6 Stars Who Have Had the Strangest Elvis Presley Encounters
For many celebrities, getting to meet Elvis was one of the peak perks of their career. Paul McCartney described meeting Elvis as “like a dream” (and said Elvis showed him and the other Beatles one of the first TV remote controls). Whitney Houston remembered that “just being in his presence was awesome.” Rick Springfield recalled meeting Elvis on a plane as “amazing.” Or even the time when the King himself wanted to meet Nixon.
For some other celebrities, however, meeting Elvis was a bit more … shall we say, unpredictable. But while some of these encounters may have been incredibly awkward for all involved, you can’t deny that no matter what, the King was always memorable.
These Celebrities had strange encounters meeting Elvis
Alice Cooper
In 1970, at the start of his shock-rocking career, Cooper was summoned to meet Elvis, he said in a 2012 BBC appearance. Arriving at the hotel, Cooper found that he wasn’t the only one — he was being joined by Liza Minnelli, Chubby Checker and Linda Lovelace. After telling Cooper that his performing with a snake was cool (“I wish I’d thought of that”), Presley handed him a loaded gun, and said he was going to teach him to disarm a gun-wielding assailant. Cooper said that he was briefly tempted to shoot, but Elvis did exactly what he said, and quickly disarmed him.
Despite this very unusual introduction, Cooper still came away with good memories of Elvis — he described Elvis as “an amazing character … a very funny guy.”
Liza Minnelli
And in case “Alice Cooper, Chubby Checker, Liza Minnelli and Linda Lovelace go up to Elvis’ hotel room” sounded so much like the beginning of a bad bar joke, you thought it couldn’t possibly be true … Liza Minnelli has told the same exact story! In a 2011 interview on The Graham Norton Show, Minnelli described Elvis showing up at her Las Vegas show and, because he was taken by one of her backup dancers, inviting the whole group back to his hotel suite. Once there, Minnelli tried to make small talk with the assembled Cooper, Checker and Lovelace, only for Elvis to make a dramatic entrance doing karate moves. Moments later, Elvis’ karate teacher also entered, and the two continued to spar in front of the assembled group. In spite of the very funky introduction, Minnelli recalled Elvis as “a nice man.”
Steve Martin
If weird celebrity encounters with Elvis have a theme, that theme might be the sudden and unexpected brandishing of loaded guns. In addition to the previously noted Alice Cooper meeting, Presley also pulled out a firearm (or three) when he met comedian Steve Martin. As Martin told Howard Stern in 2021, in 1971, he was opening for Ann-Margaret, and heard that Elvis was expected in the audience that night. Backstage, Martin spotted Elvis and Priscilla. Elvis asked Martin, “Want to see my guns?” Elvis then unloaded three different guns and handed them all to Martin to handle. In addition to gun handling skills, Elvis showed off some pretty spot-on comedy criticism; he told Martin, “Son, you have an oblique sense of humor.”
Shirley Bassey
As the songstress behind a raft of ’60s and ’70s hits told Graham Norton in 2003, she was performing in Vegas during one of Elvis’ runs in the city. She met Presley while wearing a jumpsuit cut down to her navel, and as the two talked, Bassey said, Elvis doodled with a pen on her exposed skin. When Bassey got up to her room, she claimed she saw that Elvis had doodled all the way to her belly button … and she didn’t shower for days, to preserve the marks.
Eric Clapton & Patti Boyd
In her 2007 memoir, Wonderful Tonight, Pattie Boyd recalls actually meeting Elvis twice — once with her first husband, George Harrison, and again with her second husband, Eric Clapton. Though she doesn’t have much to say about her first meeting with Presley, she fully dives into the second one, which took the form of an invitation for she and Clapton to join Presley at a movie, where she wrote: [Presley was] surrounded by henchmen, who stopped us as we made for the row Elvis was sitting in and told us to sit five rows back. Not so good. We found ourselves watching some boring old 1950s movie. At the end Elvis said, “Do you want to see another? We’re going to the theater next door.” It was a five-screen complex. We had visions of going from one to the next watching more boring fifties movies, so we made our excuses and left.
Brian Wilson
In a 2012 appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, the Beach Boys singer and songwriter told the story of perhaps the only weird Elvis story that actually ends with Elvis getting weirded out. While they were at the same recording complex, Brian Wilson invited Elvis into his studio to hear some song he was working on. Wilson then moved to karate chop Elvis; Elvis blocked the chop and said, “I’m leaving, I’m leaving” … and he did.
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