Part 21

Walter was delivering some staccato comments into a microphone when a sound engineer tapped me on the shoulder: “You’re on next,” said he, “and you’ll have five minutes.” This was Friday.

“But I don’t start until Monday,” I whispered. Too late. I was on. I closed my eyes and prayed. I had no more idea than the man in the moon what I was going to say.

With my eyes closed, I thought how different it was now from the last time I’d been there. I said into the microphone: “The entire Diamond Horseshoe is now taken over by the press, cameras, radio equipment. Not one of the people who sat here a year ago is with us. They’re up in the gallery, and happy to be there because we’re all here for one reason, to help bring peace to a troubled world.”

I went on like that for five minutes. When I’d finished, Winchell thrust out his hand and said: “I’d like to congratulate you. I couldn’t have done that for the life of me.” And so we made up, and we’ve been good friends ever since.

_Fourteen_

Every time I go out on the town twisting, I murmur a silent apology to Elvis Presley. I realize that I’m indulging in the same gyrations that pushed Sir Swivel Hips along the road to fame. I told him in a note not long ago: “You’ll be surprised to know that I’m now doing the twist. Not as well as you, but I’m doing it. I have taken one inch off my waist and two off my _derrière_. Now I know how you keep so thin.”

When I originally saw the act, I was horrified. I said so, loud and clear. He was rolling around on the stage floor of the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Hollywood with his arms and legs wrapped around the microphone as though they were bride and groom. Nine thousand teens shrieked with excitement as he wiggled, jiggled, and bumped, and six husky policemen looked the other way. At the crucial point, from my front-row seat for opening night, I saw him give his bandsmen a broad wink that spoke volumes.

The policemen’s job was to keep the hands of the audience off the boy. He’s been manhandled so often by his frantic fans that he’s scared he’ll be torn to shreds someday, suffering the same fate as his shirts and suits. “If anyone comes down the aisle,” the loud-speakers announced, “Elvis will go off stage and not come back.” In his gold jacket with white lapels, he twisted and writhed for an hour, belting out the whole skull-cracking repertoire, from “Heartbreak Hotel” to “Jailhouse Rock.”

It was like a neighbor of ours in Altoona, who had fits, fell down, and squirmed on the sidewalk. Mother told me it was an illness and not to be upset. I hadn’t heard then about epilepsy.

The next day the Los Angeles police told Elvis to clean it up and tone it down. That night the six cops had their backs to the audience to make sure he did. I’d said my piece in the column: “Every muscle jerks as though he were a marionette. I’ve seen performers dragged off to jail for less. But Elvis’ audience got the emotional impact of the lines and screamed their undying love for the greatest phenomenon I’ve seen in this century.”

Time passed, but it doesn’t necessarily heal all wounds. When Norman Taurog, who directed Elvis in _G.I. Blues_, came up with the idea that his star and I should get together for luncheon, I fancied Presley might be tempted to swat me. “He isn’t what you expect,” Norman promised, so I went along, ready to keep my guard up.

I’ve seldom been more mistaken about anybody. I hadn’t been with Elvis five minutes when we were cozy as old pals who’ve been dragged apart and have a lot of talking to make up. His manners would have put Lord Chesterfield to shame. His face was firm, lean and unlined as a four-year-old’s. “What did you do with sideburns and the pompadour?” I asked.

“The army barber got the sideburns, and I gave the pompadour to the Sealy company to stuff mattresses with.”

“I’m one of those who felt you were a menace to young people who imitate you without realizing what they--or you--are doing.”

I must have sounded defensive. He smiled. “I gathered that. You can’t make everyone like you, but I try.” He toyed with a container of yoghurt, a bottle of Pepsi, and a cup of black coffee--nothing more. I remember how he used to lunch on a huge mound of mashed potatoes and a bowl of gravy, meat, tomatoes, a quart of milk, with half a dozen slices of thickly buttered bread to top it off.

Two years in the Army had brought many changes. I found that out when I talked with his commanding officer in Berlin. “I’d be happy if I had ten thousand more like him,” said the C.O. Sergeant Elvis, the highest-paid entertainer that ever lived, realized only $12 a month of his $145 pay because it was subject to ninety-one per cent surtax. But the trade in Presley souvenirs--a fantastic assortment of shirts, slacks, ties, statues, masks, dog tags, records, and sheet music--brought in $3,000,000 while he was out of civilian circulation.

He’s one of the few new faces in our industry who has been promoted into a living legend, and we need dream stuff like Elvis to survive. He owes his reputation to the labors of “Colonel” Tom Parker, the old-time carny and circus hand who isn’t above peddling photographs and programs at his protégé’s personal appearances to boost the take. He and his wife are childless; he’s quick to say he loves Elvis like a son. The “colonel,” with eyes like ball bearings and a mind like a bear trap, acts the part of the hick from the sticks in business dealings. “I only went to fifth grade” is his line, “so I have to go slow.” Elvis’ role is to create the impression of the country boy whose head is still awhirling from the bedazzling luck that’s befallen him.

