In January ’65, Elvis’s soundtrack for Roustabout beat out albums by the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and all the other British invasion groups for the top spot on the Billboard “Hot LPs” chart. Since Elvis had placed no singles on the trade magazine’s “Top 100 Records of 1964” list, the Roustabout triumph was doubly important.
Furthermore, in April, Elvis would have surprising success with a single he’d recorded five years earlier. For the first time in his career, he had scheduled no regular studio sessions that year, and RCA, running low on material not pulled from the soundtracks, reached back in its vaults and released “Crying in the Chapel,” a quasigospel ballad first recorded by Darrell Glenn in 1953 and covered several times since. The song quickly climbed to number three and sold 1,732,000 copies worldwide by the end of the year.
For most of the entourage, however, Elvis’s personal mystery train was now a runaway engine, thundering down the track with no one in control.
MARTY LACKER: One night in ’65, in Memphis, Elvis had gone upstairs to bed, and Patsy and I were just getting ready to go to sleep, when the phone rang. It was Joe. This was about eight or nine months after he’d left. I said, “Well, you timed it right. We just got home from the movies.” He said, “Let me ask you something. Do you think Elvis would take me back?” I said, “Why? What’s wrong?” He said he hadn’t been working—he was trying to be an extra in the movies—and he was tired of sitting by the phone waiting for Central Casting to call. And he said, “I’m broke. I need to come to work.”
One time before, in L.A., Joe had wanted to come back. But Elvis wasn’t ready—he pretty much exploded when I asked him—and I had to tell Joe, “I don’t think it would be a good idea.”
This time, when Joe called Graceland, he sounded desperate. In fact, he said, “Please. I need the job.” I knew Elvis hadn’t gone to sleep yet, so I put Joe on hold and I buzzed upstairs. I said, “Joe’s on the phone.” He said, “What does he want?” I said, “He wants to know if you’ll take him back.” And the first thing Elvis said was, “Do we need him?”
I said, “Well, yeah, Elvis. Quite frankly, I could use the help.” I was just saying that because I wanted to get them together again. The next week, he was back.
LAMAR FIKE: It was a difficult world outside of the gates of Graceland, and Joe found that out.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis let you know that you were secure as long as you were with him. You also knew that if anything happened—when it got hard on the outside—you could come back.
LAMAR FIKE: If Elvis wanted you back, he’d make sure he got you back.
MARTY LACKER: I might be wrong, but in Joe’s coming back, I see the fine hand of Colonel Parker. Because the Colonel wasn’t getting diddly out of me. Goldman’s book said I had an opportunity to do Elvis a favor. No Joe, no pipeline to Parker. It kind of shocked me to read it, but I guess that’s right.
BILLY SMITH: I’m not discrediting Joe. He did a good job. But Marty did, too. I think Colonel pushed Elvis, and said, “You need to get somebody else back in there.”
MARTY LACKER: When Joe came back, we more or less shared the duties, although I kept the checkbook. Not long after, we went to Hawaii to do Paradise, Hawaiian Style. Colonel and Vernon insisted that when we went on location, the guys couldn’t sign for their meals at the hotel. We had about thirteen guys, and Vernon and Colonel told Elvis, “If you let them do that, they’ll eat steaks all the time.” So they gave us a per diem—$84 a week, or $12 a day, for food. And every Monday, from wherever we were shooting, I’d have to go back to the hotel when the cashier’s office opened and get a check cashed.
This one day, I came back with a big roll of dollar bills because I had to give everybody precisely $84. We were standing on the beach at Hanauma Bay. And I pulled the roll out of my pocket and started giving everybody money. And Parker, who liked to make fools of people when he had an audience like the crew or Hal Wallis, walked over and said, “Whose money is that?” I said, “This is Elvis’s money.” Parker said, “Let me have $300.” I said, “Colonel, I can’t do that. It’s not my money.” And his voice got a little louder so everyone could hear him. He said, “Didn’t you just tell me this was Mr. Presley’s money?” Or as he used to say, “Mr. Pwezley,” because of his Dutch accent. I always noticed his accent, but I never questioned him about it.
I said, “Colonel, this is for the guys’ meals.” And then he got really loud. “You’re telling me that’s Mr. Presley’s money and I can’t have $300 of it?” I knew what he was doing. I said, “Colonel, look. If it was my money, I’d give you all of it.”
