Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  The staff of the Enquirer began to mobilize. Calder had already chartered a Cessna Citation jet to take a team of four reporters and a photographer to Memphis. Sixteen more would be flown in from around the country to join them. Operation Elvis would have an unlimited budget and a simple mission: get the story, get it first, and get it exclusively. Calder needed a commander to oversee the effort. He turned to Tom Kuncl, an aggressive 6-foot 2-inch, 215-pound former war correspondent with a caustic sense of humor and a booming voice. “Tom, what have you got going right now that’s important?” Calder asked. The editor had just killed a story that Kuncl had worked on for months, and the reporter was in a sulk. “Nothing,” Kuncl mumbled. “You,” Calder ordered Kuncl, “go to Memphis.”

  By 6 P.M. the Enquirer crew was in flight on its chartered Cessna and headed to Graceland.

  In midtown Manhattan, up on the twenty-ninth floor of Time-Life’s sleek skyscraper on Avenue of the Americas, Dick Stolley was in the final stages of closing that week’s issue of People magazine when he heard that Elvis Presley had died. Stolley sighed. He was not an Elvis fan, but he knew he should somehow acknowledge the death of the once-revolutionary singer. Stolley didn’t even consider putting the story on the cover of People; Time Inc. had a policy of not picturing the deceased on its magazine covers. To do so would have been considered unseemly, exploitative. “You didn’t spend a lot of time covering dead people back then,” Stolley later said, “unless they were world figures, presidents and the rest, and even then probably not on the cover.” When John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Time didn’t put him on the cover, and he was a beloved president. Elvis was a flabby, over-the-hill crooner who gave concerts in Vegas. Besides, the cover of that week’s People was already finished: it featured Marty Feldman and Dick Stolley’s good friend Ann-Margret on the release of their movie, The Last Remake of Beau Geste. Stolley decided to put the news of Elvis’s death in “Star Tracks”—a two-page section of photographs with paragraph-long captions that ran toward the back of the magazine. He had a picture editor round up shots of Elvis and chose a recent one of the singer in concert, looking jowly and ludicrous, his paunchy belly pushing up against his rhinestone-studded belt. People gave Elvis’s death a 169-word write-up. The “late Elvis Presley” shared the page with a couple of other people in the news, including Dorothy Hamill, who made it into the “Star Tracks” section because a toy company was marketing a Dorothy Hamill doll. “It was the biggest mistake of my career,” Stolley later admitted. “I probably should have been fired for not putting Elvis on the cover.”

  A few blocks away, at 745 Fifth Avenue, the young hipsters who worked for Rolling Stone were also about to put their latest issue to bed. It was a special New York edition, celebrating the magazine’s move from San Francisco to Manhattan. Editors and production people were congratulating one another on a job well done when word spread through the moving-crate-littered offices that Elvis Presley had died. Music editor Peter Herbst went to Jann Wenner’s office to share the news with his boss. “His face sort of scrunched up and he started crying,” said Herbst. “These tears were rolling down his face, and he was trying to say something, but I couldn’t understand.” Then finally, the grief-stricken editor gathered his composure enough to speak. “It’s …” Wenner sobbed. “It’s a cover.” The music editor protested. The New York issue had been put together in the midst of the transcontinental move and involved tremendous effort from everyone. The staff was particularly proud of the results. An Andy Warhol portrait of Bella Abzug was on the cover and everything inside was very New York and very hip. Wasn’t Elvis sort of … hokey? “It’s a cover!” Wenner practically screamed. “It’s a cover!”

  But Wenner didn’t want just a new cover—he wanted an Elvis Presley issue. The magazine was ripped up and redone in four days. Rolling Stone’s deadline was pushed back and writers were dispatched to Graceland, and to Elvis’s birthplace, Tupelo, Mississippi. His movies were reevaluated; his records re-reviewed. Jann told staffers that he wanted them to evoke the slim, hip swinging rock-n-roll rebel of the fifties—not the bloated recluse that Elvis had become. Some of the young editors and photo researchers rolled their eyes; as usual, Wenner was acting less like a dispassionate, unbiased journalist and more like a fan. That, however, was the secret of his success.

