Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  “Let’s face it—Elvis’ taste sucked,” Lamar Fike snorted. “If something wasn’t overdone, it was abnormal to Elvis.”

  Lamar said that at first the guys thought that Linda could not “chew gum and walk at the same time.” Soon, however, they reversed their opinion. She was “as smart as they come,” a “lady,” and “a lot of fun.” The guys not only accepted Linda; they positively liked her and soon came to respect her. Linda relieved them of a lot of work and stress. She took excellent care of Elvis whether he was asleep or awake. They had confidence in her vigilance and her capacity to act. As his drug intake increased, he would sometimes fall asleep with food in his mouth. Linda would dig the food out with her fingers to save him from choking to death. There were times when he was so drugged up that he almost stopped breathing, and Linda was there to call the doctor. Marty Lacker asserted that she was “like a mother, a sister, a wife, a lover, and a nurse.”

  She was also like one of the guys. One time, she parodied her own beauty-queen image by dressing up in her Miss Tennessee outfit, descending the stairs at Graceland with appropriate music to present herself for the admiration of the gang, and breaking into a big smile with one of her front teeth blacked out. Like Ann-Margret, the other girl in Elvis’s life whom they respected and truly liked, Linda knew who she was and did not feel threatened in the Elvisian universe. She was one of the guys, but they were also very much aware that she was an attractive young woman. Billy Smith captured that quality: “She was pretty,” he said, “but her personality made her beautiful.”

  Decades later, Lamar Fike observed that Linda sometimes played “the dumb role, and acted subservient to a degree, but she’d get what she wanted.” One might well add that she earned her pay from Elvis and spent it on what she wanted. Billy Smith said Linda “saved his life at least three times.” She worked hard but unsuccessfully to get Elvis to change his drug habits, but outside of that she accepted him as he was. She helped him as well as she could for as long as she could. She wanted a career in show business and a measure of financial support until she got it. Elvis helped her move toward a career, and he was very generous to her in a material way.

  The Girls Who Came and Went

  The number of girls streaming in and out of Elvis’s bed diminished while Linda stayed with him, but not to zero. Elvis and the guys had developed the art and craft of waving girls into and out of Elvis’s bed with the skill of air traffic controllers. They would pick up the incoming girl on the radar as she approached and clear the field for her landing. After being delivered to Elvis, she would taxi out onto the runway again, the field would be cleared for her departure, and she would take off. Rarely were two planes on the tarmac at the same time. Some returned from time to time, but sooner or later all flew away and never came back. Linda, of course, was well aware of what went on, but she knew that there was virtually nothing she could do about it. If she had forced Elvis to choose, he would have opted for the girls.

  During his Las Vegas run in January and February 1974, Linda had gone off to do some modeling, and Elvis brought in, sequentially, two other young women, Ann Pennington and Sheila Ryan.

  Ann was a twenty-three-year-old model and the single mother of a three-year-old daughter named Adriane. Ann had first bedded down with Elvis in Palm Springs where she found that he only wanted “to cuddle and kiss,” and “the other just wasn’t very important.” Elvis went through his usual sweet and vulnerable routine with Ann—not necessarily a performance at all given the girls’ motivation for their presence in the first place. Sex with Elvis was a score, not seduction.

  One night while Ann was staying with Elvis in Las Vegas, they had smoked pot in bed. He went to sleep and wet the bed. Ann retreated to the high ground along the edge on her side. The next morning Elvis was laughing as he told the guys about how she had spent the night on this one narrow dry strip. “He didn’t seem to be embarrassed,” she marveled.

  Ann knew that he had other women, and he knew she had other men. Elvis told her he did not like to think that she “had been with anybody else.” But Ann was not bothered by the other women. For her, Elvis was too needy. She had her daughter to take care of, and she didn’t need another child in Elvis. Before the end of the Las Vegas engagement, she happily passed the Elvis baton to Sheila Ryan.

