Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  Around midnight Elvis and his party drove back to Graceland. He had ordered one of his favorite movies, MacArthur, for that night at the Memphian Theater. Ricky Stanley, the guy on duty, had goofed. He could not get the film, so Elvis canceled the outing.

  The Last Night

  Elvis was in bad shape generally, but he was not always dysfunctional. His dentist, for example, saw nothing wrong with him less than twelve hours before he died. Later, Billy Smith would say that he was high about 60 percent of the time during his last years. Elvis was keyed up to a high pitch that last night. After the visit to his dentist, he took Ginger up to his quarters at Graceland, where Ginger said that he spent much of their time planning for the wedding. Interviewed by Geraldo Rivera for 20/20 in 1979, she recalled that Elvis sought her suggestions, and “he had gone into more detail about our wedding than he had gone into at any time ever before.” Her wedding dress was already being made, he said. When Ginger indicated that the dressmakers didn’t have her measurements yet, Elvis replied, “Well, they’ll just have to come up here.” This wedding would occur in Elvis’s hometown, the Memphis he loved and would never leave. “This will blow them all aside,” Ginger recalled Elvis saying as he finished projecting the image.

  About 4:00 a.m., Elvis phoned Billy and suggested that he and Jo come out for a game of racquetball. The Smiths came over from their mobile home to the big house to join Elvis and Ginger. As the four of them walked along the cement walkway toward the two-story-high concrete blockhouse that contained the court, it was raining lightly. Jo complained about the rain. “Ain’t no problem,” Elvis said and raised his hands in a lazy, commanding gesture toward the sky.

  Jo and Ginger went onto the court first, then Billy and Elvis. Jo was good at the game, and gave away no points to save either male or female egos. As he often did, however, Elvis fell into his own game of trying to hit his opponent, Billy, with the ball. He ended by overreaching himself in attempting a very hard serve and struck his leg with his racquet. Complaining, he raised his pants leg to examine and then rub the wound. Billy, who had been the object of his attack, made light of his injury. “Hell, if it ain’t bleeding,” he teased, “it ain’t hurting.” Elvis threw his racquet at him.

  Elvis sat down at the piano in the lounge area in front of the court. He began to play gospel songs and sing. Elvis played the piano by ear. He had never had lessons. The piano, not the guitar, was his natural instrument. Billy remembered particularly that one song he played was not gospel. It was “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

  About six o’clock, Jo went home, Ginger went upstairs into the big bedroom, and Billy went with Elvis into his capacious upstairs bathroom. Billy washed and dried Elvis’s hair, a usual ritual before Elvis went to bed. Elvis had a chair in his bathroom that was something like a barber’s chair where he would sit to get his hair washed and sometimes to read.

  Billy recalled that he talked about Alicia Kerwin, but most of all he talked about the bodyguard book. He was going to invite Red and Sonny up to Graceland and kill them himself. Billy dismissed the death threat as a way to let off steam.

  Soon Ricky Stanley, the guy who was officially on duty from midnight until noon, brought in the first “hit” for Elvis to take. This was the first of three packets of pills in the protocol that Dr. Nick had established to put him to sleep. That night Elvis had also acquired some codeine pills from Dr. Hofman in case he had pain from the dental work. In addition, Elvis had called Dr. Nick about 2:15 a.m. saying that his teeth were hurting. In the past, he had suffered severe reactions to codeine, so it seemed logical that he should take a different kind of painkiller. Dr. Nick called in a prescription for six doses of Dilaudid, a very powerful drug often given to patients dying of cancer and other painful disorders. Elvis sent Ricky to the all-night pharmacy at Baptist Memorial Hospital to pick up the medicine. Later, when Ricky brought in the second of Dr. Nick’s prescribed hits, Billy was still in the bathroom with Elvis and saw Elvis swallow the pills.

  Billy left about 7:45 a.m. As he was leaving, Elvis said, “Billy … Son … this is going to be my best tour ever.”

  Morning

  When Ginger woke up in the big bed about 8:00 a.m., Elvis was in bed beside her, reading. He couldn’t go to sleep.

  “Precious, I’m gonna go in the bathroom and read for a while,” he said.

