Nonetheless, Colonel Parker concocted schemes to strike ever more spectacular, highly publicized deals to make ever more money. He very much wanted Elvis to get a salary of at least a million dollars for a movie. In November 1967, he had negotiated a contract for a film, Charro!, for which Elvis would be paid $850,000 and half the profits. That seemed pretty good, but the profits from Elvis’s movies were evaporating as the movies got worse. The Colonel and his Hollywood partners were constantly cutting the budget to meet Elvis’s salary (more than half of the total cost), and the quality of the films had deteriorated so much that people were increasingly unwilling to pay money to see them. No moviemaker was stepping up with a million-dollar salary offer, and the possibility arose that there might come a time when there would be no acceptable offer at all.
In the looming financial crisis, the Colonel moved adeptly. Ultimately, he negotiated an arrangement with NBC whereby the network would put up $850,000 for another Elvis movie, plus $250,000 for a television Christmas special, plus $125,000 more for another airing of the special in 1969, plus some extras to bring the total up to $1,250,000. NBC brought in the Singer Company (the maker of sewing machines) to sponsor the show. In January 1968, immediately after the deal was closed, Parker organized a press conference in which he boasted to the world that he had just negotiated a contract in which his client would receive for his work well over a million dollars, unprecedented in show business. The Christmas show was scheduled to be recorded in NBC’s studios in Los Angeles in June 1968 to air on December 3.
Cast and Crew
What finally came out of the Colonel’s deal was not at all the trite, homey, Perry Como–style, Christmas-by-the-fireside kind of presentation that he had projected. Steve Binder, the thirty-two-year-old director chosen by NBC producer Bob Finkel to do the show, had another vision. Among his recent credits was a breakthrough television special he had built around the young, beautiful English singer Petula Clark. It was bright, bouncy, dynamic, and almost flashy, virtually the opposite of the carefully casual, snap-your-fingers, bend-your-knees-and-sway productions that were then standard for pop singers. The Petula Clark show also became highly controversial for its racial content. Onstage and right in front of the cameras for all of America to see, a very handsome black man, singer Harry Belafonte, notorious among whites as a civil rights activist, had touched Petula’s arm. Steve Binder had suggested that it was a good idea that they get “close” on camera, and the two stars had willingly obliged. In spite of all the progress made on civil rights, America was still not at all comfortable with suggestions of interracial intimacy between men and women, especially when one of the parties was white, female, young, blond, and beautiful. Some Southern affiliates of the network refused to air the show as originally taped.
Steve thought that a lively production built around Elvis in the same style as the Petula Clark show could have great cultural significance, a marker for the revolution in musical entertainment in America that was then under way. In his initial meeting with Elvis in his office on Sunset Boulevard, Steve gave him the hard sell. It was a marvelous opportunity, he urged, for Elvis to show the world “who he really was” by telling his life story through his music. Steve’s proposal offered the prospect of an answer to Elvis’s most ardent prayer. His great sorrow, he often lamented, was that nobody understood him, nobody knew who he really was. Now he had a chance to tell the world who he was, through his own medium, music. When Steve asked Elvis what he thought of the idea, Elvis replied that he was “scared to death.”
While Elvis went off to Hawaii in mid-May for a two-week vacation, Steve worked out the storyline for the show. The theme would be that Elvis was a poor boy who gained fame and fortune through a great gift that was there all the time just waiting for recognition—his amazing talent for music. The discovery of his gift in Sam Phillips’s studio was a miracle, and Elvis’s music over time, it declared, revealed the real Elvis. The theme song would be “Guitar Man,” a recent hit by singer, songwriter, and dynamic showman Jerry Reed. Elvis would be the Guitar Man.
When Elvis returned from Hawaii, Steve laid out the full package for him. Steve was increasingly excited by the prospect of creating a significant cultural event, and he presented the program with great enthusiasm. If Elvis did the conventional show that the Colonel and the bigwigs at the network wanted, he would end up riding off into the sunset and obscurity. If he took the highly creative chance being offered, he could be reborn as a star. As Steve concluded his pitch, he was afraid that Elvis might flee from the daring project he had already detailed. He hastened to add that anything could be changed to suit Elvis. Elvis did not hesitate a moment. “No, I like it all,” he said.
Steve, his associate Bones Howe, Elvis, and the writers began to meet in Steve’s offices every afternoon at three o’clock. Bones was a recording engineer, a master at using the newest technology to put performances on tape and preparing them for replaying as records, films, and television shows. Bones was on top of the revolutionary new technologies, and his work on the Comeback Special contributed significantly to its success.
The team had hardly begun its work when they were seriously distracted. On June 5, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was shot and killed in the basement of the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, only a few miles away from Steve’s office. Steve later said that Elvis was very upset. He said that Elvis couldn’t talk about anything else. He talked a lot about what he considered to be a conspiracy against the Kennedys, linking the shooting of Robert Kennedy to the shooting of President John Kennedy in Dallas five years before. He was also concerned about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis only two months earlier, just blocks away from where Elvis had lived as a teenager. The murder of King in Memphis was especially awful, Elvis said, because it confirmed bad feelings that people had about the South.
