Barbara had to return to California, so Elvis flew Joyce down from Washington. As Vernon helped his ailing son up the stairs toward his bedroom at Graceland, she followed behind. She was touched by that father-son scene but then was shocked to see Priscilla in front of her. Actually, it was a full-sized portrait of Priscilla, with Elvis standing beside her, hanging on the wall in the stairwell. They looked “almost like brother and sister,” she said, “both in facial structure and expression.” Joyce stayed for a few days, nursing Elvis.
It was an intimate time for Joyce, stuffed away with him in his bedroom. But it was also strange. She felt hemmed in by the “velvet haremlike drapes” covering the windows, bulky “dark wood furniture,” and “a red-and-black color scheme.” His books on religion and philosophy lay all around, and she read to him from The Impersonal Life, his current favorite. During the previous winter in Las Vegas, he had persuaded her to take pills before having sex. Before long, Placidyl was her drug. When she left Graceland she asked Elvis for a supply to take with her.
Joyce was back within three weeks. This time, Elvis took her downstairs to meet his grandmother Minnie Mae. They engaged intensely right away because, as Joyce said, they talked about “the man we both adored.” Minnie Mae was amazingly quick to embrace anyone in the endless sequence of Elvis’s young women who happened by, and thereafter each could imagine that she was truly the only woman in Elvis’s life. Joyce was favorably impressed by it all. That weekend she saw a beautiful Elvis, but she did not know how to respond when he suggested that she move into Graceland. There was, after all, his wife, Priscilla, to consider.
In late May 1971, Joyce was again back in the studio in Nashville with Elvis. The producers were having trouble finishing this recording session, in part because the musicians kept going outside to the parking lot, where they gathered in a van and smoked marijuana. They excused themselves from the studio, asserting that it was so crowded with all the guys in the Elvis entourage and all the talent that there was no place left for them to sit or stand. They were so far gone on “grass” that they thought Joyce was Priscilla.
To bring the musicians to sobriety and back to work, the security guards, who were Nashville policemen off duty, fed them “speed,” amphetamines they had taken off a pusher they had just jailed. Elvis, for his part, attempted to bring them to a proper sense of their responsibilities by showing them his Narco badge and giving them a speech denouncing rock groups known to have drug problems. The musicians thought it hilarious that they should hear such preaching from a guy who was himself stoned. Joyce again went back to Memphis with Elvis. This time she inquired about the possibility of Dr. Nick writing her a prescription for her own bottle of Placidyl.
In mid-June, when Priscilla left Memphis for California to work on decorating their house, Elvis immediately brought Joyce back to Graceland. Two months later she joined him in Las Vegas, and she had big news. She was pregnant. She had become pregnant at Graceland during her last visit. Joyce was determined to tell Elvis. She took her Catholicism seriously. Sexual relations outside of marriage and adultery were bad enough; abortion was beyond endurance. Alone in his room on the twenty-ninth floor of the hotel, she began to break the news gently by asking Elvis about his daughter. After he answered, she intended to announce that he was about to become the father of another child. She thought Elvis sensed what was coming and tried to avoid the issue by talking nonstop about how sacred motherhood was and how mothers should not try to be sexy. The message seemed to be that if she had a baby it would be her fault and sex between them would cease. Joyce asserted that sexuality was a part of life. Elvis waved her away. “Trust me on this, Joyce,” he said, “I know I’m right.” She gave up. Three weeks later she had her abortion and never told him.
On November 5 and 6, Saturday and Sunday, Joyce joined Elvis as he performed in Cleveland and Louisville. She observed that there were no “high rollers” in the audience such as she had seen in his audiences in Las Vegas. These huge crowds were true believers. Increasingly, Elvis was seeing himself as the messiah to the masses. His mission in life, he kept telling her, was to make people’s dreams come true. She saw guns and books scattered about in his hotel room, and he always carried his Jaycees award and his badge from the Bureau of Narcotics.
All Fall Down
In 1972 Elvis wrote:
Philosophy for a happy life.
