There’s no doubt that Elvis Presley remains one of the most significant musicians to ever grace the earth, but in 1956, he turned his undoubted talents to the world of cinema with his debut acting performance in Love Me Tender, marking the beginning of a successful second venture into the entertainment industry.
Elvis starred in the likes of Jailhouse Rock, Blue Hawaii and Viva Las Vegas, which were all commercially prosperous given his stature in popular culture in the 1960s but were equally critically derided. Marlon Brando he was not. Still, starring in a movie with ‘The King’ was still deemed an attractive prospect, even if only for the cash and exposure.
That said, not everyone was actually keen on working with Elvis despite the fact that he was just about the biggest cultural phenomenon in the Western world at the time. One person who expressed her dismay at having to work with The King was Stella Stevens, who played with Elvis in Girls! Girls! Girls!.
Stevens’ career seemed to be split in two somewhat. She was an actor and a model who won a Golden Globe in 1960 and, in the same year, was the centrefold in Playboy. She discussed her contributions to the magazine by once saying: “Playboy has an enormous circulation, and getting into Playboy increases recognition. People know they’ve seen you somewhere. The recognition factor.”
Not that Stevens needed to justify her decisions to anyone, but the worlds of acting and X-rated modelling were often worlds apart, so Stevens’ career was somewhat unique in that regard. Eventually, an opportunity to work with Elvis arose via her contract with Paramount Studios, but Stevens wasn’t impressed with the script and decided to reject the offer.
Stevens, like Elvis, was from Memphis, Tennessee, so she thought working together with him might be a good idea, but the actual film was not up to her standards, remembering in 2004, “I thought, ‘What a piece of shit. I’m not going to be in this.’” Paramount even threatened to blacklist her from future productions, but she refused to back down.
That was until the studio promised that if she took on the Elvis picture, her next role would be with the actor Montgomery Clift. With Stevens on board, Girls! Girls! Girls! went ahead, but it was typical of an Elvis flick, lightweight and largely only made to facilitate millions of his fans flocking to the cinema to catch The King on screen.
Still, Stevens couldn’t help but feel regret about being in the film, noting, “Anyway, never be in an Elvis movie. His fans come for the sole purpose of seeing Elvis. They don’t look at anyone else on the screen.” There was another problem, too, and that was the way that both Elvis and director Norman Taurog behaved on-set.
She remembers Taurog “screaming at me at the top of his lungs in front of the cast and crew… It embarrassed me in front of everybody,” while Elvis “was drunk in on the set. Drinking and taking pills seemed to be his main interest.” Stevens had always been wary of being in an Elvis film, and it turned out that her suspicions were right all along.
