CHAPTER 24

CHANGES

MARTY LACKER: When I got home after that first trip, my wife, Patsy, didn’t want me to go back out again. So in February of ’62, I quit traveling with Elvis and went back into radio. I got a job at WHBQ, the number one station in Memphis.

I didn’t really mind dropping out of the group, partly because I couldn’t stand Colonel. I still got to see Elvis when he was home. Boy, there were all kinds of changes going on in the group that year, or there would be.

BILLY SMITH: Early ’62, or maybe the last part of ’61, was when Elvis made a final break with Anita Wood. Elvis was corresponding with Priscilla, and talking about her a lot, even though he hadn’t seen her in two years. Elvis was somewhat fickle. He’d be madly in love for a little while, and then somebody else would come along, and he’d think, “Here’s someone who understands me a little more.” And Anita wanted to get married, and they argued about that a lot.

LAMAR FIKE: I think Anita saw his personality changing, and she didn’t know what to think or how to handle it. She thought the army made him sad and pensive, which it did. But how much she knew about his drug use, I don’t know. The changes that came with bigger and bigger fame were hard enough for her.

BILLY SMITH: In ’62, Elvis went out and bought a Dodge motor home for us to travel in because this traveling in cars was getting kind of old. We were cramped, and we needed more room for the stuff, too. The motor home was only twenty-five feet long, but we thought it was huge. It was like a Winnebago. Lamar took it down to Florida to a guy named Jimmy Sanders, who’d painted a Cadillac purple for us. Jimmy turned it into a bus. It had a breakfast nook up front, and a couch on the other side, and a bedroom in the back.

LAMAR FIKE: Elvis traveled in that motor home for three years. I talked him into buying it, but I cursed the day. It was uncomfortable, and it would break down. God, we had some times in that thing.

MARTY LACKER: When we started traveling in the home, we got tired of losing radio stations, so we rigged up a big reel-to-reel tape recorder to play tapes. Elvis liked Andy Williams at the time. And up came “Moon River.” Joe sang out, “Mooo-oon Lacker,” because my face is round and I had lost most of my hair. Elvis looked back at me, and he said, “Moon Lacker, you poor old bald-headed son of a bitch.” And he started laughing and almost crashed the bus. From that moment on, they started calling me “Moon.”

BILLY SMITH: You didn’t ever want Elvis to drive. He couldn’t keep his mind on what he was doing. He’d leave the turn signal on half the time.

LAMAR FIKE: Elvis would get behind the wheel and start talking, and he’d be doing eighty one minute and ten the next. We were going across the desert one time, and I said, “Can I ask you a question?” He said, “What?” I said, “Why are we going so slow?” He said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Elvis, we’re going twenty-five or thirty miles an hour here.” He said, “Oh,” and he ran it back up again. And he started talking, and he let it run back down again.

BILLY SMITH: There were times when Elvis liked to leave you totally in limbo, just for the hell of it. Sometimes he’d do it to punish you. He did it to me when I wanted to go home in ’62. I was getting married in November, and I said, “Look, I got to go home, man. I got to see my family and my fiancée.”

One day, after a week of promises, Elvis said, “Okay, we’re going to leave tomorrow.” We sat in the den, waiting. Well, tomorrow came, and again, he had something else planned. He just didn’t want to go.

LAMAR FIKE: We’d come out and get on the bus, thinking we were actually leaving. We stayed on the bus for five goddamn days! I said, “Fuck this shit, boy.” Elvis liked to run us crazy.

BILLY SMITH: Finally, I said, “Either we’re leaving tomorrow, or I’m taking a flight out of here, and you can stay!” And Elvis just blew up. He said, “Well, goddamn, we’ll just go then!” Seven days later, we made it to Memphis. He punished me the whole way.

LAMAR FIKE: That’s exactly right. Elvis drove. And he stopped every fifty miles.

MARTY LACKER: Elvis drove 250 miles a day, max. All the way from California.

BILLY SMITH: Sometimes it was less. One day, we drove one hundred miles.

LAMAR FIKE: That was the trip from hell. Finally, Elvis got tired and went in the back. That was our window of opportunity. Joe or Red would get behind the wheel, and we’d gain one hundred miles, just like that. They took turns and floorboarded that son of a bitch. Actually, Elvis pulled that stunt several times.

