Elvis Sightings in L.A.

Elvis Presley’s roots will forever be linked with the American South but, like millions of other people around the world, he grew up with dreams of Hollywood in his head.

In fact, the influence of his screen heroes--chiefly Marlon Brando and James Dean--contributed to the youthful, rebellious attitude of Elvis’ electrifying persona and music, just as the records of various country, blues and gospel singers helped shape his actual sound.

So you can imagine young Elvis’ excitement in April 1956 when he came to Hollywood for his first screen test at the Paramount Studios lot. A week later, he signed a seven-year, three-movie contract. His first feature, “Love Me Tender,” was such a hit that it earned its entire $900,000 production cost in its first weekend when it opened in the fall of that year.

It was the start of a 16-year film career, which meant that Hollywood became a second home to him for much of that time. Memphis remains the ultimate Elvis nostalgia tour, but there are enough places in Los Angeles that played important parts in Elvis’ life that a visit to all could take half a day.

Elvis--who would have celebrated his 63rd birthday today--recorded many of his most celebrated hits, including “Jailhouse Rock” and “All Shook Up,” at a studio on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. He also met the Beatles in a house he rented in Bel-Air and often looked for tranquillity at a spiritual retreat in Pacific Palisades.

“The Hollywood years were a little strange for Elvis because he wasn’t really proud of a lot of the things he was doing here . . . so many of those movies,” says Jerry Schilling, a close friend of Elvis who serves as creative consultant to the singer’s estate. “But there was a lot he enjoyed about the town itself. He had a lot of fun out here.”

Schilling had been planning to return to Arkansas State University in 1964 for his senior year when Elvis, whom he had met in a pickup football game in a Memphis park years earlier, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: Presley wanted Schilling to go to Hollywood and work for him.

Schilling, 55, has assembled an impressive series of credits since his days as a member of Elvis’ “Memphis Mafia,” whose “job” included palling around with Elvis.

Schilling managed the Beach Boys from 1976 to ’86 and he has produced or co-produced several Elvis-related movie and TV projects, including the ABC-TV series “Elvis.” He is co-producer of “Last Train to Memphis,” a film based on Peter Guralnick’s biography of the rock star, who died in 1977. Mike Newell, whose credits include “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Donnie Brasco,” is scheduled to direct.

As Schilling recently led Calendar Weekend on a tour of some of Elvis’ favorite Los Angeles haunts, he reminisced about the old days.

“His death hit me so hard that I couldn’t talk about Elvis . . . interviews and the like . . . for 10 years,” he says. “And the memories are still painful sometimes when I hear the music. But there are also the memories of the good times.

“I don’t quite feel like celebrating Aug. 16, which was Elvis’ death, though I can understand why the fans do it. But his birthday? That’s a great day for me. It brings back everything he meant to me.”

Elvis’ Los Angeles:

CBS Television City, 7800 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. Apparently feeling that Elvis’ hip-shaking antics weren’t fit for a family audience, Ed Sullivan, host of the nation’s most popular TV variety show, vowed in early 1956 that he would never book the young rock singer. But he changed his mind about Elvis’ suitability for a family show when Presley went on Steve Allen’s rival show and nearly doubled Sullivan’s rating.

Elvis taped the first of his three Sullivan show appearances in Los Angeles rather than perform live in New York because he was here filming “Love Me Tender.” According to the Nielsen ratings, 82.6% of the TV sets in America were tuned to the Sept. 9, 1956, show, the highest rating for any variety show until that time. (The uproar over his wiggling on this and his next appearance led to the famous waist-up only shots during his final “Sullivan” guest shot.)

Radio Recorders, 7000 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Here’s a question that’ll probably fool even some hard-core Elvis fans. Where did Elvis record most of his hits? No, it wasn’t Memphis or Nashville. It was Hollywood. Though the RCA Records artist could have used the RCA studio, then across the street from where the Cinerama Dome is now, he preferred Radio Recorders, which he apparently first used in 1956 to record “Love Me Tender.”

