CHAPTER ONE
JULY 22, 1963
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA
1 P.M.
Elvis Presley is Lucky.
The King, playing the role of race driver Lucky Jackson in the film Viva Las Vegas, strolls the deck around the Flamingo Hotel’s expansive swimming pool. He walks alone, strumming a guitar while singing a love song. Movie extras lounge in the sunshine, pretending to read a book or sip a drink. Elvis keeps singing as he arrives at the door marked “Women’s Changing Room,” knowing that the woman with whom he is infatuated can hear him on the other side.2
Elvis is twenty-eight, six feet tall, his hair dyed jet black. Inside the “changing room,” twenty-two-year-old Ann-Margret, a Swedishborn actress, changes into a swimsuit. Ann-Margret, playing the character Rusty Martin, is a vibrant on-screen presence. As Elvis sings, she slips into a pair of stiletto high heels that match her yellow one-piece and then emerges onto the pool deck.
There, the two stand eye-to-eye as they begin to sing a duet.
“Once the music started, neither of us could stand still,” Ann-Margret will write in her autobiography. “Music ignited a fiery pent-up passion inside Elvis and inside me. It was an odd, embarrassing, funny, inspiring, and wonderful sensation. We looked at each other move and saw virtual mirror images. When Elvis thrust his pelvis, mine slammed forward too. When his shoulder dropped, I was down there with him. When he whirled, I was already on my heel.”
The song, “The Lady Loves,” is not the rock ’n’ roll that made Presley famous but a charming pop tune soon to be forgotten in movie history, overshadowed by the eponymous Viva Las Vegas theme song. But the chemistry between Presley, strumming his guitar while wearing a gray sharkskin suit, and Ann-Margret, in her form-fitting bathing suit, is scorching.
It is one week since filming began on location here in Las Vegas. The Flamingo’s guests were informed in advance that the pool would be closed this afternoon and tomorrow. Many now watch from the hotel lobby as this highly choreographed scene is repeated over and over. As the couple slowly climbs the pink stairwell leading to the top of the diving board, cries of “Cut!” come from director George Sidney. The cameras must be repositioned. It is taxing work under the desert sun, with the few palm trees landscaping the pool providing little shade to bring down the 106-degree temperature. But neither Elvis Presley nor Ann-Margret shows any sign of exhaustion. Elvis’s makeup and black pompadour are touched up after each scene, and his suit coat shows no signs of perspiration.
In fact, the true heat comes from the actors themselves. The on-screen chemistry is no accident, for their off-screen romance is incendiary. Ann-Margret is not married; nor is Elvis. But it is known around the world that the King has a longtime girlfriend in young Priscilla Beaulieu, who just turned eighteen two months ago.
So the affair is kept secret. Barely.
* * *
Three years earlier, on March 1, 1960, Sgt. Elvis Presley returned to the limelight. The location is Friedberg, West Germany. The time is 9:17 a.m. The twenty-five-year-old singer wears an olive-drab army uniform as he steps into the enlisted men’s club at Ray Barracks. The three chevrons of his rank are stitched onto his sleeves. His tie is neatly cinched. More than one hundred reporters and photographers fill the canteen, jostling to get close to the entertainer for questions before he finishes his military service and returns to the United States. More journalists are present today than were for President Dwight Eisenhower’s press conferences during his recent visit to West Germany.
Elvis Presley’s body has grown muscular in the army. He has learned karate as part of his training and has also developed a fondness for the amphetamines soldiers take to stay awake while on night maneuvers. Elvis sees nothing wrong with the drugs, though they sometimes make him jittery. He believes the “pep pills” elevate his mental faculties and keep him trim, even as he pursues a diet heavy in white bread and potatoes fried in bacon fat. To ensure a steady supply of pills for himself and his friends, Elvis has bribed an army pharmacist. One fellow soldier, Rex Mansfield, will later say that the drugs were so available in the army that it took him five years to kick his own habit.
But there is no evidence of narcotics right now. A toothy smile creases Presley’s face as he prepares to take questions. It has been four years since the blues-rock single “Heartbreak Hotel” turned the former Mississippi truck driver into an international star. That hit was followed by “Hound Dog,” which eventually sold ten million copies globally, guaranteeing first-name status for “Elvis.”
On this day, Sergeant Presley strides through the crowd with poise and command, instantly owning the room. Removing his army-issue cap, he reveals a high pompadour.
Though the United States is not at war, a draft is in effect. When Presley’s number came up two years ago, he was offered the chance to perform light duties entertaining the troops. Instead of taking advantage of the “celebrity wimp-out,” as his fellow soldiers call that service, Elvis requested a more ordinary path. For the past eighteen months, he has been assigned to Company C, part of the US Army’s Third Armored Division. But now his two-year military service has come to an end, and his fans, who labeled the day of Presley’s induction “Black Monday,” are eager to know what comes next.
