Me and a Guy Named Elvis

by Jerry Schilling

  “The pictures got very similar. If something was successful, they’d try to re-create it the next time around. So I’d read the first four or five pages of it, and I knew that it was just a different name with twelve new songs—the songs were mediocre in most cases. That’s what might have made it seem like indifference. But I was never indifferent. I was so concerned until that’s all I talked about. It worried me sick.”

  I could tell that Elvis wanted to voice some of these heavier thoughts—things I’d always felt to be true but had never heard him put into words before. I’d been with him on days when the stress of starting another film had made him physically ill, and I’d been there on days when studio representatives rushed to his home to insist that he stay on the work schedule he’d been contracted to. Abel tried to steer the interview toward some of the artistic successes in the movies, like the memorable dance sequence in Jailhouse Rock, but Elvis didn’t go for it. He was more interested in speaking to a troubling truth of his movie career: Right from the start, he’d been made false promises. That again and again, from Love Me Tender on, he’d been told that he’d get a chance to do some real acting, only to be handed underwritten nice-guy roles and songs that existed simply to move along story lines.

  “I didn’t know what to do. I just felt that I was obligated a lot of times to things that I didn’t fully believe in. And it was very difficult…I had thought they’d give me a chance to show some kind of acting ability or do a very interesting story,” he said. “But it did not change. It did not change. And so I became very discouraged. They couldn’t have paid me no amount of money in the world to make me feel any self-satisfaction inside.”

  Adidge seemed a little taken aback at the idea of Elvis feeling so conflicted about his work. “But you still did them—you must have forced yourself…”

  “I had to. I had to,” said Elvis.

  There was an almost eerie hush in the room for a moment. This was not the punchy, upbeat interview the filmmakers had been after, and they weren’t sure what to make of it. Elvis, sensing that he’d moved into some disturbing territory, backtracked a bit, pointing out that he was the only one to blame for the course of his career (it was impossible not to sense the Colonel’s name hanging in the air, but Elvis wouldn’t say a word about him, even when asked directly for “a Colonel story”). And he pointed out that not all the films were so bad, and that some of them worked as pure, escapist entertainment. There was a bit more back-and-forth, and then after about forty-five minutes, the interview was over.

  Elvis had been quite candid with Abel and Adidge, but I think they left that dressing room at MGM feeling he was more of a mystery than ever. They’d gotten Elvis in his own words, but those words didn’t quite fit the film that had been shot. They were putting together a celebration of his music and talent, but he’d been most open with them expressing regret about his career. I thought the interview was powerful enough to be the basis of the film, and would work brilliantly against current footage of Elvis on stage. But only a few lines would make it to the final cut of the film, most notably Vernon’s quote about the worthlessness of guitar players.

  My role in both the montage and interview situations improved my status in Abel and Adidge’s editing room, and pretty soon I’d moved up from grunt work to some real assistant editing. Working near Scorsese was like taking a master class in the art of filmmaking. He worked frantically—to the point that sometimes you thought he might just explode—but in addition to his amazing eye for striking images, he was brilliant at cutting to music, creating rhythms in the picture that moved with the music to create a powerful whole. I admired his skills, but I didn’t get to know the man very well—he was so buried in his work that there wasn’t much time for conversation. And when he got up from his editing bay, it was usually to dart straight out the door for one of his therapy sessions.

  One night, after a long day of editing, we were sitting around on the floor, getting ready to shut the office down, when he surprised me with a direct question.

  “Jerry, you know what I got?”

  “No, Marty. What?” I was sure he was going to tell me about some strange medical diagnosis he’d just received.

  “I got ‘That’s All Right Mama,’” he said. “On Sun. A seventy-eight.”

  Elvis went on to another monthlong Las Vegas engagement while I continued to work on the film. We were pushing for a November opening, and everything was coming together well. With most of the film cut, the final challenge was coming up with a strong end title sequence—something that would both sum up the film and give some added entertainment to an audience that stuck around for the very end of the credit crawl. Abel and Adidge were having a hard time coming up with the right song to use. They struggled with whether to end with an old song or a new one, a ballad or a rocker, but mostly they wanted something that had the right feel—something that could sum up the hour and a half that moviegoers had just spent with Elvis. Pierre Adidge asked me to come up with three or four songs I thought might work.

  I thought about it for just a moment, and the choice seemed obvious to me: “Memories,” a ballad Elvis had introduced in the ’68 TV special, which was all about taking a bittersweet look at the past. I played it for Bob and Pierre, and they agreed it was perfect. Pierre was excited enough about the song to say, “Jerry, I’m going to put a diamond in your TCB.” And better than that, he made me an offer. If I wanted to come into the office over the weekend and try out my own cut for the end sequence, I was welcome to. I told him I’d be there.

  I felt like a slightly overwhelmed kid in a candy shop facing the editing equipment by myself that weekend. I had the same buzzing mix of excitement and nervousness that I’d felt during my first solo plane flight in Memphis. I didn’t think crosswinds could affect a film splice, but I kept the windows closed anyway.

