Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Nobody really blamed her, especially not Joe. “She wanted some real love that she wasn’t getting from her husband. She was at home going out with the girls, and then started to take karate with Mike, and boom, it all changed.”

  But Priscilla would wait for the right time to tell her husband that she had chosen another man over him.

  He was already acting like a man who knew, but even if he didn’t, he began moving farther out on the edge, taking bigger chances and demonstrating increasingly reckless regard for his own life. But there were still glimmers that he held out hope. In May he renewed contact with Daya Mata at the Self-Realization Center, and soon he would invite Larry Geller back into the fold. For a short period, he looked into Scientology, the religion founded by L. Ron Hubbard.

  While he ultimately dismissed Scientology as cultish and money grubbing (“He stayed away from Scientology like it was a cobra,” says Lamar), it ultimately brought about his curiosity regarding actress Peggy Lipton. He’d heard she was spiritually curious, and he thought he might connect with her on several levels. He’d loved her cool reserve on The Mod Squad, even as it scared him.

  Two of Peggy’s actress friends, Janet and Shelly, were seeing him at the same time and suggested she meet him, even as they warned her that he was damaged and fragile. Something about him fascinated her—she had idolized him growing up and called him “the sacred monster of rock and roll.”

  Joe placed the call, and in July 1971 Elvis got on the phone and invited her to his first engagement at Del Webb’s Sahara Tahoe at Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

  “He kissed like a god,” Lipton wrote in her 2005 memoir, Breathing Out, “but that was about it. He didn’t feel like a man next to me—more like a boy who’d never matured.”

  Elvis came for her in a private plane, a Bach 111 twin-engine jet he’d chartered with a full-time pilot to get over his fear of flying. From the moment she stepped aboard, she knew it was a mistake: “Sitting in the cabin in full white regalia complete with sunglasses, rings, and rows of gold chains . . . Elvis looked like an action figure of himself.”

  He immediately offered her jewelry from a myriad of blue cases, which put her off, as it seemed too practiced. But she accepted a square ring with little diamonds, rubies, and sapphires “that you could move around to form any letter.” The one he gave her had a P on it, and she didn’t know if he meant it for “Presley” or “Peggy.” But he was funny and charming, and she was surprised to find him “smart and considerably savvy, despite his hillbilly ways.” All the same, he was just too otherworldly and theatrical. What in hell was she doing there?

  She’d brought along cocaine to get through it, and after they rolled around on the bed in heavy petting, they made love. “Or tried to,” she wrote. “Elvis knew he was sexy; he just wasn’t up to sex. Not that he wasn’t built, but with me, at least, he was virtually impotent. . . . When he couldn’t consummate it, he became embarrassed and went into the bathroom. I knew he felt badly, because he left me a poem scrawled on a torn-off scrap of paper on my pillow.”

  After his show, they tried again, but then they gave up. He had too many drugs in him to perform, and then each morning, a doctor came and gave him a shot to help him sleep. He wanted her to have one, too. But it scared her. “Had I taken the shot, I’m sure I would have either died or passed out for days. These were heavy chemical cocktails, and Elvis was seriously into them.”

  It was then she realized that the prerequisite for being with him was to get as stoned as he was. And all she wanted to do was run. One terrifying night, loaded up on his pharmaceutical escort to slumber, Elvis fell into a heavy stupor and woke up violently gagging and choking. Peggy pulled him into a sitting position, but he continued to struggle.

  “Oh, my God, I thought, he’s going to choke to death,” Lipton wrote. “I punched him firmly on the back and he made a final heave. I frantically turned on the light. He was white as a sheet but still breathing. In his lap, all over his silk pajamas, was vomit filled with . . . maybe fifty or seventy-five capsules and pills of every description . . . along with the contents of last night’s meal.” At the apex of the crisis, “He called for his mother. He sat there like a baby, wailing for her. I cleaned him up and held him until he fell back to sleep . . . while the sun tried desperately to enter the curtained and darkened bedroom.”

