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At the morning rehearsal on June 29, Elvis became reacquainted with Al Wertheimer, a young photographer only slightly older than Elvis who had photographed him during his fifth Stage Show appearance. RCA’s Anne Fulchino had hired the German émigré as part of her dedication to making Elvis a huge pop phenomenon.

With no budget for publicity—or certainly nothing like the $200 or $300 a day Columbia Records paid freelance shutterbugs—she’d gone in search of “talented, hungry kids who’d work cheap,” striking a deal in which the photographers were free to shop their pictures and make a few bucks once she’d finished her campaign. That’s the way she worked with Wertheimer.

She picked him over a temperamental photographer she’d originally considered because Al, a quiet, laid-back, easygoing person, “had the right personality” to shadow the singer in close quarters and a variety of circumstances. “I also knew he could handle the Colonel.”

She made the right choice. After late 1956, Parker lowered an iron curtain around Elvis, restricting media access to only a handful of carefully orchestrated events. Before that happened, Wertheimer, a night person like Elvis, would travel with him for a week, shooting some 3,800 frames, all unposed and in natural light, to chronicle both his professional and personal life—onstage, backstage, in the recording studio, at home with his parents and friends, and on the road with his fans.

No other photographer would capture such startlingly intimate moments or chronicle such an important phase of Elvis’s career. The resulting photos, elegant, eloquent, and iconic, “were probably the first and the last look at the day-to-day life of Elvis Presley,” Wertheimer has written. “I was a reporter whose pen was a camera.”

While RCA needed images that promoted Elvis as an explosive young singer on the rise, Wertheimer had another agenda. “Basically I was covering the story because Elvis made the girls cry, and I couldn’t understand what he had that was that powerful, that brought all that raw emotion to the surface.”

As Fulchino predicted, Al was so unobtrusive and good at his job that many of the people who surrounded Elvis hardly knew he was there. And Elvis himself enjoyed being documented, allowing closeness that embarrassed even the photographer, particularly for an image Wertheimer calls The Kiss, a brief encounter between Elvis and a fan in the stairway of the Mosque Theatre in Richmond, Virginia.

According to Wertheimer, Diane Keaton, the actress and photographer, has called it “the sexiest picture ever taken in the whole world.”

On the afternoon of June 29, after The Steve Allen Show rehearsal, Elvis took the train to Richmond with the Colonel and an entourage that now included his cousins Bobby and Junior Smith, the latter of whom bore the haunted, eerie look of a crazed killer, having come home from Korea with a Section 8. The following day, Elvis was scheduled to perform two shows at the Mosque Theatre, at 5 and 8 P.M.

His date for the day was a well-dressed young woman in a dark, sleeveless dress and cluster pearl earrings. A southern girl, she had a fresh-faced look about her, with her dark blond hair cut in a summer bob. Elvis apparently made her acquaintance in the Hotel Jefferson coffee shop, where only a few minutes earlier, he’d wrapped his arm around the waitress.

He had his script for The Steve Allen Show, and “flipping through some of the pages,” as Al remembered, “he was trying to impress this young lady whose name I forgot to get. But she remained cool, not wanting to look too impressed. Elvis continued to try and loosen her up with conversation. At one point, he came in close, within three inches of her face, and just shouted, ‘Ahhh!’ ”

Al clicked off some shots, and then Junior said it was getting late and they needed to go to the theater for rehearsal. Elvis invited the blonde to come along, and a trusting soul, she climbed in the cab. On the ride to the theater, Elvis tried to amuse her, pointing out silly