Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  At first several of the guys considered Elvis’s metaphysical studies his latest obsession, a mood regulator like his interest in slot cars that would come along at the end of 1965. But in short order the group accused Larry of “messing up Elvis’s head with all that nonsense,” as one of them puts it. Joe realized that it didn’t just fill a void in his life: “He got so wrapped up in it that he started forgetting about his work and his music. All he talked about was this religious stuff.”

  The Colonel, who was negotiating with MGM for the benchmark figure of $1,000,000 for Elvis’s next picture, Harum Scarum, had a heated discussion with Elvis about it at the studio that August, accusing him of going on a “religious kick.” Elvis was furious. “That motherfucker, man,” he told Larry. “My life is not a ‘religious kick.’ I’ll show that fat bastard what a kick is.’ ”

  Elvis fumed for days and made plans to fly Larry and his wife, Stevie, and their children to Graceland later that month. On the way home, during a stopover in Amarillo, Texas, Elvis was still so testy that he blew up with Joe over a minor matter and fired him. Marty would now be the foreman of the Memphis Mafia.

  He stayed home until October, lying around much of the time, depressed, listless, not feeling well. Late in the fall, he took the caravan back to Hollywood for Allied Artists’ Tickle Me, with Norman Taurog again in the director’s chair. It was another embarrassing plot—Elvis plays a singing rodeo cowboy who moonlights as a handyman at a beauty spa—and served mostly to get half-naked girls on the screen.

  As usual, he flirted with women on the set, beginning with the tall brunette Francine York. They had a scene together in which he pretends to teach her how to shoot a bow and arrow. “There was something wrong with the lights or the camera angle, and so we had to shoot the scene several times. Norman asked Elvis if he’d mind shooting it again, and he said he wouldn’t mind doing it all day. Then he pulled me closer and whispered, ‘And all night.’ ”

  She took it as just a friendly comment but, “Elvis and the guys enjoyed themselves with all the beautiful women in the movie. Elvis had a girlfriend then, too, and I remember him getting angry when she drove onto the set. He had a few words to say to her, and it seemed as though he was upset that she had come to the studio.” Francine didn’t remember her name. But “this definitely wasn’t Priscilla. She had a huge car, a Cadillac or something.”

  It was his last trip to California for the year, and with him on the way out were two new members of the entourage, Mike Keaton, and twenty-two-year-old Jerry Schilling, whose brother, Billy Ray, was a friend of Red West. Jerry, who’d grown up poor and scrapping, and without a mother, had been planning to return to Arkansas State University for his senior year when Elvis made him the offer. He had been part of Elvis’s touch football games from the age of twelve, and Elvis treated him almost like a younger brother. But when he found out that Jerry lost his virginity with an actress Elvis had romanced on his last picture, they had a tense exchange. Jerry had no idea that Elvis and the girl had any history, and Elvis let it blow over. But Jerry learned a cardinal rule in the inner circle: None of the guys were permitted to date a girl Elvis had known.

  Jerry did know that part of his gig was protecting Elvis, and he was also well aware that Elvis had his share of crazy fans who would do almost anything to get near him. His heart started pounding on his first night in the Perugia Way house, then, when about 2 A.M., he heard a key turn in the front door lock, and watched a shadowy female figure cross the room in the dark. Jerry had been too buzzed from Dexedrine to sleep, and now he called out sharply: “Miss—

  “The woman spun around and let loose a bloodcurdling scream,” he wrote in his memoir, Me and a Guy Named Elvis. “And at that very moment, the wall behind her opened up to reveal Elvis. He flicked on the lights in the room. There was a huge smile on his face. The girl being there didn’t seem to bother him at all. In fact, he seemed to know her.

  “My eyes adjusted to the light. Now I recognized the girl, too. It was Ann-Margret. Elvis put an arm around her and grinned in my direction. ‘It’s okay, Jerry. It’s just Ammo. She’s not gonna hurt anybody.’ ”

  Elvis went home around Thanksgiving and spent the holidays in Memphis, renting out the Memphian for New Year’s Eve. But it was getting harder to watch quality films now when his own fell so short of the mark. No one was allowed to sit in front of him, and there in the darkened theater, when he’d get caught up in the emotion of a dramatic scene, he’d cry and slyly wipe away tears, or pretend that something had gotten in his eye. Sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was weeping because of the situation on the screen, or because he knew he’d never get a role like that again.

