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“Elvis told Marilyn he likes her because she doesn’t act like a showgirl, because he’s real,” her mother bragged to her hometown paper, The Fresno Bee, at the time. He invited Marilyn to come visit him in Memphis the following month.

But then he met Dottie Harmony, a blond, eighteen-year-old dancer at the Thunderbird who had a friend who worked at the New Frontier. Elvis kept trying to get her attention, sending requests to her table for her to join him, but she ignored him. Then all of a sudden she looked over, “and there was Elvis on his knee, saying, ‘Ma’am, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life. Would you have a drink with me?”

From then on, he spent the rest of his vacation with her. They talked a lot—he made her call her mother, like he did every night—but mainly they just hung out, driving to the airport and watching the planes take off, going to the Vegas shows, even helping an old man change a tire one night. She was a little frightened at how jealous Elvis got when other men looked her up and down, and when they fought, he’d get so angry he’d rip the phone out of the wall. “But next thing I knew it was always fixed again.”

Even though it was Dottie he liked, on December 4, Elvis made good on his promise to bring Marilyn Evans to Audubon Drive, where “that phone just rang and nobody answered, which was odd.” Elvis made no moves on her (“He was extremely honorable”), and treated her to the usual motorcycle rides and eating out. But they quickly realized there was nothing between them. “I always preferred classical music,” for starters. “We were just into different things, not that one is better than the other.”

Evans would have been a totally forgettable presence in Elvis’s life except for one stop they made during her visit. It was at the Sun Studio, where Carl Perkins was recording, with Jerry Lee Lewis playing piano on the session. Johnny Cash also dropped by, and Sam Phillips called the newspaper, which sent over a photographer as the tape rolled. The recordings would become famous as the “Million Dollar Quartet” session (though Cash doesn’t really sing). And though Marilyn is often cropped out of the iconic photograph, in the full shot, she’s clearly on the right, seated atop the piano. Her voice can be heard on the recordings, requesting a song, “End of the Road.” Hearing it now, she says, is “otherworldly . . . out of body.”

Just over a week later, Elvis had another guest, Hollywood director Hal Kanter, who was set to helm Elvis’s next picture Loving You, his first for Paramount and Hal Wallis. Kanter, writing with Herbert Baker, would loosely base his screenplay on Elvis’s own story—a truck driver with a knack for a song catches the eye of a manipulative press agent, who propels him to fame.

Kanter, a southerner himself, born in Savannah, Georgia, had come to the project after running into Wallis, who said, as the director remembers, “I want you to come see a test of a young man. I want you to see if you can do a picture with him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Elvis Presley.”

“You must be kidding.”

“Just look at the test, will you?”

Kanter agreed but surely in vain. “Foolishly, I subscribed to the generation that said, ‘He’s just a passing fancy, a nasty little boy.’ ” But he walked out of the screening room with a different attitude. He thought Elvis was “dynamite.”

Wallis had a first-draft screenplay, Lonesome Cowboy, which Kanter completely rewrote with the title Stranger in Town. Then the director went to Memphis to meet Elvis. There, he sampled Gladys’s chicken and okra on Audubon Drive, “a modest home . . . decorated in a style that displayed more financial success than taste,” he would write in his autobiography, So Far, So Funny: My Life in Show Business. He didn’t like the meal very much, either.

Afterward, Elvis had a question for him. Was his character, Deke Rivers, required to smile much in the movie?

“What do you mean, do you have to smile?”

“Well, I’ve been watching a lot of movies. People like