Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1959)

Continued from page 88 I can tell you is just do what I did. Just have faith in yourself and faith in God and nothing will stop you.” I used to watch the way he treated so many people with kindness and respect, the way he used to be so grateful to his fans. He used to say, “Shari, I’m only human. When I wait backstage to go on and I hear all that screaming and I know it’s for me, well, sometimes I feel as if my head is going to get real big with all that kind of fuss and stuff. Then I think that my daddy drove a truck and that but for the grace of God I’d be drivin’ one too. Then I say to myself, ‘Elvis, the day you lose your head, then that’s the day when you should go back and start drivin’ a truck.’ You have to have humility, Shari,” he would tell me. “You can never forget who put you where you are and how many people would like to change places with you.” Elvis is afraid of very few things, but the fears I remember him having were deep ones. He used to be afraid people wouldn’t like him, especially older people. He kept feeling that they’d judge him by the stories they read, that they wouldn’t give him a chance to show them what he was really like. He used to say, “I love those little girls who are my fans, but I sure am afraid of their folks and the rest of the older people. They just don’t like me.” He’d purposely avoid going to parties he was invited to because he was afraid people wouldn’t accept him, except as an oddity, as a curiosity. He’s so deeply sen sitive that he preferred staying away from places where there was the least chance he would be disliked. That last trip he made to Hollywood, during the filming of “King Creole,” was very hectic. It was Elvis’ best part to date, his most dramatic role. He wanted desperately to do a good job. but he had lots on his mind. Right after he finished the film, he was to be inducted in the service. He wasn’t afraid of the Army itself, he was only scared about how the other guys would take to him. One night we were all having dinner, and one of the boys still in the group, without meaning to, started talking about some of his experiences in training camp and how rough it was on all the guys. Then he said, “Gosh El, if that’s the way they treated us ordinary GI’s, what will they do to you?” Elvis got pale. I went over to him and he just sat there and finally he looked at me and said, “Shari, do you think they’ll give me a chance? Do you think they’ll get to know me before they make up their minds about me, or will they hate me because I’m Elvis Presley? I sure want to do the best I can to be a good soldier. I just hope to God they let me.” It was time to say goodbye. That night when Jody and I drove back to Newport we were very quiet. Elvis was going away — for two years. Two months later, I had “Poor Little Fool” published. By that time Elvis was in Texas at Ft. Hood. But one night the phone rang. It was George Klein (a disc jockey friend of Elvis’). He said, “Shari, I just got through talking to Elvis. He tried to call you but your line has been LIZ AND EDDIE with the blues. . . . And, listen, Liz, bring the boys, okay?” Continued from page 63 P 90 tween Debbie and Eddie now. But to Eddie Fisher, there must be a message in the photograph, a message he sees more clearly each time he looks. These are your children, it must say, caught in a moment you missed — because you weren’t there to see. Ridiculous, he tells himself. He picks up the photo in its silver frame — now, almost angrily, he puts it down on the piano again. Absolutely ridiculous. Of course he wasn’t there. Even when he was married to Debbie he was away from home a good deal — what man sees much of his kids in the middle of the day anyhow? And it wasn’t as if he were cut off from them now. He sees them every week, sometimes almost every day. He talks to Carrie on the phone. They probably hardly realize he doesn’t live in the same house anymore. Debbie has seen to that, in her usual fair way; she has even told a reporter that she never thinks of her children as fatherless: “They have a father, a devoted, loving, wonderful father,” she said. Well, he doesn’t know if he is wonderful or not — but loving, that he can vouch for, that he’d always be. That’s what makes it so very difficult when on impulse, at a moment such as this, he wants to see them so much. He looks at his watch. It’s too late to see them now — too late to call and ask permission, to give Debbie a chance to get out of the house if she wants to before he comes to do the thousand-and-one things that somehow have to be done now before he can see his daughter and his son. Sharply, Eddie turns away from the picture. He strides to the phone and dials automatically. “Liz?” he says into the receiver a moment later, “Listen, let’s do something. ... I think I’m coming down ^^hey took them to Disneyland. Michael JL Wilding, age six, held his mother’s hand. His brother Christopher, four, trotted