Elvis Presley's Greatest Dream Was Never Music — The Day He Proved It And The Man Who Took It Away D

Elvis Presley’s greatest ambition was to win an Academy Award, not a Grammy, not a chart position, not another sold-out concert. He wanted to be a serious dramatic actor, the kind that Marlon Brando and James Dean had become, performers who took the full weight of a human being and put it on screen in a way that made audiences feel something they couldn’t name.

He told Life magazine in 1956 in plain language, you can’t build a whole career on just singing. He pointed to Frank Sinatra, who had been slipping until he added acting to his identity. He pointed to Bing Crosby and Dean Martin. He was 21 years old and he was telling anyone who would listen what he wanted his life to look like.

In January of 1958, he got the closest he would ever come to living that life. The film was called King Creole. What happened to it afterward is one of the most documented and least discussed losses in American entertainment history. To understand what King Creole meant to Elvis, you have to understand the comparison that was following him everywhere in 1956 and 1957.

James Dean had died in a car accident on September 30th, 1955 at the age of 24. In the months before his death, Dean had completed three films, East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant, that redefined what a young male actor could do on screen. He was volatile and internal and utterly unlike anything that had come before him.

Teenage America had lost something enormous when Dean died and the question of who could possibly fill that space was not an abstract one. It was an urgent cultural question being asked by producers, directors, journalists, and audiences simultaneously. The answer that kept coming back was Elvis Presley.

Director Nicholas Ray, who had made Rebel Without a Cause with Dean, met Elvis and came away shaken. He later told interviewers that Elvis had gotten down on his knees in front of him and recited whole pages from the Rebel Without a Cause script. Ray said Elvis must have seen the film a dozen times and had memorized every one of Dean’s lines.

Ray wanted to cast Elvis as Jesse James in his next film at Fox. David Weisbart, who had produced Rebel Without a Cause, was photographed talking to Elvis about portraying Dean himself in a biographical film. A special edition magazine called Elvis and Jimmy was published in 1956, positioning Elvis as the direct cultural heir to Dean’s leather jacket.

Producer Hal Wallis had acquired the rights to a novel called A Stone for Danny Fisher in February of 1955 for $25,000 with the intention of casting either James Dean or Ben Gazzara in the lead role of a New York boxer. After Dean’s death that same year, the project was shelved. In January of 1957, following the success of an off-Broadway stage version of the same story, Wallis revived the project with Elvis in mind.

The character of Danny Fisher was changed from a boxer to a singer. The setting was moved from New York to New Orleans. A full soundtrack was added at Colonel Tom Parker’s insistence. And Wallis chose as his director Michael Curtiz, the man who had made Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and Angels with Dirty Faces to point the cameras at a 22-year-old from Tupelo, Mississippi and find out what was there.

What Curtiz found surprised him. Before shooting began, he had told people around him that he expected Elvis to be conceited and demanding. He had spent his career working with major Hollywood stars and he knew what vanity on a film set looked like. Within the first weeks of production, his assessment changed completely.

He told actress Jan Shepherd, who was playing Elvis’s sister in the film, that Elvis was a lovely boy who was going to be a wonderful actor. He described Elvis to others as every director’s dream, the first one on set at 7:30 in the morning, lines learned, always with a new shot of the camera, so he never had to be called twice.

Walter Matthau, who played the film’s gangster Maxie Fields and who would go on to win an Academy Award himself, told a BBC interviewer that he struggled to call Elvis by his character’s name because he kept forgetting it wasn’t real. He said Elvis was an instinctive actor.

He said he was quite bright, very intelligent, elegant, sedate, and refined, not a punk in any sense. He said he was sophisticated. The film shot partly on location in New Orleans, where the crowds that followed Elvis were so large and so ungovernable that Wallis had to bring in police and ropes to hold them back during street scenes.

Getting Elvis back to his hotel at the end of the shooting day required security details and improvised escape routes. He was staying at the Roosevelt Hotel and after a fan discovered the path he used to avoid the lobby, Wallis moved him to the 10th floor of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and rented the entire floor for the cast.

When Elvis tried to eat dinner at the legendary Antoine’s restaurant, one of the most famous restaurants in New Orleans, he had to be turned away because no one could guarantee crowd control. He ordered room service every night he was in New Orleans. He could not go where he wanted to go, eat where he wanted to eat, or move through the city where they were filming his movie.

The price of being Elvis Presley was already this specific and this total and he was 22 years old. At the Paramount commissary in Hollywood during the indoor portion of the shoot, actress Jan Shepherd was sitting with Elvis at lunch when she spotted Marlon Brando come through the door. She told Elvis, he was too nervous to turn around.

Brando noticed Elvis, walked over, and sat in an empty chair directly behind him. Shepherd whispered that when Elvis stood up, his chair was going to hit Brando’s, so he should just say hello. That’s exactly what happened. The two of them stood up, the chairs collided, and Elvis turned around and shook Marlon Brando’s hand.

They made small talk. Elvis held it together until they were outside the commissary. Then, by Shepherd’s account, he erupted with excitement over meeting the man he had studied and admired and wanted to emulate. The most famous young person in America, surrounded everywhere he went by people who screamed his name, lost his composure completely at the prospect of being noticed by the man he considered a real actor.

The New York Times review of King Creole, written by Howard Thompson, opened with a line that became one of the most quoted sentences in Elvis’s film biography. Thompson wrote, “Elvis Presley can act.” He called the film “snugly tailored to Presley’s shoulders.” Variety declared that the film showed the young star as a better-than-fair actor and noted his improved dramatic ability and the tense, moving moments he created.

