It was like a magical kingdom, with famous stars constantly strolling by, cowboys and Indians making casual conversation in the commissary, and everyone sneaking a peek out of the corner of their eye to get a look at the latest arrival on the lot. Gene seemed a little bit overwhelmed by it all and took to whittling or retreating to the big dressing room where the Colonel conducted business while Elvis was on the set. For his part Elvis couldn’t seem to get enough—it was like the playing out of a childhood fantasy, he just didn’t want to reveal by an inadvertent glance or blurted-out words how excited he really was.
On his second day on the set he met twenty-five-year-old Nick Adams, a Hollywood hustler who had originally brazened his way into the cast of Mister Roberts two years before by doing impressions of the star, Jimmy Cagney, for director John Ford. Adams, a coal miner’s son from Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, had had a supporting role in Rebel Without a Cause and was, he announced to all and sundry, currently writing a book about his “best friend,” Jimmy Dean. Desperate for success and recognition, he was known to keep meticulous notebooks on Hollywood social life and never failed to send thank-you notes and congratulatory messages to producers, directors, and people of influence in the industry. On this particular day he was roaming the lot, looking to make a connection for the “bad guy” role in The Reno Brothers that Cameron Mitchell had just dropped out of. That was when he ran into Elvis. “It’s no secret around town that Nick’s a go-getter,” wrote Army Archerd in Photoplay, but “before Nick knew what had hit him, Elvis was saying, ‘Gee, I think you’re a swell actor.’ It didn’t take Nick long to tell Elvis how much he’d like to be in his film. He told Elvis how he’d played a ‘heavy’ in ‘The Last Wagon.’ ‘Gee,’ said Elvis, ‘I’ll tell Mr. Weisbart to look at “The Last Wagon.” ’ ” Though nothing came of it, the point was made, and when Nick offered to introduce Elvis to some more of his, and Jimmy’s, friends, their friendship was sealed. Had Elvis met Natalie Wood? He had to meet Natalie. And, of course, this being Hollywood, there were always lots of girls…
It was hard to keep track of everything, it was all happening so fast. Every night he called home to tell his mother the latest news. Almost every night he called June. Three songs were now set for the picture, and Colonel was making deals for their delivery to RCA, working out the publishing, and making sure that Elvis got coauthorship. Colonel Parker was staying up nights, Elvis told a reporter, “thinking up ways to promote me.” In the midst of it all, Scotty and Bill and D.J. showed up after driving cross-country from Memphis. They had been promised a tryout for the picture, and there was an RCA recording session with Mr. Sholes scheduled for the following weekend.
The tryout was held in the music bungalow on the west end of the lot where Elvis was rehearsing his three songs with Mr. Darby, the musical director. They were asked to play their regular show, but when they got done they were told they were not “hillbilly” enough for the picture. Scotty was furious—if they had known the musical director wanted “hillbilly,” he fumed, they would have given him banjos and jugs and Roy Acuff music, that was what they had grown up on, after all. Elvis’ mind was somewhere else, though, and the Colonel was certainly not going to stick up for them. As far as the Colonel was concerned, Scotty knew, they might just as well never have showed up.
It was a minor setback—the next picture, Elvis promised them, he would make sure that they were used. He had finally gotten to renew his brief acquaintance with Debra Paget, he told June on the telephone. She was even more beautiful than he had first thought, she was really nice, and… Well, who else had he met? June wondered. When Elvis didn’t answer, June asked, Well, what did you talk about with Debra? After a long silence he finally said he didn’t remember, but he had met Richard Egan. “Oh, I love Richard Egan,” June simpered. “Oh, really? And just how much do you love Richard Egan?” About as much as he loved Debra Paget, she supposed. Now who else had he met?
