LAMAR FIKE: In August of ’60, we were out on the set of Flaming Star, and Elvis and this big wrangler named Jim—you know the kind, tight jeans and a big belly—went riding over in the back streets where the western set was. That’s Century City now. Elvis was getting acquainted with the horse he was going to ride in the movie, when the horse decided he wanted to go back to the barn.
We were sitting there, when out of the blue, here came Elvis. His horse was just wide-open. And the wrangler was nowhere in sight.
There was a road there with asphalt pavement, and a gate and a fence and a lot of things you could run into and get hurt pretty bad if you were on top of a runaway horse. And the horse turned to go down this road. His legs went one way, and Elvis, hanging on, was pretty much leaning the other. And we couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
Well, that horse came running in underneath that gate. If Elvis hadn’t ducked, he would have decapitated himself. And then right after Elvis ducked, the horse got to his stall and stopped on a dime. Elvis sat there a minute, just white as a sheet, and then he climbed off. He never let go of the reins. He reared back like he was going to hit the horse, and he hollered, “You son of a bitch!”
Just then, Jim, the wrangler, showed up. Jim said, “Mr. Presley, I am so sorry about this. I don’t know what happened.” And he got up on that poor animal and spurred him for about fifteen minutes, until a bloody froth came out of his mouth. He said, “I got to tender that mouth up.”
When he finished, he said, “Mr. Presley, I’ll have another horse out here for you tomorrow.” And Elvis said, “No, no, I want him.” And that’s the horse that Elvis rode in Flaming Star.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis liked Flaming Star because it was a more serious movie than G.I. Blues. He had a real dramatic role, and one that touched home a little bit because he played an Indian—his mother was Kiowa, and his father was white. Which went back to the Cherokee heritage on Gladys’s side. And in the movie, the mother dies suddenly, and Elvis could certainly relate to that.
LAMAR FIKE: Slowly, but surely, the pictures Elvis made after the army gently ushered him from being a rock ’n’ roller to a leading man. And you never knew who was going to be drawn in by him. I got surprised on Flaming Star. Carl Sandburg was downstairs at Twentieth Century-Fox one day with Eleanor Parker. I saw him, and I was so impressed because I’d read his works on Lincoln.
I went over and introduced myself and told him I worked for Elvis. He said, “How is that young man?” I said, “He’s doing fine.” He said, “He’s a fine young man, isn’t he?” I said, “Yes, he is.” I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. He collected and sang American folk songs and ballads. Sandburg was very tall, very gentle. His hair was solid white. He must have been in his early eighties then. I had my picture made with him. It was one of the thrills of my life. I went back and told Elvis, and he said, “Who the fuck is Carl Sandburg?”
BILLY SMITH: Elvis sang only two songs in Flaming Star, and that was fine with him because he wanted to take the focus off singing and concentrate on acting. Colonel wanted him to sing four songs, and he fought for ’em. The director was Don Siegel, who made Dirty Harry with Clint Eastwood years later. He was sympathetic to Elvis. He said a lot of nice things about him as an actor. Siegel shot the singing scenes like Colonel wanted, but he cut the songs down to the two Elvis wanted.
I remember Elvis wore dark makeup and brown contact lenses to make him look more Indian-like. They gave up on the lenses, though, because they made his eyes look too dark. But by gosh, if he didn’t really look like an Indian. It was almost spooky.
LAMAR FIKE: Red had a small part in Flaming Star. He played an Indian brave. Almost every one of the guys worked as extras in one picture or another. You have to look pretty quick to see any of us, but we’re there. We made some extra money. After Elvis found out that Marty wasn’t doing any acting because he was taking care of business, he made us pool the money and split it up.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis had that kind of mumble and stutter way of talking. He didn’t like to look at himself on screen because he’d say, “God, listen to that fast-talking Southern boy! You can’t understand a word he’s saying!” After Flaming Star, he tried to slow himself down.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis got wild as a goat in ’60. The guys had already gotten thrown out of the Knickerbocker Hotel because they were having water fights in the halls. We’d stayed at the Beverly Wilshire, and things had gotten kind of touchy a time or two. Like the time Sammy Davis, Jr., came over and we were throwing whole pizzas at each other. Then during G.I. Blues, things got a little rowdier, and Elvis and the hotel management mutually agreed that we’d get another place.
BILLY SMITH: They were essentially asked to leave. I wasn’t there. I was still in high school. But I heard about it. They were horsing around in a play fight. It was Joe and Red and Sonny, teasing Elvis, holding him down and tickling his nose.
They took it too far, and Elvis got superagitated. And then Elvis got loose and jumped up and started chasing them around. He threw a guitar and a few other things down the hall after them. It got out of hand, and one of the other guests reported them. Colonel decided he didn’t need that kind of publicity. He wanted to get ’em in a house where nobody would hear ’em.
LAMAR FIKE: In September of ’60, Elvis rented 525 Perugia Way, in Bel Air. This was an Oriental-style house. Frank Lloyd Wright designed it, and at one time the Ali Khan and Rita Hayworth owned it. So did the Shah of Iran. Fast company, huh? It was very modern, which Elvis liked, with modern furnishings. He hated antiques of any kind. He said, “I grew up with antiques.” Meaning everything they had was old and worn-out. We stayed there about a year, and then we moved to Bellagio Road.
