There was nothing to say, or rather, I was speechless. Six weeks of easy, safe work, at the side of an idol, and in Acapulco to top it all off. I think that for the first and last time I blessed the place of my birth, which doesn’t usually bring me any advantages, and there I went, off to Mexico, to do hardly anything, since Mr. Presley had to pronounce very few Spanish phrases in the course of the film, things like “muchas muchachas bonitas,” “amigo,” and “gracias.” The hardest part was “Guadalajara,” he had to sing the whole song with the original lyrics, but that was scheduled for the third week of the shoot and there would be plenty of time to practice.
Mr. Presley won me over right away, he was a funny, friendly man and after all he was only five or six years older than me though at that age even five or six years is enough for the younger one to be in awe of the more experienced, and even more so if the older one is already legendary. The concern with his accent was no more than a passing whim, and as it turned out he was completely incapable of pronouncing the Madrid c, so we settled for the Seville c; I promised him that this was indeed the famous Spanish c, though he found it suspiciously similar to the Mexican c, which, as a matter of principle, he wanted to avoid. I ended up being employed more as an interpreter than as a professor of Spanish diction.
He was restless and needed to be doing something all the time, he had to get out of Acapulco as soon as the day’s filming was over, so we would take his plane and a few of us would go to Mexico City — five of us could fit, including the pilot, it was a small plane, the five amigos — or we would all go in several cars to Petatlán or Copala, Presley couldn’t stand to spend the day and the night in the same place, though he also got tired of the new place right away and we always went back a few hours later, and sometimes a few minutes later if he didn’t like what he saw, maybe it was only the trip that appealed to him. But he also had to work the next morning, and what with all the to and fro we would sleep from two or three a.m. to seven; after three or four days of that the rest of the excursionists were worn out, but not Presley, his endurance was incomparable, a man in a perpetual state of explosion, used to giving concerts. He spent the whole day singing or crooning, even when he was under no professional obligation to do so, you could see he had a passion for it, he was a singing machine, endlessly rehearsing with The Jordanaires or the mariachis or even The Four Amigos, and in the plane or the car, if conversation hadn’t set in, it wouldn’t be long before he started humming and the rest of us would join him, it was an honor to sing with Presley, though I hit a lot of false notes and he would laugh and gleefully encourage me, “Go on, Roy, go on, just you by yourself, you’ve got a great career ahead of you.” (We switched back and forth between slow and fast numbers, and I’ve sung along with him above the clouds of Mexico on one of my favorites, “Don’t,” and on “Teddy Bear”—PA-palala, PA-palala —. You don’t forget a thing like that.) His mania for singing made everyone involved in the shoot a little frenetic, or at least excited, Wallis’s people and Presley’s people, no one can take a life of non-stop music in stride, I mean without being a musician. Even the good Paul Lukas, at his advanced age and with his great burden of annoyance, hummed at times without realizing it, I once heard him humming “Bossa Nova Baby” between his teeth, though in his defense that song really sticks in your mind, I’m sure he didn’t realize what he was doing. Presley sang it with a bunch of guys in glittering green jackets shaking tambourines.
