Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Somewhere around June 26, choreographer Jaime Rogers began rehearsing the “Let Yourself Go” dance sequence. Like everyone who worked with Elvis on the show, he was impressed: “People would be shocked to know how hard Elvis worked on this special.”

  Dick Loeb, an NBC executive, would later nickname the production number “Bordello,” as it frames Elvis wandering into a house of ill repute. There, the Guitar Man is surrounded by a bevy of older, hardened prostitutes who paw and grab at him seductively. He has fun with them, and just as he is about to pick one for the evening, he spots a virginal innocent, a young girl with long blond hair who has yet to meet her first client. They eye each other from across the room, but as the Guitar Man makes his way toward her, the vice squad arrives, and he jumps out the window, continuing on his journey.

  In the days leading up to the segment rehearsals, “Elvis ushered young girls into his dressing room like they were on a conveyor belt,” Alan remembered. And then the dancer playing the “Virgin” showed up: It was Susan Henning, Elvis’s mermaid from Live a Little, Love a Little. He had no idea she would be there, and Binder wasn’t aware Elvis even knew Susan when he hired her: “With her blue eyes, long blond hair, and angelic face, she just looked like the ideal person to cast.”

  Susan thought she’d have a little fun with it.

  “When I walked into the room where we were to rehearse the dance, he had his back to me. He had his little macho pose, and I think I had on a pair of short shorts. . . . I remember walking up and sticking my leg between his legs, and kind of doing a little can-can. He looked down [and said] his favorite expression, ‘My boy, my boy!’ ”

  Susan spent her nights in Elvis’s studio dressing room, and then she would have to get up and rush to her parents’ home to pick up her daughter. “Mom would say, ‘You still taping?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, Mom, sometimes they need you late.’ I remember it was a teensy bed, and one night, one of my eyelashes came off on his pillow.” At first, it scared him—he mistook it for a spider, he later told the guys. “He thought that was so funny.”

  Though Binder didn’t realize that Elvis and Susan were spending time together (“I was and still am very naïve about these kind of things”), it was obvious to everyone else that they were dating. Priscilla was always home with the baby, and Elvis and Susan flirted openly. Says Binder, “I understand that was the real reason Elvis didn’t want Priscilla around. A few years later, she told me Elvis said for her to stay home because there were too many good-looking men on the set.”

  It made Elvis feel good to have Susan nearby. They were always joking and joshing and teasing with everybody, and to her, “he seemed very comfortable. He was happy to be back working.”

  Elvis never let her know about his anxiety, but still, she saw herself as his support, since he asked her to stay for much of the taping. “I almost feel I was there to be his strength during that time. I would just be off on the side, and when he’s singing, you can often see him looking over that way.”

  They saw each other for a year and a half. “And certainly we talked about the future.” But in the end, she didn’t think they had enough in common. She was ready to phase out of show business, and he was going in deeper. And while they shared a love of horses, his was an occasional interest, and hers was a passion—she would become one of the top horse breeders in America.

  “The sparks and chemistry lasted with us. But I wasn’t prepared to follow anybody around the country. I still had a lot that I wanted to accomplish.” And, of course, there was another problem: “He had a multitude of women.”

  The Bordello sequence would be cut from the original broadcast, as the sponsor was afraid it “might offend the little ol’ ladies in the Singer Sewing Centers across the country,” as Binder puts it. However, the segment was reinserted in the airings that followed.

  On June 27 Elvis rehearsed the gospel medley, taped the carnival segment, and then went to his dressing room to rest before his two, one-hour sets before a live audience that evening. But shortly before the six o’clock taping, he panicked, reporting “sheer terror” that he might lock up once he got onstage. Binder had seen him agitated only once, when Finkel suggested they might need to lighten his hair (“Do you think my hair’s too black?”). But now Howe recognized a crisis: “He sat in that makeup chair and literally trembled, just really sweated. He said, ‘What am I going to do if they don’t like me?’ ” Binder reasoned with him and then asked Elvis to do it as a personal favor: “If you get out there and you have nothing to say and you can’t remember a song, then say, ‘Thank you,’ and come back. But you’ve got to go out there.”

