Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [205]
Once again, Kanter drew on a piece of Elvis’s autobiography to shape the framework. As Chad Gates, Elvis is fresh out of the army, but instead of returning to the Mississippi Delta, he goes home to the fiftieth state. Hawaii had been admitted to the union only two years before, and the milieu was wondrous to most moviegoers. It was also a place dear to Colonel Parker’s heart, since Parker had spent his first hitch in the service at Fort Shafter.
As the plot unfolds, Chad rejects the notion of going into the family business—his father supervised a pineapple company—preferring to work as a tourist guide, along with his Hawaiian girlfriend Maile (Joan Blackman). Romantic diversion comes in the form of Abigail (Nancy Walters), there with her underage charges. “Mr. Gates, do you think you can satisfy a school teacher and four teenage girls?” she asks. “Oh, I’ll sure try, ma’am,” Chad answers.
On March 25, 1961, the cast and crew flew to Honolulu for location shooting. But the Colonel had also booked Elvis to perform a benefit show that evening to raise money for a memorial to the U.S.S. Arizona, the battleship in which 1,177 seamen were entombed after the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had approved the creation of the memorial in 1958, while Elvis was in the army, and Parker had worked feverishly behind the scenes to attach himself and his client to the cause.
The show, in Honolulu’s Bloch Arena, where the audience never stopped shrieking, “not for one minute,” according to Joan Blackman, raised more than $62,000. Elvis, wearing the jacket to his gold lamé suit, was both energized and uninhibited. At twenty-six, he was also at his physical peak, looking lean, hard, and well tanned, after producer Wallis issued strict orders through Colonel Parker that his star get in shape, watch his weight, and use a sun lamp.
Colonel Parker had booked country comic Minnie Pearl as an opening act for the show, but until they landed at the Honolulu International Airport, she hadn’t realized “how encapsulated Elvis was in his fame.” As three thousand screaming females rushed to surround the plane, “I began to get these chilling feelings that maybe I didn’t want to be all that close to Elvis—the fans were all along the route he was taking to the [Hawaiian Village] hotel, and my husband was afraid that we’d be trampled trying to get inside. I felt myself being lifted completely off my feet by all these people.”
On the afternoon following the show, Minnie, aka Sarah Cannon, joined some of the musicians down on Waikiki Beach, “cavorting and kidding and having a big time. We got to talking about how we wished Elvis could come down and be with us, and we turned and looked up at his penthouse, which was facing the ocean. He was standing on the balcony, looking down at us, this solitary figure, lonely-looking, watching us have such a good time. He was literally a prisoner because of the fans. We sat there on the beach and talked about how it would be—what a price you pay for that sort of fame.”
Elvis had a different experience from the balcony when nineteen-year-old cast member Darlene Tompkins visited his penthouse. “His buddies had gone out onto the wide patio which overlooked the beach, and they started yelling to him, ‘Elvis, come out here, some of the girls on the beach want to see you!’
“I realized he was ignoring them, and I finally said, ‘Elvis, those are your fans. You really should go out there and let them see you.’ He hesitated and then said, ‘I probably shouldn’t.’ Whereupon I