When Elvis returned to the States on March 2, 1960, he was a different man, although at the time he tried not to show it. During a press conference, a reporter asked him if two years of sobering army life had changed his mind about rock ’n’ roll. “Sobering army life?” Elvis answered. “No, it hasn’t. Because I was in tanks for a long time, you see, and they rock and roll quite a bit.”
Later, Elvis made it clear that his taste in music hadn’t really altered because “I appreciate all types of music really. But I have to do what I can do best, so I do the rock stuff.” Yet in short order, Elvis would show that, indeed, his taste had matured, both in his music and in his dress (“Well, you get a little older, you know. It’s like the sideburns. They were okay for a while, but you outgrow it . . . The army took care of those . . . Even though they were worth $1 million apiece.”)
In the postarmy era, Elvis’s image was no longer that of an unschooled ruffian, but of a middle-class hero. Yet politically and culturally, the sixties would be as foreign to him as the fifties were familiar. With his mother dead and his innocence gone, the prearmy Elvis was merely a memory.
LAMAR FIKE: We came home, and Elvis was lost like a duck in a snowstorm. About a week before we left Germany, we were sitting in the living room, talking. He said, “What am I going to do? I’m going back, and Mama’s not there.” I said, “Elvis, you’ve been wanting to go home forever.” He said, “Now that I’m going, I don’t want to.”
BILLY SMITH: When Elvis come out of the army, my family moved from Graceland to an apartment on Fairly Road in Memphis. I was still around Elvis as much as ever, though. He found out that I was singing, imitating him, while he was in the army, and he ragged the shit out of me about that. He always said, “Hell, he tries to be just like me.” I guess it boosted his ego.
Once Elvis was back home, it was almost, “Man, let me get right back to work! I got to get away from here.”
He changed Graceland a lot. He did away with most of his mother’s pictures. Albert Goldman said Elvis had a picture of Aunt Gladys on an easel near his bed, so he could stare at it for hours on end. That’s totally untrue. I’d like to know who concocted that, Goldman or Lamar. Sounds like a Lamar special to me.
LAMAR FIKE: No, he didn’t have a picture of his mother on an easel by his bed. Or a picture of Jesus on another one. Give me a break.
MARTY LACKER: The stuff about the Jesus picture . . . I don’t know about one on an easel near his bed. But later on, he kept a picture of Jesus on top of a console tape recorder by the door of his bedroom.
BILLY SMITH: Not long after Elvis got back, he said, “If Mama were here, my life would probably be a lot different.” He said, “Maybe I should have married Anita and had kids like Mama wanted me to. I regret that. Because she would have been wild about grandkids.”
He had a lot of guilt that she worried about him so much. He said, “If she hadn’t worried, she might still be alive.” After I got married and had kids, he told my wife, “You ought to quit worrying so much about your boys. That’s what Mama done. She worried herself to death.”
He also regretted that medicine hadn’t progressed enough to save her. And he kind of resented the fact that she held back telling how sick she was. For a while there, he was just reliving it all over again. So it was good that he went right back to work.
MARTY LACKER: What’s interesting about the prearmy Elvis and the postarmy Elvis is that before he went in, he looked kind of sexually “dangerous.” But he wasn’t all that wild then, really. There was a kind of playfulness about him. After the army, sexually, he was basically a predator. But he started looking like the boy-next-door, and he was practically deemed safe for all America.
He started cutting his sideburns up higher and higher. And his manner of speaking was different, and so was the way he dressed. He started wearing tuxedo coats, and colored shirts, and cummerbunds. Almost every day. And sometimes, he’d wear an ascot instead of a tie. He was just different. He wasn’t that raw, unsophisticated person, uneducated in the ways of the world.
LAMAR FIKE: The first real work Elvis did when he came back was that TV special, in late March, in Miami. They called it Frank Sinatra’s Welcome Home Party for Elvis Presley. Timex sponsored it. Frank’s whole Rat Pack was there—Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop. And Colonel called out three hundred members of Elvis’s fan club, just to make sure he had an enthusiastic audience.
