CHAPTER 31
LAMAR FIKE: From ’64 on, things started getting really strange. Geller turned Elvis upside down.
MARTY LACKER: Geller used to talk to Elvis about words. Elvis was always a little self-conscious about his education, so he went along with it. He and Geller would dissect words, and Geller would break them up into syllables, like a teacher. Pretty soon, Elvis said, “This could be a good learning experience for all of us.”
BILLY SMITH: The difference between me and Elvis was he’d find the word in the dictionary and learn it, and I’d just say, “What the hell does it mean?” He had a hunger to learn. He read constantly, and he was self-educated. If you said something about a subject he’d read about, he might have fifty books, but he’d pick up the right one and turn right to the page. He remembered things word for word.
MARTY LACKER: One day, at Graceland, Elvis looked at me and said, “I want you to go out and buy ten dictionaries and ten yellow legal pads. And get some pencils.” He said, “We need to have a session on words for an hour or two in the evenings.” I said, “Are you serious?” He said, “Yeah, don’t argue with me. Go get ’em.”
Well, we did this for a while. The whole group would sit around in what is now the Jungle Room. None of that jungle stuff was there then. Vernon decorated that room from Sears, with these big round tables like you’d see in a restaurant, with high chrome bottoms and big round black tops. Elvis would open the dictionary, find a word, and cut it up into syllables. And then we’d all say it out loud.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis would get hung up on phonetics. He heard the word “condominium” one time. And he walked around going, “Con-do-MIN-i-um.” Over and over, like a mantra. I said, “If I hear ‘condominium’ one more time, I’m going to scream.”
MARTY LACKER: He wouldn’t just say the word. He’d go into this whole explanation. He’d say, “Let’s break it into ‘condo’ and ‘minium’ and see what it really means.” We lost our minds. We changed it to, “Conned a many of ’em.” Those classes lasted three or four weeks. By then, Elvis had gotten tired of them.
BILLY SMITH: You know how Larry would bring these religious books up to show Elvis? Well, pretty soon, Elvis started giving out these books to people. One was The Impersonal Life. And he gave away Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. And Madame Blavatsky’s The Voice of Silence.
MARTY LACKER: He got on this tear about reincarnation. But he thought only strong people got to come back. If you were weak, you were finished. He was pretty certain Gladys would be reborn. He didn’t get into séances or say he was going to communicate from the grave. But in a way he did. He said, “When I’m gone, I’ll haunt your asses! I’ll know everything you’re doing.”
LAMAR FIKE: The Scientologists tried to get Elvis involved later on, mostly to get money out of him. He wanted no part of it. And he nailed them pretty hard. Priscilla and Lisa Marie are into it big-time. They say they’re not a cult, that it teaches you to confront issues, talk things out, and get straight with yourself.
MARTY LACKER: When Alan married Jo Tuneberg, I was sort of surprised. I’d known Jo a long time, from back when I was a teenager. She liked to have a good time. And that meant she wanted Alan thinking about her 100 percent of the time. But Alan wanted to hang out with Elvis. She’d get real mad at him, and they’d fight. So he’d escape all of that by taking pills and by drinking.
When they were getting ready to take their honeymoon, we happened to be going out to California, so Alan thought he’d combine the trips. Elvis said okay, as long as Alan took his own car because he didn’t want any women on the bus.
I was on the bus almost all the time, and so was Geller and a couple of the other guys. Elvis and Geller started getting into these conversations about religion. And I knew he was feeding Elvis all this shit for a reason.
Pretty soon, Geller told Elvis he ought to think about becoming what we’d now call a New Age evangelist. He said, “As big a celebrity as you are, if you started saying these things publicly, you’d be one hell of a religious leader because so many people would follow you.” And Elvis was getting a little embarrassed. Geller got so worked up that he was shaking.
Well, I’d heard enough. I said, “Larry, why don’t you shut your fuckin’ mouth? He’s not a religious messenger. He’s not a holy man, and I don’t think he wants to be one.”
Larry started arguing with me. But Elvis said, “Marty’s right, Larry. I don’t want to hear any more about it.” And Geller shut up for a while. But the religious talk continued, to the point where Elvis was just weirded out. I said, “I’m going to ride in the Cadillac.”
