by Alanna Nash
Elvis had Sherry Williams in town for consolation. But he’d had two women walk out of his life within a matter of hours, and now he did the unimaginable: He raped his wife.
Priscilla never termed it “rape,” but she told Red’s wife, Pat, that Elvis forced her to have sex. As she wrote in her memoir, Elvis and Me, “He grabbed me and forcefully made love to me. It was uncomfortable and unlike any other time he’d ever made love to me before, and he explained, ‘This is how a real man makes love to his woman.’ ”
After the second show, he called all the guys in and said, “Another man has taken my wife.” He was seething, but a river of sadness ran through him, too. When somebody said, “I thought you wanted to get rid of her,” his voice was shaky. “Not that way, man.”
“It wasn’t so much that she was having an affair,” Sonny says. “It was that she was going to actually leave him for Mike. If Elvis hadn’t known Stone, it wouldn’t have been as bad for him.”
“Elvis was very upset about the divorce,” seconds Joe. “Here he is, the sex symbol of the world, and he’s losing his wife to another man. It was really an ego killer for him. He wouldn’t admit that to us, but we all knew it was hurting him, and he was affected tremendously by it.”
He found solace with Barbara Leigh, who listened as “he cursed Priscilla and Mike on a daily basis, since no one leaves the King. But that was good—it helped him process the hurt and the embarrassment of being left.”
When Marty went out to California on business in March, Elvis was still coming to grips with it. He said he had a “problem,” that Priscilla was leaving him. He’d just been to the Monovale house and found she had moved out.
“I’m sorry, man,” Marty said.
“What am I going to do?”
“Let me ask you a question. Are you going to change?”
“Hell, no. I ain’t doing that for nobody.”
For his next recording session, later in March, he chose songs of heartbreak and regret: “Separate Ways,” and “Always on My Mind.” He poured himself into his work, including a second documentary film, Elvis on Tour.
After a period in the early 1970s in which he lost his discipline in some of the Vegas shows, “lying down on stage and talking into the mike and laughing,” Joe Moscheo remembers, Elvis revitalized himself for the fifteen-city tour and filming. A young Martin Scorsese supervised the montage editing.
While Elvis on Tour would share a Golden Globe award with Walls of Fire as the best feature documentary, some critics believed it lifted no veils on Elvis’s private life. But a posthumous theatrical release, This Is Elvis, contained footage which was originally shot for the earlier documentary. When Elvis is asked in the limousine if he saw the Apollo 16 rocket launch, he implies he was too busy to see it: “I was buried in a beaver.” And in a later scene from Greensboro, North Carolina, Elvis references another sexual episode to Jerry.
“You know that girl I was with last night?”
“The dog?”
“Oh, man,” Elvis says. “She gave great head, boy . . . Hey, Joe, that chick last night gave the greatest head I ever had in my life.” The last line was later overdubbed for a TV and home video version, euphemistically becoming “could raise the dead.”
Bragging about cunnilingus and fellatio may have simply been a cover-up for what was really going on with him. “He loved cuddling and petting more than he did the actual sex anyway,” one woman noted. “But when the drugs entered the picture, they took over his body and his sex drive took a nosedive, too. I saw the changes starting to happen to him in 1972. It was showing as early as that.”
Despite the early stages of his physical deterioration, Elvis could still summon the full strength of his artistry when the Colonel offered him a challenge.
In June 1972 Elvis became the first performer to sell out four consecutive shows at Madison Square Garden, grossing $730,000 over three days. He had never played New York City before, as the Colonel always believed Elvis appealed more to a rural and small-town fan base than urban sophisticates. Now Elvis was apprehensive, though he tried not to let it show. When his new opening act, comic Jackie Kahane, was essentially booed off the stage opening night, Elvis went to him in his dressing room. “Mr. Kahane, they’re animals out there. Don’t let them bother you. You go out there tomorrow and you kick ass.”
When Elvis emerged to the billowing strains of Also Sprach Zarathustra, Joe Guercio remembers, a great roar echoed through the fabled building, and “so many flashbulbs went off that the Garden was almost lit for a second.”
The New York Times, in a rave, recognized it as a legendary performance. Chris Chase’s review headlined “. . . A Prince from Another Planet.” The writer saw Elvis as a one-of-a-kind talent, “a special champion [like] a Joe Louis . . . a Joe DiMaggio, someone in whose hands the way a thing is done becomes more important than the thing itself. . . . He stood there at the end, his arms stretched out, the great gold cloak giving him wings . . . the only one in his class.”
During their four-and-a-half-year love affair, Linda Thompson was as much Elvis’s nurse and mother substitute as girlfriend. The Memphis Mafia believes he would have died three years earlier had she not been there. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
Chapter Thirty-One
Buntin’
The success of the Madison Square Garden engagement buoyed Elvis for a time, but he was still shaken by the divorce. On July 26, 1972, Elvis and Priscilla legally separated, and the world at large learned about Mike Stone. Elvis’s lawyer, E. Gregory Hookstratten, drew up the papers and worked out the terms of the settlement, which Priscilla readily accepted: a lump sum of $100,000, plus $1,000 per month for her own expenses and $500 child support. Even though she would reopen the divorce in 1973, seeking more money, they would still walk out of divorce court arm in arm and remain close, in part for Lisa’s sake.
“It was like we were never divorced. Elvis and I still hugged each other, still had love. We would say, ‘Mommy said this,’ and ‘Daddy said that.’ That helped Lisa to feel stable. There was never any arguing or bitterness.”
Elvis recklessly roared around town on his motorcycle, looking terrible, his face unnaturally round and seeming distorted. Twenty-year-old Mary Kathleen “Kathy” Selph, an exotic dancer and singer at the Whirlaway Club and another Priscilla look-alike, was often seen on the back of his Harley-Davidson, her hands around his waist. On June 30, the Commercial Appeal photographed them at the corner of South Parkway and Highway 51 South, which had been renamed Elvis Presley Boulevard a year earlier. Her mother saw the picture, and reprimanded her daughter for dating a married man, later learning that Elvis and Priscilla were separated.
But in less than a month, it was all over. Just before three o’clock on the morning of July 18, 1972, Kathy, whose father, E.B. Selph, was the deputy fire chief, was killed in a single-car accident, when her vehicle struck a cement pillar on eastbound I-240 near Elvis Presley Boulevard. She was alone in the car. The Press-Scimitar assumed she was driving home from work, but perhaps she was en route elsewhere.
“There was a real nice spray of flowers at her funeral from the Presley family,” her mother, Peggy Selph Cannon told the paper in 2000. “And there was a huge orchid at the funeral. I always felt it came from Elvis.”
Earlier that month, Elvis had begun seeing twenty-two-year-old Linda Thompson. She would become not only the most important of his postdivorce girlfriends, but he would also build a stronger and deeper bond with her than he’d ever had with Priscilla. She was his best hope yet for a long-lasting and meaningful relationship with a woman.
Predictably, Linda was the winner of a beauty queen title—Miss Tennessee Universe, representing the state in the Miss Universe pageant—but she did not precisely fall in line with his ideal type, despite her brown eyes. At five foot nine, she was tall, not petite, and refused to darken her long, blondish mane to make Elvis happy. Like Joyce Bova and June Juanico before her, she was an independent thinker. Furthermore, she w
as educated, having attended Memphis State. But she was a virgin.
Most of all, she would nurture him, seeing that “Elvis needed more love and care than anybody I ever met, probably more than anyone in this world, because of who he was and what he had done.” She found him “intensely lonely at heart.”
One day Linda was having lunch at a Memphis restaurant with Jeanne LeMay, a former Miss Rhode Island USA who had shared a hotel room with Linda at the Miss USA pageant in Puerto Rico. They had become instant friends, and after the pageant, Jeanne moved to Memphis to live with Linda, the two thinking they might become flight attendants together. That day at lunch, Linda ran into an acquaintance, Bill Browder, who worked in record promotion and would later become a country singer known as T. G. Sheppard. He invited the two of them to Elvis’s movie marathon at the Memphian that night, July 6.
“I thought Elvis was still married,” Linda remembers, “so I didn’t have any kind of designs on him. But I found out he wasn’t when I got to the theater.”
It was George Klein who actually introduced the two. Elvis appreciated her southern girl beauty and personality, as well as her sense of humor, and asked her to come back the following night.
When Linda then left for three weeks on a family vacation, Elvis turned to another Memphis belle, Cybill Shepherd, the 1966 Miss Teenage Memphis and later the national Model of the Year. Cybill had just made a terrific splash as Jacy Farrow, the small-town Texas temptress in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. Elvis didn’t know the classically beautiful twenty-three-year-old was involved with the older director and that she had broken up his marriage. But her provocative scenes in the film reminded him of his sexual awakening with real-life Texas beauties on the Hayride.
He had George call her when she was home from New York, and they followed the usual M.O.: Would Cybill like to come to the Memphian?
“I said, ‘Well, I’ll come and meet him, but I want to bring my best friend, and my brother, and his best friend.’ ”
When they arrived, Elvis wasn’t there yet, and she tried to concentrate on the movie until he made his grand entrance, everybody to the right of her getting up and moving one seat down. “He was still looking fabulous. And he smelled great.” They dated a month, and “if he had smelled bad, it probably would have ended sooner.” Things got rolling when he invited her to Graceland for chicken-fried steak, a meal after Jacy’s heart.
Just as Elvis and Priscilla had fallen in love with myths, he and Cybill were attracted to each other for all the wrong reasons. He was entranced with a celluloid image that reminded him of his youth, and she had grown up in Memphis hoping to catch sight of the hometown boy who became a god.
If Cybill had been interested enough in Elvis, Linda Thompson might never have been anything but a two-night date. But Cybill, though fourteen years Elvis’s junior, ran in far more sophisticated circles, and as with Peggy Lipton, it doomed them from the start. Still, they gave it a try. But like so many women before her, Cybill found his lifestyle stultifying.
In her autobiography, Cybill Disobedience, she described a weekend in Palm Springs:
“The house was luxurious in a rental sort of way, sprawling and devoid of personal taste. Everything had a metallic glow. All the King’s men . . . spent the afternoon competing to see who could make the biggest splash into a murky swimming pool. The guys raced dune buggies three or four abreast while shouting into walkie-talkies, or sat around a long table with a thick top of beveled glass, eating their favorite deep-fried sandwiches.”
Today, she sees that she and Elvis actually had a lot in common, that fame and beauty “can cause you to be emotionally underdeveloped. People do things for you. There were a lot of times . . . where I just didn’t get a chance to grow and learn.”
But in 1972, she simply couldn’t get over the control. Elvis wanted to take her shopping—he didn’t like her jeans and tie-dyed mirrored vest—and he demanded she ditch Bogdanovich, who continued to pursue her. She chose to be with Peter, and when Elvis showed up on an unexpected late-night visit, “I don’t think it had sunk in that I had already ended it.”
What finished them was the drugs. In a replay of Joyce Bova’s experience, Elvis insisted that Cybill join him in his nightly ritual of sleeping medication. “He said, ‘Here, take these,’ and he had pills in his hands. I said, ‘Aren’t you going to take some of them?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ve already had mine.’ He was almost already asleep, and I went and flushed them down the toilet, returned his emerald-and-diamond ring, and just said, ‘Thank you, but I can’t.’ ”
Though brief, their sex life ran the gamut. In an interview with E! television, she labeled him “a wonderful lover, very sexy,” but later spoke of his bumbling technique. “Let’s put it this way: I think before I met him he was [sexually] conservative, trapped in a stupid macho thing.” Her much-quoted declaration that it was she who taught him oral sex brought hoots of derision from other of his lovers, who knew that by the time Cybill arrived “it was just a shuttle—one came in the door as another was flown back to Vegas.”
That’s precisely what happened when Elvis opened there on July 31, 1972. During his three days of rehearsals, he flew Linda to Los Angeles and then brought her to the Hilton for most of his engagement. As soon as she left, Cybill came in. “The Elvis that I got to know in Memphis was very different than the Elvis that I got to know in Las Vegas. He was unavailable in a way. And then years later, I would find out he had two other women there at the same time.”
Elvis followed Raquel Welch into the Las Vegas Hilton showroom that summer, and she had someone call the Colonel to ask if she could come see the show. He arranged for her to sit in Elvis’s booth, and she sat there agog at what she terms his third transformation. Despite costumer Bill Belew’s best intentions, Raquel thought “Elvis looked almost like Liberace or one of those apparitions, dressed all in white, with rings on every finger.”
Reviewers noted that he seemed more subdued during his engagement and spent less time interacting with the audience between songs. When Raquel went to his dressing room after the show, “he was very sweet, very nice, and he showed me all his jewelry.” But he didn’t seem to be really happy, and she couldn’t get the show out of her mind. “He had a whole basket of blue scarves, and he must have thrown fifty of them into the audience. It was so carnival. He was almost like a windup toy.”
His most devoted fans, including Robin Rosaaen of San Jose, California, saw him otherwise. “Once he was onstage, it was like somebody flipped a switch. Just pure sex energy filled that showroom.” Robin had been attending all of Elvis’s Vegas engagements since 1970, and in 1972, he gave her the first of eight kisses and thirteen scarves she would receive over seventy-two shows in six and a half years. “Elvis was like a drug,” she says. “Once you saw him, you had to see him again.”
She earned that first kiss by holding up an I WANT YOUR BODY bumper sticker, a promotional item from the health spa where she worked. It caught his attention and lured him over to where she sat at the edge of the stage.
“He said, ‘You got it, baby,’ and I pulled the scarf off from around his neck, and it was hot and sweaty, and he smelled wonderful. I had my ring hand up through his hair, and he was looking in my eyes, and he kissed me with those lips that were like big, soft, warm, puffy pillows. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I wonder what this would be like for more than just a split second?’ ”
He winked at her then and went on to the next song. “That’s when I realized a couple of his hairs were stuck in my ring. I wrapped them in a tissue and stuck them in my bra, and when I got home, I put them in a Gerber’s baby food jar, where they’ve been ever since.”
In time, he came to recognize her face, and one year, he pointed her out to the crowd and officially dubbed her “Rockin’ Robin.” She felt they knew each other then, and so she grew bolder. One night she tried to walk her fingers up his jumpsuit, hoping to tweak a hair off of his leg. “He just looked at me like, ‘What are
you doing?’ ”
Uh-oh, she thought. Busted.
As a contributor to the book All the Kings Things, she became an internationally recognized expert on Presley collectibles and formed a family with other serious fans. Some of them ran to the extreme: “I’ve known women who went to so many Elvis concerts that they got divorced over it. Their husbands said, ‘It’s either me or Elvis,’ and the women said, ‘I’ll take Elvis.’ ”
Sex and love was a topic Elvis and Larry Geller discussed many times, particularly with Larry’s return to the camp in August 1972. During one engagement, they stepped outside on the balcony of the Hilton about five one morning as the sun rose over the desert. They were talking about his struggles, and indirectly, his loneliness, and the difference between personal and impersonal love.
“Elvis looked at me and said, ‘I want you to put yourself in my shoes. Do you realize I can never know if a woman loves me or Elvis Presley?’ And trying to be my philosophical self, I said, ‘Elvis, as far as I am concerned, you have had only one real true lasting love in your whole life.’ He looked at me and he said, ‘Who?’ I said, ‘The world. Your fans.’ He said, ‘You’re right, man. That’s the truth. And that’s a heavy price to pay.’ ”
On September 4, 1972, Colonel Parker and RCA President Rocco Laginestra held a press conference in Las Vegas to announce Elvis’s next big record-shattering event, “Aloha From Hawaii,” a live concert to be delivered worldwide in January 1973 by satellite technology. The show, staged in Honolulu with some of the proceeds going to the Kui Lee Cancer Fund, would reach 1.4 billion viewers. But the “live” label was largely ballyhoo, as both Europe and America would receive a delayed signal.
“It’s very hard to comprehend,” Elvis said, repeating himself over and over, crumpled in a chair at the press briefing. For many who witnessed it, the more perplexing thought was why Elvis’s speech was slurred, and why he perspired so heavily, wiping his upper lip. His eyes, visible through tinted glasses, seemed dull and dazed.
