Under fire from several directions, Dr. Francisco ignored the lab results and the opinions of other pathologists. He gave heart disease as the probable cause on the official death certificate and ruled that Elvis died a “natural” death rather than an “accidental” death, which an OD would have been labeled. Over the decades that followed, he held to that position steadfastly and with a seemingly happy defiance.
Jerry Francisco was a self-assured and strong-minded man. He loved his work, and he was sure that he did it well. Every year his office certified the deaths of about three thousand people in Shelby County, about a third of which required some investigation. In accomplishing his formidable task expeditiously, Dr. Francisco seemed to be guided when possible by the ancient and usually wise dictum “Let the dead bury the dead.” To that, he added a Francisco addendum, “And let life go on.”
On one revealing occasion, both he and Dr. Muirhead testified in a civil case involving a claim against an insurance company brought by the relatives of a man who had died, predictably, of a heart condition long known to his doctors. Dr. Muirhead testified that the man died of natural causes, his failing heart, which meant that his family could not claim the insurance money. Dr. Francisco persuaded the jury that he died from accidental causes because the man happened to hit his head on an object as he fell to the floor just before he died. The insurance company paid the claim. When Muirhead criticized Francisco, he replied, “Eric, you just don’t know how to play the game.”
Dr. Nick on Trial
One result of Elvis’s death was that Dr. Nichopoulos’s practice of medicine came under close scrutiny. In January 1980, a panel of five doctors commissioned by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners to judge his treatment of Elvis and a number of other patients began a hearing in the chambers of the Memphis City Council. The doctors concluded that Dr. Nick was, as one member of the panel worded it, “not a bad doctor.” He was simply too sympathetic to his patients and too quick to write prescriptions for people who just dropped in at his office. They suspended his license for three months and put him on probation for three years.
In the fall of 1981, local authorities, under the direction of the state attorney general, charged Nichopoulos with violating a law against doctors overprescribing drugs. The previous year a panel of five doctors had let Dr. Nick go with a slap on the wrist and an indulgent smile; now, the state’s prosecutors were determined to put him behind bars for years. Nichopoulos hired James Neal to defend him, reputedly for $150,000. Neal had won national fame as the legal counsel for the Senate committee that brought Richard Nixon down from the White House following the Watergate cover-up.
Neal’s defense of Dr. Nick was brilliant. He portrayed the doctor as the Good Samaritan who put the welfare of his sorely afflicted patients far above his own. In Elvis’s case, Dr. Nick had shown great compassion, faithfully treating an exceedingly difficult patient over many years. Neal also cleverly managed to use the “polypharmacy” argument to exonerate his client from sole and punishable blame in the death of Elvis. He questioned one expert witness for the prosecution after another, going down the list of drugs found in Elvis’s body one by one. Tell me, Doctor, he would say, which drug killed him? Was it codeine? “No.” Was it Dilaudid? “No.” The witness would have to answer “no” to each question because it was the combination of drugs that did Elvis in and no single one. The jury had no difficulty deciding that there was indeed reasonable doubt that Dr. Nick had done anything at all illegal in Elvis’s case or in any of the other cases. Rather, the good doctor cared very much, personally as well as professionally, about his patients. They returned a verdict of “not guilty.”
An amazing array of wild theories sprang up to explain Elvis’s untimely death. Within a few days of his passing, Dr. Nick, seemingly desperate, told Vernon that Elvis was actually dying from bone cancer. Thus, it was merciful that he died as quickly as he did and escaped the agony that would have come. Another story asserted that someone came into his bathroom and delivered a karate chop to the neck that did him in. Elvis was an ardent karate fan, and the young men in his coterie had become expert in the art. One alienated friend might easily have gained entry into the bathroom and given him the lethal chop. Vernon, at least at first, was absolutely convinced that someone had killed his son. He commissioned Dick Grob, the chief of security at Graceland, to find the culprit.