One night, we checked in a motel somewhere. The next day, Alan and Jo and I stayed back to pay the bill. Elvis had pulled out in the bus first, and we were behind him, just speeding like the devil to catch up. We went about three miles down the road, and we couldn’t find him. We figured that he’d just speeded up, too, and that he was way ahead of us.
We never saw him the whole day. The next morning, we were having breakfast, sitting by the window in the restaurant, and looking out at the cars on Route 66. And here came Elvis in the bus. He’d been behind us all the time. At the last stop, he and Geller went around the corner from the hotel and hid from us. I’m sure Geller was working on Elvis, trying to get him to be a cult leader. Because things got weirder after that.
BILLY SMITH: It was like Elvis was searching for something. He’d listen to what Larry told him, and he’d think, “Don’t rule out this because this might be it.” He was looking for fulfillment. He starved for it, and he was willing to experiment with a whole lot of things to find it. Which led him to try other kinds of drugs. In the mid-sixties, for example, Elvis had marijuana around the house and LSD. Just to see what it was like. He’d heard that LSD would give him a kind of altered consciousness, so that maybe he’d see the light of God. I heard he smoked pot, but he didn’t like it because it burnt his throat. I never actually saw him do it, but I saw him eat brownies that supposedly had marijuana in them. I’m not sure how it affected him. I don’t know if he acted especially goofy. We ate ’em, too, so we might have been just as goofy as he was.
LAMAR FIKE: I usually had some grass, and so did some of the other guys. We got some and took it back to the house on Perugia Way one day and made a bunch of fudge brownies with it. We all ate ’em, except Elvis wasn’t there at the time, and nobody told him.
Elvis was very nocturnal, of course, and he would get up at night and go to the refrigerator. And he found this tray of brownies. And hell, he loved those. Priscilla was visiting at the time—she’d finally managed to get out there—and Elvis took the tray back to the bedroom. And they didn’t come out for four days. They just stayed ripped the whole time. And they didn’t know what had caused it.
I went to get some of ’em, and I realized what had happened. I said, “Oh, my God, they’ve got the fudge brownies!” I went in there and told Elvis what had happened, and I said, “Are you loaded?” Elvis held out the tray, and he said, “Lamar, put another ounce in there.” He was ripped to the skies.
MARTY LACKER: Somebody asked me once, “How did Elvis reconcile his drug use with his religion?” He didn’t. Elvis didn’t consider himself a drug addict. A drug addict was somebody who stuck a needle in his arm or snorted coke or did all the street drugs. He abhorred those people.
LAMAR FIKE: I don’t think that ever crossed his mind. Does the Bible tell you not to take Placidyl? Does it say, “Thou shalt not pop a Seconal”? None of us had any guilt. Elvis had his own religion.
MARTY LACKER: One day on Perugia Way, Geller brought some LSD. Elvis thought it would enhance his spiritual experiences. Priscilla was there, and Jerry and Charlie and Red and Sonny. They were all in Elvis’s bedroom. And Elvis was asking who wanted to try it, telling Red it would help him be more creative, write better songs. I don’t know if Elvis tried it or not. Red says in his book that Elvis had them test it out for him.
BILLY SMITH: At the time, they said Elvis tried it. He liked you to be a guinea pig before he tried something like that—to see how it affected you. LSD was a street drug, see, and he was afraid of it.
LAMAR FIKE: We tried hallucinogens for a while. We just didn’t like them. This was late ’64, or early ’65, when all the Hollywood types like Cary Grant were trying it. One time, Alan brought some LSD back to Graceland. I went over there, and Jerry and I dropped some at the same time. Elvis gave me a 750-milligram tab, and he walked me through the whole process. He’d read this book, so he thought he knew what to do.
That was my first time. God. I went upstairs, into what was then a conference room, and had my LSD trip. I had two big plastic jars of dates because we were just hung up on them. I walked in and Jerry was sitting in the middle of the floor in the closet, eating dates hand over fist.
