Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [234]
Sonny West saw that “there was a little situation there at first. She was very cool toward Elvis. But once again, his charm. He never backed off. It was a challenge to him. Later she told him why she didn’t want to get close to him at first. She took him aside and said, ‘It’s because you remind me so much of Robert.’ She was referring to Robert Taylor, the love of her life. . . . They had the same look: dark hair, smoldering features. ‘He was gorgeous, and you’re gorgeous,’ she said to Elvis.”
The Roustabout soundtrack logged the top spot on the charts, but it would be the last of his to do so, both because the music became weaker on subsequent films, and because Beatlemania and the British invasion were just about to dominate the American music scene. When the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show that February, Parker sent a congratulatory telegram “from Elvis and the Colonel” for the old impresario to read on the air. It was a clever way to attach Elvis to his competitors, and to attempt to convince viewers that he was still on top.
“Elvis always said there’s room for everybody,” Red West would recount. “He was never threatened.”
But privately Elvis told women just the opposite, that he was very worried about the Beatles’ ascension, especially as their 1964 film, A Hard Day’s Night, was an inventive piece of moviemaking. Elvis’s films, still churned out at three a year and timed for release during school vacations, had become passé, and he knew it. “They never go to bed in a Presley picture,” an MGM spokesman would be quoted as saying in the Saturday Evening Post. “Otherwise, mamas wouldn’t let their kids come.”
“When he made movies,” his late record producer, Felton Jarvis said, “he’d have to sing to a cow, or a dog, or a kid, because they were situation songs—they fit into the script. I remember him talking about the soundtrack to Roustabout. They were cutting the title song, and he told the Jordanaires, ‘Fellas, sing along with me on the chorus.’ And the director [John Rich] ran out [in the studio] and said, ‘Elvis, I don’t think you understand where this song’s going to be in the picture. You’re riding down the highway on a motorcycle, singing. If the Jordanaires are singing, too, where are they supposed to be?’ And Elvis said, ‘The same damn place the band is.’ ”
In Roustabout, Sue Ane Langdon plays the fortune-teller, Madame Mijanou, and recalls that she almost passed on the film, “because doing an Elvis movie at that time was not such a sensational thing to do.” She acquiesced mainly because she’d always wanted to work with Stanwyck. Nonetheless, she enjoyed her kissing scenes with Elvis (“his lips were very, very soft”) and recalls he giggled through most of them. Around the set, he called her “Madame,” for her character. “He thought that was so funny.”
The opening scenes of Roustabout introduce Elvis as a short-tempered singer (Charlie Rogers) who loses his job at a roadhouse for brawling. Making her uncredited film debut as a college girl in the audience was twenty-three-year-old Raquel Welch.
Like so many adolescents of the 1950s, Raquel had been “completely gaga over Elvis.” She saw him live in San Diego in 1956 at her first rock-and-roll concert, and she was struck by how he was able to synthesize the sensuality and the sexuality of black music for the mainstream. She was also smitten with him. “That was the first time I ever conjured up what a sexy guy could be. It was just so cool to see a guy dance like that. And then he had this wonderful, full, rich voice. But he also had the attitude down, and that sexy little sneer.”
She hadn’t kept up with him, though, and when she saw him on the set of Roustabout eight years later, “It was a little shocking to me, because they took all the sex out of him! He was a whitewashed, cleaned-up Elvis. His clothes were not the same, his hair was obviously dyed, and it was all sprayed into place—no cool tendrils flopping over