by Alanna Nash
A confrontation quickly ensued over the publishing rights to “Suspicious Minds,” which Moman controlled, as well as Mac Davis’s “In the Ghetto,” which Moman thought was a perfect statement for a man whose music sprang in part from black culture. Davis, like so many songwriters before him, including the great Otis Blackwell (“All Shook Up”), relented, and gave up part of his publishing for Elvis to record the song. But Moman held firm.
“Their deal was that they weren’t going to record any song that they didn’t have the publishing on. I was ready to erase the tapes and just let it go. I ended the session and sent the musicians home and asked all of Elvis’s people to leave my studio.”
Parker told his lieutenant, Tom Diskin, that if Moman didn’t play ball, they’d figure a way around him or simply scrap the sessions. But RCA’s Harry Jenkins knew that “Suspicious Minds” could be a huge career record for Elvis, and at the next day’s session, he mediated for the greater good: Elvis would cut it, and Chips would keep his publishing.
Lost in the battle was the fact that without a Steve Binder there to fuse his backbone, Elvis made no attempt to persuade the Colonel that the material was right for him, or to rise up and say he was going to have the song, publishing rights be damned.
That summer, “Suspicious Minds” became Elvis’s first number one single in seven years, and though he would never see another, the sides from the American Studio sessions rank among the finest work of his career. Eventually they covered two albums. From Elvis in Memphis, the first to be released, earned a lead review in Rolling Stone magazine.
Looking at it again as a reissue in 2001, the magazine still found it remarkable, James Hunter calling it “new as polyester yet old as leather, religiously involved yet flashy as neon, refined like pop yet savage like rock & roll.” The Elvis Presley of 1969 “was a more mannered and complex adult version of the Fifties kid with the nerve to combine the gnawing friction of the blues, the flourishes of gospel quartets, the zinging concision of pop and the melodic leisure of country.”
Elvis was on such a fiercely creative roll that it could only have been stultifying to have to return to Hollywood in March. There he honored the second half of his commitment with NBC, teaming with Mary Tyler Moore for Universal Pictures’ Change of Habit. Though he would make two concert films for MGM in the 1970s, this was his last narrative motion picture.
Change of Habit was measurably better fare than the likes of Stay Away, Joe or Clambake, in that it offered a dramatic role and only a handful of songs. But it presented little in the way of challenge. As Dr. John Carpenter, the head of a free ghetto clinic, Elvis finds himself with the unexpected help of three young women—nuns in street clothes—who never reveal their true vocations. Dr. Carpenter falls for Sister Michelle Gallagher (Moore), but the film forgoes a happy ending, framing Sister Gallagher in church, struggling with her vows.
Moore, whose range of characters spans the perpetually buoyant Mary Richards (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) to the bitter, raging mother of Ordinary People, seems somewhat embarrassed by Change of Habit, joking that “Elvis has said on the record, ‘I slept with all my leading ladies except one.’ Well, I don’t mean to bust anyone’s cover, but I know who the one is. And what was I thinking?”
It wasn’t strictly true, of course—he hadn’t slept with all his leading ladies. But putting the words Elvis and nun in the same sentence always seems to make people smile. That includes one of his earliest acquaintances in Tupelo, Barbara Spencer, for decades a member of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth: “Gladys and my mother were friends, and my mother loved to tell that I slept with Elvis. However, it was when we were infants. They even put us in the same crib sometimes.”
Change of Habit was yet another different direction for Elvis—it marked the first time he played a professional man, and he didn’t exactly get the girl. But the film seemed more like an after-school special for the preteen set than a movie of the week. Elvis never quite commanded the bearing of a doctor, and his scenes with Moore were so preposterously wrongheaded as to render the two the least likely couple in the universe.
It was a dreary, if emblematic, end for an actor whose talent was misused, misunderstood, and all but choked off by the big screen. “He came to Hollywood a greasy golden boy, dripping with sexuality,” observed entertainment journalist Steve Pond. “He left an entertaining, safe icon.”