BILLY SMITH: That was Elvis’s way of never letting you forget who was in charge.

LAMAR FIKE: The motor home lived a hard life. Marty broke a side mirror off it one time, but I ripped the top off. When we went to Vegas, we’d stay at the Sahara Hotel because of Colonel’s friend, Milton Prell. I was driving, and I was just worn-out. We’d been there for a while, and we’d gambled and lost a lot of money.

Elvis and his dad were sitting at the breakfast nook behind the driver’s seat. And I said, “This is Lamar Fike, your safe and courteous driver.” And I took a left under the covered walkway in front of the Sahara. It had maybe a ten-foot clearance. And the motor home had a twelve-foot clearance. I heard this “Crrrrrr!” And the bus came to a jarring halt. I peeled the top back about fifteen feet on that son of a bitch. It looked like an open sardine can, just rippled.

The worst part was that all that gunite poured down on Elvis and Vernon. I glanced back at Elvis, and he looked like a wolf. All I could see was his eyes. And he was blinking. The bus was just silent for a minute. Only thing you could hear was this gunite sprinkling down. And then Elvis said, “Lamar!” And I said, “Oh, God!”

Elvis pulled me out of the seat, sat down, and started driving down the highway. That damn gunite was just flying out the top, leaving this trail. And then I remembered something.

I said, “Elvis, I was going to stop and get gas.” He said, “You didn’t fuel it up?” I said, “I figured we would stop at a station.” And do you know, for spite, Elvis drove it ’til it went to empty. In the middle of the Mojave Desert. He said, “Now, Lamar, you get out and find some fuel.” And I went, “Jesus Christ!” I got out, and there were all these dead cow skulls everywhere. And I hitchhiked and got some gas, and thank God, I got a policeman to bring me back. It was hot out there, boy.

MARTY LACKER: Elvis was an impulsive guy. And when you mix impulse, temper, and pills, you’re going to have some interesting situations.

In ’61, Harold Loyd went to work at Graceland, on the front gates, on the night shift. Harold was Elvis’s first cousin on his mother’s side. His mother was Rhetha Smith Loyd. She and Gladys were sisters. Rhetha died when Harold was about nine and Elvis was five. She burned to death in a house fire in Tupelo. Harold grew up living with various relatives, moving from one family to another.

Elvis liked Harold because when Elvis was a kid, Harold used to bring him candy bars, PayDays. Harold lived with the Presleys for a while in North Tupelo when he got out of the service. And every month when he got his government check, he’d cash it at a little store there and buy a box of Baby Ruths and PayDays. Elvis used to talk about that a lot. So much so that Harold wrapped up half a dozen PayDays and put them under the Christmas tree for Elvis just a couple of years before he died.

Harold never had the nerve to ask Elvis for anything. One time, he needed a pickup truck because his was falling apart, and he asked Sonny to ask Elvis because he didn’t want to do it. Elvis was funny. If you needed something, and you went to him and asked him for it, more than likely he’d say no. But if a third party came to him and said, “Elvis, So-and-so needs something,” he’d do it. So Harold got his truck, because Elvis remembered the PayDays.

Even though Harold never intentionally gave Elvis any trouble, in ’62, they got into it. Elvis came home to Memphis after Girls! Girls! Girls! He went out to the midnight movie, and when he came back about three or four in the morning, he pulled up to the gate and Harold wasn’t there—he was up checking on things around the house. Elvis was in a brand-new ’63 Buick Riviera, and he blew the horn about three times. And Harold still didn’t open the gate. Elvis had a lot of people with him—probably about fifteen cars—and he was embarrassed not to be able to get in his own driveway.

The lights were off at the gatehouse, so he thought Harold was messing around or sleeping. And he got pissed off, and he said, “Fuck you, Harold! I ain’t waiting for you.” And he backed across the highway and drove full speed through the gates—busted them open and drove up the driveway. Tore the hell out of the gates. And did about $800 damage to the car because as the gates swung open and hit the curb, they flew back and slapped the side of the Buick.

Harold heard this awful commotion, and he didn’t know what the hell had happened. He started running down from the house, and he met Elvis about halfway down the driveway. Elvis stuck his head out the window and said, “Goddamnit, I don’t know what the hell you were doing, but you better be alert! And from now on, those gates better pop open when I get there!”

