She walked in without knocking. That was the first thing Elvis noticed. Not the cigarette, not the eyes, not the way she filled the doorway with something that had nothing to do with physical size. It was that she walked in without knocking. The way people walk into rooms they have decided belong to them before anyone else has been consulted on the matter.
Elvis stood up. This was automatic. the tupelo reflex, the thing Glattis had drilled into him before he was old enough to understand why. The specific response to a woman entering a room. He stood up and she looked at him doing it and something moved in her expression that was not quite amusement but was in the same neighborhood.
Sit down, B. Davis said, I’m not the Queen of England. She paused. Although she said some would argue the point. What happened in the next 40 minutes in that Paramount Studios breakroom in the spring of 1960 would stay with Elvis for the rest of his life. Not because of what was said first, because of what was said last and because of what happened in the space between them before she said it.
Paramount Studios in 1960 had the specific atmosphere of a place that has been producing dreams long enough to have developed its own dreams, its own mythology, its own ghosts, its own particular quality of light in the afternoons when the sun came through the lot at a low angle and made the false fronts of the standing sets look for a moment like something that could be believed.
Elvis had been here for 3 weeks. He had come from the army and from 2 years of managed absence and from the specific determination of a man who has been away from what he does and come back with a clearer sense of what he wants to do with it. He wanted to act not the way he had acted in the films before the army, the vehicle films, the musical films, the films that had been built around his name rather than around any particular dramatic purpose.
He wanted to actually act and he had convinced himself with the optimism of someone who has recently succeeded at something difficult that the wanting was enough to make it possible. Hal Wallace had other ideas about what the film should be. Elvis was working through this privately in the way he worked through most things that troubled him without announcing the trouble, without the performance of difficulty, but carrying it in the specific way of someone whose interior and exterior have learned to run on separate tracks. The breakroom was where he went when the tracks needed to run separately for a while. It was a small room, a table, chairs, a coffee machine that produced something approximating coffee, a window that looked out onto the lot’s service road, not a room that appeared in any studio publicity material, a room for people who needed to be somewhere quiet for a
few minutes without explaining why. He had been there for 20 minutes when the door opened. B. Davis was 52 years old in 1960, which in Hollywood years was a different kind of age than 52 is anywhere else. She had been famous since before Elvis was born, had won the Academy Award twice, had fought the studio system in the 1930s with a directness that was considered shocking at the time, and that had produced both a lawsuit and a contract renegotiation in her favor, which was the kind of outcome that directness rarely produces, and that said something about the specific quality of her directness. She was not sweet. She had never been sweet. sweetness, she had decided early, was a costume that the industry asked women to wear, and that she was not interested in wearing, and the decision had cost her things and produced other things, and she had made her peace with
the accounting. She looked at the young man who had stood up when she entered the room. He was 25 years old and had cheekbones that the camera had understood before any director had fully understood what to do with them. And he was looking at her with the combination of recognition and composure and something underneath both that was not quite what he was showing on the surface.
She recognized the underneath part. She had worn a version of it herself for 30 years. She sat down across from him. You’re the one they’re calling the next James Dean, she said. Some people, Elvis said. What do you think? He looked at her for a moment. I think James Dean was James Dean, he said. I’m trying to figure out what I am.
Bet picked up her cigarette from the ashtray she had placed on the table with the confidence of someone who had decided the ashtray would be there before she arrived. Good answer, she said. Most of them can’t resist the comparison. It does something to them. Makes them puff up. She looked at him. You didn’t puff up. It doesn’t seem accurate, Elvis said, puffing up over something that isn’t true. B.
looked at him for a moment longer than the look required. Something had shifted in the room, and neither of them had announced it. They talked about acting, or rather Elvis talked about acting, about what he thought it was and what he was trying to learn and where he felt he was failing. And Bet listened with the quality of someone who has been in the same conversation before, but has not heard it from this particular angle.