A reviewer in New Orleans, working from the scene they had watched being filmed in their own city, called him a Bourbon Street Brando. The film opened on July 2nd, 1958 at Loew’s State Theatre in New York City, made two and a half million dollars in North America in its first year, and earned Elvis the best reviews of his acting career.

His co-star Dolores Hart, later Sister Dolores Hart of Regina Laudis Abbey in Connecticut, told journalists decades later that Elvis had confided in her during filming that this was the first picture where he’d really had a good acting part, the first time he had been given something worth doing.

He had told her directly he really wanted to be the next Jimmy Dean. And Hart’s assessment, delivered plainly from her monastery in Connecticut, was equally direct. She said he could have done it because he had learned to play a character and not just himself. But his manager was just thinking about money and everything he did after that was just girls and stuff.

14 days after filming on King Creole wrapped, Elvis Presley reported for induction into the United States Army. He was gone for two years. The momentum that King Creole had built, the reviews, the critical repositioning, the sense among serious Hollywood people that something real was there, sat and cooled while he was in Germany.

When he came back in 1960, Parker had already made deals. GI Blues was waiting. Blue Hawaii was waiting. The Blue Hawaii soundtrack would spend 20 consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard album chart and become his most commercially successful record. The money was staggering and the artistic direction of his film career from that point forward was locked.

Between 1960 and 1968, Elvis made 27 films. Most of them ran between two and four weeks of production. Parker had negotiated deals that paid Elvis $1 per picture plus a percentage of profits, which meant that short productions with guaranteed audiences were worth more than long ones with uncertain outcomes. The formula was consistent.

Elvis plays a charming, ruthless young man who sings several songs, gets the girl, and resolves the conflict by the last reel. The locations changed, Hawaii, Las Vegas, Acapulco, the American West, but the character did not. The songs were written to order, recorded quickly, released as soundtrack albums that the formula guaranteed would chart.

From 1964 to 1968, Elvis had exactly one top 10 hit that was not connected to a film, a gospel recording called Crying in the Chapel that had actually been recorded in 1960 and sat in a vault for 5 years before being released. He did not hide how he felt about what was happening.

After the film Clambake in 1967, Elvis told people around him that it was the worst thing he had ever done. He said privately that Hollywood’s image of him was wrong and he knew it and couldn’t say anything about it. His cook at Graceland found him crying in the kitchen before his wedding in 1967 and asked why he didn’t just call it off.

He told her he didn’t have a choice. The man who had made King Creole was now singing Old MacDonald Had a Farm in a 1967 film called Double Trouble and Priscilla, watching that scene in a Netflix documentary decades later, used the word crime twice in a single sentence. She said it was a crime to put him in that situation and sing that song.

It made him a laughingstock, she said, and he knew it. Priscilla also told interviewers that in the late years of his Hollywood period, when the films had been grinding forward for years without any creative oxygen, she would hear Elvis in the middle of the night playing gospel music alone at the piano. The piano is still at Graceland.

Gospel was where he went when everything else had become unbearable, the director Jason Hehir said in 2024 after making a documentary about Elvis’s career. It was the safest place. It was the place that brought him the most joy. In 1967, at rock bottom creatively and spiritually, Elvis recorded How Great Thou Art.

It won him his first Grammy Award for best sacred performance. His first Grammy in 20 years of recording was for a gospel album he had made because the films had taken everything else away from him. The person who had gotten down on his knees in front of Nicholas Ray and recited James Dean’s lines from memory, the person who had held himself together shaking Marlon Brando’s hand at the Paramount commissary until he was safely outside, the person whose King Creole performance had drawn comparisons to Brando from New Orleans journalists and earned a headline from the New York Times that said, “Elvis Presley can act.” That person spent the next decade in Hawaii and Las Vegas and Acapulco singing songs he didn’t believe in to people who bought tickets because his name was on the marquee. He got out eventually. In December of 1968, the NBC comeback special proved to the world what it had almost forgotten.

The career that followed, the Elvis sound sessions, Suspicious Minds, In the Ghetto, the Vegas years at their peak, showed what happened when Elvis was given material he could actually work with. But he never made another film with a director of Curtis’s standing. He never had another role that gave him what Danny Fisher had given him.

The Academy Award that Elvis Presley had told reporters in 1956 was his greatest ambition remained exactly that, an ambition, something he had said out loud to interviewers before the decade that took it away from him had started. Between 1960 and 1968, Elvis made 27 films.

Most of them ran between two and four weeks of production. Parker had negotiated deals that paid Elvis $1 per picture plus a percentage of profits, which meant that short productions with guaranteed audiences were worth more than long ones with uncertain outcomes. The formula was consistent. Elvis plays a charming, ruthless young man who sings several songs, gets the girl, and resolves the conflict by the last reel.

The locations changed, Hawaii, Las Vegas, Acapulco, the American West, but the character did not. The songs were written to order, recorded quickly, released as soundtrack albums that the formula guaranteed would chart. From 1964 to 1968, Elvis had exactly one top 10 hit that was not connected to a film, a gospel recording called Crying in the Chapel that had actually been recorded in 1960 and sat in a vault for 5 years before being released.

He did not hide how he felt about what was happening. After the film Clambake in 1967, Elvis told people around him that it was the worst thing he had ever done. He said privately that Hollywood’s image of him was wrong and he knew it and couldn’t say anything about it. His cook at Graceland found him crying in the kitchen before his wedding in 1967 and asked why he didn’t just call it off.