by Alanna Nash
“I would love to meet you just to say hello if you’re not too busy,” Elvis told the president at the close of his letter. Then as soon as they landed, penniless in Washington, Elvis insisted on dropping off his missive at the White House gates. It was 6:30 A.M. Elvis then had the limousine service take them to the Hotel Washington to await Nixon’s call.
Later that day, Joyce Bova was sitting at her desk looking over the Naval Court of Inquiry on the Pueblo incident. Her phone buzzed.
“My name is Jerry Schilling,” said the voice on the other end. “I’m a friend of Elvis Presley.”
She was too astonished to say anything.
“It’s because of Elvis that I’m calling. In fact, he’s here in Washington, and he wants to see you.”
“Put him . . . put Elvis on the phone.”
He was contrite now and told her he hadn’t been himself that night she walked out on him. He came to Washington, he said, to ask her to forgive him.
She wasn’t even sure what to say.
“How did you find me here, anyway? I never gave you this number.”
“It wasn’t easy! I had Schilling here calling all over Congress looking for you.”
Then he went through the whole thing, how he’d been there a few days before, then went on to California. But he’d tell her about all that later. Right now, all he wanted to do was find out where to send the car.
“And honey? Bring your sister.”
From then on, “Elvis always wanted my sister to come see him, too. He was acutely aware of our closeness and understood that ‘thing’ between twins and wanted it so badly himself. He always made her feel welcome anytime, anywhere, which was one of the qualities that was so precious about him and very important to me.”
By the time Joyce and Janice saw Elvis at the hotel that night, Sonny West had joined him, and Elvis had another story to tell: Outrageously dressed in his best “Vegas does D.C.” outfit—a velvet coat topping a black suede suit, a massive gold belt given to him by the International, glittering chains circling his neck, tinted sunglasses, and a cane—he got his meeting with the president in the Oval Office. He also came away with a promise of his cherished badge. John Finlator turned him down, but the president, who later said how much he had liked his visitor, wanted him to have it.
In a bizarre way, Elvis and Nixon hit it off. When the White House photographer was setting up his equipment, Nixon looked at Elvis and gave him a poke. “You dress kind of strange, don’t you?”
“Well, Mr. President,” Elvis said with a smile, “you got your show, and I got mine.”
Later that evening, Elvis and Sonny drove Joyce home in the limo. She gathered her things and returned with him to the hotel. It was December 21, 1970, the first time she spent the night with Elvis Presley.
“You’re a beautiful woman, and you’re a pure little girl, too, aren’t you?” he said sweetly.
They were sitting on the edge of the bed, and she was wearing a flimsy nightgown. She put her fingers to his lips.
“Joyce, I know this is new for you, but it’s right, believe me.”
Her stomach was in knots. He’d had a very big day. He’d met the president. And soon he would have a really cool new badge. It was no time to disillusion him with confessions.
Elvis and Priscilla at the Junior Chamber of Commerce luncheon, January 16, 1971. Surrounding them are Charlie Hodge (left, clapping), Sonny West (between), Red West (right), and Jerry Schilling (far right, middle). (Dave Darnell/the Commercial Appeal)
Chapter Thirty
“A Prince from Another Planet ”
For his thirty-sixth birthday, Elvis tricked out his new light blue Mercedes with all manner of law enforcement gear—a police radio, a revolving blue light, chemical weapons, and handcuffs. Then he spent the next few days buying $3,500 worth of additional guns and police equipment. If he couldn’t be an officer, at least he could play cop.
In D.C. he’d had the limo driver pull over at the scene of a terrible accident one night on the rain-slicked Baltimore–Washington Parkway. Someone had hit a car and driven it across two lanes, and it ended up a tangled wreck. Inside, an injured woman lay across the front seat. Elvis approached a policeman standing in a rain cape, water pouring down the visor of his cap.
“Officer, can I help with anything? I’m Elvis Presley.”
Joyce was standing behind him and saw the policeman’s stunned expression in the glare of his flashlight, his mouth agape, his eyes fixed in a wide-open stare. Before he could finally find the words, Elvis moved on. Now he was kneeling down beside the woman.