She looked at him and occasionally drew on her cigarette, and let the silence do what silence does when it is not being managed. He talked about the problem of the films, about the feeling that what was being asked of him was a performance of Elvis Presley rather than an attempt at a character, and that he was not sure how to ask for something different without seeming ungrateful for what he had. “You’re not ungrateful,” Beth said.
“You’re accurate. There’s a difference. They don’t always see it that way.” “No,” she said. “They don’t. They want the version of you that sells tickets, which is not the same as the version of you that is interesting. She flicked Ash. This is not a new problem. This is the only problem Hollywood has ever had.
Elvis was quiet for a moment. How did you handle it? He said. Beth looked at him. I didn’t handle it, she said. I fought it, which is different. Handling implies management. I was not interested in managing. I was interested in winning. She paused. I didn’t always win, but I never managed.
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Elvis looked at her with the quality of attention she had noticed when she walked in. Not the performed attention of someone who is being polite, but the actual thing, the listening of someone who is gathering something they intend to use. What made you think you could win? He said. Bet was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, “I knew what I had and I knew they needed it more than I needed their approval.” She set the cigarette down. “Once you know that, really know it, the negotiation changes entirely.” Elvis looked at the table. “I’m not sure I know what I have,” he said. “And here is where the conversation changed direction. Here is where B.
Davis looked at Elvis Presley across a breakroom table at Paramount Studios and said the thing she had been forming since she walked through the door without knocking. She leaned forward slightly, not toward him exactly, toward the conversation in the way of someone who has decided that what comes next requires a different proximity.
“You have one real talent,” she said. Her voice had dropped from the register she used for ordinary conversation. and I want to be very clear with you. It isn’t singing. The room was very quiet. Elvis looked at her. He did not respond immediately, did not fill the silence with the defensive reflex or the deflecting humor that the statement could have invited.
He looked at her the way he had been looking at her since she sat down directly with the quality of someone who has decided that what is being said is worth receiving fully before anything else happens. What is it? he said. Bet held his gaze. You walk into a room, she said, “And every person in that room feels something they were not feeling before you walked in.
Not because of your face, not because of your voice, because of,” She paused with the pause of someone choosing a word carefully. “Because of what you carry.” Whatever it is that you carry, when you’re in a space, it becomes available to the people in that space. They feel it.
They don’t know why they feel it, but they feel it. She picked up the cigarette again. That is a talent. That is, in my experience, the rarest talent, and it has almost nothing to do with technique. Elvis was still. Most people in this industry, B continued, have the technique without the substance. They can hit their marks and remember their lines and modulate their voice and they produce something that is entirely correct and entirely empty.
She looked at him. You have the substance. Whether you develop the technique is a separate question, but the substance, she stopped. You cannot learn the substance. You either have it or you don’t. The cigarette smoke moved between them. Elvis looked at her for a long moment. How do you now? He said, “You just met me.” Bet smiled.
It was not the smile of someone pleased with a compliment. It was the smile of someone who has been asked a question they have a genuine answer to. Because, she said, I’ve been in this business for 30 years, and I can count on one hand the people who walked into a room and made me feel something before they said a word. She paused.
You’re on the list. Elvis said nothing. The room held the weight of what she had said in the specific way of rooms that have heard true things without ceremony, without diminishment, simply present. She told him about the years she had fought, not as a story of triumph, as a map.
The specific decisions she had made, the things she had refused, the moments when the industry had told her she was finished, and she had disagreed with a precision that was not bravery exactly, but something more practical. The knowledge that what she had was real, and that real things do not become unreal because someone in a position of authority decides they are inconvenient.
They will try to replace the substance with the surface, she said. They will build the surface around you until you cannot find yourself inside it. This is not malice. It is efficiency. The surface is easier to manufacture and easier to sell. She looked at him directly. Do not let them mistake you for the surface.
Elvis looked at the table. He was thinking about something. She could see him thinking about it. The interior visible in the expression. the processing happening in real time. I’m not always sure which one is which anymore. The surface and the other thing. Bet was quiet for a moment. I know that is the danger.
