Elaine Dundy in her new biography Elvis and Gladys. points out that Tennesee Williams’s reaction to an encounter with Elvis Presley was to drop what he was doing and go feverishly back to work on his playOrpheus.
She suggests that the fellow-Mississippian Elvis was the model for the guitar-wielding, snakeskin-jacketed, quintessentially sexual Val, who is torn apart by the forces of corruption.
This is evident in Act Two which begins with a scene in which his dammed-up employer jealously interrogates him.
Lady: Did you walk around in front of her that way?
Val: (Elvis) What way?
Lady: Slew-foot, slew-foot!
(He regards her closely with good-humoured perplexity)
Did you stand in front of her like that?
That close? In that, that – position?
Val: What position?
Lady: Ev’rything you do is suggestive!
Val: Suggestive of what?
It fits. Elvis was initially bemused by his own magnetism in exactly that way. His musical mastery was the fruit of a long and hard apprenticeship, and it is obvious from his films that he had great natural talent as an actor.
If he had not been so jealously shielded from contact with serious artists, if he had fallen into the professional clutches of Kazan and Williams, who knows what might have resulted?
This must be one of the saddest might-have-beens of theatrical history.
She suggests that the fellow-Mississippian Elvis was the model for the guitar-wielding, snakeskin-jacketed, quintessentially sexual Val, who is torn apart by the forces of corruption.
This is evident in Act Two which begins with a scene in which his dammed-up employer jealously interrogates him.
Lady: Did you walk around in front of her that way?
Val: (Elvis) What way?
Lady: Slew-foot, slew-foot!
(He regards her closely with good-humoured perplexity)
Did you stand in front of her like that?
That close? In that, that – position?
Val: What position?
Lady: Ev’rything you do is suggestive!
Val: Suggestive of what?
It fits. Elvis was initially bemused by his own magnetism in exactly that way. His musical mastery was the fruit of a long and hard apprenticeship, and it is obvious from his films that he had great natural talent as an actor.
If he had not been so jealously shielded from contact with serious artists, if he had fallen into the professional clutches of Kazan and Williams, who knows what might have resulted?
This must be one of the saddest might-have-beens of theatrical history.
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