A soul eaten alive in Hollywood

There can’t be many rock stars or movie stars who would write off almost 10 years of their career with one clearly embittered comment. But that is precisely what Elvis Presley did in the wee small hours of August 1, 1969.

He was taking part in a press conference at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, having just finished his first concert appearance in eight years – during which time he had worked almost exclusively in films. “Are you tired of your present type of movies?” a reporter asked. To which Elvis replied “Yes.” Another voice was raised. “What kind of scripts would you like to do?” In response, with barely concealed contempt, Elvis, dismissed the nearly 30 films he’d made that decade “Something with meaning,” he said. “I couldn’t dig always playing the guy who’d get into a fight, beat the guy up and then, in the next shot, sing to him.”
During the entire run of that month-long Las Vegas engagement and, indeed, for the rest of his life, Presley continued to dismiss much of his film output in similarly derogatory terms.
Sadly, he never got to make that movie “with meaning” he’d referred to in 1969. The closest he came was six years later when Barbra Streisand came backstage after another of his concerts in Vegas and offered him the leading male role in her up-coming re-make of A Star Is Born. Elvis apparently showed enormous enthusiasm for the project and Warner Brothers subsequently offered him a $500,000 salary and 10% of the profits. But Elvis’s manager Colonel Tom Parker’s response was to demand a $1 million fee for Elvis, and 50% of the profits. Warners never came back with a suitable counter-offer and that, many now believe, was Parker’s plan from the start; because the notion of Presley playing a drugged-out, alcoholic rock star in decline was, by then, just too close to the truth.
Not that the public knew at this point that Elvis was addicted to prescription drugs, had smoked marijuana, tried LSD and cocaine – and needed a regime of potentially lethal injections in order to perform on stage and to come down afterwards. The sordid truth about Presley only began to emerge after he was found dead on his bathroom floor this time 30 years ago, on August 16, 1977.
Indeed, many of the king’s closest friends insist that the dependency on uppers and downers, which would help bring about his demise, was directly related to the sense of creative and artistic frustration that had been eating at his soul in Hollywood throughout the 1960s.
This sense of disillusionment seems to have started as early as 1961 when two of his “serious” films Flaming Star and Wild In The Country flopped. They were followed by the phenomenally successful Blue Hawaii, which set the pattern for what Elvis would later rightly dismiss as “travelogues”.
However there is another side to this story. Back in 1977 I wrote my first ever Hot Press article in response to the king’s death and proudly confessed that, as an Elvis fan from the age of nine, I not only loved but also lived to see those movies. This was largely to escape a difficult home life but also because so many of the songs Elvis sang in those movies were classics, the tales were truly hedonistic and, frankly – though I didn’t admit this in 1977 – even the worst Presley movies had plenty of fabulous female co-stars to lust after.
In the documentary Rattle And Hum U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jnr also recalled the enjoyment he got as a kid from Presley’s ’60s movies. “Elvis always seemed to play a guy who was, say, a mechanic,” he explained, “and he was all ready to plug in his guitar and sing a song.”
Thirty years after Elvis’s death, his films remain some of the world’s best-selling videos and DVDs, and clips from his movies fill internet sites like YouTube.
To mark the king’s anniversary, nine of those movies are being issued for the first time on DVD and, here in Ireland, on August 14, the Irish Film Institute is presenting an illustrated talk by Adrian Wooten (CEO of Film London) called Elvis In The Movies. His final film, Elvis On Tour, is being shown on the night of the anniversary.
It seems like the perfect time to take a revisionist look over the king’s film career – and to tell the story of the toll that Hollywood took on Elvis Presley’s soul.

As a kid, Elvis Presley sought escape at the movies – from poverty, social oppression and the kind of home life where his mother Gladys and father Vernon often beat each other when drunk. If their son wasn’t reading Captain Marvel and dreaming of being a comic-book hero, he was longing to be a singer or an actor.
It could even be said that the sense of liberation, which later fed into Presley’s sex appeal and played such a pivotal part in his success as a singer and an actor, started at the movies.
As a member of the First Assembly of God Church, he had always been told cinema-going was sinful and would lead to moral corruption. But one day at the age of 11, after seeing an Abbot and Costello film, he rejected this Church dictate – and thus began his life-long tendency to question authority.
A few years later, Elvis got a job as an usher at a local cinema, where he proceeded to soak up movies starring the likes of Robert Mitchum – just like he’d study James Dean and Marlon Brando circa 1955. He began to imitate their look, mannerisms and brooding sex appeal. When the opportunity arose, he took all of this into his own work as an actor. You can see it in his first four films: Love Me Tender, Loving You, Jailhouse Rock and King Creole.
