Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  Alicia had already resolved to break off the relationship. The whole scene was just too weird. She was repulsed by the obsequious behavior of the young men who hung around Elvis. She thought David Stanley, Dee’s son, was the worst at “bowing and scraping.” David later told Geraldo Rivera in an interview for the television show 20/20 that he and other young members of Elvis’s entourage sat around in the last months competing to see who would come closest to predicting the date of Elvis’s death. He boasted that he was the winner of the contest, having “missed [by] about two days.”

  Alicia returned to Graceland one last time late that summer, arriving at 4:00 a.m. She read to Elvis for a long time before he went to sleep, then went to work at the bank. Once Ginger had appeared at Graceland while Alicia was there, and Elvis refused to see her. While she was at Graceland, Alicia recalled, Ginger phoned “a lot.” Alicia said “she would ring the phone off the hook.” The two girls who shared Elvis’s bed that spring and summer would frequently see each other out in town—at a dress shop, from their cars at a stoplight, and “in clubs quite often”—but they never spoke to one another. Ginger had no rival in Alicia because Alicia had no great interest in Elvis. Soon she loaded her possessions into her new Cadillac he had given her, drove to Las Vegas, and became a blackjack dealer in the casinos.

  Billy Smith

  Back in Graceland, with almost two months of freedom before his next tour, Elvis retreated to his bedroom. He ordered George Klein to stay away. Also, he was tired of Lamar’s smart-alecky comments and said he was thinking of firing him. The boys’ club at Graceland was closing down. However, Charlie Hodge, who lived on the grounds, was allowed to come up to Elvis’s room from time to time, and Dr. Nick was in attendance. He had installed a nurse, Tish Henley, in one of the mobile homes behind Graceland to manage Elvis’s drug intake.

  Increasingly, Elvis had come to rely on his cousin Billy Smith—and often also his wife, Jo—for emotional, physical, and managerial support. Indeed, in July 1976, when he fired Red, Sonny, and Dave, he ordered Billy to tell all the guys to stay away for a while. For years it had been their custom—and their job—to simply drop by in the late afternoons when Elvis got up, hang out with him, go with him to one of his late-night movies, or join in whatever fun thing he was into. When Elvis indicated his interest in paring down his social activities with the boys in the summer of 1976, Billy had come up with the idea of having only one of the guys “on duty” all the time, to do whatever chores might be necessary—such as setting up the midnight movies for Elvis in local theaters. The person would be on duty for a twelve-hour shift beginning at either noon or midnight. Billy was doing more and more of what the “foreman,” Joe Esposito or Marty Lacker, had done previously.

  It was clear that the list of those whom Elvis felt he could trust was shrinking and that he chose to have Billy and Jo Smith close to him because they were “family.” They lived in a large mobile home just behind the big house at Graceland. They were dedicated to his well-being, and the services they performed for him had no bounds. From time to time, while on the road Elvis would come to their hotel room and crawl into bed with them. He would talk … and talk … and talk. Then he would fall asleep.

  At Graceland they screened the endless stream of girls that George Klein sent from the bars and clubs of Memphis. Jo said that Elvis often sent her down to the drawing room to interview candidates. “If her fingernails are dirty, or if her toenails are dirty, she’s a definite out,” he would tell Jo. Jo would talk to the girl in the drawing room for a while, then go upstairs to report to Elvis. “I think she’s real nice. I think you’d like her,” she might say.

  After some preliminaries the girl would be in her negligee propped up in the big bed next to Elvis, but he would not let Jo leave. (Sometimes it was Billy instead, but the routine would be the same.) Elvis would keep her with them, sitting in a chair by the bed or on the foot of the bed itself for an hour or more. He would not talk to the girl but rather to Jo. “Tell her about … ,” he would say to Jo, suggesting some story about himself, such as buying lamps for her double-wide mobile home. As Jo was finishing one story and about to leave, he would urge her to tell another. Sometimes the girl would say something, but mostly she just lay there and listened. Finally, before Jo was allowed to go she would have to explain to the girl that Elvis would not have sex with her because he needed to save “bodily fluids,” either for an upcoming tour or to heal some tiny wound, such as a cut on his finger that he would hold up to show the girl as if to establish credibility. The girl needed to understand that he could have sex another time, but not just now.

