Me and a Guy Named Elvis

by Jerry Schilling

  By three A.M., we were by ourselves again at the bar, and I realized that it was time for me to be the responsible party.

  “E, we better get out of here.” It took a little extra work to get the words out.

  “Yeah, OK. That’s about all the damage we can do here.” He was having a little trouble enunciating, too.

  We made our way across the casino floor and out the front doors. I went into responsible-party mode, keeping an eye on Elvis while I hailed a cab for us. We flopped into the backseat of the first one that pulled up.

  “Hilton Hotel, please.” I said to the driver.

  He turned and gave Elvis and me a very curious look.

  “Sir?” he said.

  “Yeah?” said Elvis.

  “You’re at the Hilton Hotel.”

  Yes we were. We were at the Hilton Hotel, and we were drunk enough not to know it. We laughed our way back in and up to our rooms, and then, over the next day, fought off a pair of monster hangovers.

  Joe Esposito and I were with Elvis at the RCA Hollywood Studios, where he’d just spent an all-night recording session with Felton Jarvis and most of his Vegas band. It was Elvis’s custom to OK a preliminary mix in a listening room, and it wasn’t uncommon to be in the room when Elvis was doing this kind of listening. But this night he made a point of having Joe and me listen to one particular new track with him. He knew there was something about this one that we could all relate to in a stronger than usual way.

  The song he was listening to was one that Red had written for him—a song called “Separate Ways.” While Elvis had a good time performing his rockers, he was also drawn to emotional, storytelling ballads. Red had come up with this song about a disintegrating marriage well before any of us knew the full extent of the troubles between Elvis and Priscilla. But now Elvis, with Red’s words, seemed to be singing a piece of heartbroken autobiography.

  Love has slipped away,

  Left us only friends

  We almost seem like strangers…

  There was even a verse about a child trying to make sense of her parents’ divorce. And a chorus that said there was nothing left to do but head out in separate ways and hope that a new love might be found somewhere in the future.

  Elvis could sing a ballad with as much power as he used on the rockers, but on this track there was something subdued in his voice. You could hear how sorry this singer was to be singing the words of this song.

  The track hit home with Joe and with me. Hearing Elvis’s voice, we thought of our own marriages, both crumbling from neglect. I still loved Sandy, but how could I tell her she was the most important thing in my life when I’d committed myself to a life that barely included her? It hurt a lot to think that we, too, were starting to feel like strangers. As Joe and I listened with Elvis, he stayed expressionless, but each time the song ended he’d cue it up, start it again, and look over at us. Then he’d look down, and shake his head a bit. You could almost hear the question hanging in the air: “What the hell have we done to the women we loved?”

  The next night we were all back at the same studio for another session, one of the few times I’d ever see Elvis’s musical instincts off the mark. With all the emotions that had been stirred by “Separate Ways” still fresh, Elvis was definitely not in the mood to rock. He wanted to sing more songs that would help him express the sadness and loss he was feeling. But Felton had an up-tempo song he felt sure was going to be a hit. Elvis heard it and dismissed it. Felton didn’t push, but he eventually got Elvis to give it another listen. I heard the demo, too, and though I knew where Elvis’s head and heart were from the night before, I could also tell that Felton was right—the song sounded like a hit. I knew not to push, but I supported Felton and encouraged Elvis to give the song a shot.

  Eventually, he did, and sang “Burning Love.” There wasn’t any way he could truly put his heart into it, but you couldn’t tell that from listening to what was recorded—he did a great, convincing job of sounding up. When he later began to sing the song in concert, he had a kind of psychological block toward it. Elvis—who had close to a photographic memory when it came to books, scripts, lyrics—always insisted that he needed a lyric sheet to perform “Burning Love.” He might not glance at the sheet he was holding on stage, but he needed to have it with him. He didn’t get excited about the song until it turned out that Felton had been right—the song was a hit. And, interestingly enough, with “Burning Love,” Elvis found himself battling up the pop charts with an old friend. By the fall of 1972, “Burning Love” had made it to number two, but couldn’t go higher—the number-one spot was held by Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-A-Ling.”