“Sometimes a silly tale starts a lot of repercussions,” he told me. “One time I was out at the beach with some fellows throwing baseballs at milk bottles lined up in a booth. I kept on winning Teddy bears, and I gave them to the kids that gathered round. Then somebody printed a story that I owned a collection of Teddy bears. Ever since then they’ve been coming in from all over the world. I’ve got an attic full of them at my home in Graceland, Memphis. All kinds of bears, some in tuxedos, some dressed like me with guitars strapped to them. It’s fantastic.”

Elvis is an identical twin whose brother died at birth. His mother, who could bear no more children after that, is dead, too. That combination of circumstances may go toward explaining his built-in fear of being left alone, which keeps a hand-picked group of wiry young men, roughly his own age, constantly with him as companions, bodyguards, chauffeurs, and partners in judo and karate, two pastimes he picked up in the Army. The group includes his cousin, Gene Smith, an army buddy from Chicago, and boyhood pals from Memphis. If they’re temporarily unwanted in his company, they melt away in the flick of an eye.

The “colonel,” drawing on his circus experience, has seen to it that nobody has ever been hurt in any of the public melees that have a habit of building up around Elvis. But it makes for a secluded private life. When he’s in the mood to roller-skate, another hobby, he escapes the crowds by hiring an entire rink for the evening. He drops in at night clubs with his little gang and their dates only after the lights have dimmed for the floor show, and he leaves in a hurry if he’s recognized.

The same routine applies to his movie going--he sits in the last row and high-tails out if anybody stops by to stare. Every time he leaves his rented Bel Air home for the studio, he and his companions travel in two Cadillacs, one driven hard on the tail of the other. The same compulsion for protection from who knows what sometimes results in his being delivered to an auditorium or arena where he’s singing in a moving van, lying on a couch.

He works conscientiously at a long list of charities in semi-secrecy. In twelve months he will raise as much as $118,000 for benefits; prides himself that every cent of it goes to the chosen cause with nothing subtracted off the top for expenses. “We buy our own tickets, and no free tickets are handed out to anybody. We pay every entertainer on the program. When the benefit’s over, we give local newspapers a story in which every item of money is accounted for.”

Sooner or later, he says, he aims at becoming a good actor. It looks as though he’ll have to pick up his training in front of the cameras as Gary Cooper and many others did. He isn’t depending on the gyrations any longer. “They call it the twist, but it’s the same thing I’ve done for six years. The old wiggle is on the way out now.”

Apart from sensations like Elvis, the only place a young entertainer can get training is in television. The studio schools, where promising beginners were compelled to go to classes in speech, drama, dancing, or what have you, were disbanded years ago. The studios claimed they couldn’t afford them any longer. There’s very little point in a raw recruit trying to crash Hollywood today. My advice, if anybody asks for it, is: “Start in New York; get on TV; do bits on Broadway; then take a stab at movies. Otherwise, you’re going to find California can be a great spot to starve in.”

Elvis is lucky, too, in having an agent like the “colonel,” whose itch for money hasn’t outpaced his protégé’s talents. A good agent doesn’t allow his client to take on more than he can handle. Too many ten per centers slaver for the quick buck. They’re not content to wait a week longer than necessary. So the youngsters are booked into night clubs, TV, personal appearances, fairgrounds, and every imaginable kind of fee-paying frolic. In that rat race, a greedy agent can kill a promising newcomer’s career in two years flat. I’ve seen it happen too often. The agents don’t care. Ten per cent of a boy’s murdered future is zero, but there are always plenty more lambs to lead to the slaughter.

* * * * *

Before I met him, I had an earful of Elvis one day from Natalie Wood. She was tough, very young, starry-eyed and burningly ambitious. All the beaux were after her like a pack of hound dogs--Nicky Hilton, Lance Reventlow, Jimmy Dean, Nicky Adams, Johnny Grant, Dennis Hopper, Bob Neal, and as many more. But she was crazy for Elvis. She has every record he ever made.

She wasn’t only crazy for him. She was mad for stuffed toy tigers, including one that played “_Ach du Lieber Augustine_.” She wouldn’t ride on a plane without taking aboard, to read during the flight, a wad of unopened “good luck” notes written by her friends saying how glad they were that she’d arrived safely. She also took some tigers along as talismans. She went through a phase of wearing nothing but black, clear down to all her underwear. She drove a decorator way out of his mind by ordering black drapes and black furniture for her bedroom, where rugs and walls were chalk white. At that time, she was going on eighteen years old, all but four of them spent making movies.