  I sweated it out at first, getting the feel of the process and slowly matching image to music. After a while, the mechanics of what I was doing started to feel natural, and I felt free to get creative. In the back of my mind, I wanted to impress the hell out of Bob and Pierre, and I wanted to do right by Elvis. But mainly I wanted to create something that I was proud of. There were thousands of feet of film to pull from, but I concentrated on building something that would work as a coda to the film, and tell a little story on its own. Here were the moments that tour memories were made of: the moments of laughter backstage, the time spent between band and fans, the moments of anticipation at rehearsals before the show, and the moments of calm on the rolling Greyhound bus afterward. I worked with the flow and rhythm of the music, and found some nice places to let the lyrics match up literally with the images: over the a line about “quiet nights,” I laid in an image of the band slumbering away on their plane.

  My sequence ended with what Abel would later say was the most powerful and poignant image the filmmakers had captured: Elvis peering out the window of a limo with a thousand-mile stare. An image that almost perfectly duplicated the famous image of him peering out a train window back in 1956. It was striking that whatever young Elvis had been looking ahead for out that window back then, he was still looking for now.

  The following Monday, for the first time in my life, I got to experience the elation of a good review. Pierre and Bob took a look at the end sequence and pronounced it to be perfect. The diamond Pierre had promised never actually turned up, but when the film was released, not a single frame had been changed on my editing to “Memories.”

  I stayed on with Abel and Adidge for a couple more projects, including the feature I’d offered my services for, Let the Good Times Roll. Working on that film was almost as satisfying as working on the Elvis film, because it combined great archival “birth of rock and roll” footage from the fifties with contemporary concert performances by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, and others. In some ways, this project felt like the perfect companion piece to Elvis On Tour. The Elvis film showed where my friend and I had gotten to, but Let th
e Good Times Roll said everything about where we’d come from. When Bo Diddley said in an interview sequence that he still cooked chicken in his hotel rooms—a habit he’d developed after being turned away from segregated restaurants—I thought about how he might have been treated at Uncle John’s Little Kitchen.

  As I was cutting film, Elvis was out on the road again, making concert stops that included a weekend of sellout shows in Hawaii (maybe that’s how Elvis punished me—it seemed every time I stepped away he rubbed it in by heading back to the islands). After spending the holidays in Memphis, he returned to Hawaii to begin 1973 with his biggest show ever, reaching a global television audience with the live satellite broadcast of his Aloha concert.

  At the end of January, Elvis On Tour surprised all of us by winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Documentary of 1972. With Let the Good Times Roll completed and no immediate follow-up work lined up with Abel and/or Adidge, I felt that award was a good way to end my second stint at an editing career. I’d keep an eye out for more film opportunities, but a couple of weeks later, I was back with Elvis as he worked through another Vegas engagement at the Hilton.

  By most measures, Elvis was as big a success as he’d ever been. He had an award-winning film out, had just played to the largest television audience ever assembled, was continuing to sell out concert appearances, and had a song on the pop charts (“Separate Ways” made the Top 20). And on a personal level, Elvis seemed to have found great happiness with a new romantic interest: Linda Thompson. Linda was a lively, beautiful Memphis girl—a Miss Tennessee—who had made appearances on George Klein’s local TV shows and had met Elvis on one of his nights at the Memphian. Linda was an extrovert with a fine sense of humor, and was great at bringing out the fun-loving side of Elvis. She fit into the Elvis world very comfortably, and was easy to talk to and kid around with. And it was nice to have her around—Linda was in some ways a conservative Southern girl, but she wasn’t afraid to wear the sexiest outfits imaginable (I can still hear Lamar Fike saying, “Oh Lord—where’s the rest of that dress?”).

  But despite the career successes and the new romance, Elvis’s work was starting to take a heavy physical toll on him. He’d put on weight again, and was often in pain from a variety of ailments. The guy with what had seemed for so long to be a superhuman constitution now turned out to be vulnerable flesh and blood, and during this February engagement he had to cancel several shows due to illness.

  There was no question that his pain and ailments were real, but some of us began to worry about the treatments he was getting. Dr. Nick tried to keep Elvis’s intake of prescription drugs balanced, but Elvis had a way of getting to other doctors to get other prescriptions he thought would help him and it seemed there wasn’t any doctor who would say no to Elvis Presley. I really don’t think Elvis wanted to be “high”—he just wanted to function. He didn’t want to step away from his music and tune out—he wanted to keep at what he’d been doing for years, giving his all doing two shows a night, and then bouncing back to do it again the next night. As his body aged and tired, he wanted to find some way to coax more music and more performances out of it, and if that could be done with prescription medication, he wanted it. But now, what had started as a way of managing his problems was turning into a problem itself.

  My own career seemed to be right where I wanted it. But my personal life was falling apart. Being on the road with Elvis had pulled me apart from Sandy, and in the spring of 1973, I realized that I’d become infatuated with someone else. My new love interest was an L.A. girl who’d been a part of many of the weekends in Palm Springs, and while I didn’t know if this had any chance of being a long-term relationship, I knew that my relationship with Sandy couldn’t be the same anymore.

