Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [247]
That May, Elvis began work on Frankie and Johnny at MGM, where he became the first star in studio history to have two dressing rooms—one for himself, and one for the guys. The irony was not lost upon him that Tony Curtis’s dressing room had been prepared for him.
Directed by Freddy De Cordova, whose credits included Bedtime for Bonzo and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Frankie and Johnny was a comedic turn on the old folk song by the same name, recast as Victorian period froth. Donna Douglas (Frankie) and Elvis (Johnny) appear as riverboat performers whose lives change when dancer Nellie Bly joins the troupe.
During production, Elvis and Donna (“Elly May” from The Beverly Hillbillies) squirreled away to discuss all things metaphysical. But Lamar saw that “he didn’t try to date her. She was a smart cookie, and she knew about as much as he did, so they just talked books and religion.”
On Perugia Way, Elvis was reading Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Experience and Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, and encouraging Red, Sonny, and Alan to drop LSD while he watched. He tried smoking pot, though it burned his throat. But when he and Priscilla innocently got into a batch of Lamar’s marijuana brownies, they didn’t come out of the bedroom for days. “They just stayed ripped the whole time.” Shaking, Lamar went in and confessed what had happened, expecting to be fired. Instead, “Elvis held out the tray and he said, ‘Lamar, put another ounce in there.’ ”
Sue Ane Langdon, in her second picture with Elvis, remembered that he was “never really taxed” to do much on the film. “He was quite natural as himself . . . and I think Elvis played Elvis the best that anybody could ever have played him.”
Elvis seemed to just be sailing through both his life and his film roles in the mid-1960s. But by late July, when his next picture, Paradise, Hawaiian Style, was scheduled to go into production, he was in trouble.
Like Alan and others of his group, Elvis was experimenting with barbiturates, particularly Seconal and Tuinal. Uppers had helped him keep his body trim, but downers slowed his metabolism while he continued to eat such typical lunches as a bowl of mashed potatoes, a side boat of gravy, nine slices of bacon, a quart of milk, a lettuce salad with dressing, tomato juice, and six slices of bread. For breakfast, he often upped his bacon intake to an entire pound.
He showed up at Paramount for preproduction on August 2, a week late, citing illness. His appearance was shocking. He looked jowly and puffy in the face, soft around the waist, and he perspired so heavily that he frequently changed his shirts. Director Mickey Moore, who had worked as assistant director to Norman Taurog on a number of Presley pictures, was appalled. Elvis was to play a helicopter pilot with a tourist-related charter business, which required him to look lean, handsome, and rugged. Instead, in costume, he was so pudgy, with visible pooches of fat, that he split his pants.
Producer Hal Wallis was livid. He had been steadily complaining about Elvis’s weight to the Colonel since before Roustabout. The two were friendly adversaries, and he had warned Parker in late 1963 that he needed to have a stern talk with his client, and that if Elvis didn’t shape up, “It could have a very detrimental effect on his entire career.” On one occasion, Wallis sent his sister, Mina, to the Samuel Goldwyn Studios to check up on him. She greeted Elvis warmly and then stood with her arm around him in conversation. When she left, Elvis went berserk. “That goddamn old fucking bitch!” he spewed to Marty. “She was feeling to see how much fat I had around my waist!”
Paradise, Hawaiian Style was the last picture in Elvis’s revised 1961 contract with Wallis, and during filming, the Colonel would enter into arduous negotiations with him on a new deal—$500,000 per picture, plus 20 percent of the profits. He also wanted one nonsinging role for his client. The producer would stall him until the following