BILLY SMITH: The damn pill bottles might as well have said “Hill and Range,” or “RCA,” or “Colonel.” Because Elvis started to take a really good look at the advice Colonel was giving him. Like about that yacht.
MARTY LACKER: Sometime in late ’63, Colonel read in the newspaper that the Potomac was going to be salvaged. The Potomac was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidential yacht. He had a summit meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin on it. And that’s where he got the telegram from Albert Einstein and Edward Teller telling him the atomic bomb test was successful.
Colonel thought it would be good publicity for Elvis to save the Potomac. So they bought it for $55,000. The thing was a wreck, but instead of restoring it, Colonel pulled one of his carny tricks—he had only one side of the boat painted, the side that faced the cameras at the dock. But as soon as Colonel got the word out that Elvis was going to give the boat to charity, they had a rude awakening. Nobody wanted it. Including the March of Dimes, which was a crime, since FDR suffered from polio, and that was his charity. I guess they were afraid they couldn’t afford to maintain it.
Finally, St. Jude, the Memphis children’s hospital that Danny Thomas founded, said they’d like to have it. They were going to sell it and use the money for the hospital. But Colonel arranged this big ceremony with Elvis and Danny Thomas in Long Beach Harbor in February of ’64.
There were a lot of photographers there, and Elvis was all smiles when he and Thomas signed the papers. But when we got in the car, Elvis was just spewing, he was so angry. He said, “That ungrateful motherfucker!” Apparently, when they were sitting at the table, Thomas leaned over and whispered, “Why in the hell did you buy this piece of shit?”
LAMAR FIKE: The Colonel made more good decisions than bad, I think. In the mid-sixties, he had a lot on his mind. His wife, Marie, developed Alzheimer’s disease, and she deteriorated pretty fast. She didn’t actually die until the mid-eighties. The Colonel kept a nurse with her around the clock.
MARTY LACKER: By about ’64, Joe and Charlie were making frequent reports to the Colonel. Joe, especially. That led to a lot of tension. I liked Joe, even though he looked down on some of the guys. Red didn’t like Joe, and the feeling was mutual. Joe looked upon Red as this big ol’ dumb tough guy, which was far from the truth. And Red hated Joe because of his attitude. There were a couple of times Red came close to busting Joe up pretty good.
LAMAR FIKE: I didn’t have much use for Joe. After Elvis died, he popped off at me about something, and I said, “Listen to me, you little cocksucker. The only reason I put up with you was to keep some sort of harmony in this organization.” I said, “Elvis is dead. You got no hold on anybody here. Nobody gives a fuck about you, and people are tired of your shit. Furthermore, you’re lucky Red West hasn’t killed you.”
BILLY SMITH: Joe thought he was better than some of Elvis’s family. He was a big college man and pretty smart. I liked him in some ways, and in other ways, I didn’t. He was a perfect example of a guy who pretended to be above average, but wasn’t. I’d say Joe’s philosophy was, “If you can’t dazzle ’em with your brilliance, then stun ’em with your bullshit.”
LAMAR FIKE: Joe cared about Elvis, but he also used him. He spent tons of money on his expense account. After he got married, he lived out in California, and he couldn’t have maintained his lifestyle out of what Elvis was paying him. So he supplemented his income by making sure he got the same perks Elvis got. Like from the hotels. If Elvis got a crystal set, Joe would make sure he got one, too. He pulled that leverage thing. I looked him right in the face once, and I said, “Joe, if I had my choice between you and a hernia, I’d rather have that belt on.”
MARTY LACKER: Charlie was worse. Charlie was like a little puppy dog around Elvis. But when you asked Charlie to do something, Charlie’s pat answer was, “I don’t do that. That’s not my job.” Hell, he didn’t have a job! Later, when Elvis went back on the road and Charlie held his scarves for him, Charlie would say, “I don’t do that because my job is being onstage with Elvis.”
BILLY SMITH: There was this class separation, see. It was like Joe was number one, and Charlie always thought he was second. He had this idea of him and Joe being called “Sarge” and “Lieutenant.” They wanted to run the group like a military operation. I thought, “Sergeant Esposito, hell!” I didn’t call him a damn thing, except maybe “son of a bitch.”
Stuff like that just burnt me up. I resented the fact that I was related to Elvis, and I’d known him all my life, yet I had some guy working for him telling me what to do. So I just raised hell about it. Finally, Elvis told Joe and Charlie, “Leave him alone. I’ll take care of him.”
Elvis knew what Joe and Charlie were doing. And he was well aware that too many things were getting back to the Colonel. After a while, Joe began to get a little braver about how he talked to Elvis. Then one day it was all over. Elvis and Joe had words. And Elvis fired him.
MARTY LACKER: I guess you could say that Joe quit because Elvis couldn’t ever fire anybody. Not directly. What happened was, we were coming home to Memphis from doing one of the pictures, and we stopped in Amarillo, Texas, at a Holiday Inn. The word got out to the press that Elvis was there. And that evening, when we woke up, there was a crowd of people and TV cameras outside the hotel. That really upset Elvis because he wanted to leave and he couldn’t walk out without causing a commotion. So he started ripping into Joe, saying he let it leak out, because it was the foreman’s job to check into the motel and set up the rooms.
I remember this so vividly. Joe and I were up in Elvis’s room. Elvis was sitting on the bed, and Joe was leaning against the dresser, and I was right by the door. And Elvis was screaming at Joe. I said, “Wait a minute, Elvis.” And he said, “You shut up! I don’t want to hear it!” And he started in on Joe again. After that, neither one spoke to the other, all the way from Amarillo to Memphis. Which meant there was something else underlying all this because most of the time, Elvis stayed mad for about thirty minutes. And once we got on the road, Joe would have joked him out of it.
When we got back to Graceland, Elvis went upstairs. Usually, when we came back off a trip, he’d stay upstairs for a few days, just to unwind by himself, and we’d go off to our families, even though we’d check in every day. But when we were in Memphis, Joe lived there at Graceland in the garage apartment because his family was in California.
I’d go over every day, and I’d ask Joe, “Did you hear from Elvis?” And he’d say, “When I call up there he won’t answer the phone.” Well, this went on for a week. And Joe said, “I don’t know what to do. I’ve got all these checks that need to be signed.” And he said, “If he doesn’t talk to me soon, I’m going back to California.” I said, “You mean quit?” And he said, “Yeah, I guess so. It doesn’t look like he wants me around.”
LAMAR FIKE: If Elvis really wanted you gone, he’d make your life so damn miserable that you would leave. He’d shut you down. And most of the time you’d never know why.
MARTY LACKER: After about ten days, Joe said, “If he don’t talk to me today, I’m leaving. I’m going to call up there and tell him.” Elvis answered the phone, but he didn’t want to deal with Joe. So Joe said, “If you’re not going to come down and sign these checks, then I’m going home.” And he waited and waited, but Elvis didn’t come down. So Joe handed me the checkbook and the gas cards and the bills, and he said, “You tell him I waited as long as I could.”
I tried to get him to stay, but he got somebody to drive him to the airport. And no sooner had Joe pulled out of the gate than the intercom buzzed there in the garage apartment. I answered it, and Elvis said, “Is he gone yet?” I said, “He just left.” And Elvis said, “Tell Hattie I want my breakfast. I’m coming down.”
I waited until he finished eating, and then I said, “Here, Elvis, Joe left these credit cards and the checks to be signed.” And he turned to me and he said, “Well, it looks like we got a new foreman.” I thought he meant I was pushing myself on him. So I said, “No, Joe just asked me to give these to you.” But he repeated it. Then he said, “And you got a raise.” So I said, “Are you sure?” And he said, “Yeah.” That’s how I became foreman. I think my pay went up to $150 a week.
My family and I had been living with my parents, way over on the other side of town. But now, since I had to be with Elvis twenty-four hours a day, I said, “Elvis, if it’s okay with you, we’re just going to move out to the garage.” And he thought he’d play with me a little bit. He said, “Goddamnit. I make you the foreman, and the very next minute, you want to move into my fuckin’ house.” And he started laughing.
BILLY SMITH: In ’64, we’d been out in California for two movies, which was about four months. And like before, I was real eager to get back to Memphis. There were only four of us with Elvis then—me, Richard, Marty, and Alan. The others had quit or been fired. And Red and Sonny were off working in the movies.
Elvis had a hairdresser named Sal Orifice. It turns out Sal was getting ready to start his own business, but nobody knew it. He was keeping it secret. All we knew was that he wasn’t coming up to the house as frequently. One day, Elvis asked if anybody had got in touch with Sal to come up and fix his hair. We said we couldn’t find him, which was true. Elvis got mad and said, “You sons of bitches tell him that if he can’t make it up here, as much money as I pay him, then I don’t need him.”
Well, I took that personally. I didn’t like being called a son of a bitch.
In a little while, we found Sal, and he come up to the house late that night. Elvis had already gone to his room, and he was still mad. So when Sal come up, I told him exactly what Elvis said. Sal said, “That’s why I come up here tonight, to tell Elvis that I’m going to have to quit. I’m starting my own shop.”
About two hours later, Elvis come out and said, “Did anybody get in touch with Sal?” And I piped up and said, “I told him exactly what you said, Elvis. I said, ‘If you can’t get up here when Elvis wants you . . . ’”
And Elvis never let me finish. He thought I’d fired him. He didn’t know that Sal was already quitting. All he knew was that he had movie rehearsal the next day and no hairdresser. So he threw a temper tantrum. He beat the coffee table and jumped up and said, “Since you’re all in a firing mood, all you sons of bitches are fired! Get the hell out.”
Boy, whew! I know my face went red. But I just said, “Okay.” I went in my room, and I packed my suitcase. I think everybody else hung around a little while to see if Elvis was really serious.
When I come out, I went in the den to tell Elvis goodbye. He was sitting there with his leg propped on the coffee table and shaking his foot the way he always done when he was nervous or mad. He said, “You leaving?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m heading for Memphis. I’ve got to find a job.” And Elvis said, “Then take all these other sons of bitches with you.” So Richard and Marty took me to the airport.
Alan was the only one left at the house. And about an hour or two later, Elvis fired him, too. But Alan told Elvis he wasn’t going to leave until he got somebody else to come stay with him—that he’d leave the next day. A little bit later, Alan was getting ready to go to bed and Elvis buzzed him and said, “What time does that plane to Memphis leave?” Alan said he wasn’t sure. And Elvis said, “Call and have that plane stopped and get Billy back here.”
Alan called the airport and had Marty paged. He told him, “Elvis wants you to bring Billy on back.” Treating me like I was still a little kid, you know. He said, “Even if he’s already boarded, get him off.” So Marty ran like a wild man, which for Marty was pretty good. I was already in my seat, even. Marty told me what Alan wanted, and I said, “No, you tell him I’m not coming home. I’ve got to find a job. I don’t have time for all this.”
Marty went back to the phone and told Alan, and then he come back and said, “Alan wants to talk to you.” Well, Alan went through the whole thing. I said, “Look, tell Elvis if he wants me back, he’s got to tell me himself.”
Alan said, “Hold on.” And Elvis got on the phone, and boy, it liked to killed him. He said, in this real curt tone, “Yeah?” I said, “Look, if I’m fired, I’ve got to go home.” I said, “If I’m hired, well, I’m not going to say I’m sorry. That’s going to have to come from you. Because I don’t think I was at fault. I just need to know one way or the other.” And Elvis said, as fast as he could talk, “I’m sorry, and you’re hired.”
MARTY LACKER: Sal recommended a hairdresser named Larry Geller, who worked at Jay Sebring’s shop. Jay ended up being one of Charles Manson’s victims. Elvis was on his way back to Memphis in May of ’64 and brought Larry with him. And little by little Geller just eased his way into the group.
Geller was Jewish, but he was into all this mystic stuff. He’s one of the reasons Elvis’s head got so screwed up. California was sort of a breeding ground for all these off-the-wall Far Eastern religions. And Geller really filled Elvis’s head with all that stuff. I started calling him “The Swami.” Then everybody used it.
Before Elvis met Larry Geller, the only religious book he read was the Bible. When he was young, and he’d go to his mother with a problem, she’d say, “Go in and read the Bible, son. You’ll find your answers in there.” So he knew the Bible. He had a deep belief in God, although he didn’t have much faith in preachers. When he got famous and started making money, and especially when he moved into Graceland, he said, “Every time I go to church, they have their hand out, wanting money.” Especially Reverend [James] Hamill, who’d been the Presleys’ Assembly of God minister in Memphis. He’s the one who preached Gladys’s funeral. Elvis singled him out. He said, “I never see the guy that he doesn’t ask me for money.” Hamill pretty much turned Elvis off to going to church.
Geller wanted Elvis to be a preacher, but not just any preacher. He wanted him to be The Messenger, right? Geller was smart, see. Almost every time he came up to the house, he brought a new book on all these different religions. A whole slew of ’em: The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, and The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, and The Urantia Book, all this spirit shit. I basically liked Geller. But little by little, I started getting that uneasy feeling.
LAMAR FIKE: Larry Geller was a hippie from the sixties, and he’s a phony son of a bitch. He’s like plastic. You could make toys out of that bastard.
MARTY LACKER: One time on Perugia Way, Elvis and I were sitting in the den and Geller came in and brought this book on spirituality. He was talking to Elvis about it, telling him how important it was, and emphasizing that it was a first edition, autographed by the author. The more he mentioned that it was a rare book, the more it hit me wrong. Finally, Elvis said, “What are you going to do, Larry? Are you going to let me have this book?” And Larry said, “No, no, Elvis. There’s probably not another copy out there like this that I could get my hands on. Not an autographed first edition.” It was like he was dangling a piece of candy in front of Elvis and pulling it back.
The guys and I had been around Elvis so long that all he had to do was just look at us, and it was a signal. When Geller said that, Elvis looked over at me with a glint in his eye. Elvis always knew that if he asked me to find something, I’d turn over every rock until I got it. So I just smiled back at him. When Larry left, Elvis said, “See if you can find the fuckin’ thing.”
The next afternoon, I went down to Hollywood Boulevard, to the Pickwick Book Store. I told the guy what I was looking for, and I said, “I’d really like to have a first edition, if there is one.” The guy looked it up in his microfiche, and he said, “Yeah, I got that.” I said, “A first edition?” He said, “I don’t know.” He went away for a minute, and he came back with a first edition, and it was autographed. He said, “We’ve got eight copies, and six of ’em are autographed.”
I brought one back to the house, and I put it down on the table in front of Elvis without saying anything. He picked it up and leafed through it, and he just smiled. He said, “That’s what I thought.”
So Elvis was onto Geller almost from the start, but Geller suckered him anyway. The more time Geller spent with Elvis, the more Elvis got involved with these religions. And the more involved he got, the more obsessed he became.
After Elvis died, Geller went on TV shows and called himself Elvis’s spiritual adviser, his guru. He was really just the guy who helped fuck up Elvis’s head.
LAMAR FIKE: In ’64, Elvis was out in California to do a picture, and the guys had their first brush with trouble. One day, they were at the studio, and Elvis sent Richard back to the house on Perugia Way in the Chrysler station wagon to get something, a change of clothes, I think. Richard was hurrying, trying to get the stuff and get back. And those streets in Bel Air are treacherous.
Anyway, “Broom,” as we called him, was rounding a corner and he hit a Japanese gardener. The gardener was cutting a shrub or something and backed out into the street, and Broom killed him deader than hell. It shook him up bad. He withdrew for awhile.
The accident wasn’t his fault, but in California, if you kill a pedestrian, you’re responsible. That’s when Colonel brought Ed Hookstratten into the picture. Ed was this big-shot Beverly Hills attorney. Still is. He represented a lot of stars, and he was married to Patricia Crowley, the actress. Ed became Elvis’s personal attorney. He settled with the gardener’s estate, and the insurance company had to pay a bundle.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis couldn’t be bothered with business details. That was the Colonel’s job. Colonel gave Hookstratten the instructions on handling Elvis, and he followed them.
The day Elvis went to Hookstratten to discuss the settlement with the gardener’s estate, I wrecked Elvis’s Chrysler New Yorker. I’d taken one of Elvis’s dates home about six in the morning, and on the way back to Perugia Way, I fell asleep at the wheel. I was screwed out of my head a lot during that time, and I hit the streetlight at the corner of Sunset and Carolwood, right across the street from Jayne Mansfield’s house. I don’t remember getting to the corner, but I took the pole with me at the front of the car. The hot wires from the light pole were just flicking toward the back bumper of the car. If they had touched the bumper, and I’d opened the door . . . well, I was just lucky.
Hookstratten handled that, too, because we had to pay the city for the pole. He must have thought Elvis had hired the world’s worst drivers.
BILLY SMITH: After Joe left, Elvis decided he wanted some more people around. The organization ran real smooth with just the four of us, but Elvis missed the noise. And the action. So he told us to start looking for two or three more guys to add to the group.
I got Jerry Schilling hired. Jerry wanted to fit in bad. He would run errands for you, just do anything. He was like a shy little guy, but he had a pretty good sense of humor. I think he first met everybody when he played touch football with the guys, and he was coming to the movies and the fairgrounds. We called him “Mr. Bodybuilder” because he was athletic. Then we called him “Mr. Milk” and finally just “Milk.”
LAMAR FIKE: Jerry had a good personality. But there were problems from the beginning. Jerry’s a pious asshole. He claims he knew Elvis back in ’53, from the projects, but I think it was Red he knew. As a kid, Jerry used to go watch Red play football. I don’t think he knew Elvis then. Jerry is as full of shit as a Christmas goose.
MARTY LACKER: Jerry was about one week away from being graduated from Arkansas State University when he quit to go to work for Elvis. What he learned in those three and three-quarter years, I have no idea.
At the same time Jerry came in, Elvis hired a guy named Mike Keaton, who was Jerry’s friend. Mike was a quiet, religious guy. Elvis found out that he belonged to the Assembly of God church, which the Presleys had attended when Elvis was a kid. I think Elvis liked Mike because of the conversations they had.
LAMAR FIKE: What cinched it for Mike was when Elvis found out that Mike’s wife was named Gladys. Then he wanted him in the group. And Elvis made it a point to get to know Gladys.
MARTY LACKER: We were getting ready to go back out to California to make, I think, Tickle Me. Elvis had been made a deputy sheriff of Shelby County [Memphis] that day, and he was feeling kind of cocky. He thought that was a big deal, and he’d really wanted it. That night, which was the night before we left, we were at the Memphian, and that’s when Elvis asked Mike and Jerry to join up. Jerry knew we were going to ask him. He kept talking about it when Elvis wasn’t around. Richard, I think, dropped it on him. He said, “Don’t worry about it. You’re going to get hired.” But here it was just hours before we were supposed to leave, and Elvis hadn’t said anything to Jerry, and Jerry sat there in the theater all nervous and anxious, his face getting red.
When the movies were over, we were walking up the aisle—Elvis was in front of me—and I said, “Elvis, Jerry and Mike Keaton are standing over there wondering if you’re ever going to say anything to them.” Because Elvis always liked to do the hiring. He didn’t like to do the firing, but the hiring he liked. And he looked back at me and smiled, and he said, “Yeah, I was just lettin’ ’em sweat a while.” Then he walked over to them and said, “How would you like to go to L.A. tonight?” That meant they were hired.
BILLY SMITH: Even though I brought Jerry into the group, as soon as he joined, I knew he was along the same lines as Jimmy Kingsley—looking to see what he could get out of Elvis.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis wanted to take Jerry down two or three times. He was going to do it, too. They had very different political views, and Jerry didn’t see why he should keep them to himself. Jerry was very liberal, especially about the Vietnam War, and, of course, Elvis was kind of like John Wayne. And Jerry used to piss him off. We didn’t know the term “liberal” back then. Elvis just called him a Communist. He said, “That Commie bastard.” Nobody was ever real close to Jerry. Except Joe.
MARTY LACKER: Jerry got more outspoken, and Elvis grew to really dislike him. Another reason he didn’t like him was because Jerry was Catholic. Geller had already convinced Elvis that Catholicism was dangerous.
Mike didn’t fit in very well, either, but for a different reason. Mike didn’t fit in because he didn’t like to do the crazy stuff we did.
LAMAR FIKE: Mike was like a bubble in a nut factory. Do you know what I’m saying?
MARTY LACKER: Starting in about ’64, Priscilla started scheming to change Elvis’s way of life. I don’t know if she ever genuinely loved him, but I think after a while it got to be a game with her. I’ve got to grant her—he didn’t treat her very well. But if she was looking for an ideal relationship, she wasn’t going to find that with Elvis. Still, she stayed on his ass all the time on the telephone. She’d say, “Why can’t I come out there? Why can’t you stay here?” She was putting pressure on him to marry her.
LAMAR FIKE: You know, Elvis had a terrific arrangement. He had Priscilla at home, and he had Ann-Margret in California, and whatever else there was on the road in between. And when Priscilla bitched about it, he got mad. Elvis’s defense was a great offense. He’d get all over you, and you’d back off in a defensive mode to try to fight him off. It was so funny to watch him do it.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis threatened two or three times to ship Priscilla’s ass back to Germany. They got in an argument one night upstairs at Graceland. Billy and Lamar and I were sitting in the kitchen, and all of a sudden we heard them arguing. The upstairs was almost soundproof, but we heard it like we were in the room.
BILLY SMITH: That was a famous argument. It wasn’t a roadhouse riot, but he slapped her, and she stumbled back and hit the corner of that big television set and cut her eye. It’s a wonder it didn’t put that eye out.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis was just livid. He called downstairs, and I answered the phone. I said, “Yeah?” And his exact words were, “Get this fuckin’ bitch a plane ticket!” He said, “I’m packin’ her damn shit now, and I want the first flight out of here!” And he hung up the phone. I told everybody what he said, and everybody started going, “Oh, shit! Oh, shit!” And you could hear him yelling at her. But what he was doing was playing a game with her. She’d called his number on what he was doing out in California, but he turned the tables on her. She got scared as shit and started apologizing. Then about fifteen minutes later, he called back down and said, “Cancel the flight.” In an hour or two, they came downstairs and he was just all goody-goody. She had this big gash, and he said, “She tripped and hit her head against the TV set.”
BILLY SMITH: He felt bad about it. He tried to cover it up with makeup, but you could still see the cut.
LAMAR FIKE: That was a sad situation. This girl was totally outnumbered.
BILLY SMITH: If the heat got too bad, Elvis would just get on a plane, or on one of the buses, and we’d go to California. He’d just run away from the problem.
A lot of times, they would call each other on the phone and work it out. But the bloom had been off that rose for a long, long time.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis never stopped seeing other women. Even when he was dating Ann-Margret. I think he thought he had to do it, like it was expected of him.
In ’64, we all went to Vegas for a few weeks and stayed at the Sahara. One night, we went to the Desert Inn to see the McGuire Sisters. And from a distance, Phyllis McGuire looked just like Anita Wood. We all saw the resemblance. Elvis said, “Man, she’s as pretty as Anita.” And he kept saying it throughout the show. So after the show was over, he said, “God, I’ve got to meet her.”
We went backstage, and she was there with her sisters, Chris and Dottie. They were real nice. Phyllis was the youngest, but she was the dominant one. She did all the talking. When we got up close to her, she really didn’t look like Anita. She was blond like Anita and wore her hair up, but that was about it. She and Elvis started getting to know each other, and after that, Elvis went back every night. He wouldn’t go to the show, but afterwards, they’d hole up in the dressing room for something like two and a half hours.
Finally, one of the guys worked up the nerve to tell Elvis that seeing Phyllis wasn’t such a good idea. Because it was pretty well known that she was the girlfriend of Sam Giancana, the mob boss. But, of course, Elvis wouldn’t pay any attention to it.
One night before we went to bed, Elvis said to me, “Be sure I get up by noon, because at one o’clock you and I are going somewhere.” We had the Rolls-Royce with us, and he said, “Tell the guys to have the Rolls ready.” This was totally unusual, since he didn’t get up until four or five o’clock. When I got to his suite at one o’clock, he was ready, but he seemed real anxious. He got behind the wheel of the Rolls, and we went back over to the Desert Inn.
We went upstairs, and Elvis knew exactly which room to go to. He knocked on the door, and Phyllis cracked it open a little because she had the chain on it. She had her hair in rollers. Elvis started talking to her, but she didn’t really want to let him in. So he said to me, “Why don’t you just go wait in the car?” And I thought, “Oh, shit, here we go again.”
I went down to the car, and about an hour and a half later, he came down. We were driving back to the Sahara, and he was talking, and all of a sudden he started laughing. I asked him what he was laughing at, and he said, “I was up there with her, and I noticed there was a gun sticking halfway out of her purse.” He said he asked her what she was doing with a gun, and she said Giancana had given it to her for protection. And Elvis said he looked at her and said, “Yeah, well, tell him I carry two of ’em.”
I said, “Elvis, it’s kind of foolish for you to say something like that. What if she goes back and says that to the guy in a way he doesn’t like? He’s a guy who plays for keeps. It wouldn’t make any difference to him who you were.” He just laughed it off.
Elvis’s affair with Phyllis McGuire wasn’t much of a romance—about two weeks’ worth, I’d say. As far as I know, he never saw her again, except when he opened in Vegas in ’69. She came to one of the shows with her family.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis had all kinds of women out there in California while Priscilla was in Memphis. I’d go out there, and it was like a revolving door. He dated [singer-songwriter] Jackie DeShannon for a few months. And [costar] Mary Ann Mobley during Harum Scarum.
Harum Scarum—what a horrible picture, good God! Elvis in a sheik costume! That was one of Sam Katzman’s specials. They called him “King of the Quickies” because he did everything fast and cheap. The sets rattled, they were so old. The temple set was left over from Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings, from 1927, if you can believe that. The only good thing about that picture was that Colonel got voted down when he wanted a talking camel added to the story line.
BILLY SMITH: After Marty became foreman, we got to see a little different side of Colonel. He’d always picked us for information, but now that Joe was gone, and Charlie was off somewhere, he stepped it up. He’d say, “You know, you need to report Elvis’s every move to the old Colonel.” And then he’d ask, “What did Elvis do? What did he have to eat last night?”
We’d just ignore it. But then one day, we were coming back from Palm Springs in the car. Just Colonel and me. And he talked stuff all the way back to Los Angeles. He said, “Vernon doesn’t really know business that well. If Elvis would let me handle his money, he’d be a whole lot better off financially.” And he kept talking and talking. I knew he wanted me to go to bat for him with Elvis.
Finally, I said, “Well, maybe Elvis would be better off. But Colonel, that’s his daddy. Whether he makes mistakes or not doesn’t matter. That’s still his daddy.” And I said, “You can quit picking. Because I’m not going to get in the middle.” And he never mentioned it again.
MARTY LACKER: When I became foreman, Parker would call me to talk to Elvis. One day, Colonel said to Elvis, in front of me, “Don’t forget, Marty needs to call me every day in case I have to tell you something.” Elvis said, “Sure, I’ll remind him.” Then when we left, Elvis said, with this sly smile on his face, “Don’t call him.”
So Colonel would call and say, “What’s going on? What did Elvis do today?” I’d say, “Oh, same old stuff, Colonel.” He’d say, “What do you mean?” I’d say, “Just the things we normally do.” And he’d say, “No, I want to specifically know what he did.”
This one day when we were in Memphis, I said, “Colonel, I’m not going to tell you everything he specifically did. We got up in the afternoon, and we went to the movies, and that was it.” I never, ever saw any need to tell the Colonel what Elvis was doing.
I had a number of run-ins with Parker. I knew that he wasn’t to be trusted. When I became foreman, Alan was coforeman for a while. Well, maybe ten minutes or so. Just a very brief time. Colonel had always talked to Alan, and Alan was crazy about him.
One day, Colonel and I and one of the other guys were standing around talking at the studio and Alan came by. Colonel said, “How you doing, Alan?” And he turned to us and said, “I love him like a son.” They talked on, and as Alan was getting ready to go back to the set, Colonel said, “Tell Uncle Abe hello for me.” Because Alan’s uncle was a Supreme Court justice. Alan said he would. And Colonel put his arm around him and said, “You’re a good guy, Alan.” And when Alan got out of earshot, the Colonel looked at me and said, “He’s a no-good son of a bitch. He just sits around. He don’t do anything for Elvis.”
BILLY SMITH: Colonel wasn’t crazy about Marty. Neither was Vernon, especially when Marty became foreman.
MARTY LACKER: The foreman had very specific duties. In the recording sessions, I’d organize all the guys. And I was more or less the buffer between Elvis and the people from the studio. I was the one who got the call for the next day’s shooting, and I made sure everybody knew about it. I also got the pages for his script and outlined them. Elvis’s memory was fantastic, by the way. He hardly ever flubbed his lines. And he would learn everybody’s part. In between takes, he’d sit in the dressing room and read his script.
