Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  On some days, Elvis appeared clear, lucid, and largely unaffected. But other times, particularly after the divorce action was entered on August 18, his use of sedatives, or downers, was obvious to all. One night, a boy came up to Jackie Kahane after a show. “Mr. Katane,” he asked, mispronouncing the comic’s name, “Elvis wasn’t drunk, was he?”

  At the time, Lamar Fike reports, Elvis’s usual pattern was to take a Valium, a Placidyl, a Valmid, some Butabarb, and codeine simultaneously. But now, after a sprained ankle took him to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis that July, he began adding Percodan and liquid Demerol to round out his potent and potentially lethal cocktail.

  Dr. Nick later learned that “he began getting acupuncture three times a week with Demerol and Novocain in California. He felt so good afterward that he just went more and more.”

  Considering the severity of his client’s drug use, the Colonel might have been expected to speak with Dr. Nick about how to handle it. But he never did.

  “He would ask a direct question at a particular moment when something was happening, but we never sat down and talked about any of Elvis’s health problems or what needed to be done. It seemed like his main concern was how many shows we could get in that year.”

  One reason Elvis was excited about the satellite show was what it would say about his “potency,” particularly to Priscilla, whose approval he still sought and needed. Dr. Nick remembers that he always had tremendous performance anxiety before any of the shows, that he was “a basket case . . . he’d worry whether he was going to be 100 percent, and want something for his nerves, some Ritalin or amphetamines.” If he could perform to most of the planet on his own, without any kind of artifice, it would free him. He could boast he didn’t need Priscilla, he didn’t need drugs, he didn’t need anything. He’d even take off his heavy, jeweled cape and throw it in the audience, a symbolic rebirth.

  Elvis also hoped the “Aloha” special would impress his new girlfriend. Already he could tell Linda was different from the rest. She was almost always by his side, adored him beyond description, and didn’t try to change him, other than to try to temper the drugs. When she went to Dr. Nick and asked him how she could get Elvis off pills, he advised her to simply leave. Instead, she chose to stay.

  From the outset, she realized he was a paradoxical man, and that theirs would be a complex relationship that would both exceed and fall short of normal expectations. She wanted to give him plenty of room to explore it and make it whatever he wanted.

  “I think it’s wonderful if you can be all things to each other, and he and I were. He called me ‘Mommy,’ and I was like his mother at times, and he was like my father at times, and we were like children, like brother and sister. And we were like lovers at times. That’s a full rich relationship when you can do that.”

  But her most constant roles were caregiver, nurse, and hand holder. The first time he took her to Vegas, Elvis passed out with food in his mouth and started to choke. Linda cleared it out of his throat and turned him on his side to get him breathing again. “I felt a responsibility to his mother to take care of him, and actually to the world, too, because so many people loved him.”

  She had always felt maternal, and “he was like my little boy.” Her nickname for him was “Buntin’,” short for baby bunting, after the popular nursery rhyme and lullaby. Elvis called her “Ariadne,” for three-year-old Ariadne Pennington, a character in his 1962 film Follow That Dream.

  “We both just naturally talked baby talk. That was a big part of our relationship.” She was the only girlfriend who truly understood the secret language and used it. A Mailgram she sent him when he was away in California demonstrates her prowess:

  Baby gullion, you are just a little fella. Little fellas need lots of butch, ducklin’, and iddytream . . . Grit. Chock. Chock. Shake. Rattle. Roll. Hmmmmm . . . Hit. Hit. Pinch. Bite. Hurt. Grit. Whew. My baby don’t care for rings . . . Pablum lullion (in or out of the hospital). P.S. Foxhugh [the poodle] will bite sooties if you say iddytream again. Grit. Grit. [Signed] Ariadne Pennington

  The two rarely fought. Linda even tolerated Elvis seeing other women when she wasn’t around, though for the first year and a half, he was largely faithful. When he did fool around, “it hurt her,” Marty Lacker saw. “But her attitude was, ‘What am I going to do about it? Say, “Hey, Elvis, you can’t do that or I’m going to leave?” He would have said, ‘Adios.’ ”

  For Christmas that first year, Elvis gave her what all grown-up girls want, a fur coat. And all year round, she gave him what he wanted, too—she allowed him to regress to an infantile state, to start the full journey back to Gladys.

