Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [277]
“Absolutely not,” Parker vetoed, but he gave Binder permission to re-create it. That inspired the “improv” segment, in which Elvis sits on a small stage with Charlie, Scotty, D. J., and Alan, jamming and telling stories of the early days. A highlight came when he poked fun at the Judge Gooding incident in Jacksonville, as well as his own famous sneer:
“There’s something wrong with my lip, man. No, wait a minute, wait a minute. There’s something wrong with my lip. Hey, you remember that, doncha? I got news for you, baby. I did twenty-nine pictures like that.”
At the last minute, Binder and Howe informed Colonel Parker that “If I Can Dream” would close the show. After a battle of wills (“Over my dead body will Elvis sing an original song at the end of the show! We had a deal for a Christmas song!”), Binder added “Blue Christmas” to the improv.
Binder had bested the Colonel, something few men had ever done. But Finkel gives some of the credit to Parker’s client. “We got Elvis to take a stand. It was a miracle.”
On June 23, Elvis recorded “If I Can Dream” in several passionate takes. To Binder and Howe, his performance was so staggering as to seem almost a religious experience. Out on the floor with a hand mike, standing in front of the string section, Elvis fell to his knees. For a moment, he was back at Ellis Auditorium, at the gospel sings of his youth, or maybe down in Tupelo at the Assembly of God church. Howe, having worked with him before, might have anticipated such an immersion. Not everyone was prepared: “The string players sat there with their mouths open. They had never seen anything like this.”
But the more astonishing performance came when the producers sent everybody home and Elvis rerecorded the vocal in the dark. Binder sat motionless, afraid to move as Elvis lost himself in the song. Once again, he fell to his knees. But this time, in a fervent act that was equal parts artistry and emotional regression, he assumed a fetal position, writhing on the cement floor. Then, after four takes, he got up and walked into the control room, and Binder played the recording back for him. Elvis sat in rapt attention and asked to hear it again until Binder had played it some fifteen times. Only then was he satisfied.
At the start of the project, Parker had told Binder he’d never interfere if things were going well. “On the outside, the Colonel was very unhappy with what was happening. But being a good businessman, there’s no doubt that he saw we were on to something special and he shouldn’t rock the boat.”
Parker was, in fact, a step ahead of everyone. The show would garner high ratings and sell albums, yes. But the Colonel had long foreseen the event as a catalyst for the next stage of Elvis’s career. Elvis had three movies to make to fulfill his contracts, but then the Colonel was taking him to Las Vegas, where Elvis would be the biggest act in the desert, and the highest paid performer in Vegas history.
Two months earlier, in April, Elvis, Priscilla, and the Colonel had gone to see Tom Jones in concert at the Flamingo Hotel. On the surface, it looked like nothing more than a star, his wife, and manager out for a night on the town, especially since Elvis and Jones were friends, and the Colonel could never pass up a blackjack table.
But they were there for a much bigger purpose. That night, Parker met with Flamingo president Alex Shoofey, whom he’d known during Shoofey’s twenty-year tenure at the Sahara. Over dinner, they roughed out an agreement by which Elvis would appear at the International Hotel, which Shoofey would build with Kirk Kerkorian the following year.
It was time to start reshaping Elvis’s profile. Lamar figured it out: “The only way he could set it up was to show how Elvis would perform with a group behind him. That’s why the Colonel envisioned the special.”
At six-fifteen on the evening of June 25, Parker