By then, he was shouting, “Goddamnit, you won’t give me $300 of Mr. Presley’s money!” I said, “Colonel, go over and ask Elvis. If he comes to me and says to give you three hundred bucks, that’s what I’ll do.” With that, Parker raised his cane in the air and shouted, “Goddamn you, don’t you ever come and ask me for anything again!” And I looked him straight in the face and said, “Colonel, I never have asked you for anything, and I never will. And you can count on that.”
Elvis heard me. And he came running over and he said, “What the hell is going on here?” Parker said, “I asked him for $300 of your money, and he wouldn’t give it to me.” I looked at Elvis, and I said, “If you want me to give him this money, I’ll give it to him. But it’s the guys’ money for their food.” And I was so pissed, I threw the money on the sand and started walking up the beach.
Well, in a couple of minutes, Elvis came after me. He said, “Let me tell you what the old son of a bitch said.” I said, “What’s that?” Elvis said, “Parker says to hang on to you because you’re looking out for me.”
There was a log on the sand, and I sat on it and looked out over the ocean for about an hour and a half. I wouldn’t go back and be around that bastard. But he never tried that crap with me again.
LAMAR FIKE: When they brought Joe back in, it took a little time, but he ended up doing the books. And Vernon was on him all the time. Joe told me, “The only reason I can put up with this job is because I have all these things.” I said, “Yeah, it must be rough.”
MARTY LACKER: One day, Elvis came up to me and said, “The Colonel wants you to take him to Palm Springs.” I had never done that before, and I thought it was a very strange request, considering our relationship. I didn’t want to be alone with him. Especially for a two-and-a-half-hour drive. But I did it because Elvis asked me to.
Colonel liked to go to Palm Springs on Thursday or Friday for the weekend because that’s where his wife was. So that day, I went over to his office. And I remember I had on a black pullover sweater. And Colonel looked at me and said, “You’re not dressed right. Let me give you a shirt.” I said, “No thanks.” But he opened up a closet and pulled out this ugly, old man’s yellow-and-white-striped shirt. And it had a cigar burn on the front.
I said, “Colonel, I don’t want your shirt.” He said, “You sure?” I said, “That’s right.” And he put it back in the closet.
We started driving, and we got about a half hour or so out of Palm Springs, and we hadn’t said a word to each other. He was sitting next to me in the front seat. And all of a sudden, he started chuckling, and he said, “Boy, I showed those goddamn Jews, didn’t I?” Just out of the blue. Then he chuckled again, but he didn’t say anything. Now, I’m saying to myself, “You no-good bastard. You old son of a bitch. You’ve got to know I’m Jewish.”
I wanted to take that car and head it into a pole. And just when I was trying to figure out how to kill him without hurting myself, he said, “I want to stop up here and get some coffee.” He tried to order something for me, but I wouldn’t even let him buy me coffee.
We got to his house. And this is a guy worth millions, right? He got out of the car, and he took five dollars out of his pocket and held it out to me through the passenger window. And he said, “Here, go have dinner on me.” I looked at him, and I looked at his money, and I said, “Colonel, I don’t want your money. You don’t have to buy me anything.” And he said, “No, no, no. Take this. I want to do this for you.” I said, “Colonel, you have a nice evening.” And I drove off. I looked back, and he was still standing there with the five bucks in his hand.
BILLY SMITH: In 1965, we were out in California for nine months. We didn’t come home until October, in that ol’ mobile home. I should have kicked my own ass for ever doing that. Nine months I allowed Elvis to manipulate me. And then, another time, we were out there for about six months. After that, it had to come to an end. I wasn’t going to tolerate being gone for long periods and not being with my wife. ’Cause even when we did come home, we were supposed to go to the movies, and the fairgrounds, and skating—whatever Elvis wanted to do.
Now, the wives could go along on that stuff. And Priscilla was starting to come out to California as often as Elvis would let her, which wasn’t all that much, really. But Jo still felt Elvis was taking me away from her. It really interfered with our marriage. I put her through hell, and I hate it now.
MARTY LACKER: The upshot was that Elvis allowed Jo to live at the house in California with us in the later years. That’s because of Elvis’s relationship with Billy. And he cared about Jo, too, but if push came to shove, it was really because of Billy. If anybody else wanted his wife out there, he had to get an apartment.
