CHAPTER 16

GERMANY

BILLY SMITH: Right before Elvis left Memphis to rejoin his unit at Fort Hood, he went to Gladys’s bedroom door and said, “I got to go, Mama,” and broke down right there. Of course, Gladys had been dead and in the ground for ten days or so. It like to killed him.

The troop train that carried him to the Military Ocean Terminal in Brooklyn, New York, had to stop on a spur track in Memphis. I went to the train to see him with my mama and daddy. The sergeant wouldn’t let Elvis get off the train, but he let him come to the door. Some of the guys came, like George and Alan. Elvis was really glad to see us. We told him we’d be waiting for him to get home because we were trying to act jolly. I climbed up on the train and told him how much I was going to miss him, and he leaned down and hugged me and said, “Take care, little fella, and stay in touch. I’ll be talking to you.” We both got tears in our eyes, and then he said, “Don’t forget me while I’m gone.”

He was somewhat scared. He knew he had an obligation to go, but he didn’t know how the other troops were going to act towards him. He felt he had to live up to an image and be this certain person. In the real early days of his career, guys wanted to jump him and fight because of who he was, and he thought that might happen in the army.

We talked about it a little bit, but I was fifteen, and I couldn’t exactly give him advice. I know he worried about how his absence was going to affect his popularity. That June, he’d gone to Nashville and cut “I Got Stung,” and “A Big Hunk O’ Love,” and “A Fool Such as I,” and some other songs, so he could have records out while he was gone.

LAMAR FIKE: Before he went in the service, Elvis told the press he was looking forward to being in the army. That wasn’t true. He put it off as long as he could. He hated it because it took away everything he had going for him, including being a star.

MARTY LACKER: Elvis was a very promilitary guy, a guy who was in ROTC in high school. But when he came back from Germany, he told me, “Man, that was one of the worst things I’ve ever done.” But I think he liked the fact that he made a name for himself because he didn’t shirk any responsibility. But he didn’t like the army at all. He could have taken the easy way out and gone into Special Services, which is what the army wanted him to do. But Colonel Parker said, “No, you go in there, and you do your service exactly like everybody else.”

LAMAR FIKE: Colonel always acted like he didn’t want Elvis singled out, so the public would think he was the patriotic boy-next-door. But the real reason Colonel kept him from entertaining the troops was because Elvis didn’t get paid and Colonel didn’t want people to see Elvis free. Not even on a USO show, although he and Charlie Hodge did a serviceman’s variety show onboard the U.S.S. General Randall. That’s where he first hooked up with Charlie, you know. Charlie was his bunkmate. They hit it off because Charlie was a musician, too. Charlie sang with the Foggy River Boys on “The Red Foley Show.” On that USO show, Elvis played piano and Charlie emceed and did a little comedy.

I remember Bob Hope sent people to Elvis to try to get him to do his Christmas tour. And Elvis turned it down. He was in Grafenwöhr, near the Czechoslovakian border, up to his armpits in snow with the 32nd Tank Battalion, but he had to turn it down because Colonel thought, “Why should he work for the army for nothing when he gets $50,000 a night?” That’s like when the White House wanted Elvis to come sing for President Nixon. Colonel asked if it paid. Somebody told him, “The performance is compensated by the honor of being asked.” So Colonel said, “Let ’em pay like everybody else or Elvis doesn’t go.”

MARTY LACKER: I didn’t have much contact with Elvis while he was in the army. I saw him just before he went in and then again after basic training in June of ’58, after his Nashville recording session. I wrote him one letter in Germany and sent him a magazine, Modern Screen, because they did a story on me as program director of this radio station in Knoxville. When I went up there, the radio station was ninth or tenth in the market, and six months after we took it over, we were number one.

When Elvis went over to Germany, he took some of the guys with him. He didn’t ask me to go, maybe because he knew I’d already been over there.