  Then January 8, 1965, brought a milestone birthday—his thirtieth. The morning newspaper, the Commercial Appeal, called about an interview. Reporter James Kingsley wanted Elvis’s ruminations on growing older.

  “I can never forget the longing to be someone,” he said in the article. “I know what it is to scratch and fight for what you want.” Kingsley asked him about his relationship with his fans, who always hung around the gates and made it difficult for him to go to his old haunts without being bothered. “I certainly haven’t lost my respect for my fans,” he said. “I withdraw not from my fans, but from myself.”

  He demonstrated that at the end of February, when he went to Nashville for a hastily set-up session for the soundtrack to MGM’s Harum Scarum, his million-dollar movie. The picture, another Sam Katzman quickie, cast him as a Rudolph Valentino–style matinee idol, kidnapped by a gang of assassins on a personal appearance in the Middle East. Elvis hadn’t been in a recording studio for eight months, but he was so dispirited at the material, much of it laced with flute and oboe for a Persian flair, that he stopped the first session after only four hours—thirty-eight takes into the disaffecting “Shake That Tambourine.”

  A number of people around Elvis had started to worry about him, one telling the Saturday Evening Post reporter C. Robert Jennings that the heavy schedule of three pictures a year was beginning to take its toll.

  “The money is so big,” said the anonymous source, “that he’s always doing what everybody else wants him to do. He’s a lonely guy in many ways.”

  But Joan Blackman, who was also concerned about him, later laid much of the blame at his own feet: “Elvis could have demanded changes, had he wanted to. He could have said, ‘Until we do what I want to do, I am not doing any more [of these cookie-cutter movies].’ Had he stuck by that, things could have been different.”

  Word filtered back to Colonel Parker that Elvis was lethargic, that he seemed to have no interest in coming to Los Angeles for Harum Scarum, and that it was going to take some effort to get him there. At the end of February, the Colonel arranged for Elvis to be able to take his cast insurance medical examination in Memphis to give him a bit more time at home. Then he wrote anxious letters to foreman Marty Lacker, cautioning him to get the convoy on the road in plenty of time, and to watch out for inclement weather. In a rare, unguarded moment, the Colonel let his frustration show, telling the Saturday Evening Post that “sooner or later someone else is going to have to take the reins.”

  They finally got started in early March, but on the way out, Elvis insisted on checking into a motel in Amarillo, Texas. He’d been thinking about the way he used to be, the way he lived, the things he’d said, and how he was trying to change. He contemplated what Larry and the books had taught him.

  “He was so strong in so many ways,” observed Jo Smith, Billy’s wife. “If you were with him, you felt safe. But in other ways, he was like a little kid. He was such a contradiction. As selfless as he was in religion, he always had to be number one in everything else. One time, everybody wanted to go bowling. So Elvis rented Bowl Haven Lanes, right down the street from Graceland. I don’t guess he’d ever been bowling. Billy had been on a team, and several of the other guys had gone bowling in California, so they were pretty good. And Elvis wasn’t good at all. He guttered, and he tried
to throw the ball too hard. So that’s the last time we ever went bowling. If he couldn’t be the best at whatever we did, we didn’t do it anymore.”

  Back in Germany, he used to play a game with Rex Mansfield. Rex called it “God playing,” and Elvis would initiate it. “We’d be sitting around the house, the whole group,” as Rex recalled, “and if anybody would compliment something, or say, ‘Boy, it’s a beautiful day,’ he’d say, ‘Thank you.’ Or if someone would say, ‘That’s a beautiful dress,’ he’d say, ‘Thank you,’ like everything anyone owned, it belonged to him. We all got into that game, and it became a matter of who could say ‘thank you’ first.”

  Elvis was ashamed of all that now. Having to be the best. “God playing.” How could he have done it, even in jest? In that Texas hotel room, he confided to Larry that after all his months of study and meditation, he was disheartened, that something was missing. “I read all of these wonderful books,” he said. “But they all talk about these great, profound spiritual experiences, and I never had one.”