On Wednesday the picture started shooting, but Elvis was getting ready for the soundtrack session the following day. On the day of the session Elvis was eager to perform the ballad that would provide a running theme for the movie (and was even then under discussion as a new title for the picture) for Army Archerd, who was on assignment for Photoplay. He took Archerd back to the music bungalow, where Ken Darby accompanied him on the grand piano, and Elvis stood “erect, as if he were in a choir,” in front of a tall stained-glass window and sang “Love Me Tender.” Archerd was astonished both at the stillness of his manner and the straightforwardness of his treatment of the song, which was a rewrite of the Civil War ballad “Aura Lee.” “When he finished,” wrote Archerd, “it seemed only normal to express our amazement. ‘People think all I can do is belt,’ he said. ‘I used to sing nothing but ballads before I went professional. I love ballads,’ ” he insisted to the Hollywood columnist with utter sincerity. He was going to start introducing them more into his live act. This was the kind of music he had grown up singing in church.
The session itself went off without a hitch. The film-studio setting may have been a little intimidating at first, with the distinguished conductor-orchestrator Lionel Newman counting off the beat for the little combo and the Ken Darby vocal trio not really up to the kind of support on Brother Claude Ely’s “There’s a Leak in This Old Building” (retitled, and recopyrighted, as “We’re Gonna Move”) that the Jordanaires would have provided. Elvis poured himself into “Love Me Tender,” though, and when the session was over went off happily with his new pals, Nick Adams and Nick’s roommate, Dennis Hopper.
It was a relief once the real work of acting finally began. It was a job like any other—he was up at 5:30 every morning, he told Dewey on the phone, and sometimes he fell asleep talking to June on the phone at night. “This place isn’t anything but a workshop,” Elvis declared to the Memphis DJ. “I spent one whole day plowing mules. Man, that was rough!”
Richard Egan told him that the trick was to just be yourself, and David Weisbart insisted that acting lessons would probably ruin him, because his greatest asset was his natural ability. The director, Robert Webb, was very patient, taking him aside before the start of each scene and going over it with him so that he could visualize the action and emotion. Webb would break down the lines, too, giving the fledgling actor points of emphasis and breathing points, talking to Elvis in private and showing him the kind of respect that always allowed him to take direction. Everyone liked the kid—they had all thought he would be some kind of hillbilly freak, but he had won them over with the same combination of humility and deferential charm that had worked for him in every other situation in which he had found himself in his twenty-one-year-old life. “I had a nice talk with him one day,” Mildred Dunnock recounted to writer Jerry Hopkins, “and he told me a little bit about how he got started. He evidently played the guitar and was very anxious to get on a recording—this was in Memphis. So he kept approaching the man that had the [studio] and just simply couldn’t get on it. One night this man took pity on him, or got bored with his asking, and felt finally he’d give him a try….[The night that the disc jockey played the recording] Elvis told me he was so nervous he went to the movie house. He said to his mother, ‘I can’t listen to this, I just can’t listen to it.’ So he went down to see the movie, and at about twenty minutes after eleven his mother came rushing down to the movie, to the aisle seat where he was sitting, and said, ‘Elvis, come on home, the telephone is ringing like crazy.’ And that was the start of his real popularity.”
“Before I met him, I figured he must be some sort of moron,” said Debra Paget, voicing what she said was a commonly held assumption on the set, but once she got to know him, she, too, came to find him “very sweet, very simple,” just not the kind of boy she would care to date. Trude Forsher, a Viennese émigrée, mother of two, and distant relative of the Aberbachs, who had just gone to work for the Colonel as his West Coast secretary, hosted informal meetings in his dressing room in which the Colonel and Abe Lastfogel, the head
of William Morris, talked business and Elvis drank milk and fooled around with Gene. Between takes Gene and Elvis would pester her to teach them German and reminisce about their childhood when they played underneath the house in Tupelo with a little toy car. “Gene was just so happy to be with Elvis.” The two of them followed her around the lot singing “Trude Frutti.”
