Elvis and Me - Louis Skorecki recalls meeting the great man and remembers LOVE ME TENDER (Robert D Webb, USA 1956,

 

Louis Skorecki and Elvis, Paris, 1959

(Viewed on February 3, 2006/November 11, 2021)

I didn't know Elvis well, but I've been around him long enough and close enough to guess what wood he was heating up from. He was a real guy, a macho, a tough one.

All this happened in Paris, two or three years after his first film, one of the most beautiful, LOVE ME TENDER...

He was passing by. I had been on his case for several days. He was young and handsome, I was even younger and almost as handsome, as you can see in the pictures.

We both posed,. I had about a dozen records under my arm that he signed. Two or three days later, I came back to get the pictures signed.

Like an idiot, I traded the records for some dough (or swapped them for bad jazz records. I don't know anymore.. ) ... It wasn't worth anything back then.

I still have the pics. Frontal, classical, laughing. Looking at them today, it's hard to tell who looks dumber, the fan or the rocker. Let's just say it's me.

Love Me Tender sounds better than Cavalier du Twilight, the French title under which I saw the movie at the time. Nobody watched movies in Version Originale, especially Presley's.

That was the fifties, the best, the dumbest.

Elvis, Debra Paget, Love Me Tender

LOVE ME TENDER, has also has one of the most beautiful dances by Elvis Presley, a slow rock as they called it. He sings it for the beautiful Debra Paget, she who will sing Fritz Lang three years later, in the Bengali Tiger and the Hindu Tomb (Jean-Claude Biette loved her so much, the beautiful Debra Paget, that he went to see her many times... at the Touquet... )

Debra Paget, Love Me Tender

Debra Paget, The Tiger of Eschnapur

Robert D. Webb, filming Debra Paget and Elvis Presley, isn't Fritz Lang, but the movie rocks well. With Jaihouse Rock and Flaming Star, this is one of the best Presleys. King Creole ain't bad either.

How would Fritz Lang have filmed Presley? Like John Barrymore Jr, the "lipstick killer" in While the City Sleeps, filmed in 1956, the same year as Love Me Tender?

John Barrymore Jr, While the City Sleeps

Or like Marilyn Monroe, filmed four years earlier in Clash by Night?

Marilyn Monroe, Clash by Night

I would have loved to see that for sure.

Finally, above is Elvis and young Skorecki in a photo that is not part of my original ten or twelve photos. It's colorised (Elvis wasn't wearing a red sweatshirt that day) but it's very well done (see details of the original Loving You cover, very true to the original vinyl...)

I discovered this anonymous photo, by a stroke of luck, almost twenty years ago, a beautiful book in a PRESLEY/THE FIFTIES box. I'll never know who took it...

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Editors note: I first discovered the writings of Louis Skorecki when I stayed in Paris for awhile long, long ago in 2004. His daily column in Liberation was a highlight of each morning. Now he regularly posts on his Facebook page and shares these thoughts, translated into English, on the Facebook page Friends Who Like a Fuller Life. I hope I might publish more of Skorecki's wonderful mini-essays.