He may haver got his influences right – but unfortunately, Hollywood got Elvis wrong from the start. Look at it this way – how did he make his entrance onto the world’s movie screens in 1956? Ploughing a field in Love Me Tender, a western that had originally been called The Reno Brothers and into which he’d been rammed at the last moment by Twentieth Century Fox, who reckoned rock ‘n’ roll would be dead by the end of the year.
What was the king of rock ‘n’ roll’s debut performance in a movie? Singing a pastiche rock song, ‘We’re Gonna Move’, backed by a group of studio musicians. Elvis’s regular band, Scotty Moore, Bill Black and D.J. Fontana were not involved because one of the movie’s producers said: “We don’t want hillbilly hicks playing on a Hollywood soundtrack.”
But Presley was vindicated. Love Me Tender was so successful he was able to insist that his band and vocal group, The Jordanaires, back him on the soundtrack of the next film, Loving You, and that they should also appear in the movie. It made cinematic sense. The film (written by screenwriter Hal Kanter, who had been told by producer Hal Wallis “go and stay with the kid, see his shows, talk to him,”) was clearyl based on Elvis’s own story, and on the origins of rock ‘n’ roll.
Inevitably, Hollywood played down the influence of black r‘n’b music and instead placed Elvis in a hillbilly band, backed, from the start, by Scotty, D.J. and Bill. Even so, the performances of songs such as ‘Lonesome Cowboy’, ‘Mean Woman Blues’ and ‘Gotta Lot Of Living To Do’ are some of the best that Elvis, his band and the Jordanaires ever put on film. The final version of ‘Gotta Lot Of Living To Do’ may even be the definitive rock ‘n’ roll performance from any film from that era. You can almost hear the guy thinking, “They may film me from the waist up for the Ed Sullivan Show, but this is what I do best and this is what I want the whole wide world to see.”
Incidentally, Elvis’s mother is part of the audience in that film, watching her son perform this song. That’s why he never watched the film after she died, a year later. More eerily, in Loving You, Presley plays an orphan who had taken his name, Deke Rivers, from a tombstone and who, during the movie, eulogises his mother. Was that mere Hollywood melodrama? Perhaps. Then again, maybe Hal Kanter had tapped into Presley’s life-long obsession with death following the loss of his twin brother at birth. Maybe he also understood the obsession Elvis had with Gladys Presley.
Directors Don Siegel and Philip Dunne tapped the same vein in two key scenes in Flaming Star and Wild In The Country, respectively. In one Presley’s character slips into a rage remembering a dead mother; in the other, he deifies her. It’s also likely, of course, that Elvis himself knowingly mined these emotional depths. Similarly, during the father-son conflict scenes in King Creole, he must have remembered being 19 or so, and warning Vernon Presley, “Daddy, if you hit momma again I will kill you with my own hands.” Tragically, neither he nor any director travelled into these shadowed psychological depths nearly often enough.

Elvis’s third film, Jailhouse Rock tapped into one of his deepest fears – the fact that the public might discover his father had served time in Parchment Farm State Penitentiary for forging a cheque. Elvis even suspected that by putting him in this movie, Parker was saying, in effect, “If you don’t keep in line I’ll blow the lid on you and your family.” Either way, despite the fact that Jailhouse Rock is often said to contain one of Presley’s best acting performances, I feel he is emotionally out-of-sync in too many scenes and never quite settles into the part.
Yet, it has some glorious moments. There’s a scene in which, after being kissed by the king, his co-star Judy Tyler protests, “How dare you think such cheap tactics will work with me?” “It ain’t tactics, honey,” he replies, sex dripping out of every pore. “It’s just the beast in me.” That sexual confidence, even arrogance, also pulses through Presley’s legendary performance of ‘Jailhouse Rock’, which he himself choreographed to a great degree, and the similarly scintillating ‘Baby I Don’t Care’. The film contains other remarkable insights into Elvis and his music. During the scene where he is recording ‘Treat Me Nice’, we got to see an Elvis song evolve from early ‘50s pop to regal rock ‘n’ roll and witness him working with his own band, featuring Jerry Leiber on piano. He, of course, is half of the songwriting team Leiber and Stoller – who not only composed all the songs for Jailhouse Rock but wrote and/or produced some of the biggest hits of the ‘50s and ‘60s, including ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Kansas City’, ‘Poison Ivy’, ‘Spanish Harlem’ and ‘Stand By Me’.
