Estelle Brown could only lower her head in response to such open cruelty. Elvis then attacked all the backup singers. “Estelle, Sweet Inspirations, Stamps, if you don’t look up, I’m going to kick your ass,” he raged. Estelle walked off the stage, and Kathy moved over to close the gap between her and the two remaining Sweets. As he began the introductions, he glared at the three women. “Sorry for any embarrassment I might have caused you, but if you can’t take it, get off the pot,” he said. It was not an apology. Sylvia Shemwell and Kathy responded by walking off the stage, leaving Myrna Smith the only female on the stage. During the performance, Elvis virtually forced her to accept a ring he took off of one of his fingers. It was as if he could think of nothing better to say or do.
Jerry Schilling, who would soon become Myrna’s husband, tried to calm Elvis down, but he wouldn’t have it. He would not apologize. He felt he didn’t need those women. Tom Diskin persuaded the three singers to at least travel on with the troupe to the next venue, Greensboro, North Carolina. After some sort of exchange with Elvis, the Sweets did perform, but not Kathy. After the show, Kathy was invited into Elvis’s bedroom, presumably for apologies and reconciliation. “I thought it was funny,” Elvis said, regarding his comments. Kathy replied that he knew it was not funny. He shrugged.
Elvis was sitting on the bed in his karate pajamas outfit. He had a gun in one hand and a gift in the other—it was a wristwatch. He held both out toward Kathy and said, “Which do you want, this or this?” Kathy struggled to appear calm. She took the watch. She would stay on the tour, she said, then quit the show. Elvis grinned and shrugged. It was okay with him.
The next day they were to fly to Asheville, North Carolina, to perform. Elvis delayed his departure several times. When he was finally ready to go, not every member of the troupe slated to fly on his private plane was there. He took off without them. The plane had to fly Elvis to Asheville and return for those left behind.
In Asheville, Elvis needed to see a dentist, so Dr. Nick took him to a local practice. While the dentist was out of the treatment room, Elvis rummaged through his cabinets and stole some drugs. Nichopoulos was horrified but was unable to stop the pillaging. Back in Elvis’s room at the Rodeway Inn, with Vernon present, he confiscated the pills. Elvis went wild, thrashing about and swearing. Then he went into the bathroom to put on his pajamas to take a nap before the show. He came out holding a Beretta at his side. For some reason, he threw his arm around his father’s shoulder, and the gun went off. The bullet bounced off a chair and hit Dr. Nick on the chest. Fortunately, its force was largely spent. “All it did was give me a little burn on my chest,” the doctor said. The guards rushed in and everyone was scared to death, but Elvis laughed it off. At some point during this stay, he shot out the television set in his room.
Elvis thought that the Asheville audiences should have been more responsive. During his last performance there on July 24, trying to rouse them up, he took requests for songs—as if to say he no longer knew what they wanted to hear. Finally, he gave a $6,500 ring to a fan and threw his guitar out to them—or at them.
At home again in Memphis, Elvis, as usual, gave out gifts instead of apologies. He had bought more than $85,000 worth of jewelry in flurries of gift-giving. He had also ordered a new airplane as a gift for the Colonel, which was delivered on the twenty-sixth and immediately returned by his unconsulted and astonished manager. On the twenty-seventh, he bought fourteen Cadillacs for $140,000 and gave them away, one going to Myrna, the Sweet who had not left the stage during the Norfolk show. On the twenty-ninth, he loaned Dr. Nick—who must still have carried “a little burn” on his chest from Elvis’s bullet—$200,000 for the construction of his new house.
Blue Christmas
Elvis barely made it to Las Vegas for rehearsals for his Monday, August 18, 1975, opening at the Hilton. He was overweight and tired. He sat down during much of the first performance. The second show became a sort of patchwork of requests from the audience. He tried to cancel both Wednesday performances at the last minute, but the Colonel would not let him. During these shows, he kept glancing at his watch. Before morning, all of the usual Elvis hype of photographs and broadsides had disappeared from the hotel lobby and elsewhere. There was only a small sign announcing that Elvis’s engagement had been canceled because of illness. The Colonel was expert at damage control.