  “Don’t fall asleep,” Ginger said. They all knew that when Elvis was on downers he might fall asleep no matter where he was or what he was doing. Sometimes he would drop off in the middle of a sentence. He could fall out of a chair and hurt himself.

  “I won’t,” he replied and shut the door to the bathroom.

  Closed off in his bathroom, Elvis continued to read. He lay in that chair reading, the lamp bent to light the page.

  About 8:30, Elvis called down to the kitchen for his third hit. They couldn’t find Ricky, whose duty it was to deliver the packet to Elvis. Ricky had scored some drugs of his own and had, perhaps, either locked himself in a basement room or retreated to a motel room up the street to share his drugs with a girlfriend. Stories of where Ricky was when Elvis died evolved over the years. The kitchen staff had to telephone Dr. Nick’s office downtown, where Tish Henley, Elvis’s nurse, was working. She called her husband at the mobile home where they lived on Graceland’s grounds, and he delivered the packet to the housekeepers downstairs.

  Elvis’s aunt Delta Mae Biggs was disgusted by Ricky’s malfeasance. She thought that he was a “fat ass,” and she took the bag containing the drugs up to Elvis’s bathroom herself, along with a glass of water and the Commercial Appeal. Delta talked briefly with her nephew and departed. By then it was 9:00 a.m. She was the last person to see Elvis alive.

  After Aunt Delta left, Elvis sat quietly in his bathroom and read. Probably a part of the time he was in the chair and part of the time he sat on the black leather padded seat of the low-slung, wall-hung, black ceramic commode. For several years, Elvis had suffered great pain from constipation, and he was used to spending time sitting on his toilet. He had two phones and an intercom within arm’s reach.

  The Body

  Ginger woke up in Elvis’s bed sometime before 2:00 p.m. Elvis was not in the room. She made a telephone call to her friend Cindy, who would join her on the tour. Cindy was just getting ready to leave work, go home, and pack for the trip. Ginger made another call to her mother at work at the Internal Revenue Service’s Memphis center. Then she got dressed, applied her makeup, and did her hair. She needed to go out. She had things to do before they were to fly out that night.

  Finally, Ginger began to wonder where Elvis was. Usually at this time of day he would be sleeping next to her in the big bed and she would slip quietly out of the bed and out of the house. If he was awake, she needed to tell him she would be gone for a while. He must be in the bathroom, she thought.

  She went to the door and knocked. No response. Then she called softly, “Elvis.” No answer. Again she called, “Elvis.” Again no answer. Quietly, she entered the bathroom.

  Elvis was kneeling on the floor like a Muslim in prayer. His face, turned slightly to one side, was almost buried in the three-inch-deep piles of the dark red rug. The book he had been reading had slipped from his hand and fallen open-faced to the floor. At first, Ginger was more concerned than alarmed. Elvis had passed out again.

  Kneeling, she turned his head. She heard something like an expelling of breath that led her to think that he was all right. But she was startled by how dark blue his flesh was. His tongue was protruding, and he had bitten it. She raised his eyelid. His eyeball was blood red, no sign of any white at all, and it was staring lifelessly. For a few moments, she was in a state of shock. Then she reached for the intercom by the toilet and called the kitchen.

  “Who’s on duty?” she asked the maid.

  “Al,” came the answer. That was Al Strada, who first worked as a security guard at one of Elvis’s Los Angeles houses and then became his valet and wardrobe person as well as a bodygu
ard.

  “Would you tell Al to come up here really quick?” Ginger asked.

  Al raced up the backstairs. Entering the bathroom, he saw Elvis on the floor.

  Joe Esposito had arrived in town the night before and checked into the Holiday Inn up the street from Graceland. Shortly after 2:00 p.m., he drove over to Graceland, already beginning in his mind the countdown of the many things that had to be done before they took off in the Lisa Marie for Maine that night. Joe came in the back door just as Ginger’s call came down to the kitchen. He rushed into Elvis’s bathroom only seconds behind Al.

