Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [254]
He was home for several weeks in May 1966, but the bad mood hung on. When soul star James Brown, in town for a performance, repeatedly tried to reach him by phone, he was told each time that Elvis was asleep. Elvis sent his guys on alone to the show and screened movies at the Crosstown Theatre.
At the end of the month, he traveled to Nashville for his first nonsoundtrack recording in more than two years. He had a new producer now, a thirty-year-old Georgian named Felton Jarvis, who’d made a name for himself with rhythm and blues.
“I’d just come to work for RCA. Elvis came in to record, and Chet Atkins said, ‘I’m going to carry you over to Elvis’s sessions. Elvis likes to record all night long, and I don’t like staying up like that. Y’all are about the same age. Maybe you and him’ll hit it off and become friends.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”
They spoke the same musical language, and Elvis seemed rejuvenated, eager to get into his contractual task of delivering two singles, a Christmas song, and a religious album during the four-day sessions. The religious recordings, highlighted by the presence of the gospel group the Imperials, would win him his first Grammy and count among Elvis’s proudest achievements.
Jerry Schilling was surprised at the depth of intensity Elvis poured into his performance. On the title hymn, “How Great Thou Art,” he sang as if he were standing before his savior, his voice trembling with emotion. When he finished, he was hunched over, nearly to his knees, shaken. A hush filled the room.
“I’ve never seen a performer undergo the kind of physical transition he did during that recording,” Jerry wrote in his memoir. “He got to the end of the take and he was as white as a ghost, thoroughly exhausted, and in a kind of trance.” As Jerry continued to watch, “He happened to look up, he saw me looking back at him, and a beautiful smile spread across his face. He knew I’d seen something special.”
But in the next days, Elvis’s spirits started to sag, and Felton booked a second session starting June 10. By then, though, Elvis had a cold, and for two days, he refused to go to the studio, holing up at the Albert Pick Motel, then a near fleabag that the Colonel recommended to save money. Red made demo recordings, trying to approximate Elvis’s voice and tone, and brought them back for him to hear. Finally, on the third day, Elvis made an appearance at the studio but rushed through three songs in thirty minutes.
Two weeks later, he was back in L.A. for Double Trouble, costarring the eighteen-year-old British actress Annette Day. Elvis took a shine to her, and when he heard she didn’t own a car, he surprised her with a ’64 Mustang. The problem was that it was Jerry Schilling’s car, and Jerry had paid for it himself. But Elvis gave him a Cadillac convertible to make up for it.
Double Trouble, set in the English discotheque scene, might have taken him across the pond for location shooting. But instead, as on Fun in Acapulco, he stayed home. In some ways, the film mirrored his private life: His pop-singer character romances two women but throws over an exotic temptress (Yvonne Romain) for Annette, cast as a seventeen-year-old heiress. The script included the line “Seventeen will get me thirty,” words similar to those he uttered in earnest during his wild Louisiana Hayride period.
Charlie Hodge could see that Elvis was bitterly frustrated not to be going to England: “Everyone else was shooting their pictures outside this country in different locations. He was the only one that wasn’t leaving town.” It was especially galling, in Charlie’s view, since in the early 1960s, Elvis “honest to God, kept Hollywood alive.” But the Colonel wouldn’t hear of it. Recently, in fact, he had turned down an engagement in Japan, saying the star was booked through 1969.
Then came more bad news. The day after he reported to MGM, his uncle Tracy, Gladys’s retarded brother, passed away. Elvis always had a soft spot for him—Tracy’s oft-repeated saying was “I got my nerves in the dirt”—and his sudden death was only