For years after that, we’d be sitting out in California or somewhere, and about three or four A.M., Elvis would look at his watch and say, “I wonder what Harold is doing about now? I’ll bet he’s not sleeping on the job.”

LAMAR FIKE: Of all the group, I was the one who really got into Elvis’s shit, so to speak. But I would do it when nobody else heard me. I’d tell him what was really going on. And he’d get mad and fire me, or I’d get so disgruntled I’d quit because I couldn’t take it. It was making me nuts. Sometimes he’d punish me. Like in May of ’62. He’d just finished Girls! Girls! Girls! and we got in one of our slam-bang arguments.

By then, I’d been with Elvis five years. And I was itching to get on with my life. I wanted to work in some other aspect of the business, and it was difficult because people didn’t look at us as having any training. When Elvis and I were in Germany, we used to go over the songs he got from Hill and Range. I would help winnow them down to some reasonable amount.

As a consequence, I got pretty close with Jean Aberbach and Freddy Bienstock at Hill and Range. I first met Freddy when we were doing all the background stuff for Jailhouse Rock. So when we came back from Germany in 1960 and did G.I. Blues, Elvis set it up where I would be his liaison to Hill and Range. I did the same thing Freddy did, which was present songs to him, but Freddy couldn’t get as tight into Elvis as I could.

So in ’62, when we started arguing, I came back at him with something he didn’t expect. The month before, Dub Albritten, who was Brenda Lee’s manager, had a heart attack. Dub called me and said he couldn’t go on the road anymore and asked if I’d be Brenda’s road manager. I told him I’d have to think about it. I’d helped Brenda on a motion picture she’d done at Twentieth Century-Fox called The Two Little Bears, and I got to know Dub real well. We got along.

I didn’t really think I was going to accept. But then I had this argument with Elvis. It happened in the dining room on Bellagio Road. Elvis stormed out and went halfway up the steps, and then he turned around and said, “You’re fired!” I said, “You can’t fire me. I’ve already quit.” We parted on pretty bitter terms.

I road-managed Brenda about a year. Then she got married, and pretty soon she got pregnant, so she came off the road, and that took care of my job. But I stayed in Nashville, and took over the Hill and Range office there, and became a tighter liaison between Hill and Range and Elvis from 1963 all the way up to 1970. I learned the music business as a result of Elvis because Jean and Julian Aberbach taught me everything about publishing. I was happy doing that because I’d found my niche.

BILLY SMITH: If somebody wanted to leave Elvis’s employment and go somewhere else, that really bothered him, and he’d have to talk. If somebody quit, boy, he couldn’t take that.

LAMAR FIKE: The first year I was gone, Elvis wouldn’t contact me directly because he was still mad. But the funny thing is, after that, I was with him just as much as before. He’d do a picture, and I’d go out to California. Elvis never really let go.

BILLY SMITH: That year, 1962, was the first really chaotic year. Marty left, then Lamar left, and there were just a lot of changes. That’s when Gene come back to work for Elvis, after being gone a couple years.

When he first come back, we drove out to California in the motor home. And about Texas or Arizona, Gene started getting real hyper. He’d been up for several days on speed, and he couldn’t go to sleep. We were taking so many uppers and downers. Gene had these little pills, these uppers, which he called “go-go pills.” I guess they were Dexedrine. God, there were so many of them, I can’t remember them all.

Gene was trying to fix everything on the bus, even stuff that didn’t need fixing. He’d get a damn screwdriver, or something in his hand, and not know what in the world he was doing. He had a habit of licking his lower lip with his tongue when he was working on something, and he’d have that screwdriver and that tongue going at the same time. At one point, Elvis was driving, and Gene was trying to fix the accelerator right under his foot, with the bus going seventy-five miles an hour.

Elvis started getting annoyed because Gene was flying pretty high and being a pest. So Elvis give him five hundred milligrams of Demerol—which is a pain pill—to relax him and help him nod off. But half an hour later, Gene was still wide-awake, so Elvis give him another five hundred milligrams and told him to go back in the bedroom and lie down.

Later on, Elvis told me, “Go check on him.” It was kind of dark in back, but I saw that Gene’s eyes were about half open, which was the way he usually slept. But he was breathing odd. Then, I didn’t think he was breathing at all. So I shook him, and he felt cold.

