BLUE HAWAII: ELVIS SLEPT HERE

IF you invited the rels and best friends to your wedding in a derelict hotel that’d been abandoned for over a decade, they’d have good grounds for suggesting you’d lost it.

But in Hawaii they’re queuing up for just such an opportunity.

Then again this is no ordinary abandoned pub: this is the old Coco Palms Hotel on the island of Kauai, and it became the world’s best-known hostelry when Chad Gates married his girlfriend Maile Duval there in 1961.

If you think it’s now we who’ve lost it, Chad was in fact Elvis Presley and Maile was Joan Blackman, and they tied the knot in one of the most-watched movies ever, Blue Hawaii.

Chad, if you’ve forgotten, had returned from a stint in the Army and become a tour guide with his girlfriend Maile, leading five pretty young things around Hawaii.

While doing so he sang and danced his way through Blue Hawaii, Almost Always True, Rock-A-Hula Baby, Beach Boy Blues, Hawaiian Sunset, Moonlight Swim, No More, Slicin’ Sand, Hawaiian Wedding Song, Island of Love and Can’t Help Falling in Love…

It was the biggest number of songs ever in an Elvis movie, and the soundtrack album topped the charts for 20 consecutive weeks… and interestingly Presley was just 26 years old when he made Blue Hawaii, while Angela Lansbury who played his dizzy Mom, was only a mere eleven years older.

As a result of the movie’s success couples flocked to the Coco Palms from around the world to be married on the same Wedding Barge as Presley and Blackman on the man-made lagoon amid the hotel’s 2000 coconut palms.

Others poured in simply to pose outside the bungalows that had been built especially for Elvis and his co-stars, or next to the Wedding Barge.

But although parts of South Pacific, Pagan Love Song and TV’s Fantasy Island were amongst the many films and TV soaps made in and around the hotel, nothing could compare with the impact of Blue Hawaii.

The hotel’s future came to a crashing halt, however, in 1992. In September of that year Hurricane Iniki, with winds of up to 300kmh raged across Kauai, trashing the Coco Palms.

While the hotel building and the bungalows of the stars and their support crew remained standing, most windows were blown out, doors torn off their hinges, every room flooded, and furniture flung hundreds of metres through the plantation; some items were found on a beach nearly a kilometre away.

The hotel has been empty since, but last year a group of investors announced plans for a new Coco Palms Resort with a hotel, residential blocks and time-share apartments.

Its due to open in mid-2008 with plans including the famous Hawaiian “Call to the Feast” ceremonial torch lighting once-again an evening feature … as it had been during the old Coco Palms’ glory days, and was in Blue Hawaii.

But it’s to be hoped Elvis’ bizarre food passions won’t be emulated.

Throughout filming of Blue Hawaii in 1961, breakfasts for The King consisted of toasted bacon and egg sandwiches, and for every lunch and dinner it was ‘burgers with fries.

And in-between he had a cook on standby to whip-up his favourite snack: peanut butter and banana sandwiches, deep fried.

If you’d like to visit the Coco Palms Hotel during a Kauai visit your hotel tour desk can arrange it with a private tour company that has exclusive rights; walk-ins are not permitted.

And yes, travel agents who specialise in off-shore weddings can arrange for you to get married on the Blue Hawaii Wedding Barge as it drifts down the lagoon…