  As the older guys flaked away in the mid-1970s, as Linda Thompson spent more and more time in California pursuing her career, as the girls came and went, Billy came to spend twelve to eighteen hours a day with Elvis. While they were alone, he did whatever Elvis needed, but mostly they talked. In July and August 1977, with Billy always on call, it became virtually a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. They spent a lot of time doing take-offs on Monty Python films, dialogue and scenes that they knew by heart. It was silly teenage stuff, but they loved it.

  Elvis talked about serious things too. He toyed with the idea of having plastic surgery to change his looks, disappearing, and living elsewhere. He would find a man with a terminal illness who looked like him and pay him to let the surgeon change his face to match his own. When the man died, he would be buried as Elvis Presley. Elvis could then live quietly elsewhere. “I’m giving up being Elvis Presley,” he said. He soon dropped that thought.

  Elvis went from erasing himself to perpetuating himself. He was obsessed with the idea of having a son. “He’ll have my eyes and, of course, my face,” he said. He would be an entertainer, and if Elvis chose the right woman, he would be “the best looking and the most perfect kid in the world.” His name would be Elvis Presley Jr.

  Lisa Marie’s Last Visit

  On the last day of July, Elvis’s chief of security, Dick Grob, brought nine-year-old Lisa Marie from Los Angeles to Graceland for a two-week visit. For Elvis, this was supposed to be, at last, a long and satisfying time for closeness with his daughter. Recurrently in the past he had virtually begged Priscilla to send her for visits, but then failed to pay her a lot of attention after she arrived.

  Billy Smith thought that Lisa idolized her father and was starved for his attention. Sometimes, when Elvis was available, she would crawl up onto his lap and put her arms around his neck. These were touching moments. But much of the time he was not available. He slept during the day while she was awake. Sometimes she would just go into his bedroom and wake him up. Elvis scolded her for interrupting his sleep. Occasionally persuaded to ride with her and a friend in her special golf cart around the Graceland grounds, he would take a turn and then leave them to ride by themselves.

  Billy caught one scene perfectly. Elvis was sitting on the patio beside the house talking when Lisa ran up, eager to enlist her father’s help.

  “Daddy, my golf cart’s got a flat on it, and I can’t ride it anymore,” she exclaimed.

  “Okay, Lisa, Daddy’s talking right now,” Elvis said, brushing her aside and continuing his conversation.

  “But, Daddy,” she persisted, “won’t you fix it for me so I can ride?”

  After several such exchanges, Elvis exploded. “Goddammit, Lisa! Go get Earl.” Earl Pritchard, Elvis’s uncle by marriage, was the grounds manager and general repairman.

  “But, Daddy,” Lisa persisted, “I want you to fix it.”

  “Daddy don’t fix flats, Lisa,” Elvis responded. “Daddy’s rich. He has people do that for him.”

  Lisa was a bright, spunky little girl, and, according to Billy Smith, she did find ways to get Elvis’s attention, as well as that of other people. Sometimes she would ride her golf cart down to the gate and sign autographs for the fans. She was fully conscious of the power she had as Elvis Presley’s daughter. Pert and sloe-eyed like her father, she could be a little rascal too. She developed one ta
ctic that compelled notice. Reportedly, she would sometimes sign the autographs, “Fuck you, Lisa Marie Presley,” and then hop on her cart and race up the hill. Billy called her “a pistol.” Lamar Fike called her “the Little Fuhrer.”

  As a special treat for Lisa on this visit, Elvis rented out Libertyland for Lisa and their friends, including Ginger’s little niece, Amber Alden. The reservation was for the early morning hours of Monday, August 8. Elvis had rented the park for the night many times before. He loved to crash his “bump ’em” electric car into other people’s. Nobody except maybe Linda Thompson and Lisa Marie would ever bump Elvis’s car seriously. As the time for the outing approached, Elvis called the event off on the excuse that the park staff had all gone home. Ginger finally cajoled him into doing it. Elvis rallied the staff and the games were on again. Lisa loved it.