beside Eddie, chattering away, pointing at things. Looking down at him, Eddie thought Chris looked a little like his father, Mike Wilding. A nice guy, Mike. Liz had asked him to her last party and he had come with his wife. The Wildings had stayed late to talk, to offer Eddie a ride home. Funny, how Liz always managed to stay on good terms with the men who had loved her. At Chris’ insistence, they went on half a dozen rides. On the carrousel, a photographer spotted them and, obligingly, Eddie and Liz and the boys held still for photographs, smiled, waved, cracked jokes. Finally the newsmen left. Liz, holding Mike, Jr. on her lap, ran her hand through her dark curls. “It’s good to be back on speaking terms with the press,” she remarked. She turned to smile at Eddie. “You feeling better, honey?” “Sure,” Eddie said. “I feel fine.” He reached for Chris’ hand. But even as he swung Chris down from his seat, followed him across the green lawn to the next turning, twisting ride — he knew. Tomorrow the picture would be in the paper. He would open it and see his own face smiling back, his arms around Liz Taylor’s handsome sons, posed against the child’s wonderland. And he would look from that picture to the one in the silver frame, and he would wonder, as he seemed to wonder more and more these days — what had his own children been doing that day? What new adventure had made Carrie’s eyes sparkle fire? What new word had little Todd learned to say? What had he missed — this time? The picture on the piano is not the only picture Eddie Fisher sees in his mind — sees and tries to forget. There are busy for an hour and he could only hog the phone booth so long. He asked me to call you and tell you he just heard about your song. He said he was so thrilled when he found out you’d written, ‘Poor Little Fool’ that he forgot where he was, and right in the middle of the barracks he started jumping up and down shouting, ‘My friend Shari wrote that song!’ ” George went on telling me what Elvis had said. Naturally I was thrilled. At last it seemed as if I really had a future. So many things have happened to me since that summer of 1956 when I started out to meet Elvis. All of it has been wonderful, but one of the most wonderful things of all was the night in Nashville, Tennessee, when I received an award for having written “Poor Little Fool.” It had sold over two million records. When the program was over, I heard someone call my name. I turned. It was George, and he’d come all the way from Memphis to see me. We sat and talked. Then George said, “Shari, I talked to Elvis in Germany last night and he gave me a message for you. He said, ‘Tell Shari when I get home I expect her to write a song just for me. Tell her not to forget that I’m counting on a Sheeley song.’ ” And I’m counting the days until Elvis returns. I’ve got tunes and words running around in my brain, but I still haven’t come up with a song that is just right for Elvis. I have to think of something very special — because he’s a very special person to me. The End el’s latest for rca-victor:“i need your LOVE TONIGHT,” BACKED BY “A FOOL SUCH AS I.” others, more painful than that. There is the picture of the living room of the home he shared with Debbie — as it used to be, as it is now. It was a room planned for entertaining, for welcoming friends, for two adults to read in, talk in, listen to music in. There were carefully arranged flowers in the silver vases when Eddie lived there, crystal dishes of candy and nuts on the coffee tables. It was a room kept carefully clean, carefully prepared — always ready to receive the visitors Eddie had brought home in such numbers. Debbie hadn’t approved of his friends, but her home was always prepared for them. And now? He had been appalled the last time he walked into that room. Oh, the furniture was still there, the flowers still bloomed in the vases, but — in front of the sofa, Todd’s playpen stood. On one chair Carrie had dropped crayons, a clay set, a broken doll. A huge stuffed elephant blocked the entrance, a dozen coloring books littered the floor. For a moment he had thought: Something must have happened to the children’s rooms, that’s why the living room is full of their stuff. But it didn’t seem that way. It seemed somehow as if the living room had become a nursery weeks ago, as if it would still be this way weeks ahead. Why? Debbie had always taken such pride in keeping a neat home. Why? And suddenly, without asking, he knew. Because this was a home without guests. A home no one visited any more. Family came, of course. The oldest, closest friends, like Camille, who lived with Debbie for a while — they came. But they weren’t visitors. They had been there a thousand times, could pick their way through the toys, past the playpen without noticing or caring. They didn’t have to be tidied up for. And there were no others. There were no young men, coming for the first time, to take Debbie out. “I don’t want to go back ( Continued on page 92)