  Together the two men turned Elvis over on his back. Grotesquely, the arms and legs remained frozen, so he seemed to be crouching, although upside down. With difficulty, they forced Elvis’s limbs straight. He was wearing gold silk pajamas. The bottoms were down about his legs. The body was several feet away from the toilet, indicating that he either pitched forward and crawled the distance or struggled up, took a halting step or two, sank to his knees, and then fell forward. Later that afternoon, the investigator for the medical examiner detected a moist spot that smelled of vomit and bile where Elvis’s face had rested against the carpet. He calculated from Elvis’s height and the location of the spot that he had moved away from the toilet a few feet just before he died.

  When Joe and Al turned Elvis over, they saw that he wasn’t breathing. They feared that he had blocked his air passages with vomit. They had seen Elvis choking before. It was common practice to open his mouth and pull out the obstruction with their fingers. This time, however, they were not able to open his mouth. They attempted to pry open his jaws to no avail. With rising desperation, they knocked out his front teeth and made certain his air passages were open. Then they began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and a rhythmic pumping of his chest.

  The men ordered Ginger out of the room to spare her the awful sight. She left but immediately came back and began to press Elvis’s chest also. She heard Lisa Marie calling as she came up the stairs. Running out, Ginger stopped the child in the hallway.

  “What’s wrong with Daddy?” Lisa asked.

  “Nothing,” Ginger responded, trying to hold the little girl.

  “Something’s wrong with my daddy,” Lisa cried, struggling free. She turned and ran down the hall toward the dressing room, which had another door leading to the bathroom. Ginger called out to Al, who locked the other door just in time. Lisa then ran downstairs to tell her playmate that something was wrong with her father.

  Amid the commotion, Joe began telephoning. First he tried to reach Dr. Nick at his office, only to find that he was out in East Memphis at Doctors’ Hospital making his rounds. After leaving a message, he called the office of a nearby doctor that Graceland people sometimes used. The doctor asked him to bring Elvis to the office. Then Joe moved reluctantly to the last resort and dialed for the ambulance. This meant that the whole world would soon know that something was terribly wrong with Elvis Presley and his managers would have to come up with a good story. It was now 2:33 p.m. Joe told the dispatcher that someone was having trouble breathing at 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard. He avoided giving Elvis’s name as the person in distress, but he knew that the cat was already out of the bag.

  At 2:37, Joe called the Colonel in Maine. Parker immediately began to take measures to control damage and prepared to fly to Memphis. Finally, Joe called Vernon, who was down in his office behind the house. Patsy Gambill and Vernon’s girlfriend, Sandy Miller, were with him. Together the two women helped the wheezing, gray-haired old man up the stairs. Entering the bathroom, Vernon saw Elvis on the floor.

  “Don’t go, son!” he cried. “You’re going to be all right!” Vernon was on the verge of collapse. They were afraid he would have another heart attack.

  “My son is dead!” he wailed.

  Charlie Hodge rushed in and tried to help Joe and Al revive Elvis. “Don’t die!” he cried. “Please don’t die!”

  The order for the ambulance came to Fire Station No. 29 about three miles north of Graceland on Elvis Presley Boulevard, and Ulysses Jones and Charles Crosby responded immediately. But Elvis had stopped breathing about 9:30 that morning, five hours before the call came.

  Why Elvis Died

  Pathologists doing the autopsy that evening would discover that about five feet of Elvis’s lower colon was hugely distended and solidly blocked with chalky, whitish fecal matter. In places, it was stretched in diameter to about twice the normal two inches. Elvis had not effectively moved his bowels for some time.

  That night, pathologists who were “running the gut,” as they called the part of the autopsy that involved laying out the small and large intestines—about twenty-six feet—on a table and slicing them open lengthwise, had no difficulty at all deciding what caused this bizarre situation in Elvis’s lower intestine. When someone takes downers over a long period of time, as Elvis had, the slowing down includes the digestive and elimination system. Elvis’s bowels had simply lost much of their capacity for expelling waste.

  If not medicated, Elvis would have suffered considerable pain. But he was medicated. The autopsy revealed that Elvis’s body contained about ten times the amount of codeine a doctor would ordinarily have prescribed for pain. He might well have had his own supply of codeine in addition to that given to him by Dr. Hofman. No trace of the Dilaudid was found in his body, nor in Elvis’s quarters.