  The irony was that the more childlike Elvis became, the more he treated Lisa Marie as an adult, showering her with the same gifts he gave his girlfriends. The four-year-old spent Christmas at Graceland that year, and she got a fur coat, just as Linda did. Elvis loved to buy Lisa things, including a big, round bed. It was tacky—fake fur, with a round mirror on top and a built-in radio—but he often slept in it when she was with her mother.

  He’d been thinking a lot about the first girl to whom he gave a round bed, as that September, Ann-Margret tragically fell twenty-two feet from a platform in Lake Tahoe, breaking her jawbone, and shattering her face, arm, and knee. She required extensive reconstructive surgery, but was back performing in Vegas in late November, and Elvis, who had already sent her flowers, went to talk with her.

  One night, as she and Roger entertained friends in the suite, he dropped by unexpectedly. “It was so easy for us to lapse into the closeness we’d always shared,” she wrote, and they monopolized each other until it became awkward with the other guests.

  Late that night, the phone rang in her bedroom while Roger was in the living room next door. She knew who it was before she answered. Elvis started out saying how wonderful she looked, and that his prayers for her health and healing had been answered. Then his tone shifted. He was lonely, he said, and wondered if she would see him.

  “You know I can’t,” she told him.

  “I know. But I just want you to know that I still feel the same.”

  As the “Aloha” concert neared in January 1973, Elvis “was so pumped up he could have hit the ceiling,” Marty says. He worked hard to get in shape, losing twenty-five pounds on a crash diet consisting of six hundred calories a day and what Marty remembers as “injections of urine of a pregnant woman.” He worked closely with Bill Belew on the design of what would become his favorite jumpsuit, featuring the American eagle, and exercised enormous discipline in staying off his drug protocol.

  “Aloha from Hawaii” would be his last great triumph—the album would stay on the Billboard charts for thirty-five weeks, and become his first number one chart-topping LP in nine years—and many of his old friends came to Honolulu to share the excitement. Felton Jarvis was there, though still weak from an Elvis-financed kidney transplant. And Patti Parry caught a plane at the very last minute (“Get over here, now!”) after Elvis looked at a tape of the rehearsal and decided he needed his hair styled.

  It was a remarkable performance and earned the highest ratings ever in Japan, where it was broadcast live. The feedback, all glowing, boosted Elvis’s spirits. The night after the show, he bought diamond-and-emerald rings for all the wives and gave each of the guys a thousand dollars.

  He’d stayed straight for two weeks now, and everyone prayed that Elvis had turned a corner. But just before he went on, he’d asked for a shot of vitamin B-12 mixed with amphetamines.

  The next morning, they were all supposed to go to the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial. Marty banged on his door at the Hawaiian Village Hotel, and nobody answered. “Finally, Linda came, and she just made a face and shook her head. Elvis was sitting on the balcony, on the top floor of the hotel, stoned out of his gourd. He was sweating profusely, with a towel around his neck, and he could hardly talk. He’d gone right back into it.”

  When the special was broadcast in America on April 4, 1973, 57 perc
ent of the television audience watched it, including Joyce Bova. It stirred her emotions, and she called Charlie, just wanting to share the experience with someone close to him. When Elvis himself called back on the “hotline,” the private phone he’d had installed in her home, her palms began perspiring. But it was a sweet call. “I miss you,” he said. “I want you to come to California. Call me in a couple of weeks.” She said yes, and for a second she meant it. Before they hung up, he asked for a copy of a photo of himself with both Joyce and Janice taken in Vegas. She sent it, but she didn’t call. “I couldn’t have gone back to that. I didn’t want to. It wasn’t good for me.”