Steve was surprised and delighted by what he saw as Elvis’s lack of prejudice. He concluded that Elvis transcended the racism of his native region. Those prejudices had become shockingly visual on television news all during the early 1960s as mean-faced and burly Southern white policemen attacked peacefully protesting African Americans with billy clubs, fire hoses, and snarling police dogs. The nation watched as Ku Klux Klansmen bombed a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, killing four young girls. It looked on as Klansmen killed three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in the summer of 1964. Understandably, non-Southerners came to think of the South, particularly the Deep South of which Elvis was a native, as filled with ignorant “white trash” Klansmen and quasi-Klansmen, implicitly authorized by local white communities to brutalize and kill not only blacks but also whites who sided with blacks.
In August 1965, a massive riot broke out among African Americans in the Watts area of Los Angeles. From that summer into 1968, in virtually every major city in America—Los Angeles, New York, Detroit—smoke plumes rose over black ghettoes as testimony that not all unhappy African Americans lived in the South.
Whites in the North and West grossly misunderstood the nature of race relations both in the South and at home. For the South, they assumed that federal legislation putting black people physically next to white people in public places and at the polls would solve the problem soon enough. Bad race relations in America, they thought, was a Southern matter. They were sure they would be eradicated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited segregation in public facilities and racial discrimination in education and employment, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that prohibited discrimination against blacks at the polls. They were simply unaware of the seething anger of blacks in their midst until the burning, looting, beatings, and killings broke out. By the summer of 1968, when Steve, Elvis, and the others were conceiving and creating the Singer Christmas special, white Americans were signaling their anger at the rioters and their absolute determination that such demonstrations would end or be met with crushing violence. Former vice president Richard Nixon of California
was running for the presidency on a platform of “law and order,” essentially advocating using whatever force was necessary to stop rioting blacks. He was running against George Wallace, an Alabama third party candidate for president who openly waved the banner of white supremacy across the nation and eventually gained half of his ten million votes from outside the South.
The Comeback Special as a Liberal Crusade
In the midst of rampant racism and national turmoil, it was a small wonder that Steve was delighted to see that the star of his television special was unprejudiced in spite of his lower-class Southern roots, lack of sophistication, and limited education—shortcomings indicated by his unflagging but marvelously creative, even poetic, use of double negatives and improper contractions such as “ain’t no.”
For two weeks, Elvis, Steve, and the writers met every day for hours on end and worked out a script for the show. Every day they drank Pepsis, smoked cigars, and encouraged Elvis to say whatever he wanted to say. Elvis talked freely about his life, and he poured himself into the creation of the show. In the process, Steve came to see a truly noble Elvis. Not only was he not prejudiced against blacks, he was simply a great human being. Steve saw his own mission in this matter with crystal clarity. “I wanted to let the world know that here was a guy who was not prejudiced, who was raised in the heart of prejudice, but who was really above all that,” he said. “Part of the strength that I wanted to bring to the show was [that sense of] compassion, that this was somebody to look up to and admire.” If Elvis could do it, the whole white South could do it.
Soon Steve came to see the show as not only a celebration of Elvis but also a manifestation of the great American democratic dream. Elvis was not only a poor boy who reaped the just reward for his talents and virtues in an open, free society; he was a force for unity in a deeply troubled and divided nation. “All of a sudden I realized,” he later recalled, “I’ve got Elvis Presley, Colonel Parker, Confederate flags, a black choreographer, a Puerto Rican choreographer, and a Jewish director! Everything in the show was integrated—behind the scenes, and in front of the camera [with] Elvis singing along with the Blossoms [a black female group], the dance sections black and white and—you know—purple.” Steve was inspired. “We were all one big happy family,” he exulted.
Not One Big Happy Family
In truth, in the beginning the cast and crew of the Singer special were very far from being one big happy family. For one thing, there was a wide cultural gap between Elvis and his people on one side and Steve and his people on the other. Culturally speaking, they came from different worlds.
Steve chose Billy Goldenberg to be the musical director for the production. Billy had graduated from Columbia University in 1957 and apprenticed under the Broadway composer Frank Loesser, famous for Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Previously, he had had no interest at all in Elvis Presley or his music. But he did have great respect for Steve Binder and came to share his belief that this show could be made into a cultural milestone. Getting there, however, required that Elvis change his style of performance. No more simply breaking into hokey simpering songs amidst adoring young women as he had in his movies; no more wiggling around behind a microphone and in front of a handful of countrified musicians as he had onstage.
Achieving the transformation to a more sophisticated performance in a television format proved to be a hard, almost desperate struggle. The great difficulty came from Colonel Parker and the people in Elvis’s coterie who seemed determined that they were simply not going to let him change his style. Parker himself kept reminding Steve and the production staff that this was a Christmas show, and it should feature the traditional Christmas songs. After all, the sponsor was the Singer Company, which was not exactly a “rock and roll” outfit.
