Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [281]
“You could ad-lib with him. We would do a lot of that. If the director [Peter Tewksbury] was doing a close-up on Elvis and he wanted a certain reaction, he would come to me and say, ‘I don’t care what you do, but this is the reaction I need from him.’ ”
The next time Tewksbury said that, Marlyn “started slowly unbuttoning [Elvis’s] shirt and taking his belt off, very quietly. He was just giving me these looks. . . . He didn’t stop and say, ‘What is she doing?’ He would just roll with the punches.”
Elvis held his upbeat mood throughout filming, but in his quiet moments with Marlyn, he told her how he’d come to Hollywood full of dreams. “The saddest thing E ever said to me was that he’d like to make one good film, because he knew the town laughed at him. It broke my heart.”
For all their rapport, theirs was strictly a working relationship, she says, and she never saw him after the picture wrapped.
It had been an extraordinary year, one that witnessed a birth, Lisa Marie, and a rebirth, Elvis himself. But just as it was a period of grand beginnings, it was also one of hard endings.
Johnny Smith, the uncle who taught Elvis guitar, died that year at forty-six, as did Bobby Smith, Billy’s brother, at twenty-seven. Dewey Phillips, who had spun Elvis’s first record on the radio, also passed on. For years, Dewey had suffered terribly from osteomyelitis in his leg, which left him with a limp, an incessantly open wound, and an addiction to painkillers. But a heart attack took him out. He was forty-two, just like Bobby Kennedy. They were all too young to die: Nicks Adams at thirty-six, Martin Luther King, Jr., at thirty-nine.
“Mrs. Dorothy,” Elvis said to the deejay’s widow, “Dewey was my friend.”
Steve Binder was his friend, too. But though Elvis had scribbled down his phone number and asked him to stay in touch, Binder’s messages were always ignored, his calls never returned. Or maybe they had just been intercepted.
Yet Binder could console himself with the knowledge that together, he and Elvis had created one of the most important and defining moments in the history of rock. And maybe the producer-director had done more than that.
In March 2008 Priscilla Presley sat at the William S. Paley Television Festival in Los Angeles, watching a screening of a forty-year-old TV special in which a man in a black leather suit recaptured his lost glory. Eighteen minutes into it, she leaned over to the person next to her. “You saved his career,” she told Binder. “You saved his life.”
Joyce Bova (right) and her twin sister, Janice, greet Elvis backstage at the Baltimore Civic Center, November 9, 1971. Their twinship intrigued and comforted him. “I understood,” he told Joyce, “that until your twin gave her blessing to us [that] you wouldn’t be able to give yourself to me.” (Courtesy of Joyce Bova)
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sin City
Barely two weeks after “Singer Presents ELVIS” aired in December 1968, the Colonel accepted the deal to take Elvis into the $60 million yet-to-be-built International Hotel, Kirk Kerkorian’s oasis of refinement in the Vegas desert. The showroom, with two thousand seats, would be the largest in town.
Alex Shoofey, nicknamed “the Cleaver” for his attention to the bottom line during his years at the Sahara and the Flamingo, was a good match for the Colonel. When the two sat down at the negotiating table, Shoofey, now married to Joan Adams, the girl who had pushed Elvis off the couch in her trailer years before, told Parker the hotel would be very pleased to have Elvis, but they had to face facts. After so many years in Hollywood, he was unproven as a stage act. He hadn’t even appeared in Vegas in twelve years, and in 1956 he hadn’t exactly set the town on fire, you know?
The Colonel, intent on outmaneuvering the long-faced Canadian, fixed his antediluvian eyes on him and told him that was all in the past, before the movies, before the TV special. Elvis had his old fans, and his new fans. The International would offer 1,500 rooms—two and a half times the size of Caesars Palace—but they’d have