Viva Los Elvises

When I first saw the 1964 Elvis Presley film Viva Las Vegas sometime in the spring of 1997, it was on a 13-inch VCR-TV combo in a tiny dorm room in Claremont, California. Unlike, say, the Beatles, Elvis and his music had never meant anything to me; all I knew of him was a distant caricature. Not so for Brian, the owner of the room and the Elvis video collection. Brian had the kind of charisma that imparted coolness onto whatever he was doing. As the movie played, the room was intermittently packed with the type of people I didn’t usually hang out with, namely girls; lanky, distant and smooth. When the movie ended its energy propelled me out of the room, feeling high with possibility. Elvis’s exuberance lifted the roof off my head. It seemed to have done the same for those girls, too. After the movie ended, we walked to snacktime together at Frary Dining Hall. That night, in my mind, Elvis had exploded off the screen.

This, in essence, was Brian’s way. Like Elvis on the TV, he hid the belief that he could get away with anything behind a big-chinned, confident smile. Brian was a sports hero, a practical joker, a heavy drinker. He had the ability to sidle up to a girl, slip his arm around her, and know he looked good doing it. But sometimes that cockiness bled over into arrogance. His streak of vandalism and public intoxication tested the campus authorities and suggested he was not always under control. On-screen Elvis seemed in control even innocent – even when he was in Las Vegas.

Unlike its namesake, there is no gambling in Viva Las Vegas . The movie, the King’s 15th, is a flimsy formula in which Elvis rolls into town, short of cash and long on nerve, charm, and everything else he’s got going for him. His aim is to enter his hot rod in the Vegas Grand Prix, but he keeps getting distracted by his hotel pool manager, played by the lovely Ann Margret. The real reason to watch this movie is for the chemistry between Elvis’s laconically confident racecar driver and Ann Margret’s innocent sexpot on speed — particularly their song-and-dance numbers together. Ann Margret throws around her gravity-defying hair and breasts with discomfiting enthusiasm. The Technicolor sets and flamboyant costumes make the movie look like it was filmed in Candy Land, an effect magnified by a parade of neon and flashing light: The Golden Nugget, The Horse Shoe, The Silver Spur, The Sands, Thunderbird, Stardust, Flaming, Tropicana, Sahara, Swingers.

Few of these casinos still existed when I rolled into Vegas early one morning in June 1999 for my 21st birthday. Las Vegas’s image, like Elvis’s, had by then undergone one of its countless makeovers. Forget the Mob, gambling and prostitutes; Las Vegas was now a place to bring the family, supposedly. My roommate and I got a cheap room at the Excalibur, and the first thing David did was to take the mirror off the wall and start cutting up lines on it. Like Brian, David was magnetic. Somehow his tall, sinewy body and Camel-Lights voice let him dominate every scene he visited with no appearance of effort. He worked construction; he was a handyman and a sculptor. That night we camped out at Excalibur’s blackjack tables until after the sun came up.

Much more than Brian, David exuded sexual energy. He once seduced a woman in town only for a few days, and a week later she was planning to move in with him. He spent the next weekend in a friend’s hot tub with someone else, then got together with her best friend. He was a caring and giving man, a dog-lover, an inspired tinkerer, but despite his puckishness there was never much morality apparent in his actions.

Though in real life Elvis could get laid at will, on screen he seemed like a romantic. But it would be hard to miss the subliminal sex packed into Viva Las Vegas. When Ann Margret rolls up to the body shop in a Triumph convertible, Elvis takes one look and says, “that’s what I call a real sporty model.” He’s not talking about the car. During their courting duet, “The Lady Loves Me”, Ann Margret first tells Elvis he’s “got about as much appeal as a soggy cigarette,” then, by way of self-congratulation, says “both of his heads are flipping their lids.” At the end of the seduction song “C’mon Everybody”, the couple collapses post-coitally on the floor. During Elvis’s rendition of Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say”, the camera cuts between reaction shots of the pair that are undeniably orgasmic.

This happy-go-lucky Elvis was not his only incarnation. Like Las Vegas, the public image of the man in this movie is a whitewash. A good young man, growing up poor, faithful to God and family, becomes rich and successful beyond his wildest dreams. He buys a mansion, coats the walls in mirrors and the ceilings in green shag carpeting. He has three TVs on hand to watch each network at all times. He adds a rifle range and a racquetball court, and he buys a fleet of planes and cars.

So when Ann Margret tells Elvis “Any fool would know you won’t change,” she’s talking to the man as much as the character. “Not for anybody,” she says when Elvis makes clear he won’t give up his dangerous races for her picket-fence idyll. In real life, Elvis died groggily at 42, addicted to sleeping pills and uppers. His final haunt, where he retained his popularity and power by hard-selling songs like “Sweet Caroline”, was Las Vegas.

And what Ann Margret said to Elvis goes for my friends, too, though probably no one like Ann ever told them so. In December 2004 David died of a drug overdose. I hadn’t seen him in about four years. He was on the verge of a breakup with a longtime girlfriend who would not abet his drug abuse, and losing her, it seems, pushed him closer to the edge. According to friends, he had been unstable and erratic. And when she told him to get himself under control, he lost out to his destructive impulses and swallowed an eightball of cocaine in front of her.

In February 1998, after days of rain waterlogged the soil, an ancient, giant eucalyptus tree fell on a car carrying Brian, killing him and the driver instantly. My response was a mixture of real anguish and self-centered angst. I spent a night standing in the rain watching the fire department take apart the wreck. I remember in school when we tore our clothes to look cool and pulled fire alarms in the dorms. I tried to glorify my memories, but to my surprise I learned that many people just thought Brian was crude.

When I see Elvis, either in his spritely heyday or in decadent decline, I still think of Brian and David. Neither was trying to be Elvis. I first saw Elvis in that old movie, Viva Las Vegas. But I have been seeing echoes of his complex character — the good and the bad — ever since.