Quips and Quotations (What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas Edition)

 

We experienced music in the same visceral way. 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.

--Ann-Margret

Elvis Presley confided in me soon after he did Viva Las Vegas with Ann-Margret that he was considering marrying her. I'm not implying that anything untoward ever occurred between them, but they had marvelous chemistry. But soon after that, I think he might have had it read to him from a review, he heard Ann-Margret described as "a female Elvis," and Elvis reacted negatively. To his mind, it was vaguely homosexual! Whether that's what cooled his feelings for Ann-Margret or not, I don't know.

--Bobby Darin

Are You Lonesome Tonight?

   

In 1969 Elvis Presley was enjoying a career resurgence when this photo was taken of him with the then-host of The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson, the latter visiting backstage at whatever Las Vegas hotel the former was playing at the time. Then as now, but more so then when there were much less in the way of viewing options, the late-night talk show was the first choice of celebrities who wanted to go on TV and promote their latest book, movie, record, or just themselves. Elvis, however, was such a big star at the dawn of the 1970s that the mere fact that he walked the Earth was promotion enough, and thus never appeared on Carson's show. That's not to say Johnny couldn't find another way to capitalize on the King of Rock and Roll's great success.

An up-and-coming comedian named Andy Kaufman turned out to be that other way. His act consisted of several comic characterizations, the most popular of which was the fresh-off-the-boat Foreign Man, which eventually became Latka Gravis on the hit sitcom Taxi. However, the character was still nameless when Kaufman was booked on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in March of 1977.  The following clip isn't the entire appearance, which means I have to do the mundane job of setting it up. The Foreign Guy comes and does some very poor impersonations of various celebrities, but then strikes paydirt:

The real Elvis Presley died about five months later. Andy Kaufman passed on in 1984, and Johnny Carson, who otherwise would have turned 98 today, took his leave in 2005. Of the three, only Carson's death remains undisputed. And even he's got his own streaming channel.

A Tale of Two Cities

 

I was going to do a post on the above but it's just too damn depressing. These shootings are happening so often now they might as well keep the flags permanently at half-mast.

Looking for something else to blog about I decided to travel 213 miles southwest of Nashville to Memphis, where a famous building is once again in the news:

Sneer all you want at the shallowness on display, but if a story like this was the only thing to make the news, the only thing deemed worthy of our attention, then the world in fact would be a much better place. No matter who loses this "fight", it seems farfetched that either Priscilla Presley or Riley Keough will show up at Graceland the next day toting an assault rifle. Their agents wouldn't allow it. And unlike issues involving the widespread availability of firearms or insufficient resources for the mentally ill, local politicians can with all honesty say it's not their problem to solve (in fact, it's up to a court in California, where both participants live.) None of this is to say that the feuding grandmother and granddaughter aren't genuinely distressed by all this, but compared to news elsewhere, I for one find it damn near uplifting.

 

Someone Turned the Lights Out There in Memphis

 

I've read several biographies of Elvis Presley, and one thing that all these books make clear is that at some point the King of Rock and Roll eventually came to see his throng of admirers as something of a burden. Oh, sure, he liked that they loved him--who doesn't like being loved? --but he found himself overwhelmed by fans whenever he went out in public, a situation he could only rectify by turning day into night, renting movie theaters and even amusement parks after closing hours, when the regular patrons of such places were at home in bed. Elvis' daughter Lisa-Marie, a celebrity in her own right but not so much so that she couldn't go out when the sun was still up, never felt she had to run away from her father's fans, at least not on what would have been his 88th birthday, telling the crowd at Graceland "you're the only people that can get me out of my house," and, after the official ceremony was done with, staying to mingle a bit. Two days later she was back in Hollywood at the Golden Globes, flanked by her mother Priscella and Jerry Schilling, a member of her father's fabled Memphis Mafia, i.e., his entourage. Two days after that she died of what's being reported in the media as a cardiac arrest. I remember seeing Lisa-Marie on talk shows some fifteen years ago promoting her first album, and thinking she had a kind of melancholic air about her. Call me weird, but that actually made me like this young woman when I was prepared not to, as it had seemed like she may had made this particular career choice only because, well, because she was Elvis Presley's daughter (in fact, the song I heard on the radio turned out to be pretty good.) Nevertheless, you may wonder exactly what someone born in the lap of luxury would have to feel melancholic about. Well, Lisa-Marie took a few nasty falls from that lap. The first came when she was nine years old and saw her cardiac-arrested father face down on the bathroom floor. That's the melancholy that informed those talk show appearances I spoke of. The second fall came just two years ago when Lisa-Marie's 28-year-old son, Benjamin Keough (who, had he died his hair black and combed it into a ducktail, would have looked just like his grandfather), put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. At the risk of jumping to conclusions, it would seem depression runs in this family (it runs even in the extended family, as an ex-husband of Lisa-Marie's, one Michael Jackson, died from too much chemicals in his system, just like the posthumous father-in-law he often emulated.) Of course, these kinds of things happen to poor and working- and middle-class people too. But because they're not celebrities, it happens anonymously, lending a cloak of invisibility to a mental health crisis. I wish Lisa-Marie and Elvis and Benjamin and Michael hadn't died at the young ages they did, but at least it removes, however temporarily, that cloak.

Quips and Quotations (Circle of Aquaintences Edition)

 Elvis Presley gave me the only dinner party I've ever heard of his giving, in Las Vegas. I had a house in Palm Springs and he had a house there--he and his manager, Colonel Parker. So I used to see Elvis occasionally. He lived very near me and he was going to open at this big hotel in Las Vegas. He was making a sort of comeback. He hadn't appeared in public in a long time and he invited me to come up to see it, 'cause I had never seen him. In fact, I really had never heard any of his records, either. So he said if I would come up he would give this dinner party for me. I was more curious as to who in the world he would invite to this dinner party than I was about anything else, so I went with a friend. The one and only time I've ever been to Las Vegas.                                                                                   

We saw the opening show and the dinner party was in between shows. I can't say that I was at all impressed by his performance. So we went down to this apartment he had there in the hotel and the dinner party consisted of about eight young men [Presley's entourage, the so-called Memphis Mafia]  and one old friend of mine who had flown in all the way from Honolulu to come, mainly because she was a fan of Elvis'. She loved Elvis, and guess who it was? [Tobacco heiress] Doris Duke! So we had this dinner party. This table was full of orchids up and down and everything looked very fancy in a gauche, peculiar way. But the dinner was incredible. It was all kinds of different things, fried pork and fried chicken and fried catfish....He was nice, I sort of liked Elvis.

--Truman Capote