Elvis was pretty nervous about it. Afterwards, he said, “I wasn’t nervous. I was petrified. That’s why I was moving and shaking—not from the music.”
We went to Florida by train. And we had to go to the outskirts of Miami to get off because so many people surrounded the station. But Elvis didn’t like doing the show. He didn’t like Frank back then. Frank had made a lot of derogatory comments about Elvis when he was starting out—said his music was “deplorable, a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac.” Said it was “the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear.”
How about that? But when having Elvis on a show worked to his advantage, he sucked right up to him.
MARTY LACKER: Sinatra was still putting Elvis’s music down when Elvis was in the service. That’s one reason Colonel charged Frank $125,000 for that show. That amount of money was unheard of at the time. Elvis didn’t like the thrust of the show. At one point, he sang “Witchcraft” and Sinatra did “Love Me Tender.” I think Elvis thought they were making fun of him, the way Steve Allen did when he had him on in ’56 and made him sing to a basset hound.
But when he came back from doing the show in Florida, he said, “Man, to my face, they couldn’t do enough for me. They were totally different from what I heard.” But knowing those people, I’m sure they were different behind his back. Mia Farrow told Elvis one time that Frank couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. That’s what Lamar says.
LAMAR FIKE: Gladys’s death did a lot of things to Elvis. It hardened him in one sense and made him more self-confident in another. He turned into another person. He was never again what he was in ’55, ’56, ’57. At the time, I couldn’t detect it because I was in the eye of the storm. But I see it now. I’ve heard people say he was at his best before he went into the army. I think after Elvis came out of the service, the biggest change, other than becoming harder, was that he became much more what people thought he should be.
You could see that on the Sinatra special. And you could see it with G.I. Blues. That’s the first movie we did after we got back. And that’s the first of a jillion pictures where they stuffed him into an army uniform, or some variation. You can thank Hal Wallis for that.
G.I. Blues was where Elvis got involved with [South African actress/dancer] Juliet Prowse. J.P. His costar. She was an older lady, and she was just a little too smart for him, so he dumped her ass. Sexually, though, Elvis’s story with every girl was basically the same. He said Juliet Prowse liked to grab her ankles and spread her legs real wide. But then he said it about another girl, too. I said, “I thought that was Juliet.” And he said, “Well, a lot of ’em do different things like that.” And I said, “Oh, okay.”
Part of the attraction with Juliet was that she was Sinatra’s girlfriend. Frank visited her on the set one day. Then he came by Elvis’s dressing room to say hello. That was interesting. But Elvis was never paranoid about Frank, or afraid of him either.
BILLY SMITH: When Elvis got back from the army, he didn’t know exactly what was happening with his career. He wanted to make serious movies, and the first thing Colonel lined up for him was this lightweight piece of junk that played on his army experience.
Musically, things were changing, too, because he cut “It’s Now or Never” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight”—the bigger, more mainstream pop sound—a month after he got back, and “Surrender,” which was a kind of operatic Italian love song, a couple of months later.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis liked very dramatic singers and dramatic recitations. He had a record of Charles Boyer doing recitations, and he absolutely loved it. And he liked the way those Pentecostal ministers preach, with all that fanfare. And how gospel singers recite things while all that humming’s going on in the background. That’s probably why he liked “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” because it had that recitation.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis loved the resonance of Charles Boyer’s voice, but he also loved the way he talked songs out more than sang them. I remember one song he liked was “I Saw Venice Turn Blue,” and another was “Where Does Love Go?” That was a very romantic album, with “Hello, Young Lovers,” and all. Elvis liked that romance. And he always liked a manly voice, even when it was being soft.
MARTY LACKER: Actually, “It’s Now or Never,” which was his favorite record up to that point, became his second-biggest-selling single. By early ’61, it had sold a little over four million, and “Don’t Be Cruel” had sold around six million. But he didn’t know how it was going to do, and the less control he felt he had elsewhere, the more he wanted at home.