LAMAR FIKE: Elvis docked at Bremerhaven, West Germany, and all these screaming fans were waiting, trying to see him while he boarded the troop train. He was going to Ray Caserne, Friedberg, which was the home of the U.S. 7th Army. Just as soon as he got there, they had a press conference and told everybody they assigned him to Company D, 1st Battalion, 32nd Armor, 3rd Armored Division of the 7th Army. He was going to be a jeep driver for Master Sergeant Ira Jones, the platoon leader. He couldn’t drive a jeep for an officer. Just an average soldier, you know. He made it to private first class by the end of November and then specialist fourth class the following June. When he got discharged in March 1960, he was a buck sergeant, but somebody put an extra stripe on his uniform to make him a staff sergeant. I think that uniform was custom-made. I’ll lay you money Colonel was behind that.

Elvis was at loose ends the whole time he was in the service, so when he went to Germany, he took Grandma and Vernon and myself and Red. A little later, Cliff came over. Elvis went ahead of us, and we caught up with him the day after he got there.

At first, we moved into Ritter’s Park Hotel in Bad Homburg, a resort spa where folks with bad hearts, and respiratory ailments, and other afflictions would come for the thermal baths.

Elvis hadn’t been there but about twenty-four hours when we went for a walk in the park—Elvis, Vernon, Red, and I. All these German photographers descended on us like a horde of locusts. They wanted to photograph him with this little sixteen-year-old girl, Margrit Buergin. She couldn’t speak English. Elvis would try to talk to her and it was basically impossible. Margrit was a pretty girl, blond. Elvis dated her on and off the whole time he was in Germany, but the heavy stuff lasted about two months. Then he got tired of her and went to somebody else.

BILLY SMITH: Elvis never did write to me from Germany, and in all the time he was over there—nearly two years—I talked to him only twice on the phone. He wrote to George once, and to Alan once, and he wrote to Anita several times. Elvis wrote maybe a dozen letters his whole life.

MARTY LACKER: One of the best-known stories about Elvis in the seventies is about the time he shot out the television when Robert Goulet came on. Everybody thought it was because he didn’t like Goulet’s style of singing and couldn’t stand his voice. But the real reason has to do with Anita.

Anita was a local singer when Elvis met her, but she was hoping to become a bigger singer, maybe an actress. I know she went out to Hollywood to visit Elvis once or twice, and I don’t think it was just to see him—I think she was hoping it would lead to something else. When she won her beauty contest, she also won a seven-year recording contract with ABC-Paramount Records, and she made some records for other people.

And when Elvis was over in Germany, she did a number of shows around Memphis, and she also traveled. In fact, she went on tour with Robert Goulet. And she wrote Elvis a letter, and Goulet put a P.S. on it that said in effect, “Hey, Elvis, don’t worry! I’m taking pretty good care of Anita!” Understand, there was nothing going on between Anita and Goulet, but Goulet probably figured it would really annoy Elvis to suggest that there was. I remember Elvis telling me this story, and it was obvious that it burnt the shit out of him. And that’s the reason that in 1974, when he saw Goulet on television, he pulled a .357 Magnum pistol out and blew the fuckin’ TV up. It ate at him all those years.

LAMAR FIKE: We didn’t stay at Ritter’s Park Hotel more than a day or so. Then we moved into the Hilbert’s Park Hotel in Bad Nauheim. While we were there, Ibn Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia, arrived with his thirty-two wives and twenty-five or thirty sons and entourage. Took over the whole hotel. I’ve got a picture of myself in all that Bedouin gear. Elvis didn’t like it that the king attracted all that attention.

We weren’t there very long either. Four days. Then we rented the top floor of the Hotel Gruenwald, also in Bad Nauheim. Everybody had his own room. We put in a kitchen and everything. And Elvis rented a separate room downstairs, just for the bags of mail.

The Gruenwald is where I had a little altercation with the old lady downstairs, who was a heart patient, there for the health cure. We’d pretty much roar up there. Red and I broke the bed in Elvis’s room by wrestling on it. So we quit that. But Red used to come over to my room, and we’d sit in there and talk and carry on. And the old lady would take her cane and beat it on the ceiling to tell us to be quiet. So I bought a damn cane and started beating it on the floor. It like to drove her crazy. She’d pound on that ceiling like there was no tomorrow, and I’d get the cane and beat it back on the floor like there was no tonight. It was hilarious.

