It must not be inferred from this that I’ve ever looked down or now look down on Mr. Presley. On the contrary. There can’t be many people who have admired him and still admire him more than I do (though without fanaticism), and I know I have enormous competition in that. There’s never been another voice like his, another singer with so much talent and such a range, and also he was a pleasant, good-natured man, far less conceited than he had every right to be. But movies… no. He started out taking them seriously, and his earliest films weren’t bad, King Creole for example (he admired James Dean so much that he knew all his parts by heart). But Mr. Presley’s problem, which is the problem of many people who are uncommonly successful, was the boundless extravagance it forced him to: the more success someone has and the more money he makes, the more work and the less freedom he has. Maybe it’s because of all the other people who are also making money from him and therefore exploit him, force him to produce, compose, write, paint or sing, squeeze him and emotionally blackmail him with their friendship, their influence, their pleas, since threats aren’t very effective against someone who’s at the top. Then again, there can always be threats; that’s a given. So Elvis Presley had made twelve films in six years, in addition to multiplying himself in a thousand other varied activities; at the end of the day, the movies were only a secondary industry in his conglomerate. Behind this kind of person there are always businessmen and promoters who have trouble accepting that from time to time the manufacturer of what they sell stops making it. The fact is, I’ve never seen anyone who was as exploited as Mr. Presley, anyone who put out so much, and if he wanted to avoid it he wasn’t helped by his nature, which wasn’t bad or surly or even arrogant — a little belligerent at times, yes — but obliging; it was hard for him to say no or put up much opposition. So his films got worse and worse, and Presley had to make himself more and more laughable in them, which was not very gratifying for someone who admired him as much as I did to see.
He wasn’t aware of it, or so it seemed; if he was, he accepted the ridiculousness without making any faces about it and even with a touch of pride, it was all part of the job. And since he was a hard and serious and even enthusiastic worker, he couldn’t see how his roles looked from the outside or make fun of them. I imagine it was in the same disciplined and pliant frame of mind that he allowed himself to grow drooping sideburns in the seventies and agreed to appear on stage tricked out like a circus side show, wearing suits bedecked with copious sequins and fringes, bell bottoms slit up the side, belts as wide as a novice whore’s, high-heeled goblin boots, and a short cape — a cape — that made him look more like Super Rat than whatever he was probably trying for, Superman, I would imagine. Fortunately I didn’t have any dealings with him during that period, not even for ten days, and in the sixties when I knew him he didn’t have to stoop so low, but neither was he free of all the extravagant notions that happened to occur to other people, and I’m afraid it was in Fun in Acapulco that he got stuck with the worst of those bright ideas.
Every time I watched them shooting a scene I thought, “Oh no, my God, not that, señor Presley,” and the amazing thing was that none of it seemed to bother Mr. Presley, he even, with his undoubted capacity for kidding around, enjoyed the horror. I don’t think he was pleased or proud; it was just that he didn’t have the heart to raise objections or make negative comments that would disappoint whoever it was who had come up with today’s delirious concept, whether it was Colonel Tom Parker or the choreographer, O’Curran, or the producer Hal Wallis himself, or even that quartet with the objectionable name, The Four Amigos, whose flashes of inspiration came in pairs. Or maybe he had so much confidence in his own talent that he thought he could emerge unscathed from any fiasco; certainly in the course of his career he sang about everything and in all languages — for which he had no gift whatsoever — without any resultant collapse of his reputation. But we didn’t know that yet. “Oh no, dear God, spare him that,” I thought when I found out that Presley was going to play the tambourine and do a Mexican sombrero dance in a cantina surrounded by folkloric mariachis — one group was the Mariachi Aguila, the other the Mariachi Los Vaqueros, I couldn’t tell them apart — while he sang “Vino, dinero y amor,” everyone joining in on the chorus. “Oh Lord, don’t let it happen,” I thought when they announced that Mr. Presley would have to wear a short, tight jacket with a frilled shirt and scarlet cummerbund to sing the solemn “El Toro” while stamping like a flamenco dancer. “Oh no, please, what will his father think,” I thought as he perpetrated “And the Bullfighter Was a Lady” wearing some approximation of a Mexican rancher’s garb and swirling a bullfighter’s cape over his carefully coiffed head or throwing it around his shoulders with the yellow side up as if it were a cloak. “Oh no, that’s going too far, that’s regicide,” I thought when I read in the screenplay that in the final scene Presley was to sing “Guadalajara,” in Spanish, at the edge of the cliff, cheered on insincerely by all the mariachis together. But that’s another story, and the linguistic disaster was no fault of mine.
That was what they hired me for. Not just to avoid linguistic disaster, much more than that: everything was to be pedantically perfect. I’d been in Hollywood a couple of months, doing whatever came my way, I’d arrived with some letters of recommendation from Edgar Neville, whom I knew a little bit in Madrid. The letters weren’t very useful — almost all his friends were dead or retired — but at least they allowed me to make a few contacts and stave off starvation for the time being. I was offered little jobs lasting a week or two, on location or at a studio, as an extra or an errand boy, whatever came up, I was twenty-two years old. So I couldn’t believe it when Hal Pereira called me to his office and said, “Hey, Roy, you’re Spanish, from Spain, right?”
My last name, Ruibérriz, isn’t easy for English speakers, so I quickly became Roy Berry, and people called me Roy, that was my Christian name over there, or first name, as they say, and I appear as Roy Berry, in tiny letters, in the credits of certain films made in ’62 and ’63, I’d prefer not to say which ones.
“Yes sir, Mr. Pereira, I’m from Madrid, Spain,” I answered.
“Terrific. Listen. I’ve got something fantastic for you and you’ll be getting us out of a last-minute jam. Six weeks in Acapulco; well, three there and three here. Movie with Elvis Presley. Holiday in Acapulco”—that was the initial title, no one was ever prepared to tax their brain in any way over that film—“He’s a lifeguard, trapeze artist, I’m not sure, I’m joining up tomorrow. Elvis has to talk and sing a little in Spanish, right? Then suddenly he drops this bomb on us, claiming he doesn’t want to have a Mexican accent; he wants it to be pure Spanish as if he learned it in Seville, says he found out they pronounce the letter c differently in Spain and that’s how he wants to pronounce it, O.K., you’re the one who knows about that. So the ten million Mexicans we’ve got swarming around here are no use at all, he wants a Spaniard from Spain to stay with him through the entire shoot and take charge of his classy accent. We don’t have many of those around here, Spaniards from Spain; what do we need them for? It’s ridiculous. But Elvis is Elvis. We won’t take no for an answer. You’ll be hired by his team, and you’ll take your orders from him, not us. But Paramount will pay you; Elvis is Elvis. So don’t expect to make any more than what you’re making this week. What do you say. We’re leaving tomorrow.”