  After that, she quit taking his calls. The way he lived was just too frightening, and besides, she had enough problems trying to curtail her own cocaine use. “I wasn’t going to be able to save him—nobody was.”

  There were other close calls about the same time. During the Tahoe engagement, he picked up a teenage girl named Page Peterson who sat in the second row with her mother. She wore no makeup and was precisely the sort of nondrinking, nonsmoking innocent that Elvis couldn’t resist. Sonny brought her backstage, and inexplicably, her mother let her stay with Elvis for much of the engagement. He gave her pills to keep up his hours.

  One night after the show, he took her to Palm Springs. He was drinking large doses of Hycodan, a narcotic, analgesic cough syrup, and serving it to Page in champagne glasses. She had a headache, and Elvis gave her pills to ease the throb in her temples. That night, they both nearly died. When Sonny found them the next day, the room was freezing, and Elvis’s breathing was erratic. The Hycodan bottle was almost empty.

  “Boss! Boss, snap out of it!” Sonny yelled and shook him by the shoulders. “Wake up, Elvis!” He made a moaning sound, so Sonny moved on to Page. She let out a short rasp, but when Sonny shook her, she didn’t come to, nor when he slapped her face hard. Charlie called for Dr. George Kaplan, one of Elvis’s regular suppliers, who arrived within minutes.

  A shot of Ritalin brought Elvis around, but Dr. Kaplan made no promises about Page. At the hospital, she was placed in intensive care.

  “I told her not to drink that much,” Elvis said. His voice sounded guilty, Sonny thought, and he paced the floor and sent a Bible verse to the hospital. The guys called John O’Grady and a contact with the Palm Springs police to keep the cops at bay. They came up with a plan that if she died, Charlie would take the rap. “He’d say she was his date, and he’d given her the stuff,” Marty reports.

  Colonel Parker went into damage control, getting everybody out of Palm Springs and arranging to pay $10,000 to the ambulance crew for their silence. Elvis picked up Page’s medical bills, but though he talked to her on the phone several times, he didn’t want to see her again. Still, she and her mother came to Vegas. “I’m sorry to say that Page wasn’t the same person,” Sonny wrote in his memoir, Elvis: Still Taking Care of Business. “Her personality wasn’t as radiant as before.” After Elvis’s death, the episode would be reported in the addendum papers to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s investigation of his addiction.

  When Joyce attended his Vegas engagement in August—the International Hotel was now the Las Vegas Hilton—she was ticked off not to have been invited to Tahoe. She thought that Elvis was punishing her. She’d overslept on Placydils when she was at Graceland and raced out for her plane, leaving him alone in bed. But all was forgiven. He had the flu, or at least Vegas Throat, and although he’d seen Dr. Sidney Boyer for it, he wanted to be babied. That led to a natural subject, and Joyce inquired about Lisa Marie, and about Priscilla, too. And then Elvis uttered the words that stopped her heart: “She’s a mama. She does the mothering. A mother is different. Once a woman is a mama, she changes.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “Well,” he said, “when a woman has a child, it’s a gift from God. It’s God’s way of telling her she’s not a little girl anymore. She’s grown up, you know? Now it’s time to be respected and all.”

  Joyce wasn’t following it. He didn’t respect his wife until she had a baby?

  No, no, he didn’t mean it that way. He just didn’t think a mother should try to be sexy and attract men. “It’s just not exciting and it’s not supposed to be,” he said frankly. “Trust me on this, Joyce. I know
I’m right.”

  He didn’t say he had no trouble with Susan Henning, and he didn’t say that he was currently involved with Barbara Leigh, both of whom had a child at home.

  But six days after Elvis made his declaration, Joyce sat in her doctor’s office arranging to abort his child. On September 3, 1971, laying on a gurney, she was wheeled down a hospital corridor and into a bright white operating room. Everything was sterile, including the faces of the team that attended her. She felt the chemicals flow through the tubes, and then counted back, “A hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, . . .” She never told Elvis a thing.

  “I was so all-consumed with him I was afraid he would leave me. And I didn’t want to jeopardize my relationship with him, no matter what.”

