Epidemic Film Festival 2012: Interviews

Actress Millie Perkins co-starred with Elvis in Wild in the Country

YAM: Could you talk a little bit about working with Elvis Presley?
Millie Perkins: I played Elvis’s girlfriend in the movie Wild in the Country, Betty Lou. That was the second movie I did, after The Diary of Anne Frank. Elvis was really nice. I mean, he treated me very special. Not that he didn’t treat people special, but he thought of me as a very quality person and he wouldn’t let anyone swear around me. People always ask me, “What was Elvis like?” and I always say that shooting was all I knew at the time and all his gang were always there. After we started shooting a take, they’d start wrestling on the floor and I’d say, “He was like a puppy dog.” What can I say? That’s what he was like.

YAM: Do you have any favorite stories about him?
MP: I have a lot of stories about Elvis. When I was in the truck with Elvis he was supposed to sing to me and we were riding along in the truck. He was supposed to all of a sudden break out into song, you know, and I was not a big fan of Elvis. My younger sisters were. I thought, “Oh God this is so ridiculous” and I’m thinking to myself, “We haven’t rehearsed it,” and he has to sing a love song and I’m thinking, “Oh God, this is so stupid.” After he finishes he says to me, “God, that is so stupid.” He could do no wrong. I got to love him later on because my husband used to say, “He’s great,” and we’d go to Vegas and see Elvis. It was wonderful to see what a genius he was.

Elvis Presley with his parents Vernon and Gladys

YAM: You also played his mother in a film.
MP: Years later when Priscilla Presley was producing that miniseries called Elvis: The Early Years, I went in and read for it and Jerry Schilling, who was one of Elvis’s people, hired me to play his mother (Gladys Presley). Michael St. Gerard played Elvis and we shot it in Memphis. I met a lot of his relatives and I met two women, one was called Willie and the other Billie and they were two of Gladys’s best friends. Especially Willie. They would call me up and want to take me to lunch. They told me stories about Gladys that no one else had ever heard. She was wonderful. She was not this overbearing, alcoholic mother. Maybe in the later years she drank a bit, but she was a good mother.

It was Vernon (Elvis’s father) that was… there was a lot of problems with Vernon. They’d take me for a ride in the car and they’d say, “See that mental ward in there, the insane asylum?” We’d be driving the car with Gladys and she’d say, “See that place in there? If Elvis signs a contract with that Colonel Parker, that’s where I’m going to end up and Elvis will be dead before he’s forty.” She didn’t like Colonel Parker. She tried to talk him out of signing with him and Vernon insisted that he sign with him. He did a lot of good for Elvis in that he made him more famous, but he didn’t help Elvis to grow as a human being.

Michael St. Gerard as Elvis

They were wonderful. Willie and Billie used to every Christmas after we shot that – we shot it in 1990 – they would send me a Christmas card and put a dollar bill in the card as a present. They were sweet old ladies. I loved playing his mother. I loved playing Elvis’s mother because I got to know things that other people didn’t get to know because no one did the research on Gladys. They all had this opinion that she was an overpowering, dominating, alcoholic woman and she wasn’t, you know? She loved her son.