About five years ago, I interviewed Leiber and Stoller. They told me a story, which highlights Colonel Tom Parker’s utterly insidious control of the cinematic career of the king. Around the time of King Creole, for which Leiber and Stoller would provide the title song and ‘Trouble’, they came up with a film proposal for Presley. They suggested he play the lead role in a movie of Nelson Algren’s novel Walk On The Wild Side – the same book which almost became a musical a decade later and after which Lou Reed wrote his hit single. They would compose the music and the film would be directed by Elia Kazan. Elvis was blissed by the idea, particularly given that Kazan had directed movies such as On The Waterfront (starring Marlon Brando) and East Of Eden (starring James Dean). Leiber and Stoller made the mistake of going directly to Elvis with this proposal. Parker was incensed. He told them, “You will never work with Presley again.” They didn’t – a fact which is made all the more tragic because Leiber and Stoller were two of his favourite songwriters. Even so, he did occasionally slip Leiber and Stoller songs such as ‘She’s Not You’, ‘Bossa Nova Baby’, ‘Little Egypt’ and ‘Saved’ into recording sessions, movies and the ‘68 TV show.

At this point, Elvis would have been perfect for Walk On The Wild Side. Certainly the noir-ish King Creole, which was originally meant to star James Dean, turned out to be not just Elvis’s favourite among his own movies but the first to win him almost universal critical acclaim. It also came from the purest possible Hollywood stock. Based on the Harold Robbins novel, A Stone For Danny Fisher, it was directed by Michael Curtiz, who had directed Casablanca, and it co-starred Walter Matthau, who would always fondly remember “how committed the kid was to proving himself as an actor.”
Understandably, Elvis was thoroughly disappointed in 1960 when having served two years in the US Army, he was told that his follow-up to King Creole was to be the all-singing, all-dancing musical G.I. Blues, designed to spread his appeal to “all the family” as the advertisements proclaimed. And it did. It certainly made me, as a kid, a fan – specifically the song Wooden Heart. Christy Moore once said that he loved the way Juliet Prowse draped herself over a piano in one seminal dancing scene! Even so, Elvis himself didn’t like the movie or its songs. In fact, he’d never really liked musicals, declaring, at the start of his career, that he’d “prefer not to have to sing in films at all.” How’s that for a slice of irony coming from a man who then would go on to make a succession of some of the most hackneyed musicals of the ‘60s?
Back at the start of 1961, he fought like hell to have all songs cut from the revisionist western Flaming Star which, long before movies such as A Man Called Horse and Dances With Wolves, takes a sympathetic look at the plight of Native Americans.
However the producers, and Parker, insisted that he sing the title song and ‘A Cane And A High Starched Collar’, though the latter, at least, was placed in the organic setting of a house party.
Like King Creole, Flaming Star also had a solid cinematic foundation. It was based on a novel by Clair Huffaker, and directed by Don Siegel, with a screenplay co-written by Nunnally Johnson, who won an Academy Award for The Grapes Of Wrath. At one point it was announced that Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra would play the two brothers at the heart of the story – but the lead roles finally went to Elvis and Steve Forrest. The king responded by giving one of his best, and most critically acclaimed performances and received an award from Native Americans for his “sensitive portrayal of a half-breed.”
It’s been said that, as soon as Parker realised Presley had been used by Don Siegel for a western that was just as much an allegorical tale about the racial tensions in the United States at the time, he had the director “sent back to” television where he remained until he was “rescued” by Clint Eastwood for the Dirty Harry films nearly ten years later.
I’m sure Parker also hated Wild In The Country – my favourite Elvis film – because it is the nearest thing to a movie of a Tennessee Williams play Presley ever made. Ironically, Parker had already turned down Sweet Bird Of Youth saying it wasn’t “suitable.” But Elvis was determined to make this movie which was based on a novel by J.R Salamanca, with a screenplay by Clifford Odets and co-starred Hope Lange, Tuesday Weld and Barbara Perkins, in a tale of “a man torn between three women.” Wild In The Country includes the most mature, moving love scenes in any Elvis movie, particularly between himself and Lange.
Elvis’ character is also torn between the desire to kill and the craving to be a creative writer: the movie opens with Presley’s character almost beating his brother to death.
The movie was a relative flop: one can only surmises that the bulk of Presley’s fans weren’t ready to see their hero in such a dark-hearted role and didn’t realise that he, particularly following his mother’s death, was so dark-of-heart.
So, Parker won the battle – and next up came the all-singing-all-dancing Blue Hawaii, with no less than 14 songs. Fans adored it. Elvis’s fate was sealed.