  It was his first serious musical performance in seven years. Although he was so nervous that his hand shook, he performed as an artist who was evergreen and timeless, and he revalidated his achievements and rendered himself fresh at the same time. When he lit into the rockabilly and blues that fueled the engine of his life, his energy blazed raw and palpable, his voice boasting a tough exuberance, his looks telegraphing sensuality, submission, cruelty. By the time he taped the arena segment two days later, he’d summoned such assurance that he was not so much a man, but a panther, feral in his black leather skin, growling, prowling, strutting across the stage.

  For the production team, part of the thrill was seeing the metamorphosis take place. But Elvis may have had some help. After the first taping, when they had to peel the suit off him, Bill Belew went to Binder. “We have a problem,” he whispered. The suit would have to be cleaned: Elvis had experienced a sexual emission onstage. “That,” declares Binder, “is when I really believed that Parker had planted the seed through hypnotism that Elvis was the greatest sex symbol who ever existed. I don’t think he could have built himself up to have an orgasm unless there was a stimulus there to drive him to do that. I just felt it was not a normal act.”

  The “stimulus” may have been Susan Henning, sitting offstage, but where Elvis could see her, as he requested. Either way, it was a remarkable reaction.

  In a conversation with the late Dr. William Masters, who pioneered research into human sexual response with his wife, Virginia Johnson, psychologist Peter O. Whitmer asked about Elvis’s onstage climax, which was well known in show business circles. “Bill Masters said yes, it happens, but it’s very unusual. It shows the real depth of the drive of an individual to prove his abilities.”

  When the special, titled Singer Presents ELVIS, aired on December 3, 1968, critics hailed the return of an authentic American original. The program garnered 42 percent of the viewing audience and gave NBC its biggest ratings bump of the year. The soundtrack also soared to number eight on Billboard’s pop album chart. Today the music, which has been repackaged several times, most recently as The Complete ’68 Comeback Special, still inspires wonder.

  “What impresses,” says music reviewer John Bush, “is how much it prefigures the rest of Elvis’ career. . . . During the ’70s [Elvis] was the apotheosis of rock music, a righteous blend of rock and soul, gospel and pop, blues and country.”

  “The greatest thrill I got out of it was seeing a man in a small window of time rediscover himself,” Binder reflects. “That’s the legacy of the ’68 special.”

  Before they parted that summer, Binder screened an hour’s edit for everyone on the project. Elvis didn’t react, which made Binder terribly nervous. Then Elvis asked if he could see it again, just with Binder. “He watched it three more times, and laughed and applauded, and he said, ‘Steve, I will never sing a song that I don’t believe in, and I will never make a movie that I don’t believe in. I want to do really great things from now on.’ ”

  But first he had to go to Arizona to make Charro!, an offbeat film that aspired to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Elvis, heavily bearded for his Clint Eastwood–like role of Jess Wade, a reformed badman, had high hopes that Charro! would be a serious film, as the director-screenwriter, Charles Marquis Warren, had produced the legendary TV westerns Gunsmoke, Rawhide, and The Virginian.
But the studio, National General, was in flux, and when Elvis arrived at the Apacheland Movie Ranch, nothing seemed to gel.

  He was disheartened over the poor production values, and European star Ina Balin, who played the dance hall queen with whom Jess was involved, seemed ill cast. The script painted Jess as a cynical antihero, and one day at the studio, Charlie remembered, “They had the house sitting there . . . Elvis was standing over at the end of the porch, and he looked down and said, ‘Charlie, I’m beginning to feel like this character.’ ”

  The film nonetheless would give him a margin of crowing rights, and he was eager to promote it: “Charro! is the first movie I ever made without singing a song,” he told reporters. “I play a gunfighter, and I just couldn’t see a singing gunfighter.” However, in the end, he relented and crooned the title tune. “I’m sure they had to pretty much hog-tie him to get him to cut it,” says Mac Davis, who wrote it.

  By the time he reported to the set of The Trouble with Girls in October, he was in high spirits again, hearing nothing but great things from the Colonel about NBC’s reaction to the special and the anticipation over its airing in December. He was also happy to be at the end of his MGM contract. In this movie, with Broadway musical star Marlyn Mason as his assistant, he plays the manager of a traveling Chautauqua in the 1920s.