As Elvis finished his film obligations, Parker was busy mounting a colossal promotion and advertising campaign, drawing on his background as an advance man for the carnivals to build Elvis into the biggest act in Vegas. “He just loaded this hotel,” remembered Shoofey. “He had every billboard in the entire city, not only in Vegas, but leading all the way to California. There was so much excitement it was unbelievable. We got calls from all over the world. We couldn’t accept all the reservations.”
Parker had insisted that Elvis be the second star in the new showroom, not the first, so that the hotel could work out any of the bugs with the lights or sound before Elvis went in. Barbra Streisand was the International’s opening draw, then, but by 5 A.M. after the close of her engagement, anticipation for Elvis was so great that fans were already standing three blocks deep to get into the hotel, and the lobby was jam-packed. Parker, meanwhile, stayed up all night plastering Elvis posters, banners, and flags all over the elegant walls and installing Elvis stand-ups in the lobby. Management bit their tongues and went along with it: Hotel employees donned straw hats with Elvis plaques on the front, while croupiers added red, white, and blue “Elvis” armbands. “They looked like riverboat gamblers,” says Imperials member Joe Moscheo. “Honestly, it was a very strange atmosphere.”
In May, Elvis took Priscilla and Lisa Marie back to Hawaii on vacation for two weeks. He needed time to think, to formulate the show. And he wanted the kind of deep Hawaiian tan that would be seen from the last row of the showroom. Since he never flew commercially under his own name, he booked the family as “the Carpenters,” using the name of his Change of Habit character.
As always, he brought along a retinue, adding the Fikes to the previous year’s party of the Espositos, the Gambills, and Charlie Hodge. They spent their weekdays at the Ilikai Hotel in Honolulu, and moved to the more intimate Coco Palms on Kauai for the weekend.
Priscilla, her overinflated hairstyle a laughable memory, was now much more comfortable in asserting herself and stepping out of her role as Elvis’s wife. She was still refining the changes in her appearance—growing her hair long and straight to her waist and lightening it to a honey brown, for example, and choosing her own style of dress. Now more serious about her dance lessons, she had also taken up photography and delighted in decorating the new house.
She would still say that her biggest ambition was “to be a complete person,” but she had recognized that the marriage was never going to work, that she had entered into a pure fantasy and an impossible, unworkable dynamic with a man who was by turns a father figure and a boy. “I need an equal,” she would say. “I need a relationship with a man I can grow with.”
Then she would be beguiled by him again and lapse into the old patterns: “Elvis brought out this mothering quality. I cut his meat up for him. I tasted it before he ever had it. I would fix his deviled eggs, cut off the top, put his butter in, prepare all his food as a mother would for a child. I would test it to see if it was too hot. Even making his coffee . . . I loved doing it for him. We’d all baby him. Then you’d see him onstage and he looked so strong and virile, it was like, ‘Oh, my God!’ But there was this child that was still in there.”
By the time they landed in Hawaii, Priscilla was tired of all of it—of the guys who surrounded them to the point of suffocation, of the upside-down hours, of living someone else’s life. “It was never about me,” she would say. “It was really about him on every level.”
She reached her threshold on the weekend they checked into the Coco Palms Hotel and rented the king and queen huts, the individual cottages among the co
conut trees in the rear of the property. It was there that they had their biggest fight about their sex life, Joe remembers.
“We had one suite, and they had the other, and the headboards of the beds were back to back. My wife and I were asleep, but we could hear them right through the wall.”
The tropical setting had put Priscilla in an amorous mood, especially since so much of Blue Hawaii had been shot on the grounds. But again, Elvis put her off. In Joe’s recollection, Elvis thought it was “like making love to his mother. He just had a hang-up about it. And Priscilla kept yelling at him, ‘You never make love to me anymore!’
“It had a lot to do with their relationship, naturally. I’m sure they [had sex] a little bit after the baby, but he wasn’t thrilled with it. That night, he didn’t say why. He just screamed and yelled back at her. But that’s one of the reasons the marriage fell apart.”