  When Elvis began a new national tour in the spring of 1972, there was one significant change in the touring machinery: Now, many of the concerts would be filmed, and the resulting footage would be shaped into an MGM rock-and-roll documentary feature. This would be the second documentary based on Elvis performances—the first, an MGM production titled That’s the Way It Is, had used footage of rehearsals and performances shot during Elvis’s August 1970 Las Vegas engagement (when I was still a full-time Paramount employee).

  The filmmakers undertaking this new project were Bob Abel and Pierre Adidge, a pair of young, serious-minded music lovers who’d recently completed Mad Dogs and Englishmen, a film that followed Joe Cocker’s 1970 American tour. The pair, whose production company was known as Cinema Associates, had been suggested to Elvis and the Colonel by MGM, and they impressed Elvis enough with their sense of purpose that they got the job. Elvis was excited about the project, but I think I was probably more excited. Having Elvis shows and serious documentary work come together in this way seemed like a situation full of possibilities for me.

  We got used to having cameras rolling around us pretty quickly, and the tour got off to a good start. Elvis was continuing to deliver strong performances before sellout crowds. But with all that going right, there was one career move Elvis wanted to make that didn’t ever seem to get any closer to being a reality: Elvis wanted to tour internationally. I sat up with him one night and listened as he talked about how much he wanted to go overseas—how he wanted to perform for fans in England, throughout Europe, and in Japan. He’d seen so many Japanese fans make the trip to Las Vegas to see him—why couldn’t he go over there? He felt a responsibility to his fans around the world, and when he talked about wanting to tour internationally, it was with a real passion—and an anger that it hadn’t happened sooner. “These people have a certain image of me,” he said at one point. “I don’t want to wait until I’m forty goddamn years old to get over there.”

  For years I’d seen Elvis’s talents hampered by the people around him making decisions based on business and finance, and it seemed like now, finally, he should be free to make his own artistic decisions. He was excited to be performing again, but how many times was he going to be able to put his heart into singing his songs night after night in Las Vegas, or in the same U.S. cities he’d been to the year before? He needed to stay challenged. And touring internationally seemed like precisely the challenge he would rise to. The next day, I was scheduled to have a lunch with the Colonel—at his “invitation”—and I decided to bring the issue up. It still felt dangerous to step in between Elvis and the Colonel, but I also knew how deeply Elvis felt about this, and I felt I owed it to him to get some kind of a discussion started. When I told the Colonel what Elvis and I had talked about all night, he was irritated, and clearly didn’t want to have the discussion with me.

  “Jerry, you know Hulett,” he barked. “He knows the situation over there. Why don’t you ask him?”

  Promoter Tom Hulett had become part of the Elvis world as a partner of Jerry Weintraub’s, and their company, Management III, now handled Elvis’s tours. Hulett was the partner we dealt with most often and most directly, and he and I had become close, usually finding time for a talk together after a show. He was a hip guy, but a tough businessman, too—a former athlete who, in working with Jimi Hend
rix and then Led Zeppelin, had just about pioneered the art of putting on a large-scale rock-and-roll tour. Tom had been brave enough to go up against the old showbiz promotion syndicates on the East and West coasts, and smart enough that he’d become a great success. I was impressed with the way he carried himself, and the way he conducted business, and saw his knowledge and experience as a tremendous asset for Elvis.

  So that night, after the show—following the Colonel’s “suggestion”—I brought up the matter of international touring with Tom. The Colonel had always made it sound like it was just too complicated to ever be resolved—too difficult to work out the travel and promotion and security and guarantees. But Hendrix and Zeppelin and other acts Tom had worked with hadn’t seemed to have had any trouble touring all over the globe. I asked if, theoretically, we could work out all the arrangements—and especially the security—for Elvis to perform an engagement in London that could be promoted in other European cities. Tom thought for a moment, then said, “Yeah, I think so.” We talked awhile about how some of the scheduling would work, and it seemed that, by the end of the night, some forward progress toward Europe had been made.

