They arrived in California on January 13 and reported immediately to the studio, with soundtrack recording scheduled to begin at Radio Recorders two days later. This time there was no question of where they were going to record. Hal Wallis was finally convinced that Elvis knew what he was doing, and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, at Elvis’ request, were in charge. Leiber and Stoller had been hired by RCA the previous fall as perhaps the first independent a&r men in the business (while they were on salary with RCA, they also continued to maintain a profitable relationship with Atlantic, producing the Coasters, along with numerous other side ventures). Elvis was clearly their primary responsibility at the label, and it had been suggested that they would have a relatively free hand, but so far it hadn’t worked out the way they had hoped.
Jerry was living in New York at this point and going out with former MGM board chairman Nick Schenck’s daughter, Marty Page, whose best friend was divorced from the well-known agent Charlie Feldman. “Charlie was very much connected to people like Moss Hart and Cole Porter, and he took a shine to me and was going to try to groom us as Broadway writers. He liked what we did, but he thought it was kind of kid stuff and now we were ready for the big time, which was Broadway and film. He said to me, ‘You know what would be marvelous? I have a property that would make an incredible musical motion picture. It’s called A Walk on the Wild Side [the celebrated novel by Nelson Algren], and it would be great for Elvis Presley.’ He said, ‘I’m sure I can get Elia Kazan to direct, and I think we might get Budd Schulberg to write the screenplay, and you two guys would write the book.’ He said, ‘It’s perfect. He’s handsome, he’s innocent, and he’s a victim.’
“I took the idea to the Aberbachs, who were the closest to Colonel Parker. They watched me in complete silence as I spun this story for about twenty minutes and made the pitch, and finally Jean said in his Viennese accent, ‘If you ever try to interfere with the business or artistic workings of the process known as Elvis Presley, if you ever start thinking in this direction again, you will never work for us again.’
“It wasn’t long after that, to be very frank, that we both got bored, because we knew there were no possibilities left. It was just going to be another one like the last one, every movie the same. I mean, you had three ballads, one medium-tempo, one up-tempo, and one break blues boogie, usually for a production number. It was too fucking boring. I told Stoller, ‘If I have to write another song like “King Creole,” I’ll cut my fucking throat—maybe theirs first.’ We talked about—you know, maybe we’re burning up a license to print money. I said, ‘You know what? Burn it up.’ ’Cause we could have made fucking history, and those assholes only wanted to make another nickel the same way.”
The sessions proceeded without incident. Leiber and Stoller contributed three songs, plus a fourth that wasn’t used, and for the first time experienced session players were employed to create a semiauthentic Dixieland sound. Perhaps the two most interesting songs were “Crawfish,” a duet with rhythm and blues singer Kitty White, which was written by songwriters Ben Weisman and Fred Wise as a street vendor’s cry, and Leiber and Stoller’s “Trouble,” a Muddy Waters–styled blues intended somewhat tongue in cheek but delivered by Elvis with untempered ferocity. In Jerry Leiber’s view, “ ‘Trouble’ was the same kind of song as ‘Black Denim Trousers.’ They’re both send-ups, and the only people who are going to take them seriously are Hell’s Angels and Elvis Presley. I suppose there was a bit of contempt on our part. You know, when the guy sang, Ba boom ba ba boom, ‘If you’re looking for trouble,’ you know, ‘just come looking for me’—there’s something laughable there. I mean, if you get Memphis Slim or John Lee Hooker singing it, it sounds right, but Elvis did not sound right to us. But I would be tolerant. Just like [rhythm and blues bandleader-arranger] Maxwell Davis was tolerant of me when I first walked in, this little white kid with a twelve-bar blues, and he said, ‘That’s nice.’ He said, ‘I think that’s nice.’ He didn’t say, ‘That’s full of shit, you don’t know what you’re doing.’ He said, ‘That’s nice.’ It’s a sort of tolerant attitude with a little bit of tongue in cheek. So in the early days that’s where we were coming from. It sounded sort of comical to us, but strangely enough to the mass market it wasn’t. It was somewhat generational and somewhat cultural, but they bought it.”