“Hi, ya. How you doin’?” He tried to sound friendly and calm.
The woman was dazed, but whether it was from the accident or who she saw crouched in front of her, Joyce wasn’t sure. She saw her mouth moving a bit.
“She’s trying to say something,” Joyce pointed out.
“Just relax, ma’am,” Elvis said, “and tell me what you need.”
“Are you . . . really Elvis Presley?” Joyce worried the poor woman thought she had died and gone to heaven.
The ambulance was coming now. They could hear the siren and see another policeman waving traffic around.
“You’re going to be all right,” Elvis told her, and then he went on his way.
Now he never left Graceland without his blue police light, his long flashlight, a billy club, and at least two guns. “He’d put on his uniform and go out and stop traffic—pull a guy over, tell him he was driving too fast, and give him a safety lecture,” Billy Smith remembers. Elvis may have been impersonating an officer, but he couldn’t write anyone a ticket, so he carried a pad to scribble out an autograph, and handed it through the car window as if it were a citation.
More and more, he saw himself as a patriot and humanitarian, a person put in an extraordinary position to make a difference, especially after the Junior Chamber of Commerce of America honored him as one of the nation’s Ten Outstanding Young Men of the Year on January 16, 1971. It put him in the company of past winners Leonard Bernstein, Orson Welles, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
That night at the awards ceremony at Ellis Auditorium, he would make his famous acceptance speech. (“When I was a child, ladies and gentlemen, I was a dreamer. . . .”) But at the press conference at the prayer breakfast that morning, he took the chance to say what was really on his mind: “I don’t go along with music advocating drugs and desecration of the flag. I think an entertainer is for entertaining and to make people happy.”
Priscilla was by his side that day, and she would come for the opening and close of his Vegas engagement in January and February. But Joyce was there in between. It was the first time they had made love during a time when he was “Elvis Presley.” She found that “his private nature was to be soft and tender, playful and cuddly rather than boldly erotic,” but that when she went to bed with the “performer,” something of the orgiastic frenzy of the crowd came with him.
Still there was some of that sweetness. He was glad to have met Janice the month before, he told Joyce. “I understood that until your twin gave her blessing to us, you . . . well . . . you wouldn’t be able to give yourself to me.”
But now Elvis had turned Joyce into the Priscilla of old, with the same bouffant hair and the eye makeup, and she was mistaken for her and beseeched for autographs more than ever. As with Priscilla, he also gave her pills to sleep, getting Joyce hooked on Placidyls. She was worried about herself, but she was more worried about him, about what all those books were doing to him.
“I have a serious message for the world,” he told her. “I have powers, Joyce, that I don’t go bragging about. I could announce them to the world.”
“Why don’t you?” she asked.
“People aren’t ready for me to announce that yet.”
When Elvis started messianic talk like that around Dr. Nick, the physician thought it was more of a game, “a conversation piece, something he would do to entertain himself and others.” A couple of
the guys thought Elvis really believed he could heal people. But Dr. Nick was sometimes there when he’d do the laying on of hands: “He’d wink at you, like, ‘I really don’t believe in all of this, but I’m going through the motions and saying these things.’ ”
Whether or not he had “powers,” he was a master planner at covering his tracks. That January, in Vegas, he was particularly adept, bringing Sherry Williams in as soon as Joyce flew out. She spent most of the month of February with him there, where he gave her a TLC pendant. He also shared the A & D ointment he used to keep his lips soft, because “we’d kiss so passionately that I’d get the worst razor burn on my cheeks. It hurt so much, but I loved it.” He never forced any drugs on her and paid off her car when she refused to let him buy her a new one. “He was a huge impact on my life, all positive and fun. Nothing he ever said or did was negative toward me in any way.”
When still other girls came in, Sherry stayed in his suite on the twenty-ninth floor. “I had very mixed feelings about it . . . for a sheltered, eighteen-year-old girl. If it wasn’t me, it was going to be someone else, so I rationalized it.” At first, she didn’t know about the other girls he had there at the same time. She was always told it was Priscilla. “I was very naïve. But I don’t begrudge him for that. If anybody could get away with it, it was Elvis!”