We were still there at Christmas. God, that was dismal. It was Elvis’s first Christmas without Gladys. We had a tree set up, but Elvis couldn’t get the spirit. We tried to make the best of it. We gave presents to each other, and went through the motions, but it didn’t seem like Christmas. We talked about Gladys all the time. He’d say, “Remember when Mama did this?” I’d say, “Yeah,” and we’d both start laughing about it. We’d remember how she’d get mad and how she loved to go out and feed the chickens. Really sad.

BILLY SMITH: Elvis told me about being in that hotel for the first Christmas. The guys bought some fireworks to cheer him up. Without really thinking, Elvis blasted the German civilians from the balcony of the hotel. The hotel manager didn’t like that too much, and Elvis and the guys had already been reprimanded for doing other crazy things, like having water fights in the halls.

Finally, one day, they were having a shaving cream fight, and Elvis locked himself in his room. Well, Red put a paper under the door and set it on fire to smoke him out. The smoke came out in the hallway, and some of the older people there thought the whole building was on fire. After that, they were asked to get the heck out.

LAMAR FIKE: We moved out of the Gruenwald Hotel into Frau Pieper’s house at Goethestrasse 14. This was a five-bedroom, three-story, white stucco place, with a white picket fence. That’s where Elvis lived the rest of the time he was in Germany. He never did actually stay on the base. So nobody really knew what we did. Germany was like the lost years of Elvis. Had Jesus lived in a later time, and the twelve disciples been around, they would have been rocking just like we were.

On a typical day, Elvis would get up at four-thirty in the morning. Red and I would get up, and we’d go downstairs. Grandma would be up cooking breakfast. We’d make sure Elvis got dressed on time. He always looked the ideal soldier because Red and I kept his brass and his boots spit-shined. He had about eight or ten pairs of boots and probably a hundred uniforms, a hundred shirts, a hundred pants. He’d go to the PX and buy them—hell, he was making $400,000 a month when he went in there, and basic soldier pay was $83 a month, up from $78 at Fort Hood. I think he was up to $122 a month when he was discharged.

He would win “Best-Dressed Soldier” all the time. I told him, “You ought to give that medal to Red and me.” He loved that. He’d come in for lunch and go back out in the field in fresh-pressed fatigues. And boy, it would drive them crazy.

In the mornings, Elvis would have somebody come by in a jeep and pick him up and carry him over to the post, which was about fifteen kilometers away. And he usually stayed gone during the day and came back during the evening. We put a sign out in front of the house that translated to AUTOGRAPHS BETWEEN 7:30 AND 8:00 P.M. ONLY.

We’d go into town, walk around and see the sights, or whatever. And at night, if Elvis would be on maneuvers, Red and I would go down to the beer halls and drink. And Red would beat the shit out of four or five Germans on a regular night.

Frau Pieper was a bitch and a half. She lived in a room off the kitchen. She wouldn’t get out of the house, so we rented the whole place for $800 a month, which was about five times the going rate. She was an absolute maniac. She used to run us crazy, and we drove her crazy right back. I threw a firecracker under her bed one night. We just did everything to try to get rid of her, but we never could. Actually, I think she had the hots for Vernon. God, she was horrible. She’s got to be dead now because she was sixty-something then. I’d say she’s dead or turned into something good to eat, one of the two.

She and Grandma would get in these arguments. Grandma was speaking English, and Frau Pieper was speaking German, and they acted like they understood each other. Grandma cussed all the time. Here was this old woman cussing a blue streak, and Elvis and I would just lose our breath laughing because it was hilarious. She put Frau Pieper down, and cussed her out, and called her every name in the book. Every other word was a cuss word. Grandma would get cantankerous as hell. Frau Pieper mouthed off to her one day, and Grandma threw a skillet at her. She missed her that time, but later on she decked her.

