Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [122]
Elvis brought the director up short. That had never occurred to him, but Elvis was right.
“He said, ‘When I smile, I want it to be an event.’ And I said, ‘Very well put.’ ”
Then Elvis told him he didn’t think he was much of an actor, but he was working on being true to the words. “I figure if I make people believe the words, that’s all that counts.” Kanter again told Elvis he was astute, and then Gene Smith goaded Elvis into doing what he called “the piece.”
Elvis said, “No, no, no, I don’t want to.”
“Go ahead, go ahead, Elvis, do the piece for the man! Do the piece!”
Elvis stood up, and Kanter expected him to start, “The boy stood on the burning deck . . .” Instead, he was amazed as Elvis recited Douglas MacArthur’s “Farewell Address to Congress.”
“I’m not a fan of Douglas MacArthur, but it was pretty good.”
The next evening, they all left Memphis in a two-car caravan, Kanter riding with Elvis to Shreveport to witness his last appearance on the Louisiana Hayride on December 15. This was the benefit show that Parker had promised as part of Elvis’s contract buyout (the Shreveport YMCA would get a new swimming pool out of the deal), and attendance was expected to be so large that the organizers moved it to the largest facility in town, the Hirsch Coliseum, also known as the Youth Center, at the Louisiana Fairgrounds. Every ticket had been sold.
“I observed that concert, and things I saw there I later used on-screen. I re-created some of it. There were some things that happened there that I couldn’t re-create, because people wouldn’t believe it. It was absolutely unbelievable, the things that I saw.”
It was true. Horace Logan had the roof of his 1955 Mercury hardtop stomped in by teenage girls. He’d parked it in the back of the Coliseum, in a place that seemed perfectly safe. But the kids had stood on it, dancing to the music, or used it as a trampoline to try to see through the Coliseum’s twelve-foot windows. “It looked like an elephant had danced a jig on it,” Logan lamented. “The top was pushed in so far it was practically touching the backs of the seats.”
Then there was the child who swallowed her hand, or at least Kanter thought she had. “She appeared to have her hand in her mouth all the way down to her wrist, and I was wondering, ‘How can a little girl like this get her whole hand down her throat?’ And then at one point she pulled her hand out of her mouth, and I found out she didn’t have a hand at all. She was just sucking on the stump. I thought, ‘God, I’ve got to get that in the picture!’ ”
At first, however, Kanter wondered if he would even survive the trip to Shreveport.
He sat next to Elvis while Gene, Junior, and Bitsy occupied the backseat. They raced through the chilly night, Elvis singing and cracking jokes until he stopped “for refreshments—a piss, a pop, and some barbequed pork,” as Kanter detailed in his book. The restaurant, of course, was the Trio Club, the Brown family’s roadhouse in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Maxine caught Elvis and Bonnie pining for each other, “not saying a word, but kind of smiling and looking sad at the same time.” Both of them knew that life was about to change forever, as Maxine put it. He wasn’t that big of a star yet, but “the Elvis Presley who left our club that night was not the same as the one the world grew to adore.”
Back out on the road, Kanter wrote, “a souped-up Chevy pulled up beside us. Four men and three women were packed into the hot rod, and one of the girls yelled, ‘Hey, Elvis!’ Elvis slowed his Cadillac and lowered his window to call, ‘Howdy, honey,’ and Bitsy Mott warned, ‘This ain’t no time to stop for pussy, boy.’
“The ersatz cowboy driving the Chevy shouted, ‘Drag you for a tank of gas, Presley!’
“ ‘Is he kiddin’?’
“Elvis grinned, stomped on his accelerator, and we zoomed from 40 to 90 mph. Elvis loved that. I was terrified, and he loved that, too.”
They arrived at the Captain Shreve Hotel about five in the morning,