As usual, the Colonel sent in his own minions to make sure of the purity of the “product,” as he called Elvis’s productions. One of these was Billy Strange, a songwriter and arranger who had worked with Elvis on his most recent movies. Parker made Strange the “personal music director” for Elvis for the show, thus presumably assuring continuity with his latest performances. Day after day, dressed in cowboy hat and boots, Strange drifted in for what were supposed to be rehearsals but did nothing at all with the proposed music. He sat around and talked and seemed to think that he was merely making a social call. People in the business knew that this was typical behavior for Strange. Steve and Billy Goldenberg grew increasingly anxious as the time drew near for actually going into the studio with musicians and taping what they had prepared. Elvis’s people were thinking that when that time came he would simply go onstage and sing “Jingle Bells,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and a dozen or so other numbers, form-fitting his mood to the message of each song with his usual emotive brilliance. Hence no special preparation was required.
This was not what Steve and Billy had in mind. Among other things, the projected script called for a long segment in which Elvis would appear onstage with a large orchestra behind him and tell the story of his career by singing a series of his most famous songs. Again Elvis’s people were dragging their feet and nothing was being done, no sheet music written, no orchestra made ready, no carefully scripted rehearsals. Furthermore, Joe Esposito, Elvis’s right-hand man, who often spoke for the Colonel, began phoning Billy Goldenberg. “We don’t like orchestras,” he would say. “Elvis works well with guitars.” Billy pointed out that the music contemplated was not just guitar music. It was very complex, he explained, a “lot of conceptual stuff.”
“I don’t know if that’s gonna do, sonny,” Joe responded threateningly.
Finally, Billy told the producer that he needed to work with Elvis directly. He did not like, he said, “being called by people and having to worry about whether I’m going to be killed for writing a dominant seventh.” He won. Billy Strange was fired from the show, Joe Esposito’s menacing calls ceased, and Billy Goldenberg gained access to Elvis.
Still, Billy had to deal with the guys, who were almost always hanging around. He walked into the studio one day to find Elvis alone at the piano playing the first part of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” When Billy expressed his interest, Elvis responded eagerly. “Oh, do you know this?” and played the first part again. Billy sat down beside him and played the rest. Elvis was impressed. They spent the remainder of that session “learning,” as Billy described the process, the first movement of the piece. Thereafter, every night they did a little Beethoven on the piano together. Billy liked Elvis and thought that he was a quick study. Elvis also liked Billy. Soon Billy was amazed to find even Colonel Parker becoming friendly toward him.
“My boy likes you a lot,” the Colonel declared genially.
One night Elvis was playing the “Moonlight Sonata” when two or three of his guys came in. “Immediately he picked his hands up from the keyboard, as if some strange, dark shadow had come over the place,” Billy recalled.
“What the fuck is that?” they said.
“Oh, it’s just something we were doing,” Elvis answered.
“Oh, it’s awful,” they said.
Elvis made no comment but simply picked up his guitar and began to play “those old E-major chords again.” Again Billy called the producer, and the guys stopped coming to their sessions. Elvis, he said, “couldn’t wait to continue.”
Billy Goldenberg liked Elvis, but he did not see the purely noble Elvis that Steve Binder saw. “The one thing I’ve always felt about Elvis is that there was something very raw and basically sexual and mean,” he told the writer Jerry Hopkins as he was researching his 1971 biography of Elvis. “There’s a cruelty involved, there’s a meanness, there’s a basic sadistic quality about what he does, which is attractive,” he said. “Most of Elvis’s movies have shown him as the nice guy, the hero, but really that is not where he shines best. He’s excited by certain kinds of violent things … I thought, if there was a way we could get this feeling in the music … ”
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bsp; A generation after the Comeback Special Billy Goldenberg had not changed his mind about a dark and deeply sexual Elvis. He “tuned in to the darkness, to the wild, untamed, animalistic things,” he told Peter Guralnick. “That was [such] a big part of Elvis,” he said. “He did not make his statement by being sweet. He was blatantly sexual and that was something I wanted in the music. And if I could get that, I felt I was getting closer to the raw Elvis. Not the Elvis that came in the room to talk to you, because he was the sweetest person in the world, I mean, he was [the] good son—I think that was a lot of Elvis’ problem.”
Another highly creative artist on the staff who had his own special sense of Elvis’s essence was the designer Steve Binder had chosen to create Elvis’s costumes for the show, Bill Belew. As Bill said, the one word that came to his mind the moment he first saw Elvis was “Napoleonic.” Bill associated Elvis not with the ideal of American democracy but rather with raw power, the French emperor who inspired total loyalty from millions of people.
Bill told Elvis that his costumes should have high collars that framed his face. He should wear soft silk shirts and scarves and never neckties. He could conceive of grown men wearing V-necked silk shirts, the V dipping down toward the waist and threatening not to stop there. He liked tight-bottomed creaseless cuffless pants with legs ballooning below the knees, the looseness of which emphasized the tight bottom and the cleavage of male buttock above. Any decent person would have called such outfits obscene, if not outright immoral. Elvis could not even wear underwear under some of the costumes Bill made for him because the lines would show. Among other attire, Bill created the black leather, tight-all-over suit that Elvis wore for some segments of the Comeback Special. He was surprised and delighted that Elvis so readily adopted his most flamboyant suggestions.
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