“My father said he didn’t want his child to be an actress,” she once told me, “but my mother took me on a train to Hollywood to see Irving Pichel, who gave me a bit in _Happy Land_, on location in Santa Rosa. In my scene I had to drop an ice-cream cone and cry.”

There was no turning back after that. She used to pose in the darkness of movie theaters because her mother, youthful-looking Mrs. Maria Gurdin, an ex-ballet dancer, used to pretend the cameras that ground away in the last fade-out of the newsreel were focused on Natalie. By the time she was eight she had appeared in court, calm and collected, to squeeze a pay increase, up to $1000 a week, from her studio.

The build-up toward an earful of Elvis began at breakfast in the new Hilton hotel in Mexico City. A crowd of us had gone down for its opening, including Nicky Hilton and Bob Neal, who qualified in trumps for the phrase beloved of society gossip columnists, “a millionaire playboy.” Over coffee, he came in and whispered that he’d just slashed every tire on young Hilton’s automobile, “so Natalie will have to ride with me.”

Limousines were to take us to catch a plane home to Los Angeles. But Nicky foxed Bob. He took another car, and Natalie, to the airport. If either of the two swains thought he’d furthered his cause, he was dead wrong. En route, we landed for twenty-five minutes to refuel, and I went with Natalie to the waiting room, where a mammoth jukebox stood waiting to be fed. Like a thirsty traveler who’s reached the oasis, she pumped nickels and dimes into the maw of the thing to make it play Presley nonstop from the moment we arrived until we left.

She got as far as riding on the back of Elvis’ motorcycle and staying with Elvis at his home “because I wanted a vacation and a rest--his parents were there all the time.” But the passion soon faded. “Since he’s in town, why don’t you see him?” I asked her soon after her return.

She shrugged. “He’s busy and I’m working.” Did she think the vogue for him would last? She shrugged again. “That depends on how he does in his next picture.” Within a matter of weeks she had married Robert Wagner.

This pair of newlyweds made lovebirds look like scorpions. This was the couple that invented “togetherness.” In private or in public made no difference; they held hands, kissed, clutched each other in an altogether nauseating display of coltish affection. The fan magazines drooled over Bob and Natalie as the symbol of all young lovers. They bought a boat and painted it together. They bought a $175,000 house with marble floors and went into debt together.

When Warners suspended her for eighteen months, she sat out her time on the sets of Bob’s pictures, nuzzling him between takes. The marriage lasted three years. In that time, the career of Bob Wagner, who started out as a caddie carrying clubs for Bing Crosby and Spencer Tracy at a Beverly Hills country club, slowed down considerably, while his wife’s took wings. Togetherness turned into that delight of the divorce attorneys, “mutual incompatibility,” and Natalie cut fan-magazine interviews out of her life completely.

As an actress, she’s always been a child wonder. Orson Welles remembers her vividly in her first major part, with him in _Tomorrow Is Forever_: “She was so good she was terrifying. I guess she was born a professional.” In her teens, when there was nothing better to do, she’d collect a bunch of young actors together to improvise scenes with her, which she immortalized on her tape recorder. On top of the world at twenty-three, she drew $250,000 for _West Side Story_, with more money promised from Warners.

She yearns to do more live TV, which her contract allows, as a prelude to Broadway. “The last five minutes before you start, while you’re waiting for the first cue, is like being poised on a roller coaster, before it swoops down. When it’s over, you feel you’ve really accomplished something.”

Off camera, she is a ninety-eight-pound kitten who gazes adoringly upward from her 5 feet 2 inches at the current man who takes her fancy. Warren Beatty jumped into that category when they worked together in _Splendor in the Grass_, and he dumped Joan Collins after two years of going steady. Joan turned down four pictures so she could stay with her ambling heartthrob. They’d talked about a wedding.

This very sexy member of the new male generation came to me to ask: “Do you think I should marry Joan?” He received a quizzical look. “If you can put that question, you know the answer.”

Warren isn’t alone among young actors of any generation in having an eye for the publicity mileage to be obtained from a newsy romance. As for Natalie, she wasn’t talking about marrying anybody, by her account. Like most young actresses, she can’t be taken seriously on the subject. Two months before she married Bob Wagner, she was saying much the same thing.

When she was seventeen, she had one concealed admirer who lost fifty pounds in weight while the torch burned him. Raymond Burr specialized in menace roles when they worked together in _Cry in the Night_. She was the screaming heroine, he was the kidnaper who had the audience chewing its fingernails down to the knuckle wondering whether he would kill her or rape her before the final fade-out.

I had Ray literally at my feet when I met him for the first time. I used to lunch most every day with Dema Harshbarger in the garden of Ivar House, a restaurant now demolished which used to stand around the corner from my office. One day a husky fellow was laying bricks in the patio where we were sitting, and we had to keep moving our chairs to make way for him.