MARTY LACKER: Joe and I found the houses. And not everybody wanted to rent to Elvis Presley and five or six guys. I remember one time in the mid-sixties we saw a house that we liked a lot, and we were thinking about renting it. It was owned by Nanette Fabray, who was Shelley Fabares’s aunt. Shelley really liked Elvis, and Elvis liked her. But when Nanette Fabray found it was for us, she refused to rent it.
We had a husband and wife, Jimmy and Lillian Jackson, who took care of us. He was the maintenance man, or butler, although he wasn’t really a butler. And she was a cook. We had a maid, too.
Elvis didn’t want to buy a place because he didn’t want to call California home. He could take the people for a few months—to do the movies—but then he wanted to go home. There were tax reasons, too.
LAMAR FIKE: It’s unbelievable, but Elvis paid 91 percent in taxes. He had this accountant, and he had taken some deductions, and the Internal Revenue Service came back on him. They were able to settle for about $80,000, but after that, Elvis didn’t want the IRS to say, “You owe this from years past.” So he always paid what he owed ahead of time and had the IRS go over his books periodically to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. That was Colonel’s idea, although we couldn’t figure it out at the time.
MARTY LACKER: Colonel was afraid of the government finding out that he wasn’t a U.S. citizen. So instead of getting Elvis with financial people or tax attorneys who could show him how to invest his money, Colonel said, “When it comes to paying taxes, don’t fool with the government. Don’t end up like [boxer] Joe Louis” [who had a celebrated run-in with the IRS]. He said, “I want you to pay 90 percent, because that’s what I’m paying.” That’s basically why Elvis never did anything with his wealth, not even invest it in tax-free bonds.
When it came to the end of the year, and they told him how much he made, he was proud of it. He used to brag. Because a lot of times the press would say, “Elvis Presley is slipping in popularity.” So he’d say, “Yeah, I’m really slipping. I made $7 million this year.”
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis made Vernon his business manager, and even though Elvis hated talking on the phone, he and his father would have long conversations between California and Memphis.
Vernon was hardly the most knowledgeable guy, but the reason Elvis made him business manager was because Vernon said they couldn’t trust anybody. That was one reason the estate and Elvis’s finances were in such a shambles when he died. Neither one of them trusted anybody. They didn’t want anybody to know what they were doing or how much they had.
MARTY LACKER: Actually, there was one investment, in a coal mine, I believe. Vernon made and lost something like two-and-a-half million dollars.
Any lawyers, bankers, and accountants Elvis hired were of Vernon’s choosing. Vernon would say, “I’d like you to do this and this and that.” And if it wasn’t good for Elvis, they wouldn’t tell him otherwise. They’d just go ahead and do it. Vernon made something like $84,000 a year, for which he did almost nothing. He only listened to what Parker and the rest of them told him.
Vernon couldn’t teach himself about money management because he read like a kid. He’d run his finger under the lines on the page, trying to figure out the words. It’s about all he could do to sign his name.
BILLY SMITH: I don’t know where Marty got that. Vernon could read and write and understand things. If somebody wrote a contract, there might be a lot of big words in there Vernon didn’t understand, but he could basically read it. He didn’t have a great education, but Vernon could read and write fairly well.
LAMAR FIKE: People say, “If Elvis had been a more astute businessman or taken more interest in the workings of his career, he would have been a much bigger star.” But God Almighty, he made more money than anybody I know of. And next to Jesus and Coca-Cola, nothing’s any better known than Elvis Presley.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis never discussed business with any of the guys. I wish to God I could have broke him of that. But see, that was Colonel’s influence. He told Elvis, “Don’t talk about business. They don’t need to know nothing. In fact, your daddy needs to know as little as possible. That’s just between me and you. The old Colonel will take care of that.”
Not until his final few years did Elvis realize what was happening. And then, he didn’t do anything about it. Why? Because a poor kid made it big. The Colonel had told him, “I’ll see to it that you’ll always be able to write a check for a million dollars.” That’s staggering to somebody who come out of Tupelo and North Memphis.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis used to brag to me and some of the other guys. He’d say, “Oh, man, I get a nickel a record!” Colonel would con him so much that he would convince him that he’d gotten the best deal possible. They initially had a twenty-year contract with RCA. And every time, the Colonel would re-sign with RCA and say, “They’re putting so much faith in you that they’re going to put you under contract for another year.” So there was always a perpetual twenty-year contract, but no increase in royalties. And it really got me because Elvis always said, “Hey, I did great! RCA is going to sign me for another year.” It was like Colonel had worked a miracle. There were a hundred managers out there who could have handled Elvis’s career a whole lot better. And protected his money, too. Plus there were other record companies and other movie companies who would put up all the money in the world to get him. He really had no idea what was going on outside of his own little world. And none of us knew enough about how the industry worked to be able to advise him.
Years later, when I got out from under his shadow and got out in the real world, I went to work in the music business, and I found out what other artists were getting and how deals were made.
When I’d talk to Elvis and he’d tell me about his paltry royalty and about being signed again for another year, I’d look at him and I’d say, “Yeah, Elvis, that’s nice. But you know, they ain’t doing you a favor.” And he never asked me why.
The real question is what was RCA doing for the Colonel? He had an office in the RCA building on Sunset Boulevard for a good while. It remained empty, but it was all part of his wheeling and dealing. He had it even after Elvis died, until the estate made him give up all of his rights to Elvis. But Colonel was big on perks. He refused to close a movie deal one time ’til the studio threw in the ashtray on the table. They thought he was nuts. But that’s why Colonel called himself The Snowman. He got all kinds of things free. Except a lot of the time, Elvis was the one who paid the price.