  It was a late-breaking story for the networks to cover. The story wasn’t formally announced until 4 P.M. The networks usually started feeding footage to local stations at 5 P.M. for the 6 P.M. news. At NBC, there was no question what the lead story would be. Anchor David Brinkley was a North Carolina native. “The truth is that I never liked Elvis Presley’s music,” Brinkley later said. “But I knew millions of others did.” Brinkley opened the news with the death of Elvis, and spent nearly three minutes eulogizing him—an extraordinary time in network news. At Brinkley’s urging, NBC immediately began putting together a late-night special tribute to Elvis, which they broadcast that evening.

  ABC also led with the Elvis story—devoting two minutes to the segment. Upon hearing the announcement of the NBC special, ABC scrambled to put together its own special, which was hosted by a long-haired reporter and Elvis fan who had recently joined the network to give the news a little pizzazz: Geraldo Rivera.

  News executives at CBS, however, didn’t think Elvis’s death was a significant story. The Tiffany network led instead with the news that former President Gerald Ford had endorsed the Panama Canal treaties. The minute-long report on Elvis’s death was buried six minutes inside the broadcast. “We thought the [Panama] story was terribly important,” said Burton Benjamin Jr., the program’s executive producer. Several staffers, including anchor Roger Mudd who was filling in for the vacationing Walter Cronkite, protested the decision—people care about Elvis, they said. The staffers were overruled—rather vehemently. The Panama story was significant; the Elvis story merely interesting. CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, which regularly led in the ratings, was badly beaten by both NBC and ABC.

  CBS executives said they had no plans to broadcast an Elvis tribute like the other two networks, but on Wednesday, when they saw the high ratings that NBC’s and ABC’s Elvis specials had pulled in, CBS did an about-face. On Wednesday the network announced that it would broadcast a special on Thursday evening. It was put in a tough time slot—opposite NBC’s Tonight Show, but the CBS tribute had the network’s highest ratings of any late- night show that year—with forty-one percent of viewers—twice those who were tuned in to NBC.

  Newspapers that played the Elvis story big were finding an almost insatiable appetite for details of his death. Some papers reported selling more copies than they had when they carried the news of John Kennedy’s death. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, printed 370,000 copies of the paper, 100,000 more than usual, and it still sold out. One person bought 500 copies. A driver delivering copies of the Post Dispatch was forced off the road and a man carrying a baseball bat stole fifty copies of the paper. Around the country, papers with Elvis’s death on the front page were being resold within hours of hitting the newsstand for five dollars or more.

  Tom Kuncl didn’t really get this whole Elvis thing. He thought the story was just another celebrity death. He had been a war correspondent, a police reporter, and a political writer. He sometimes covered celebrities for the National Enquirer, but his favorite articles were ones about government waste, dumb crooks, and astonishing human feats. “I didn’t know sic ‘em about Elvis,” he said. But Generoso Pope had this idea that America was obsessed with Elvis, that all this “King” stuff wasn’t said in jest, that for some of his followers, Elvis held a monumental, almost religious, significance. As soon as the Enquirer’s plane landed in Memphis, Kuncl knew Pope was right. The city had erupted into mayhem. Its streets were clogged with thousands of mourners who—upon hearing the news of Elvis’s death—had left their jobs and their houses to make pilgrimages to Graceland. They clutched record albums or photographs or paintings of the singer. Some clung to tedd
y bears. Many of them were in a state of shock. Others wept openly and inconsolably. Dozens of mourners collapsed from grief and from ninety-degree heat.

  Throngs of grief-stricken fans had “simply gathered up their children, got in cars and headed for Memphis when they heard the news that Elvis had died,” according to one account. “They had packed no bags; most had made no plans beyond telling friends or neighbors to notify their employers that they had gone.” The three Tripper brothers who lived in Buffalo, New York, heard about Elvis’s death when they were playing softball. “There was no question,” said Charlie Tripper. “We just stopped to get money for gas and took off. He was the man. He was it.” He was still wearing his softball outfit. A woman from Pennsylvania told a reporter, “Thirty of us decided to come down here because there’ll never be another one like him. He was the king. He was the king of everyone and especially of our people. He was ours.”

  A hundred vans delivered 3,116 floral arrangements. Every flower in the Memphis area was sold by noon Wednesday, and more were shipped in from other states. The Floral Telegraph Delivery (FTD] recorded its biggest volume of shipments ever. Arrangements arrived shaped like hound dogs, broken hearts, and blue shoes. Liberace sent one resembling a guitar. Elton John sent a huge bouquet with a note, “For All the Inspiration.” Tributes poured in from stars and heads of state. “If there hadn’t been a Presley, there would have never been any Beatles,” John Lennon said. “Nothing really affected me until Elvis.” President Jimmy Carter issued a statement that noted, “Elvis Presley’s death deprives our country of part of itself.” Even the government of the Soviet Union sent flowers.