* * *
Three years later, as Viva Las Vegas continues filming around the Flamingo Hotel pool, Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret complete their duet. Newly minted choreographer David Winters has planned every step of their routine, directing the two young stars to walk perilously close to the water’s edge without falling in, all the while singing. Another conceit of the pas de deux is that Elvis and Ann-Margret never look at one another, as if playing hard to get.
It is apparent that the young Elvis Presley, who set the world aflame nine years ago with his swiveling pelvis and innocent snarl, has grown up. His early hits—“Hound Dog,” “Love Me Tender,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and “All Shook Up”—are still his bestselling songs, all having charted to No. 1. But now, on this movie set, Presley knows he has to find the magic formula once again. “I hear the music’s changed,” he confessed as he returned to civilian life. “I couldn’t commit myself to saying I’m gonna be, or I’m not gonna be. All I can say is I’m gonna try.”
New hits recorded since he left the army—“Return to Sender” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”—become instant classics, but they have not matched the amazing sales of his early songs. The same holds true for the King’s film career. Viva Las Vegas is just one of thirty-one movies he will make in his lifetime, as arranged by his overbearing agent and manager, Colonel Tom Parker. But unlike many of his other pictures, fated to be immediately forgotten, this production reveals that the King has major acting potential.
As per the script, it soon becomes clear that “Lucky” is so smitten by “Rusty” that he is following her, perhaps being led into a peril of his own making. The scenes play well, capturing the sly innuendo of two people attracted to each other. Ann-Margret, who will admit many years later that her sexy on-screen demeanor led her to be typecast as a “female Elvis,” enjoys the King’s sense of humor. “He would tease me and I would tease him back. We had lots of laughter.”
As the cameras roll, the joke appears to be on Elvis. Ann-Margret leads him up the column of steps to the top of the pool’s high dive. At ten feet above the water, it’s a long way down should the King fall.
Suddenly, Ann-Margret approaches Elvis with mischief in her eyes.
* * *
It was upon leaving the army that Elvis Presley chose his future.
Originally hailing from Tupelo, Mississippi, Presley found that his easy southern drawl charmed the press in Germany. Sitting at a large table at the German press conference, reporters on all sides, Presley proclaims that he will once more return to singing rock ’n’ roll—though without the rebellious sideburns for which he was once so well known. Life in the military has matured Presley, and he now tells reporters he also wants to make “serious motion pictures.”
“Has your military experience been beneficial?” asks a writer from Screen Digest.
“It has changed both my career and my personal life,” Elvis responds. “I learned a lot and made a lot of friends I wouldn’t have otherwise.… It’s good to rough it. To put yourself to the test.”
The questions keep coming.
Presley’s measured responses are vastly different from the youthful swagger of his pre-army years. He speaks of going home to Memphis for a while and then traveling to California to perform in a television special with Frank Sinatra, eventually becoming a “singing actor.” First up, a film called GI Blues.
The members of the media hang on every word, some scribbling notes while others man the television cameras. It is the first and only press conference the army has allowed Presley to conduct, so after two years of silence, his words are eagerly anticipated. However, some reporters cannot help but wish for something a bit more sensational.
The moment finally comes. A question arises about a rumor—that Presley has a “sixteen-year-old girlfriend.”
Presley well knows that the young woman in question is only fifteen, yet he does not correct the reporter. Sergeant Presley has never been considered a paragon of virtue, but the notion of a man his age dating a high school sophomore has a touch of scandal.
But Elvis Presley does not back down.
“She’s pretty,” he says of Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he has been seeing since she turned fourteen. The dark-haired stepdaughter of an air force captain is poised beyond her years, but she still has an eleven p.m. curfew on school nights. Elvis has met her parents, Paul and Anna Beaulieu, who have since allowed their daughter to be driven unchaperoned to Elvis’s rented three-story stucco home in Bad Nauheim three or four times a week for the past six months.
“She’s a very nice girl,” Elvis tells the journalists. “Her family is nice. She is very mature for her age.”
It is not known whether Elvis Presley has ever considered his Mississippi rival, Jerry Lee Lewis. In 1957, at age twenty-two, the piano rocker married his thirteen-year-old first cousin once removed, a girl named Myra Gale Brown. Lewis had monster hits with songs like “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shaking Goin’ On.” At the time of the marriage less than two years ago, Lewis was earning $10,000 a night to give a concert. After the press learned of Myra’s age, Jerry Lee Lewis became a pariah, and his concert fee dropped to just $250 per night. Lewis was shamed, and almost ruined. So the revelation that Elvis Presley is dating a girl only slightly older than Myra Brown gives the press a major story.
Four thousand miles away, the man who could have prevented that revelation is seething.
* * *
The most influential figure in Elvis Presley’s life will be Colonel Tom Parker, the business manager who now plots the entertainer’s future. But Parker cannot travel to Germany to protect Elvis—for good reason. So the corpulent businessman pulls the Presley puppet strings from afar.