LAMAR FIKE: I can see why Elvis didn’t want the wives out there. He was going to play around, and he didn’t want anybody carrying tales.
My wife, Nora, liked Priscilla real well, and she liked Nora. But being with Elvis would put a hell of a strain on a marriage. And on being a family. I was home so infrequently that my kids would see an extra place at the table and wonder who was coming.
Elvis hated the idea of families. You had to fight to get home with your kids. And they suffered quite a bit, or at least mine did. They’ve all had some problems of one kind or another. Especially my youngest child, John. He had spinal meningitis when he was a baby, and he’s had a lot of difficulties. There were times I had to go back and be with Nora, of course, and Elvis understood that.
But we all treated our wives like an appendage. Sonny’s and Red’s and Billy’s marriages are the only ones that survived.
MARTY LACKER: Billy and Jo were together more than most of us were with our wives. It would always amaze Elvis how close they were.
LAMAR FIKE: One time, Elvis got on this kick where he wanted me to chauffeur. So I got a black suit, and here I went. One day, Elvis and Alan and I were in the black Rolls-Royce. I was driving. And it had been raining. It was one of those fifteen-day California rains, where it just rains ’til Hitler comes back, and then the mudslides start. We were at Sunset and Sunset Plaza, on the way to Paramount, stopped at the traffic light. That intersection is a hill. And it had rained so much that those cantilevered houses were just falling. And there on the left, a garage was literally coming down the street in this flood of water.
I looked to my left, and I looked at the light, and I looked back to the left at the garage, and I said, “Gee, I hope it makes the light.” And I was serious. Elvis opened the door and just started screaming with laughter. Fell clean out of the car. And sure to God, that garage came right in front of the car and went down the hill. I said, “Well, hell, it made it!” The light changed to green, and we drove on off.
These things seemed like everyday occurrences to me. But it was insanity is what it was. We were just so encapsulated in our world. The Memphis Mafia was our thing.
MARTY LACKER: Sometimes it got almost surreal. Not just with weird events, but in the way people responded to Elvis. One day, we were coming back from MGM in the Rolls-Royce, and we were driving down Sunset. We’d just gotten past UCLA, when this limo pulled up alongside of us. I was sitting in the front seat, and Elvis was in the back. I had the window down. And I heard this voice yell, and I turned and looked, and there was Judy Garland, hanging out the limo. She knew it was Elvis because of the Tennessee license plate. Plus, at that time, he was the only person in the United States who had that Rolls-Royce limousine, which was really a big, overgrown, ugly piece of shit.
I turned around, and I said, “Elvis, that’s Judy Garland, hanging out the window trying to get your attention.” So he rolled down the window, and she said, “Hi, Elvis! How are you?” And Elvis said, “Fine, how you doing?”
About then, I noticed that sitting in the back of the limousine with her, in the corner, was Jack Paar. They were good friends. And Paar leaned forward and said, “Oh, by the way, I’m Jack Paar.” Like, “Well, what about me?” It was a funny gesture.
God, what an odd trio—Judy Garland, Jack Paar, and Elvis Presley. But that was it. Elvis closed the window, and on we went.
BILLY SMITH: When we were with Elvis, the pressures of the outside world were taken away. We thought, “Nothing can happen to him. If we’re with him, we’re safe. It’s God’s way of protecting us.” He had that kind of power over us.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think, “God, all the crazy things I did!” We’d try anything. In ’66, I got on the damn bulldozer with him and we tore down that house in the back of Graceland where my family lived in the fifties. It collapsed around us, and one beam snapped off and damn near pinned both of us. We done some very dangerous things. But it didn’t scare me. He would holler, “Let’s go!” and I was ready.
LAMAR FIKE: People do funny shit on drugs, you know? Stumbling and falling. We’d take all these pills and sit up and see who could stay up the longest. Elvis and Sonny would be loaded and just reeling. And Alan would be loaded, and I’d be loaded, and it was like everything was slower than slow motion.
MARTY LACKER: When you take drugs as much as we did, you automatically become paranoid. You think everybody is out to get you. And sometimes you hallucinate. Because they dull your senses. That’s why Elvis took pain pills. They helped him escape the thoughts about Priscilla, the thoughts about his mother, everything.
We all started with uppers. What they laughingly call “diet pills.” It was nothing but speed, amphetamines. Then we got on sleeping pills to counteract the uppers. The sleeping pills felt so good that we started taking them instead of taking speed. We’d walk around in the daytime with sleeping pills in us. And we never thought there was anything wrong with us. Then sometimes we’d switch off and take pain pills.