BILLY SMITH: I hear Grandma worked her over pretty good. And when Elvis came in, Grandma got to him first. Since Frau Pieper didn’t speak English, she didn’t know what Grandma had told him. She tried to tell him what Grandma had done to her, and Elvis pretended to sympathize. He was petting her, saying, “Well, it’ll be all right. You got your butt beat, didn’t you?” Frau Pieper thought he was taking up for her. She was nodding and smiling, and he kept on petting her, and all the while he was saying, “That’s right, you old bag, Grandma knocked the shit out of you, and you probably deserved it.”

LAMAR FIKE: Ordinarily, Grandma was a very quiet woman. She basically just dipped snuff and stayed in her room. Elvis would give her a $10 bill and she’d keep it for five years. Back in Memphis, she decorated her room with all the stuffed animals the fans sent. Looked like a toy store. In the latter years, she moved into Gladys and Vernon’s old bedroom.

Grandma was a funny person. Tall and skinny. Wore sunglasses night and day. The light hurt her eyes. I liked her. I called her “Miss Minnie” at first, and then I started calling her “Grandma.” Elvis would kid her. He’d cuss, and she’d cuss back at him.

Vernon acted sort of indifferent to her. There was no reverence there. It was “Mama this and Mama that,” but no affection or respect. So Elvis was her world, and she adored him. After Gladys, she was the only person who could cook Elvis’s breakfast. She’d get sick, and she’d still get up and cook. Grandma became his mother. That’s why he brought her to Germany, because he had to have a connection. He used to sit by her bed over there in Germany by the hours.

One time, Grandma was sick for a week. So Elvis would come in my room at three o’clock in the morning and lie down on the bed and say, “How you doin’?” I’d say, “Elvis, you’ve got to be out of here at six A.M.!” It didn’t matter. He had to have somebody to talk to. He just wanted you to listen. I’d make two or three comments, and he’d say, “I’m tired of this shit!” and get up and go to bed.

MARTY LACKER: This stuff about Elvis being a regular soldier . . . he was like everybody else during the daytime and when he was out on field trips. But at the other times, he wasn’t like everybody else. He lived in a house off the base. There were women all over the place. Cars—he bought a used BMW 507, a sport coupe. Of course, he totaled it on the Autobahn on New Year’s Day. The rumor got out that he was killed, so he donated a pint of blood to the Red Cross to show he was still alive. But he was not a deprived soldier, by any means.

LAMAR FIKE: I think BMW lent him that car. He thought he was buying it, but it turned out he signed a leasing agreement. They let him have it cheap because he went to the factory and they took pictures of him there.

We got another car after that. It was a 300 Mercedes sedan, four-door. Vernon wrecked it. Elvis had dated this little girl, Elisabeth Stefaniak. She was eighteen, a German by birth, but her stepfather was an army sergeant named Raymond McCormick. Elisabeth was a companion to Elvis. That wasn’t a real romance. She took care of all the fan mail, and she could speak German and write it. She was very fluent. And she would translate for everybody. She was more like a secretary.

Anyway, Vernon and Elisabeth were coming back from Frankfurt. Vernon would go to the PX there and buy groceries because you could get them so cheap. And somehow the right front tire went off the Autobahn, and the car went clean across it and flipped over on its top. Elvis and I rushed out there, and Vernon and Elisabeth both were all right, but the car was gone. Elvis ended up bringing Elisabeth back to Memphis with him to work in the office. But she married a guy named Rex Mansfield, who was in Elvis’s unit and who was the closest friend Elvis had at that time. That was before he got so tight with Charlie Hodge and Joe Esposito.

MARTY LACKER: Joe met Elvis in the army in ’59. He wasn’t in Elvis’s outfit, but they were stationed at the same place. Joe was a clerk, a bookkeeper, I think. Lamar and Red met him at a bar. And then they introduced him to Elvis. Joe was a bit of a loan shark. He’d loan all these soldiers money at 100 percent premium. Joe was an operator. He’s not a stupid guy. He’s a pretty good hustler.