  The Trouble with Girls is an odd entry to the Presley filmography, as he’s on-screen for only about one-third of the picture. Yet Marlyn would remember the movie, a mix of music, comedy, and melodrama, as “ten weeks of hilarious bliss . . . all party, every day. I still smile.”

  Marlyn hadn’t been an Elvis fan and wasn’t prepared to like him, but “I felt very close to him. I know that he liked me very much, and I liked him very much. It was a sweet relationship. We hit it off immediately. I think if you are in tune with somebody, you sense things. I could be sitting fifty feet from him, and I would just get a feeling, and I would turn, and he would be looking at me.”

  He called her “Cap,” for a hat she wore to work. She was single at the time, and everything between them just clicked. She didn’t mind the practical jokes—not even the loud firecrackers under her chair—and found they shared a sexy sense of humor, both appreciating a line of dialogue in which Elvis tells her they should continue a conversation in bed.

  “You could ad-lib with him. We would do a lot of that. If the director [Peter Tewksbury] was doing a close-up on Elvis and he wanted a certain reaction, he would come to me and say, ‘I don’t care what you do, but this is the reaction I need from him.’ ”

  The next time Tewksbury said that, Marlyn “started slowly unbuttoning [Elvis’s] shirt and taking his belt off, very quietly. He was just giving me these looks. . . . He didn’t stop and say, ‘What is she doing?’ He would just roll with the punches.”

  Elvis held his upbeat mood throughout filming, but in his quiet moments with Marlyn, he told her how he’d come to Hollywood full of dreams. “The saddest thing E ever said to me was that he’d like to make one good film, because he knew the town laughed at him. It broke my heart.”

  For all their rapport, theirs was strictly a working relationship, she says, and she never saw him after the picture wrapped.

  It had been an extraordinary year, one that witnessed a birth, Lisa Marie, and a rebirth, Elvis himself. But just as it was a period of grand beginnings, it was also one of hard endings.

  Johnny Smith, the uncle who taught Elvis guitar, died that year at forty-six, as did Bobby Smith, Billy’s brother, at twenty-seven. Dewey Phillips, who had spun Elvis’s first record on the radio, also passed on. For years, Dewey had suffered terribly from osteomyelitis in his leg, which left him with a limp, an incessantly open wound, and an addiction to painkillers. But a heart attack took him out. He was forty-two, just like Bobby Kennedy. They were all too young to die: Nicks Adams at thirty-six, Martin Luther King, Jr., at thirty-nine.

  “Mrs. Dorothy,” Elvis said to the deejay’s widow, “Dewey was my friend.”

  Steve Binder was his friend, too. But though Elvis had scribbled down his phone number and asked him to stay in touch, Binder’s messages were always ignored, his calls never returned. Or maybe they had just been intercepted.

  Yet Binder could console himself with the knowledge that together, he and Elvis had created one of the most important and defining moments in the history of rock. And maybe the producer-director had done more than that.

  In March 2008 Priscilla Presley sat at the William S. Paley Television Festival in Los Angeles, watching a screening of a forty-year-old TV special in which a man in a black leather suit recaptured his lost glory. Eighteen minutes into it, she leaned over to the person next to her. “You saved his career,” she told Binder. “You saved his life.”

  Joyce Bova (right) and her twin sister, Janice, greet Elvis backstage at the Baltimore Civic Center, November 9, 1971. Their twinship intrigued and comforted him. “I understood,” he told Joyce, “that until your twin gave her blessing to us [that] you wouldn’t be able to give yourself to me.” (Courtesy of Joyce Bova)

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Sin City

  Barely two weeks after “Singer Presents ELVIS” aired in December 1968, the Colonel accepted the deal to take Elvis into the $60 million yet-to-be-built International Hotel, Kirk Kerkorian’s oasis of refinement in the Vegas desert. The showroom, with two thousand seats, would be the largest in town.