  The next day, the Colonel and I were walking together down a hallway in the Hilton Hotel in San Antonio when I told him about my conversation with Tom.

  “Colonel, Tom said we can do it. He thinks we can work it out if Elvis wants to tour overseas.”

  The Colonel stopped in his tracks, hurled his cane down the hall, turned on me, and hollered, “Goddamn it, then—you handle him.”

  There were two messages that became very clear to me in that hallway: I was not actually being requested to “handle” Elvis in any way. And we wouldn’t be going to London anytime soon.

  Having a documentary film crew around while on tour with Elvis, I felt I was in the middle of everything I wanted to be a part of. The dream of being an editor on an Elvis film—working with him on some kind of creative level—seemed entirely possible now, but it required patience and some careful steps. As tight as Elvis and I had become on the road, I didn’t want to give him the impression that I would jump ship easily. And I knew that, after making their way through all the Colonel’s hoops and hassles, the filmmakers had no desire to invite an Elvis guy into their offices.

  But when the filming was done, and we’d finished a second leg of the tour, I did talk to Elvis about trying to get involved with the film. I think he’d gotten used to having these kinds of talks with me by then, but this felt a lot different from the last time I’d asked to part ways with him. This time, I was secure about my abilities to fend for myself in the world at large, and I was also secure about the strength of the friendship between Elvis and me. I didn’t feel like there was any chance this would be a permanent good-bye (I’d thought that might be the case the first time, but had found myself right back at Graceland for Christmas, New Year’s, and the birth of Lisa Marie). But again, it meant a lot that he gave me his blessing to follow my heart.

  It wasn’t as easy to win over Abel and Adidge. I went to their offices one afternoon to formally offer my services as an assistant editor, but was not met with much enthusiasm. I could sense that they were very hesitant about having a member of Elvis’s inner circle working on an Elvis project. I liked these guys and the way they’d worked with Elvis, and I didn’t want to push too hard. So I told them if my connection with Elvis disqualified me from the Elvis film, maybe they could let me work on their other film project—a celebration of fifties rock and roll called Let the Good Times Roll. Somehow, that request changed the way they looked at me. I guess they figured that if this Elvis guy wasn’t necessarily looking for work on the Elvis film, he had to be serious about the film side of things. And it must have struck them that, given the fact that I had some real editing experience, I was probably not just a “spy” sent by Elvis or the Colonel. Finally, I suppose they saw the value of having a way to get to Elvis other than going through the Colonel. Within a few days, I completed my next career turn and began as an entry-level assistant editor with Cinema Associates, working on Elvis On Tour.

  Almost immediately, I had a chance to serve Elvis and the film in a unique way. A young filmmaker named Marty Scorsese was working as an editor on the film (he’d already done a brilliant job as part of the editing team on Woodstock), and one of the special sequences he was overseeing was a montage of early photographs of Elvis—a flowing, visual history of his career. When the Colonel heard that this was a part of the film, he nixed it, telling Abel and Adidge that Elvis did not want any old photographs of him to be a part of the project. I knew that the facts were a little different—Elvis had complained to the Colonel about the use of old photographs, but he was talking about their use on new album covers. I had a feeling that if Elvis got a sense of how the montage fit into the film, he’d have no problem with it.

  I went over to the Monovale house one night and, when the time seemed right, explained to Elvis how the montage worked shot by shot—how it fit with the music and built up to the tour footage. He got it right away. “Sounds good. I don’t have any trouble with that,” he told me. I brought his OK back to the filmmakers, the Scorsese montage was in, and the film was better off for it. Over that one film sequence, I’d taken the huge step of being able to approach Elvis as a fellow creative. Not a creative equal, of course, but it felt huge to be with him discussing film edits rather than sit-ups.