Still another idea floated about claiming that Elvis was not dead. He had paid a man who was terminally ill to undergo plastic surgery to look exactly like him and then commit suicide. The money was to go to the man’s family. Elvis, thus relieved of the burden of his celebrity, now lived happily in some unknown land under an assumed name.
Very knowledgeable people differ widely on exactly what killed Elvis. One highly creative yet plausible theory is that his excessive straining on the toilet somehow cut off the circulation of blood to his heart; hence the sudden pain that led him to stand up and fall forward. It was a heart attack after all, even though his affinity for “downers” had brought about the phenomenally high level of constipation that triggered the attack.
Another creative but plausible scenario held that during that last night he mistakenly took the codeine pills supplied by his dentist, rather than the Dilaudid prescribed by his doctor, since the pills were virtually indistinguishable. No Dilaudid was found in his body during the autopsy, while codeine was at a lethal level for an ordinary person. It was well known that Elvis was highly allergic to codeine; hence the pain just before he died.
Yet another plausible theory is that Elvis carelessly downed the codeine pills his dentist had given him, and those, combined with a host of other drugs he ordinarily took, produced a lethal reaction. Dr. Nichopoulos himself had established a routine “protocol” in which three separate packets of drugs were to be given to Elvis when he needed to go to sleep. Elvis definitely took all three of these that morning, downing the last at about 8:30 a.m. Quite possibly, the depressants he took trying to induce sleep reduced his breathing to the critical level. He had frequently suffered such episodes before and come terribly close to dying—saved only by the vigilance of his caretakers. That morning, no one was watching. For some reason—perhaps involving a reaction to the codeine and attempts to move his bowels—he experienced pain and fright while sitting on the toilet. Alarmed, he stood up, dropped the book he was reading, stumbled forward, and fell face down in the fetal position. He struggled weakly and drooled on the rug. Unable to breathe, he died.
The young man who met the medics when they first arrived at the front door of Graceland had already made the correct diagnosis of an overdose even before the experts saw the body.
David Brinkley on The Nightly News, August 16, 1977
“Elvis Presley died today,” David Brinkley declared at the beginning of the six o’clock NBC Nightly News on August 16. “He was forty-two. Apparently it was a heart attack,” he continued in his dry, staccato, and compelling style. “He was found in his home in Memphis not breathing. His road manager tried to revive him. He failed. A hospital tried to revive him. It failed. His doctor pronounced him dead at three o’clock this afternoon, the end at an early age of one of the two most spectacular careers in the history of entertainment, the other being Frank Sinatra.”
Brinkley said Presley was very near the peak of his career when he was drafted into the army and “actually trained as a tank man” rather than serving as a performer entertaining for the troops. “He sold records in the multiples of millions, made millions, bought a string of Cadillacs, one after another, gave away a string of Cadillacs to people he liked. And along the way he was married to Priscilla Anne Beaulieu. The very symbol of sex for all the millions of … uh … hundreds of thousands of teenagers, he was married only once and then relatively late. The couple had one child, a daughter. The marriage did not last very long. It ended in divorce.
“He was a part of American popular history,” Brinkley continued. “In the 1950s, the great swing era of Benny Goo
dman, Artie Shaw, and Tommy Dorsey was about dead. Big band pop music had turned into what was called Bop or Bee Bop, remote, obscure, and bloodless, nobody liked it, nobody could dance to it. And then here came Elvis with a hot, stomping, steaming, sexy kind of music that turned on young people as pop music never had before. Others came along, including the Beatles, but they were all indebted to him and most of them said so.”
Coolly and calmly, David Brinkley gave Elvis the obituary that the country wanted to hear. He was a fine young man of the lower social orders who had risen to fame and fortune by his talent to become one of America’s top entertainers. A true patriot, Elvis had served in the army; he became rich; he was generous; and he was a father. Now Elvis was dead; he was forty-two.
The Woman at the Gate—“A Heart of Gold”
There were millions of Americans—especially women—who loved Elvis. Their feelings could hardly be expressed in words. Many of them journeyed to Graceland to mourn his death.