  Larry explained to him that it had nothing to do with an intellectual perception, but that it happened in the heart and was more of an emotion, a surrendering of the ego to God. They talked for thirty or forty minutes, and then they all got back into the vehicles, Larry and Elvis riding alone in the Dodge motor home.

  They drove the rest of the night and all the next day, traveling through the panhandle of Texas, through New Mexico and eastern Arizona. As they approached the famous San Francisco Peaks, the home of the sacred Hopi Indians at Flagstaff, Larry suddenly realized they had gotten separated from the rest of the caravan.

  “Uh, I think we’re lost,” Larry said. But Elvis was unfazed: “This is really good, because I needed to be away from everyone. I’m into something very, very important within myself.”

  It was getting on in the day now, and the sky was electric blue, deep and unfathomable. Suddenly, Elvis called out. “Look, man! Do you see what I see?”

  He pointed to a cloud, and Larry immediately knew what he meant.

  “What the hell is Joseph Stalin doing in that cloud?” Elvis said, amazement in his voice.

  Larry laughed. “I don’t know. That is really far-out.” He watched as the cloud dissolved back into a nebulous shape, and then he saw a change come over his friend.

  “I looked at Elvis, and all of a sudden, his jaw dropped, and he gasped for breath. He said, ‘Ahhh,’ and his eyes were wide open, and he had a look on his face that was just full of revelation. He pulled the motor home over, and he jumped out into the desert and yelled, ‘Watch! Just follow me, man!’ He ran about thirty feet away, and he turned around and looked at me, and there were tears rolling down his cheeks. He grabbed me and he hugged me and he said, ‘I love you! I know now! It happened. It happened.”

  Larry stood back. “I saw Stalin in the cloud. But what happened, man?”

  Elvis struggled to regain his composure. “Larry,” he finally said, “I remember you said, ‘It’s not a thing in your head. It has to do with your heart.’ And I said, ‘God, I surrender my ego. I surrender my whole life to you.’ And it happened. That face turned into the face of Christ. It was like a lightning bolt went right through me! I know the truth now, and I don’t believe in God anymore. I know that God is a living reality! He’s within us!”

  He was laughing and crying at the same time now, shaking with emotion, and wiping away tears. “You can’t understand it unless you get the experience,” he said. “Otherwise people will just think you are nuts, man!” Suddenly he was aware of cars passing on the highway.

  “Man,” he said, “can you imagine what the fans would think if they saw me now and knew what I was going through?”

  “Elvis, they would probably love you all the more, you know?”

  Just then, the caravan caught up with them, and Red West stuck his head out the door.

  “Hey, boss,” he yelled. “You all right?”

  “Yeah,” Elvis yelled back, “don’t worry about it. I’ll be right there.”

  Whatever he went through, “It was very, very meaningful to him,” in Larry’s estimation. “It was a classic rebirth, a confluence of religious feelings and perceptions of his earlier life in the church, and it impacted him deeply.”

  When they got back in the motor home, Elvis was still so discombobulated he couldn’t drive, and he called for Red to take the wheel.

  “Come on, man,” he said to Larry. “Let’s go in the back.” He laid on the bed and kept repeating, “Wow, wow,” softly, like a mantra. Soon Elvis would start talking about giving up his career and entering a monastery. And he would spend a lot of time with a woman named Faye Wright, better known as Sri Daya Mata, at the Self-Realization Fellowship’s Lake Shrine retreat in Pacific Palisades.

  Mary Ann Mobley was Elvis’s costar on Harum Scarum, and she dropped by Colonel Parker’s office one day to sign her contract. Time magazine called while she was there. “They said they wanted to put Elvis on the cover, and Colonel Tom said, ‘Good, that’ll be $25,000,’ or some outrageous price. And Time said, ‘You don’t understand, it’s an honor to be on the cover of Time.’ And Colonel Tom said, ‘No, you don’t understand. We don’t need you.’ ”

  Parker, still gloating that Elvis was the first actor ever to be paid $1 million for a single movie, might have been smart to let Time promote Harum Scarum, for despite Elvis’s astonishing fee, the picture rivaled Kissin’ Cousins as his absolute worst. Shot in eighteen days, it recycled the 1925 set of Cecil B. De Mille’s silent feature King of Kings, as well as costumes from the 1944 production of Kismet. The plot was paper-thin, the music unlistenable, and the sight of Elvis in a turban ludicrous. Even the Colonel, who would eventually suggest adding a talking camel as a narrator so the absurdity might seem intentional, admitted it would take “a fifty-fifth cousin to P. T. Barnum” to sell it.