It fucked us both up pretty good. I tried to dive into the hood of a car. We had a black ’64 Cadillac limousine, with the side windows filled in. Elvis had taken me outside and walked me around, and I couldn’t get over the car—the black was so deep. He said, “You can’t touch the car, Lamar.” But I thought it was a swimming pool. Just everything seemed surreal. Even the texture of the leaves. Boy. I had flashbacks of that for two or three years afterwards.
BILLY SMITH: Larry Geller is also the one who got Elvis into Self-Realization. It teaches that we are all a part of God, but we are gods, ourselves, in a way. People who follow that think you can have this aura, like Christ, by being pure, like Mahatma Gandhi. In other words, you can’t believe that Christ was the only one. And they teach you to believe that you can heal a plant or make the wind do what you want if you believe strong enough.
Elvis was taken by it. But deep back in his mind, what he learned as a child in the Assembly of God church stood out more. He was thinking, “Who’s right and who’s wrong?” He got into a turmoil about it, so he tried to combine the religions. He’d say, “This new stuff sounds a little easier, so maybe it’s right. After all, we’re all part of God.”
MARTY LACKER: The Self-Realization teachings were based on the beliefs of the yogi Paramahansa Yogananda. I always read that his disciples, I guess you’d say, had a fellowship center, a sort of a spiritual retreat, on Mount Washington, in the Hollywood Hills. But all I remember is the Self-Realization Park at the end of Sunset Boulevard, near the Pacific Coast Highway. It was a block away from the ocean in Santa Monica. The woman who ran it called herself Sri Daya Mata. Her real name was Fay Wright.
Geller used to tell Elvis about this place, and he gave him a brochure for it, which said that when the yogi died in the early fifties, his body refused to deteriorate. Three weeks after his death, his body was still perfectly preserved—no mold, no odor, no decay. It quoted the Forest Lawn people as saying this was unparalleled—they’d never seen anything like it or read about it in any of their mortuary books. Elvis thought that was great, you know, because he liked to visit morgues and look at dead bodies. So he was totally fascinated.
One day, Geller asked him if he’d like to meet Daya Mata. Pretty soon, he started going over there all the time. Daya Mata was supposed to help him realize self-control and the highest form of spiritual existence through meditation. I thought it was just a waste of time and money.
I’ll say one thing, though. This meditation park was very, very peaceful. If you had things on your mind, and really wanted to get away, it was a great place to go and just sit.
BILLY SMITH: Daya Mata wrote a book called Only Love, which Elvis read and kept around him all the time. He called her “Ma,” which I guess was short for “Maya.” But Priscilla used to say she looked like Gladys. So maybe that’s part of why he called her that. When Vernon found out Elvis was giving her money, he went haywire. If her letters came to Graceland, Vernon tore ’em up.
In a little while, Larry started telling Elvis he should go on television and preach about Self-Realization. They had at least one heated discussion about it. Larry said, “That’s why you were put here on this earth.” And Elvis said, “No, my music is why I was put here. I think I’ll hang with that.”
MARTY LACKER: Long before Geller, Elvis used to say that he felt he was put on earth for a specific purpose. He didn’t know what the purpose was, except to entertain people, and make them feel good through his music. So he fulfilled his destiny. Most of the millions of people who were affected by Elvis never saw him perform live. And I can tell you there are scores of people whose lives he changed. Lots of people have written letters about how listening to Elvis’s music kept them from committing suicide or made them well when they were sick. Now, you and I might not claim stuff like that, but these people are very serious about it.
LAMAR FIKE: The wacko part of this is that Elvis is becoming a religion unto himself. In 1990, there were two Elvis churches in Denver. One was The Church of the Risen Elvis, started by two women, and the other was The First Preslyterian Church, which was begun by two men. Martin Rush, one of the founders, said, “Elvis died so we could get fat and use drugs . . . It’s the way he would have wanted it.”
In 1993, there was an Elvis convention in England and some guy got up onstage and said, “Gimme an ‘E’! Gimme an ‘L’!” You know, the whole trip. “Who’s going to live forever? ELVIS!”