NBC sent a television reporter, Jackson Bain, to capture the scene and interview some of the people present. On Wednesday, the film clip appeared on the early morning Today Show, hosted by Jane Pauley. She began by explaining that Elvis came to Memphis for “a better life.” His “parents were hard-working people,” and Elvis became a “truck driver like his father.” She announced that his father, Vernon, was opening up Graceland for two hours that afternoon for a public viewing of the body.
At sunrise, Bain had positioned himself at the twin black metal gates at the foot of the driveway that led up the low hill to the front entrance of the house at Graceland and interviewed some of the people present. At one point he approached an attractive, long-haired, blonde in her midthirties. She and her family had begun to drive from California to Memphis to visit the Graceland site before they heard of Elvis’s death. One can imagine the family getting into their car in the predawn hours in California, traveling for a couple of days over the Rocky Mountains and across the Great Plains, then hearing the news of Elvis’s death on the car radio. They pressed on to Memphis through the night and arrived at the gates at first light.
“Why have you come here?” Bain asked the woman. “Why do you feel close to Elvis Presley?”
“We were on our way from California to see him when we heard the news that it had happened,” she replied in the shocked, sad tone of someone recounting events immediately after the sudden death of a loved one.
“But why are you here?” Bain persisted. “What makes you feel close to the man?”
“I just love him,” she answered. “I love his generosity, his talent, everything about him. He has a heart of gold.” For at least two generations, millions of Americans have agreed.
CHAPTER TWO
KILLERS OF THE DREAM
Even wise and excellent students of the Elvis phenomenon have written about it as a “mania,” as if these girls had fallen into some sort of insanity. The girls were “hysterical,” a psychotic illness allegedly peculiar to women. As the number of young women at Elvis occasions swelled into the thousands and then tens of thousands, many people were profoundly disturbed, even deeply frightened by what they saw. They felt that things were getting more and more out of control.
If the girls were “out of control,” it was only in the sense that the rebels who staged the Boston Tea Party during the American Revolution, or stormed the Bastille in 1789, or sat-in, rode-in, and marched-in during the civil rights movement in the early 1960s were out of control. In certain times and places, the girls were in control. That was precisely the problem. They turned Elvis occasions into what they wanted them to be.
The girls decided it was much more satisfying to see Elvis than to hear him. By the hundreds and the thousands, they wanted to hear their own voices, to move their own bodies, to express themselves as sexual creatures on those occasions. Some were even ready to do violence to the police and other girls to get, as Elvis said, a piece of him. No shrinking violets or swooning maidens, they were more like warrior women, Amazons, whose bodies had power.
Adult Americans were horrified. They saw Elvis as the culprit and they saw what he did, but they had great difficulty articulating exactly what it was that he did to perpetrate the crime. His public performances were points where the social corruption came to a head and burst forth most powerfully. In 1956 and 1957, as he moved from city to city in the North and West as well as in the South, it fell to journalists everywhere to describe and interpret Elvis’s actions onstage. They tortured metaphors and struggled mightily for language to do their job.
The Press
One ploy was to describe Elvis as a person who was, in effect, physically ill. The Buffalo Courier-Express likened him to a man with chronic and painful indigestion. The Columbus (Ohio) Citizen thought his “continual flexing of the hands, gyrating of the knees, and facial expressions” suggested acute appendicitis. Others said he was “spastic,” “epileptic,” or afflicted by “St. Vitus Dance.” Another tactic was to depict him as an animal—predatory like a panther or silly like a goose. The Tacoma (Washington) News-Tribune stretched to make a very unkind analogy, declaring that Elvis “strutted like a duck, his hands dangling loosely in front of him.” The Miami Herald declared flatly that “the boy is a show business freak,” while its companion the Daily News dismissed him as simply “stupid.”