Among the hits recorded there: “Wear Your Ring Around My Neck,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “One Night.” Of course, he also recorded most of those horrible movie soundtracks here, including embarrassments like “Petunia, the Gardener’s Daughter” (from “Frankie and Johnny”) and “(There’s) No Room to Rumba in a Sports Car” (from “Fun in Acapulco”).

“Elvis liked the sound that he got in the studio,” Schilling says. “He’d usually go in around 7 or 8 in the evening, joke around with the musicians for a while and then record from around midnight until 3 or 4 in the morning.”

Now known as Studio 56, it continues to be a leading studio, attracting such stars as Toni Braxton and Boyz II Men.

Beverly Wilshire Hotel, 9500 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Elvis reportedly first stayed at this luxury hotel with his parents in 1958 when he was making the film “King Creole” and liked it so much that he continued to make it his home here until 1960, when he was asked to leave because guests were complaining about all the pranks Elvis and his entourage pulled. One time, for instance, Elvis locked himself in his room, and some of his pals started a fire outside the door in hopes of smoking him out.

Years later, when John Lennon was staying in Los Angeles for several months while estranged from Yoko Ono, he, too, made the Beverly Wilshire his home. One reason: He heard that Elvis--his original rock hero--had stayed there.

The Perugia Way house, 500 block of Perugia Way, Bel-Air. Elvis liked this house, which he rented after being kicked out of the Beverly Wilshire, because it had lots of bedrooms, which he needed so that his Memphis Mafia cohorts could stay with him. It also had two adjoining dens that made the house ideal for entertaining. The house, which has since been torn down, has a celebrated history: It was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, according to “Elvis: His Life From A to Z,” a 1988 Presley reference book. Among its previous owners: Ali Khan and his wife, Rita Hayworth.

On a normal workday, Elvis would get up around 6:30 a.m. and have breakfast, then be driven to the movie studio, returning home around 6:30 p.m. for dinner. “On most weeknights, Elvis liked to get to bed early . . . around 10,” Schilling says. “He wanted to look good on camera. The partying was mostly on the weekends.”

This was the house where Elvis met the Beatles on Aug. 27, 1965, while the band was in town to play the Hollywood Bowl. Schilling recalls that the Beatles arrived at the house by limo around midnight and stayed until nearly dawn.

The Beatles were apparently so nervous about meeting Elvis that they sat speechless in one of the dens while Elvis, also not knowing what to do, idly played bass guitar while he watched television with the sound turned down.

“Finally, Elvis said, ‘If you guys are just going to sit here and stare at me, I’m going to bed,’ ” Schilling recalls. “He was just trying to break the tension and it worked.Everybody relaxed after that. I don’t think they ever really jammed, as has often been written, but Elvis did play records and it was all very pleasant.”

De Neve Park on Beverly Glen Boulevard just north of Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles. Way before all the Elvis-sighting jokes of recent years, it’s easy to imagine people drawing incredulous looks in the ‘60s when they tried to convince friends they had seen Presley playing touch football in this tiny park. After all, Elvis didn’t tour or appear on television for most of the ‘60s, which meant the only way you could see him professionally was in his movies.

But there he was, from about 1 p.m. to dusk most Sundays when he was in town, playing quarterback (usually) in games featuring the members of his entourage and such celebrity guests as Rick Nelson, Johnny Rivers, Ty Hardin and Max Baer.

Chinese Theatre, 6925 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Elvis was such a big movie fan that he regularly rented the Memphian Theatre back home for private post-midnight screenings of current films and some of his old favorites. He especially loved comedies, including “Dr. Strangelove,” “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and “The Pink Panther.” But he also enjoyed adventure films, ranging from the “Dirty Harry” series to the cult favorite “Across 110th Street.”

But his all-time favorite, apparently, was “Patton,” which he saw three times at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where he and the entourage would often go. Two of the guys would go in and block off an entire row at the back of the theater, and then Elvis and the others would come in as soon as the lights went down.