BILLY SMITH: After Gladys died, Elvis took her place. He became the dominant figure in the family. His daddy could try to talk to him, but nobody could tell him what to do.
LAMAR FIKE: One time in ’60, when we had just come back from Germany, we were upstairs, and Elvis was raking me over about something. He was madder than a hornet. He said, “You’re fired! Get your ass out of here!” So I went downstairs, and Vernon went up, and then Elvis called me back up. I met Vernon coming down the steps and I said, “What’s going on?” And he said, “Well, hell, Elvis just fired me.” I said, “How does a son fire his father?” And Vernon said, “I’ve got to go out to the office and figure that one out myself.”
But you’ve got to remember that Elvis lost more than just his mother when Gladys died. He lost his confidante. They used to talk about stuff for hours on end. He sure didn’t want any of the guys giving him advice. If one of us had tried, boy, he’d have been on us like white on rice.
BILLY SMITH: At times, like when he was hurt, he did talk to the guys. But I’m not sure he wanted anybody to know him that well.
LAMAR FIKE: I think when Dee came over here, she thought she was going to get close to him in some way. But she was only ten years older than Elvis and not particularly motherly.
MARTY LACKER: Dee used to follow Elvis from room to room. And leave him these notes addressed to “My Little Prince.” He came down the steps with one of those one day, and he said, “I’ve got her little prince, and you know where it is.”
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis’s biggest worry about the Vernon and Dee situation was that Vernon was going to move Dee into Gladys’s room. So he just shut that room off. That’s the reason Dee and Vernon went to Panama City, Florida, for a while. That whole deal was very uncomfortable for Elvis.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis reacted to that the same way he reacted to the stress of previous situations. One, he played a lot. And two, he thought, “Well, let’s just pop a few pills here, and then we’ll be happy.”
MARTY LACKER: When he first came back, we partied like hell. And not just skating parties. Things were a lot wilder.
LAMAR FIKE: I think you can break the serious drug use into three stages. The first stage came in the sixties, when Elvis came back from Germany. That’s when he started real heavy on uppers. And that’s when he wanted to buy a drugstore. I said, “Elvis, you can’t just go dispense pills. You’ve got to go to school to be a pharmacist.” He said, “No, I’ll own the son of a bitch. I can do what I want.” He believed the laws were written for him.
Elvis had a very addictive personality. He loved pills, even vitamins. Whatever you had, he wanted it. He just liked to get fucked up. There is no other way to say it. He loved it! It wasn’t to escape any kind of reality, either. Shit, there was no reality in that group in the first place, so how can you escape it? Jesus Christ! Some of the guys think he took stuff whenever the pressure was on. But if that was the reason, Dee must have sent him running to his best stash.
MARTY LACKER: Dee stuck her nose in everybody’s business. When Elvis was traveling, she acted like the lady of the house. The maids laughed at her, even though she ordered them around. The Smith side of the family resented her, too, and resented Vernon for moving her into Graceland.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis said to Dee, “You care about Daddy, and Daddy cares about you. That’s all fine.” He said, “But as far as you ever being anything other than Daddy’s wife, that’s never going to happen. You’ll never take my mother’s place. Let’s get that out in front.” And he said, “You two can stay out in the garage apartment back of Graceland, but not in Mama’s room.”
MARTY LACKER: Not very long after Vernon got home from Europe, Bill Stanley came to Memphis and signed all the legal papers, which effectively gave Dee custody of the kids. Dee says in her first book, Elvis: We Love You Tender, that Vernon poured him a couple of drinks, and Bill said, “I’m going to tell you something. You have her now, you took her from me, but if it wasn’t for this”—holding up his glass and meaning the liquor—“you or any other man couldn’t have taken her from me.” But Bill had some consolation—he got $250,000 and a new car every year for keeping quiet. And that saved his pension, too. He got his full retirement.
