Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  “He was really involved with what was going on in a healthy way,” Howe recalled. So when Finkel told him that the Colonel insisted that the NBC show be a twenty-song Christmas special and that Elvis was not to say anything other than, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” and “Merry Christmas, good night,” he scowled.

  Binder and Howe realized the best way to present Elvis was in a relaxed atmosphere—some kind of showcase where people could see how warm and funny he was, instead of the canned personality from the movies. They tossed around the idea of a live segment where Elvis could talk about his musical roots, and then maybe play a little informally. Binder talked to Finkel and said he would only come on board if he could draw the curtain back on what he saw as a once-in-a-lifetime personality.

  On May 14, Finkel again met with Elvis, who listened to his ideas and agreed with his direction. Afterward Finkel wrote a memo reporting that Elvis would like the “show to depart completely from the pattern of his motion pictures and from everything else he has done. . . . [He] wants everyone to know what he really can do.”

  Next Binder and Howe met with the Colonel, who lived up to his eccentric reputation, showing them the scrapbooks he kept as the dogcatcher in Tampa, diverting their attention while he sized them up. Binder, watching Parker in action with his staff, saw that the Colonel prided himself on his ability to terrorize grown men all around him. Politely, but firmly, Binder insisted he needed a one-on-one meeting with Elvis before he committed to the special.

  Secretly, Binder was thinking that at thirty-three, Elvis was no longer the rebellious Hillbilly Cat whose fluid hips and good-natured sneer had captivated a nation. The world was a different place than it had been in 1956, and the movies had rendered Elvis an anachronism. Musically, he had been eclipsed by a long list of British and American musicians, from the Beatles to the Doors to the Jefferson Airplane. He would always be remembered as a pioneering rock-and-roll icon, but to a generation that listened to FM rock radio and elongated album cuts, he was a relic, a man who hadn’t placed a record at the top of the charts in six years.

  The producer-director suspected that “with that exterior of self-confidence and bravado, Elvis was actually a scared little boy,” even as the singer had to know that the special, if done correctly, could rejuvenate his career and liberate him from the artistic brimstone of grinding out three B movies a year. And indeed, years later, Priscilla would tell Binder she had never seen Elvis so excited about anything, that he was so eager to get started he could barely sleep.

  They met in Binder’s office, in what was known as the glass elevator building on Sunset Boulevard. At first Binder was taken aback by the enormity of Elvis’s presence, which he hadn’t expected. (“You certainly knew that this was a special person . . . his looks were just phenomenally sculpted, without any weak points.”) The two men liked each other, and both were comfortable enough to speak candidly.

  “I felt very, very strongly that the special was Elvis’s moment of truth,” says Binder, “and that the number one requirement was honesty.” They joked around a bit, and Elvis told Binder he had never felt at ease doing television, going back to Steve Allen, the tuxedo, and the basset hound. Binder told him he understood, but that this would be different, because this time it would be about music: “You make a record, and I’ll put pictures to it, and you won’t have to worry about television.”

  They talked about the Colonel, and Binder said they would probably move in directions that Parker wouldn’t like. Then as tactfully as possible, Binder told Elvis that Parker had neither kept up with the times nor his client’s need to grow. Parker had certainly been a promotional genius, though “once he had the stranglehold, he forgot that what he was marketing was built around talent, and manipulated the whole thing with smoke and mirrors.” The Colonel had pulled off a great con in getting MGM to pay Elvis a million dollars for Harum Scarum, but if Parker had been really smart, he would have turned around and given that money to a great director to put Elvis in the right kind of movie.

  “He laughed at that, and said, ‘You’re right.’ ” He then told Binder he had been burning up inside for years to communicate.

  But Binder still wasn’t sure what that meant. How was Elvis’s musical gut these days? If songwriter Jimmy Webb had brought him the melodically complex, lyrically poetic “MacArthur Park,” for example, would he have recorded it, even at seven minutes?

  “Definitely,” Elvis said, his voice firm and eager. Now Binder felt certain that Elvis was thinking more about the future than the past. They had a deal.

  Elvis said he was going to Hawaii to get a tan and relax for a few weeks, and Binder told him they’d have a project he could believe in when he returned.