Someone to love
Something to look forward to
And something to do.
E. P. 1972
After the November tour, Elvis flew to Memphis, then to California, and then back to Memphis where on Saturday night, December 11, 1971, he took Joyce Bova to a private screening at the Crosstown Theater. Increasingly, Elvis talked to Joyce about moving into Graceland with him, but she worried about his rapid mood swings—and the pills they both were taking. Plus, he was still married to Priscilla. On Sunday, he and Joyce flew to Washington and checked into the hotel where they had first consummated their love. On Tuesday, he flew back to Memphis and on Saturday Priscilla and Lisa Marie arrived from California. Now it was Priscilla who had some news for Elvis.
Priscilla told Elvis that she did not love him anymore and was separating from him. She and Lisa stayed for Christmas but flew out the night before New Year’s Eve. With a dramatic flair that seemed to please him, Elvis gathered together an assembly of his people at Graceland and announced that Priscilla was leaving him. She had not told him why, he whined to everyone who would listen—in groups, in person, and by phone. Elvis was clueless as to the cause of her desertion.
Joyce was back at Graceland for Elvis’s thirty-seventh birthday on January 8, 1972. She saw no great change in him. But he did say to her that he was past the age that Christ was when he was crucified—thirty-three. He needed, he said, to “plan the rest of my life’s work.”
Later that month Elvis opened again in Vegas. He added “An American Trilogy” to the show. He also added “You Gave Me a Mountain,” in which the singer cries that his wife has deserted him and, most grievously, taken away “his reason for living,” which was their “small, baby boy.” Although some people liked to think that Elvis was expressing his own real grief, he denied this.
Joyce flew to Vegas for what turned out to be her last meeting with Elvis. Somehow, in a ladies’ restroom in the hotel, she fell into a conversation with two young women, probably prostitutes. They talked enthusiastically about how they had recently performed for Elvis in his suite by making love to one another. When she confronted Elvis with the story, he just laughed it off. “Honey, I never touched those girls,” he said. “I just watched.” It was, he said, just “innocent fun.”
Before she left, Joyce tried again to talk to him about his drug use. The drugs were a part of his mission, he said. The drugs were to gain “silence.” “Silence is the resting place of the soul,” he said. “It’s sacred. And necessary for new thoughts to be born. That’s what my pills are for … to get as close as possible to that silence,” he explained. Presumably, a drug-induced silence, not sober meditation, was bringing him closer to the divine spirit. “We all have divinity inside us,” he declared. “Some of us just understand it more.” People listened to him because of his understanding, he said. He knew what they wanted and needed. Some day they would all listen to him. Seemingly, a new messiah was in view, rising from Las Vegas and visiting stages all over America.
Joyce left the next morning while Elvis was still sleeping. “What a small, dull, shitty way for it to end,” she thought.
The Girls Are Gone
Some days later, just at the end of the engagement, Priscilla traveled to Las Vegas. She not only wanted to leave Elvis, she wanted to live openly with Mike Stone. Elvis, a karate enthusiast, had idolized Mike. In August 1971, he had proudly introduced him from the stage in Vegas as having been the Grand International Champion for two years. “The best in the world,” he declared. “My god, he will dissect you,” he said in awe and admiration.
Lo
sing Priscilla to no one in particular was one thing; losing Priscilla in a competition with another man who was famously masculine and virile was something else. Elvis flew into a rage. “He grabbed me,” Priscilla wrote in Elvis and Me, “and forcefully made love to me. It was uncomfortable and unlike any other time he’d ever made love to me before.” He told her that “this is how a real man makes love to his woman.” Thus, the love affair between Elvis and Priscilla ended, ignominiously, with spousal rape.
Joyce was gone. Kathy had left. Barbara was living with Steve McQueen. Priscilla was having an affair with Mike Stone. Elvis was in a daze. He could not understand how these women could have deserted him. His search for new bedmates went on, as the guys went trolling for girls for Elvis in Los Angeles, in Las Vegas, in Memphis. The spring of 1972 passed, and he was still adrift.