  The only way they got through it, remembered Mary Ann, who played Princess Shalimar, was by joking. “Elvis said, ‘This isn’t going to change history, is it?’ I said, ‘No, but it’s gonna make people laugh.’ ”

  The whole thing seemed a comedy of errors.

  “For part of it, I was dressed as a beggar woman, because I was supposedly this princess in disguise. And then the rest of the time I had on seventeen thousand yards of orange chiffon, and all these veils and so much hair I could barely keep my head up. And Elvis came out in this Arab sheik outfit, and if he wasn’t a good sport to be seen in that getup! But he never complained about it. He never said, ‘You want me to wear this?’ He wasn’t one of these prima donnas.”

  Still, she was concerned about him. “He was into the metaphysical then, ‘willing’ things to move. That was unique to me. I hadn’t seen that before. I was worried about it, but it was not for me to judge. I thought, ‘If that works for him . . .’ But it didn’t cause problems. He was never late and never caused a discussion. It was just so easy working with him.”

  The picture also reunited Elvis with Barbara Eden, whose husband, Michael Ansara, was cast as a prince. Barbara sat with him for a while on the set and found him more outgoing and sure of himself than he had been five years earlier on Flaming Star. “He’d laugh out loud, for example. But he was still the same basic, good, sweet, malleable guy. Such a gentleman. He said he was a huge fan of my husband, who was in the series Broken Arrow. I said, ‘When do you ever have time to watch television?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Barbara, that’s all I do. I can’t go out. I have to stay in.’ I got the impression it was like a jail.”

  He got his opportunities, of course, but as Patti Parry knew, sometimes they were unorthodox. “When he was doing Harum Scarum, we found out that Rudolph Valentino was buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. So we drove over there at eleven o’clock at night and poked around a little bit, and we found Valentino’s grave. Elvis just wanted to see it.”

  They walked around cemeteries a couple of times, she says. “That’s the only place nobody bothered us.”

  Elv
is found a willing spiritual acolyte in costar Deborah Walley during the filming of Spinout in early 1966. “I was never the same after Elvis,” she said. Their friendship lasted until his death, and afterward, she often felt him around her. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “You Don’t Really Love Me!”

  In March 1965, the Colonel convinced Elvis that Joe Esposito should come back into the camp. Parker had never liked Marty Lacker, who refused to kowtow to him and share secrets of the internal workings of the group, and the Colonel was determined to find a way to exercise more control over his loose canon of a client. Citing Joe’s excellent organization skills, Parker encouraged Elvis to mend fences with him. For a time, then, Joe and Marty became co-foremen of the Memphis Mafia. But Marty’s time was written on the wall, for Joe was also a favorite of Priscilla, going back to their shared time in Germany. With his return, she began playing a bigger role in Elvis’s life.

  “I am a child-woman,” Priscilla said in 1991. “When people meet me, they don’t know what to say to me. They really don’t know how to approach me. I’m always trying to find that place to fit in. I am a misfit.”

  But as one of her business associates knows, “Priscilla has a remarkable interior gyroscope which keeps her on course. She’s uncanny.”

  In 1965, her interior gyroscope was already at work, and the “child-woman” began working hard to drop the prefix on her self-image. Lamar saw that while Elvis controlled the guys, starting in 1965, Priscilla started lording it over the wives. She expected them to cater to her, Billy thought, and took advantage of her position, borrowing the wives’ clothes and not returning them, and asking to use their credit cards.

  As she asserted herself, the group began to splinter into separate camps—Jerry Schilling gravitated to Joe and Priscilla—and a caste system took hold among the couples, Joe and his wife, Joanie, leading the pack behind Elvis and Priscilla. Marty thought Priscilla paid attention only to Jerry and Joe, and that Joanie became her shadow.