It is striking—and revealing—that the one image Elvis’s critics most often used in their attempts to describe their revulsion at his performance was that of the female stripper. In Los Angeles, after witnessing an Elvis show, a reporter for Variety declared that a “stripper who tried anything like it would find herself a guest of the county,” meaning that she would be thrown into the county jail. Journalists in Waco and Amarillo emphasized his “bumps and grinds,” while in Omaha the World-Herald asserted that his “gyrations” were “simply no more than a male cooch dance complete with bumps and grinds.” St. Paul declared him “nothing more than a male burlesque dancer,” while Topeka asserted that he “would put a burlesque queen to shame.” The Savannah Morning News was kinder but held to the analogy. “Women have discovered burlesque,” the reporter said, “and they love it.
Paul Wilder, writing in the Tampa Morning Telegraph, wrapped up the Elvis stripper image in a couple of sentences. Elvis was “America’s only male hoochy-kootch dancer,” he declared after attending a show. “He wrestled microphones, slunk panther-like across the stage with a masculine version of Marilyn Monroe’s wiggle in every jerking step, and blasted his feminine heart-wilting voice into every cranny of the huge armory.”
Elvis was not simply a stripper out to entertain an audience and earn a living; he was a stripper who used nefarious means to pursue an evil and specific end—the destruction of female purity. His performances were not merely sensual, they were deliberately lewd. He was sullen, sulky, and sinister. “His performance was the most disgusting exhibition this reporter has ever seen,” Marjorie Howe wrote in the Sioux City Journal. “He has a sulky look and his infrequent smile is almost surly.” Critics thought that Elvis was unhappy with society for no good reason, and it was outrageous that he took every opportunity to show the world his contempt for its ways. His whole body, it seemed, mocked the stunning inadequacy of the mainstream world. An Oakland writer resented his “staggering, sulking walk,” which seemed to say that he just couldn’t take the stupidity of his elders anymore.
Elvis was bad, but the girls were worse. When Elvis appeared onstage, the girls screamed mindlessly. “You couldn’t hear Elvis in the front row,” Betty Schiebel wrote in the San Antonio Light. “Uproar exploded each time he looked as though he might open his mouth,” she continued. “A flood of white teeth from Elvis, a loose-hipped slur of dance steps, a Brando-like gaze from his soulful blue eyes, and the floor vibrated from 6,000 stamping feet, whistles shattered the air.” Onstage, Elvis moved his body vigorously, and outrageously. “He comes across like the midnight express. He kicks, slinks, shimmies and gyrates.
Writers struggl
ed to find words to describe the girls’ performances. They “exploded” in La Crosse, Wisconsin, “screamed” in Hawaii, and in New Orleans set up a “din of squealing.” In Amarillo, “the air raid siren screams” rose as Elvis “worked himself into an orgiastic rhythm, losing himself to the savage beat.” In Shreveport the girls yelled “like Zulus every time he moved a muscle.” In Long Beach they “whistled, screamed, wept, stomped their feet, jumped up on their seats, ran up and down the aisles and shrieked over and over again, ‘Ohhh Elvis, Elvis!’ ”
A reporter in Seattle said it sounded “like 12,000 girls having their heads shaved at once.” This image is both problematical and fascinating. As World War II came to an end, the newsreels often showed French and Italian women who had consorted with German soldiers having their heads shaved and then being put on public display, marking them as tramps and traitors. Readers of the Bible might be reminded of St. Paul’s dictate to the Corinthians. “If a woman does not cover her head, she should have her hair cut off,” Paul preached, because “it is just as though her head were shaved” (1 Corinthians 11:5–6). For Paul, the woman covered her head as a sign of respect for the man; shaving the heads of twelve thousand girls in Seattle suggests censuring them for rejecting the authority of men. Indeed, by their behavior at an Elvis concert female fans could be seen as betraying future husbands, and defying fathers, lovers, boyfriends, self-appointed censors, and most pointedly policemen, whose sole purpose was to preserve law and order in society.
Elvis Presley Page 4
