The two key words, I realized, are “Southern culture.” Elvis is the creature of that little postage stamp of earth in northeastern Mississippi that also gave birth to William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. William Faulkner was born in New Albany, less than thirty miles northwest of the tiny shotgun house in which Elvis was born; Tennessee Williams was born in the Episcopal rectory in Columbus, about sixty miles south of Tupelo. Why did America’s greatest writer in the twentieth century, America’s greatest playwright in the twentieth century, and America’s greatest entertainer in the twentieth century emerge from this same place? The answer, I think, lies in the history of the South and the particular history of the region.
A hundred years before Elvis was born, this land was populated and controlled by Native Americans, the Chickasaws. By the 1830s nearly all of the Indians were moved west to Oklahoma, and the land was quickly filled with African Americans and European Americans, with slaves and slaveholders, and with the plain folk of the Old South. Slavery dictated relations between men and women, and further it promoted a class structure that was hierarchical. Elvis was highly conscious of his place in that social hierarchy. Everyone born and reared in these Southern communities is conscious of his or her place. It is not so much a matter of simple class divisions as it is a matter of “who your people are.” What does your family name mean, and how do you yourself fit into your family and clan and community? Elvis was well down in the hierarchy, and he never attempted to climb higher on the social ladder, regardless of his considerable wealth and global fame.
Perhaps Elvis knew enough to know that elite Memphis would not have accepted him anyway. Money can help one make it in Memphis, but not within a generation. Even so, poor boys and girls who do make it often do aspire to the columned mansion with surrounding grounds that they associate with gentility. Elvis bought that symbol when he acquired Graceland.
Graceland was created as a show piece, verily a signal to the world of wealth, social eminence, and elite culture. Elvis’s sense of aesthetics alone was a gulf separating Elvis and his people from the elite of Memphis whose wealth was comparable to his own. When he moved in, one of the first things he did to change the landscape was to add a mobile home. When Elvis died, there were three mobile homes, two of them conspicuously large. In the later years a nurse who would monitor Elvis’s drug addiction would work out of one of those trailers. Elvis was not at all a social rebel, no leveler of classes. But race and gender were other matters.
Looking at Elvis in 1984 and considering the matter of race, I very soon picked up on the Sam Phillips story—this Memphis white man who was recording black musicians and who allegedly said something to the effect that if he could just find a white singer with the Negro sound—the Negro feel—he could get rich. Phillips is a highly significant figure in the evolution of Southern culture. Had he been in politics or journalism, scholars would have called him a “Southern white liberal” and put him in the camp with such movers and shakers as Frank Porter Graham, president of the progressive University of North Carolina and Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution. Phillips did not wait for the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education to begin deliberately undermining the racial establishment in the South. He was a “cross-over” person, a person of one race who relates closely to the other race. Among whites in the early to mid-twentieth century these persons were rare but not unique. Often they were church people, professional or lay. They were also writers, and very often musicians. Given the compelling character of African American religion and music, this is not surprising. In Elvis, Sam Phillips found his white man with the Negro feel. Soon white women did too, and then the rest of us.
Let’s consider Elvis’s first great audience—that is, his early audience in the flesh. Those Memphis audiences in 1954, 1955, and into 1956 were vastly white, female, and young. The very first audience was Southern, even “Deep South Southern.” In photographs the girls appear to be fourteen years old or in that neighborhood. The person who was female, white, Southern, and fourteen in 1954 was born about 1940 as the country was plunging deeper into World War II. Perhaps her father was away, among the millions of men in the American military. The need for soldiers was so great that men who had been in Parchman Prison with Elvis’s father, Vernon, were released to join the service. Her father might not have been in the military but he might have taken a job in war work away from home, as did Vernon. In any event, all Americans suffered some of the physical and psychological pain of wartime. Priscilla Presley, for example, lost her father, a Navy pilot, in a crash that occurred just as the war came to a close.