That said, there were moments in Presley’s next film, Follow That Dream, where he proved he had, as even a highbrow film magazine such as Films And Filming was forced to admit “a real flair for comedy.” Kid Galahad, a remake of a Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson film from 1937, also featured at least one scene that resonated with the kind of suppressed rage Presley had exhibited in King Creole.
But the rot truly set in with Girls Girls, Girls which was basically Blue Hawaii Part Two. Then the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair took the place of Hawaii for It Happened At The World’s Fair – before Mexico, Hollywood Style, served a similar purpose for Fun In Acapulco.
But at least the latter had Ursula Andress who, much to my delight as a boy, looked like she had just stepped, still dripping wet, from Dr. No! As, indeed, she had. It wasn’t until later I learned that the producers of Fun In Acapulco were so afraid Ursula’s sexuality would overshadow the king that they made her wear ribbons in her hair!
Elvis followed Fun In Acapulco with the truly irredeemable Kissin’ Cousins, which was ‘directed’ by Sam ‘king-of-the-quickies’ Katzman and made in 18 days! It shows: during one scene of the movie in which Presley plays a dual role: his double can be seen facing the camera and Katzman, clearly, decided, “Fuck it, who cares?”
No wonder Elvis began lashing back the uppers to get him through the day in Hollywood. Yet he did, at least, get to sleep with all his “leading ladies, bar one.”
Or so he later claimed. Including one of the sexiest ’60s “sex kittens” Ann-Margret, who apparently “disappeared into a Las Vegas hotel bedroom” with the king for an entire weekend, not long after they met to “discuss” their forthcoming film Viva Las Vegas.
They seemed to have stayed in a similar sexual zone while making the movie. If you don’t believe me, check the way they look at each other while Elvis sings ‘C’Mon Everybody’ and the way even the camera simulates the sex act during ‘What’d I Say’. This is, by far, the king’s sexiest flick.
But he was about to come down, in every sense, after making Viva Las Vegas. Because while getting ready to make his next movie, Roustabout, Elvis read an article with the headline ‘Elvis Helps in Success of Burton-O’Toole movie.’
It quoted Hal Wallis saying that the money he made from “commercially successful Presley pictures” enabled him to do “artistic pictures” such as Becket starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. Elvis was devastated.
“Why can’t he use some of that money to make artistic pictures with me?” Elvis asked, though he knew in his heart Wallis never had, and never would, take him seriously as an actor.
It also was around the time of Roustabout that Elvis met Larry Geller, who became his hairdresser and “spiritual advisor”. He then began reading books such as The Impersonal Life, which suggests that each person’s divinity lies within and that each person is “the Divine I”.
Presley also read Through The Eyes Of The Masters: Mediations And Portraits and wrote on one page, “God loves you. But he loves you best when you sing” – which, hopefully, helped him get through the abysmal ‘Do The Clam’ song from his next beach movie Girl Happy.

However if you want the most telling example of the contradictions inherent in the not-even-one-dimensional image Presley was presenting on screen during the mid ’60s it can be gleaned from the fact that while making what was arguably his most vacuous movie Harem Holiday, in 1965, he got involved with the LA branch of the Self-Realisation Fellowship, which was founded in 1920 by Paramahansa Yogandanda, an Indian Holy Man.
Elvis even met with Sri Daya Mata – the group’s spiritual leader since 1955 – and she then reportedly became “central to his spiritual quest for the rest of his life.”
Then again, there is one scene in Harem Holiday where Presley sings, behind prison bars fittingly enough, the mystical ‘So Close Yet So Far (From Paradise)’ and is almost left in tears. It is a staggeringly revealing moment in an otherwise savagely stupid movie.
Not surprisingly, Colonel Tom Parker disapproved deeply of the king’s new spiritual quest. Elvis even believed Parker told scriptwriters to insert into the 1967 film Easy Come, Easy Go – which followed formulaic flicks such as Tickle Me, Frankie And Johnny, Paradise, Hawaiian Style and California Holiday – a scene in which he sings a song that mocks counter-cultural tendencies, ‘Yoga Is As Yoga Does’. That said, it wasn’t as bad as ‘Old Macdonald’, which Elvis had to sing in Double Trouble!
In fact, all of this left Elvis so depressed by the prospect of making his 25th movie, Clambake, that he faked an accident at Graceland in order to delay his return to Hollywood. On hearing about this, through one of his ‘spies’ at Graceland, Parker flew straight to Memphis. Storming into Presley’s home he said: “Some people here seem to think Elvis is Jesus Christ, I don’t want him filling up his head with all that spiritual nonsense, he is an entertainer.” He then sacked Larry Geller.
