On July 9, 1963, two of the hottest young stars in Hollywood were introduced on a soundstage at MGM. They looked at each other and said the exact same words at the exact same time: “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Both of them laughed. And that was the start of one of the most talked-about pairings in Elvis Presley’s whole career.
The other star was Ann-Margret, a 22-year-old singer and dancer born in Sweden and raised in Illinois. She’d just lit up the screen in Bye Bye Birdie, a musical released that April. Years later, she wrote that her team had seen a need in Hollywood for “a female Elvis Presley.”
Now they were making a movie together. It was called Viva Las Vegas.
Elvis played Lucky Jackson, a race car driver who comes to Las Vegas for a big race and needs cash for a new engine. Ann-Margret played Rusty Martin, the hotel’s swimming teacher, who isn’t easily impressed by a guy with a guitar.
Most of the filming happened in Las Vegas that July, with the cast staying at the Sahara Hotel. They shot at the Flamingo pool, Lake Mead and a skeet range at the Tropicana.
You can see the spark between them in this scene, where Rusty pushes Lucky up on stage.
Rusty (Ann-Margret) Convinces Lucky (Elvis Presley) To Perform
Off camera, things got complicated.
The director, George Sidney, had a real soft spot for Ann-Margret. He’d directed her in Bye Bye Birdie too, and he gave her careful lighting and plenty of time for her dance numbers.
That didn’t sit well with the Elvis camp. Sidney later claimed, “The only problem was Elvis didn’t want the girl Ann-Margret to have any close-ups.” His answer, by his own telling, was that he was directing the picture and he’d do it his way.
The money was a sore spot as well. The movie went over its $1 million budget, and Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, reportedly clashed with Sidney over how much film went into Ann-Margret’s scenes.
But the two stars got along just fine. They shared a love of music and motorcycles, and they fell for each other fast.
There was one big problem. Elvis already had a girlfriend back home in Memphis, Priscilla Beaulieu, the young woman he’d later marry. The gossip columns soon caught on to what was happening in Vegas.
The title song, written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, became a hit and later turned into an unofficial anthem for Las Vegas itself.
Elvis Presley, The Jordanaires – Viva Las Vegas (Official Audio)
When the film came out in May 1964, it took in more than $9 million at the box office and landed at No. 14 on Variety’s list of the year’s top-grossing films, one of the biggest hits of Elvis’s movie career.
The romance didn’t last. Elvis married Priscilla in Las Vegas on May 1, 1967, and Ann-Margret married actor Roger Smith a week later, also in Vegas.
Still, they never really let go of each other. Years later, Ann-Margret opened up about what Elvis meant to her.
Ann Margret talks about Elvis
According to her 1994 memoir, every time she opened a show in the 1970s, a bouquet of red roses shaped like a guitar arrived from Elvis.
The only opening he missed was her Las Vegas show on August 16, 1977. That was the day he died.