I think that after a while, I took pain pills so I wouldn’t think about my family being at home in Memphis. Today, I realize what a bastard I was, as far as my family was concerned. My first two children basically grew up without me. And even when I was home, I’d be up at Graceland every night. When I was out in California, I would call home every night or every other night. And sometimes I felt bad about not being there, and I’d want to be with them. And other times, I couldn’t wait to get off the phone.
Probably the lowest thing I ever did was right after my youngest daughter, Angie, was born. I’d just gone to California with Elvis. We’d been there about a week, when Patsy started bleeding a lot. She called and wanted me to come home. And I told her I couldn’t. The truth is, I could have. She got really upset and called me names and slammed down the phone. And she had to go into the hospital. But I still stayed in California. I didn’t want to miss anything with Elvis.
The sad thing is I didn’t get any better. When Patsy’s mother died, I was in California, and she wanted me to come home and go to Knoxville to the funeral with her. I told her no. And so Priscilla went with her. It was the nicest thing Priscilla ever did. Patsy hated my guts for that, and I don’t blame her.
I think Patsy loved me, but she probably stayed with me for the kids. I had a gun under my bed all of the time because I carried anywhere from $150 to $2,000 for Elvis. Fortunately, this was an automatic. One day when Angle was still a little-bitty girl, she walked into the living room holding the gun. My wife had a maid, who was more like a companion, actually, and it scared them both to death. With an automatic, you have to pull back to put a bullet in the chamber. And thank God Angie wasn’t strong enough to do that. It makes me shiver to think about that now.
LAMAR FIKE: My thing was Placidyls. You’d take them, and you’d get right in that zone between staying awake and passing out. Which is really wild. It would get the shit off your mind.
We’d take a needle and punch a hole in the back of them. That liquid would ooze in your mouth and you’d just get ripped out. We called them “footballs” because they were shaped sort of like that, and they were green. These were 750 [milligram] Placidyls, the heaviest kahunas you could take. We didn’t go to bed ’til eight or nine o’clock in the morning, and I needed something to knock me out so I could sleep. I got to where I was taking ten or eleven of them a night, and I still wouldn’t go to sleep.
It really fucks up your system. You can just load and load and load. That’s why, when you die, you don’t know it. When the mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker, was on his deathbed, his wife came over to him, and she said, “Where are you?” And he said, “I’m halfway across that river.” Isn’t that a great saying? Well, with that stuff, you’d be halfway across that river, but you wouldn’t know it. And all of a sudden you’d be dead. So you had to be careful.
I should be dead, really. I stayed up for five or six days at a time on uppers. Dexedrine. Blackbirds. We took so many uppers, our teeth sounded like Xavier Cugat’s rhythm section, man. We just chattered up a storm. This went on for about five, six years in a row, from about ’61 to ’67.
BILLY SMITH: Back in the sixties, I could have had a drug problem. At times, I know I was right at the point. Because it was so easy to fall into that, trying to keep Elvis’s pace. And Elvis had a very cunning way about him. In the sixties, he’d shove it to you like candy. Especially if he thought somebody was not going to be right in the groove of things. He’d say, “Look, we’re going to the movies, and we’re going to be up most of the night.” And you’d think, “Well, God, if I’m going to be able to keep up, I guess I’d better.” So I got to the stage where I’d say, “Hey, give me a Dexedrine.” And then pretty soon I’d be saying, “Give me a sleeping pill because I’ve got to have some shut-eye.” For a number of years, I might take one Dexedrine a day and maybe one sleeping pill. But then it gradually got to where it was an everyday thing. And then more as I went along. My weight dropped down from about 140 to 116.
I don’t buy this stuff that Elvis got anybody on drugs. That was their own choosing. We were leading a fast-paced lifestyle, and hell, when you took that stuff, it was even faster. We were on a dead run and didn’t know where we were going. Like that old saying “Live fast, love hard, and die young.” We were well on that damn road.
Thank goodness, I reached a point to where I said, “I don’t need that. My nerves are shot.” I was like a cat, ready to climb the wall. So I shut it off. I’m not a strong individual, but I knew myself.
LAMAR FIKE: Alan used to get so fucked up on pills, he didn’t know where he was. Alan truly loved ’em.