  Lisa Marie’s room at Graceland was on the second floor just down the hall from Elvis’s bedroom. Gladys and Vernon had first occupied the room, and later Minnie Mae. Now it contained Lisa’s special bed—king-sized, with a canopy, and a headboard covered with simulated white fur. The mattress was raised so high that the child had to climb steps to get up to it. Some fifteen stuffed animals and dolls lounged around the room.

  Because Elvis was so often asleep when Lisa was awake, she sometimes found company with her great-grandmother Minnie Mae and great-aunt Delta in their quarters downstairs just off the kitchen. She also had the fourteen-acre estate to explore, plus Billy and Jo’s two little boys, a swing set, and her golf cart to play with.

  Lisa might also visit with grandfather Vernon, but he was by nature not much fun. Moreover, he was not in good health that summer. He had suffered from ongoing mild heart issues in the spring of 1977. His heart condition, however, had not kept him from joining Elvis on his tours, where he, like the guys—including his two stepsons, David and Ricky Stanley—would cruise the crowds for girls and young women. Often enough there were keys on rings bearing hotel room numbers lying on the stage after a performance, thrown there as an invitation to Elvis but available to the guys and Vernon. Lamar Fike said Vernon had cheated on Dee “for years and with pretty much anything.”

  While on tour with Elvis in Denver, Colorado, in April, 1976, sixty-year-old Vernon found a thirty-six-year-old divorcee, a nurse named Sandy Miller. He brought Sandy and her two sons to Memphis and set them up in an apartment near Graceland. She was billed as his nurse, but no one was deceived.

  Vernon’s marriage to Dee was rapidly falling apart. Dee was getting out and socializing more, which Vernon did not like. Billy Stanley said that Vernon “told her he’d smash every bone in her face if she didn’t keep her ass at home.” With Sandy on the scene Dee was ready to accept divorce, but she wanted a quarter of a million dollars in return. Vernon was horrified. He got Elvis to try to persuade her to settle for less. Elvis told her that he would give her $10,000 right away to help her get started in life again. Dee wanted to become a songwriter, and presumably that lesser sum would enable her to begin that career, feel that she could earn her own living, and be less demanding of Vernon. She, however, stuck to her guns, went off to Santo Domingo, and secured her divorce with, Marty Lacker said, a settlement of $250,000.

  On August 4, the publishers of Elvis: What Happened? released the bodyguard book that Elvis so feared and hated. He never read the book. Billy dissuaded him. But promotion geared up quickly and the air was full of it. In an interview for a Chicago radio station, Steve Dunleavy, the acid-tongued journalist who helped write the book, said that Elvis was nothing but “white trash.” Elvis’s death twelve days later made the book a smashing success. It sold more than three million copies. The authors were well paid, surely making much more than they would have received had they continued to work for Elvis.

  The Last Tour

  As Elvis prepared to leave for Portland, Maine, and begin his tour in August 1977, he was banking on the double effect of the prospect of his new marriage and the usual magic that came with his live performances to drown the bodyguard book. He wanted this tour to be perfect. He called a meeting with some of his staff. The music would be changed to suit his mood, and he wanted everyone to be fully charged for the performances to come.

  They would open in Portland on Wednesday evening, August 17, a thousand miles northeast of Memphis. New England, where Elvis had first played in Boston in 1971, was the region in America most alien to Elvis’s native South. In his whole life, he had performed there only eleven times, and ten of these were in the last two years. On May 24, 1977, three months before his death, he went onstage in the Civic Center in Augusta, Maine, as far into the northeast of America as he would ever go.

  The motivation for the depth of this regional invasion was almost surely financial. Elvis needed audiences. In his last years, he played in places he had never played in before and in towns and areas with relatively small populations. Two of the last six towns in which he performed were in South Dakota—Sioux Falls and Rapid City.

  After Portland, the tour would work its way toward home—Utica, Syracuse, Hartford, Uniondale (New York), Lexington (Kentucky), Roanoke (Virginia), Fayetteville (Tennessee), Asheville, and finally Memphis, a triumphal procession. All the while, Ginger’s lovely presence would be seen and eager anticipation aroused. On August 27, at home again in Memphis, during the first of two shows he would announce his engagement to Ginger. His fans, seeing their hopes and dreams for his happiness coming true through his marriage, would be filled with joy. The news would galvanize the world. “Elvis to marry!” the press would shout. The second show, in Memphis on August 28, would be sheer ecstasy.