They wound up the session in two days. In reality, the score was independent of the picture; the character that Elvis played was a singer, it was true, but the story was up-from-poverty, and the protagonist might better have remained the boxer that he was in the novel in terms of the dramatic impact of the story.
Elvis had read the book in preparation for making the film. He was determined to do his very best, because, he told Alan Fortas, this could be it for him. He got together with his new friend Kitty Dolan to run lines with him and spoke with concern of what his absence from the scene for two years might mean. The director, Michael Curtiz, was a sixty-nine-year-old Hungarian émigré who had been directing films since 1919 and had made such notable pictures as Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, and Young Man with a Horn. Elvis was a little taken aback at first when Curtiz told him he would have to cut his sideburns and lose fifteen pounds for the role, and he had a great deal of trouble initially understanding Curtiz’s accent. “You just didn’t have a lot of fooling around with Curtiz—I mean, he would embarrass the hell out of you,” said Jan Shepard, who played Elvis’ sister in the movie. “But no matter what Curtiz would ask of Elvis, he would say, ‘Okay, you’re the boss.’ Curtiz said he thought Elvis was going to be a very conceited boy, but when he started working with him, he said, ‘No, this is a lovely boy, and he’s going to be a wonderful actor.’
“The first time I met Elvis was when we went to the doctor’s office for the insurance. I was sitting there, and he walked in with his little group from Memphis, and then we worked together alone for about a week, because we did the opening of the show. He was just really young, carefree—it was like letting a kid loose in a candy store, he was just a lot of fun and buoyant, not guarded at all. There was a five-and-dime store on our set, and in the morning I would find earrings and little bracelets, little five-and-dime stuff on my dressing room table. I used to call him the last of the big-time spenders!
“He was very concentrated, very focused on playing Danny. For a kid coming in and just beginning his career he had a great sense of timing; there was great honesty in his acting. He was a very good listener, and he just became that young boy, he became Danny in the show. Just like in his music, he really got involved in his acting, you’d look in his eyes and, boy, they were really going.”
With Walter Matthau as the heavy, Dolores Hart once again as the fresh-faced ingenue, Carolyn Jones as the offbeat vamp, and Dean Jagger as the weak, ineffectual father (a stock-in-trade for every teen picture since Rebel Without a Cause), the cast that Wallis had assembled was a uniformly good one, and there was a uniformly positive spirit on the set. “I almost hesitate, I creep up to the sentence,” Walter Matthau told a BBC interviewer, “he was an instinctive actor. Because that almost is a derogation of his talents. That’s saying, ‘Well, you know, he’s just a dumb animal who does it well by instinct.’ No, he was quite bright, too. He was very intelligent. Also, he was intelligent enough to understand what a character was and how to play the character simply by being himself through the means of the story. Michael Curtiz used to call him Elvy, and he’d call me Valty. He’d say, ‘Now Elvy and Valty, come here, now, Valty, this is not Academy Award scene. Don’t act so much. You are high-price actor. Make believe you are low-price actor. Let Elvy act.’ But Elvy didn’t overact. He was not a punk. He was very elegant, sedate… refined and sophisticated.”
In Carolyn Jones’ observation “he was always asking a lot of questions. God, he was young! I didn’t think anybody could be that young! He was always talking about his folks and about the house he’d just bought them.” Jones suggested that in order to really learn his craft he should consider taking
acting lessons, and the guys picked up one of her lines in the film, “Take a day out of your life and love me,” as a kind of sardonic commentary, to be trotted out on any number of occasions, in a wide variety of social settings.
One Sunday when he was feeling blue, he told Jan, he spent most of the day just talking to his mother on the phone, and he was both saddened and amused as he and the guys retold the story over and over again of how Dewey had been fired from his new midnight television show on the eve of their departure from California. The show had commanded a number-one rating in its afternoon slot, until it had been forced off the air to make room for Dick Clark’s network-syndicated American Bandstand. It was in the fourth night of its present incarnation when Harry Fritzius, a noted young abstract painter who appeared in an ape suit on the air, explicitly fondled a life-size cutout of Jayne Mansfield in an altogether human way. “He embarrassed the station, and he embarrassed me personally,” said station manager Bill Grumbles. Dewey would continue on the air with a Saturday-evening show and his nightly radio spot, but his sidekick Harry Fritzius was finished, “probably the best thing that ever happened to me,” declared Fritzius. “I’m twenty-five, and it’s time I found something to do with my life.”