Everybody called him “Diamond Joe.” He’s Italian, of course. Joe’s from Chicago. And there were a lot of Mafia people in the neighborhood where he grew up. Matter of fact, he told me he dated the daughter of a Mafia figure for a while. I’m talking about the Italian Mafia now, not the Memphis Mafia. Joe had a nutty sense of humor. Elvis liked that.

LAMAR FIKE: Red and I both liked Joe. I thought maybe he had something that our group could use. I talked to him, and I told Elvis, “You ought to consider hiring this guy Joe Esposito when you get back.” And Elvis said, “Well, make sure I meet him.” So Joe started coming over to the house a lot when we were in Germany, the same way Charlie would come back and forth.

Joe would crack Elvis up real quick. But nothing, really, made Elvis happy in Germany. He vacillated between “What the shit am I doing here?” to “I’m an American” to “This is the army, Mrs. Jones.” At one point, he said, “I’m about ready to go back home. They can stick this army up their ass. I’m fed up with it.”

Elvis was not a person who liked to take orders. If you asked him to pick up an anvil, he’d carry it on his back for twenty years. But if you told him to do it, he’d tell you where to put it.

They drafted me while I was over there. I had to go to the 3rd Armored headquarters and let them flunk me. I was about one hundred pounds overweight, even though I was down to 265 or 270, something like that.

BILLY SMITH: One time Elvis was on maneuvers, and they’d gone up in the mountains and it was cold and snowing like mad. This was probably in Grafenwöhr. Elvis said they would do anything to stay warm. They couldn’t build fires, so they would get on the tanks to keep warm.

Elvis was a scout in the tank corps, and he drove a jeep for this master sergeant. They had this direct heating system rigged up from the motor. One day, they pulled a canvas up over themselves, and when it got warm, they got sleepy. Elvis said next thing he knew, he woke up in the hospital with carbon monoxide poisoning—they got exhaust fumes coming up from a hole in the floorboard. Having a heater in the jeep was against regulations. The army covered for him, though, because they didn’t want it to get out that he almost died in one of their vehicles. They said he was in the hospital for tonsillitis.

LAMAR FIKE: Elvis got in trouble over there one other time. He was on maneuvers, and he took a wrong turn, and before he knew it, he was practically in East Germany. Because they were up near the eastern border. Grafenwöhr is where [Germany’s General Erwin] Rommel trained his troops. Anyway, Elvis caught on to it—it wasn’t a very guarded border—and he wheeled around real quick and got out of there. He didn’t actually go into East Germany, but he got real close. It scared the shit out of everybody.

One of the reasons Elvis didn’t like to go out in the field or on maneuvers was because he had a big fear of snakes. I think he always thought he’d jump in a foxhole and one would be waiting on him.

BILLY SMITH: ’Course, the strange thing about that is that he had a lot of books about snakes. He was fascinated by them. And he used to go snake hunting. He liked killing them with a shotgun.

MARTY LACKER: Elvis had a number of obsessions, and one was karate. That started when he was in Germany. He took instruction from Jürgen Seydel, a champion karate expert. That’s who he first trained with. Then he met a guy named Hank Slemansky, who was a paratrooper and ranger for Special Services, the equivalent of a Green Beret. He was a martial arts instructor, too. He taught Elvis karate in ’59 over there. Elvis was intrigued with it because nobody much had ever heard of karate in the States. Slemansky told him he jumped from a plane one time and his chute didn’t open, and he broke his back. But because of the martial arts discipline, he’d learned not to feel pain, and he got up and walked away. That seems far-fetched, but I think Elvis believed it. Slemansky got killed in Vietnam in the sixties. Elvis was real upset.