Soon after that war ended, the Cold War with the Communists began, bringing with it omnipresent fears of the atomic bomb. At school, say, in the fourth grade, this girl might have participated in an air raid drill, crawling under her desk when the alarm sounded. Another killing war broke out in Korea when she was ten and wound down to an uneasy ceasefire when she was thirteen. This girl’s family doggedly pursued the good life under the real danger of nuclear war and amidst fears of Communist subversion.
A threat of a very different order arose in May 1954, when the Supreme Court decided that her junior high school would be desegregated. Desegregation was a vital and potentially violent issue in the South and especially so in the Deep South, the black belt South, the Bible-belt South, the South where Elvis would find his first great live audiences. That is where Elvis found this girl who, with her friends, responded to him so enthusiastically he did not know what was happening. For the girls, it was escape from cultural restraint, however temporarily it might turn out to be for some. It was more than the music.
In the Southern white mind, race and sex are inextricably mixed, and it is not difficult to accept the idea that the primary purpose of segregation was to keep black males away from white females. Ideally, white women were expected to be pious, pure, domestic, and submissive, while the men provide and protect. Purity, of course, meant purity of body, but it also meant purity of mind and thought. No lusting by women allowed; no sex outside of marriage; no overt admiration and appetite for the male body; no overt expression of awareness of themselves as sexual creatures.
Then Elvis—with his mix of black and white rhythms, with his seeming indifference to race, with his exciting moving body—came along. During the months that followed his performance at Overton Shell in Memphis, “Elvis mania” swelled. In the audiences, the girls shrieked, danced, and stomped in expressions of their sexuality. Not every teenage girl in the lower Mississippi Valley became an Elvis girl, but enough did, and the movement spread through the black belt South, first in places where the numbers of black people relative to white people ran highest and where the tension over integration was greatest—from east Arkansas and Texas across to north Florida and up into eastern Virginia. Wherever Elvis played, the girls responded in the same demonstrative style as his first audiences.
“His audience was his true love,” Priscilla Presley wrote in her book, Elvis and Me, her 1985 remembrance of her ex-husband. The engine that drove Elvis Presley for the rest of his life has never been stated more clearly. These teenage girls, not Elvis’s managers, created “The First Elvis,” without whom the Elvis that the world came to know and often celebrate during his life and after his death would not have existed. From 1954 to 1957, when Elvis performed live on stage, it was as if he and the teenage girls in his audience existed in a huge and protective bubble, alone, ecstatic, and away from the stultifying world.
Elvis became—and remains—a worldwide phenomenon. Graceland is one of the most visited homes in America, a quintessential piece of Southern culture where the spirit of a shy young man still seems to wander the house and its grounds. Elvis’s dream included a son who would look like him and be with him in Graceland. But no daughter could look more like her father than his daughter, Lisa Marie. The feminine in the masculine and the masculine in the feminine are living contradictions, phenomena like no other in Western Civilization where dualis
m is virtually a religion. No duality may be more sacred than sexual duality. No other phenomenon asserts more beautifully, more perfectly the oneness of us all. Elvis had a treasured masculine side … and a sensitive feminine side too. Perhaps we all do.
The gender world in which Margaret Mitchell of Gone with the Wind came to maturity was precisely the world into which the Elvis girls were born. The culture in which she suffered as a woman and finally flourished as a writer in the late 1930s was the culture that poured into the bodies of the Elvis girls virtually as they first stirred to life. In Gone with the Wind, it was Scarlett, not Melanie, who took charge of her life. Just two decades after publication of the novel, it seemed like the audiences for Elvis were filled with women who reflected Scarlett, cautiously bold, tentatively independent and, for a few hours at least, openly sexual. In Gone with the Wind, Scarlett raised a pistol and fired a bullet through the head of an intruding bummer who invaded her plantation home at Tara. As she did so, she glanced up at Melanie dragging a sword for their defense to the top of the stairs. Why, Scarlett exclaimed, she’s just like me! As it turned out, it was not just Southern women who responded to Elvis’s unique blend of musical cultures. It was American women, and in time women everywhere, and men, too.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Donald Shaw, Kenan professor emeritus of journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Professor Shaw met with me biweekly for the last several years and recruited special assistants to follow the manuscript through many changes, rewrites, and revisions. There have been many helpers. I mention in particular Melanie Hudak, Dr. Tom Terry, and my friend, Chapel Hill writer Joanna Catherine Scott. I appreciate my long association with the late Frank Ryan of the University Department of History. Of course I am grateful to Oxford editor Susan Ferber. Thank you also to my seminar students with whom I shared my research and insights, and who, in the back and forth discussion, inspired me with new ideas. Without all these brilliant and generous people, twenty-five years of labor would never have come to fruition in the publication of this book. Of course I owe a special debt of gratitude to my wife, Anna, and my children, Alethea, William, and Joelle. I feel I have been supported tenderly.