Crazy old Dewey, the guys all said, and Elvis was tempted to join them. He thought about giving Dewey a call, but he knew the complications that could cause, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to deal with them now, when everything seemed to be spinning out of control. And yet, for all of his worries, he had probably never felt more relaxed or at home on a set. He saw Pat Boone on the Paramount lot one day and greeted him smilingly with an impromptu rendition of “April Love”; on the soundstage he serenaded cast and crew alike; and he even got to meet Marlon Brando, after a fashion. He and Jan Shepard were in the commissary. “Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti were sitting at a table next to us, and I remember Cornel Wilde came over and asked for an autograph for his daughter. Elvis said, ‘Can you believe that Cornel Wilde wanted my autograph?’ He was stunned by it. Then I said, ‘Elvis, did you know Marlon Brando is sitting right behind you?’ He had his back to him, and he almost started shaking, and I said, ‘You know, he keeps looking over.’ He was just like, you know, ‘I couldn’t, oh I couldn’t, you know, it’s Marlon Brando’—like that. So I said, ‘Well, when we get up, all you have to do is push your chair back and you’re going to go right into him.’ So as we got up to go, he bumped into Brando, and Brando got up, of course, and then they shook hands, and when we went out he said, ‘Oh my God, I shook hands with Marlon Brando!’ ”
February 1 was the only day open for RCA recording, and with his induction date rapidly approaching, Steve Sholes was desperate to get a final studio session in. Elvis had rehearsed two numbers for the upcoming date at a January 23 soundtrack session, but he was insistent that Leiber and Stoller, who had returned to New York after the initial session the previous week, be there. Dutifully, the Colonel had Tom Diskin inform Sholes that their presence was required—Elvis by now considered them a kind of “good-luck charm.” Sholes wrote, telegrammed, and attempted to call, but all to no avail, because Stoller was unable to locate his partner, who was lying incommunicado in the emergency ward of a Harlem hospital with pneumonia. “Nobody knew where I was, I didn’t know where I was for a couple of days. When I came to my senses, I started calling around. I called Mike, and I got out of the hospital, and when I got home there was a stack of telegrams jammed under my door, and they were all about the same thing: ‘You must come to L.A. immediately.’
“I called the Aberbachs, and I got Julian on the phone. He said, ‘You must come to California immediately. Presley is ready to record, and he will not go in the studio without you.’ I said, ‘I don’t think I can come immediately, but I’ll see.’ So I called my doctor, and he told me absolutely not to go anywhere for two weeks, and I called them back and they started to get real nasty. Finally, Parker got on the phone and said, ‘Boy, you better get your ass out here or else.’ He said, ‘By the way, did you get my contract for the new projects?’ I said, ‘No, it might have slipped by. I opened up about eight telegrams, and they were all the same, so I figured the rest weren’t any different.’ He said, ‘You better open up the rest.’
“So I opened them up, and there was in fact another piece of mail from Colonel Parker’s office, and it said, ‘Enclosed you’ll find the contract. Please execute and return.’ And I looked at the piece of paper, and it had nothing on either side, but it had a line at the bottom with a space for my signature. And on the right-hand side was a line for Tom Parker that was signed by him. So I got on the phone and said, ‘There must be some kind of mistake, Tom. There’s just a blank piece of paper here with a place for my name.’ He said, ‘There’s no mistake, boy, just sign it and return it.’ I said, ‘There’s nothing on the paper.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll fill it in later.’
“We never worked with him again. That was it. We never talked to each other again.”
The session was a disaster. They spent eight hours in the studio and got two barely usable tracks. Elvis was a wreck—it was as if the magic had worn off, and for the first time the Colonel was embarrassed both for his boy and for the waste of RCA’s (and Elvis’ and his own) time and money. Two weeks later Elvis wanted to go back into the studio to repair the damage, and there was some talk among all the parties about arranging another session, but that would have meant Colonel acknowledging some degree of failure to Steve Sholes, and he was not prepared to do that. So in the end Sholes had to make do with what he had. For the Colonel the whole experience underlined one fundamental point: never let anyone, let alone a songwriter, get in the middle of your business. In future, he stressed emphatically to his brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott, keep those people away from Elvis, watch very carefully anyone who got anywhere near him, and, for God’s sake, keep them away from the suite.