LAMAR FIKE: They literally had to buy Bill out. According to his son, David, he flat nailed ’em. Got a bunch of money upfront and then additional money and the cars. Bill was a highly decorated soldier—won the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was a hell of a soldier. So it wasn’t hard for him to keep his mouth shut. He died a few years ago.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis couldn’t stand it that Dee and Vernon were right out back. Finally, he told his father, “I think you need to find somewhere else to live. I don’t want her here.” So they found that house on Dolan Street. It was around the corner, but it was at the end of the property. Elvis bought it for them.
One day, we were sitting in the den—what people now call the Jungle Room—in front of those big picture windows, and Elvis saw Dee walking up the backyard from her house. Vernon was sitting there with us. And Elvis said, “Lock the goddamn doors! If she comes in I want her to come around the front! I don’t want her in this room!”
It never did get much better. Dee came around at Christmas, but only because Elvis wanted his father there.
LAMAR FIKE: Dee and Vernon were in that house, but they still weren’t married. One day in July of ’60, Colonel Parker called and said, “Get Dee out of there, today. Either get her out of there, or I’m gone.” Because reporters had their cameras set up and were shooting across the street [from the house]. So Vernon and Dee went down to Huntsville, Alabama, and got married at her brother’s house. Elvis refused to attend.
BILLY SMITH: That’s when Elvis told Anita Wood to stay away from Graceland. She wasn’t exactly living there, but it was her being there at any time that seemed to maybe create a problem.
LAMAR FIKE: Oh, yeah. Morality became an issue. Colonel never let Elvis off the hook. He said, “There’s a morals clause in every one of your movie contracts, so keep your nose clean.”
You’d think after his army experience that Elvis could have stood up to Colonel, but he relied on him even more heavily. And Hollywood provided the quickest way of making big money, so he started Elvis on a grind of three pictures a year.
BILLY SMITH: After the first one, G.I. Blues, Elvis went to Las Vegas to cool down. He took Lamar, Red, and Gene and these new guys, Charlie Hodge and Joe Esposito. And he took Sonny West, who was Red’s cousin.
MARTY LACKER: In the early years, when Elvis wasn’t playing Vegas, we’d go out there just to have a good time. That was when Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and all those guys were really swinging. Frank and Dean used to like to be around Elvis because of the girls. They would go into the lounges, and sometimes we’d be in a lounge to see a show. And these girls would start coming over to try to meet Elvis. And all of a sudden the waiter would come over with bottles of champagne or drinks.
Elvis didn’t drink much. So we’d say to the waiter, “We didn’t order this.” And he’d say, “Oh, it’s compliments of Mr. Sinatra and Mr. Martin.” Then he’d point to their table and say, “They would like for you to join them.” And Elvis would always say, “Tell them thank you very much, but I’m getting ready to leave.” And when the waiter walked away, he’d say, “Those sons of bitches. I know what they want. They want me sitting with them so the women will come over.”
LAMAR FIKE: Sonny didn’t actually join the group until ’60, but he hung around a little starting about ’58. His real name is Delbert. Sonny was dating Patsy Presley, Vester’s daughter. He started coming up to the house, and that’s how he worked his way into the organization.
At first, Sonny was very humble. He wanted everybody to like him. Later on, he became more sure of himself and turned into a good security person. Sonny was the type guy who would talk forever on different subjects. We used to call him “The Great Explainer.” He could explain water. He’d tell you a story, and if it took five minutes, he’d stretch it out to an hour. He was a dreamer. Like all of us.
BILLY SMITH: Now we had Charlie, Joe, and Sonny. I thought, “Why all the guys?” But the entourage was really coming into being. Elvis took Charlie with him to Nashville to sing on his first religious album, His Hand in Mine. And he made Joe Esposito foreman of the group. I later saw that he needed these guys. Now people had real jobs. And Elvis paid a salary.
LAMAR FIKE: The highest I ever made with Elvis was $365 a week, and that was just before he died. In 1960, he started us off at $37.50 a week. He didn’t pay us much because that was the chain that held you—he didn’t want to give you too much independence. We were sort of like ranch hands. We lived on the premises and ate the food and got our bunks, like a cowboy.
Elvis was never big on salaries. He paid Joe more, but that’s because he was foreman. The fact that he actually made more money was kept very secret because if the guys had known, they’d have killed both him and Elvis.