Gone are the rock-’n’-roll days, with Elvis gyrating across the stage. Now the Colonel believes those moves should belong to a younger man. The Colonel is Elvis Presley’s Svengali, and just as he has since 1955, he will, until the end of the singer’s life, push Elvis relentlessly. An ongoing schedule of recording, concerts, and movie roles will be thrust upon Presley, leaving him exhausted and bitter.
Tom Parker’s real name is Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk. He is a fifty-year-old Dutch carnival barker who may have been involved with a murdered woman in Holland.3 That suspicion was raised because, soon after she was killed, van Kuijk left town, finding work on a vessel headed for the United States. Eventually, he jumped ship in Mobile, Alabama, and entered the USA illegally. Soon, he enlisted in the US Army, though he had no passport. The sergeant at the recruiting center was named Tom Parker. The name caught Kuijk’s eye and led him to change his name legally to Tom Parker.
In 1932, Parker went AWOL and was charged with desertion. He spent several months in a military prison, finally receiving a dishonorable discharge—but not before the army had him confined to a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed as a psychopath.
Upon his discharge from the service, Tom Parker worked in the carnival business, often operating as a con man on the side. One favorite scam was painting sparrows yellow and selling them for a higher price as canaries. Then World War II broke out. With a universal draft in place, Parker, to avoid possibly being forced to return to the military, deliberately gorged himself until he weighed more than three hundred pounds, making himself unfit for duty. Though he would lose some of that weight, he would remain portly for the rest of his life. And like the phony canaries, he would often appear in light yellow, his favorite clothing color.
The transition into music promotion, with its demand for bluster and charisma, was an easy one for Parker. Among his first clients was country singer Eddy Arnold, who brought Parker to Nashville, Tennessee, with great frequency.4Another of Parker’s early clients, singer Jimmie Davis, would one day leave the entertainment industry and become the governor of Louisiana. In 1948, a grateful Davis bestowed upon Parker the honorary title of “Colonel,” a sobriquet Parker instantly adopted.
But it was the 1955 signing of the young Elvis Presley to an exclusive contract as “special adviser” that was the making of Tom Parker. By cleverly pairing new hit singles with movies of the same title, the Colonel and the singer rose to the top of the music and motion picture industries.
Elvis’s first film was Love Me Tender. The record of the same name sold more than one million copies. Then came the movie Jailhouse Rock. That single sold three hundred thousand copies in the first week and eventually also sold more than one million, reinforcing Presley’s superstar status.
Then came the draft. At the peak of Elvis Presley’s popularity—he had a seven-figure deal at Paramount Pictures and a steady stream of chart-topping hits—the singer would be required to devote two years of his life to the military and would, thus, disappear from the public eye completely. The chances of his emerging from this exile with his career intact were dubious, to say the least.
But where some saw calamity, Colonel Tom Parker saw opportunity. It was the Colonel who insisted Presley perform his service as a regular soldier, sensing that this would become a public relations coup. As the farewell press conference demonstrated before the Priscilla revelation, this was very much the case. During his time in Germany, Elvis regularly appeared outside his rented house to sign autographs. Indeed, a sign posted the hours each evening when he would make himself available. As Colonel Parker predicted, Elvis Presley remained in the public eye while still enjoying the status of a “regular” GI.
Parker never once visited his client in West Germany, out of fear he would not be allowed to return to the United States; he possessed neither US citizenship nor a passport. Because of this, Elvis would never perform in concert outside North America.
On the morning of March 2, 1960, Sgt. Elvis Presley boards a military flight from Rhein-Main Air Base bound for Fort Dix, New Jersey. Although he has enjoyed ten Top 40 hits since his induction, having spent considerable time in the recording studio prior to reporting for duty, Presley is deeply concerned about his career.5
But Elvis need not worry: Colonel Tom Parker is in complete control—except for one matter.
In June 1963, when she is eighteen, Priscilla Beaulieu moves into Elvis Presley’s Memphis, Tennessee, mansion—not as his wife or fiancée, but as his very young girlfriend. However, the world seems not to judge and, instead, awaits the day when Elvis and Priscilla will tie the knot.
Viva Las Vegas begins filming just three weeks later.
* * *
Atop the Flamingo Hotel high dive, Elvis and Ann-Margret conclude their duet. The King stands at the very end of the board, with his back to the water. Just as it appears that the two might lean in for a kiss, Ann-Margret pushes Elvis into the pool, guitar, sharkskin suit, and all.
But it is not Elvis hitting the water. Just before the push, his stunt double, Lance LeGault, replaced the idol, and a camera angle allowed the perception that it was Elvis taking the dive. But with the King being paid a salary of $500,000 ($4.1 million today) and a percentage of the profits, that was never going to happen.6
Just off camera, Colonel Tom Parker watches the scene. He understands the sizzle between Presley and Ann-Margret and believes it will produce box-office gold.
This makes the Colonel very happy, for he gets 50 percent of every dollar Elvis Presley will ever earn.7
Copyright © 2022 by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard