CHAPTER 26
By April of ’63, RCA boasted that Elvis had sold more than 100 million records worldwide. While that made Elvis the undisputed King of Rock ’n’ Roll, in his film roles the transformation from rough rocker to passive leading man was complete—and the movie songs more flaccid than ever. In a 1961 press conference, Elvis tried to put the best spin on everything, declaring, “I would like to play a dramatic role, but . . . I’m not ready for that, really. I haven’t had enough experience in acting, and until I’m ready for it, it would be foolish to undertake something very dramatic . . . You can rest assured that there will be music in almost all of them . . . There has to be.”
On-screen, and before the public, Elvis was handsome and debonair, laying his perfect manners out like a sterling silver place setting—the personification of a desirable bachelor-at-large. At home, he was becoming increasingly something else.
MARTY LACKER: All the time I was in radio, I liked to write and be creative, and most of the spots I did were humorous. We did good production work at WHBQ. A guy from WNOE in New Orleans heard about me and offered me a job there as production director and weekend on-air talent. It paid a lot more, so I went down there in October of ’62. And for the first time, WNOE became the number one station.
My personal life wasn’t going as smoothly. Patsy hadn’t really wanted to move to New Orleans. I found a house for us out near Lake Pontchartrain, and the first two days we were there, it was so hot we had lizards crawling on the walls. The mosquitoes were unbearable. Sheri was two or three years old, and as soon as she went out the door, she’d come back in with her whole face a mass of mosquito bites. That really shook Patsy up. Quite frankly, she had a nervous breakdown while we were there. It was hard for me to see her like that. And it was rough in other ways. Especially financially. Even though I was making more, it seemed like I was always broke.
My son, Marc, was born on January 8, ’63. He had the same birthday as Elvis and my sister, Anne. My bills were so high that I didn’t know how I was going to get him out of the hospital. I mentioned it to either Alan or George Klein during a phone conversation, and one of them told Elvis. About three days later, I opened up the mail and there was a check from Elvis for $300. I was so surprised. I wrote him a thank-you note and told him I’d pay him back as soon as I could.
That spring, we were back in Memphis. The year before, Joe had married a Vegas showgirl named Joanie, and his daughter, Debbie, had been born. We went back for the christening.
While we were home, I went over to Graceland. Little by little, I’d saved $50 in cash—I remember it was two twenties and a ten—and I put it in a white envelope. Patsy was with me, and the three of us talked for a while. Then when Elvis was getting ready to go upstairs, I asked him if I could see him in private for a minute.
That’s the way most of the guys would start when they wanted to borrow money, and he knew it. He didn’t like to be asked for money unless you had a really good reason. So he said, “Yeah, what is it?” I pulled the envelope out of my back pocket, and I handed it to him. I said, “That’s part of the money you sent me when my son was born. I’ll pay the rest back as soon as I can.” He looked so surprised. We were in the dining room at the time, and he left and went up the hall stairs. And as he got halfway up, he turned to me and said, “You don’t know what this means to me. You’re the first one who’s ever paid me back.” And he had tears in his eyes.
Fifteen minutes later, he came back downstairs. I was sitting at a table on the patio. And he handed me the envelope and said for me to take it back, that I needed it more than he did, and the fact that I tried to pay it back made him happier than he could say. Then he said he’d burn the damn money if I didn’t. So I put it in my pocket.
LAMAR FIKE: In May of ’63, Elvis came to Nashville for a recording session at RCA’s Studio B. I hadn’t seen him since I quit the year before. I went over to the studio, and we hugged and made up.
After that, I was back and forth with him, going out and doing pictures with him and heading up the Nashville office of Hill and Range. I spent most of my time finding songs for him. That year—1963—was also the year I met Kevin Eggers. Kevin had a company with Hill and Range, and we became friends. After Elvis died, Kevin put the whole deal together for the Goldman book and published it under his imprint at McGraw-Hill.
When I was talking to Elvis at the recording session, I told him I was getting married. I’d met a woman named Nora at the Copacabana while I was working for Brenda Lee. She was a Copa girl, a dancer. I said, “My name is Lamar Fike, and I’m going to marry you.” I was twenty-eight at the time.
When I started back traveling with Elvis, I got right back into that cocoon, to where the outside world was very strange to me. I had a phone in my car because I was in the business, and I got used to having one with Elvis.
One day, I had to pick up Freddy Bienstock at the airport. It was about seven-thirty in the morning. I was driving, and here was all this traffic. I didn’t know what to do. I got on the phone and called Nora. I said, “Is there some sort of bomb scare, or attack or fire somewhere?”
She said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “There are all kind of cars out here on the road at seven-thirty in the morning! They’re everywhere! What are they doing?” She said, “Lamar, it’s rush hour. They’re going to work.” I had totally forgotten that people did that at that hour. Because I’d go to work at ten or ten-thirty.
I also discovered real quick that being away so much didn’t help the marriage. I was married to Elvis, really. Hell, we all were. There was never any question where my allegiance was. My wife was secondary. And most of the guys felt that way. Not because Elvis made us feel that way. Because we chose to be that way.
I’m just now, in my late fifties, getting to know my children, for Christ’s sake. I mean, you’re talking eternal devotion to Elvis. The Catholic Church would hope to God it has monks and nuns as dedicated as we were. Seriously. Hitler never had the kind of loyalty Elvis had around him.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis expected us to be married to him. He didn’t want you to put anybody before him. My wife’s greatest struggle was with Elvis. She thought she was in a battle with him over me. And she was.
A lot of times I thought, “God, what in the hell am I doing? I’ve got a family here.” I regret it now. But I wanted to be loyal, and I also liked that lifestyle—the excitement, the pictures, Hollywood. It gets in your blood.
It made me feel special. Yet I wanted to be home with my family, too. It was hell. But it had to be even worse for Jo because the guys were constantly doing things, and she was alone. And it took me a while to see that she was going through sheer misery. Jo still sees Elvis as a threat, and he’s not even here.
MARTY LACKER: My family and I stayed in New Orleans almost a year, and then we went back to Knoxville, where all of Patsy’s relatives lived. I didn’t have a job, but my reputation was still good enough to radio to get me a shot at the morning show.
Patsy was ecstatic because she wanted to stay in Knoxville with her family. But that afternoon, Alan called. He said, “Elvis wants to know if you want to come back.” That was September of ’63. I thought about it a little while, and then I gave him my decision. My wife wasn’t pleased.
Once I started back to work, I told Vernon to take $25 a week out of my paycheck until I’d paid back the whole $300 Elvis had loaned me. I said, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell Elvis.” I don’t think he ever did.
BILLY SMITH: About ’63, I think, is when Elvis started realizing that the movies weren’t ever going to get much better. He called them his “travelogues.” The story almost always stayed the same—boy, girl, romance, trouble, lots of songs, happy ending. Only the locations changed. Fun in Acapulco was maybe a little more forgettable than some of the others. Hell, most of ’em after Wild in the Country are pretty forgettable.
He done Fun in Acapulco with Ursula Andress. She scared him a little, I think. She wasn’t his kind of woman because she wasn’t petite and she wasn’t dark-haired. Alan had the hots for her. He always liked blondes. But Elvis was more fascinated by her than anything. She had those big shoulders, you know. He was laughing about it one day. He said, “I was embarrassed to take off my damn shirt next to her!”
But they flirted with each other some. She was married to John Derek, but she used to call Graceland a lot. She wouldn’t ask for Elvis because she knew Priscilla was there. So she’d ask for Alan. And then the secretaries would tell Alan that Ursula called, and Alan would call her back, and Elvis would get on the phone.
MARTY LACKER: There’s a picture of Elvis and Ursula in the booklet for RCA’s From Nashville to Memphis boxed set, where they’re gazing at each other on the movie set, like they’re ready to gobble each other up. But that wasn’t any real big romance. He just enjoyed being with her. She came to visit him on the Roustabout set later on and maybe on another picture, too. Her nickname was “Ooshie.”
BILLY SMITH: Elvis didn’t actually go down to Mexico for Fun in Acapulco. He done it all at Paramount, except for a camera crew who went down there and shot the backgrounds and stuff. Elvis was kind of touchy about Mexico, anyway.
Back in ’57, a Mexico City newspaper said Elvis had eloped and come down there to get married and that they had a hotel suite reserved for him. Well, he didn’t even know the girl he was supposed to be married to. So he said it wasn’t true, and the rumor went around that he’d gone on the radio in Texas and said he’d kiss three black girls before he’d kiss a Mexican girl. I’m sure he never said any such thing in public. Or it would have been in a joking way. He loved the Spanish look a whole lot and copied some of that. And he had Mexican friends through the years.
That statement about Mexican girls like to start a war down in Mexico City. They said this was further proof that Elvis was ruining the morals of America, and now he was starting on Mexico. Radio stations down there wouldn’t play his records, and a bunch of people got together in a downtown square and piled up his pictures and his albums and set ’em on fire. Somebody even took out a big newspaper ad that said, “Death to Elvis Presley!” It ended up in his FBI file. Stuff like that hurt him.
MARTY LACKER: Altogether, Elvis probably gave away a hundred cars and trucks. And each year at Christmas, he gave $105,000 to Memphis charities. He did a lot of other nice things for people, too, that you never heard about. He bought a house for one of his maids, for example. You might expect that. But he did things you wouldn’t expect. Like when he first got famous, he bought ROTC uniforms for Humes High. And then later on, he anonymously gave a lot of stuff to the Los Angeles Police Department, like money for toys for kids at Christmas. And then kind of offbeat things, like uniforms for the police marching band and flak jackets for the dogs that sniffed out bombs. Actually, they probably also sniffed out drugs.
A lot of people hit him up for things, and he could have said no a lot more than he did. For example, when we moved back to the Perugia Way house, there were two English girls who used to come to the house on weekends. They were sisters. They lived in Redondo Beach, south of L.A., and they’d come up and sit and talk to Elvis.
The schedule back on Perugia Way was no different from anywhere else. On the weekends, we’d stay up all night. When the sun started coming up, Elvis went to bed. He was like Dracula.
One morning, we all went to bed, and I was in my room, and the phone rang. I answered it, and it was the English girls, just sobbing. I kept saying, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Finally, they said, “We got home and found our mother dead on the floor.” I talked to them for a while, and they said they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t have any money to take her to a funeral home.
I asked them where they wanted to have her buried, and one of them said, “I know Mother would want to be buried back in England.” But she said none of their relatives over there had any money. And then she said, “To be honest with you, you’re really the only people we know over here.” So I said, “Give me your number, and I’ll call you back.”
Elvis hadn’t gone to sleep yet, so I told him about the call. And he said, “Do whatever has to be done.” I took care of the arrangements, telling the funeral home to prepare the mother any way that the girls wanted and ship her home to England. Elvis paid for everything. And then he flew the girls to England with the body. That’s the last we heard of them. Except to get a very nice letter.
I could give you a lot of examples where Elvis showed he cared about people that he didn’t even know—people he heard about whose situations touched him. But other times, he just didn’t give a shit.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis started getting into class separation. If he got ticked off at somebody in the group, it might be weeks before he’d speak to them again. He’d turn to somebody else and say, “That cocksucker, I’m ready to fire him.” He’d pal up with that guy for a while, and then it wouldn’t be long ’til he’d go to the next one.
A lot of times, if he was hacked at somebody, he’d start thinking there was a Judas among us, and he’d start telling things to just one person, and he’d play one of us against the other. This always happened when he’d heard that one of the guys had said something about him. And we were all guilty of that.
To some degree, Elvis was paranoid. When everybody thought he wasn’t around, he’d stand at the top of the stairs at Graceland, or in the doorway coming down to the den, where we couldn’t see him, and listen to our conversation. He did this in California, too. And if somebody said something, he’d bring somebody else up and say, “I understand that So-and-so thinks such-and-such.” Then you almost knew that either somebody had said something to him or he had overheard you.
Same way with the Colonel. The Colonel picked the hell out of every one of us to find out what Elvis done.
MARTY LACKER: By the early to middle sixties, anytime Elvis saw two of the guys talking by themselves, he thought they were talking about him. He’d say, “What the hell are you whispering about?” That’s what happened the time he hit Sonny at a party on Perugia Way, which shocked the life out of us. That’s when we knew he had really changed.
BILLY SMITH: Sonny had a date. He brought her up there, and he thought she was making eyes at Elvis and Elvis was making eyes at her. One thing led to another, and Elvis supposedly put a move on her, and Sonny resented it. The rules were that if you brought your own date, she was off limits to everybody else.
Sonny said, “Hey, man, this is my date. You know I can’t compete with you.” And Elvis said, “Well, Sonny, the girl come on to me.” From there, Sonny got real agitated, and they got into a cuss fight, and Sonny started backing Elvis up ’til he backed him into a wall. He got right up in Elvis’s face. And he should never have done that because Elvis thought he had no choice but to fight back. Because Elvis was like a caged animal. He was scared, and he was probably a little bit leery of Sonny, and he was leery of Red.
In a plain old fistfight, either one of them could have whipped Elvis, but he was a funny person. He would kill you in a minute, boy, because when you got him cornered, he didn’t know no better, and he’d urge you on. And he picked up a Coke bottle first. But thank goodness he hit Sonny with his fist.
Sonny didn’t hit him back because he couldn’t believe it. He was stunned. He felt like it shouldn’t have come to blows, and he was shocked because Elvis had never hit one of the guys before. Sonny thought they were just arguing and cussing each other. Sonny yelled, “I quit!” And Elvis yelled something like, “You can’t quit, you mother-you-know-what, because I’ve fired your ass!” Then Elvis pretty well kicked him out of the house. Although when Sonny was packing, Elvis had one of the guys make sure he had some money. And it was a good while after that until Sonny come back.
One time in ’63, Elvis had been upset about something, and he took it out on all of us. Then he realized what he’d done. And he broke down and cried. He said, “You guys know how I am. Don’t take it personal. You know I don’t mean it.” We knew he had a lot of fears. And he had to maintain a certain image. Like he once said in a press conference, “An image is one thing, and a human being is another.” He had to live up to that image.
MARTY LACKER: The difference in Elvis and the image of Elvis was never greater than in the TV movies they’ve made about him. Nothing has been done that even comes close to capturing his personal power or the strength of his personality. He had a great deal of intensity, magnetism. That’s the reason most of us stayed with him for so long.
BILLY SMITH: The thing about Elvis was that you never knew where you stood with him. All he had to do was get mad and start taking it out on the guys, and I’d get angry and say, “The hell with this,” and leave. I was fired numerous times, but it didn’t last more than a hour or maybe a day at the most. But I actually quit about three times.
I quit one time in late ’63 because of Vernon. We were in California, on Perugia Way. In ’63, my first son, Danny, was born. We’d been out in California two or three months, and by now this was really getting old to me. No wives were allowed out there at the house. And it was putting a heck of a strain on my marriage, and I’m sure on Esposito’s, too.
I talked to Elvis about it, and he said, “Well, call her every night if you want to—I don’t care.” He was making Viva Las Vegas, I think. And he said, “Tell Jo it won’t be much longer. As soon as I get through with the movie, we’ll come home.”
We went home, like he said. We were home about three or four weeks. Then two days before we were fixin’ to go back to California for Kissin’ Cousins, Vernon come up to me and said, “Before you leave, I want to know how you plan to pay this phone bill.” I said, “What phone bill?” He said, “The one for all those calls you made back to Memphis from California.” He said, “You run up a bill close to $600.”
My first thought was, “God Almighty!” Because that was an awful lot of money back then. And then I thought a second, and I said, “What do you mean? Elvis is going to pay it.” And Vernon said, “Uh-uh, this is too much. It’s going to have to come out of your check.” And I flew mad.
I was making seventy-five dollars a week. I said, “I’ll tell you what. As of today, you can quit paying me. That way you’ll get it paid a hell of a lot quicker. Tell Elvis I quit.” And I got in my car and went home.