Joe pretty much left me alone. Colonel told him to. He said, “Let Lamar do what he does,” which at that time was heading up transportation—and not just taking people home at three o’clock in the morning and chauffeuring Elvis around when he needed it. I mean coordinating the trips to California, too. So Joe never really threw orders at me. I have a thing to this day about somebody popping orders at me. Elvis could do it to me, but anybody else, I’d tear their head off.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis thought Joe could do a lot of the paperwork—pay the personal bills, keep the books. He answered to Colonel about as much as he did to Elvis, coordinating activities between Elvis and the Colonel’s office.
BILLY SMITH: When Elvis started paying the guys a salary, Vernon got furious. Maybe Joe Esposito was about the only one he liked, but he didn’t really trust him.
LAMAR FIKE: We had sort of a code within our group that was sometimes unrealistic, but basically we all lived by it. We were cohesive on account of Elvis. And Joe would be the first to break that code.
When he first came in, he was reticent, like everybody else was when they first began working for Elvis. Kind of like being a cat in a new house. You know how a cat walks with his tail down, slouching around checking everything out? After about two or three weeks, the tail’s straight up in the air and the son of a bitch is running through a brick wall. That was Joe.
Joe was the third one to move in. We shared the brown bedroom upstairs.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis hadn’t closed Graceland off upstairs yet. Grandma lived across the hall in what would later become Lisa Marie’s room.
Charlie Hodge lived at Graceland, too, but not really until the later years. For most of the sixties, Charlie wasn’t a real part of the group. It was just their common interest in music that kept him and Elvis together. Charlie would be out on the road with Red Foley or Jimmy Wakely. But when he didn’t have any work, he would come by and say, “Can I stay here ’til I go back on the road again?” And Elvis would say, “Yeah, okay.” So every once in a while, you’d see Charlie bringing his little clothes bag with his little clothes in them because Charlie was a little guy—about 5’5”. And he’d stay for a while. Charlie got on most people’s nerves when he drank too much.
BILLY SMITH: By the time Elvis came out of the army, I was almost eighteen years old. That’s when I went to work for him. And that’s when our relationship changed. At times, I could talk with him and say things, but I knew not to blurt things out like I did when I was a kid. Not to him, at least. It was real odd to work for a member of your family, especially a person you loved, that you’d known all your life and looked up to.
I was still real hot-tempered, and in some ways, working for Elvis made it worse. I resented people with power trying to manipulate me, and yet I let Elvis do it. But even with him, I would rebel. I would get angry and say, “The hell with this,” and leave.
MARTY LACKER: Billy used his mouth as a weapon. When somebody said something that he didn’t like, like if Joe gave him an order, he’d say, “Well, goddamn, I ain’t going to put up with this. I’ll quit!” Then, when he did, Elvis would get upset and say, “Well, goddamnit, why did you let him quit?”
BILLY SMITH: Elvis called me “Mighty Mouth,” but my mouth was my only defense. When Elvis got famous, I thought, “Hey, Elvis is my cousin.” I was still living in tough North Memphis. And I’d run my mouth, and I usually ended up in a fight. And because I was small, I usually ended up getting the crap beat out of me.
When I got to Graceland, I was very rebellious. School only made it worse for me. Because I thought everybody ought to love Elvis like I did. And if somebody said something against him, I’d light into ’em.
Pretty soon, I got a reputation. My classmates thought, “Because you’re Elvis Presley’s cousin, you think you’re something.” So then, I got to living up to that smartass attitude. And it wasn’t until I got on up to eighteen, nineteen years old that I realized I’d better cool it.
Elvis and Anita Wood come to pick me up at school one time in the limousine. The principal’s secretary called out on the loudspeaker for me to come to the office, so I played that up real big. I knew a whole bunch of people had to be watching us, see. I thought it was serious, you know. But not as serious as my brother, Bobby. With Bobby, it was serious as a hog shitting.