  On May 18, Elvis, Priscilla, and the baby flew to Honolulu, and while they had talked about the trip as being a second honeymoon, they also brought along Joe and Joanie Esposito, Patsy and Gee Gee Gambill, and Charlie Hodge. Elvis, determined to be in the best shape of his life, went on a crash diet and slacked off on his barbiturates so as not to impede his weight loss.

  Still, he indulged his interests. A week after they arrived, the group attended Ed Parker’s championship karate tournament at the Honolulu International Center. Elvis had known Parker since 1961, but he had never met Mike Stone, the former international light-contact champion.

  When the couple was introduced to the cocky young champ, Priscilla’s eyes lit up. She now looked at other men the way Elvis looked at women, and Stone was precisely her type. The twenty-four-year-old half-Hawaiian was the recognized bad boy of karate, a dangerous rebel who considered competition a blood sport. Moreover, he was dark-skinned and swarthy, which she found a turn-on. (“There is a certain strength I feel with dark men. They’re very virile.”)

  Less than a year after their marriage, Elvis had heard that Priscilla was having an affair with her dance instructor, Steve Peck, a tall, dark, tough-talking Sicilian. And only recently, word had gotten back to him that she had danced and flirted with Little Anthony of the Imperials at a disco on a recent trip to New York. In fact, they’d had a terrible row about it.

  Priscilla was just so tired of the lying, sick of the games, and especially angry that she and Elvis had not had full intercourse for ten months, while she knew he was getting sex elsewhere. As Joe remembers, “Often Elvis would say, ‘I’ve got to go away, honey, to get away from all the pressure.’ She’d say, ‘What pressure? You’re at home with your wife and daughter.’ And he’d go, ‘I’ve just got to get away,’ which meant he wanted to go out and fool around.”

  What was good for the goose was now good for the gander. Priscilla’s flirtations with Steve Peck and Little Anthony wouldn’t amount to anything, but Mike Stone would be big trouble down the road. Elvis either didn’t see it coming, or didn’t care.

  “This guy’s great,” he told her. “You should take karate lessons from him.” Priscilla would later tell Mike that she decided the day of the tournament that she would do exactly that. She also vowed that he would be her lover. There was something catlike about Mike Stone that she found irresistible. And the fact that Elvis admired him, that he couldn’t touch him in the sport they both loved and shared, made Mike an especially delicious conquest.

  While Elvis was in Hawaii, Binder brought in writers Allan Blye and Chris Beard, who structured the special around Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1908 theater staple, The Blue Bird, in which a young girl and her brother leave home to pursue their cherished lost pet, quite literally the blue bird of happiness.

  To tailor the theme for Elvis, Blye and Beard wove a medley of songs that told a story about an innocent, small-town boy who loves to play the guitar. Soon, he sets out to explore the world, traveling what he hopes will be the road to success. His journey leads him to a carnival boardwalk, a house of prostitution, a seedy dance bar, an upscale nightclub, and a stadium arena.

  So that viewers would realize it was Elvis’s story, too, the team incorporated snippets of his own music, as well a
s a gospel segment that symbolized salvation. They’d use very little actual dialogue but rely on his song “Guitar Man” as an autobiographical cord to tie it all together.

  It was a clever, if natural, concept, but a more inspired moment came from costume designer Bill Belew, who conceived Elvis’s now-famous black leather suit, a brilliant update of the classic ’50s motorcycle jacket, and an inside homage to James Dean and Marlon Brando, Elvis’s idols.

  When he first saw the singer in the initial production meeting, Belew, a graduate of the Parsons School of Design, perked up: “This is somebody who is going to be fabulous to dress. This is one gorgeous man!” He chose Cordoba leather, the kind usually reserved for ladies’ gloves, so that the heat and perspiration would mold the suit to Elvis’s body, despite a lining of black Chinese silk. Belew knew the suit would be hot under the lights, but he felt certain Elvis would like it.