It scared me because I’d found his brother, Junior, dead in my bed. So I thought, “Oh, God, no, Gene’s dead!” I came running back up front of the motor home and I yelled, “Elvis, pull over! I think Gene’s dead!”

Elvis slammed on those brakes, boy, and run back there and shook him. I know it scared him pretty bad, too, or he would have just said, “Aw, hell, let the son of a bitch sleep.” It took Elvis a while to wake him up, and when Gene did come around, it was slow.

At first, Elvis said, “C’mon, Gene, stay awake! Hang in there with us!” And then he wanted to kill him. He said, “Hell, you don’t know what you’re doing! You mix all this stuff up, and you don’t know what counteracts what.” Which was true. He was taking downers along with sleeping pills to counteract the uppers he’d taken earlier in the day. Elvis had started memorizing the Physician’s Desk Reference, so he knew what he could mix with what. He knew enough to tell a doctor where he hurt—make up stuff, you know—to get a certain kind of pill.

When we finally got Gene awake, Elvis dragged him out of the motor home and we walked him alongside the highway for a while to make sure he was all right. Finally, we saw he was going to make it. We got back on the bus, and Elvis climbed behind the wheel. About a minute passed, and Elvis turned around and said, “Goddamnit, Gene. I ought to kill your ass!”

MARTY LACKER: Gene Smith made the most foolish mistake of all because Elvis would have done anything for him. I guess the best way to put it is that he and Elvis had a misunderstanding about some missing jewelry. And Elvis said he didn’t ever want to see Gene again. That was late ’62. Every once in a while, Gene would come up to Graceland. But every time he came up, he wanted something. And Elvis was always hurt.

BILLY SMITH: Sometimes I think Elvis give things away more for effect than out of wanting to help somebody. For example, he had a habit of picking up hitchhikers. He’d stop, and they’d get in not knowing who it was, and he’d turn around and say, “How you doing?” Gosh, they’d just freak out. Sometimes they’d say, “Elvis Presley! And on his bus!” But a lot of times they were just too dumbfounded to say anything. They’d be in total shock.

One time he picked up two boys who were in the service. They got to talking, and he asked them where they were from and why they were hitchhiking. One of them said he was trying to get home, and he didn’t have much money. So Elvis carried them to the next city and bought ’em plane tickets. Now, he didn’t always do that. It depended on his mood. And if you hit him at the wrong time, he wouldn’t help you for nothing.

In late ’62, I was getting married, and I asked Elvis to sign a note for me at the bank. It was for $1,600, and I was in bad need of it. I told him what I needed, and he said, “Goddamnit, I can’t even walk in the house that some son of a bitch don’t want me to sign a note or give him a handout!” And I thought, “God!” It flew all over me. I know my heart sunk to my damn feet. Because I was desperate, and I thought, “My gosh, it wasn’t like I wasn’t going to pay it back.” And hell, I’d just seen him buy an expensive shotgun for some sailor in a sporting goods shop in Beverly Hills—just because Elvis overheard him talking to his wife about saving enough money to buy it.

I finally said, “The bank won’t let me have it. I’m only nineteen years old. You’ve got to be twenty-one to sign by yourself.” He didn’t say a damn word. So I said, “Well, you don’t have to sign anything. I appreciate it, but I’ll handle it myself.” I tore the note up, and I started to walk out. And then I turned and said, “I quit.”

Boy, he got mad! He got mad at himself because he knew damn well he was wrong and that he’d hurt my feelings. He couldn’t stand to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Little by little, he worked his way back around to make up with me. But I never did pursue the note no further. I worked my way out of that money mess all by myself.

MARTY LACKER: When I was back working in radio in Memphis, I used to go over to Graceland to play touch football with Elvis and the guys. And two new guys started coming around—Richard Davis and Jimmy Kingsley. They were friends. I think Richard had known Alan and Sonny, although he was a little younger, like twenty-two.

One day, Jimmy told Elvis he liked this expensive jeweled watch he had on, and Elvis just slipped it off his wrist and said, “It’s yours.”

Elvis really liked Richard better because he had a hell of a sense of humor. Jimmy was basically a nice guy, but he was a little bit of a wiseass. Sarcastic.