  Elvis watched the show with Linda and Jerry, sitting at home in the Monovale house in Los Angeles. But over the next few weeks, Jerry felt as if Elvis were distancing himself from him. The younger man had become infatuated with a girl who was often part of the Palm Springs weekends, and he knew his marriage to Sandy was coming apart. He and Elvis hadn’t discussed it. Then on another trip to Palm Springs, Elvis said, “Jerry, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

  Jerry braced himself for a lecture but instead, he got a confession: Elvis had slept with Jerry’s girlfriend. It had only been a one-time thing, he said, one night when Jerry had fallen asleep early. Jerry knew he was in no position to be self-righteous, but it stung. Elvis had broken the cardinal rule of the brotherhood.

  Soon Jerry’s marriage to Sandy collapsed, and he would eventually marry Myrna Smith of the Sweet Inspirations. But that, too, would unravel.

  Hanging with Elvis was rough on a marriage. Joe and Joanie would be divorced by the end of the year, but Joe soon meet a smart and energetic blonde named Shirley Dieu, an Oklahoma transplant who had grown up in San Diego.

  Joe and Shirley were a strong couple, and Elvis told her on numerous occasions how much he admired their relationship. However, one time when she visited him in the hospital, he was half-dressed and got close in her face, and she got the impression that he was coming on to her. She dismissed it and acted as if it hadn’t happened. But he was clearer on another occasion in the Imperial Suite in Las Vegas, when they both got up from sleep and ended up in the kitchen at the same time.

  “He put both of his arms up and tried to kiss me, and I just kind of slithered out from underneath him. I said, ‘I’ve got to go. Joe’s in the room.’ It was awkward, but I never thought of him in that way, and I never, ever, accepted any of his advances. I guess if you are really in love with somebody, you don’t.”

  That didn’t stop Angie Stanley, the eighteen-year-old wife of Elvis’s stepbrother Billy. She went after Elvis “like he was the last piece of cake on the platter,” according to Billy Smith. Elvis’s response was to set Billy Stanley up with another girl so he could be with his wife. Billy wrote about it in his book Elvis: My Brother, saying the two had a month-long affair in 1972, and that Elvis felt bad about it.

  Elvis told Billy Smith that he had intentions, but that he never went through with them. He and Angie simply talked, he said, and he ended up preaching to her a little. But Marty Lacker got a different idea one day when he and Elvis walked down the steps into the den from the kitchen, and Billy Stanley happened to pass them.

  “I was thinking about Elvis and Angie, and somehow Elvis knew that. He kind of glanced over at Billy, and then he looked at me, and he said, ‘Well, it ain’t like he’s my brother.’ ”

  Three weeks after the “Aloha” concert, Elvis opened his eighth Vegas engagement. He was tired now. All the Vegas nights of the past seemed to run together, the great shows when he was heralded as the white knight of rock, the bad shows when he’d change songs so spontaneously the band could barely keep up. He thought he’d wanted this life so badly, but what had it brought him in the end? Right now, he only knew what it had cost.

  Sometimes he thought about the night Anita Wood came to see him. She was in Las Vegas with her husband, Johnny Brewer, and ran into Joe and Charlie in the hotel lobby. They invited her to the show, saying they knew that Elvis would want to see her, and they gave her his booth right in front. She took a girlfriend with her, “and man, he looked so fine. He talked to me, sang to me. I was just . . . ooh, my goodness.” She hadn’t counted on feeling like that.

  She went backstage like they’d told her to, and she and Elvis embraced, held on hard and long. “Come on in this room,” Elvis said. “Let’s go in and talk.” It was a little private area, with just a bed and chair, and he closed the door to shut out the sound of his father and all the important people he didn’t want to see.

  They talked for about an hour, and the years melted away. Then he looked at her, his face all clouded up and somber. “Little,” he said softly, “I wonder if we made a mistake?”

  It was a shattering moment, and Anita fought to hold back tears. But she collected herself. “No,” she told him. “It’s for the best. We wouldn’t have our wonderful children, Elvis.” But they would always love each other, they both knew that, and there were things between them no one could ever take away.

  He wished she would come back again. He’d sat with Cliff Gleaves once, playing records, spinning “Funny How Time Slips Always” over and over. “You know why I’m playin’ it, Cliff,” he said. “My heart still burns for Anita.”

  On this night in 1973, he didn’t care about the present. He only cared about the past.