  On June 3, Elvis arrived at the Binder-Howe offices for the start of two weeks of rehearsals. He was fourteen pounds lighter from his diet, and his skin was bronzed from the Hawaiian sun. “He looked amazing,” Binder remembers. Elvis got excited about the script, and then Howe said he’d like to bring in some of L.A.’s best session players, like guitarists Mike Deasy and Tommy Tedesco, and drummer Hal Blaine. Elvis nodded in agreement. In fact, he said, “I like it all.”

  However, the team’s buoyant mood vanished three days later, when on a visit to Los Angeles, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel. His death, coming so close on the heels of the Martin Luther King Jr., assassination, spiraled Elvis into a well of despair. Binder, seeing Elvis’s deep reaction and listening to him talk about the lost Kennedy brothers—and in a roundabout way, civil rights—asked songwriter Earl Brown to compose an emotional finale that captured some of Elvis’s idealistic and spiritual outlook on life.

  Brown stayed up all night to write a climactic ballad called “If I Can Dream,” the title hinting at the slain leaders’ impassioned words.

  In mid-June, to Elvis’s surprise, Binder dismissed Billy Strange, the musical director who, with Mac Davis, had written “Memories,” one of the special’s keynote ballads. Strange, who also worked as a writer-scorer for Nancy Sinatra, was the only person Elvis had asked to be on the project, stemming from his work on Live a Little, Love a Little. In his place, Binder brought in Billy Goldenberg, a cohort from a number of Binder’s previous specials.

  At first, both men were uneasy. Goldenberg thought, “I’m a Jewish kid from New York who grew up on Broadway. What am I doing playing ‘Hound Dog’?”

  Their first big test came on the day the team went to Elvis’s dressing room and played “If I Can Dream.” Howe said he was sure it was a hit song, but the way Goldenberg played it, Elvis thought it sounded a little too theatrical. Howe knew it was right for him: “You can do it with a real bluesy feel.”

  “Let me hear it again,” Elvis said.

  Goldenberg played it seven or eight times, Elvis bowing his head, getting inside the song. Finally, he looked up. “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  For his entire life, Elvis had fronted nothing bigger than a small rhythm section onstage. Now, in backing him with a thirty-nine-piece orchestra, Goldenberg would bring about the biggest change in Elvis’s music since his move from Sun to RCA.

  Ultimately, the musical director would create a new, sophisticated sound that would set Elvis up for the next phase of his career. But Elvis had never allowed anyone to tamper with the direction of his music. The angriest he’d ever gotten with Colonel Parker was in January, when Parker had ordered RCA to remaster “Guitar Man” and bring Elvis’s voice farther out front. And when he walked into the session at Western Recorders and saw the horns and string section, he nervously called the producer-director aside. Binder told him they’d send everybody home if he didn’t like it.

  “When Elvis heard the first note, he loved it,” Binder says. “He had his sunglasses on and was standing next to Billy on the podium, and he looked into the control booth at me and gave me the high sign, like, ‘We’re going to be okay.’ He just fell out, and he never once questioned anything that we did musically. That was the one moment when he knew it would all come together.”

  Elvis had now literally moved into the NBC studios, the staff having converted the dressing rooms on the stage into sleeping quarters. Each evening, Elvis jammed and cut up with Charlie, Joe, Alan, and Lamar, and Binder was enthralled, realizing that was the kind of intimacy, informality, and playfulness he’d hoped to get onscreen. He could use a new little handheld video camera to capture it and give the audience a glimpse of an Elvis that no one outside his friends and family had ever seen.

  “Absolutely not,” Parker vetoed, but he gave Binder permission to re-create it. That inspired the “improv” segment, in which Elvis sits on a small stage with Charlie, Scotty, D. J., and Alan, jamming and telling stories of the early days. A highlight came when he poked fun at the Judge Gooding incident in Jacksonville, as well as his own famous sneer:

  “There’s something wrong with my lip, man. No, wait a minute, wait a minute. There’s something wrong with my lip. Hey, you remember that, doncha? I got news for you, baby. I did twenty-nine pictures like that.”

  At the last minute, Binder and Howe informed Colonel Parker that “If I Can Dream” would close the show. After a battle of wills (“Over my dead body will Elvis sing an original song at the end of the show! We had a deal for a Christmas song!”), Binder added “Blue Christmas” to the improv.