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel also got a lot of perks from the William Morris Agency, which represented Elvis for all of his professional life. Colonel had three residences. One was this house in Palm Springs. Colonel said William Morris bought that house, and he rented it from them. No wonder. He provided them with their biggest star.
MARTY LACKER: The William Morris Agency also gave him an office. He used to get these guys, “his trainees” he’d call them. He was supposedly breaking them in for William Morris. But by the time they got through working for the Colonel, a lot of them didn’t want to work in the business anymore.
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel told everybody in the office that if somebody came in, they had to look like they were totally consumed with work. So if Colonel heard footsteps, he immediately had everybody start dialing phones and sending telegrams—all kinds of shit just to look busy.
MARTY LACKER: Colonel was always putting on a show. He told us these stories about when they signed the movie contracts. He’d start negotiating with these people, and he’d let them draw up everything, and he’d change half of it. Just to change it. What started out as a contract maybe about an inch high would end up being ten inches.
Finally, they’d get it all done. And then he’d say, “Okay, bring it down here, and I’ll sign it.” They’d send a studio courier, and Colonel would say, “What is this?” The messenger would say, “This is the contract that came from So-and-so at MGM.” And Colonel would say, “Who are you?” And he’d say, “I’m the messenger from the studio.” And Colonel would say, “No, no, no. Take this back. Tell ’em if they want me to sign this, the president has to bring it down to me himself.”
LAMAR FIKE: There wasn’t anything Colonel didn’t ask for. His office was called the “cookhouse.” It’s an old carny expression. He’d turn part of a soundstage into a kitchen and have somebody come in and cook.
MARTY LACKER: Colonel would have these William Morris kids do the cooking, and he’d have them clean the tables—all kinds of stuff that didn’t have anything to do with being an agent.
Lunchtime was the only time the Colonel really stopped. He’d have a big wooden table from the movie studio, and he’d cover it with this old oilcloth. And he’d have all kinds of food. He always had a refrigerator full of stuff. Most of the food was “appropriated” from somebody. He would get the studio to buy him something, or William Morris.
He loved to eat. And he liked to go over to Vegas to gamble and to see his good friend Milton Prell, who ran the Sahara Hotel. The restaurant at the Sahara was called “The House of Lords.” And everybody in the hotel was afraid of Colonel because of his association with Milton Prell and because of Elvis. So he’d go in and order the waiters and the maître d’s around. And he’d have banquets full of food and sit there and eat it all.
I went with him and Joe one time. He had food all over the table. You could have fed fifty people, and it was just the three of us. But, of course, it was free, so he ordered everything there was.
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel enjoyed lording it over people. That’s one of the reasons he called himself “Colonel.” And insisted that everybody else did, too.
MARTY LACKER: On the movie sets, he would have the top brass from William Morris come over. Colonel had a special chair made for [Chairman of the Board] Abe Lastfogel. It had “The Admiral” on it.
Elvis might have been William Morris’s biggest client, but the fact of the matter is the Colonel did the booking. He might have used them for advice on the movies, and later Las Vegas, or for contacts. And he might have had them put him together with people. But it’s a little bit of a puzzle as to exactly what they did for Elvis to earn their 10 percent.
LAMAR FIKE: Here’s an interesting riddle for you. According to Goldman, the agency never had a documented representation agreement with Elvis. And nobody at William Morris will tell you. But legal papers filed after Elvis’s death say the same thing.
MARTY LACKER: It may not be far-fetched if Colonel didn’t have a contract with William Morris. Colonel didn’t like signing anything, so that could have been a handshake deal between him and Lastfogel. Then, again, it could have been another of Colonel’s side deals.
LAMAR FIKE: When we weren’t actually on the movie set, we didn’t see Colonel all that much. For one thing, Colonel lived in Palm Springs. Alan [Fortas] was usually the one who drove Colonel back and forth. And too, Elvis didn’t invite Colonel to the house because he didn’t want Colonel to know too much about what went on there.
That Perugia Way house—that was the first one with the two-way mirror, so we could spy on guys making out with their girlfriends. Sonny was the one who got it.
BILLY SMITH: The two-way mirror was there, and we used it. But that was just a short-lived thing. The way Albert Goldman described it, you’d think we used it all the time, and that’s not true. It started with one little mirror, maybe three-by-two, in a kind of a closet, to watch the guys and their dates in the den. Later, when we moved to Bellagio Road, we graduated to a bigger one, like five-by-five feet. Elvis had one put in the dressing area out by the swimming pool, which had a men’s and women’s dressing room. And I think he might have used that sucker maybe twice. You had to crawl under the cabana to use it.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis was a voyeur. Always was. There’s nothing wrong with being a voyeur.
MARTY LACKER: In the early years in Hollywood, a lot of people thought we were all gay. There used to be parties almost every night in Hollywood, and we didn’t socialize a lot.
In the beginning, the invitations came through the Colonel because nobody could get to Elvis. And Elvis would never go to the parties. His excuse was usually: “I have to get up too early in the morning.” But Elvis just didn’t like the people. He knew they weren’t really interested in him as a person, that they just wanted to be around Elvis Presley. And they made him uncomfortable. Because he was still a country boy with simple tastes. So, all in all, he just figured we didn’t have to go out and be seen.