Elvis spent the rest of May, June, and July working up material with Charlie, or “Cholly,” as he pronounced the little man’s name. He wanted only the best musicians and songs, and as a fan of Mario Lanza, Jan Peerce, and Roy Orbison, Elvis was eager for songs that would let him show off the voice he’d kept hidden so long, one that could now handle sustained high notes and operatic endings. His artistry had never been so well developed, Charlie saw. “He would be Billy Eckstine, he would be Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, he would be Hank Snow—all these people became Elvis Presley. He had all these people inside him.”
In choosing the musicians, Elvis spoke to nearly every good player he’d known, including Billy Goldenberg, whom he wanted as his arranger–musical director, but who declined, citing previous commitments. For now then, he’d go with Bobby Morris, who led the thirty-piece International orchestra.
To lead his own band and help audition the players, he settled on famed Louisiana guitarist James Burton, who had come out of Ricky Nelson’s late 1950s group and gone on to become a top L.A. session musician. And for backing voices, he chose not one, but two groups: The gospel-based Imperials, a white male act, and the Sweet Inspirations, a black female quartet that had backed Aretha Franklin. It was a “helluva big stage to fill,” he told Charlie.
What he hoped for, he remarked to James, pulling on what he learned in the television special, was a sound that would bring together all of the diverse American traditions—black and white, sacred and secular—that had influenced him.
“Our music was from the same school,” explains Burton, who, like Elvis, got his start on the Louisiana Hayride. “He needed to have that strong background, that drive, and he liked to have a lot of voices back there singing and really pushing. He had a natural feel for the way the tempos should be, and how the background should surround his vocal. . . . He knew the feeling he wanted.”
Now he was trying to think of everything, including the way he’d interact with the fans. So he could get in the habit of being in public again, dealing with the crowds, he made concerted efforts to go down and sign autographs at the gates. He wasn’t sleeping well, though, worrying if he could sustain his voice over such a long engagement, with two full-hour sets a night. And he was short-tempered, partly out of nerves, and because he was working hard at staying skinny, hovering around 168 pounds. He wanted his cheekbones to show in the photographs.
Most of all, he wanted to be able to fit into his new Bill Belew–designed outfits. Belew, who had never worked in Vegas before, originally made his stage costumes in a variety of colors, including red and blue, Elvis’s favorite. Then he discovered that white worked best, to accommodate the changing colors of the lights.
“The first thing I said was, ‘I will not dress him like Liberace.’ Elvis, for me, was a very macho man. I did not feel that all the furs and feathers and sequins were right for Elvis. So the jumpsuits and macramé belts I did for him in the beginning were very subdued.”
Some of them, however, like the white Cossack-style suit, accented with a dangling macramé belt, played up Elvis’s androgynous beauty and made him contemporary with many of rock’s leading figures, who favored a flowing, feminized style of dress. He wore the outfit for at least two of his three run-throughs of the performance with full orchestra accompaniment on July 31, only hours before the show opened at 8:15 P.M.
For days he suffered the kind of debilitating panic attacks that crippled him just before the Singer special. If he seemed at thirty-four to be the King of the Oldy-Moldy-Goldys, or simply fought off technical problems, it would be reported in the press both domestically and overseas, where he had such a stronghold of fans. That would affect business and future touring, which he hoped to resume in 1970.
He would also have to face the invitation-only audience, studded with such celebrities as Cary Grant, Paul Anka, Carol Channing, Fats Domino, Wayne Newton, Ann-Margret and Roger Smith, and most important, Sam Phillips, who had started it all. He was so jittery, in fact, that he asked Joe to tell Marty Lacker and George Klein not to come until the second night. He would start his two-shows-a-night schedule then, and he was afraid the showroom would be half-empty.
