Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [269]
Live a Little, Love a Little, which features a cameo from Vernon as a rich hotel guest, was billed as a comedy, not a musical comedy. As such, Elvis sings only four songs, including a well-received psychedelic production number, “The Edge of Reality.” And in a second bit of rehabbing, he performs a fresh, modern rhythm number, “A Little Less Conversation,” written by a young Texan, Mac Davis, who had seen Elvis perform in his hometown of Lubbock on Elvis’s Louisiana Hayride tours.
Davis had written the song for Aretha Franklin, but it fit a scene in the movie, and he was thrilled to be associated with Elvis in any way. He was deflated, however, when he showed up at the recording session: “You couldn’t carry on a conversation with him. There were at least four or five guys sitting around staring at you as if to say, ‘You’d better not mess up.’ I felt terribly uncomfortable.”
The songwriter was twenty-six years old, seven years Elvis’s junior, and Elvis had been his hero since he’d first heard “That’s All Right (Mama)” on the radio at fourteen. “It turned me on, and I’ve been hooked on music from that moment on.” But in person, Elvis was “just like a big old kid, you know? It was like he never got past nineteen in a lot of ways.”
“A Little Less Conversation” would become one of Elvis’s biggest postdeath hits, when in 2002 an irresistible dance remix by Dutch musician Junkie XL soared to number one in more than twenty countries. The revamped track—vibrant, dynamic, and techno heavy—introduced a timeless Elvis to a whole new generation of fans. To many who remembered the original rendition, which sold just over 100,000 copies, it was a revelation.
“I told him it would be a number one hit,” boasts Celeste Yarnall, the actress Elvis romanced with it in the film. “It just took a few years.”
The scene in which it appears pairs him with the pretty blonde “swaying my hips” at a poolside party. It’s one of his smoothest on-screen pickups: In the scope of a single song, he chats her up, lays the lyric on her, grabs her coat, and sings her out the door and into his convertible before the last note rings.
Celeste was so entranced with “A Little Less Conversation” that when they wrapped the scene, Elvis took her over to the soundman. “The little lady loves the song,” he said. “I’d like to give her the disc.” The soundman frowned. “This is the property of MGM. I could lose my job.” Elvis told him not to worry. “I’ll take care of it.”
The film picks up with Elvis taking Celeste’s character back to his house. “He’s hoping to get lucky,” as she puts it. “But he’s thwarted by Michelle Carey’s character and her famous vacuum cleaner, chasing me around with Albert the Great Dane by her side. It’s a very cute scene.”
Celeste and Elvis had an equally droll first meeting in real life. Five years earlier, when she was a brunette and about to be crowned Miss Rheingold 1964, they were both shopping for luggage at the Broadway Department Store in Hollywood. “I turned around and there was Elvis and his entourage. He gave me this beautiful smile, and then every time I went around a corner, there he was again, with this little look. I won’t say we were playing peekaboo, but we were definitely making eye contact.”
When Celeste showed up for a wardrobe check her first day on the set, producer Doug Lawrence told her Elvis wanted to meet her.
“I turned around and there he was. I wasn’t expecting to see him, and I just about fell over. He was exquisitely beautiful. You had to see this man in person—the skin, the nose, the profile. And he had the most gorgeous sapphire blue eyes. One could never forget the color of his eyes.”
They became “instantaneous friends,” she says, and almost pushed the relationship to