In addition to handling all the bills, I wrote all the checks. Elvis signed them, of course, but I was the one who wrote them for daily expenses and expenses for the group.
There were times when I’d write checks for $50,000 or maybe $100,000. One day, Colonel called, and he said, “I want you to write a $50,000 check to the Motion Picture Relief Fund, as a charity donation, for Elvis. I’ve already cleared this with him. I’m donating another $50,000,” which I doubted. And he said, “This afternoon, Frank Sinatra is coming over to the set, and we’ll have photographers there showing Elvis handing over the check to Sinatra.” I asked him why they were doing this, and he said, “Because Bob Hope asked us to.” And I said, “Okay.”
Back then, $50,000 was a hell of a lot of money. And because I knew the way the Colonel was, I started thinking. Of course, when you take so many pills, you get paranoid, and you worry about everything. But I thought that since this check was in my handwriting, Colonel might someday accuse me of stealing $50,000. So on the little line for the explanation of the check, I wrote, “Given to Frank Sinatra on the set, as per request of Bob Hope.” I thought that would also be good for the accountant.
After that, I continued to make out the checks that way. I didn’t know it at the time, but the fact that I went into such detailed explanation grated on Colonel’s nerves. A few years later, during the biggest showdown Elvis and Colonel ever had, Colonel declared that somebody else would write the checks. And when he did it, he said, “Now maybe the explanation portion of the check won’t be so full.”
BILLY SMITH: Money, or rather the control of money, was power in that camp. Even for Elvis. Sometimes he would go out and spend a lot of money just to aggravate Vernon. Then Vernon would confront Elvis. But he never understood Elvis to the fullest because he picked the most inopportune times to say something to him. You’d think a father would know better. He would catch him right after he’d bought something and say, “We’ve got to cut back!” Well, the next thing you knew, Elvis would go out and buy more.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis would say, “Look, goddamnit, I make the fucking money, and I’ll spend it the way I want!” And Vernon would turn around and leave, mad as hell. On a number of occasions, Elvis would say to me or Billy, “Goddamnit, he thinks that’s spending? Wait ’til he gets the bill for the shit I’m going to do today!” And he would purposely go out and spend some enormous amount of money. Like that time in the mid-sixties out in Hollywood. Elvis bought eleven Harley-Davidson motorcycles for all of us. Except I didn’t want one. The press loved it. Said to watch out for “El’s Angels.”
I had a grudging respect for Vernon. He did the best he could, you know? The amazing thing about him was that for a long time, he never looked his age. The skin on his face was like a baby’s, even when he was fifty years old. He gave me a tip about that once. He said, “I use only cold water on my face and no soap. It dries you out, gives you wrinkles.” Maybe out in the country they didn’t have a lot of hot water. Maybe that’s where Elvis got this idea that he didn’t need to bathe.
LAMAR FIKE: You know what it was with him? Elvis never knew how to bathe. He thought a whore’s bath was the real thing.
BILLY SMITH: I want to clear up about this idea about Elvis not bathing. That didn’t happen until later, starting about ’74, when he wouldn’t shower for maybe two or three days. But I didn’t always take a damn shower every day when I first started working for Elvis. Because you don’t take a bath every day in the country. When Elvis was real little, everybody in the area had to tote their water from two or three wells there in East Tupelo.
But Elvis wasn’t always dirty. He was a clean person in the earlier years. The Jordanaires say that Elvis was always semi-dirty. That’s not true. What do they know about Elvis Presley? The only time the Jordanaires got to see him was when they made a record. In the sixties, Elvis would go upstairs and take a shower and put on clean clothes sometimes three or four times a night. You never smelled him until the later years. And I blame the drugs for that.
MARTY LACKER: Billy’s sensitive about this topic. But the truth is that there were times even in the sixties when Elvis didn’t bathe, either.
LAMAR FIKE: When you’re doping, man, it’s a drag to bathe. Elvis just got so fucked up he didn’t care about it.
MARTY LACKER: When I became foreman, we were living on Perugia Way. About once or twice a month, I would have to do the expense reports to send back to the accountant in Memphis. I’d stay up two or three days at a time. And one night, after I’d probably been up three days—I was sitting in the middle of the bed, writing. I had all the books and receipts around me. And I was so screwed up on pills that the last thing I remember, I looked at the clock and it was like two-thirty or three o’clock. The next morning I woke up and I was still in that same position, right in the middle of the bed. The books had been moved, though. And when I went in to eat breakfast, everybody started laughing. Especially Elvis.
He said, “Man, you’ve got to start getting some fuckin’ sleep.” I said, “Why?” Red was there at the time. And Elvis said, “Me and Red opened up the door, and there you were, sittin’ in the middle of the bed, with your head down on your chest, fast asleep.” He said, “You had a pen in your hand, and when you fell asleep, the pen dragged right across the paper.” He said they just touched me with a finger, and I fell backwards on the pillow. But you couldn’t help stuff like that when you were doing as many uppers as I was.
When Christmas rolled around that year, I found out that the foreman had a couple of extra duties that nobody had told me about. One was to buy the Christmas gifts that Elvis gave out. Elvis liked my taste. I guess it goes back to the flashy days at Humes High School. So when it came time to buy these Christmas gifts, Elvis and I went into the small conference room upstairs at Graceland and made out a list. He told me what to buy for a few people—his father, his grandmother, Priscilla, or whatever girl he was going out with at the time—but for the other people, he’d leave it up to me. And the guys did, too. That Christmas we gave Elvis a white Bible, and I designed this tree of life with all our names, and Hebrew and English and Latin phrases, and I had it stamped on the Bible in gold. For his birthday a couple of weeks later, I had a gold medallion engraved with the same design.
I was kind of amazed that Elvis wanted to give gifts to the guys he’d fired or who had left. Like Esposito. And Gene Smith. Elvis said, “Send them a hundred-dollar money order.” I’d talked to Joe a few times since he left, and he’d mentioned his oldest daughter, Debbie. Just before Christmas, he said, “Remind Elvis that he’s Debbie’s godfather, and she needs new furniture.” That kind of took me back, you know? But when Elvis said to send him the money order for Christmas, I brought this up. And Elvis said, “Well, that’s nice that she needs new furniture.” But he didn’t buy it for her. The next night, Elvis said, “I want to buy Debbie a real nice cross on a chain.” He wouldn’t let anybody dictate to him.
Joe wasn’t the only one who did stuff like this by the way. I’m sure George Klein doesn’t want people to know this, but he used to give me his Christmas wish list every year. He’d say, “I need this, and I’d like to have this and this.” Hoping I’d tell Elvis.
LAMAR FIKE: You know how Colonel liked to pose as Santa Claus on those Christmas cards he’d send out for Elvis? That speaks volumes, really. And yet Colonel could be sincerely benevolent, and he’s done a lot of things that he never wanted people to know about. He took pride in that. He used to give Alan big hunks of meat. Alan would drive him back and forth to Palm Springs, and a lot of times he’d have Alan stop at a meat market, and Colonel would buy $500 worth of steaks and tell Alan to divide them with Elvis.
He gave me money one time when I was on the wall, man—just literally broke. Elvis was finishing up a picture at Twentieth Century-Fox, and I had come by, and Colonel was with [producer] Jerry Wald. I was over in the dressing room, and Colonel came in and said, “Lamar, how you doing?” He stuck his arm out to shake my hand, and he put five one-hundred-dollar bills in my palm and walked away. I said, “Thank you.” And he said, “What for?” But on the whole, Colonel was the cheapest son of a bitch who ever walked the earth. And you’d really see that at Christmas.
MARTY LACKER: Colonel always had the guys do a lot of things for him. And some of the things he did in return were so petty and cheap. At Christmas, that first year I was foreman, Colonel sent two big boxes to Graceland for the guys. We opened them up, and they were filled with stuffed animals. Now, I’m sure those stuffed animals came from one of two places—the supply house Colonel used when he was in the carnival, because they looked like the kind you win at those games, or they were the teddy bears that Elvis’s fans sent him. And Colonel said to me three times, “Now, you be sure that all the boys get some of these. And be sure they know they came from the old Colonel.”
One Christmas, he sent us, like, eighty bucks. He wrote me a note that said, “This is my Christmas gift to the guys. I want you to take this money and divide it up among them.” I mean, we’re talking probably seven or eight guys at the time. And he had the audacity to add, “P.S. I’m going to check with Mr. Presley to make sure that’s what you did. Merry Christmas.”
Then one year, he gave each of us all a very valuable gift—a foot massager. A foot massager! And the stuff he sent always looked like it came from some surplus store, real crummy quality. But that was Colonel. Each June, when it was time for his birthday, he would call and say, “Be sure to remind Elvis and the boys that tomorrow is the old Colonel’s birthday.” Elvis would send him an elephant statue or something, but I don’t think the rest of us ever sent him anything.
LAMAR FIKE: In late ’64, a couple of days after Christmas, Alan got married to a cute little blonde named Jo Tuneberg. Jo was from Mississippi. Right after the ceremony, they were driving over to tell Elvis they’d gotten hitched and somebody ran into Alan’s ’59 Caddy and totaled it. Alan showed up at Graceland in a rental car.
When he told Elvis about it, Elvis walked them outside and asked Alan for a dollar. Alan took out his wallet, and Elvis said, “Congratulations, you just bought this car.” And he handed Alan the keys to Priscilla’s little red Corvair. She’d just gotten it as a graduation present the year before. He didn’t care. Elvis loved to play Santa Claus. Loved to spend money. Especially when he was high.