But most unbearable of all were the kind of people who not only let themselves be carried along on the tide of song and incessant humming, but who went looking for it and egged Mr. Presley on in order to feel they were on his level or to ingratiate themselves, trying to out-Elvis Elvis. There were a number of them among that vast company, but the most grotesque of all was McGraw, the small-town magnate, a man of about fifty-five — my age now, awful thought — who, during the days he spent on location with us, behaved not like a young man of twenty-seven (Presley’s age) or twenty-two (mine) but like a fourteen-year-old in the full frenzy of burgeoning pubescence. George McGraw was one of the many inappropriate individuals who swam along in Presley’s wake for reasons that were not at all clear, maybe they were big investors in his conglomerate, or people from his home town whom he tolerated for that reason or owed old favors to, like Colonel Tom Parker, possibly. I found out that George McGraw had several businesses in Mississippi and maybe in Alabama and Tennessee, but in any case in Tupelo, where Presley was born. He was one of those overbearing types who are incapable of rectifying their despotic manners even if they’re very far from the five-hundred-square-mile area where their remote and doubtless crooked business dealings matter. He was the owner of a newspaper in Tuscaloosa or Chattanooga or even in Tupelo itself, I don’t remember, all of those places were often on his lips. It seemed he had tried to make the city in question change its name to Georgeville, and, having failed in that ambition, he refused to give his newspaper the town’s name and christened it instead with his own first name: The George Herald no less, in daily typographic retaliation. That was what some people called him in derision, George Herald, reducing him to a messenger (I’ve known other men like him since: editors, producers, cultural businessmen who quickly lose the adjective and are left with the noun). I remember joking with Mr. Presley about those towns in his native region, he thought it was hilarious when I told him what Tupelo means in Spanish if you divide the first two syllables (“your hair,” he repeated, laughing uproariously), especially since it sounds so much like toupee. “They seem completely made up, those names,” I told him, “Tuscaloosa sounds like a kind of liquor and Chattanooga like a dance, let’s go have a couple of tuscaloosas and dance the chattanooga,” with Mr. Presley everything went fine if you joked around a lot, he was a cheerful man with a quick, easy laugh, maybe too quick and too easy, one of those people who are so undemanding that they take to everyone, even airheads and imbeciles. This can be a little irritating, but you can’t really get angry with that kind of simple soul. And anyway, I was on the payroll.
George Herald, I mean McGraw, was no doubt very boastful of his friendship with Presley and would imitate him in the most pathetic way: he wore a sorry excuse for a toupee, an overly compact mass that looked like Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap from the front, and from the side, since there was no tail, like a bellboy’s hat, though without the chin strap. He admired or envied Presley so much that he wanted to be more than Presley, he didn’t want to lag behind in any respect, but to be a kind of paternalistic partner, as if the two of them were singers at the same level of success and he were the more experienced and dominant. Except that McGraw couldn’t sing at all (even in the airborne choruses of that ill-fated journey which for me was the last), and his ability to rival Elvis was no less delusional. He would shamelessly appropriate Elvis’s phrases, so that if Elvis said to the pilot and me one afternoon, “Come on, Roy, Hank, let’s go to FD,” referring to Mexico City, Federal District in his language, and then added: “FD sounds like a tribute to Fats Domino, let’s go to Fats Domino” (whom he admired tremendously), McGraw would repeat the quip a hundred times until he had entirely stripped it of any conceivable charm: “We’re off to see Fats Domino, to Fats Domino we go.” You start to hate the joke. In the throes of this half-adulatory, half-competitive zeal, he spent the two days of his visit exaggeratedly tripping the light fantastic wherever he happened to be (on the beach, in the hotel, in a restaurant, in an elevator, in what was supposed to be a business meeting) as soon as he heard a few notes nearby or even in the distance, and there was always music playing somewhere. He danced in the most unseemly fashion, doing a big loco act, aided and abetted by a towel which he rubbed at top speed against his shoulders or along the backs of his thighs as if he were a stripper, it was truly a vile spectacle since he was husky verging on fat but moved like a hysterical teenager, shaking that broad head from which not one of his Davy Crockett hairs ever came unglued, and spinning his tiny feet like tornadoes. And he did not stop. In the plane, on the way out (for me there was no return trip), we had to ask Presley not to sing anything that was too fast, because the owner of the George Herald would immediately go into his dance fever — those wee vicious eyes of his — and endanger our airborne equilibrium. McGraw didn’t like slow tunes, only “Hound Dog,” “All Shook Up,” “Blue Suede Shoes” and so on, songs that let him go nuts and do his number with the towel or whatever scarf or handkerchief happened to be at hand, his indecent bump and grind. It may be that he was what we would call in Spanish today un criptogay, a homosexual who hides it even from himself, but he boasted of never letting a tasty chick — his expression — get away from him without putting his hands on her or making some lewd remark.