That, coupled with the fact that he had an entourage of anywhere from seven to thirteen guys, and we were all living in this house together and didn’t go anywhere, led to the rumor, “Oh, they must be gay.” Little did they know that the house was packed with women.
BILLY SMITH: When we got out to California, I was going with Jo, who’s now my wife, and we were real serious. But Elvis said, “You ought to date out here, so it doesn’t look like you’re gay.” I said, “You date. I don’t want to.” I guess he couldn’t understand commitment.
MARTY LACKER: The gay rumors first got going when Elvis started hanging out with Nick Adams. And you can see why gay men would be attracted to Elvis. His cousin Gene Smith was looking at him one time, and he said, in that funny way he talks, “Elvis, you know I ain’t no damn queer, but you’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.” And it was true.
Elvis didn’t like a man to put his hands on him unless you were joking around. Even though we all loved each other and were almost as close as brothers, you couldn’t go over and put your arm around Elvis’s shoulder. He almost always flinched.
LAMAR FIKE: I’ve never seen that trait. Elvis and I would hug. And I never noticed he didn’t want to be touched. I used to put my hand on his shoulder and talk to him.
BILLY SMITH: I hate to say it, but Elvis was prejudiced about homosexuals. He wouldn’t mistreat them for anything. But if one of them had made a pass at him, all hell would have broke loose.
On Fun in Acapulco, which was set at a resort hotel, the script called for Elvis to make this dive and for a bunch of guys in swim trunks to carry him up the steps. One actually grabbed him, or at least Elvis said he did. And he cussed and raved about that. He wanted us to find out who it was and get him thrown off the set.
MARTY LACKER: During the week when we were doing movies, we had to get up at four-thirty A.M., so Elvis would go to bed early. But the fans rang the doorbell all night. I’d get up at two, or three, or even four in the morning and answer it. They’d say, “Can we see Elvis?” I’d say, “I’m sorry. He’s asleep.” And sometimes they’d say, “Could we just go to his door and look in at him? We won’t wake him up.” A couple of times, I had to threaten to throw them off the property.
On the weeknights, Elvis wouldn’t let any of the girls up from the gate. Or if Elvis had a date, one of the guys would have to take her home about one o’clock in the morning. But on Friday and Saturday nights, he would let all the girls in, even if he had a date with somebody.
They’d come in droves. Because the word got around that on Friday and Saturday nights, if you were fairly good looking, you could get in. Every five minutes there would be a knock on the door.
The parties at Elvis’s house weren’t really parties. There was a bar back there where he used to keep liquor for the guests. He didn’t drink at the house, and most of us didn’t drink, either. Essentially, we’d watch television, except there would be all of these women. One night I counted 152 girls and us six guys. They were all trying to figure out a way to get Elvis to notice them.
We had this big console TV in the middle of the main den, and there were long couches up against the wall with two chairs on each side. So we’d all sit there and watch television or talk. A lot of times, the picture on the television would be on, but the sound wouldn’t. That’s the way Elvis liked it. And he’d have music playing on the phonograph.
So that’s basically what we did. And people would go out by the pool, which was downstairs and out in the back. Then, after a while, some of the guys would walk off with a girl and go towards their rooms.
But primarily, Elvis and some of us would sit up there on the couch and talk all night long. When the sun started to come up, Elvis would say, “I’m going to bed.” He always took one or two, or sometimes three or four girls with him. And then the rest of the girls would leave.
BILLY SMITH: One time, on Perugia Way, there was five girls come up there together. And Elvis just took all five of them into his room.
LAMAR FIKE: Everybody was trying to fuck Elvis. We had girls all over. We’d meet them at the studios and invite them up there. It was kind of like owning a candy store.
MARTY LACKER: Maybe some of the girls came because they were actresses who hoped Elvis would advance their careers. But he wasn’t the kind of guy who made promises like that.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis didn’t really brag about his sexual exploits, except later on when he didn’t have as much sexual activity.
MARTY LACKER: He was funny about that. Sometimes he’d tell us about what he did, and sometimes he wouldn’t. Nothing real freaky. But you never knew if Elvis was telling you the truth because he would make up a lot of stuff. Just to get you excited, I guess. He loved to manipulate people. Like about keeping a secret. He’d tell us things and say, “Now, don’t tell anybody about this, or your ass is fired.” The very next day, or maybe that same night, we’d hear it back from a stranger. We’d say, “Where did you hear that?” “Oh, Elvis told me.”
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis had very specific ideas about what kind of women he liked. He went after weak, subservient women as a rule. Physically, he liked ’em dark-haired and petite, about 5’2” and 110 pounds. He was an ass and legs kind of guy.
He didn’t like smart women. There were a couple of exceptions, but usually, if they were intelligent, they were out. He went from cute girls, like Anita Wood, to just astoundingly beautiful women. But mental capacity wasn’t his thing. He didn’t like women speaking out, either. That’s one reason he liked teenage girls. They weren’t a threat.
Elvis’s thing with women was they had to baby him and take care of him. Because his mother raised him that way. I’ve never seen anybody who could bring out the basic instincts in a woman like he could. They’d get around him, and they’d immediately turn into nurses. They waited on him hand and foot. Even the real young girls would do that.
You need to understand that Elvis had a lot of personalities. Around us, he was a dominant badass. Around the public, he was “Captain America, apple pie, and Mama.” But Elvis was also a person who did not like to have a real conversation with a woman. Except Gladys.
