The two filmed for a couple of weeks together and would play catch and chat about baseball. It also turns out that Elvis wanted to speak with Kurt’s father Bing Russell, a film actor, who had featured in The Magnificent Seven. The King had seen Bing on the big screen and had a particularly sincere question for him.
Kurt, now 72, remembered: “He loved the way my dad wore his hat. He said, ‘Mr Russell, would you mind if I wore my hat that way?’ He was really serious about it.” Bing would go on to play the star’s father Vernon in Kurt’s Elvis TV biopic in 1979.
Yet before that, the future Hollywood star remembered going to see Elvis in concert twice in Las Vegas. The first time The King was in great shape, but the second show he was as much as 60 pounds overweight and the audience gasped at the sight of him. Nevertheless, Kurt defended him.
Kurt, who also went on to voice Elvis in Forrest Gump, remembered: “I’m telling you, God’s honest truth, thirty seconds later, he was Elvis. What I realised about that was, which I drew on later on, he was living it.
“He was just doing what he was doing, and had gone to the ‘oh, f*** it’ state, and he was fantastic. He knew it didn’t matter if he weighed a thousand pounds. The performance, it made it sort of even better. He was moving into a different zone, and becoming like Pavarotti, or something.”