Joel Williamson
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
December 2013
ELVIS PRESLEY
INTRODUCTION
THE DEATH OF ELVIS
The call came to Memphis Fire Station No. 29 at 2:33 p.m. on Tuesday, August 16, 1977. The dispatcher indicated that someone at 3754 Elvis Presley Boulevard was having difficulty breathing. “Go to the front gate and go to the front of the mansion,” the voice directed. Ambulance Unit No. 6 swung out of the station onto Elvis Presley Boulevard and headed south, siren wailing, advertising a speed that the ponderous machine had not yet achieved.
The two medics manning the ambulance recognized the address right away. The “mansion,” as the dispatcher called it, was Elvis Presley’s home, Graceland, three miles south of the fire station. They had been there often, to take care of fans fainting at the front gate and pedestrians injured by passing automobiles. Two years before, one of the medics, Charles Crosby, had come to assist Elvis’s father, Vernon Presley, after he suffered a heart attack. He thought it might be Vernon again.
On this run Crosby was driving the ambulance. He was thirty-eight, stoutly built, dark-haired, and heavily mustached. His partner, Ulysses Jones, twenty-six, sat in the passenger seat. Members of the Memphis Fire Department, they had received eighty-eight hours of special training to become emergency medical technicians and had years of experience. On each call, they alternated between driving and riding in the back with the ill or injured. This time, Ulysses Jones would ride with the patient.
Crosby expertly threaded the boxy white, blue, and orange vehicle through the thin midafternoon traffic with lights flashing. Heat waves shimmered up from the asphalt in front of him. During the day, the mercury had risen into the mid-90s and hovered there. In a city not yet fully air-conditioned, many working Memphians breathed the hot, damp air, mopped their brows, and thought fondly about getting home to an icy drink on their shady screened-in porches.
As the ambulance crested a low hill and swooped down the broad six-lane boulevard toward Graceland, the gates swung open and the crowd milling around the entrance parted. Making a wide sweeping turn to the left, the vehicle bounced heavily across the sidewalk and hurtled through the entranceway, striking one of the swinging metal gates a clanging blow. One of the several musical notes welded to the gate fell off. Crosby accelerated up the curving drive toward the mansion. He braked hard in front of the two-story, white-columned portico. Climbing down from the ambulance, Crosby and Jones were met by one of Elvis’s bodyguards.
“He’s upstairs,” the man exclaimed, “and I think it’s an OD.”
Grabbing their equipment, the two medics rushed into the house and up the stairs. They pushed through Elvis’s bedroom, noticing the deep-pile red rug and the huge unmade bed facing three television consoles, one for each of the three major networks. Passing through a wide doorway, they entered Elvis’s enormous bathroom, what had been two rooms combined into a sitting room, dressing room, and bathroom. Ulysses Jones told a reporter later that day that he saw “as many as a dozen people huddled over the body of a man clothed in pajamas—a yellow top and blue bottoms.”
At first sight Jones didn’t recognize Elvis. The man was stretched out on his back on the thick red rug with his pajama top open and his bottoms pulled down below his knees. Rolls of fat girded his belly. He was very dark, almost black. Jones thought that he might have been a black man. “From his shoulders up, his skin was dark blue,” he told a reporter for the Memphis Press-Scimitar. “Around his neck, which seemed fat and bloated, was a very large gold medallion. His sideburns were gray.” A young man was pressing Elvis’s chest rhythmically, while a middle-aged woman gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Jones knelt quickly to search for any sign of life in the prostrate form. He felt no pulse, and he saw no flicker of response when he flashed a penlight into his eyes. “Elvis was cold,” he said, “unusually cold.”