Vernon may have been my uncle, but my relationship with him had gone downhill years before that. You could tell he resented all the guys around Elvis. He didn’t show it as much when Aunt Gladys was alive. But after Elvis come back from Germany, and he had more guys around him, Vernon let that resentment show. Maybe it was because Elvis spent more. Vernon was always watching that money, boy.
Elvis didn’t see me that night. And the next night, when they were getting ready to go back to California, Esposito called me and said, “Where are you? We’re packing already.” I said, “I’m not going. You tell Elvis that I quit.” He asked me why, and I said, “You tell Elvis to ask his damn daddy why.”
Later, one of the guys told me Elvis threw a fit and tore the kitchen all to hell and back. And then he started in cussing his daddy. He told Vernon, “Goddamn, Daddy, I’m rich! There are some things you don’t do!” But he never once called me or said he was sorry about it. He went on to California, and I stayed here in Memphis. I went to work for a little old lumber company.
I didn’t have any contact with Elvis for probably three or four months. And if I hadn’t made the first move, I might never have had any more. But it got around Christmastime, and I missed him real bad. So I bought him a box of candy, and put a Christmas card with it, and wrote down my name. I said, “I wish you the best.”
My daddy was still working for him as gate guard. And Elvis sent word to my daddy that just because I’d quit didn’t mean I wasn’t allowed to come up there. So I went on up because I knew he wouldn’t come to me.
I got up at the house, and Elvis asked me what happened, and I told him exactly what it was. He said everything was forgiven. And then he said, “But don’t ever do that again.” He said, “Come to me. My daddy works for me just like you do.” And I thought, “Yeah, right. I’m going to put myself above your daddy and put him in the middle.” I’m kind of dumb about a lot of things, but I was never that dumb.
From then on things were pretty much cleared up. Vernon never told me to do anything again. And I didn’t have to pay the phone bill. I wasn’t about to pay the damn thing.
LAMAR FIKE: From ’63 to ’64 on, Elvis got squirrelier then a yard dog. The pictures started declining, and he got tired of doing the same thing. He’d have to be damn near drugged to do a singing scene. And when I was out in California with him, I saw that things got weirder at the house, too.
BILLY SMITH: One day on Perugia Way, we were all in the den watching a war movie on TV. Elvis started talking about how stuff like that was done in the studio—how the special effects guys did such a great job making a tub of water look like a real ocean and toy ships look like real ones. Then he got this sort of mischievous grin on his face, and he said, “Let’s set up our own ocean in the pool.”
He sent Richard and me down to the toy store to buy all the boats they had, and about twelve BB guns. We went back to the house and put all the little boats in the pool and loaded the guns. Then we lined up, and Elvis said, “Ready, aim, fire!” And we blasted the hell out of those little boats. Plastic flew all over the place.
After about an hour of this, we started getting bored and we kind of eased up. Nobody said anything—just started putting the rifles down. And then Elvis said, “You know what’s wrong? It’s too easy. We need moving targets.” So he sent us back to the store for those little windup boats and some with batteries. And he said, “Get some more BB guns so we won’t have to stop and reload.”
We got home and put the boats in the water, and Elvis yelled, “All guns poolside!” Then he set a time limit, and whoever sank the most ships would be declared the best shot. Of course, Elvis bragged that he was the best shot because he’d won some sharpshooter medal in the army. Well, the battle began, and this went on for the rest of the day. We even had snacks brought down to the pool so we wouldn’t have to stop to eat. The neighbors must have . . . well, they thought we were lunatics anyway.
At some point, somebody tried to take a picture—Joe, maybe—and the flashbulb didn’t go off. He picked it off the top of the camera and threw it in the pool, and somebody took a shot at it. Well, when the BB hit it, it flashed. So Elvis told us to go to the camera shop and buy all the flash bulbs they had. We were standing at the cash register, and the salesman said, “What kind of film do you need to go with these?” And Richard said, “Oh, we don’t use film with them.” And the guy said, “I see.” He watched us all the way out the door.