But when he finally hit the stage at 10:15, following warm-up sets from the Sweet Inspirations and comedian Sammy Shore, he buried his nervousness in the bravado of the rock-and-roll beat, walking out onto stage left unannounced, and winking to the Imperials as he passed.
Just as he shuffled onstage at his high school variety show, he hesitated for a moment, as if summoning his courage. Then he churned through a repertoire that burned the fires of nostalgia (“Blue Suede Shoes”), and thrilled with the soulful tenderness of the Memphis sessions. He was as much athlete as aesthete, falling to his knees, sliding across the stage, even turning a somersault. The crowd leapt to its feet and stayed there.
Both the establishment and the counterculture press, including the New York Times, the Village Voice, and The New Yorker, rushed to praise, and even the seen-it-all pit bosses said they couldn’t remember such excitement on an opening night.
There to share it was June Juanico, who seemed to speak for most of the women in the audience. “Oh, my God, he was still the most gorgeous creature I have ever laid eyes on. I could hardly control my heart. It was just jumping out of my chest. He knew I was in the audience, and I had to pretend I wasn’t in love with him, because I was with relatives, you know? That was not an easy thing.”
When the Colonel greeted Elvis backstage, he was visibly moved and pulled out of a quick embrace to contain his emotion. Then he made his way to the hotel coffee shop to join Alex Shoofey, the International’s president. There, in blue ballpoint ink, they turned a badly stained tablecloth into a contract. Figuring Elvis’s engagement would break all Vegas records (grossing $1,522,635, with an attendance of 101,500), the hotel boosted his salary to $125,000 a week and extended its option for two engagements a year for five years, through 1974. The Colonel, who always bled a deal for the extra drop, gouged Shoofey for a trip to Hawaii for Elvis and eight companions. The short man smiled, the fat man grinned, and the two shook hands.
Secretly, Shoofey knew he’d just made the best deal in Vegas history, and he’d done it standing on the back of Elvis Presley. Parker had hit the million-dollar mark again and crowed that he had negotiated the most money ever for eight weeks of work in Vegas. But he hadn’t demanded a sliding scale, and instead had signed Elvis to five years for the same amount of money, without an increase.
Why? To protect his own interests with the hotel, for Parker was the most pathological of gamblers. He couldn’t lose money fast enough.
“[The] Colonel was one of the best customers we had,” Alex Shoofey later reported. “He was good for a million dollars a year.” But others later questioned that figure, saying it was too conservative: The truth was that Parker routinely lost between $50,000 and $100,000 a night during Elvis’s engagements, the hotel treating him like royalty, roping off tables for his private play twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch.
While Parker was figuring Elvis’s future in numbers on a coffee-marked table coverin
g, Steve Binder was discovering that the Colonel had barred him from going backstage. It would be thirty years before he found out Elvis had been expecting him, eager to get his feedback.
“I was convinced at the time he left the ’68 special that he had a whole different mind-set of what he wanted to do with his life. And quickly, that window of opportunity was shut tight, and he ended up being a saloon singer in Vegas just to indulge the Colonel’s gambling habits.”
As Elvis’s guests and friends filtered back to congratulate him, he told them what he repeated the next day to reporters—that he’d been “a little nervous for the first three songs, but then I thought, ‘What the heck, get with it, man, or you might be out of a job tomorrow.’ ”
Patti Parry was there, as much for support as to see the show, and sat near him to help quell his butterflies. As celebrities filed through his dressing room, Elvis looked around nervously for Ann-Margret and Roger Smith, and invited them up to the suite later on. Then, hoping to impress Roger, he leaned over to Patti and whispered in her ear: “Go put on every piece of jewelry I ever gave you.”
At his press conference the next afternoon, wearing a black suit with a standing collar and an accent scarf of bloody orange at his neck, he resembled not so much a Vegas performer as a European prince, at once modern and timeless. The questions were predictable, his answers sometimes not.
“Did you enjoy performing live again?” came a voice.
“Yes! This has been one of the most exciting nights of my life.”
“How does your wife feel about you being a sex symbol again?”
