My first visit to Los Angeles was during my Christmas respite from home building in 1956. On that trip I met James Dean's great actress friend Christine White and walked the Hollywood streets that my favorite stars walked before me, never imagining I would ever have my own taste of celebrity. I had passed through the city on tours since then, and while the scene was entirely different than the scene in New York, I knew that an exodus of New York had begun. Los Angeles - Hollywood- had always been known for movie making but now it seemed television shows were leaving the cold weather of the east for the warm weather of the west.
Just before he left New York Bobby Darin and I had been talking about producing one of my songs into a record for me. Bobby went to Los Angeles to make the movie "Come September" which also starred his future wife and the mother of his only son, Dodd, Sandra Dee.
Elvis was based in LA too. I caught up with him and stayed at his suite in a hotel while he was making "G.I. Blues." Now that more movies were ahead for him, he was renting a home in Bel Air.
One of my brothers decided that he wanted to try living in Los Angeles for a while too, so I met up with him in Winston-Salem, we loaded up his old car and drove it across the country. We pulled into Elvis' driveway in Bel Air. Joe Esposito came out and demanded that we remove the "bucket of bolts" because it made Elvis' luxury cars "look bad." Before we could put the key in the ignition, Elvis came out, heard Joe, and said, "You leave that car right there. It looks fine."
Elvis liked my brother. "He's country, just like my cousins," he said. He meant Gene and Billy Smith, the two men who started with him as members of his entourage when he first came into fame and would be there when he died.
Here's a Youtube Presentation of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, with Bobby singing "Once Upon A Time"
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