Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [268]
A few days later, Jerry brought Elvis, Priscilla, and Lisa Marie home from the hospital. The Beaulieus were there, standing with Vernon and Minnie Mae to greet them as they came in the door. As Jerry watched Elvis hold his daughter, “I got the feeling that whatever he’d been searching for in his spiritual explorations, he had finally found a piece of, right there in his arms.”
Elvis had been seeking a replication all his life, and Lisa Marie looked as if he had just spit her out. She had his own hooded eyes and a full head of Gladys’s dark black hair. “He was thrilled to no end when he had a daughter,” Joe says. “He loved kids. He talked baby talk and played with my daughters, and he was just happy to be a father, because his mother raised him to be family oriented. It fulfilled a dream.”
On Valentine’s Day, Elvis and Priscilla took the baby to visit Gladys’s grave. They left a wreath of flowers with a card from “Elvis—Priscilla—Lisa Marie,” and instructions for the card to be burned with the flowers when they wilted.
He was thirty-three years old, in the prime of his life, at the start of what would prove to be a monumental year. Lisa Marie’s birth had him thinking more intently about the circle of life and death, and about the spirit, so indomitable and mysterious. Five days after Lisa Marie entered the world, Elvis’s old friend Nick Adams left it—a suicide, over a woman. When they found him, he was braced against the wall with his eyes wide open, staring at the face of death. The last time Elvis saw him, Nick had visited him on the set of Girl Happy.
For more than a year, Colonel Parker had been thinking of ways to redraw his great plan. Elvis’s films now grossed a fraction of the big dollars of the early 1960s, and it was clear that his client was unhappy and despondent about his career. Parker had tried, and failed, to find projects to jolt him from his artistic apathy. With Easy Come, Easy Go, Parker asked Hal Wallis to frame Elvis in a nonmusical role, and the producer had refused. And as late as March 1967, the Colonel sent a memo to MGM, nudging the studio to come up with something inspired for the remainder of Elvis’s contract. Whatever it was, it should not include bikinis or nightclub scenes, “which have been in the last fifteen pictures. . . . I sincerely hope that you are looking in some crystal ball with your people to come up with some good, strong, rugged stories.”
Now the Colonel returned to an old idea. In 1965 he had begun talks with Tom Sarnoff, vice president of NBC’s West Coast division. Parker offered Elvis for a motion picture for television, and Sarnoff liked the idea, but the Colonel wanted world rights to release the movie theatrically after only one airing. The negotiations were long and exasperating, Sarnoff felt, and finally sputtered and stalled.
In October 1967 Sarnoff met with the Colonel again. This time they began negotiating a package deal to include Elvis’s first TV appearance since the Frank Sinatra “Welcome Home, Elvis” special of 1960. On January 12, 1968, they came to terms: $250,000 for a music special, and $850,000 for a feature film (Change of Habit), plus 50 percent of the profits, bettering Parker’s million-dollar marker.
Sarnoff had a vision for the music special, one that would let Elvis stretch out in his first full-length performance since the U.S.S. Arizona concert of 1961. However, the Colonel had his own idea about what the special should be. For now, the two men just agreed that it would tape in June 1968 and air in December, sometime around Christmas.
First Elvis would make Live a Little, Love a Little for MGM that March. The studio brass had paid heed to the Colonel’s memo. The film was not precisely the “good, strong, rugged” story Parker requested, but it freshened Elvis’s image. He played Greg Nolan, a photographer who shoots for both a girlie magazine and a classy advertising agency. Screenwriters Michael A. Hoey and Dan Greenburg adapted Greenburg’s comic novel, Kiss My Firm But Pliant Lips.
In the era