  Sheila was not an actress or a beauty queen. Her claim to fame was appearing on the cover and in the centerfold of Playboy. In February 1974, she found herself sitting all alone on a bar stool in Elvis’s suite in the Hilton International waiting for her first meeting with the star. He was to come up and join her after his first show. “I looked like I was thirteen years old in those days,” she later recalled. “I had an angelic little face, and really my personality went along with it.” She was, she said, very young, naive, Midwestern, and “a blank canvas.” Her early-adolescent but Playboy-worthy body got her to Elvis’s suite; it was probably the “blank canvas” that kept her there.

  Elvis came in “all sweaty” after his dinnertime performance below. He “half-hugged” her. Right away he commented on the way she was dressed—in slacks and not at all to his taste. He could fix that and would love doing so. They talked for a while, and then they went down for him to do the second show. When they returned, he acted “just like a little kid.” He showed her a fire hat that a fan had given him and a baby bib. At some point he kissed her and then fell asleep. She thought it all very weird, got up, put on her clothes, and went home.

  The next day Joe Esposito called her at home. “Goddammit, where are you?” he barked. “Boss is furious.” Sheila half knew she was supposed to stay in Elvis’s bed until he woke up, but she was “this little rebellious thing.” She went back to the Hilton. Elvis was eating breakfast and was irritated. “I was quiet,” Sheila said. “I was always very quiet, just kind of took it all in.” After breakfast, Elvis had Las Vegas’s most chic boutique send up racks of clothes. Sheila modeled while Elvis chose.

  Afterward, Sheila spent a couple of nights with Elvis. Like so many other girls, she had misread his sexual preferences. “The sexual thing was never a big deal to him, you would think it was, but it wasn’t … We had sex but what he liked best was the petting, the kissing.” It was like “in high school and neck and neck and neck and grope and do whatever you’re doing.” She was shocked by the next transition. “It was adolescent,” she said, “until all of a sudden you graduated into Mother.” Very quickly, she found that she was supposed to take care of him, “to get him things in the middle of the night”—water, pills, Jell-O—and read to him. But also he would glide into romantic fits in which he would sing to her on the balcony high above Las Vegas or shower her with gifts that only embarrassed her.

  Elvis took Sheila with him as he began his next tour with a performance in the auditorium at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Three days later, in Monroe, Louisiana, however, he replaced her with Ann Pennington, the model. Lamar Fike picked Ann up at the airport while one of the other guys taxied Sheila to the airport for her flight out. “He had women in revolving doors,” Lamar said. “They could run into each other at the airport and not know it.”

  Sheila Ryan lasted for well over a year. During his August–September 1974 run in Las Vegas, Elvis sent Linda away after four nights and brought Sheila in. In the Showroom on the last night, Monday, September 2, he put her in the special booth near the stage with Priscilla and Lisa Marie. He had Priscilla stand up and introduced her to the audience. “Boy, she’s a beautiful chick,” he exclaimed. “I’ll tell you for sure. Boy, I knows ’em when I picks ’em, I think. Hot damn.” Then he had six-year-old Lisa stand up. “Look at her jump up,” he said to the crowd. “Pull your dress down, Lisa. You pull your dress down before you jump up like that again, young lady.” Elvis was playing the responsible father, training his daughter to have ladylike modesty.

  Finally, he had Sheila stand up and turn around. He introduced her as his “girlfriend.” He had her show off the diamond ring he had given he
r. It took a while. “Sheila, hold it up,” he ordered. “Hold it up. Hold the ring up. Hold the ring up. The ring. Your right hand. Look at that sonofabitch,” he insisted. Everyone had to marvel at what a generous man he was.

  After the introductions, Elvis launched into declarations about how he and Priscilla were the “best of friends.” They divorced, he explained, “not because of another man or woman” but because he traveled so much. It was not fair to her, and he made the sacrifice. She got whatever “she wanted as a settlement … about two million dollars,” he said. Elvis was a considerate man as well as a generous one.