BILLY SMITH: Yeah, he enjoyed being babied. But he could be the nurturer, too. But once he had done it for a little while, he thought, “That shit’s over now. Let’s get on with it.”
I’m not sure he wanted his girlfriends to be stupid, though. I think that’s unfair to both Elvis and the women. I’d say Elvis liked a woman with a good wit, who was fairly intelligent. He wasn’t looking for total beauty, either. Most of them were good-looking women, but then, he went with a lot of women who weren’t beautiful. I’ll tell you what, though—he didn’t hit it off with a lot of women because something would turn him off.
MARTY LACKER: Dirty fingernails, or dirty toenails, were a total turn off. He didn’t even like to go to bed with a girl who had ugly toes.
LAMAR FIKE: I guess some people would think we shouldn’t be talking about this. But my God, the man was probably the biggest sex symbol, other than Marilyn Monroe, ever. How can you not examine what motivated him in that area?
BILLY SMITH: Elvis liked that mystique about courting. If women came after him, he wasn’t interested. Always, in the early years and in the later years, too, unless Elvis already had a date, the guys pretty well let him have first pick of the girls before they made a move on anybody. That was standard.
LAMAR FIKE: There were very few men who were allowed to visit the house. If somebody came over to see him that he liked, they had to get past us first. Like Johnny Rivers used to come over some in the early sixties. If Elvis wanted to see him, he would tell one of us to let him in. But Elvis would never take him somewhere alone. Never, ever. He wanted at least one of us with him at all times. For company and for protection. Elvis was more confident onstage than he was off. Onstage, he knew what he could do.
People thought we kept Elvis cocooned. The fact is, he didn’t want to be left alone with a guy. And nobody outside of our circle knew what he was like. Absolutely nobody. He didn’t trust anybody. He was safe only with us. And even though we were a veil of secrecy—that was one of our unwritten rules and one of our functions—he didn’t have intimate conversations all that much with us.
I’ve had people say, “Didn’t you think that was odd?” Well, I didn’t have anything to judge it by. It was normal to us. And what’s normal to us is not normal to anybody else. I think you could say that about our entire lives.
MARTY LACKER: Only the guys in the group really knew Elvis Presley. I mean, really knew him. And there were things we didn’t know. In the last years of his life, Billy was closer to him than anyone. He was his best friend. And more than that, really. He was more like a brother or a son.
I read these things where certain entertainers like Mac Davis or Wayne Newton or Bill Bixby said they were friends of his. That’s a joke, man. He was never close to those people. And as the years went on—which is when most of these guys say they buddied up to him—he became less and less in touch with the outside world. He was certainly beyond calling up Bill Bixby or any of them and inviting them over for a Pepsi, let’s put it that way. He just didn’t want them around. He’d say, “Get them away from me.”
People would get in so far, and we’d shut ’em down. We wouldn’t let them in all the way. Nobody ever got in. And we just kept it that way. Because that’s the way he wanted it. Understand, now, that’s not what we thought he wanted, but what he told us he wanted. He could always be what he wanted to be around us. But he couldn’t be that way around anybody else.
LAMAR FIKE: I think it’s fair to say that Elvis demanded special attention. And you had to guard yourself because you’d find yourself treating him like one of the guys, and all of a sudden, he’d throw it up to you. Elvis would say, “No, that shit stops there.” He had to be the center of attention.
We would have birthday parties among the group, and after a while we got to where we would never invite him because he would come in and expect everything to revolve around him. He found out we stopped inviting him, and it made him madder than a hornet.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis was the one in charge, and he never let you forget it. We used to sit around the house and play cards some. And Elvis always had to be the banker, the house. We played blackjack, and he’d always put Sonny on his right-hand side. That way, he would take, or not take, the last card to help his hand.
Billy and the others were aware of what was going on because everybody owed Elvis money. He didn’t owe anybody anything. And everybody would complain about it, and he’d say, “Well, that’s how those big hotels in Vegas were built, guys. The house is always the winner. You can’t beat the house.”
BILLY SMITH: Goldman wrote about how Elvis would humiliate us in front of the guests if we didn’t light his cigar quick enough. Well, we had a job, and he was the boss. If he picked up a cigar—he smoked those little Hav-a-Tampa Jewels and Rum Crooks or the bigger Villiger Kiels—we knew to light it for him. He almost demanded that. Maybe some of the guys thought that was humiliating, but I never did. Now, he might have said, “All right, you need to pop to it.” In other words, “Get it quick.” If he was mad, he was liable to say something harsh.
Christina Crawford, who had a bit part in Wild in the Country, came up to the house one night to see Joe Esposito. She’s Joan Crawford’s adopted daughter, the one who later wrote Mommie Dearest.
Elvis was smoking cigars that night, and every time he’d take one out, Joe would start to light it for him. And Christina would reach out and grab it and break it. And Elvis said, “Don’t do that. That’s not funny.” So he picked up another one, and Joe went to light it again. And she broke it again. And Elvis said, “I’ve asked you nicely.” She said, “Well, he shouldn’t have to light your cigars.” And Elvis said, “Look, he works for me, goddamnit. And he knows when I get a cigar to light it for me.”