  For the funeral, Elvis’s coffin was carried by a silver Cadillac, followed by a caravan of seventeen white Cadillacs, that snaked its way through two-and-a-half miles of mourners on the way to Forest Hill Cemetery. “The crowd was unbelievable,” said Memphis Police Director Buddy Chapman, who was put in charge of the mourners outside the ornate iron gates around Graceland on Elvis Presley Boulevard. “They had crushed people up against the fence to the point where we had to rescue some people.” But unlike most crowds of this size, they weren’t angry or moblike. “They were—I don’t want to say like zombies, but they were almost like in a daze.”

  Before long, the docile, exceedingly polite crowd became somewhat crazed. Fans descended on the floral arrangements and plucked them bare for souvenirs. They ripped out chunks of grass from Graceland and from the mausoleum where Elvis was buried. A distraught, drunken driver plowed his 1963 Ford Fairlane into a crowd of mourners at 55 miles an hour, killing and critically injuring several of them. Three men were arrested and charged with a plot to steal Elvis’s body and hold it for ransom. They later said they were just trying to prove that Elvis had never really died.

  The hundreds of reporters who came to Memphis fought for rental cars and hotel rooms. Adding to the bedlam, 16,000 Shriners had already come to town for a convention, taking up most of the city’s 9,000 hotel rooms, so many of the reporters had to set up campsites outside Graceland with the mourning fans. The competition to interview anyone who knew Elvis was insanely intense. “I was a war correspondent and had covered the war in Bangladesh and two wars in the Middle East and a revolution in Ethiopia,” said one National Enquirer reporter. “Well, covering Elvis was a war too. A journalistic war.” “The Elvis death coverage—that was the Normandy landing,” said another writer for the tabloid. “Other reporters were the enemy.”

  One of Pope’s Fleet Street imports was Iain Calder, a native of Scotland who was so cold and direct that his staff called him the Ice Pick. Calder became Pope’s right-hand man, was named editor in 1975, and once fired his best friend for not delivering the goods on stories. The mandate for the Elvis story was to get exclusives, pay whatever it cost to get exclusives, and throw caution—and ethics—to the wind.

  The National Enquirer took over the top floor of a seedy boarding house. The main area—a place that the owner of the boarding house called the Card Room—was set up as command central. Within hours, a bank of twenty-two private phone lines was installed. “It was a trick that Pope learned from his CIA days,” said an Enquirer reporter. “Whenever possible, we wouldn’t go through switchboards or hotel operators. That way, we could make calls posing as friends or relatives or people from other papers and people calling back wouldn’t get suspicious or be able to check us out.”

  It was the National Enquirer at its best—and at its worst. The tabloid had seemingly unlimited resources, and Enquirer reporters infiltrated Memphis, handing out $100 bills like they were business cards. Their aggressive tactics appalled the mainstream reporters. Some Enquirer reporters were assigned to get their competitors too drunk to work. They befriended and bribed telephone operators at other hotels who would keep them posted on what the other journalists were doing. Kuncl had his people track down the two paramedics who drove Elvis from Graceland to the hospital. They were paid off and put under exclusive contract with the Enquirer. Likewise dozens of groupies, band members, and Elvis hangers-on. The Enquirer located Robert Call, the fan who had been waiting in front of Graceland when Elvis returned home on the day of his death and who snapped the singer’s picture with the $20.95 instamatic camera; the Enquirer bought the photograph for $10,000 and ran it under the headline: “Last Photo of Elvis Alive.” One Enquirer reporter faked a toothache to get an emergency appointment with Elvis’s dentist. Dee Presley, who had been married to Vernon for seventeen years, was put under exclusive contract with the Enquirer. Although she had divorced Vernon, she was a valuable source for the Enquirer. She gave them the story—disputed by Elvis’s inner circle—that the singer left a suicide note.*