Elvis didn’t dare protest. Not only that. Priscilla, who would soon become his wife, agreed with Parker and subsequently asked Elvis to burn his more than 300 religious books to “prove” his love for her. He did. This was, however, something he’d regret for the rest of his life and a moment he said marked the beginning of the end of his marriage.
Elvis’s marriage probably never could have worked anyway because he never stopped having affairs with his co-stars. Such as, in 1968, Nancy Sinatra while making Speedway, Quentin Dean during Stay Away Joe and Michelle Carey from Live A Little, Love A Little.
Yet, by now, Presley’s film career was in tatters and even though Live A Little… opened in cinemas in America that year it would be two years before it was screened in Europe – on television.
The same fate befell Elvis’s final narrative film Change Of Habit, which is a shame because both – as with Charro and The Trouble With Girls… And How To Get Into It – are fascinating cultural artifacts and tantalizing signifiers of what might have been had the king continued to make movies into his late 30s and 40s.
Live A Little, Love A Little, for example, featured a “trippy” pill-induced dream sequence, where Elvis sings the almost psychedelic ‘Edge Of Reality’! Also, after nearly 30 films where a kiss was just a kiss and a clearly extended period of foreplay, Elvis finally was also allowed to fuck on screen in Live A Little, Love A Little! Even if the camera did cut away during the sex scene. But you sure as hell can see from the smile in Elvis’s eyes, during the scene in The Trouble With Girls – where he is trying to get Marilyn Mason into bed – that he relishes this opportunity to show the world that he hadn’t been totally castrated by Hollywood.
Yet the real surprise is the relatively adult Change Of Habit, a gritty little drama in which Elvis plays a doctor who falls in love with a nun, alludes to abortions, saves one of the female characters from rape and refers to a heroin problem in the ghetto area of Chicago in which the movie is set. He also plays to perfection a moving scene with an autistic child.
And for those who like to read symbols into the king’s story, the final scene of Change Of Habit juxtaposes an image of Christ on the cross against an image of Elvis, spiritual seeker, singing ‘Let Us Pray’.
Not that Change Of Habit marked the end of the man’s Hollywood career. In 1970 he was back filming at MGM – but this time rehearsal scenes for his forthcoming Las Vegas concert film That’s The Way It Is.
Two years later, producers Pierre Adidge and Robert Abel made a similar documentary Elvis On Tour. It even featured a montage – which, in part, mocks Presley’s movies by showing only kissing scenes – “supervised by” Martin Scorcese. If only Marty had gotten his hands on the king between the years 1972 and 1977 and made a Raging Bull of rock ‘n’ roll.

There is no doubt that after Priscilla left, taking their daughter Lisa Marie, Elvis descended deeper than ever into his drugs hell and became a raging bull of sorts, even if he more often than not internalised rather than externalised his pain.
There was one very public moment, during a show in Vegas, which by now Elvis also felt was eating his soul alive, when he was singing ‘It’s Midnight’ – with Priscilla watching from the audience – when he knelt down and punched the floor just like Raging Bull‘s Robert De Niro punched the walls in that Dade County Stockade.
I’d go so far as to say that the mammoth and clearly unsustainable volume of pills Elvis pumped into his body during the five, final hellish years of his life proves that the man was, in a sense, slowly beating himself to death.
And so Elvis never got to make the movie with “meaning” he referred to during that press conference in 1969. To paraphrase his greatest song, ‘If I Can Dream’, he never got the chance to redeem his soul as an actor. Yet let’s not over-romanticise the king. Maybe he was, as Presley himself, and no doubt many fans believed, crucified on the cross of crass commercialism in Hollywood. But, to carry on that analogy, he provided the nails and is far from blameless in this process. In fact, the ‘Irish Elvis’, Brendan Bowyer, tells a great story about how he and fellow Royal Showband member Tom Dunphy were at a Vegas party hosted by Elvis, maybe even in the summer of 1969, and Dunphy dared to tell Elvis that most of the films “after Flaming Star looked the same” and that he’d “stopped going to see them.” Presley just smiled and said, “well they all made a lot of money, fella”.
So if, in the end, it is true to say that Elvis’s soul was eaten alive by most of the movies he made during the ‘60s, it is also true to say that during that decade he sold out to Hollywood.

Joe Jackson’s two-part radio show Elvis: Remember Him This Way will be broadcast on RTÉ Radio One on August 9 and August 16 at 9pm.