In August of ’62, Elvis went out to California to do It Happened at the World’s Fair. Jimmy and Richard hopped in the car and followed him out there—just showed up in L.A. and said they were on vacation.

Elvis was getting ready to go to Seattle to do the location shooting, and after he talked to them a little while, he and Joe disappeared in the bathroom. In a minute, Joe stuck his head out and asked Richard and Jimmy to come in. Elvis said, “I’m going to Seattle to do a movie. How would you like to come work for me?” Richard says they were probably the only two guys Elvis hired in a bathroom.

Richard left the group periodically and came back in. He worked as a valet with Elvis’s movie wardrobe. Jimmy didn’t do much of anything for Elvis.

BILLY SMITH: Elvis called Richard “Broom” because he was so skinny. He was a lot of fun. Whatever you wanted to do, he was in for it, regardless of how rough it got.

Jimmy would have been shunned out of the group had he not pulled the wool over everybody’s eyes. He conned us all, and he eventually let his true colors show. He started pushing Elvis to get us into the Screen Extras Guild so he could get into the Hollywood scene. He wasn’t really interested in Elvis. I could tell by the way Jimmy talked that he wasn’t going to last long. He bitched about everything that went on, and he bad-mouthed Elvis.

MARTY LACKER: About the third time Jimmy pulled that crap, I said, “You know, Jimmy, if you don’t really like the man, you shouldn’t be here taking his damn money.” Jimmy’s dead now. Shot himself, in ’89.

BILLY SMITH: The parties we had on Bellagio Road were a little different from the parties we had earlier on Perugia Way. One reason was a lot of the guys were married now, like Red, and Marty, and Joe. Or they were almost married, like me, and like Lamar. So their priorities were a little different.

MARTY LACKER: Even though at times there were so many women around, most of the married guys didn’t cheat on their wives. It was awfully tempting, but there was always a fear of somebody getting pissed off and blabbing. Two or three of the wives, by the way, married the guys just because they wanted to be around Elvis. But we never talked to anybody about what went on in the group. There’s a lot of stuff I never told my wife, and everybody else was the same way. It was an unwritten rule. In that sense, we really were a Mafia.

BILLY SMITH: Elvis had very strict rules where the girlfriends and wives were concerned. Number one was, “Don’t fool with my girlfriend, and I won’t fool with your girlfriend or your wife.” And number two, he expected the women who came to the parties to mind their manners, and when they didn’t, like Christina Crawford, he’d get angered into doing something he’d regret. He got so mad at an actress one time that he picked up a watermelon and threw it at her and hit her in the rear.

The most famous incident like that happened on Bellagio Road in ’62. A girl was there at a party, and she was trying to get Elvis’s attention any way she could. She wasn’t getting anywhere with him, and after a while, she followed him downstairs where he was playing pool. And she got real abusive.

Women to him were a dime a dozen, let’s face it. And she demanded his attention to the point where he finally had to say, “Look, I’m shooting pool, and I’m going to finish this game before I do anything else.” And she took the cue ball off the table. Elvis said, “If you do that again, they’ll have to surgically remove it.” And she said, “You’re a smartass son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

That’s all it took. The first thing that went through his mind was, “You don’t call me that—my mother’s dead!” And he harpooned the hell out of her—launched that cue stick before he even knew what he had done.

He hit her in the shoulder, almost on the collarbone—not in the breast, as some people say. And he went right over to see about her. Of course, he wasn’t going to apologize. But he felt bad about it. He told one of the guys, “Take her to the doctor and make sure she’s all right, but get her away from me.” Later, he broke down and cried because he done it. That was Elvis, though. Just for that brief moment, he would hurt you, but he wouldn’t really mean to do it.

LAMAR FIKE: I think Elvis just did what he wanted to do. He had no parameters. There was no line of demarcation. He moved the lines of behavior wherever he wanted them, and if he went too far, he moved them out farther. His discipline was nonexistent. And the more insulated he got, the stranger he got. You have to understand that you’re not dealing with a normal person. But then normal people don’t go into this business to start with. Or if they do, they aren’t normal when they get out of it.

MARTY LACKER: Elvis was never big on going to restaurants because he’d have everybody coming up to him, wanting to shake his hand or get an autograph. I never saw him refuse an autograph to someone’s face.