  The National Enquirer locked up an exclusive interview with Elvis’s fiancée Ginger Alden. She gave the tabloid a graphic account of how Elvis looked when she discovered his body: “His eyes were closed and his face was a purplish color and swollen looking. His tongue was sticking out of his mouth and he’d bitten down on it.” There were some inside Graceland who were convinced that it was Ginger Alden who initially leaked the news of Elvis’s death to the National Enquirer. Dick Grob—a member of Elvis’s entourage—claimed that Alden placed a call to Enquirer reporter James Kirk shortly after she discovered the body—as early as 11:30—well before she alerted Elvis’s entourage. Alden admitted she did sell an interview to the Enquirer, but insisted that she didn’t call the tabloid before she called for help. Still, many in the Memphis Mafia were suspicious of Elvis’s last girlfriend and banned her from their inner circled.†

  Then there was the controversy over the cause of the death itself. The official word was that Elvis had died from “cardiac arrhythmia brought on by an irregular heartbeat caused by undetermined causes.” Elvis’s physician, Dr. George Nichopoulos, initially denied that Elvis had any drug problems, although he would later be charged with overprescribing drugs to Elvis—some 10,000 pills in the last twenty months of the star’s life. Because Elvis’s death had been ruled the result of natural causes, under Tennessee law, the findings of the autopsy did not have to be released. That didn’t stop the Enquirer; within hours they had the names of all twelve people present at the autopsy. “We knew virtually every substance that was in Elvis’s body,” said Kuncl. Among those substances were codeine, Quaaludes, Valium, pentobarbital, butabarbital, and phenobarbital. They were all “downers,” and the codeine itself was enough to kill most people.

  The Enquirer knew that Elvis used psychics, so Kuncl called all the physics listed in the Memphis Yellow Pages, and asked them if they had ever treated Elvis. Sure enough, one of them had seen him shortly before his death, and Elvis had expressed morbid fears of death. That yielded the epic scoop: “ELVIS KNEW HE WAS GOING TO DIE.”

  In those weeks after Elvis’s death, the Enquirer was riding high, scooping the mainstream press and beating the television news. It was, however, getting fierce competition from its new nemesis, the National Star. Rupert Murdoch’s four-year-old tabloid was proving to b
e more competition than Pope had expected, and had scored a scoop in the Elvis story that was hard to match. Shortly before the singer died, Murdoch’s star reporter Steve Dunleavy learned that three of Elvis’s bodyguards had been fired. Dunleavy interviewed the men, Red West, Sonny West, and Dave Hebler, hoping to turn their stories into a three-part series for the Star. After the initial conversations, however, Dunleavy realized he had struck gold. Until then, Elvis’s private life was a very closely guarded secret. These three bodyguards told Dunleavy jaw-dropping tales of debauchery and decadence: drug abuse, kinky sex, and violence. “I realized we were dealing with an incredible story about the biggest star since Valentino,” said Dunleavy. He consulted with Murdoch, who agreed to pay the bodyguards a flat fee of $50,000 for their story. Dunleavy spent a month in a Los Angeles hotel taping the bodyguards’ stories. More than thirty publishers had asked to read the manuscript, but only Ballantine bid. The imprint is a division of Random House, which at the time was owned by RCA, Elvis’s label. They knew that anything with Elvis’s name on it sold. Elvis: What Happened? was published on August 1, 1977, a few weeks before Elvis’s death, with an initial print run of 400,000 copies. Within six hours of Elvis’s death, Ballantine ordered an additional 250,000 copies. Eventually, K-Mart alone ordered 2 million copies, the biggest single shipment ever for a book. Some of the details contained in Elvis: What Happened? were so lurid that the head of Ballantine later confessed that he didn’t know “whether the book was legally publishable.” And Rupert Murdoch’s Star had exclusive excerpt rights to the book.

  “Read the book the world is talking about!” The Star headlines blared for weeks. The book gave shocking details about the extent of Elvis’s pill habit, calling the singer “a walking pharmaceutical shop.” It revealed that Elvis “firmly believes he has the powers of psychic healing by the laying of hands. He believes he will be reincarnated. He believes he has the strength of will to move clouds in the air. He firmly believes he is a prophet who was destined to lead, designated by God for a special role in life.” The excerpts reported Elvis’s obsession with firearms, and revealed that he usually carried two or three guns on him; he even carried a gun on stage in concert, tucked into his boot. Elvis would shoot holes in television sets when he didn’t like a particular show.* 30 According to the book, he ordered one of the bodyguards to kill the karate instructor who was dating his ex-wife Priscilla. The book also revealed Elvis’s then top-secret visit to the White House to meet with Richard Nixon in hopes of becoming a federal drug enforcement officer.