Dr. Nick put Elvis in Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis on August 21. Nothing to worry about, he announced to the world, just fatigue. In truth, Elvis was depressed. The manic highs he had manifested earlier in the summer, the gunplay, the boisterous “I don’t need you, I’ll do what I want,” gave way to a feeling, as he said to his friend Jo Cathy Brownlee, that “the boy is just falling apart.”
Jo Cathy, a schoolteacher and the press box hostess for the WFL team the Memphis Southmen, moved into Graceland and took care of him. She was going at it twenty-one hours a day. Elvis began to recover. Part of his therapy was zooming around Memphis with his gang on three-wheeled motorcycles he had bought that summer, smoking cigars, and wearing sunglasses. Spied by a UPI wire service reporter on September 15, he declared positively that he was feeling fine. Jo Cathy noted that the pills were coming into Graceland again, some from Las Vegas, some from local sources.
But Jo Cathy herself was now wearing thin for Elvis. One day near the end of October, when she arrived at Graceland, he told her to get what she needed and go home. He had a date. She gathered all her things in a laundry basket. She was hurt, and Elvis was not sympathetic. “Now you don’t have to be a bitch about this whole thing,” he said and stormed out of the room. Jo Cathy never came back.
On November 10, the Lisa Marie was delivered to the Memphis airport, where Elvis had based the Jetstar he had bought for himself in August and another plane he had bought as an investment. He now owned well over $2 million worth of airplanes. During the next couple of weeks, he flew everywhere, showing off the Lisa Marie with its lavish appointments. He was flying high, but he was almost out of cash. On November 25, he borrowed $350,000 from his bank, secured by a lien on Graceland.
Elvis earned only $180,000 for two weeks at the Hilton in December 1975. Even he began to realize, if only in his dreams, that he was in big trouble. Marian Cocke, his middle-aged and motherly nurse from Baptist Hospital, visited him in his bedroom at Graceland on Christmas Eve. He had awakened “in a rage,” he told her. He dreamed that he had gone broke and found himself deserted by all those people who called themselves his friends. In fact, at that moment they were all waiting downstairs for him to deliver his Christmas gifts to them, and he did not want to go down. Finally, he took everybody up in the Lisa Marie for a ride around the city. His aunt Delta got drunk, used foul language, called Marty Lacker a “wall-eyed son of a bitch,” and threatened to shoot him with the .38 pistol she carried in her purse. After they landed, Elvis gave out jewelry as usual, but later threatened to strip Aunt Delta, throw her over the wall, and exile her from Graceland, because she had so embarrassed him in front of his friends. Summoned to answer for her conduct afterward, she seemed not to remember what she had done and earnestly asked for forgiveness. Urged by Billy Smith, Elvis decided not to exile Aunt Delta.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SAVED
Elvis was ever mindful of the sudden and precipitous downfall of celebrities, and he dreaded the appearance of the bodyguard book. He had been exceedingly fearful that he would be forgotten while he was in the army in Germany. Afterward, he hated the Beatles, who had seized America’s attention during his absence and gained wildly increasing popularity. With the Comeback Special in Vegas and the road shows, he had survived the Beatles and the movies, but now the sea of his troubles was rapidly rising. How would his fans respond to the book? How could he live without his fans? How could he survive without recurrently immersing himself in the warming waters of adulation? How could he go on without money?
Then rather suddenly the promise of salvation began to take shape in his mind. As usua
l with Elvis, what began as a thought quickly became a passion, and again as usual, after a time the passion faded. Salvation took the form of a young woman named Ginger Alden.
“I think I am in love” was the thought. Elvis made the declaration in the late fall of 1976. Ginger was twenty years old, a Memphian, and a beauty queen. Love, marriage, and a budding family with this beautiful young woman would create “a new Elvis,” wash away the tales in the bodyguard book, and save him. His marriage to Priscilla had been a cover-up managed by the Colonel. Elvis would manage this one himself.
