Bad Nature or With Elvis in Mexico Read online

  And somewhere in there, very depressed, were also two veterans of the cinema whose attitude, between skeptical and humiliated, contrasted with the festive atmosphere of that thirteenth production. (We should have thought more about that number.) One was the director Richard Thorpe; the other, the actor Paul Lukas, a native of Hungary whose real name was Lukács. Thorpe was about seventy years old and Lukas around eighty, and both found themselves at the end of their careers playing the fool in Acapulco. Thorpe was a goodhearted and patient man, or, rather, a heartsick and defeated man, and he directed with little enthusiasm, as if only a pistol shoved into the back of his neck by Parker could convince him to shout “Action” before each shot. “Cut,” though, he would say more energetically, and with relief. He had made terrific, very worthwhile adventure movies like Ivanhoe, Knights of the Round Table, All the Brothers Were Valiant, and The House of the Seven Hawks and Quentin Durward, and had even worked with Presley on his third film, back in less formulaic days, directing Jailhouse Rock, El rock de la cárcel, “that was something else altogether, in black and white,” he rationalized to Lukas during a break in the shooting; but discreetly, he wasn’t a man to offend anyone, not even the provincial magnate McGraw or the producer Hal Wallis, who was also well along in years. As for Lukas or Lukács himself, he had almost always played supporting roles, but he had an Oscar under his belt and had taken orders from Cukor and Hitchcock, Minnelli and Huston, Tourneur and Walsh, Whale and Mamoulian and Wyler, and those names were permanently on his lips as if he wanted their noble memory to conjure away the ignominy of what he was afraid would be his final role: in Fun in Acapulco he played Ursula Andress’s vaguely European father, a diplomat or government minister or perhaps an aristocrat come down so far in the world that he now worked as a chef at the hotel. During the entire shoot he never had a single chance to take off the lofty white hat—far too tall, it had to be starched stiff to stay up—that is the cliché of that profession, at least while he was on the set, I mean, mouthing trite phrases that embarrassed him, but as soon as Thorpe mumbled “Cut” with a yawn, and even if another take was being shot immediately, Paul Lukas would tear off the loathsome headgear in a rage, looking at it with a disdain that may have been uniquely Hungarian—in any case, an emotion never seen in America—and muttering audibly, “Not a single shot, dear God, at my age, not one shot of my glistening pate.” I was glad to learn two years later that this was only his penultimate film; he was able to bid his profession adieu with a great role and an excellent performance, that of the good Mr. Stein in Lord Jim, along with true peers such as Eli Wallach and James Mason. He was always polite to me and it would have pained him to say his farewell to the cinema at Mr. Presley’s side.

  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.”

  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.