But she did it a third time, and boy, Elvis got mad. They got into just a barrage of words. Elvis said, “Look, you bitch —” and Christina threw a drink in his face. He stopped a minute, and then he said, “I’m going to eliminate this problem.” He got up and stepped on top of this five-by-six marble coffee table we had and grabbed her by her ponytail and dragged her across the damn table out of the room. Then he kicked her right in the rear as she was going out the door.
It wasn’t but a short time later that she came back up and apologized. She said the reason she done it was because she resented seeing her mother treat everybody who worked for her the same way.
LAMAR FIKE: Yeah, the guests who came to the house sometimes got onerous. The women and the men. Johnny Rivers got barred from the house for cutting the song “Memphis” after Elvis played him his demo.
MARTY LACKER: That happened in ’64. Johnny was up at the Perugia Way house one day, and Elvis played him a dub of his cut on the song. Not too long after that, we were coming home from the studio in the Rolls, and we were listening to the radio, and they started playing “Memphis” by Johnny Rivers. Naturally, we all got upset. I turned around to Elvis and I said, “If you put yours out real quick, that’ll kill his.” And Elvis said, “No, let the little bastard have his hit record. I wish him luck, but I never want to see him again.”
About two Saturdays later, Johnny came up on his motorcycle because he used to go riding with the guys on the weekends. Alan and I happened to be in the courtyard out front, and we both started calling him a no-good thief. He acted real innocent. He said, “What did I do?” I said, “Johnny, if you don’t realize what you did, that’s your problem. But you’ve got five seconds to get off this property, or we’re going to throw you over the wall.” He never came around again. But Elvis could get cruel. And he’d burn into you.
LAMAR FIKE: The biggest fights that we all ever had with Elvis was over girls. I had a girl one time, and he took her away. I protested, and he said, “If you don’t shut up about it, it’s going to cost you.” And I said, “Well, fuck you! You take my girl, and you tell me it’s going to cost me?” And he said, “I’ll tell you what. That just cost you a trip.”
BILLY SMITH: When Elvis made Wild in the Country, with Hope Lange and Tuesday Weld, Hope got him drinking a little vodka and stocking the bar with it. Before that, he didn’t allow liquor in the house. Hope came over one time and asked for some, and Elvis was embarrassed not to have any.
Elvis didn’t drink that much, but there were times when he tried it. For a while there, probably ’63, he got on it hot and heavy. It was almost like Elvis needed to see what the big thrill was. That went on for maybe four or five months, mostly when we went to Vegas. There were times, but not every day, when we’d just get totally drunk. He’d drink mostly vodka and tonic. And then, it was over, and he hardly touched it again.
MARTY LACKER: He could hold his alcohol pretty well, though. It might be affecting him, but he’d still walk a straight line. He would get up and go to the bathroom, and nobody would be the wiser.
In the early days, he was that way with pills, too. The average person couldn’t tell. We knew what to look for because speed, or uppers, make your pupils get a little bigger. But Elvis didn’t see that doing pain pills was just as harmful as drinking alcohol.
BILLY SMITH: With pills, Elvis said he wanted to get the same feeling that an alcoholic gets with booze, except not be totally out of control.
MARTY LACKER: On Wild in the Country, he got a boil on his rear end. He didn’t bathe a lot. Every time we’d leave a motel room on the road, me or Joe or Billy would check the room and the bathroom to see if he left anything, and we’d never see any used towels. And the soap on the tub wasn’t unwrapped, either. He didn’t smell, though, because he loaded up on deodorant and cologne—Brut. But he had a lot of blackheads on his back.
The studio doctor lanced this boil, but it still hurt like hell. He couldn’t sit down—he had to just sort of pivot on his hip. This was when he was on location in Napa, California. One weekend, when he wasn’t shooting the movie, the guys went to San Francisco, Elvis was in so much pain he couldn’t handle the trip in the car. So he stocked up on a bunch of pain pills. At one point, they were stopped for some reason, when a car full of kids pulled up beside the Cadillac limo and started mouthing off. Elvis had begun carrying this little four-shot derringer. He kept it in his boot, and he kept another one in his pocket. It made an interesting effect with his little cigars—he thought it made him look like a real bad guy. He rolled down the window and stuck the gun out, and those kids took off like ninety carrying the mail.
Of course, he had some fights through the years. He even got into a fight with a Marine.
BILLY SMITH: This was real early on. The way Elvis told it, he had this play gun on him from one of the movies, a starter’s pistol that fired blanks. Somehow, these Marines got to following him and Gene. They kind of cornered him in a park. Elvis told us the one guy jumped him and started beating him up. Elvis said, “There were two of them, and I was a little scared.” He said, “I had this little ole gun that would shoot blanks, and I just jerked it out and stuck it right under his chin and said, ‘You son of a bitch. You’re not going to bother nobody. I’ll blow your damn head off.’” And the cops arrested him for assault and battery. And the other guys, too. I think the police got him for carrying a concealed weapon, but he got off that.
Now, about the fight Elvis had with the service station attendant in ’56 . . . Elvis pulled in there to get gas and a Pepsi. And some girls recognized him and asked for his autograph. The guy, whose name was Edd Hopper, got jealous, and he come over to Elvis and said, “Look, you’re going to have to move this car.” And Elvis said, in a real nice way, “I’ll sign these autographs, and then I’ll move it.”
Hopper kept on, and Elvis kept signing. So Hopper said, “Look, I done told you to move this damn car.” And I guess from Elvis’s looks, Hopper just took him as being weak. And he reached over and kind of slapped Elvis on the back of the head and said, “I told you to move this—” And he never got the rest out of his mouth. To hear Elvis tell it, he almost beat the guy to death. But Hopper was the one who got fined in court. Elvis was exonerated.