Courtship
George Klein, always the eager procurer, provided the link. On November 19, 1976, he sent Elvis not one girl but two, the Alden sisters, both beauty queens. Terry, the older of the two, was the reigning Miss Tennessee–Miss America. She had won her crown as Miss Tennessee in the contest organized by the Jaycees in April 1976 and went on to compete in Atlantic City. She played classical piano. In February 1976, Ginger Alden had become the first runner-up in the Miss Tennessee–Miss Universe contest. Ginger had won other contests. She was the reigning Miss Mid-South Fair, and she had been Miss Traffic Safety. After high school she had worked as a saleswoman at Jeans, a clothing store. In December 1976, interviewed by the Memphis Press-Scimitar as Elvis’s new girlfriend, she told the press that she had appeared in several commercials and was a student at the Memphis Academy of Arts.
By this time the procedure by which a new girl connected to Elvis in Memphis was well established. Arriving at Graceland at the designated time, she would be admitted by one of the staff and seated in the drawing room, just off the front entranceway. Sooner or later either Elvis or his agent would appear.
With the Alden girls it was Elvis himself who did the interview. On this first visit to Graceland, Ginger and Terry were accompanied by their older sister, Rosemary, already married, a mother, and not a rising professional in the beauty business. The three women sat in a row on the fifteen-foot long white couch. Elvis sat in a chair in front of them. It was as if Ginger and Terry were there to simply interview for a job. Rosemary was by nature a leader and a talker, and Terry was not far behind if at all. They volleyed the ball of conversation back and forth with Elvis. Ginger hardly said a word. Elvis liked what he saw and invited the Aldens to visit again.
Probably it was twenty-two-year-old Terry Alden, rather than Ginger, that George Klein had in mind for Elvis’s attention. Tall, intelligent, self-confident, and engaging, she was compellingly attractive. If Terry ever had a chance with Elvis, however, she soon blew it. She was not one to bat her eyelashes and call men masterful. On a later occasion she challenged Elvis to an arm-wrestling match—elbows on table, opposing hands locked. Terry won, hands down and all too easily. Bad move. Nobody beats Elvis. Especially a girl.
Ginger was reticent and not easily readable. In her dark good looks, she was not unlike Priscilla or Elvis himself. But at five-eight and with appropriate fullness of figure, she was not a young girl. She was twenty. From the first, it seems, Elvis chose her—not as simply another in his usual game of revolving girls but as a possibly permanent bedmate. She had, as Billy Smith said, “that virginal look” that was so important to Elvis. In the order of Elvis’s women, she ranked with Anita Wood, Priscilla Beaulieu, Kathy Westmoreland, Joyce Bova, and Linda Thompson—all convincing virgins with a chance of substantial tenure in Elvis’s bed.
As he had with the Beaulieus and the Thompsons, Elvis engaged not just the girl but her whole family, and he did so with a rush and a magnitude that were unprecedented. It quickly became a more serious commitment than he had made to Linda and her family and much quicker and thicker even than his involvement with the Beaulieus. It left the Aldens reeling. They could hardly believe their good luck.
The Aldens, it developed, had encountered Elvis before, if only briefly. Mr. Alden had been a sergeant in the army induction center in Memphis when Elvis entered the service in 1958. Ginger had also met Elvis previously. In 1961, when she was a little girl, her mother, Jo Laverne Alden, took her to Libertyland, the Memphis amusement park. Elvis was there. Jo Alden, an ardent Elvis fan herself, took Ginger up to meet him. He patted the little girl on the head. He was twenty-six then, and Ginger was five.
In 1976 the Aldens still lived in Memphis. Mrs. Alden was working in the IRS processing center. In the late sixties and early seventies, after leaving the army, Mr. Alden worked as a department manager in Dixie Mart, a chain store. In the seventies he was a production worker at the Schlitz brewery. Their son, Michael, was a fireman in the Memphis Fire Department.
The transition to Ginger required one last highly charged encounter with Linda Thompson. In late November 1976, Elvis played in San Francisco. He wanted to bring Ginger in for that occasion, but Linda was already there and staying with Elvis in his suite in the Fairmont Hotel. Finally he arranged for Linda to leave, but Ginger arrived before Linda actually left Elvis’s quarters. The guys had to stash Ginger in another room in the hotel for many anxious hours—without food, explanation, or communication of any sort. Finally, after Linda departed, one of the guys came and ushered Ginger into Elvis’s presence. It was an insult for Ginger and a close call for Elvis.