  Within seven months she would change her mind. By the time she joined him in Las Vegas in February 1972, much had happened. She had gone on tour with him in November 1971, where she discovered that his drug use escalated to new heights on the road and made him another man.

  They were in the presidential suite of Philadelphia’s Bellevue Stratford Hotel the night of November 8 when he called her into the bathroom to show her how he kept his voice in shape, cupping running water in his hands and inhaling it through his nose, then violently arcing a geyser out of his mouth into the sink.

  He laughed when she gave him a hard time about it and left the bathroom. But then he called her back, and when she walked to the door he was standing before her completely naked, which “blew my mind,” since it was so out of character for him to show himself that way. He once told the guys, “I don’t want these girls to know that I have this hillbilly pecker,” referring to the fact that he was uncircumcised, and he was so modest he always slept in pajamas.

  “Look at this,” he said, and took hold of himself with his left hand.

  “I’ve seen it before,” she said wryly. “Are you feeling all right, Elvis?”

  “I want you to watch this.”

  Now he pulled his foreskin back and washed himself with soap and water.

  “Elvis!” she said. She couldn’t believe he wanted her to witness that and turned on her heel. “I’m going back into the bedroom.”

  “You’re not embarrassed are you, baby? I just want you to know I’m clean.”

  It wasn’t that she was embarrassed so much as she was astonished. She knew it was the drugs talking, and she was beginning to get scared. Not of him, really, but for him.

  Seconds later, there was a loud knock at the door, which further surprised her, since no one had the nerve to disturb Elvis in his bedroom. But Elvis moved to answer it, as if he expected someone, and in walked a total stranger.

  “Come on in, Doc,” Elvis said to the man in the gray suit. He was carrying a black bag, and eyed Joyce suspiciously.

  She asked why Elvis needed a doctor, and he told her it was okay. Then the doctor pulled out a rubber tube and a hypodermic needle. Elvis rolled up the sleeve of his pajama top, and the doctor tied the tube around his arm.

  “Elvis, what is that? What are you taking?” Joyce was nervous. She’d never seen him do anything like that before.

  “Just wait,” he said. “It’s okay.” Then the doctor slipped the needle into his vein and slowly pushed the plunger. Joyce turned away, but Elvis said, “And give her one, too.”

  She jerked around just as the physician pulled out the spent syringe.

  “No! No!” she cried. She jumped back a half step. “I don’t want a shot of anything!”

  Elvis pleaded with her. She’d feel better. It would help her sleep. They got into it then as the doctor took his leave. He wasn’t going to hurt her, he said. She should know that. But what was it? she asked. Did he even know?

  “All you need to know,” he told her, “is that I say it’s something you need.”

  As the argument wound down he asked a favor of her: Would she take the used needle back home and throw it away? He didn’t want anyone to find it.

  When she awoke the next morning, the air conditioner was going full blast, and Elvis was as cold and clammy as the icy winter dawn, his breathing so shallow “that the incredibly handsome face seemed almost like a death mask.” Joyce saw then that his innocent shots and pills could kill both of them. Certainly, he was killing himself.

  He could be the most charismatic man in the world, like the time he, Joyce, Janice, and Sonny took the limo to Amy Joy’s Donut Shop, an all-night drive-in in a tough part of the District where the local ghetto youth hung out. It was past 9 P.M., and Elvis didn’t really eat doughnuts the way legend has it. But when he saw the sign, it just felt like a familiar thing to do, the way he used to ride around Memphis at night and stop for sacks of Krystal burgers.

  The limo had barely stopped rolling when at least twenty young black men hurried over, eager to see who could be inside such a vehicle.

  The situation could have flashed out of control in an instant, with Elvis, decked out in ostentatious gold chains and eye-popping rings, trapped in a limo. They were all at their mercy, and the kids could have shaken them all down, even a man as powerfully built as Sonny. The crowd swelled by the second to yells of, “HEY . . . IT’S ELVIS! C’MON MAN, THAT’S NOT . . . HEY, IT’S REALLY . . . ELVIS!”