By the time we got back to the house, it was getting sort of dark. We dumped all the bulbs in the pool and lined up with the rifles and cut loose. And man, that pool lit up like the Fourth of July. It never hit us that the flashbulbs were made of glass, you know. And next morning, we come out there and seen what a mess we’d made. We had this Mexican gardener, and when he seen all this glass and broken plastic in the bottom of the pool and all over the yard, he about keeled over. He couldn’t speak English, but we got his message loud and clear. Some of the guys cleaned up the yard, and the rest of us took the pool.
We never did it again, but not because of the mess—because Elvis lost interest. It was fun while it lasted, and it helped him release tension. If he’d just stuck to BB guns from then on out, it would have cut down on a whole lot more tension later on.
MARTY LACKER: The day John F. Kennedy was shot, I’d been up two or three days doing pills. I was always taking pills. Sometimes I stayed up four or five days on them. I’d have to take a lot of sleeping pills just to counteract the uppers so I could finally get some rest.
Anyway, that morning, I’d gone to my room to go to bed, and I’d turned on the TV to relax. And the bulletin came on saying President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.
Elvis had gone to bed an hour or so earlier, and I figured he was probably asleep. But I knew he really liked Kennedy. So I went in the hallway and knocked on his door. I didn’t get an answer, and I knocked harder. And I heard him say, “Get away from the door! Go on! I don’t want to be bothered now.”
I said, “Elvis, you need to get up. President Kennedy was just assassinated in Dallas.” There was this long pause. And then he said, “What?” I said, “President Kennedy was just assassinated, and it’s on TV.” I thought he would turn on the television in his room and watch it from bed. Instead he yelled, “Have them bring some coffee into the den.” And he got up and put his robe on and came on in there. By that time, I got some of the other guys up, and we all gathered around the TV.
Most of us were just silent, but Elvis started screaming and hollering. He said, “What kind of no-good motherfucker would do that? Kennedy’s a good man!” He had his coffee cup in his hand. And all of a sudden, he slammed his cup down on the big marble-topped table in front of the television. It broke in his hand, and the pieces just shot everywhere.
I’m sure Kennedy’s death reminded him of his own mortality, which always made him uneasy. But it was more than that. Elvis thought of himself in the same context as the president. He said, “Goddamnit, if anybody ever assassinates me, I want you guys to get to him before the police do. I want you to pull his eyes out, rip his throat apart, and kill that son of a bitch!” He said, “I want you to make him suffer! I don’t want some mealymouthed bastard going on television and telling the world, ‘I took out Elvis Presley.’” He was just screaming. He said, “I don’t want him to be able to sit there and smirk about it.”
We were kind of shocked, you know, even though we knew he got in a terrible mood whenever somebody he liked or admired died. This one had more behind it, though, because he’d gotten these death threats through the years, and in fact, he’d get another one about six weeks later, on a postcard from Huntsville, Alabama. It was handwritten, and addressed to “President Elvis Presley, Memphis, Tennessee.” It said, “You will be next on my list,” and it had his name on the top, and then Johnny Cash, and some name we couldn’t really make out, and then an attempt at writing President Lyndon Johnson, and then George Wallace. Vernon took it seriously because Huntsville was where Dee’s family lived, and he thought some of her wacko relatives might have sent it.
With the Kennedy assassination, Elvis stayed glued to the TV for two days. And when they led Lee Harvey Oswald through the jail on his way to the sheriff’s office, Elvis started ranting again. He said, “I mean it! If somebody kills me, I want you to get to that son of a bitch and torture him!” And he was talking to Oswald on TV, saying, “You no-good wimpy bastard! You rotten son of a bitch!” And again, he looked around and said, “You remember what I told you, guys!” And his eyes were almost glowing, he was so hot. Then when Jack Ruby shot Oswald, it set Elvis off again. He started screaming, “That’s right! Kill that little bastard! Don’t let him sit up there and tell everybody how he killed the president!”
I think that’s when his fondness for guns began to turn into an obsession. He realized that if somebody could bring down President Kennedy, they could take him out just as easily. His obsession didn’t really take hold for a couple of years, though. He had another obsession at the time—Ann-Margret.