Javier Marias - Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico

My own role was certainly not indispensable but resulted from one of Presley’s caprices; I was hired just for that single occasion. And there we all were, the regulars of his formulaic movies, all copied from each other— Fun was the thirteenth — and the newcomers, all of us present for the indolent shooting of a ridiculous film, without rhyme or reason, at least in my opinion, I’m still amazed that the screenwriter was actually paid — a guy named Weiss who was clearly incapable of making the slightest effort, he hung around the set paying no attention to anything but the music, I mean the music Presley sang at the drop of a hat, with his inseparable Jordanaires or another group of vocal accompanists who went by the offensive name of The Four Amigos. I don’t really know what the plot of the film was supposed to be, and not because it was too complicated; on the contrary, it’s hard to follow a plot when there is no story line and no style to substitute for one or distract you; even later, after seeing the film — before the premiere there was a private screening — I can’t tell you what its excuse for a plot was. All I know is that Elvis Presley, the tortured former trapeze artist, as I said — but he’s only tortured sometimes, he also spends a lot of time going swimming, perfectly at ease, and uninhibitedly romancing women — wanders around Acapulco, I don’t remember why, let’s say he’s trying to shake off his dark past or he’s on the run from the FBI, perhaps some thought the fratricide was deliberate (I’m not at all clear on that and I could be mixing up my movies, thirty-three years have gone by). As is logical and necessary, Elvis sings and dances in various places: a cantina, a hotel, a terrace facing the daunting cliff. From time to time he stares, with envy and some kind of complex, at the swimmers — or rather, divers — who plunge into the pool with tremendous smugness from a diving board of only average height. There’s a lady bullfighter, a local, who has a thing for Elvis, and another woman, the hotel’s publicist or something like that, who competes with the matadora for him, Mr. Presley was always very successful with the women, in fiction as in life. There’s also a Mexican rival named Moreno who jumps off the diving board far too often, frenetically, pausing only to taunt Windgren and call him a coward. Presley competes with him for the publicist, who is none other than the Swiss actress Ursula Andress, in a bikini or with her shirt capriciously knotted across her midriff and ribbons winding through her wet hair, she had just made herself universally desirable and famous — particularly among teenage boys — by appearing in a white bikini in the first James Bond adventure, Agente 007 contra el doctor No , or whatever it was called in Spain; her Acapulcan bikinis weren’t cut very high and didn’t live up to expectations, they were far more chaste than the one she wore in Jamaica, Colonel Tom Parker may have insisted, he seemed to be a gentleman of some decorum or maybe he was unwilling to tolerate any unfair competition with his protégé. Running around somewhere in all that was also a pseudo-Mexican boy, greatly overendowed with the gift of gab, whom Windgren befriended — the two amigos — without knowing why or for what purpose: that boy was an epidemic of talk and was absolutely to be avoided and ignored even in the elevators, which in fact was what we all did every time he came chattering towards us imagining that the fiction carried over into life, since in the movie he was a boon companion to the former trapeze artist embittered by the fraternal fatality and by Moreno the mean diving champ. That was the whole story, if you can call that a story.

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.