“Elvis liked ‘Patton’ so much that he knew George C. Scott’s famous speech and he’d act it out all the time,” Schilling says. “He had a photographic memory. He could remember lines and even an actor’s mannerisms from films. I think one of the real disappointments in Elvis’ life is that he wasn’t taken seriously as an actor . . . that he was kept . . . in all those formula films.”

Red Velvet, 6507 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. Elvis didn’t go out a lot during the Hollywood years, but when he did, this club--now Club Lingerie--was his favorite spot. He’d usually go on Monday nights when entertainers like the Righteous Brothers would stop by to perform after the taping of the television show “Shindig.” Elvis would sit in one of the booths, and the entourage even allowed fans to go up and chat for a few minutes. “When he went out, unless it was to a movie, Elvis enjoyed mingling,” Schilling says.

Pacific Coast Highway, from Sunset Boulevard to Malibu.

Elvis loved motorcycles and cars, and one of the ways he relaxed in Los Angeles was to ride his Harley at high speed along Pacific Coast Highway. Elvis’ Bel-Air neighbors, however, didn’t like the roar of the motorcycles, so he and his buddies had to load the cycles onto a truck and drive them from the Perugia Way house to the Bel-Air gate, where they could start the engines without getting complaints from the neighborhood association.

The Hillcrest house, 1100 block of Hillcrest Road, Beverly Hills. This was the first house that Elvis bought in Los Angeles, chosen by his wife, Priscilla. “One of the reasons I think Priscilla picked out this house was because it didn’t have a lot of bedrooms, which is totally understandable because that meant there’d be [fewer] of Elvis’ guys living there,” Schilling says. “I think she was trying to have a somewhat more normal family life with Elvis, especially with Lisa Marie on the way.”

This house, which he bought in 1967, was also Elvis’ destination the only time in his life that he traveled across country by himself. According to various books, Elvis had an argument with Priscilla and his father, Vernon, over his excessive spending during the Christmas season in 1970, and he stormed out of Graceland.

Elvis ended up in Los Angeles, where he contacted Schilling, who was then living in the city, and startled Schilling with the news that he wanted to go to the White House and ask President Nixon for a federal narcotics officer’s badge. Schilling was even more surprised when Nixon handed Elvis one.

The lake shrine of the Self-Realization Fellowship, 17190 Sunset Blvd., Pacific Palisades. “Elvis was always kind of intrigued by the place, and we were in the car one time and he just pulled in,” Schilling says. “We walked around this beautiful lake and he took some brochures and later sent off for some books about Indian philosophy and Indian religion.”

Elvis later met Sri Daya Mata, who is now president of the fellowship, and he would often call or see her when he was in trouble, Schilling adds. “I almost think she was a spiritual mother for him at one point in his life. . . ,” he says. “And what impresses me is that during the entire 12-year relationship, no one ever asked Elvis for a penny. They just gave him information and love.”

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Elvis Tour of L.A.: 10 locations the King frequented.

1. The lake shrine of the Self-Realization Fellowship, 17190 Sunset Blvd: The Pacific Palisades shrine where he went to relax and meditate.

2.. Pacific Coast Highway: He loved to ride his motorcycle between Sunset Boulevard and Malibu.

3. 500 block of Perugia Way: His first home was here, a Bel Air rental, was where he met the Beatles.

4. De Neve Park on Beverly Glen Blvd.: He and his pals played football here on Sunday afternoons (just north of Sunset).

5. 1100 block of Hillcrest Road: He bought a Beverly Hills home here for Priscilla and Lisa Marie.

6. Beverly Wilshire Hotel: He lived her when he first moved west, until he was kicked out for one too many pranks.

7. CBS Television City: He was actually here, not in New York, the first time he appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

8. Chinese Theater: He frequented this landmark Hollywood cinema, where he saw “Patton” three times.

9. Red Velvet: He hung out in this Hollywood club. Now it’s Club Lingerie.

10. Radio Recorders: Studio where he recorded many hits, including “Jailhouse Rock.”