He was constantly busy with visitors and reporters on the set. He flirted openly with the women reporters and trusted them to see through his bravura facade. “I could make you like me if I tried,” he told one reporter. “I’m just teasin’ now, but I’d be sweet, and you’d like me because I was sweet, wouldn’t you?” With the men he was equally forthright, and he was open about his hopes and fears with one and all. “I’m so nervous,” he said in response to a question about biting his fingernails. “I’ve always been nervous, ever since I was a kid.” “From the time I was a kid, well, I knew something was going to happen to me,” he told another interviewer. “Didn’t know exactly what.” To True Story staff writer Jules Archer he confessed his genuine disturbance at the reaction to his Jacksonville shows and the preacher who asked his congregation to pray for Elvis’ salvation. “I think that hurt me more than anything else at first. This man was supposed to be a religious leader, yet he acted that way without ever knowing who I was or what I was like. I believe in the Bible. I believe that all good things come from God…. I don’t believe I’d sing the way I do if God hadn’t wanted me to. My voice is God’s will, not mine.”
He signed autographs willingly and met with studio executives’ daughters. He and Gene spent $750 on a Saturday night at a Long Beach amusement park. Meanwhile, the Colonel was working without letup to promote his boy, to make sure that the film’s title was changed and that the title song, with Elvis’ name on the copyright, would run all the way through the picture, to solidify his merchandising deal with marketing king Hank Saperstein, to earn his own newly conferred title (and salary) as “Technical Adviser” to the film. He wore his pink Elvis Presley button everywhere he went on the set and, when asked by a reporter how to obtain one, said, “We’ll have to check you over. It’s not that easy, you know.”
Back at the hotel Elvis was exhausted, frequently by 8:30 or 9:00 at night. Sometimes he and Nick went out together. Mostly he and Gene ordered in room service. He kept June up-to-date on how the movie was going. One night he told her in some wonderment how William Campbell, who played his brother, Brett, had refused the director’s orders to wear a hat, because he was so vain about his hair. “He combs his hair even more than I do,” he told her—if she could believe that. He was lonely, he missed her, he wanted her to come out. He would arrange for a screen test. What was she up to back home in Biloxi, what was she doing without him?
Everything was going pretty much according to plan. He put himself into the scenes the same way he put himself into the music. He listened intently to the other actors saying their lines, and then he reacted—the character that he played was an innocent, almost a child as he portrayed him, full of hurt and rage and indignation. The only thing that gave him away was his hands. If he didn’t have something to do, his hands betrayed him. You could see it in the rushes: his fingers fluttering, just as they did when he was onstage, as he waited for the other actor to get through with his lines, revealing the same lack of training that Mr. Weisbart told reporters was a virtue. “Presley has the same smoldering appeal for teenagers, and the same impulsive nature [as James Dean did]. In his singing style Elvis often expresses the loneliness and yearning of all teenage kids as they break away from childhood and become adults…. Elvis is simply a kid who is emotionally honest, and honestly emotional.”
On the Friday before Labor Day weekend, Mr. Sholes visited the set, and Colonel got him into a broad-brimmed straw hat while donning a fake goatee and mustache himself for a photograph with other RCA executives to commemorate the occasion. Sholes had flown out the day before with Bill Bullock, manager of RCA’s singles division, for the recording session he had been importuning the Colonel for ever since the spring. It was imperative, he argued, that they have material for the second album, which was scheduled for November, and Colonel had finally, grudgingly, conceded the point and scheduled a session for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday of the holiday weekend. Also flying out for the session was Freddy Bienstock, and the three men, plus the Colonel’s assistant Tom Diskin, met for breakfast each morning in the hotel dining room, with Sholes dressed in his somber suit and tie while the Colonel was suitably decked out for the California sunshine in a colorful western or Hawaiian shirt that barely tucked into his ample waistband.
Sholes had sent out a bunch of songs and arranged with Henri Rene, an arranger-producer at RCA’s West Coast office, to make sure that Elvis was supplied with a phonograph player, but every time he made inquiries as to whether or not Elvis had selected material, he was rebuffed with a corny joke or enigmatic double-talk. Freddy Bienstock, the junior member of the trio and the Hill and Range representative who had brought “Don’t Be Cruel” to the last session, had arrived with material of his own, and Sholes grew impatient as Bienstock and the Colonel bantered back and forth and spoke with evident good humor of Freddy’s cousins the Aberbachs, with whom Steve had been doing business for years. It was a most uncomfortable situation but one he was going to have to get used to: no matter how much bullshit there was to get through, he was the one who was responsible in the end for delivery of the product, and he was going to make sure that he delivered.