I finally looked down and saw a handsome face and a very large body. “You don’t look to me like a bricklayer,” said I.

“I’m not; I’m an actor.”

“Then what are you doing this for?” If looks could kill, I wouldn’t be here, he was so mad. He quit his job that night and never laid another brick.

Ray Burr enjoys food, to put it mildly. When he fell for Natalie, he made up his mind to reduce. As the pounds melted off, he progressed from heavy to hero, though he made no headway with her. And that’s how lean, hawk-eyed Perry Mason was born. This I learned after he’d been on the show for a year.

Most of the action in Hollywood today centers on television. In the spring of 1962, only a half dozen motion pictures were in production there, while TV studios churned out hour shows and half-hour shows literally by the hundred. MCA alone owned 403 hour and 2115 half-hour negatives. The majority of the new faces in town are television faces--like Raymond Burr; like Chuck Connors, who went from baseball bats to Winchesters; like Vincent Edwards, who describes himself as “an eleven-year overnight sensation” after serving that long a stretch in the wilderness of odd jobs.

Ten years ago, the movies treated television the way a maiden aunt treats sex--if she doesn’t think about it, maybe it will disappear. But TV grew into a giant, and now it’s the odds-on favorite in entertainment. It’s the turn of television factories like MCA to declare, in Lew Wasserman’s words: “We think the movie industry has made many mistakes in judgment. It has refused to face up to the need for progress in the entertainment industry.”

David Susskind, of Talent Associates, another TV production company, can arrive in Hollywood to make a movie, remarking pleasantly: “This town is dedicated to pap. Show business here is founded on quicksand. The people are quick to take offense at criticism because they have a guilt complex. They know they’re turning out commercialized junk. Basically, they are ashamed of it, and they’re defensive.”

Neither the television industry nor Mr. Susskind used to be quite so cocksure, and working in TV was a lot more fun before the craze to put every show on film. David got his start in our town as a junior publicity man at Universal-International. He sat for three days in an agent’s waiting room, trying for an interview with the boss before he clicked and was invited to join the staff there.

“We don’t pay much--we’re a new business,” Al Levy told his new boy in those days before Marty Melcher and Dick Dorso squeezed him out of Century Artists.

“I must have $100 a week,” said David. “I’ve got two children to support.” That was what the little fellow was paid, $100 and no more, when he wet his feet as an agent’s assistant. After the breakup of Century Artists over Doris Day, David aligned himself on Al Levy’s side and went to New York with him in a shaky new business called Talent Associates.

After a few months of getting nowhere, the company’s bank balance had sunk to ten dollars. Al felt the fair thing to do was see whether he could help David land another, more secure job elsewhere. He introduced him to Sonny Werblen of MCA, and David enlisted in the regiment of cold-eyed young men in charcoal-gray suits who are MCA’s shock troops.

Over the next three and a half years Al Levy pounded a lot of sidewalks. Television was still the runt of the entertainment industry. Hollywood jeered at the little black box, with its nightly parade of women roller skaters, bicycle riders, and grunt-and-groan artists in the wrestling ring. In advertising agencies the money was in the big radio shows--Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. The head of the agency TV department was usually tucked away in a windowless cubicle next to the mail room. Radio had networks stretching from coast to coast, television was in the chrysalis stage, centered in a few cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Talent Associates began to get lucky when it signed Janet Blair, who’d been dropped by Columbia after seven years making pictures. Levy had seen June Allyson do a movie song-and-dance number with the Blackburn Twins. He put Janet in with the twins to make up a similar act, which ultimately was booked into the Wedgwood Room of the Waldorf-Astoria. Richard Rodgers saw Janet there, signed her for the road company of _South Pacific_, which kept her going for three years.

Al’s hustling meantime was paying off, though nobody was making any fortune on the prices television paid. His agency put Wally Cox, Tony Randall, Marion Lorne, and Jack Warden into the first of the situation-comedy series, “Mr. Peepers”--with a price tag of $14,500, which had to be stretched to pay for everything from script to hire of a studio. The Associates also had the “Philco Playhouse,” an hour-long dramatic series for which they were paid $27,000 to cover everything but actual air time. “Playhouse” had stars like Eli Wallach, Eva Marie Saint, Grace Kelly in Scott Fitzgerald’s “Rich Boy”--the finest talents in the theater. I even did a couple of shows myself.

After three and a half years soldiering for MCA, David Susskind received his marching orders. He hadn’t won any medals as a salesman or contact man. He wanted to be a bigger noise than that. I suspect that David’s ambitions spouted the day he was born. He talked over his problems over breakfast in a Schrafft’s restaurant on Madison Avenue. As a result, he was taken back into Talent Associates on a six-month trial.