  The more I thought about my situation, the more I hated thinking about myself as just another lousy, unfaithful husband. I knew that, at the very least, I had to be honest with Sandy. So one night, at that little Culver City apartment, I decided to tell her everything: that I’d been untrue, that I thought I loved someone else, that I didn’t see any way for us to stay together. It wasn’t easy to get the words out—I felt flushed, my heart was pounding, my mouth was dry. And looking into my beautiful wife’s eyes—so full of worry, concern, and, still, love—I became physically overwhelmed. I’d barely started speaking when my knees went weak and I suddenly found myself on the floor—taken down by some kind of anxiety-triggered fainting spell. The pain in my bumped head was rivaled only by the guilt I felt over the fact that the woman whose heart I was breaking was now doing everything she could to comfort me.

  On April 4, 1973, I sat with Elvis, Linda, and some of the guys at the Monovale house to watch the American network broadcast of the Aloha special. In contrast to the state of mind Elvis had been in when I watched the rough cut of the ’68 special with him, he was in a great, fun mood. I think the big difference was that in watching Aloha, he knew that the concert itself had already been a success—he’d already heard the applause of a live crowd, and he was hearing it again on TV. Knowing that he’d already pleased his fans, he could relax and enjoy the show himself.

  The good mood lasted a few days, and it had him feeling energetic enough that he decided to accept an invitation to check out a karate tournament that Ed Parker had organized in San Francisco. Parker had some phenomenal karate abilities and a powerful personality to match, and he and Elvis had connected with a real friendship. I liked and admired Parker, too, and briefly also studied karate with him. I’d felt honored that, at no charge, I was receiving instruction from such a master, but I moved on when I began to feel that we were spending more time talking about Elvis than working on our karate forms. Elvis wanted a close group of friends to travel with him to attend Parker’s tournament: Linda, Joe, Charlie Hodge, Patsy and Gee Gee Gambill, Master Rhee, and myself. All our spirits lifted as we made all the required preparations, chartering a plane, lining up limos, reserving hotel rooms. The spirits stayed high on the flight to San Francisco. But in the limo on the way to the hotel, we passed the venue where the tournament was going to be held, and I saw something that I knew was going to shatter the mood.

  Across the auditorium marquee, in great big letters, it said, ELVIS PRESLEY—IN PERSON. This was a legal problem—the contract for an upcoming Lake Tahoe appearance stipulated that Elvis was not supposed to be promoted within a 500-mile radius in the weeks before the event. But more to the point, this was a violation of the loyalty that was so important to Elvis. Elvis thought he had accepted an informal invitation to his friend’s tournament, and he was happy to support Parker in that way. But he had no interest being part of the event’s promotion.

  Once Elvis got to the hotel, I headed back to the venue and insisted that Parker’s associate Dave Hebler get up on a ladder and take Elvis’s name off the marquee. This violated all local labor-union regulations, but it got done. By the time I got back to the hotel, Joe had already chartered a flight back to Los Angeles. This incident in a small way illustrates how Elvis’s fame could wear down his spirit. He wanted to have a fun, getaway weekend, and wanted to pursue his passionate interest in karate. But instead of being able to attend as simply a friend or a guest, he saw himself used as a name that would sell tickets.

  Elvis was having some trouble keeping himself healthy and in shape, and I was still terribly conflicted about my extramarital romance. But despite our personal problems, I hadn’t ever felt that there was a problem between us. Over the course of some of our Palm Springs weekends, however, I detected a strain in our friendship that I couldn’t explain. When a group of us sat and talked, Elvis seemed to go out of his way not to make any eye contact with me. He’d laugh with the other guys, but when we talked, it felt perfunctory—a basic exchange of information. At first I tried not to think too much about it, but after a while it was impossible not to be aware of the chill between us.

  A week after the San Francisco trip, we were out in Palm Springs again, and, for the first time in a while, just he and
I sat together in the living room. Conversation was a little awkward, and it seemed that something was really bothering him. Finally, he said, “Jerry, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.” What he told me was that he’d slept with my girlfriend.

  It was a one-night fling between them, on a Palm Springs night when I’d fallen asleep early. Something that had just happened. I didn’t care about the details—I was furious. And stunned. As tangled together as our lives had become, this was a horrible crossing of boundaries. It hurt like hell that the guy who had done so much for me could do something so awful to me.

  It was extremely rare for Elvis to apologize about anything, but he stood there fumbling for an explanation, telling me, “It never happened before and it’ll never happen again.”

  As angry as I was, I couldn’t help thinking of what I would have done if I had heard about this some other way. I looked him in the eye and said, “Thank God I heard it from you and not from anybody else.” I could tell he was embarrassed, and I was furious, but the truth was that he’d had a fling with a woman I was having an affair with—there wasn’t any high moral ground for anyone to take. And it didn’t sound like he’d had to work too hard at a seduction—the fling had happened between two willing parties.