Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [285]
“We had one suite, and they had the other, and the headboards of the beds were back to back. My wife and I were asleep, but we could hear them right through the wall.”
The tropical setting had put Priscilla in an amorous mood, especially since so much of Blue Hawaii had been shot on the grounds. But again, Elvis put her off. In Joe’s recollection, Elvis thought it was “like making love to his mother. He just had a hang-up about it. And Priscilla kept yelling at him, ‘You never make love to me anymore!’
“It had a lot to do with their relationship, naturally. I’m sure they [had sex] a little bit after the baby, but he wasn’t thrilled with it. That night, he didn’t say why. He just screamed and yelled back at her. But that’s one of the reasons the marriage fell apart.”
Elvis spent the rest of May, June, and July working up material with Charlie, or “Cholly,” as he pronounced the little man’s name. He wanted only the best musicians and songs, and as a fan of Mario Lanza, Jan Peerce, and Roy Orbison, Elvis was eager for songs that would let him show off the voice he’d kept hidden so long, one that could now handle sustained high notes and operatic endings. His artistry had never been so well developed, Charlie saw. “He would be Billy Eckstine, he would be Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, he would be Hank Snow—all these people became Elvis Presley. He had all these people inside him.”
In choosing the musicians, Elvis spoke to nearly every good player he’d known, including Billy Goldenberg, whom he wanted as his arranger–musical director, but who declined, citing previous commitments. For now then, he’d go with Bobby Morris, who led the thirty-piece International orchestra.
To lead his own band and help audition the players, he settled on famed Louisiana guitarist James Burton, who had come out of Ricky Nelson’s late 1950s group and gone on to become a top L.A. session musician. And for backing voices, he chose not one, but two groups: The gospel-based Imperials, a white male act, and the Sweet Inspirations, a black female quartet that had backed Aretha Franklin. It was a “helluva big stage to fill,” he told Charlie.
What he hoped for, he remarked to James, pulling on what he learned in the television special, was a sound that would bring together all of the diverse American traditions—black and white, sacred and secular—that had influenced him.
“Our music was from the same school,” explains Burton, who, like Elvis, got his start on the Louisiana Hayride. “He needed to have that strong background, that drive, and he liked to have a lot of voices back there singing and really pushing. He had a natural feel for the way the tempos should be, and how the background should surround his vocal. . . . He knew the feeling he wanted.”
Now he was trying to think of everything, including the way he’d interact with the fans. So he could get in the habit of being in public again, dealing with the crowds, he made concerted efforts to go down and sign autographs at the gates. He wasn’t sleeping well, though, worrying if he could sustain his voice over such a long engagement, with two full-hour sets a night. And he was short-tempered, partly out of nerves, and because he was working hard at staying skinny, hovering around 168 pounds. He wanted his cheekbones to show in the photographs.
Most of all, he wanted to be able to fit into his new Bill Belew–designed outfits. Belew, who had never worked in Vegas before, originally made his stage costumes in a variety of colors, including red and blue, Elvis’s favorite. Then he discovered that white worked best, to accommodate the changing colors of the lights.
“The first thing I said was, ‘I will not dress him like Liberace.’ Elvis, for me, was a very macho man. I did not feel that all the furs and feathers and sequins were right for Elvis. So the jumpsuits