The Documentary: Elvis on Tour
While Elvis was thus bereft, the Colonel arranged for a documentary film—eventually called Elvis on Tour—to be made during the April 1972 tour. It was financed by MGM and produced by Bob Abel and Pierre Adidge, whose previous documentaries, including Mad Dogs and Englishmen, had won high praise. This film caught beautifully the magical quality of the rapport between Elvis and his audiences in performances in Buffalo, Hampton Roads, Richmond, and Jacksonville. In taped interviews, it also caught Elvis’s thinking with an intimacy that no outsider had ever achieved before. In these, he did not always sound like the happy, upbeat, and healthy man he had always projected publicly. Instead, he took the occasion to run the litany of his torments and tormentors, including the “squirrel-get-him” analogy from high school and the trauma of having to dress in a tuxedo and sing to a dog dressed in a tie and top hat on The Steve Allen Show. He complained bitterly about the movie business, which he had thought would give him “a chance to show some kind of acting ability or do a very interesting story.” But no, he said, and he became discouraged.
“They couldn’t have paid me no amount of money in the world to make me feel self-satisfaction inside,” he declared.
“But you still did them,” Pierre Adidge pressed.
“I had to. I had to,” Elvis responded with expiring breath.
So many abuses, so much humiliation—on television and in the movies. “I really took it as long as I could,” he said. “Physically, emotionally, and everything.”
When the Colonel saw the tape and heard what Elvis had been saying in the interview for the documentary, he was very upset. They could never admit that Elvis’s movies were bad or that he was in any way lacking in talent. Parker remonstrated with MGM and achieved some adjustments. Nevertheless, a deeply troubled Elvis came through on the film.
Onscreen Elvis conveyed how he worked much too hard trying to convince the guys in his entourage that he was fully and excitingly engaged sexually.
Elvis’s perennial search for a possibly permanent bedmate experienced an uptick in quality during the summer of 1972 when Cybill Shepherd came home to Memphis from Hollywood for a month of rest and rehabilitation. Cybill had been Miss Teenage Memphis before going west to pursue an acting career and had turned in compelling performances in The Last Picture Show and The Heartbreak Kid. She was also taking a leave of absence from her current lover, director Peter Bogdanovich. Years later, she told an interviewer that during this interlude she had taken the macho out of Elvis. What she had really done was merely discover what numerous other girls and women had already discovered about Elvis’s lovemaking, that it was not very macho anyway.
Linda Thompson
On July 6, 1972, eighteen years to the day after he had suddenly broken out singing “That’s All Right” in Sam Phillips’s studio, Linda Thompson came to him like a gift from heaven. Linda was the current Miss Tennessee in the Miss USA contest, twenty-two years old, and a senior at Memphis State University majoring in theater and English. She had a gift for engaging new people instantly and making them feel comfortable. George Klein brought Linda to the Memphian Theater one night while Elvis was enjoying one of his beloved midnight screenings. Elvis approved the introduction after cleverly scoping Linda out on his way to the men’s room. The attraction was immediate.
Elvis had her sit beside him. As he usually did in such situations, he managed, seemingly casually, to throw his right arm across the back of her seat. He hastened to assure her that he was no longer married. In truth, his divorce was still a few weeks away.
Linda had brought along a visiting friend, Jeanne LeMay, the reigning Miss Rhode Island. When they got home in the wee hours of the next morning, Jeannie reported to Linda’s aunt, with whom they were staying, that her niece and Elvis had been sitting in the theater kissing. Just then, as if on cue, the phone rang. It was Elvis for Linda. “Where have you been all my life?” he asked. The full-court press was on. Linda noticed that his voice was strangely slurred. She thought he might have been drinking.
Elvis invited Linda and Jeannie to the movies again the next night, and afterward out to Graceland. Linda fit right in. She rode around the grounds of Graceland with the gang in golf carts, and then she went with Elvis up to his bedroom. “We kissed, we made out—which was wonderful—and then we read the Bible,” she told Peter Guralnick. “We felt as if we’d known each other all our lives—we kind of did [through knowing] how the other person was brought up.”