  Binder had bested the Colonel, something few men had ever done. But Finkel gives some of the credit to Parker’s client. “We got Elvis to take a stand. It was a miracle.”

  On June 23, Elvis recorded “If I Can Dream” in several passionate takes. To Binder and Howe, his performance was so staggering as to seem almost a religious experience. Out on the floor with a hand mike, standing in front of the string section, Elvis fell to his knees. For a moment, he was back at Ellis Auditorium, at the gospel sings of his youth, or maybe down in Tupelo at the Assembly of God church. Howe, having worked with him before, might have anticipated such an immersion. Not everyone was prepared: “The string players sat there with their mouths open. They had never seen anything like this.”

  But the more astonishing performance came when the producers sent everybody home and Elvis rerecorded the vocal in the dark. Binder sat motionless, afraid to move as Elvis lost himself in the song. Once again, he fell to his knees. But this time, in a fervent act that was equal parts artistry and emotional regression, he assumed a fetal position, writhing on the cement floor. Then, after four takes, he got up and walked into the control room, and Binder played the recording back for him. Elvis sat in rapt attention and asked to hear it again until Binder had played it some fifteen times. Only then was he satisfied.

  At the start of the project, Parker had told Binder he’d never interfere if things were going well. “On the outside, the Colonel was very unhappy with what was happening. But being a good businessman, there’s no doubt that he saw we were on to something special and he shouldn’t rock the boat.”

  Parker was, in fact, a step ahead of everyone. The show would garner high ratings and sell albums, yes. But the Colonel had long foreseen the event as a catalyst for the next stage of Elvis’s career. Elvis had three movies to make to fulfill his contracts, but then the Colonel was taking him to Las Vegas, where Elvis would be the biggest act in the desert, and the highest paid performer in Vegas history.

  Two months earlier, in April, Elvis, Priscilla, and the Colonel had gone to see Tom Jones in concert at the Flamingo Hotel. On the surface, it looked like nothing more than a star, his wife, and manager out for a night on the town, especially since Elvis and Jones were friends, and the Colonel could never pass up a blackjack table.

  But they were there for a much bigger purpose. That night, Parker met with Flamingo president Alex Shoofey, whom he’d known during Shoofey’s twenty-year tenure at the Sahara. Over dinner, they roughed out an agree
ment by which Elvis would appear at the International Hotel, which Shoofey would build with Kirk Kerkorian the following year.

  It was time to start reshaping Elvis’s profile. Lamar figured it out: “The only way he could set it up was to show how Elvis would perform with a group behind him. That’s why the Colonel envisioned the special.”

  At six-fifteen on the evening of June 25, Parker presented his rehabbed attraction to fifty TV-radio editors at a press conference on NBC’s Rehearsal Stage 3. The Colonel cracked a few jokes to warm the crowd, and then Elvis bounded into the room in an electric blue shirt, black pants, leather wristbands, and a diamond ring one reporter described as the size of a Ping-Pong ball.

  “Come on, Steve,” Elvis said to Binder. “These are always fun.”

  Binder and Finkel sat on either side of him as he smoked his favorite stogie. Bones and Lamar anchored the end of the table, and Joe, Charlie, and Alan stood behind them. Almost everyone had on a yellow scarf—Parker had handed them out as gifts from Elvis.

  The reporters were eager for answers.

  “Elvis, why are you doing this show?”

  “We figured it was about time. Besides, I thought I’d better do it before I get too old.”

  “Do you think your audience has changed?”

  Elvis smiled: “Well, they don’t move as fast as they used to.”

  They were just starting to enjoy the exchange when the Colonel ended it abruptly, springing his client in full pitchman’s style. “Right over here, folks, get your picture taken with Elvis.”

  “I have no proof to back this up,” says Binder, “but I felt the Colonel had the magic power. And I believe that before Elvis did anything, the Colonel would take him quietly into a room and use his hypnotism on him. Elvis was very insecure. But fifteen minutes later, he would come out oozing confidence, convinced that he was the greatest performer who ever walked on the stage.”