Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [280]
When the special, titled Singer Presents ELVIS, aired on December 3, 1968, critics hailed the return of an authentic American original. The program garnered 42 percent of the viewing audience and gave NBC its biggest ratings bump of the year. The soundtrack also soared to number eight on Billboard’s pop album chart. Today the music, which has been repackaged several times, most recently as The Complete ’68 Comeback Special, still inspires wonder.
“What impresses,” says music reviewer John Bush, “is how much it prefigures the rest of Elvis’ career. . . . During the ’70s [Elvis] was the apotheosis of rock music, a righteous blend of rock and soul, gospel and pop, blues and country.”
“The greatest thrill I got out of it was seeing a man in a small window of time rediscover himself,” Binder reflects. “That’s the legacy of the ’68 special.”
Before they parted that summer, Binder screened an hour’s edit for everyone on the project. Elvis didn’t react, which made Binder terribly nervous. Then Elvis asked if he could see it again, just with Binder. “He watched it three more times, and laughed and applauded, and he said, ‘Steve, I will never sing a song that I don’t believe in, and I will never make a movie that I don’t believe in. I want to do really great things from now on.’ ”
But first he had to go to Arizona to make Charro!, an offbeat film that aspired to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Elvis, heavily bearded for his Clint Eastwood–like role of Jess Wade, a reformed badman, had high hopes that Charro! would be a serious film, as the director-screenwriter, Charles Marquis Warren, had produced the legendary TV westerns Gunsmoke, Rawhide, and The Virginian. But the studio, National General, was in flux, and when Elvis arrived at the Apacheland Movie Ranch, nothing seemed to gel.
He was disheartened over the poor production values, and European star Ina Balin, who played the dance hall queen with whom Jess was involved, seemed ill cast. The script painted Jess as a cynical antihero, and one day at the studio, Charlie remembered, “They had the house sitting there . . . Elvis was standing over at the end of the porch, and he looked down and said, ‘Charlie, I’m beginning to feel like this character.’ ”
The film nonetheless would give him a margin of crowing rights, and he was eager to promote it: “Charro! is the first movie I ever made without singing a song,” he told reporters. “I play a gunfighter, and I just couldn’t see a singing gunfighter.” However, in the end, he relented and crooned the title tune. “I’m sure they had to pretty much hog-tie him to get him to cut it,” says Mac Davis, who wrote it.
By the time he reported to the set of The Trouble with Girls in October, he was in high spirits again, hearing nothing but great things from the Colonel about NBC’s reaction to the special and the anticipation over its airing in December. He was also happy to be at the end of his MGM contract. In this movie, with Broadway musical star Marlyn Mason as his assistant, he plays the manager of a traveling Chautauqua in the 1920s.
The Trouble with Girls is an odd entry to the Presley filmography, as he’s on-screen for only about one-third of the picture. Yet Marlyn would remember the movie, a mix of music, comedy, and melodrama, as “ten weeks of hilarious bliss . . . all party, every day. I still smile.”
Marlyn hadn’t been an Elvis fan and wasn’t prepared to like him, but “I felt very close to him. I know that he liked me very much, and I liked him very much. It was a sweet relationship. We hit it off immediately. I think if you are in tune with somebody, you sense things. I could be sitting fifty feet from him, and I would just get a feeling, and I would turn, and he would be looking at me.”
He called her “Cap,” for a hat she wore to work. She was single at the time, and everything between them just clicked. She didn’t mind the practical jokes—not even the loud firecrackers under her chair—and found they shared a sexy sense of humor, both appreciating a line of dialogue in which Elvis tells her they should continue a conversation