  In any event, Elvis had surely taken his three hits and other drugs as well. When the assistant medical examiner, Dan Warlick, came that afternoon to examine the scene, he found two empty syringes. One was in Elvis’s office, next to his bedroom, on the desk in front of the placard that read elvis presley—the boss. Warlick found the second syringe on top of the bookcase. He found no syringes in the bathroom, but a maid had thoroughly cleaned that space soon after the medics and the ambulance left. Dan Warlick also found the little black bag that Elvis called his “medicine chest.” It was empty.

  After considering carefully all of the substantial evidence available, the pathologists at Baptist Memorial Hospital concluded that Elvis had died of “polypharmacy.” The codeine alone would have killed an ordinary person, but the doctors could not say that Elvis died of any one drug and exclude the others. Nor could they describe the exact effect on his body of the combination of several drugs found in lethal or large amounts. There was simply no way of knowing precisely how these drugs taken in various quantities at various times combined to affect this particular body.

  Also, the doctors could not say exactly how the drugs acted in Elvis’s body to kill him. Did he die of a heart attack? Did he suffocate? Certainly he did not simply doze off on the downers and die quietly in his sleep. He suffered horribly before he died. Tiny blood vessels hemorrhaged all over his upper body, as if exploded by high pressure. His eyes were blood red. His tongue protruded, and he bit it. He vomited.

  Over time, experts offered several hypotheses as to what specific malfunction in Elvis’s body did him in. For instance, Dan Warlick later suggested that his excessive straining at the stool might have caused his internal organs to move in such a way as to cut off the circulation of blood to his heart. Thus, it was a very painful death and one not caused directly by drugs. In this sense, Elvis had died of a heart attack after all.

  The Will

  Back in March, Elvis had been thinking pointedly about his children both present and prospective when he worked out the details of his last will and testament. In the wee hours of the morning of March 3, his lawyer Beecher Smith had come over with the finished document for him to sign. Vernon was there for the signing. Ginger, Charlie Hodge, and the lawyer’s wife, Ann, witnessed Elvis’s signature. Legally, only two witnesses were required, neither of whom could be a beneficiary of the will. Charlie, then, could not have been a beneficiary, and neither could Elvis’s prospective wife, Ginger. The lawyer perhaps brought his own wife to ensure that they had at least one qualified witness readily available. Elvis himself must have decided that Ginger and Charlie would bot
h serve. He would like that—more “taking care of business,” Elvis style. The signers did not need to read the will, only attest to the legitimacy of the signature. The will was not read aloud. Billy Smith was there. He said it was all done in “six or seven minutes—hardly any time.”

  Afterward, Elvis gave Billy a copy of the will and invited him to read it, but Billy put it away without reading it. A couple of nights later, Billy later recalled, Elvis got the will out and showed him one section on one page—a section on who got what. Billy did not remember the substance well. Two or three people would get $50,000; Grandma and five or six guys were mentioned; cars would go to some people like Aunt Delta.

  Some people who were left out of Elvis’s will as filed in the county courthouse claimed that he had handwritten another will in which everyone was taken care of, as he had repeatedly promised. Some speculated that Vernon persuaded Elvis to make a new will, then dictated the contents to the lawyer himself, and Elvis signed the document without reading it. The substance of the will filed in the Shelby County Probate Court in Memphis after Elvis’s death could not have suited Vernon more perfectly, but no copy of the handwritten will has ever been discovered, and no clear and consistent memory of its contents has surfaced.

  Elvis’s will as duly filed provided that his entire estate, divided into equal parts, would go to his “lawful” children. Lisa Marie was a lawful child. Each child would receive his or her inheritance when he or she reached the age of twenty-five. Vernon would be the administrator and also one of three trustees, along with Elvis’s accountant and a person named by his bank. Vernon himself would be supported out of the estate during his lifetime, and he was explicitly directed to take care of Minnie Mae for the rest of her life. Neither of them could be expected to tax the estate heavily. Vernon was in ill health (and would die in 1979); Minnie Mae was in her eighties (and would die in 1980). Vernon was to help other relatives only in the face of dire necessity. With Vernon in charge of the estate, that necessity would have to be dire indeed. Any of Elvis’s relatives in need of funds would do better begging with tin cups on the sidewalks of downtown Memphis.