A couple of times, Joe talked him into going to the Luau in Beverly Hills. We used to go through the backdoor and sit in a private room in the rear. No one ever knew he was there.

We got him to go out some to the Red Velvet nightclub on Sunset Boulevard near Cahuenga. It was owned by a friend of ours, the father of a girl named Sandy Ferra who Elvis dated on G.I. Blues. She’s married to Wink Martindale now. The Red Velvet was one of our favorite hangouts.

We used to have a lot of good times. Sandy’s father, Tony, always had two booths reserved for us. He wouldn’t allow anybody else to sit there, even when he knew Elvis wasn’t coming with us.

Monday night was Talent Night. Some of the guys who came out of there were pretty good—the Righteous Brothers and the Checkmates [,Ltd.]. A lot of black groups.

BILLY SMITH: Basically, Elvis liked blacks. He liked black music, of course. But he also liked black artists in the business. And black sports heroes.

MARTY LACKER: Jim Brown, the former football star, was doing a movie out in California one time when we were out there, and he came over to the set. A number of football players used to come over and see Elvis—Rosey Grier, and Mike Henry, and a lot of guys from the [L.A.] Rams.

We always watched the Cleveland Browns because Elvis really liked Jim Brown. He liked to watch him bust tackles because Brown was the greatest runner of all time. So when these football players came to visit, Elvis would always say, “What kind of guy is Jim Brown? Do you know him?”

Everybody told us what a cold person Brown was. They said he never talked to anybody, that he never gave anybody any tips on breaking tackles, and that he was the same on the movie sets—he just didn’t share much.

Well, we found out that Brown sort of liked Elvis, and since it was mutual, Elvis invited him to come on the soundstage to meet him. We started talking to him, and he seemed real friendly. Finally, the conversation got around to “Man, how in the world did you break those tackles? You’d have four guys on you, and you’d run right through them.” And he told us how he did it. We didn’t find him reticent at all.

He came to Memphis one time for something, and Elvis said he’d like to have him out to the house. Richard and I took the limo and brought him over. We all sat in the living room, and somehow the conversation got on karate. And of course, Elvis had to get up and start doing a demonstration.

For some reason, Jim thought that was childish, or it didn’t set well with him. So he said, “Well, I’m late for an appointment. I gotta go.” And I made some stupid remark, like “What’s the matter? Can’t handle karate?” And he looked at me like “I can handle whatever you got.” And that was it. Elvis was happy to see him, but they never spoke again.

LAMAR FIKE: People ask me how Elvis felt about blacks. He had a Mississippi upbringing, so I think he had a certain amount of prejudice. But in the entertainment business, I’ve never seen a color line drawn. You’re judged on what you can do, how fast you can draw your gun. They don’t care if you’re black or white. If you can outdraw them, you’re a gunslinger.

I heard Elvis use the term “nigger” maybe once or twice, but never directly to anybody. And as a rule, he didn’t use it. Alan was on a call-in radio show out of Louisville a few years ago, and a black waiter from Chattanooga called in. His name was Willie, and he said he was standing about three people away from Elvis at the Patton Hotel in the fifties, and he overheard Elvis say, “All a nigger can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.”

But it wasn’t like him to make racist remarks like that.

MARTY LACKER: Sometime in the seventies, we were in Baltimore, and a guy who’s now a football coach with a major team came backstage with a couple other players. And he used the word “nigger.” Elvis didn’t say anything while he was there. But then Elvis made an excuse to get them out of there, like “Well, I got to get ready.” And when the coach left the dressing room, Elvis had a fit because he’d used that word. He said, “That no-good, prejudiced bastard.” With Elvis, it was always “Do as I say, not as I do.” He was prejudiced, but he didn’t want anyone else to be.

BILLY SMITH: Elvis tried not to be prejudiced, but at times he come off that way. It’s really hard to get that completely out of you when you’re brought up that way. I’m the first to admit that I still am, to a certain degree. And that’s how Elvis was.

MARTY LACKER: Every Christmas, or anytime someone asked, Elvis gave a lot of money to black charities. When he met black people, he always showed them the same respect he gave anybody else. He’d say, “Yes, sir,” and, “Yes, ma’am,” and talked to them like they were old friends.

