When The Beatles Met Their Idol, Elvis Presley / Ray Connolly. In: Lit Hub Daily Dec 3, 2018

There’s an unwritten rule in entertainment that says you should never meet your idols—because nine times out of ten they will disappoint you. For John, Elvis Presley had already disappointed by appearing in vapid beach-boy movies since he’d left the US Army in 1960, and by making some mediocre records. All the same, although Hollywood stars had flocked to the Beatles when they’d first arrived in America, Elvis was, as John said, “the only person in the United States we really wanted to meet . . . though, I’m not sure that he wanted to meet us.”
So when, during a break in Los Angeles halfway through the tour, a young English journalist called Chris Hutchins engineered a summit between the Beatles and their one-time hero at Elvis’s home in Bel Air, the mood was tentative. Elvis had only agreed to it because the Colonel pushed him into it, believing that it would be good publicity. Now, however, he was no longer the 21-year-old rule-breaking and ground-breaking rebel who had inspired them almost a decade earlier.
No photographers were permitted to record the meeting, but if a picture had been taken it would show Elvis in a red shirt and black jerkin, his hair dyed black and lacquered like a helmet, being stared at by the four silent, shampooed, shaggy-haired English usurpers of his throne, John and Paul on either side of him on a horseshoe-shaped settee. Across his large sitting room were Priscilla Presley and some of her girlfriends, all overdressed for the occasion in party attire, who, in turn, gazed at the Beatles. Elvis was then 30 and John approaching his 25th birthday. But in the way the two men looked, and in their attitudes, there could have been a two-decade difference in age.
Uncomfortable with the awed silence, Elvis finally joked, “Well, if you guys are just going to stare at me, I’m going to bed.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/when-the-beatles-met-their-idol-elvis-presley/