When Elvis got back to the States, he was talking karate all the time. That’s when he got his first-degree black belt. In a way, he helped popularize it here because the magazines wrote stories about him learning martial arts, and a lot of kids became aware of it. He’d buy up a bunch of lumber, and he and the guys would go downtown in the middle of Main Street in Memphis and start breaking boards with karate chops.

LAMAR FIKE: Elvis always pictured himself as a badass, but he never was, and karate gave him permission to be that.

MARTY LACKER: When Elvis was in the tank corps, he had a sergeant who gave him Benzedrine because he had to stay up all night and watch during maneuvers. Elvis saw that it helped him stay awake and alert.

LAMAR FIKE: He liked that Benzedrine. So he went looking for some more, and some stronger stuff, too. He found a pharmacy mate over there who’d give him anything he wanted as long as he got paid. We’d get all kinds of stuff—buy it by the jugs, boy. He’d taken those pills of Gladys’s before, but that slacked off. But when he found the pharmacy mate, that’s when he started back again.

Responsibility was not one of Elvis’s things. Here was a guy who made money like an Arab oil sheik, for Christ sake, back when money was money. He had it all—his closest buddies around him, Cadillacs, a beautiful home, and adulation. The only thing he didn’t walk on was rose petals. And so this army stuff didn’t set too well with him, and he’d take pills so he could sort of be someplace else. We didn’t think anything about it at the time.

BILLY SMITH: Actually, for a soldier, Elvis had a pretty good time over there. I remember him telling me about the day him and Lamar and Red started throwing snowballs at some of the civilians. The civilians didn’t take it as a game after a while, and they started chasing ’em. And Lamar was running behind Elvis and Red. Elvis and Red made the corner, but Lamar missed the turn. He was still going straight ahead. There was this picket fence in front of a house there, and Lamar didn’t slow up in time. His feet flew out from under him, and he slid for half a block—went right through the fence. Elvis and Red went back and helped him to his feet. I think they had to help carry him home.

LAMAR FIKE: Red and I didn’t have any money at all, and every day Vernon would give us two marks a piece. Back then, a mark was about a quarter. If we wanted to go out and drink, or have fun while Elvis was out in the field, we’d have a tough time.

One day Elvis came back from maneuvers and said, “How much is Daddy giving you?” I said, “Two marks a night.” See, Elvis didn’t pay attention to what people were paid. Elvis didn’t know what a loaf of bread cost, not even in America. But now this got his attention.

Elvis said, “What! Fifty cents? You can only buy a couple of beers with fifty cents!” And he went in and said, “Daddy, what the hell are you doing?” Vernon said, “Well, everything else is paid for. Let them go out and try to get some money on their own.”

Elvis said, “They’re living with me. What do you want them to do, get a job?” So Elvis had him give us two hundred marks a week, and we would go on trips and stuff. Later on, Elvis decided we should have a little salary. He’d give us a couple hundred dollars occasionally.

Vernon liked me, but he would turn on me in a second. One of the biggest fights that Elvis and I got into was in Germany in ’59. Vernon kept mouthing off to me. And I said, “I’m sick of hearing your mouth. Damnit, you’re driving me crazy. Fuck you!” Well, Elvis picked up a three-layer chocolate cake that somebody had sent him and hit me with that son of a bitch. It was as hard as a brick bat. Elvis said, “I know Daddy was wrong, but you just can’t fight with him.” And I said, “Well, I’m sure as hell not going to let him run over me. I won’t even let you do that.” Then he apologized. It was one of the few times Elvis ever said “I’m sorry” to me.

MARTY LACKER: When Elvis came out of the army, a lot of his rough edges were gone. He was exposed to a whole lot of different things. He spent time in Paris, and he saw how other people lived. Of course, the Colonel would have liked him to stay dumb and unpolished because he could control him a lot easier.

Parker may have gone to Elvis’s induction, playing ringmaster to all the reporters and photographers, but he couldn’t go to Germany with him because as an illegal alien he didn’t have a passport. Of course, we didn’t know that then. At that press conference they gave before he shipped out, Elvis said they’d already been talking about a tour of Europe before the army. That never could have happened because Colonel wouldn’t let any of his seconds in command play advance man.