Elvis had a lot of incidents happen like that, so he became like a cat, constantly watching. He had a gun even back in ’56, a little .22 that he kept in his room.
You’ve got to remember, too, that starting in ’56, Elvis routinely got death threats. The first one come on a postcard, from Niagara Falls, New York. It was written in pencil, and it said, “If you don’t stop this shit, we’re going to kill you.”
LAMAR FIKE: While we were over in Germany, in ’59, some woman in Canton, Ohio, sent a handwritten letter to RCA Records. She said a relative of hers in West Germany wrote her to say that a Communist soldier from East Germany was going to kill Elvis, even if he had to blow up the house and everybody in it. She said he’d wear an American army uniform to throw everybody off, and she gave the dates he’d try to do it. That ended up in the FBI file.
Stuff like that made Elvis really nervous and uncomfortable because it played into his nightmares. The first hard-line death threat came in ’57. The FBI caught the woman who did that. She said she’d bomb us from an airplane. I had to go out and crank up those damn cars every morning, expecting them to blow up. It scared us good, boy. We’d be playing badminton in the backyard, and a plane would come over, and we’d all run inside the house.
That’s how Elvis became friends with Captain [W. W.] Woodward of the Memphis Police Department. He was always taking care of Elvis. Big guy, about 6’4”. He used to travel with us some in the early years. If I remember right, he was assigned to Elvis in the security detail, particularly when Elvis did shows around Memphis, like at Russwood Park. He shepherded a lot of situations for Elvis, and Elvis was pretty close to him.
Just why, I don’t know. I guess you could make all kinds of psychological cases for it, but we never talked about stuff like that.
Woodward is like an unknown character in all of this. But he always had a car around us. Whenever we’d go somewhere, a car would be nearby. Vester or whoever was on duty would say Elvis had left the gate, and it would go out on the radio, and all the cops would know he was out, and they would track us. A car would pick us up in different areas of town. But that wasn’t just in ’57. That was all the time, whenever he was in Memphis.
MARTY LACKER: All that stuff put together made Elvis think more and more about somebody shooting him. And as the years went by, he started carrying guns. One time, he went out to Kerr’s Sporting Goods Store in Beverly Hills. He was looking around at the guns, and he spotted Paul Newman in the store. He went over, and they said hello to each other. And Elvis, as crazy as he was, said, “Hey, Paul, I want to show you something.” And he opened up his coat, and he had two guns in his belt, one on each side. Then he took another little gun out of his pocket. Paul said, “Hey, it was nice seeing you,” and he turned around and left.
Later, Elvis started getting badges from law enforcement agencies. Not honorary, but real ones.
Lamar and some of the others started calling him “Crazy.” They’d say, “What’s Crazy doing today?”
LAMAR FIKE: Tuesday Weld came over to the house a few times on Wild in the Country. She was only seventeen then, and very smart, but she had an edge to her. I never got good vibrations from her, and neither did anybody else in the group, except Alan. He was crazy about Tuesday, and they became friends. In fact, she gave him a white German shepherd.
Elvis dated her a little. She had the ass and legs, and Elvis liked that, and she’d baby-talk with him, but that was about it. She used to come over to the house with the girl who later married Frankie Avalon. Tuesday came in and looked through the two-way mirror one time and called us all a bunch of adolescents. I saw her in New York two years later, and I spoke to her, and she high-hatted me.
Wild in the Country was a terrific picture. It had a beautiful look about it, partly because we shot some of it on location in Napa Valley. And Philip Dunne, the director, was brilliant. This was another one of those dramatic roles that Elvis liked.
Colonel hated it because Elvis sang only four songs in the picture. It made money—all of his movies did because they were so low-budget—but in comparison to a lot of the others, it flopped miserably. So Colonel used that as leverage for the formula pictures he laid on him from there on out. He’d already had Flaming Star stiff at the box office. So Colonel pointed at Wild in the Country and said, “That’s what I’m talking about. You want to do the serious stuff? We won’t make any money!”
MARTY LACKER: In those days, we traveled by car a lot, and we pulled some good pranks on the road. We’d stay in these motels and order room service. We always had more than one room. And sometimes the rooms were connected. So right after we hung up the phone, we’d start taking all the furniture out and put it in the other room and close the door.
The guy with room service would come up and knock on the door. And he’d wheel the cart in, and see that he’d come into an empty room. We’d be standing there. And everybody would act normal and keep a straight face. Nobody would laugh. And we’d watch the guy, and he’d look around. But he wouldn’t know what to say because he didn’t want to get in trouble with Elvis.
He didn’t question it while he was in the room. He’d park the cart, and we’d sign the check, give him a tip, and he’d leave. Then he would go back and tell either the desk clerk or the manager. And about fifteen minutes later, there would be a knock on the door. But between the time the waiter left and the manager came up, we’d put all the furniture back in the room.
So the manager would knock on the door, and he’d start off with, “Mr. Presley, we have a problem. The waiter just came down and said all the furniture was missing from this room.”
We’d look at him like he was nuts. And then Elvis would say, “What are you talking about? Come have a look.” And the manager would step in and see that everything was in place. And the guy’s face would turn beet red. He’d make some excuse and say he was terribly sorry. And then, when he closed the door, we’d just fall on the floor laughing.