She would go back in August and then again when he returned to Vegas the following year. All together, she saw more than fifty of his shows. One time he sang “Just Pretend” and pointed over to her booth. Another time, he sang one of their special songs for her, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Until It’s Time for You to Go,” a lover’s ballad about an affair that can never grow into a real relationship.
He was still thinking about Ann-Margret, who was wrestling with her own demons now. Suffering from depression, she was hurtful to her husband and her mother, and her social drinking had slipped into alcoholism. Seeing Elvis at her shows, sitting in the back booth, or coming onstage, doing a knee slide and stopping just at her feet, didn’t help.
That February 1971 she came into Vegas a few days early for her engagement, and Elvis invited her and Roger to a party at his suite, where he told her to stand perfectly still, and then demonstrated karate chops all around her face to show off his prowess. She knew that “a mistake of a mere millimeter could kill me, injure me severely, at the least. But I trusted him implicitly.” Then she felt a breeze as he reeled off several punches. When he finished, he shook his head.
“You know, you’re crazy,” he told her, his voice full of so many emotions.
She smiled. “So are you.”
Before long, he’d accidentally break another guest’s ankle with a karate kick and, in the recording studio, send a gun flying out of Red’s hand and straight through Chip Young’s handmade guitar.
In the middle of March Priscilla flew to California to supervise the continuing redecoration of the Monovale house, while Elvis went to Nashville to meet Felton Jarvis at RCA’s Studio B. Felton needed a lot from him this time—a pop album, a holiday LP, a gospel record, and some singles—and hoped they would have a marathon session like last time. But it wasn’t to be. He had folk songs on his mind, especially Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” And at 1:30 A.M., normally a productive time for him, he called off the session. He was having increasing pain in his eye, he said, probably just a flare-up of that infection from December.
When it worsened the next day, he called Dr. Nick, who flew in with Dr. David Meyer, an ophthalmologist. Dr. Meyer first treated Elvis at his hotel and then admitted him to Nashville’s Baptist Memorial Hospital. His diagnosis: iritis, probably a constancy from the dye he used to color his eyelashes, Dr. Nick thought, and secondary glaucoma.
Barbara Leigh came to visit him, flying in from California and staying in the doctors’ quarters when she wasn’t lying right in the hospital bed with him. “I held his hand while they shot him in the eyeball, but I looked the other way. He was brave and didn’t make a peep.” The very word glaucoma made him think he was going blind, so Barbara understood when he flew in girlfriends one at a time to stay with him. Later that spring, he invited her to Graceland.
She loved sharing that world with him, seeing all his old Memphis hangouts, and walking the Graceland grounds, though he scared her playing chicken on the go-karts with the guys. Like Minnie Mae, who swore she heard noises coming from Gladys’s ghost, and Priscilla, who had sensed Gladys’s spirit when she found racks of her clothing in the attic, Barbara perceived Gladys around her, first in the dining room, but even more so upstairs in Elvis’s rooms where her picture stood on a table.
“I felt her. Her presence was always there. Elvis spoke mostly of her when we were alone in his bedroom.” It was there, under the Naugahyde ceiling with the TVs built in above his bed that he shared most everything with his girlfriends, in his private time away from the boys. “He said Gladys had told him he would marry a brown-eyed girl, and that he knew she would have liked me.”
He handed out Placydils to her for sleep, but she didn’t want them and hid some of them in the sofa. One time when they were together, he’d given her a gray pill for a headache, and it made her intensely ill.
Joyce, too, visited Graceland that spring. The same day that Barbara went back to California after Elvis’s glaucoma scare in Nashville, Joyce came from the opposite end of the country and then flew with him to Memphis. With all the medical equipment now set up in Lisa Marie’s room, it was Joyce who held his hand and flinched while Dr. Meyer put the needle in his eye.