BILLY SMITH: Just because Colonel kept Elvis from entertaining the troops doesn’t mean he never sang any music over there. He’d go to these nightclubs, like the Moulin Rouge in Munich or the Lido in Paris, and play some. And he made some home recordings, too. They came out on record in 1984, in that Elvis: A Golden Celebration set. He had a piano, and Charlie Hodge would go over, and they’d sing together. It’s kind of funny—on one of those home recordings, on “The Fool,” Elvis stops and calls out to his daddy in the other room. He says, “Hey, Daddy, would you mind getting these kids out of the window? They’re yelling, and I can’t hear what I’m doing.” Fans, I guess. You really get the feel of that whole scene—you can almost see it. When you listen to those today, you feel a little bit like you’re eavesdropping.

LAMAR FIKE: Those eighteen months over there were really rough. Elvis lost fifteen pounds, from 185 to 170. He was miserable. And he was scared to death his career was going to dry up. In February of ’60, right before he went home, Billboard reported that he’d sold $50,000,000 worth of records. But in December of that first year, ’58, his decline on the charts was pretty obvious.

BILLY SMITH: Colonel had told him, “Look, son, I will keep you on top.” The whole time Elvis was in Germany, there were records released right on schedule. And Colonel kept promoting him. He had movie deals waiting on him when he come out. And he had the Frank Sinatra TV special set up for as soon as he got back.

But inside, Elvis was wondering if the public was going to see him the same. And he was afraid of how much the music had changed. Because he said, “While I was over there in Germany, things seemed like they were at a standstill.” He said, “It’s almost like I stepped backward into the music world rather than forward.”

That’s why when he came out of the army he wanted to record “It’s Now or Never.” I can tell you he was proud of that song. Because all during the fifties, people said, “He’s a fly-by-night singer. He doesn’t have that good a voice.” He liked that challenge, and he worked on his voice the whole time he was in Germany. He was thinking about what he was going to do and sound like when he come out. Before, his music had a kind of playful innocence. But in the early sixties, Elvis felt like “I’ve got this force, and I’m going to use it.”

MARTY LACKER: While Elvis was in Germany, RCA had a press conference where an executive said that Elvis would probably change his style of music when he came back. Well, Colonel’s office got thousands of calls from fans who didn’t want anything changed. But Elvis himself was changed. All of a sudden, he wanted to be a crooner. You’ve got to remember what he was exposed to over there. He was listening to European music. And they came up with “It’s Now or Never,” which was a takeoff on “O Sole Mio.”

Elvis loved opera, and he especially liked Mario Lanza. He would watch The Student Prince, which was set in Heidelberg, over and over again. He loved the power of the big voices. And he loved big orchestras. He liked real dramatic things. He’d see these maestros conducting, and he would get up and imitate them, standing in front of the television.

BILLY SMITH: Elvis had a range of about two octaves and a third. Most pop singers have about a one-octave range. He was a high baritone. He could nail high G’s and A’s full-voiced. That was just his natural ability. But in the army, practicing with Charlie, he made his voice stronger. He sang more from the diaphragm, and with some power, rather than just from the throat. He’d say, “It’s the same music, just with more balls.”

LAMAR FIKE: He sang every night in the living room. Charlie had gone to the Stamps School of Music, and he and Elvis talked a lot about how to improve the range, how to sustain notes at the top of the register.

One reason Elvis was real concerned about range and pitch and making his voice stronger was because he started having a little trouble with his hearing. He had a perforated eardrum, or at least some kind of trouble, from being around a big cannon. He came home at Fort Hood one afternoon and I said, “How did it go today?” And he walked right by me. They immediately pulled him out of tanks and put him into the scouts. Some of these books say his hearing deteriorated more through the years and caused him trouble onstage. I don’t think so.

MARTY LACKER: If Elvis had trouble with his hearing, it was temporary because he could hear a pin drop on a two-inch-thick carpet. He’d sure as hell hear what you were whispering across the room, especially if you didn’t want him to.