Indeed, both came out of the same Southern white working-class culture. The Thompsons, like the Smiths and the Presleys, were country-come-to-town people. They worked hard all week to collect their pay on Saturday and ordinarily went to church on Sunday. Linda’s father drove a truck for a trucking firm. The Thompsons honored and relished very close clan and family ties. They had struggled through the Great Depression but had prospered, relatively speaking, in postwar Memphis.
Linda’s background was similar to that of Elvis’s teenage sweetheart Dixie Locke, but Linda, like Elvis, was determined to succeed in a striking way in the world. Attending Memphis State University was an indicator that she was ambitious. Winning beauty contests was another way up for her, as it was for many Southern girls who had no special advantages by dint of their parents’ affluence or social position. Linda made the most of her talents and looks, just as Elvis had. Elvis had to mold Priscilla into the woman he wanted; Linda was born and bred that way. Gladys would have loved Linda right away.
Linda recognized her kinship with Elvis virtually within minutes of their meeting and made the most of it. As they settled into their seats in the Memphian Theater, Elvis had explained that he had been separated from his wife since January. “I’m really sorry to hear that,” she replied, “but I could have told you a long time ago, you should have married a Memphis girl.” Elvis immediately grasped the sharp truth in her observation and laughed. After months of fruitless searching, he had found the girl he needed.
On the morning after their second night together, Linda went off to the beach with her family for three weeks. Elvis tried repeatedly to contact her, or at least his minions did. The phone was “ringing off the hook” when she got home. It was Elvis, inviting her to fly to Las Vegas with him. She accepted without hesitation even though, as she later said, she was still a virgin and took her religion seriously.
Elvis was a way up for Linda. Even though she only needed twelve more hours of course work to graduate from Memphis State, she really didn’t want to go back to school that fall. Already she had thought about going to Los Angeles to start her acting career, going to New York to be a model, or becoming an airline stewardess. This was a marvelous opportunity to jump-start her search for a career, and she took it.
In the beginning it was, for her, also a lover’s idyll. In his luxury suite on the twenty-ninth floor of the Hilton in Las Vegas, Elvis was “so loving and affectionate,” everyone was so nice to her, and Las Vegas was so exciting. Early on, she saw that he sometimes staggered a bit and his speech was slurred. Within a few weeks, she realized that drugs were a major problem.
From the first Elvis must have sensed that Linda
was the next one, another beautiful virgin to follow Elisabeth, Priscilla, Kathy, and Joyce. She was another girl whom he could initiate and train to his taste sexually, who would be devoted to him far and above all other men and faithfully share his bed—day and night. And so it was. Linda moved into Graceland and like no one ever before or after was with him constantly for more than four years—in Graceland, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Las Vegas, and Tahoe, on tour, and on vacations in Hawaii and Colorado.
At home in Graceland, they would lounge together for days on the huge bed in his cavelike bedroom watching television, reading, eating, and talking. Linda would call him “Baby Bunting” and he would call her “Mommy.” She would talk baby talk to him, and soon they developed a language with code words that they had made up, walling themselves into their tiny little world.
Linda flowed easily into Elvis’s family, clan, and coterie. In November, she flew to Hawaii with Elvis and Lisa Marie to begin preparations for a television show that would be carried worldwide via satellite. During Christmas 1972, she shared festivities with the family, and Elvis gave her a mink coat.
A year or so after they met, Linda helped Elvis redecorate Graceland, moving away from the blue, white, and gold that Priscilla had used and into the dark red that Elvis chose. “It was red crushed-velvet everything, and red satin drapes, and red shag carpet,” said Marty Lacker, one of the guys who prided himself on his aesthetic sense. Marty’s sister and brother-in-law, home designers and decorators, had redone much of Graceland in the 1960s, including creating the Meditation Garden. Linda had tried to tone things down, he said. “Oh, yeah. That’s pretty,” she would say to Elvis. “Let me show you this, let me show you that.”
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