Fans pay huge prices for his scarves and clippings from his toenails—all this shit, like they’re pieces of the cross. They say Red and Sonny betrayed him like Judas with [their book] Elvis: What Happened? and that I did the same thing in helping Goldman. And they say that Elvis has been “resurrected” because of all these phantom sightings. This one piece on the Gannett wire said that “groups of female fans have given up marriage to live near Elvis’s grave.” They might as well just build the Graceland convent, and run around in little nun costumes like Mary Tyler Moore in Change of Habit.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis never really bought Geller’s idea to be a messenger. But he did get on these preaching sprees. He liked to call them “conversations.” He’d jump up on the coffee table and deliver this sort of Sermon on the Mount. Most of the time, what he said was real funny because of the pills. He’d get into this big, loud preacher’s voice, and he’d carry on about Jesus and Mary gettin’ it on at the well. Or he’d say something like, “Moses was this white-haired son of a bitch who came down from the mountain. The burning bushes directed his ass on down.”
If it made him happy, what the heck? Most of the time, he did it just with the group. Although he’d do it when we had girls over. They didn’t know whether to laugh or not.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis had one of the most extraordinary egos of any human I’ve ever seen. I’d go in to see him in the morning, and I’d say, “You got a minute?” He’d say, “Yeah.” I’d say, “What lake are we walking across today?” He’d say, “You son of a bitch!” He used to get so mad. I said, “You’re getting really bad about this.”
MARTY LACKER: This religion thing lasted from ’64 until he died. And I got to where I just couldn’t stomach it. Goldman, by the way, says Elvis believed he was a divine messenger. I never heard him say that.
LAMAR FIKE: I think Elvis thought he was a prodigal son, not the Messiah. But I think he thought he would become omnipotent. Because the combination of Geller and the drugs really expanded his mind. After a while, it got to where he halfway believed he had superhuman powers. Like in the seventies, he got into healing, the laying on of hands. He wanted to really help people, but he wanted to be thought of as above mere mortals, too. He would bounce back and forth.
When Elvis would give us a bunch of money, Charlie and I would harmonize and sing, “What a Friend We Have in Elvis.” It used to get him so damn mad! He would just go crazy! Then, after a time, he’d sing it himself. He’d laugh about it and call us his “disciples.”
One night, he and I were sitting in the middle of the bed at Graceland, and he said, “You know, Lamar, there’ll always be a star in your crown.” I’m not a great student of the Bible, so I said, “What the hell are you talking about?” He said, “You’re kind, you always look out for people, and you’re not self-centered.” I said, “Yeah. So?” He said, “Lamar, I’m self-centered, you’re not. I think about myself and what and who I am all the time. And I don’t like it. Being self-centered is a really bad situation.”
I said, “Well, I always thought self-centered meant being egotistical and arrogant.” And he said, “I’m not either one of those, am I?” And I said, “I question that.” And he started laughing. That was a rare episode of reality with him. And he got off it real fast.
Right after that, he got into this thing of parting the clouds. When he started that, I went, “Holy moley!”
MARTY LACKER: He’d have two or three guys go out in the backyard on Perugia Way with him, and he’d have them look up at the sky. Then he’d say he’d parted the clouds or made the stars move. And he’d say, “Did you see that?” He was testing us. Of course, you get enough pills in you, you can see anything.
We’d be in the bus, traveling in the early daylight hours or in the evening. We’d look up at the clouds, and Elvis would say they looked like people. Everybody who was dead. He’d say, “Oh, look, Joseph Stalin.” Or, “John F. Kennedy.” Then, one time, real softly, he said, “Oh, my God!” Red and I said, “What’s wrong?” And he said, “Look, there I am. In the clouds.”
BILLY SMITH: Elvis used to stop the bus in New Mexico, where it’s just wide-open spaces and the sky is so expansive. He’d get out and say, “Look, man! All those UFOs!” It would be a shooting star or something. But he’d say, “Can you see them?” I think he had a need to believe in mystic stuff.
Every once in a while a weird incident would take place. One time, we were driving across the Arizona desert, and it was cool out. This was the wee hours of the morning. And here come this white-haired man with a white beard. Walking from out of nowhere and going way off to the side of the road. He was probably just a hitchhiker, but he didn’t look interested in a ride.
