Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [283]
“Their deal was that they weren’t going to record any song that they didn’t have the publishing on. I was ready to erase the tapes and just let it go. I ended the session and sent the musicians home and asked all of Elvis’s people to leave my studio.”
Parker told his lieutenant, Tom Diskin, that if Moman didn’t play ball, they’d figure a way around him or simply scrap the sessions. But RCA’s Harry Jenkins knew that “Suspicious Minds” could be a huge career record for Elvis, and at the next day’s session, he mediated for the greater good: Elvis would cut it, and Chips would keep his publishing.
Lost in the battle was the fact that without a Steve Binder there to fuse his backbone, Elvis made no attempt to persuade the Colonel that the material was right for him, or to rise up and say he was going to have the song, publishing rights be damned.
That summer, “Suspicious Minds” became Elvis’s first number one single in seven years, and though he would never see another, the sides from the American Studio sessions rank among the finest work of his career. Eventually they covered two albums. From Elvis in Memphis, the first to be released, earned a lead review in Rolling Stone magazine.
Looking at it again as a reissue in 2001, the magazine still found it remarkable, James Hunter calling it “new as polyester yet old as leather, religiously involved yet flashy as neon, refined like pop yet savage like rock & roll.” The Elvis Presley of 1969 “was a more mannered and complex adult version of the Fifties kid with the nerve to combine the gnawing friction of the blues, the flourishes of gospel quartets, the zinging concision of pop and the melodic leisure of country.”
Elvis was on such a fiercely creative roll that it could only have been stultifying to have to return to Hollywood in March. There he honored the second half of his commitment with NBC, teaming with Mary Tyler Moore for Universal Pictures’ Change of Habit. Though he would make two concert films for MGM in the 1970s, this was his last narrative motion picture.
Change of Habit was measurably better fare than the likes of Stay Away, Joe or Clambake, in that it offered a dramatic role and only a handful of songs. But it presented little in the way of challenge. As Dr. John Carpenter, the head of a free ghetto clinic, Elvis finds himself with the unexpected help of three young women—nuns in street clothes—who never reveal their true vocations. Dr. Carpenter falls for Sister Michelle Gallagher (Moore), but the film forgoes a happy ending, framing Sister Gallagher in church, struggling with her vows.
Moore, whose range of characters spans the perpetually buoyant Mary Richards (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) to the bitter, raging mother of Ordinary People, seems somewhat embarrassed by Change of Habit, joking that “Elvis has said on the record, ‘I slept with all my leading ladies except one.’ Well, I don’t mean to bust anyone’s cover, but I know who the one is. And what was I thinking?”
It wasn’t strictly true, of course—he hadn’t slept with all his leading ladies. But putting the words Elvis and nun in the same sentence always seems to make people smile. That includes one of his earliest acquaintances in Tupelo, Barbara Spencer, for decades a member of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth: “Gladys and my mother were friends, and my mother loved to tell that I slept with Elvis. However, it was when we were infants. They even put us in the same crib sometimes.”
Change of Habit was yet another different direction for Elvis—it marked the first time he played a professional man, and he didn’t exactly get the girl. But the film seemed more like an after-school special for the preteen set than a movie of the week. Elvis never quite commanded the bearing of a doctor, and his scenes with Moore