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“Jesus!” Elvis exclaimed. “This is unbelievable. Listen! ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea!’ ”

Suddenly, as if called to deliver the sermon on the mount, Elvis jumped up on the coffee table, pointed his cane at the heavens, and still holding the Bible, began spouting words he never heard at the Assembly of God church: “And Jesus said, ‘Woe ye motherfuckers!’ ”

“With that,” Joe recounted, “we all fell out laughing, including Elvis, once he’d realized what he’d said. Everyone was rolling on the floor. Someone lit up another joint, and that was the end of Bible class for that night.”

The Colonel, who had wangled a free home in Palm Springs out of the William Morris Agency, encouraged his client to spend his weekends there, so that he might keep a closer watch on him. In September, Elvis signed a one-year lease on a modern home at 1350 Ladera Circle. It made the Colonel happy, but they spent almost no real time together, and Elvis carried on the same as if Parker were a thousand miles away. He’d started to hate the old codger, whose bad back and massive weight—he tipped the scales at around three hundred pounds now—necessitated that he walk with a cane. When Elvis was particularly displeased with Parker, he’d do dead-on impersonations of him to the guys, and then hang his cane over his erect penis in a not-so-subtle message.

The two had words in September over a letter Hal Wallis sent the Colonel saying he was concerned about Elvis’s appearance. Wallis cited feedback from film exhibitors who watched Paradise, Hawaiian Style and reported that something must be “radically wrong” with Elvis, as his hair was too black and fluffed up and resembled a wig, and he just didn’t seem like himself. He certainly didn’t fit the profile of a navy frogman, his forthcoming role in Easy Come, Easy Go, which was to begin filming at the Long Beach Naval Station on October 3.

Elvis didn’t much care, and while he slimmed down for the part, he was short-tempered on the set and fought with director John Rich, whom he hadn’t liked when they worked together on Roustabout.

One day Elvis and Red got a case of the giggles during a scene, and Rich, angry at what he interpreted as unprofessional behavior, threw the entire entourage off the set. Elvis was livid, as he already believed that the picture, which featured a yoga class and the song “Yoga Is As Yoga Does,” mocked his interest in Eastern philosophy. His paranoia over the Colonel was such that he believed—incorrectly, according to screenwriter Allan Weiss—that Parker had planted it in the script. In later years, he told Larry Geller he regretted doing the scene and should have stood up for himself. Instead, he blew up at Rich and Wallis about the entourage.

“Now, just a minute,” he told the Paramount brass. “We’re doing these movies because they’re supposed to be fun, nothing more. When they cease to be fun, then we’ll cease to do them.” But he should have said it years earlier. Easy Come, Easy Go was his last picture for Wallis, and none of his seven remaining films for other studios would live up to his expectations.

Wallis refused to give him his release from the picture until just before Thanksgiving, which Elvis uncharacteristically spent with the Colonel in Palm Springs before heading home to Memphis on his retooled Greyhound.

Just outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, around Forrest City, Elvis heard his buddy George Klein spin Tom Jones’s new “Green, Green Grass of Home” on his WHBQ radio show. The country weeper, which Elvis turned down when Red brought it to him the year before, now struck a nerve, especially the line “And there to meet me is my mama and papa.” Elvis stopped the bus at a pay phone and had Marty ask George to play it again. “Soon, he was stopping at every pay phone. George played that thing three or four times in a row, which he wasn’t supposed