He had on a white shirt and dark-colored pants. We started to pass him, and he just kept walking. We all looked at each other like “God, what was that?” And somebody said, “That’s Jesus.” We were into this Self-Realization thing by now, so it started us thinking.
Another night, we come over the mountains close to Albuquerque, and we seen these blinding lights shining to oncoming traffic. Elvis slowed down, and we come to a stop and got out. It was a damn car, turned upside down, on its top. Not a soul around. It scared the hell out of us. We looked all over for somebody because we thought they might be hurt or dead. But we never found anybody.
It kind of gave us the creeps. Just miles and miles of desert darkness. And this weird light.
MARTY LACKER: About this same time, when Elvis was really into his spiritual self, he woke up on Perugia Way one day, and he looked out this big picture window to the right of his bed. There was a lot of shrubbery by the window, and Elvis said he was lying in his bed, and he looked out and he saw a bird sitting on the bush. And the head of the bird was Jesus. It really shook him up.
BILLY SMITH: Once Larry came into the picture, Elvis studied the Jewish religion quite a lot. I remember he kept asking, “What is it about Jews, man?” He was fascinated by how most Jews seem to make good. I think that burnt Vernon up, actually.
MARTY LACKER: Some of what Elvis grew up with was still in him, as far as Jews were concerned. It was drummed into him that Jews were trying to take over the world, so he believed that crap. He was still around his father, who was full of hatred for everybody, and Colonel Parker. I’ve heard Parker make anti-Semitic comments.
Red got in a conversation with Elvis and some of the other guys one time, and Elvis evidently said something derogatory about Jews. Red popped up and said, “Now wait a minute, Elvis. Marty’s Jewish.” And Elvis looked at him and said, “Well, Marty’s one of the good ones.”
There are a lot of good—and bad—people in all the religions. But Elvis was never taught that growing up. Vernon was a vicious person, and totally anti-Semitic, as was most of his family.
Vernon had this kind of odd way of talking. He also had a nasty habit of puckering up his top lip while he was talking, and he’d get this smartass, know-it-all look on his face. He had an attitude. And he was really upset when Elvis hired Geller. For one, it was another guy to pay—taking money out of Vernon’s pocket, the way he looked at it. And two, Geller was Jewish. And Vernon didn’t want any more Jews around. He would have keeled over if he’d known I got Elvis eating food from a kosher delicatessen.
LAMAR FIKE: Vernon was very prejudiced, but I don’t know that Elvis ever really was.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis liked a lot of Jewish opera singers, and he liked some Jewish music. On Perugia Way, my room was in the back, next to his, and it overlooked the backyard. When you’re under the influence of drugs, you get obsessed with stuff, whether it’s food or music. I happened to like the Jewish prayer for the annulment of vows, Kol Nidre. And I had an album of Johnny Mathis singing it, of all people, and I used to play the hell out of that at night. I’d get in a trance, more or less. I’d play it louder than hell. And sometimes Elvis would be sitting out in the backyard, and I’d play it over and over, loud as I could, and he never said anything. He must have liked it because usually if he didn’t like to hear something, he’d scream, “Turn that fuckin’ thing off!”
He used to do this Hebrew thing with Alan. They were watching The Greatest Story Ever Told, and somebody in there said in Hebrew, “Ali Ali loma sabat.” I think it was supposed to be Jesus Christ on the cross, saying, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And Elvis and Alan used to say that to each other all the time. It became a catchphrase. Elvis thought it was hipper to say it in Hebrew than in English.
Geller claims in his book [If I Can Dream: Elvis’ Own Story] that Gladys told Elvis she had Jewish ancestors, starting with her maternal grandmother, Martha Tackett Mansell. Which is pretty close to what Elaine Dundy says in her book. Dundy just has it going back a step farther. Geller says Gladys told Elvis this when he was young and warned him not to tell any of the relatives, including his daddy. Geller said Elvis was fascinated by this, and by Jews, and by their culture.
I know that when Geller first came to Memphis, Elvis took him out to the cemetery to show him Gladys’s footstone with the Star of David. But the thing is, Elvis would say anything. He might have told Geller that Gladys was Jewish to make him think he wasn’t prejudiced. But if Elvis was Jewish . . . boy, that would be a kick, wouldn’t it?