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He demonstrated that at the end of February, when he went to Nashville for a hastily set-up session for the soundtrack to MGM’s Harum Scarum, his million-dollar movie. The picture, another Sam Katzman quickie, cast him as a Rudolph Valentino–style matinee idol, kidnapped by a gang of assassins on a personal appearance in the Middle East. Elvis hadn’t been in a recording studio for eight months, but he was so dispirited at the material, much of it laced with flute and oboe for a Persian flair, that he stopped the first session after only four hours—thirty-eight takes into the disaffecting “Shake That Tambourine.”

A number of people around Elvis had started to worry about him, one telling the Saturday Evening Post reporter C. Robert Jennings that the heavy schedule of three pictures a year was beginning to take its toll.

“The money is so big,” said the anonymous source, “that he’s always doing what everybody else wants him to do. He’s a lonely guy in many ways.”

But Joan Blackman, who was also concerned about him, later laid much of the blame at his own feet: “Elvis could have demanded changes, had he wanted to. He could have said, ‘Until we do what I want to do, I am not doing any more [of these cookie-cutter movies].’ Had he stuck by that, things could have been different.”

Word filtered back to Colonel Parker that Elvis was lethargic, that he seemed to have no interest in coming to Los Angeles for Harum Scarum, and that it was going to take some effort to get him there. At the end of February, the Colonel arranged for Elvis to be able to take his cast insurance medical examination in Memphis to give him a bit more time at home. Then he wrote anxious letters to foreman Marty Lacker, cautioning him to get the convoy on the road in plenty of time, and to watch out for inclement weather. In a rare, unguarded moment, the Colonel let his frustration show, telling the Saturday Evening Post that “sooner or later someone else is going to have to take the reins.”

They finally got started in early March, but on the way out, Elvis insisted on checking into a motel in Amarillo, Texas. He’d been thinking about the way he used to be, the way he lived, the things he’d said, and how he was trying to change. He contemplated what Larry and the books had taught him.

“He was so strong in so many ways,” observed Jo Smith, Billy’s wife. “If you were with him, you felt safe. But in other ways, he was like a little kid. He was such a contradiction. As selfless as he was in religion, he always had to be number one in everything else. One time, everybody wanted to go bowling. So Elvis rented Bowl Haven Lanes, right down the street from Graceland. I don’t guess he’d ever been bowling. Billy had been on a team, and several of the other guys had gone bowling in California, so they were pretty good. And Elvis wasn’t good at all. He guttered, and he tried to throw the ball too hard. So that’s the last time we ever went bowling. If he couldn’t be the best at whatever we did, we didn’t do it anymore.”

Back in Germany, he used to play a game with Rex Mansfield. Rex called it “God playing,” and Elvis would initiate it. “We’d be sitting around the house, the whole group,” as Rex recalled, “and if anybody would compliment something, or say, ‘Boy, it’s a beautiful day,’ he’d say, ‘Thank you.’ Or if someone would say, ‘That’s a beautiful dress,’ he’d say, ‘Thank you,’ like everything anyone owned, it belonged to him. We all got into that game, and it became a matter of who could say ‘thank you’ first.”

Elvis was ashamed of all that now. Having to be the best. “God playing.” How could he have done it, even in jest? In that Texas hotel room, he confided to Larry that after all his months of study and meditation, he was disheartened, that something was missing. “I read all of these wonderful books,” he said. “But they all talk about these great, profound spiritual experiences, and I never had one.”

Larry explained to him that it had nothing to do with an intellectual perception, but that it happened