Toward the end of February, just before most of the cast and crew were scheduled to depart for New Orleans for a week of location shoots, Dolores Hart staged a surprise birthday party for Jan Shepard at her home. Although Elvis was invited, no one expected him to show up, and Jan was surprised enough just to discover most of her fellow cast members, along with young Paramount contract players like Ty Hardin and Edith Head’s assistant, Pat Richards. “But I was really shocked when Elvis walked in, and he had this big stuffed tiger cat on his shoulders. We named it ‘Danny Boy,’ because he always used to sing that song on the set. The other thing was, I had all these little kids in the neighborhood who wanted pictures of him, and we had this running gag, where I kept saying, ‘Elvis, bring some pictures in for my birthday.’ So his second gift to me was a movie camera with a light bar and, I think, three rolls of film, and he said, ‘Go ahead, take your pictures now.’ Which I did, even though I’d never used a movie camera before!
“It was wonderful. Everyone was cooking and helping out in the kitchen, and we all had dinner, and Ty Hardin, who had studied to be an engineer, made a cake that looked like a theater, with a marquee and everything. Then after dinner we sat in the living room, and Elvis sat down at the piano and Ty had brought his guitar and started playing, and then Elvis took the guitar and Dolores had her clarinet, and Dolores’ mother was dressed up like Topsy and was doing a number from Topsy. It was kind of a free-for-all, just, you know, just a very relaxing time, and he stayed till the end, which was really amazing, but there was nobody there that was going to interfere with him. It was really nice.”
Red West showed up the next week on a two-week leave from the Marines. He had stopped by Graceland to pay his respects, and Mrs. Presley called Elvis on the phone, and Elvis invited him to fly out the next day. “When I got up to say goodbye,” Red wrote in Elvis: What Happened?, “she just sort of called me back, and I heard her say what she had said a hundred times: ‘Bob, look after my boy.’ ” Red arrived in Hollywood, “a crew-cut hick sonofabitch in a Marine uniform on a Paramount movie set,” they had their first extended reunion in more than a yea
r, and Elvis asked him if he wanted to go to New Orleans with the troupe two days later.
While most of the film company flew, Elvis and his friends rode the train. Red, Cliff, Gene, and Alan all accompanied him, along with Carolyn, her husband, Aaron Spelling, and Nick Adams, whom Red met for the first time and who amused everyone with his impressions on the long trip. In New Orleans, the Colonel, who had argued bitterly against a location shoot for security reasons, was, not surprisingly, proved right. “Hal Wallis loved locations,” said Alan Fortas, whose opinion of the Colonel was considerably higher than it had been at the start. “He said, ‘I had Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in their prime. I had this star and that star…’ Colonel said, ‘I don’t care who you had, Wallis, you never had Elvis Presley.’ ”
Cliff was given a line in the picture (“See you next week, baby,” he said to a prostitute while dressed up in a sailor’s uniform), and the guys got a big kick out of kidding Alan that he would soon be making his movie debut as well. They had him walking around in makeup all day with Kleenex stuck into the collar of his shirt, convinced that his scene would be coming up any minute. Meanwhile, Cliff met a kid whose father owned a clothing store and conned him out of blazers for the whole gang. According to George, who joined the group in New Orleans, “Cliff said we worked for Elvis, and it would be real sharp if all of Elvis’ guys wore blazers, uniform-style. The guy said, ‘Yeah?’ Cliff said, ‘Man, I’ll tell you what, what do those blazers sell for?’ The guy says, ‘About fifty dollars apiece.’ Cliff said, ‘There are five guys that work for Elvis, there’s Elvis and Colonel Parker. We need seven blazers, but we ain’t gonna pay for them. Here’s what we are going to do for you. You give us the jackets, and you can advertise that Elvis’ traveling companions and Elvis Presley are wearing clothes from your clothing store.’
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