In truth, Linda was ready to move on. Before she left, however, she ran up $30,000 on one of Elvis’s credit cards. Everyone, including Elvis but excluding Vernon, said that Linda’s action was totally appropriate. She had been lover, mother, nurse, companion, and confidant to an ailing Elvis for more than four years. She had earned her compensation and more. The only difficulty was that when she left she took the job description with her. Ginger Alden was no Linda Thompson.
In December 1976, Elvis brought Ginger, her mother, father, and her sisters out to Vegas on the Lisa Marie for the last two days of his engagement. He housed them at the Hilton Hotel and entertained them lavishly. “Don’t let this one get away,” Mr. Alden was heard to advise his daughter humorously.
Back in Memphis in January, the courtship with the Aldens continued apace. Mrs. Alden’s father died in Harrison, Arkansas, her hometown. On January 3, Elvis, Ginger, and a dozen or so members of his staff flew up to Harrison, high in the Ozark Mountains near the Missouri line. One of the guys was already there to meet them at the airport with Elvis’s Lincoln Continental.
After the funeral at 10:00 a.m. (which Elvis attended wearing his giant sunglasses), lunch at the Ramada Inn, and proper paying of respects to family and friends, the Lincoln Continental brought them back to the airport for the return flight to Memphis. Elvis generously paid for the funeral. He had paid for any number of weddings outside the family, but never a funeral. Elvis had involved himself with the families of his girlfriends before in order to achieve his ends, but never so much as he did with the Aldens.
By now Ginger was sleeping in Elvis’s bed and spending time with him in his upstairs quarters at Graceland. If eyebrows might rise at the thought of such intimacy in an unmarried state, Mrs. Alden quickly lowered them with her even-tempered comment that she never worried about Ginger when she was with Elvis.
On January 5, Elvis and Ginger flew to Palm Springs for a week-long vacation at his house. Rosemary came along, and Lisa Marie came up from Los Angeles to help her father celebrate his forty-second birthday on the eighth. Elvis’s Los Angeles dentist, Dr. Max Shapiro, and his fiancée also happened to come by for a visit. Dr. Shapiro made house calls and wrote prescriptions freely; he had built an extraordinary practice among celebrities in Bel Air and Las Vegas. Elvis persuaded them to marry on the spot at his expense. He bought the necessary rings and supplied flowers and music. Ginger served as the bridesmaid, and Larry Geller, Elvis’s tutor in Eastern thought and religion, who had somehow acquired an official minister’s license and ministerial clothing, came in to conduct the ceremony. Perhaps seduced by the sheer beauty of the proceedings, Elvis was heard to say that he might marry Ginger.
Back in Tennessee again, Ginger was supposed to go with Elvis to Nashville on Thursday, January 20, for a scheduled recording se
ssion for RCA. At the last minute, she backed out. Elvis postponed his departure for a day, and they had a prolonged and acrimonious argument. The next day he went to Nashville without her but would not go to the studio. He had a sore throat, he said. He spent much of his time in the hotel room calling Ginger. For three days the backup singers, the band, and the technicians waited in the studio for Elvis to appear. Finally, Elvis flew back to Memphis without recording anything at all. RCA paid everyone for the full week they were supposed to have worked.
Elvis was obsessed with having Ginger with him in Nashville, and he was in rebellion against RCA and the Colonel. Even before they went to Nashville he said to Billy Smith, “I’m not going to do it. If I have to, I’ll say I’m losing my voice.” He did that, Billy said, as a way of “getting back at Colonel and RCA.”
Engaged
Elvis’s intense involvement with Ginger and her family strongly suggested that he was into the traditional progression of love and courtship that would end in marriage. But Ginger was acting as if the relationship were not all that important to her. Elvis was not used to rejection. He was challenged, and he raised his bid substantially. He asked Ginger to marry him.
As Ginger later told the press, the marriage proposal came in the early morning hours of Wednesday, January 26. She and Elvis were together in Elvis’s bathroom, which also often served as his sitting room. Elvis kneeled before her seated figure and asked her to be his wife. In the process he produced a green velvet box and drew forth a custom-made engagement ring valued at $50,000. Among Elvis intimates that figure would soon inflate to $70,000. Ginger agreed to become Mrs. Elvis Presley.
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