  He continued his discourse on his generosity by saying that he had given Priscilla a mink coat, but he added that Priscilla had also given him a Jaguar. Thus, she still cared about him. He began to talk about his own beloved Stutz Blackhawk, which he intended to give to her. “She liked this Stutz that I have,” he said, before losing control of his thoughts and speech. “No it’s called a stud … a Stutz. And she likes a stud (laughs) she likes the Stutz. Mike Stone ain’t no stud, so forget it. She liked the Stutz, and so I’m gonna give her the Stutz … Stone better wish he was a stud. He’s a … ” Elvis paused, then concluded lamely, “nice guy.” Some two thousand people sat and listened in silent embarrassment.

  Elvis moved on to introduce his next song, one that he had been listening to on record over and over, testing the endurance of the guys with the repetition of the same dreary message. “Softly as I Leave You,” Elvis said, was about a man dying in a hospital bed in the middle of the night with his sleeping wife lying beside him. As he passes he writes out his last message to his beloved, beginning with “Softly as I leave you … ”

  Earlier in the show, Elvis had complained that the microphone was too high. “I’m six-one-and-a-half and this sonofabitch is six-three-and-a-half,” he said. Next he complained about a toothache. Then he complained to Charlie Hodge about the large bejeweled belt he wore. “Charlie, take this belt off, really. It’s gonna cut me … castrate me … do somethin’ … really.” As Charlie took off the belt Elvis complained further that Charlie was choking him with the entangled microphone cord.

  Years on a psychiatrist’s couch might not have sufficed to untangle the painful emotional threads that made up Elvis’s being at that point in his life, September 1974. One vital thread was his fear that he was not really the highly sexual man that he ought to be and that his failing was visible. He had sent Linda away during this run and publicly announced his possession of Sheila Ryan. He created a fantasy narrative that neither Mike Stone, nor any other man, had taken Priscilla away; he had generously let her go. Mike Stone certainly was a “stud,” and Elvis’s flat denial could only acknowledge the fact that Stone was a virile, younger man, while Elvis was sliding into middle age.

  Another thread running through Elvis’s strange discourse was that love could only be expressed by garish and outlandishly expensive gifts publicly displayed. Rings, fur coats, cars, and, ironically, a $2 million divorce settlement bespoke true love. Lavish gifts made feelings for someone real. And the gifts had to be witnessed. Elvis’s gifts were never secret.

  Elvis relished the idea that Priscilla was giving him a Jaguar, but there is no record that Priscilla ever did so. Indeed, none of Elvis’s intimates ever gave him any gift that amounted—by Elvis’s materialistic values—to more than a trinket. Perhaps no one other than his fans altogether could ever have given him a gift high enough in dollar value to make him feel loved. His fans did that in the form of millions of dollars spent for his records and especially for the famously reasonably priced tickets for his always “sold out” performances. Elvis did relish the money that they gave him. “Charlie, you know how much money we made for working all of twelve hours onstage?” he once said to Charlie Hodge, full of warmth and good feelings. The answer was “a little over $800,000,” and certainly he used that money to give himself garish, outlandishly expensive gifts that were conspicuously and publicly displayed.

  Elvis was in trouble in the summer of 1974, and it was evident from the beginning of this September run in Vegas. He put a lot of new material into the opening night, and then took it out for the second night. He grew rebellious. After the midnight show several days later, with the aid of Red and Jerry, he climbed up a ladder in the Showroom to paint black the image of one of the Louis XIV ladies included in the room’s Baroque decor. During later performances, he proudly pointed out his handiwork to his audiences. Two days later he canceled both performances for the night, pleading stomach flu.

  A few days later Elvis put on a full-scale demonstration of his karate skills during the dinner show, using Red West as his fall guy. He had been boasting about his mastery of the art and showing off his moves more and more during the shows, but this was just too much. Finally, the Colonel said stop. Thereafter, Elvis confined himself to proudly passing out “certificates” of achievement onstage to singers and band members who had attended his karate classes in his suite.

  Sheila Leaves

  Elvis was compelled to feel that he was a generous man, but Sheila Ryan had difficulty expressing unbounded gratitude for Elvis’s gifts. Joe tutored her. She had to understand that Elvis felt a great need to give things to people, he lectured, and people had to express great gratitude for the things he gave. Sheila was not materially minded. She was twenty-one and never owned anything in her life, she said. She did not know what to make of this man giving her a brand-new Corvette. She just said, “Thank you.” Slowly Sheila learned to say, “Oh, God, it’s beautiful, I love it.” She felt so phony, but she did it.