  Alex Shoofey, nicknamed “the Cleaver” for his attention to the bottom line during his years at the Sahara and the Flamingo, was a good match for the Colonel. When the two sat down at the negotiating table, Shoofey, now married to Joan Adams, the girl who had pushed Elvis off the couch in her trailer years before, told Parker the hotel would be very pleased to have Elvis, but they had to face facts. After so many years in Hollywood, he was unproven as a stage act. He hadn’t even appeared in Vegas in twelve years, and in 1956 he hadn’t exactly set the town on fire, you know?

  The Colonel, intent on outmaneuvering the long-faced Canadian, fixed his antediluvian eyes on him and told him that was all in the past, before the movies, before the TV special. Elvis had his old fans, and his new fans. The International would offer 1,500 rooms—two and a half times the size of Caesars Palace—but they’d have no trouble filling them when his client was in town. Vegas had never seen the kind of business Elvis would generate, and the Colonel would see to it personally.

  “You’re going to find out what an opening is like when Elvis comes in,” Parker boasted, closing his deal with a jab of his cane, and then waving it across an invisible map. “They’ll come from all over the world.” Shoofey raised a thick eyebrow, pondered the thought, and then shook his head yes.

  In late July 1969 Elvis would kick off a four-week engagement of two shows a night, seven nights a week. No other entertainer had ever committed to such a grueling schedule, usually taking Monday or Tuesday off. As compensation, Parker demanded $100,000 a week, out of which Elvis and the Colonel would pay the musicians and backup vocalists. “Mark my words,” Parker declared, “Elvis will be the first star in Las Vegas to make money for the showroom, apart from whatever his fans drop out in the casino. You’ll never have an empty seat. I can promise you that.”

  Elvis, meanwhile, concerned himself more with what he’d promised Steve Binder—to maintain his artistic credibility. On January 6, two days before his thirty-fourth birthday, Elvis took a meeting with Felton Jarvis, who drove over to Graceland from Nashville to discuss Elvis’s next record. Marty Lacker was there, and for a while, he just listened to what the two men had to say.

  Marty was now running a small record label and working closely with Chips Moman at his American Studio there in Memphis. He had already reminded Elvis that Chips was one of the founders of Stax Records, and that 164 hit records had come out of his little run-down studio at 827 Thomas Street in just the last eighteen months. Red had recorded his own stuff there recently, too, and though he and Elvis still weren’t speaking, George Klein also prompted Elvis t
o think about cutting his next record at American. Maybe there was something magical in those North Memphis walls.

  Elvis hadn’t recorded in his hometown since the Sun years, and it might put some of that deep-dish soul back in his music, Marty told him some months earlier. It would be his most logical album setting in years. But Elvis had only said he’d think about it. Jerry Leiber, who wrote so many of Elvis’s hits with his partner Mike Stoller, knew that Elvis’s music was “really white music with black undertones,” but that there was no getting around “that Memphis place, where a lot of different things came together at the right time, at the point it was ready to happen.”

  Maybe it was time for that to happen again, Marty said, speaking now to both Elvis and Felton. Nothing against Nashville, of course, but a lot of the records that came out of there sounded like something turned out of a factory. Felton knew what Marty meant. He knew, too, that Moman had a group of players there—particularly Reggie Young on lead guitar, Bobby Emmons and Bobby Wood on keyboards, Gene Chrisman on drums, and Tommy Cogbill and Mike Leech on bass—who’d mastered a hand-in-glove synthesis of pop and rhythm-and-blues.

  After the television special Marty “saw that it could go either way. And Chips kept saying, ‘When are you going to tell Elvis to let me produce a record?’ ”

  It took a bit of arm-twisting, but before Marty and Felton left that day, Elvis had agreed. And during the first two months of 1969, he would record some of his most enduring music, including “Suspicious Minds,” “Kentucky Rain,” “In the Ghetto,” and “Long Black Limousine.”

  “It would have taken a complete fool not to hit with Elvis Presley, if you had the songs,” Moman says. But in getting the right songs to him, the project would be fraught with tension, as both RCA and the Colonel threw up obstacles and hurdles about studio policy and publishing rights. That put Lamar, now working for Elvis’s publishers, Hill & Range, and Marty, who was Chips’s friend and also moonlighted as a song plugger, in the middle.