etal stands and microphone cables and the particular organized chaos that preceded every broadcast. “I wanted to say something to you before we got in front of the cameras,” Sinatra said. He turned his glass of water on the table with two fingers, a slow half rotation, and then stopped. “Because once we’re out there, it’ll be business, and this isn’t business.
” Elvis waited. “I said some things about your music. You know what I said?” “Yes, sir.” Sinatra looked at him directly. “I was wrong about the music. I didn’t understand it.” He paused, and the pause was not evasive, but deliberate, as though he was making sure each word was placed correctly before moving to the next.
“I understood what it was doing to a certain kind of crowd, and I made a judgment based on that. But I was wrong about the music itself. There’s something in it that I couldn’t hear at the time.” Sinatra stopped again and looked down at the glass. “Maybe I didn’t want to hear it.” Elvis felt something shift in his chest.
He was aware of the strangeness of the moment, that this man who had once reduced him to a slogan was sitting 2 ft away in rolled-up shirt sleeves, and there was no audience for this, no column inches to fill, no angle to work. There was only the lamp and the two chairs and whatever this was. “You don’t have to say that,” Elvis said.
“I know I don’t,” Sinatra said. “That’s why I’m saying it.” There was a pause that was not uncomfortable. Outside, someone called a name down the corridor, and the name echoed and then was gone. “I heard your album before they shipped you out,” Sinatra said. “The ballads.” “Elvis’ Christmas album,” Sinatra said, not entirely without irony.
Elvis almost smiled. “But then I put on King Creole, and I sat with that for a while.” He seemed to be constructing something precise here, something he had rehearsed not in the theatrical sense, but in the way a man rehearses an apology when he wants to be honest and not merely sorry. “There’s a thing that happens in your voice on the slow songs.
There’s something in the break of it.” “You do something in the middle register that sounds like a man trying to hold something together while he’s singing about it falling apart.” Sinatra looked up. “I know that sound. I’ve been trying to make that sound my entire career.” Elvis did not know what to do with this. He was not accustomed to being spoken to this way, with precision, with a vocabulary of craft, by someone whose relationship to that craft was as long and complicated as Sinatra’s.
He had spent the past 2 years surrounded by men who had known exactly what they thought of him from the moment they knew his name, and it had required a continuous small discipline to remain himself inside that. To not let the aggregate weight of other people’s certainty flatten him into either the idol or the joke.
“I was 15 when I first really listened to you,” Elvis said. He said it simply, without the performance of humility that would have made it graceless. “My mama had a record. Not one for my baby. She had Come Fly With Me. She played it on Sunday mornings.” He stopped. The memory was sitting very close to the surface, the way certain memories did now, since Germany, since the phone call.
“You know how to sing loss,” he said. “I don’t think I knew that was something you could learn. I thought it was just something some people had.” Sinatra was quiet for a moment. “You think you have it? I don’t know, Elvis said. I think I might have it now. He didn’t explain what he meant by now. He didn’t need to.
Sinatra nodded slowly as though this made a kind of sense he was filing away. They sat for another minute without speaking and it was the kind of silence that exists between two people who have arrived at the same place by entirely different roads and are each privately surprised by the view. Then Sinatra stood and the informality folded itself away with his movement.
The sleeves still rolled but his bearing resuming a certain organized authority. He extended his hand and Elvis took it and the handshake was brief and firm and said something that neither of them put into words. One other thing, Sinatra said. He picked his jacket up from the chair. When we’re out there and he made a small gesture toward the stage somewhere beyond the walls.
Just do what you do. Don’t adjust for the room. His eyes were steady and direct. You’ve been adjusting for other people’s rooms your whole life. It shows. He moved toward the door, jacket over one arm, and then he stopped without turning around. Did the army take anything from you? He asked. His voice was quiet, not casual.
Elvis considered this. It was the question underneath every other question he had been asked since he landed at McGuire Air Force Base and nobody had asked it this directly. It took some things, Elvis said. I’m trying to figure out if they were things I needed. Sinatra turned the door handle. Aren’t we all? he said and left.
Elvis sat in the chair for another moment after the door Somewhere in the building the rehearsal was waiting and the cameras were waiting and the America that had saved his seat for two years was waiting with a particular held breath quality, not entirely sure who was going to walk out on at He thought about his mother’s kitchen and the radio playing on Sunday mornings.
He thought about a barracks in Friedberg and the specific way snow fell there, heavier and more deliberate than Tennessee snow. He thought about a notebook he had kept during basic training in which he had written down song ideas the way another man might have written down prayers. He stood.
He straightened the bow tie that didn’t need straightening. When he walked out onto the stage 40 minutes later, something in the room changed. Not the screaming. The screaming was always the screaming, the frequency the world had agreed to broadcast him on. But underneath it there was something else, a watching, the kind that happens when people are not sure whether they are seeing something familiar or something new and are not yet sure which they want it to be.
Sinatra was at the microphone already. He turned when Elvis appeared and his smile was the public smile, the one the camera loved, and he made the kind of gracious introduction he was famous for. But then, before Elvis reached the microphone, Sinatra did something small that lasted less than a second and was noticed by almost no one.
He stepped back, half a step perhaps, not away but to the side, not deferring exactly, making room. Elvis came to the microphone. He looked out at the audience, at the lights, at the room full of people who had been waiting without entirely knowing what they were waiting for. He sang, not the way he had been singing before Germany, not the boy with the rubber legs and the nervous energy that could fill any silence.