We used to have a great time. The camaraderie then was really great.
LAMAR FIKE: God, back in those early days, we were thicker than molasses. Most of us, anyway. You have to understand that Elvis was a true chameleon. I promise you, they couldn’t put up a maze in a fourteenth-century castle like what was in his mind. He was such a dichotomy. Different personalities would emerge at different times, and he would use them to his advantage.
The biggest problem in dealing with these personalities was trying to outthink him. Oftentimes, you would know what to expect, but if he caught you figuring him out, he would do just the opposite to throw you off or prove you wrong. He just didn’t want you to know him. That was rough to be around. You were addicted to it, but God, it was rough.
MARTY LACKER: The sad thing is, as good a time as we had back then, I think there were always doubts in Elvis’s mind about why we were there. All of us really cared about him. Sure it was glamorous, to a point. But it got pretty damn old—sitting around all the time, doing nothing, being on-call twenty-four hours a day, and having to listen to him rant and rave. We weren’t there for the money because there wasn’t any.
I guess you get that way when you reach that level of fame and fortune. You have to wonder sometimes why those people are around you and ask yourself, “Are they here because they care about me? Or are they here because of what they can get or what I can do for them?” There were times I sensed that Elvis really didn’t know.
BILLY SMITH: I think Elvis looked at all of us and saw things that other people teased us about—like when Red was teased about his red hair in high school. We were outcasts, in a way. And Elvis knew what he went through himself as he come up.
I don’t think he ever planned to collect “outsiders.” But “outsiders” collected him. And if he took a strong liking to you, like he did Lamar, and Red, and George, he’d do almost anything for you. He was as loyal to you as you were to him. Just as long as it fit his needs.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis had a couple of really great personal traits. And one was, if you got in a big argument with him, he would settle it that night. He would not let it go another day. He’d say, “Okay, I love you,” and it would be over. Of course, he didn’t actually say, “I’m sorry.”
BILLY SMITH: Elvis didn’t really know how to tell you he loved you. He showed you, like by sticking up for you or buying you things. Like once, when Elvis decided to go to Wilshire Motors in California. At the time, my wardrobe was real limited. I think I had on a T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans.
Everybody was looking at something different, and I happened to go over to this BMW. I was leaning on it, and the salesman came over. He said, “Look, you’re not going to buy anything. Why don’t you get off the car? You’re going to scratch it.”
Elvis had real keen ears, and he turned around and said, “Sir, who are you?” And he said, “I’m So-and-so. I’m a salesman here.” And Elvis said, “I don’t want to talk to you, goddamnit. Get the manager out here.” The salesman recognized him then, and he said, “Oh, Mr. Presley!” And Elvis said, “Mr. Presley, hell! Get the manager out here. That’s the person I want to see.”
The manager came out. And Elvis said, “How much you want for this goddamn car?” The manager told him. And Elvis said, “I’ll take it.” And he said, “You have this son-of-a-bitch salesman drive it up to my house.” Then he added, “And the next time, tell him to be a little more respectful to his customers.”
He bought that damn BMW. That’s the one we drove back and forth across country. And that’s how he bought that Rolls-Royce. He brought it back to Memphis, and one of the maids, Alberta, said, “Oh, Mr. Elvis, I want to see that new car you’ve got. Everybody’s telling me you brought a Rolls-Royce home from California!” And Elvis said, “It’s setting out front there, Alberta.”
She kind of screwed up her face, and she said, “All I saw out there was some old black car, a ’38 Buick maybe.” Elvis looked like he’d been slapped, and he said, “That old black car you’re talking about—that’s the damn Rolls-Royce!” For a while, he wouldn’t bring it back to Memphis. She put him down bad.
LAMAR FIKE: Christmas of ’60 . . . That was some Christmas. Dee didn’t rescue her kids from boarding school and move ’em in until after she and Vernon were married, and this was their first Christmas in Memphis. I think it was fun for Elvis. He went out and bought all this stuff for them, but he would just keep them at arm’s length.
MARTY LACKER: That first Christmas, when Vernon asked Elvis to be nice to the Stanley boys, he bought ’em drum sets and bicycles. I remember a couple of us were standing in the dining room, going into the hallway, when he came in and handed us these boxes. He just sort of said, “Here, set this shit up for them boys.” Elvis looked at me and said, “That ought to hold the little bastards for a while.”
LAMAR FIKE: Billy, Ricky, and David Stanley would stay with Vernon and Dee over at their house, which was connected to the back of the fourteen acres. And Vernon treated them very well. Then later on, Elvis worked them into the group.
In defense of the Stanley boys, it’s well to remember that they didn’t ask to be there. And Elvis was stuck with having stepbrothers, so he made the best of it.
MARTY LACKER: The Stanley boys—all three of them—always claimed that Elvis was like their brother. The fact is, Elvis always referred to them as “Dee’s boys” or “Dee’s brats.” The only reason he did things for them is because his father asked him to.
BILLY SMITH: Later on, Elvis kept them around for one reason and one reason only. And I hate to say this, but it’s true. To get drugs for him. Ricky and David were on the street. And Elvis, in essence, put them there.
LAMAR FIKE: I’m very partial toward David because I raised him from the time he was three years old. Or I feel like I did. Those boys have had it hard. What you have to remember is that they were corrupted by Elvis Presley. All of them were. Absolutely. No doubt about it.