  Abel and Adidge were talented pioneers in bringing visual sophistication and state-of-the-art sound quality to to the genre of the rock-and-roll documentary. Adidge was an even-tempered giant of a guy with a keen sense of image and story, while Abel was a gregarious personality with a strong command of the latest audio technology. They’d shot the Elvis shows with a team of 16 mm cameras that allowed them to capture all angles and elements of the concert experience, and wanted to present the images they’d collected across a triple split screen. As early sequences were cut together, it looked like the results were going to be exciting and involving. But the filmmakers were after something more. They hadn’t come to the project as dedicated Elvis fans, but had been completely charmed and won over by the “man” rather than the “star.” They’d come to realize something that Elvis himself had put into words at a press conference before the wildly triumphant Madison Square Garden shows: “The image is one thing, the human being another.” And, frankly, I think they were surprised by his natural intelligence—his ability to read a person or a situation quickly and deeply.

  They decided that what the movie needed was Elvis’s story in his own words, and they wanted him to sit for an audio-only interview to be used against images in the film. They hoped Elvis might open up and, in discussing his life and career, show the thoughtful, reflective side that they sensed was there but had never been showcased in any past interviews. The Colonel, predictably, was completely against it. Allowing Elvis to talk freely and openly to a running tape machine went against all his showman’s instincts. But he didn’t tell the filmmakers that he wouldn’t allow it, only that he would do nothing to facilitate it. I’m sure he figured that without him setting things up, the interview would never happen. He was wrong.

  Over a period of weeks, when I had the chance, I talked to Elvis about the film and told him about what I was seeing in the editing room: This wasn’t just concert performances on film, it was turning into something important. This documentary felt like it would be a great piece of legacy, and Elvis could be proud to put as much of himself into it as possible. Again, he got it. And, more importantly, he trusted me. The interview was on.

  One day in late July, he sat in a dressing room on the MGM lot, with Abel and Adidge, myself, Joe, and Charlie. The room was nothing fancy, but it had a pedigree—it was one of the few dressing rooms reserved for the biggest stars—all others got a trailer out on the lot. This had been Clark Gable’s room, and it had been Elvis’s when he made his MGM films. Elvis was at a table, facing the filmmakers, and I sat in a director’s chair behind them, making eye
contact with Elvis over Abel’s shoulder. I could see right away that Elvis was a little uncomfortable being on the spot this way, knowing that every word was on the record. So I decided to try to break the ice a bit.

  “Hey, E,” I said. “Why don’t you tell them about what your daddy said about you being a guitar player.”

  He laughed a little. “My daddy said, ‘I never saw a guitar player that was worth a damn.’”

  Everybody laughed, and the atmosphere in the room loosened up. The filmmakers began handing Elvis some old photographs, asking him to reminisce about some of the images, and he began to relax into a friendly, storytelling mood. He discussed his childhood, and his early days as a performer, even the inspiration for his sideburns (Memphis truck drivers). When asked about the screaming reaction of his early fans, he said that the first time it happened, it scared him to death. He didn’t know what he’d done to elicit that response and went backstage to ask the manager, “What’d I do? What’d I do?” Elvis said the manager responded, “Whatever it was, go out and do it again.”

  When asked about his current fans, his respect for his audience was obvious. But he also said something that hinted at a more frustrating side of his career. “If I do something good, [the fans] let me know. If I don’t, they let me know that. For a while there was the theory that anything I did would sell. I knew that was not true. It’s according to the material. You’ve got to have good material—whether it’s a song or a script or whatever. It’s got to be good.”

  The interview stayed easy and conversational, though at times Elvis did not seem interested in delivering the kind of quotable self-examination the filmmakers were after. When they asked how he would describe his early sound, he simply said, “It was good.” But when the talk turned to a discussion of Elvis’s movies, he was not only forthcoming, he was shockingly honest about the disappointment and frustration he’d felt in Hollywood. When asked how deeply he cared about the quality of his films, he answered, “I cared so much until I became physically ill. I would become violently ill…At a certain stage I had no say-so in it. I didn’t have final approval of the script, which means I couldn’t say, ‘This is not good for me’…I don’t think anyone was consciously trying to harm me, it was just Hollywood’s image of me was wrong, and I knew it, and I couldn’t say anything about it. I couldn’t do anything about it.