  The Hollywood Reporter, in its opening night review, noted his “lack of energy and interest” and attributed it to illness. The guys knew it ran deeper than the flu. He canceled several of his midnight shows, and even Alex Shoofey sympathized with the situation.

  “He didn’t have breathing room, you know? It was a continuous thing. I even said to the Colonel one time, ‘Give him a breather, Colonel, gosh! You know, he needs a little rest.’ He said, ‘Oh, he’s young. Don’t worry. He loves every moment of it.’ I think he could have let up a little, given him a little more time off.”

  But when four South American men jumped up onstage near the end of his show on February 18, it pushed him over the edge. The men had just been overexuberant fans, and probably drunk, and the guys had quickly wrestled them off. In a dramatic display, Elvis knocked one back into the audience, and then told the stunned crowd, “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen. I’m sorry I didn’t break his goddamned neck is what I’m sorry about.”

  He was paranoid now, delusional, his behavior drug-induced. In the early hours of the morning, high on pills, he convinced himself that Mike Stone had sent the dark-skinned men to kill him. Climbing the walls, waving guns around, and ranting (“Mike Stone has to die!”), Elvis ordered Red to arrange a hit on the karate champion.

  “He really felt that way,” Joe says. “He was the man, the masculine guy who was hurt by his wife, and ‘I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch!’ He kept harping on getting it done until finally we said, ‘Okay, we have someone who’ll kill him for you.’ And he said, ‘Well, we’ll talk about it later,’ and dropped the subject.”

  Things were closing in on him. Priscilla wanted more money for the divorce, and he didn’t readily have it. He was overextended now as it was. But RCA wondered if Elvis would be interested in selling his master recordings, or back catalogue, for $3 million.

  At first Parker rejected the offer—accepting meant the label would never again have to pay royalties on records released before March 1, 1973, and Elvis would have no control over how the songs would be used. Yet Vernon argued otherwise, insisting it was a quick cure for many of Elvis’s financial ills. And so the Colonel sat down with RCA’s Mel Ilberman and when he’d finished negotiating, the label paid Elvis $5.4 million for all rights to every one of his songs.

  It would have been a paltry sum under any circumstances. But then Parker delivered Elvis a second blow, sliding a new management contract before him. All income from Elvis’s recordings would now be divided fifty-fifty from the first dollar, making Elvis and the Colonel pure and equal partners. The RCA monies would be subjected to that agreement, of course, and th
e Colonel would receive extra monies for his side deals. RCA paid the pair $10.5 million total, and of that, $6 million went to the Colonel, and $4.5 to Elvis. After taxes, Elvis would see $2 million for the most valuable recordings in the history of popular music.

  Much of it would go to Priscilla. When the divorce decree was finalized in October 1973, she received a cash payment of $725,000, plus spousal and child support, as well as part of Elvis’s new publishing companies, and half the sale of the Hillcrest house.

  By the time Elvis played the Sahara Tahoe in May 1973, the strain was obvious. He was thirty pounds overweight and lethargic, and canceled a number of shows, going to a local hospital for chest X-rays. Word spread throughout the industry.

  Barbara Eden followed Elvis into several venues when she was singing, and one of them was Tahoe.

  “The man who hired the talent up there sent me to a doctor one time in the mid-1970s, because I had a terrible cold and sore throat. He said, ‘Use him for this one job, but don’t use him for anything else.’ I asked why. He said, ‘He’s very proud that he took care of Elvis, but I was there when he treated him. Elvis’s rear end was like leather, it had been poked so many times with needles to keep him going.’ ”

  It was so very sad, she said. “Elvis was like a racehorse that you work too hard and then lose.”

  When Elvis returned to Memphis, the Colonel, furious about the canceled dates, called Vernon about the open dialogue between Elvis’s friends and family concerning his abuse of prescription medications. His rant fell on deaf ears.

  Dr. Nick saw that Vernon’s relationship with Elvis wasn’t good enough for him to hold any sway. And Vernon, who had a girlfriend and would separate from Dee the following year, didn’t truly realize what was going on. Vernon “was wrapped up in his little world. And he didn’t really want to accept that his son needed any help. That was one big problem.”