He was incoherent nearly her whole visit, but the only part that really scared her was the oxygen tank in the room. “I couldn’t understand why there was an oxygen tank for an eye problem. The doctor showed it to me and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I hope I don’t have to use this thing.’ ”
Elvis wore a black patch for a while, smoking marijuana to alleviate the pressure in his eye, and canceled his immediate touring plans. Joyce came back to Tennessee to see him on May 21, flying again into Nashville, where he was completing a weeklong recording session. But he awakened in pain the next day in their hotel room, complaining of stomach cramps, and insisted on flying home to Memphis. They drove straight to Dr. Nick’s office from the airport, and suddenly, to Joyce, “He was like brand-new.”
At the time, Elvis seemed to be suffering only from irritable bowel syndrome, an uncomfortable intestinal dysfunction that can largely be managed through diet, exercise, and supplements. But it was just the first presentation of a far more serious problem: He had a premorbid condition, a congenital megacolon, or an abnormal enlargement that would soon be revealed as “tremendous in size,” in Dr. Nick’s words, three to four times normal in diameter. Eventually, the organ would lose much of its nerve enervation and ability to function.
He had been an outpatient in Palm Springs earlier that month for his fourth wedding anniversary, and more and more, Palm Springs would become a place where Elvis threw all caution to the wind. At some point that year, probably that summer, the guys held one of their typical weekend orgies, and one of the female guests later sent a letter to the house addressed to “Lizard Tongue.” Priscilla found it, “went ballistic,” Sonny says, and called Joe in Vegas, insisting on talking with Elvis. Joe told her he was asleep, and when Elvis called her back, he turned the tables on her, chewing her out, and saying the letter had really been for Sonny, not him. Priscilla apologized and telephoned Sonny’s new bride to tell her that her husband was fooling around.
During big arguments such as that, Joe saw that “he played the tough part: ‘Hey, you don’t like it? Here’s the door.’ A couple of times, he got in fights with her and some of the later girls and said, ‘You can take your clothes and leave.’ Elvis was very good about being on the defensive whenever he got in trouble, and he was great when it came to screaming and yelling. It frightened them to the point that they wouldn’t say any more. He had a real bad temper.”
Priscilla’s way of dealing with it
all was just to continue building her own life in California with Lisa Marie. She had a new set of friends, and she was taking karate now from Ed Parker. When she was in Memphis, she’d keep up her technique with Kang Rhee at his studio on Poplar Avenue, where Elvis studied tae kwon do. Priscilla also continued her dance sessions while in Memphis, frequently at Sally O’Brien’s studio behind the Davis YMCA in Whitehaven. Pat West, Red’s wife, went with her, Priscilla driving and taking Lisa Marie to play with Sally’s daughter, Paige, who was Lisa’s same age.
Sally considered Priscilla to be “a lovely dancer, and missed few classes. . . . I found her to be a very warm and kind person. I think she just needed to have some normal time and conversation away from the spotlight.”
It was normalcy that Priscilla craved the most. Some of her favorite moments with Elvis were the “nights when he’d come into Lisa’s bedroom—he always called her ‘Yeesa’—and read her nursery rhymes on the bed.”
But those times grew fewer and fewer. One night in California, Elvis looked across the living room and realized Priscilla could do quite well without him.
“My,” he said. “You’ve grown.”
And that, Priscilla says, “is the moment we both knew the marriage was over.”
For a while, she remained the token wife, tucked away at home while Elvis indulged himself with a plethora of girlfriends. Finally she did what she felt she had to do. “I took a lover. It was my way out.” He was, of course, Mike Stone, the karate champ she and Elvis had seen in Hawaii.
The guys knew about her affair before Elvis did. Henrietta, the maid at the Holmby Hills house, told Red that Mike was spending a lot of time there. Then three-year-old Lisa Marie inadvertently ratted them out. Mike had taken them camping, she told new entourage member James Caughley, and “I saw Mommy and Mike wrestling in their sleeping bag on the beach. They wrestled all night.” Finally, Sonny caught them in the shower together on Monovale.