Since RCA did not have studio facilities of its own in Hollywood, the session was booked into Radio Recorders, an independent studio on Santa Monica. There had been a problem with the Jordanaires’ schedule, but that was worked out, and when Elvis walked in the door shortly after 1:00, everyone was there and all set up. The engineer in charge of the session was a twenty-nine-year-old mixer from Dundee, Michigan, named Thorne Nogar who had been assigned the RCA account a year or two before. A quiet man of Scandinavian background and dour mien, he resembled Scotty somewhat in temperament and was neither impressed nor unimpressed by this kid from Memphis, “awful nice kid—he come in there with no pretensions, just a kid off the street.” Elvis in turn warmed to the sound recordist’s equally unpretentious manner from the start. He liked Nogar’s assistant, too, a soft-spoken young jazz drummer named Bones Howe who had just gone to work for the studio and did everything that needed doing, from getting Thorne coffee to cueing up the tape on the reel.
They started off with “Playing for Keeps,” a number that Elvis had gotten from Stan Kesler in Memphis (Kesler had written “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” and “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone” for him at Sun), and then Bones played the acetate demos, as Freddy handed them to him, over the PA that boomed into the studio. Freddy had a new song “from the pencil of” Otis Blackwell, and, after the great success of “Hound Dog,” he had solicited a number from the songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller, too. They had submitted an old tune called “Love Me,” which they had originally written as a kind of hillbilly send-up, to their mind “what Homer and Jethro might have done to a legitimate lyric.” On this first day Elvis also responded favorably to both “How Do You Think I Feel,” which he already knew from Jimmie Rodgers Snow’s rhumbaized version (Snow had also recorded a perfectly sincere version of “Love Me”), and a beautiful Eddy Arnold ballad, “How’s the World Treating You?” When he liked a song he touched the top of his head so as to hear it again, from the top. When he didn’t like a number, he simply drew his finger across his throat. By the end of the day they had three songs wrapped and a fourth (Blackwell’s “Paralyzed”) well in hand. More significantly, there was an overall spirit of optimism and a new order of ascendancy in the studio.
There was no longer any question of who was in charge. Mr. Sholes might still call out the take numbers; he recorded all the session information meticulously in his notebook; he might even request another take or mildly interject a suggestion here and there—but the pace, th
e momentum, the feel of the session, were all with the boy. Maybe it was his sense of dislocation (Sholes did almost all of his recording at this point in Nashville and New York), and certainly the presence of Freddy Bienstock in the control room, and the central role that Bienstock had assumed, changed things in a fundamental way. It could have been a combination of the Colonel’s constant needling and a recognition on his own part, without ever really acknowledging the full truth of it to himself, of the limited, somewhat peripheral and demeaning role of company watchdog into which he had been thrust. Whatever the reason, Steve Sholes seemed at this point to subside into a role of almost avuncular disinterest.
Meanwhile, Elvis ran through the material with the musicians the same way that he always had, he worked out head arrangements for the songs by having Freddy play the dub over and over again, he listened carefully to the final mix with Thorne—whom he called “Stoney,” either as a joke or because of a misunderstanding that no one wanted to bother to correct in case it was a joke—but he did it all at a pace, and in a manner, different from that of any other RCA session to date. As Bones Howe remarked: “It was always about the music. He would keep working on a song, and he would listen to it played back, and his criterion was always: did it make him feel good? He didn’t care if there were little mistakes, he was interested in anything that would make magic out of the record. The sessions were always fun, there was great energy, he was always doing something that was innovative. It was always about whether you had a feeling for music or not, whether you felt what he felt. That’s why he liked Thorne so much. Thorne was a very genuine, sincere person, and he wanted Elvis to be completely happy with the records. The trick was that there was no trick. Thorne was there, and the studio was there—it was a level playing field. So he could just come in and do what felt good.”
Last Train to Memphis Page 41