But Elvis was prejudiced about blacks, sure he was. Because of the way he grew up. His family hated blacks, hated Jews, hated everybody. And that only came from ignorance.

You also have to consider the times. When his daughter was little, we were talking about this one time and he said he’d be damned if Lisa Marie married a black man. Which is kind of ironic now. He gave blacks all the credit in the world when it came to music. But he thought the races should be separate in love and marriage.

He had a couple of dates with Joan Blackman when he first went to Hollywood. She costarred in two of his movies, Blue Hawaii and Kid Galahad. And she used to come over to the house some. Alan asked Elvis what happened to that romance, and Elvis said Joan had dated a black guy and it turned him off.

One night at the Memphian—much later, now—Elvis was out of his mind on drugs. Me and Red were up in the lobby with him while the movie was on. Elvis started screaming and raving because this girl he had dated in California called him all upset. He said she’d told him she’d gone on a date with a famous football player who happens to be black. This guy thinks he’s a badass. He has a reputation for beating up women, especially white girls.

Well, Elvis had taken too many pills, and he was talking about shooting him or having somebody kill him. And Red and I were trying to calm him down. But he just kept on. He always thought that I was good friends with a couple of guys in the real Mafia because of my father. And he remembered that I had met some guys from what he called the Black Mafia at a music business function, so I played on that.

I said, “Elvis, do me a favor. Let me take care of it. I’ll put a stop to it.” I had no intentions of doing that, but I wanted to quiet his ass down and get him to forget about it.

He looked at me and he said, “You will?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Okay. Let me know what happens.” I think he forgot about it by the time he got home.

BILLY SMITH: Elvis went at everything in a big way. He’d do it ’til he wore it out, and then it would just die off. In the early sixties, Elvis got on this suit kick. He went through a Louis Roth phase because he went through the factory one time. Then he sent Alan down to Julius Lewis in Memphis to buy a couple dozen suits and shirts and the whole works. Everything except underwear because he didn’t wear any. Later on, he decided we should all wear suits, and he bought ’em for us—hauled us all down to some store in Beverly Hills for suits and ties.

He said, “We’re going to dress accordingly.” Well, some of us groaned, but we knew it wouldn’t do no good. For a few days, we all dressed in these new suits, uncomfortable as hell. Then one morning, Elvis showed up without his tie. Alan said, “Hey, Elvis, if you’re not wearing a tie, how come we have to?” Elvis thought a minute, and then he said, “In the mornings, if I come down in a suit, you all dress in a suit. If I come down in casual clothes, you wear casual clothes.”

Well, God, it got to looking like a Keystone Kops comedy—guys constantly going back in their bedrooms to change. Colonel saw us in the suits one day and told us they made us look like old men. Boy, Elvis didn’t like that! That was the last time he made us wear suits.

MARTY LACKER: Just before It Happened at the World’s Fair, Elvis had everybody get black jumpsuits. He got a white jumpsuit for himself. Then they all got in the Dodge motor home—which was also black and white—and took off across country.

They’d pile out at the service stations to stretch, and the attendants and the other customers would take one look at ’em and get uneasy. Some people just got back in their cars without getting their gas—I guess they thought they were about to get robbed.

When they went to Seattle for the location shooting, Elvis told the guys to keep wearing the jumpsuits so he could pick them out in the crowd because the World’s Fair drew eighty thousand to one hundred thousand people a day.

After they finished up there, they went to Vegas to relax. We did wear our suits in Vegas because it was stylish. And in Vegas, the sun bothered us, so we all wore dark sunglasses.

Elvis had Joe make reservations to see Johnnie Ray at the Hacienda Hotel, and when twelve guys who all looked alike arrived in black limousines and black mohair suits and sunglasses, people started to stare. The guys just automatically surrounded Elvis to protect him from the crowd, and somebody yelled out, “Who the hell are they, the Mafia?”

A Las Vegas newspaper reporter happened to be there, and he put “Memphis” in front of “Mafia.” And when it came out in the newspaper the next day, it just stuck. Elvis thought it was funny, and since it made him sound like a bad dude, he decided it was all right. He even used it sometimes. We’d been called “flunkies,” and “leeches,” and worse, you know. So Elvis told us we finally had a respectable title.