BILLY SMITH: His hearing cleared up, and it certainly didn’t deteriorate over the years. There’s some story about when he was a kid, he had ear trouble, and Aunt Gladys supposedly poured urine in his ears. That’s a bunch of shit. We used “sweet oil” that you heated up and dropped into the ear. But urine . . . God! We were country, but we weren’t completely ignorant.

LAMAR FIKE: There are a lot of misconceptions about Elvis, some big, some small. For example, Albert Goldman wrote that Elvis kept me a virtual prisoner over in Germany. We had an argument about it. I said, “Albert, it wasn’t a case of being a prisoner. I went everywhere with him. I did everything I wanted to do. I traveled all over Europe.” When Elvis went to Grafenwöhr for the winter maneuvers, Cliff and I would get on a train to go to Italy and Switzerland. We’d stay gone for three or four weeks. So I wasn’t a prisoner. I told Albert, “You can’t say that.” But again, what are you going to tell Albert?

Cliff decided he wasn’t going to come straight to Germany. He flew to Paris and stayed with a couple friends for about a week. Then he flew to Munich and stayed there for a couple weeks. Elvis said, “Where is the son of a bitch?” So Cliff came and stayed two weeks, and then he took the Volkswagen and stayed gone for a month.

MARTY LACKER: Actually, that probably worked out for the best. Elvis could only take Cliff for two or three days at a time.

LAMAR FIKE: After a while, Cliff moved in with Currie Grant over in Wiesbaden. I tried to tell him that wasn’t really the cool thing to do, that Elvis had brought him over there and Elvis wanted him around him. He spoke very fast, and he said, “Wait a minute, man. Don’t you tell me what I can do now. I’m not going to stay around and shine some fuckin’ shoes. I’m going to Wiesbaden.” And he packed up and took the 220 Mercedes. Stayed gone three months that time.

That’s how Elvis met Priscilla—through Cliff. Her stepfather, Captain Joseph Beaulieu, was a career officer. He’d been transferred to Wiesbaden Air Force Base, which was near Friedberg. Priscilla was born in Brooklyn and moved to Connecticut for a while, but she’d lived in various places—the last was Austin, Texas. Her real father, Lieutenant James Wagner, was a navy fighter pilot who’d been killed in a plane crash coming home on leave. Her mother remarried two years later and had four more kids. So Priscilla was the eldest. Apparently, her stepfather was pretty strict. She says he wouldn’t let her wear a tight skirt when she was a cheerleader, so at thirteen she joined the Girl Scouts so she could wear a tight uniform.

Cliff met Currie Grant in Wiesbaden. Currie was a clerk for Air Force Intelligence at Schierstein, near Wiesbaden. His wife’s brother was Tony Bennett, the singer. Currie ran a weekly variety show for the air force, and he was also a photographer. Cliff and Currie would go up to this pool, and that’s where they met Priscilla. She’d been in Germany about a week and a half. Currie was taking pictures of her. Cliff described her to Elvis, and Elvis told Cliff to have Currie bring her over.

There are all these different stories about how Elvis and Priscilla met—Priscilla says that Currie approached her at the Eagle’s Club in Wiesbaden, which was a place American service families went for dinner and to see shows. Priscilla says he asked her if she’d like to meet Elvis Presley. And Currie at one point was saying that Priscilla sought him out at the Eagle’s Club and said, “Hi, I understand you know Elvis Presley.” That might be true because she says in her book [Elvis and Me] that before she left Texas, she told her girlfriend, “I’m going over there to meet Elvis.” But the meeting with Cliff is what really set the wheels in motion.

When Cliff described her to Elvis, I went over to take a look at her. I told Elvis, “She’s as cute as she can be. But God Almighty, she’s fourteen years old. We’ll end up in prison for life.” He had Currie and his wife bring her over to the house anyway. I remember she wore a little blue-and-white sailor suit, and white socks. I watched that from the very beginning with abject fear.