  But Elvis, who had spent his youth surrounded by girls rocking the sides of his Cadillac, took command, climbing from the car and stepping right into the throng. Sonny stood at his side, trying not to let his nervousness show.

  “Whatcha doin’ here, man,” one of the youths asked.

  “Just tryin’ to get a few doughnuts,” Elvis said calmly. Then he leaned down to Ben, the limo driver. “How ’bout goin’ in and gettin’ us three dozen?”

  He straightened back up and faced his audience. Joyce and Janice were frozen in their seats, but Elvis knew what to do. “Okay, guys, keep cool . . . and pay attention now.”

  Slowly he pulled back his coat to reveal his massive gold belt, gleaming as it caught the reflection from a streetlight.

  “This here,” he told the kids, “was a gift from the International Hotel in Las Vegas for breaking their all-time attendance record.”

  A chorus of “oohs” and “aahs” went up from the wide-eyed crowd, some of them moving in to get a closer look. They were pushing against one another now, more excited than before.

  “This belt says I’m the best . . . ,” he declared. Then he grabbed the pistol out of his shoulder holster with lightning speed.

  “And this,” he said, turning the gun in his hand, “says I get to keep it.”

  The rough ghetto kids let out a loud laugh. “Sure, man,” somebody said. “It’s yours. Okay, take it easy.”

  It was a masterly performance, and to close it, Elvis shot a curled-lip grin.

  “That’s it, fellas,” he said, and now with Ben back in the car and the doughnuts on the seat, they sped away.

  It was Joyce’s favorite memory of him. But she didn’t know this new Elvis. And he kept asking her to move into Graceland, where she spent his thirty-seventh birthday with him January 8, 1972, Priscilla having told him at Christmas that she was leaving. Now Elvis was finally free to be with Joyce, to really be with her. But the idea of living with him scared her.

  “He was so out of control. And I needed my independence. He really wanted to take over my life, but of course, I had no control over his, and I knew there was something wrong with that thinking.” She was also disappointed that while he had been “very sexual, though intermittently, it didn’t last.”

  In February, in Vegas, she realized it was impossible to make a life with him. They came from two different worlds, and she didn’t want to belong to his anymore. In the ladies’ room at the hotel, two hookers who told her they counted Elvis as a customer had just mistaken her for one of their own. Now she just had to get away from it all—the clothes and hair that weren’t really her, the dependence on Placidyls, and being around the man who said that pills helped him get close to the “silence,” to the “resting place of the soul.”
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  From the passages that he underlined and noted in the margins of his books, she knew he was trying to find his purpose in life. (“El,” he said, was another name for God.) But when he read them aloud to her, “It drove me crazy. They didn’t make any sense to me.” But she did understand that “he truly ached for his brother, and he really wanted his brother to guide him from these books.”

  On one of her last nights with him, he was just about to slip away, the pills taking him under, when he mumbled something about not having much time left to get his message out. He was terrified of growing older, worried that “it won’t be long until I’m forty, and that could be too late.”

  It was already too late for Joyce. One afternoon when she awoke, he was still sleeping. The room was cold, the way he liked it, and she shivered from the chill. She dressed, packed, and finally, pulled off the gold ring with the little diamond he had given her when they first met, and laid it on the nightstand. Then she kissed his cool cheek and closed his door for the last time.

  Things were slipping away from him in triplicate now, not just in singles or in pairs. The Colonel had rewritten his management contract to give himself a bigger cut of Elvis’s live performances, even as he would soon renegotiate his client’s Vegas contract for more money: $130,000 a week for the next two engagements, and $150,000 a week for the following three. And Priscilla, in town for the close of his run that February 23, 1972, had something she wanted to formalize with him, too: In between shows, she told him she was involved with Mike Stone.

  He already knew for certain now, knew it when he sent Red down to the hotel’s Italian restaurant to bring her up to the suite. But hearing it from her own lips outraged him. He told her she was crazy, that she had everything a woman could want. But she didn’t back down. In fact, she wanted a divorce.