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gloating that Elvis was the first actor ever to be paid $1 million for a single movie, might have been smart to let Time promote Harum Scarum, for despite Elvis’s astonishing fee, the picture rivaled Kissin’ Cousins as his absolute worst. Shot in eighteen days, it recycled the 1925 set of Cecil B. De Mille’s silent feature King of Kings, as well as costumes from the 1944 production of Kismet. The plot was paper-thin, the music unlistenable, and the sight of Elvis in a turban ludicrous. Even the Colonel, who would eventually suggest adding a talking camel as a narrator so the absurdity might seem intentional, admitted it would take “a fifty-fifth cousin to P. T. Barnum” to sell it.

The only way they got through it, remembered Mary Ann, who played Princess Shalimar, was by joking. “Elvis said, ‘This isn’t going to change history, is it?’ I said, ‘No, but it’s gonna make people laugh.’ ”

The whole thing seemed a comedy of errors.

“For part of it, I was dressed as a beggar woman, because I was supposedly this princess in disguise. And then the rest of the time I had on seventeen thousand yards of orange chiffon, and all these veils and so much hair I could barely keep my head up. And Elvis came out in this Arab sheik outfit, and if he wasn’t a good sport to be seen in that getup! But he never complained about it. He never said, ‘You want me to wear this?’ He wasn’t one of these prima donnas.”

Still, she was concerned about him. “He was into the metaphysical then, ‘willing’ things to move. That was unique to me. I hadn’t seen that before. I was worried about it, but it was not for me to judge. I thought, ‘If that works for him . . .’ But it didn’t cause problems. He was never late and never caused a discussion. It was just so easy working with him.”

The picture also reunited Elvis with Barbara Eden, whose husband, Michael Ansara, was cast as a prince. Barbara sat with him for a while on the set and found him more outgoing and sure of himself than he had been five years earlier on Flaming Star. “He’d laugh out loud, for example. But he was still the same basic, good, sweet, malleable guy. Such a gentleman. He said he was a huge fan of my husband, who was in the series Broken Arrow. I said, ‘When do you ever have time to watch television?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Barbara, that’s all I do. I can’t go out. I have to stay in.’ I got the impression it was like a jail.”

He got his opportunities, of course, but as Patti Parry knew, sometimes they were unorthodox. “When he was doing Harum Scarum, we found out that Rudolph Valentino was buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. So we drove over there at eleven o’clock at night and poked around a little bit, and we found Valentino’s grave. Elvis just wanted to see it.”

They walked around cemeteries a couple of times, she says. “That’s the only place nobody bothered us.”

Elvis found a willing spiritual acolyte in costar Deborah Walley during the filming of Spinout in early 1966. “I was never the same after Elvis,” she said. Their friendship lasted until his death, and afterward, she often felt him around her. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

Chapter Twenty-Five

“You Don’t Really Love Me!”

In March 1965, the Colonel convinced Elvis that Joe Esposito should come back into the camp. Parker had never liked Marty Lacker, who refused to kowtow to him and share secrets of the internal workings of the group, and the Colonel was determined to find a way to exercise more control over his loose canon of a client. Citing Joe’s excellent organization skills, Parker encouraged Elvis to mend fences with him. For a time, then, Joe and Marty became co-foremen of the Memphis Mafia. But Marty’s time was written on the wall, for Joe was also a favorite of Priscilla, going back to their shared time in Germany. With his return, she began playing a bigger role in Elvis’s life.

“I am a child-woman,” Priscilla said in 1991. “When people meet me, they don’t know what to say to me. They really don’t know how to approach me. I’m always trying to find that place to fit in. I am a misfit.”

But