comment to get me laughing and make me lose count. And if I lost count, then he started laughing. The truth was, he could do karate all day long, but he couldn’t get through our exercise routine fast enough. There was no competition to it, except that I could do more sit-ups than him, and he didn’t like that at all. So by the end of our sessions, he’d still be cool and calm in his pajamas, while I’d have sweated through my dress clothes.