See, I was confused about a lot of things. The Elvis of the fifties was different from the Elvis of the sixties. For instance, in the beginning, family was important to him. He’d been taught, “Keep your family because they’re the most loyal. They’re the ones you can trust.” But in the sixties, Colonel influenced him a whole lot more than people ever knew. A lot of what Elvis said and did was the Colonel’s dictate. And his guidance was somewhat distorted, in my view. He told Elvis it was okay to keep his family around him, but he told him never to let them get too close. He said, in effect, “Always keep them beneath you.”
The way Elvis changed towards me was part of his hardening after the army, I think. Elvis wanted you to realize that he had made it, and you were just an average person, and that’s all you were ever going to be. He let you know that he was the boss, and he was the one with the money and the popularity. It was strange. I was hurt by it.
Now, too, after he became famous, and after he’d been hurt by some of his family, I still felt I had to prove myself to him. And I needed for him to prove himself to me in some ways. I just hoped that we both understood each other.
LAMAR FIKE: I’ve known Billy since he was fourteen years old, and the way he’s changed through the years is phenomenal. He’s gone from being just a totally insane kid to somebody who’s very down-to-earth, with a good grasp of things. Had Billy been left alone, he would have either killed somebody by now, or been in prison, or ended up like his brother, Bobby. God only knows what he’d have been like. I don’t think he’d have lived to be twenty-five. Because he was crazier than a barn owl.
Elvis worked with Billy, and he literally raised him. And we just practically beat him up to get him to pay attention. We used to lay up at night and figure ways to kill him the next day. I told Elvis, “I can take care of this little son of a bitch for you tomorrow!” I mean, I had drawn out plans! Billy was just evil.
MARTY LACKER: Billy was like a pesky mosquito. For instance, he was little for his age, and when we’d go skating, he’d get down real low and blindside you. He’d grab your legs and squeeze so damn tight, or he’d knock your legs out from under you and then just skate off. He’d say things that would make you want to knock his block off.
BILLY SMITH: You can’t put that many guys together and have them get along 100 percent of the time. But we had what we called “burning sessions.” We would slur one another pretty heavy.
MARTY LACKER: If there were a bunch of us guys sitting around, we’d likely rip into the guys who weren’t. We talked about Elvis when he wasn’t there—and we hoped to God he wasn’t eavesdropping because he liked to do that.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis was a real gossipmonger. And he was two-faced, especially about other guys in the group. He’d put them down real bad. He’d put down the Colonel real bad, too.
MARTY LACKER: If we had a real gripe, we’d usually confront the guy. Through the years, I think there were only about three guys that the rest of us totally disliked.
LAMAR FIKE: We had to suppress our anger. Except for Red. Red didn’t know how to suppress anger.
BILLY SMITH: In the early days, I always thought the guys were conning me. And it cost me. Like with Red.
I had gotten my job with Elvis, which was cleaning up his dressing room. Well, one day Red cut his hair in there. And Elvis had said he didn’t want anybody in his dressing room. I wasn’t the brightest teenager. So I told Red, “You’re going to have to clean up your damn mess.” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Your hair and all.”
I should have said, “Look, Red, when you get through . . . ” I could have done it in a nice way. But I didn’t. And Red mouthed back, and I called him a son of a bitch. A little later, Red come in the dressing room and we got into another argument, and he rapped the shit out of me. That got my attention.
LAMAR FIKE: The amazing thing is that in one year, Billy changed to a whole other person. That was in ’62, when he married his childhood sweetheart, Jo Norris. We thought Jo was the prettiest thing that ever breathed and hated him because he got her. Everybody just loved Jo and couldn’t stand Billy. We’d say, “How in the shit did he get her, man?” We couldn’t believe it.
But I can never remember Elvis really, sincerely, ever getting mad at Billy. And I’ve had Elvis so mad at me he was ready to kill me.
BILLY SMITH: Sure he got mad at me. But when you think about it, only somebody like Elvis with a strong personality could bring a group of guys like that together. You had an Italian Catholic, you had a couple of Jews, and later on you had an Eastern religion zealot. But we blended together. Elvis was the glue.