Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [225]
But Elvis persisted.
“He would call and track me down and say, ‘Come on up. We’re going to sing tonight.’ And I would say, ‘Elvis, I can’t come. My mother will not have it.’ This went on for several months, and so finally, I came home from ballet class one night, and there was Elvis talking to my mother with a huge pink dog—bigger than I was. From then on, my mother didn’t care how I got there.”
Actress Teri Garr, who danced in nine of Elvis’s movies, was also a familiar face around the Perugia Way house starting at age sixteen. She remembers going to a party there with her friend, Carrie. (“No chips, no dips, just Elvis, his boys, and a couple of girls sitting around.”) Soon, Elvis and Carrie began flirting, and eventually they disappeared into Elvis’s bedroom. “I was usually such a Girl Scout,” Teri wrote in her autobiography, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood. “Just so you know, she swore they didn’t ‘do it.’ Knowing Carrie, it’s the truth.”
One woman Elvis was not about to romance was Ursula Andress, his leading lady on Fun in Acapulco. One, she was married (to actor-producer-director John Derek), and two, the Swiss-born sex goddess intimidated him. He was uncomfortable in their romantic scenes, believing that her shoulders were broader than his and made him look weak. “I was embarrassed to take my damn shirt off next to her,” he told Alan, laughing. Later, he elaborated to Mindi Miller. “He didn’t think she was pretty. She had this big, broad back.”
He masked it well, though. “The only way I knew Elvis was from television,” Ursula later said. “Here was this new idol, this hip-swinging lover with the guitar. I said, ‘Oh, my God!’ And the first day I went to work, here comes over this humble man, full of charm, love in his eyes, and kind, and considerate, and warm. I was so surprised.” She liked him well enough to drop by on another picture later in the year—and according to Sonny West, to pester him, always asking for Alan as a way to get around Priscilla. “She went after him. She wanted him bad. And Elvis told us never to leave him alone with her.”
Fun in Acapulco, another tame Hal Wallis musical, marked a new low in Elvis’s career. He sometimes referred to his films as “travelogues,” but this time, he didn’t even get to travel, since the Colonel refused to let him go on location. In 1958 a rumor had circulated that Elvis found Mexican women unattractive, and Parker was afraid that someone might try to harm him.
“We had to do all kinds of trick shots,” says screenwriter Allan Weiss. “A lot of it is background projection. We all knew that making money was the basic thing, but at the same time, we wanted to preserve a little bit of his dignity.”
All background settings were shot without him, including the breathtaking 136-foot dive off the cliffs at La Quebrada. For that, Elvis modeled his swim trunks, mounted two stairs to a platform on the set, and with his arms rigidly fixed in a diver’s pose, stared resolutely down at the floor.
It might as well have been an abyss of self-loathing. Fun in Acapulco was, as journalist Chet Flippo has noted, another of the “worthless movies that obviously began to drain his self-confidence.”
RCA publicist Anne Fulchino, concerned about Elvis’s spirits and the quality of the music of the soundtracks (“Bossa Nova Baby” would be the film’s only notable song), visited him on the set. “That kid was not only unhappy, he was ashamed for me to see him prostituting himself with those crummy pictures,” she recalled. She took him aside and advised him to take better control of his career, citing Colonel Parker’s “nonguidance,” and “practically drawing him a diagram on how you build a star.”
Elvis promised Fulchino he would speak with the Colonel about finding both better scripts and songs. “He knew Parker was not the right manager for him—the way the Colonel wanted him to go was not the way Elvis wanted to go.” But Elvis seemed paralyzed to make the kinds of changes Fulchino told him were necessary to revitalize his standing in the music