People in the room began frantically asking the medics what should be done. Suddenly, as if in response, one young man blurted out helpfully, “We think he OD’d.” It was the second time the medics had heard that opinion. The man seemed to speak for the whole group. No one dissented, but Jones thought the statement caused “a kind of funny stir in the room.” Elvis’s employees were rigorously trained never to mention Elvis and drugs in the same breath. Elvis did not take “drugs” of any kind. If they ever had to say anything at all, they were to say that he was on “medication” prescribed by his physicians. One of the medics asked for the container that held the drugs taken by the victim. None was ever produced.
Jones and Crosby quickly concluded that emergency treatment in a hospital offered the only hope. It took five men to lift the body onto the stretcher. “He must have weighed 250 pounds,” Crosby said.
With much difficulty, they negotiated the stretcher around the corners and down the stairs. Two men had to hold back Elvis’s father, Vernon, as he cried and called out, “Son, I’m coming … I’ll be there … I’ll meet you there.”
As they were about to leave, a Mercedes-Benz raced up the driveway and lurched to a stop. A stocky middle-aged man with a thatch of white hair dashed from the car and leaped into the back of the ambulance just as the doors closed. It was Elvis’s doctor, George Nichopoulos.
Dr. “Nick” Nichopoulos
Four years later it would be established in court that during the seven and a half months preceding Elvis’s death, from January 1, 1977, to August 16, 1977, Dr. Nichopoulos had written prescriptions for him for at least 8,805 pills, tablets, vials, and injectables. Going back to January 1975, the count was 19,012. The numbers defied belief, but they came from an experienced team of investigators who visited 153 pharmacies and spent 1,090 hours going through 6,570,175 prescriptions and then, wit
h the aid of two secretaries, spent another 1,120 hours organizing the evidence. The drugs included uppers, downers, and powerful painkillers such as Dilaudid, Quaalude, Percodan, Demerol, and cocaine hydrochloride in quantities more appropriate for those terminally ill with cancer. In fact, at about 2:00 a.m. on the morning of his death, Dr. Nick was again ready to prescribe. He responded to a telephone call from Elvis by prescribing six doses of Dilaudid, an opiate that was Elvis’s favorite drug. One of Elvis’s bodyguards, Billy Stanley, drove over to Baptist Memorial Hospital, picked up the pills at the all-night pharmacy, and brought them to Graceland. The bodyguard said that he saw Elvis take the pills. The autopsy, however, showed no traces of Dilaudid in Elvis’s body.
In the fall of 1981 the state tried Dr. Nichopoulos in criminal court for overprescribing drugs to Elvis and a number of other patients. Dr. Nick testified that if he had not given Elvis a large proportion of the drugs he demanded, other doctors would have. By supplying Elvis, he had at least some control over his patient’s intake. His defense was weakened substantially by evidence that he had prescribed an excessive amount of drugs to at least ten other patients, including rock star Jerry Lee Lewis and his own teenage daughter, Chrissy.
On the other hand, it was clearly established that Elvis could, would, and did get any drug he wanted from show business doctors in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. One of his suppliers was a Las Vegas physician called “Flash” by Elvis’s staff, since he would appear on a moment’s notice, syringe in hand, ready to inject Elvis with whatever drug he wanted. The guys said that “Flash liked to attend Elvis’s parties to mix with the overflow of attractive young women present and perhaps find a companion for the evening.” At home in Memphis, Elvis would get packages containing drugs mailed from the West. Sometimes he sent his private plane, the four-engine Lisa Marie, to Las Vegas or Los Angeles to secure drugs from doctors in those cities and ferry them back to Memphis. Sometimes he flew out himself.
Elvis Presley Page 2
