Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [198]
Director Siegel would say that Elvis gave a beautiful performance, but Flaming Star, in which he dies at the end as in Love Me Tender, was not a commercial hit, and a hastily created EP of the two songs, coupled with 1960s smash hits “It’s Now or Never” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” peaked at only number fourteen. Coming after G.I. Blues, with its number one soundtrack, it was a disappointment, especially since the Colonel was in negotiations for all of Elvis’s film and recordings contracts. The Mirisch Brothers and United Artists were about to pay him $500,000 plus 50 percent of the profits on each film of a two-picture deal (Follow That Dream, Kid Galahad). This was no time to be screwing things up.
In May 1960, Elvis took the entourage to Las Vegas so he could introduce the newer members to his favorite getaway. Lately, he’d taken to dressing them all in black mohair suits and sunglasses—an early “Blues Brothers” look, and most certainly his answer to Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack. The press picked up on it and started calling them the Memphis Mafia. The name stuck.
By now, most of the guys shared Elvis’s fondness for pills—speed, or amphetamines, in the day, and sleeping pills at night. As in Germany, “It didn’t matter if you needed to sleep,” Joe Esposito says. “If he was awake, you had to be awake. That’s just the way it was.” They’d get up in the morning and take uppers and stay up all night, and then finally crash on sleeping pills. “That,” says Joe, “became a vicious routine.”
One side effect of the pills was that Elvis’s camp became more noisy and disruptive at the Beverly Wilshire. Elvis was always breaking boards in his karate practice, and they were staging three-hour pie fights and pouring buckets of water on each other now, not just having squirt gun battles. “One time we came in and water was dripping from the ceiling,” Charlie remembered.
In a repeat of the Hotel Grunewald incident, it provoked complaints from management and residents alike, especially after Elvis threw an old cheap guitar down the hall, Charlie said, “and a lady looked out and ducked back in, because it went right by her head and broke in all pieces when it hit down there.”
And so Elvis went searching for a house to rent. In October, he found one at 525 Perugia Way, in the Bel Air section of Beverly Hills, overlooking the Bel Air Country Club. “It was a round house, more or less,” as Charlie put it. “You could walk all the way around the garden inside it. It was unique.” The home was part of the estate of Prince Aly Khan, Pakistan’s representative to the United Nations, who had also been actress Rita Hayworth’s third husband. Rent was $1,400 a month.
In November, Elvis started production at Twentieth Century-Fox on Wild in the Country, his last shot at challenging movie material. In Clifford Odets’s intelligent script (adapted from the J. R. Salamanca novel The Lost Country), Elvis is a troubled college kid (Glenn Tyler) whose bad temper gets in the way of his gift for writing. As with King Creole, his character teeters between the good girl (Millie Perkins) and the bad (Tuesday Weld), Hope Lange playing the psychiatrist who helps him find his way. With three leading ladies, Elvis was allowed to show his acting range: he was courtly and sweet with Perkins, wild and mischievous with Weld, and wary, then reverential with Lange.
Millie Perkins, who would go on to play Gladys Presley in the 1990 television series Elvis, was fresh from the title role in The Diary of Anne Frank. She found the offscreen Elvis “very sensitive about who a person was and what they needed. I was very shy and he treated me . . . with such care, like a hothouse flower.”
Hope Lange, who costarred with Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop in 1956, and garnered an Oscar nomination for Peyton Place the following