Being Elvis by Ray Connolly

Author:Ray Connolly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright

24

“If we can control sex, then we can control all other desires.”

Elvis to Priscilla

He’d seen the Beatles coming. At first only dimly aware of their presence in the British record charts, gradually, as 1963 had worn on and they’d had number one after number one in the UK, he’d become increasingly intrigued. But only when they hit the US at the beginning of 1964 did he fully recognize that something completely new was happening. With Priscilla at Graceland, he was enjoying a break in Las Vegas with the guys when he watched the group’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9. With the excitement in the New York TV studio and the hysteria building across America, it all seemed so familiar. But this time it wasn’t for him. It was only seven years since his last appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, but it felt like decades. Just twenty-nine years old, he was only six years older than John Lennon, but as the Beatles dominated conversation and newspapers, he suddenly felt out of touch.

The biggest market after the US for his records had always been the UK, and, through RCA and Freddy Bienstock of Hill and Range, he’d kept a casual, if flattered, eye on the charts there. The volume of records bought in Britain might not nearly have matched that in the US, but he’d had more number one hits there, several of which hadn’t even been singles in America. Now the Beatles were totally dominating the British charts.

Like many Americans, when he’d first seen newsreel of the Beatles he’d been amused. They looked like nothing he’d ever seen before outside a Marx Brothers movie, and disc jockeys had ignored them when their records had first been released in the US on a variety of small labels. But then, just after Christmas 1963, backed by a huge Capitol Records publicity campaign, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had catapulted past everything in the US charts to number one in less than three weeks. And now every radio station he turned to was playing them—virtually all the time. When he’d been on the first Ed Sullivan Show, he’d pulled in the biggest TV audience ever. Now an even bigger audience had turned on to watch the Beatles.

At the Colonel’s suggestion an open telegram had been sent to the group welcoming them to the US.

In it, he and Parker congratulated the Beatles on their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, adding that they hoped that their shows in the US would be successful and their visit would be pleasant.

It had been a gracious, if hardly enthusiastic, gesture of recognition from the man the press still called the King of Rock and Roll to a new band of young pretenders—easy to do, but pretty meaningless and hardly sincere. Elvis didn’t wish the Beatles success. How could he? They’d become serious rivals. He was jealous of them. Some of his guys tried to reassure him, laughing them off, and describing them as a flash in the pan.

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