  Sheila found that her relationship with Elvis was not a matter of exchanging heavy sex for favors. “You gave and you got,” she said, but not for sex. “I’ve read bits and pieces about his sexual behavior, and how perverse and bizarre it was, and it really wasn’t. It was innocent … Adolescent innocence was what it was all about.” Sheila concluded that Elvis “was just this guy who had this wonderful charisma and things got blown way out of shape. He was just this innocent little guy.” It was really not as complicated as it seemed.

  After the run in Las Vegas was over in early September, Elvis stayed on for a few days, going to shows with Sheila. Then he went to Los Angeles and flew back to Memphis with Linda.

  Sheila was increasingly unwilling to go on tour with Elvis. She just wasn’t much interested in Elvis, she concluded, and his interest in her was limited. “There wasn’t much at stake. I was his friend, I was his little pal.” She was relieved when he took Mindi Miller, a model and dancer, with him for the first part of his tour that began in Macon, Georgia, on April 4, 1975.

  Elvis wanted Sheila to go with him for his third tour in 1975, seventeen days that began on July 8. Joe couldn’t find her, so Elvis brought along the reigning Miss Georgia, Diana Goodman, whom he had previously picked out of a tour group at the gates of Graceland. When Joe did reach Sheila, she confessed that she was practically living with actor James Caan, so they agreed to tell Elvis that she had an ear infection and could not fly. Elvis responded with an offer to hire a low-flying plane to bring her to him. Sheila declined. Elvis seemed to understand and accept the end of their relationship. He said he would call after the tour.

  The Kathy Blow-up

  Within days of Sheila’s rejection, Elvis began to disintegrate onstage. Traditionally, during every show at some point he would introduce the people who were onstage with him, usually with some adolescent attempts at humor. For instance, he was always introducing himself as someone else. “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” he would say. Or Tom Jones, or Sammy Davis Jr., or Bill Cosby. Often, his humor was at the expense of someone else. He loved to pick on the diminutive Charlie Hodge. “Charlie does something,” he would say, “I don’t know what.” Sometimes his insensitivity was outrageous, as when he introduced the Sweet Inspirations to a Las Vegas audience as “the young ladies that stood out in the sun too long.” In March 1975, he had a camera do a close-up of Estelle Brown’s new hairdo, comparing her to S
tepin Fetchit, a weak-minded black character in white movies. Onstage, in front of two thousand people there to see Elvis, Estelle met the insult as best she could. “Oooh, I hate you!” she responded in a laughing tone. “I hate you!”

  That July, Kathy Westmoreland became the prime target of Elvis’s malicious stage humor. Kathy was no longer available as his bedmate, but unlike Priscilla and Sheila, she was right there with him during every performance on tour and in Vegas or Tahoe. Introducing Kathy during the performance in Richfield, Ohio, on July 18, 1975, Elvis said: “She will take affection from anybody, any place, anytime. In fact she gets it from the whole band.” The next night in Uniondale, New York, he did it again. Kathy was livid. After the show, she grabbed Joe Esposito and said, “Get the word to him, tell Elvis to stop doing this to me. Tell him I’ve had it.”

  During the afternoon performance in Norfolk on the next day, he began the cruel attack again. Kathy pointed at him and said, “You had better stop this.” Elvis stopped, went over, and kissed her on the cheek. Just before the evening show, Tom Diskin, the Colonel’s man on the scene, cautioned him about such comments. Elvis, who never took criticism lightly, bridled. Reportedly, he attacked Kathy again onstage, but in a voice so low that only the people around him could hear. Allegedly he said, “She gives good head. Ask any man in the band.”

  Then he very audibly turned his guns on the Sweets. The press reported that Elvis declared that “he smelled green peppers and onions and that his backup singers, the Sweet Inspirations, had probably been eating catfish.” No one knows exactly what he meant by that assertion, but white Southerners generally regarded catfish as one of the least desirable fish to eat and often associated it with black people of the lowest social order within black society.