A Telegram On Elvis In N.Y.C.

Mr. Presley is not coming out until everyone sits down. The Mercury Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel, like a little theater with stage and cream and gold chairs only in leatherette row upon row on modern red carpeting in the sort of modern design only modern hotels have. The Press, is solid in the first maybe eight rows, and scattered beyond that although every chair is supplied with an Elvis Tour Photo Album rubberstamped “compliments ELVIS and the Colonel” and a wallet-sized picturecalendar (and Meltzer came up with a red Bic pen imprinted with something like “Elvis Presley on RCA Records” that the Colonel, over there in the aisle with a straw cowboy-type hat, had given him; “Isn’t this tacky?” he said). The tv crews were all crowded in front along with a bunch of hunkering still photographers. The Colonel has requested that you please sit down, the man is telling the crowd up front again, setting off a lot of bickering I can’t hear. I pass a note down to Lillian: “Why do we have to go on meeting like this?”

Thed for some reason they bring out Elvis’ father, Vernon Presley, looking very Southern comfortable in a bigstriped suit and thick curly grey hair. He sits down, smiles, doesn’t say a word and the man in charge says something cute about, Mr. Presley has a friend backstage. Immediately El comes out. Squeals, sighs, some women in front of me yell, We love you Elvis! and he poses. Really models his outfit – baby blue suit the kind only fancy stars and rich pimps have with black trim and very weird cut including a raised, furled collar in the back (from the looks of his Tour Photo Album, a trademark, preventing any glimpse of the secret nape of his neck sigh) and a black cape (on this very hot day) which he very consciously flares out by holding one arm cocked at the elbow – and smiles real pretty for the cameras. The network

news people are the most practiced and aggressive and they sit close in, slinging their questions like darts.

It goes something like this: Q: Why have you waited 15 years to come to New York City? A: Well (smile) we had to wait for the right building. Q: In 15 years you couldn’t find the right building? A: Well, seriously, we had to wait our turn to get into the Garden. Q: How have you managed to outlast so many Other entertainers? A: I take Vitamin E. When asked about his days being filmed

from the waist up on tv, he said, “I didn’t do anything but just jiggle.” “Give us a jiggle,” a woman called out. To the women, he answered with “Dear” and “Honey,” but generally he didn’t answer much, avoiding all political questions (Have you endorsed or do you intend to endorse any presidential candidate? What do you think of women’s lib?) with either a series of shrugs and uhhs or the all-purpose, “I’m just an entertainer.” He was: lots of nasty' smiles, those sort of side-of-themouth greaser grins, the lights shinin’ off his cheeks; lots of little jokes interspersed with the proper serious expressions. But press conferences are not meant for serious questions or serious answers and what he seemed to enjoy most was standing up to show off his belt, a monstrous thing made out of several gold plaque-like squares strung together. He said it had been an award of some sort and everyone took pictures. Someone asked Vernon Presley a question – how do you feel about your son’s fame and success? – to which he answered something vague but proud about, We’ve enjoyed it. Then the Colonel stumbled about a little trying to get the increasingly aggressive camera and tv people to fall back a bit and it began to get boring and inaudible and suddenly Elvis was gone backstage again and it was over. It wasn’t as exciting as the Stones press conference several years back When there were drinks and lots more pushing and shoving and standing on chairs for christs sake and Jim Fouratt fighting with some bullish men over god knows what. Meltzer wanted the drinks but I told him it wouldn’t be in keeping with Elvis’ image, would it?

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Tom and I were late for the concert in our usual style and missed the Sweet Inspirations. We walked in on a terrible comedian who was being hooted and jeered off the stage!. He’d been on ten minutes and was grade z (the one joke he managed to get out before he finally succumbed to the audience after we arrived was about the Garden of Eden and how it “wasn’t the apple, it was the pair/pear on the ground!” get it? the Garden was a sea of groans). A long intermission. We watched the audience which was odd and impossible to generalize. Yeah, there were fantastic waitress bouffant hairdos and it was older than the usual rock crowd by at least 10 years; but it was also younger —

lots of blonde girls in their teens prowling around with Elvis pennants.

Anyway, with the lights off, his fanfare was that crashing, triumphant Thus Spake etc. Theme from 2001 just like Grand Funk and even the Temptations. It gets more outrageous every time. Old El strides up to SCREAMS, waves of SCREAMS, in a white and glitz jumpsuit with matching cape lined in gold and that trophy-like gold belt. He did the first song with guitar slung on, as a token, then put it aside for the rest of the hour. Well, look, it was great but although I shreiked when he went into “Love Me Tender,” it was not a peak of ecstasy if you know what I mean. It was a show, a very good tv variety show, a special. You want maybe emotion? soul? It was plain old-fashioned entertainment. And fun. Great music it was not. Yes, he did the oldies like “Teddy Bear,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” etc. but they were shrugs compared to the production numbers built around “Suspicious Minds” and “You Lost That Lovin’ Felling” and a medley of — get this — “Dixie,” “Glory, Glory Hallelujah,” and “All My Trials.” On “Love Me Tender” he slipped in a line that made me gasp in disbelief, like a subliminal shock: “Oh my darling I love you and I always will/. . . Won’t you take the pill. ” It was one of those inappropriate things like you think about when stoned — “Wouldn’t it be incredible if on tv sometime you saw Lucy's cunt right in the middle of some fight with Desi? — just for a second and the next second she’s in a towel and you don’t really know if you saw Lucy naked but you did” — and Elvis carried it off beautifully. Did he really do that or was 1 stoned? The high points, if you measure the screams from the audience, were all Presley’s dramatic turns and falling-on-knees etc. and the few times when he accepted a handkerchief from the front rows, wiped the sweat off brow or chest (sigh) and threw it back! The last few times he did this, howevei^ he handed the now-sweaty hankie to some man in front of the stage to hand into the front row which hardly has the same effect as recklessly tossing it to the crowd but the police seemed more interested in controlling the hysterics than

maximizing aesthetic and dramatic effect.

At one point, Elvis walked to the rear of the stage where the women seemed particularly frantic and, facing that wall of screams and exploding flashbulbs, reached out to a woman in the Erst row of the promenade section and handed her his yellow scarf. Eeek. A minute later, as El walked back toward the front of the stage, a girl stood on the railing near where he’d reached out and hurled herself across a good five foot gap onto the stage. Great heroics. All she got for her effort, however, was a quick hustle from the stage and not even a glance from Elvis who was just keepin’ on out front. Before the next song, he was handed an identical yellow scarf, later handed off into the audience. Aside from these little dramas, the audience provided a spectacular light show: an endless barrage of flashbulbs from every comer of the Garden lit up the dome like some sort of cosmic strobe. The flashing was so constant and overwhelming, you couldn’t even avoid it by closing your eyes. Far out. For the last flashy moment Presley put aside his mike and strutted the stage holding his gold-lined cape out like a Las Vegas angel ready to fly, a cross of Liberace and Dracula or more precisely, Snow White’s prince. Who else but Muhammed Ali could be so gloriously arrogant?

When he let the gilt bat wings down, it all happened very fast: he sprinted down the stairs from the stage as thousands screamed pitifully , the lights came up and hardly seconds later a big man was announcing very matter-of-factly that Elvis was “already out of the building.” A girl on the aisle started throwing her ELVIS pennant about petulantly as people filed by her. Her girlfriend said, “But Marie, they said he’s already out of the building.” On the eleven o’clock news they said Elvis Presley dyed his hair black.