That is the only real danger. She paused. The surface is comfortable. The surface is applauded. The surface gets the reviews in the box office and the magazine covers. Another pause. The substance is what you lie awake thinking about at 3:00 in the morning. The thing that keeps not being satisfied no matter how much the surface gets.
She looked at him. You know what I’m talking about. Yes, Elvis said. Good, she said. Hold on to that. The 3:00 feeling. It means you haven’t lost it yet. She stood. She picked up her cigarette case from the table with the economy of movement she brought to everything. And then she did something that the assistant, who had come to the doorway with two coffees, who had stopped in the corridor when she heard the voices and had not announced herself and had heard most of what was said, would describe 30 years later as the moment she understood that she had witnessed something that was not in the category of ordinary. B. Davis leaned across the table. She reached forward and adjusted the collar of Elvis’s shirt. A small practical gesture, a single movement, a matter of perhaps two seconds. And in the closing of that distance, in the proximity that the gesture required, she looked at his
face from a few inches away with the eyes that had been looking at people for 52 years, and had learned to see what was actually there rather than what was being presented. She held that proximity for 1 second longer than the collar adjustment required. Then she stepped back. Don’t waste it, she said.
She walked out. She did not look back. Elvis sat in the breakroom for a while after she left. The coffee machine made its sound. The lot’s service road was visible through the window, ordinary in the afternoon light. The ashtray B had placed on the table still had the last of her cigarette in it, sending up a thin line of smoke that moved in no particular direction.
He was thinking about what she had said. Not about the technique. He had heard enough about technique, about the other part, the substance, the thing that kept not being satisfied. The 3:00 feeling, the difference between the surface that was applauded and the thing underneath that kept moving regardless of the applause.
He knew what she was talking about. He had known what she was talking about before she said it. He had been carrying it for years. The specific restlessness of someone who is receiving everything the external world has decided constitutes success and who is aware in a way they cannot fully articulate that the receiving is not the thing and the thing is somewhere else.
And the question is whether they will find it before the external world convinces them that the receiving was the point all along. He sat with this for a while. Then he stood up. He picked up his script from the table. The script for the film he was working on. The film that was not what he wanted it to be and that he was going to make anyway because that was the current condition of the negotiation.
He looked at it for a moment. Then he put it down again. He walked to the window and looked out at the lot, at the false fronts and the service roads and the ordinary afternoon machinery of a place that manufactured a particular version of reality for export to the rest of the world. He thought about the 3:00 feeling.
He thought about the substance. He thought about a woman who had walked into a room without knocking 30 years ago and had decided in the face of everything the industry told her about what she was and what she should be that she knew better. He thought about the caller. The assistant who had been in the doorway, a young woman named Grace, 23 years old, 3 months into her job at Paramount, told the story in 1991 in an interview about the early 1960s Hollywood studio system.
She had been asked about memorable moments she had witnessed in her years there. She had told several stories, but the one she told last, the one she described as the one she had thought about most across the 30 years since, was this one. Two people in a breakroom at Paramount Studios, a caller adjusted, a cigarette, a sentence about one real talent.
I don’t know if he took what she said seriously, Grace said. I don’t know if it changed anything, but I know what his face looked like when she walked out. She paused. He looked like someone who had been told something they already knew and had been waiting without knowing they were waiting for someone else to say out loud. She stopped.
“That’s a rare thing,” she said. “To have someone say out loud the thing you already know. It’s rare.” Another pause. Bet Davis could do that. She could see what was there and say it directly without softening it and without cruelty, just directly. She looked at whoever she was telling it to.
I think that afternoon he needed someone to do that. She thought for a moment. I think he knew exactly what his talent was, she said. I think he’d always known. I think what he needed was for someone who had no reason to flatter him to confirm it. She paused one last time. She had no reason to flatter him. She didn’t need anything from him.
She just saw it and said so. She looked at the table. That was B. Davis. That was exactly who she