  Afterward, the media would celebrate the couple’s every move. Later, the announcement of the wedding date would provide another grand opportunity for publicity and after that another period of eager anticipation. The wedding must not occur too soon or too late. It might be during the Christmas season, or perhaps on Elvis’s birthday, January 8, 1978, to make that date a double celebration.

  The details of the plans for the absolutely breathtaking wedding ceremony would be revealed to the public piece by piece, building toward the crescendo of the event itself. For months, the bodyguard book would have to do battle with images of Elvis and Ginger in love, devoted to one another and gliding happily toward marriage, children, and a resplendent family life at Graceland. The Colonel, too, would have to accept and follow Elvis’s lead. He would not dare try to sell Elvis’s contract or embarrass him financially in this time of rising admiration. Indeed, he would devote his considerable promotional talents to making the most of it.

  In anticipating the tour and what was to follow, Elvis was coming alive again. Possibly his seclusion, several relatively restful weeks, and the unstinting tender love and care that he got from Billy and Jo Smith were therapeutic. He undertook to slim down for the tour and fit himself into a new jumpsuit. His special diet for losing weight was unnerving to the ordinary observer; he ate nothing but Jell-O. His diet on this occasion was not highly effective, nor were they usually. As Lamar said, Elvis would “go on a diet today and try to lose fifty pounds by one o’clock.” Even his newly made suit proved too small. “Billy,” he said to Billy Smith, “I’m just too damn fat.”

  Dying Day

  On Monday, August 15, Elvis woke up, as usual, in the afternoon. Billy found him keenly focused on the upcoming tour and increasingly enthusiastic about it. But also he talked on and on about the bodyguard book. What if someone in an upcoming audience yelled out, “Hey, drug addict!” or some such, what would he do? As Billy recalled, he ran through several possible responses he might make. He would say that writers said all sorts of things about him good and bad all the time; this was just more of the same. Or he would say that all his drugs were prescribed by his doctor for medical reasons and then introduce Dr. Nick, who would explain everything. But maybe there would be no challenge at all. He finally decided, as Billy remembered, that he would say that he was going to take some time off to get straight.

 
; Ginger had agreed to come with him on this tour, and Mrs. Alden was fully supportive. In truth, it seemed that Mrs. Alden was very ambitious for Ginger to marry Elvis, perhaps even more so than the bride-to-be. On the previous Monday, Elvis and Charlie Hodge had gone over to the Aldens’ house, where they had all stood around the piano singing gospel songs. The romance and, presumably, the matrimonial ship was again sailing smoothly.

  About 10:30 on Monday evening, Elvis slid into his Stutz convertible along with Ginger, Charlie Hodge, and Billy Smith. Down the hill they raced, through the gates swung wide, and up Elvis Presley Boulevard toward Memphis. In his usual fashion of doing business after hours, he was off to see his dentist and friend, Dr. Lester Hofman.

  Billy helped Elvis dress for the evening out. Elvis put on his black sweatsuit with the Drug Enforcement Administration patch on the back, black leather boots (which he could not zip up because his ankles were too fat), and aviator sunglasses. He stuck two .45 pistols in the waistband of his pants to complete his attire.

  Dr. Hofman’s office was just off Poplar Avenue, out east near White Station, about nine miles from downtown Memphis. During the 1950s and 1960s, White Station became the home of many Memphians who were rising high on the tide of postwar prosperity, including many who were born well-to-do and those whites who wanted to flee the increasingly black downtown. Kemmons Wilson, business tycoon, developer, and founder of Holiday Inn, had built his high-rise office building there, visible for miles around.

  Elvis pulled his Stutz Blackhawk up to a side door of the building where it would not be seen and led his party into the dentist’s office. Dr. Hofman refilled two of Elvis’s teeth and cleaned them. It was a pleasant, chatty visit. Dr. Hofman volunteered to clean Ginger’s teeth as the convivial evening continued.