MARTY LACKER: Alan should never have done a lot of drugs. His respiratory system wasn’t good. He just smoked too much. We used to call him “The Hacker” because he coughed all the time. He used to cough and get choked so bad that it was scary.
One time, Alan and I shared a motel room in Nashville, when Elvis went over there to a recording session. We were at the Albert Pick, on Murfreesboro Road. It’s a fleabag, or at least it was then. But it was out of the way and cheap. The Colonel picked it.
Alan was lying flat on his bed asleep. And he started coughing so hard that one cough lifted his whole body—in a prone position, now—two feet off the bed. Like he levitated. Honest to God, he coughed and went straight up, and then fell back down on the bed again. And never woke up. I was on the other bed looking over at him, and I just busted out laughing. And then I started cussing because I was afraid he was going to choke on his own cough.
I said, “Goddamnit, quit smoking all those damn things!” And, of course, he couldn’t hear a word I was saying. Because he was not only smoking so bad and taking pills, he was drinking.
LAMAR FIKE: Alan took Seconals, or Tuinals, which are hypnotics. He loved downers. He liked uppers, too, when we were driving cross-country transporting the cars. Of course, I did, too. We’d take a big handful of them, boy, before we’d start out on these trips. Back then, we didn’t have CBs. We had walkie-talkies. And we’d stick the aerial out the window and talk to each other, tell each other if we spotted a cop, and tell each other the things you do when you’re high.
One time, I was driving the Cadillac limousine, and Alan was driving the Rolls-Royce. I called him and said, “Look over here to the left. Do you see this town?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Let’s stop and look at it.”
This was in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Alan and I pulled over, and we saw a whole city together. We stood there and smoked a cigarette and talked about the buildings and stuff. Both of us hallucinated the same thing because we had been driving nearly twenty-four hours. I can still see it. We saw cows in the middle of the road that weren’t there. And people who didn’t exist got in your car and talked to you for two or three hundred miles.
God, talk about hallucinations! That same trip, we were driving across the desert and all of a sudden, Alan threw on the brakes so fast the car dipped down in front and slid sideways. ’Cause we’d do eighty or one hundred miles per hour—we’d get so damn many tickets that Elvis put a pool of money together just to pay ’em. I said, “What the hell was that?” Alan said, “Damn, all those kids crossing in front of me! I had to stop!” I said, “Alan, we’re in the fuckin’ Mojave Desert. There are no kids out here!”
Later the same day—because we’d drive straight through to Memphis in thirty-six hours—we pulled into Little Rock, Arkansas. And we came to a school crossing. All these kids were walking across the street in a line, and Alan went right through them. Kids were jumping on trees, just diving and dodging. They scattered like quail. And Alan went right on. I said, “What in the hell are you doing, man? You could have killed those kids!” He said, “Oh, God! You told me there weren’t any kids!” He thought he was hallucinating again.
MARTY LACKER: In California, Alan and his wife, Jo, had an apartment on Beverly Glen Boulevard. She used to call me all the time. I’d have to go over and search for the damn pills and flush them down the toilet. Red did it a couple of times, too. We had to haul Alan over to UCLA Medical Center in ’65. He had thirty-five yellow jackets [phenobarbital] in him. Tried to kill himself over this tug-of-war between Elvis and his wife. Alan had six, seven, maybe eight real good scares when he wasn’t trying to kill himself. That’s a lot.
One time in Memphis, he and Jo were staying at his mother’s house. And he was in really bad shape. When I got there, he was slobbering all over himself and couldn’t talk. All this goop was coming out of his mouth, and he was choking. Strictly from drugs. I got him up and walked him around, and they called the doctor. And then they turned the damn bed upside down and got all the bottles and threw them away. Because he had pills stashed under the mattress. He had them behind the night tables. He had them everywhere.
Alan just got caught up in all that stuff, which you can easily do. And he was combining too many things. When he took pills and drank at the same time, he’d get stupid drunk—he’d look at you and just grin.
One night, Jo called up at the house and said Alan was messed up and she didn’t know where he was. Richard and I headed straight for the Red Velvet nightclub and found him there, out of his mind. We took him home, and got out of the car, and just as we were taking him into the house, Jo came out, holding this .25 automatic. She was screaming, “I’m gonna kill you, you son of a bitch!”
It was sort of comical because Richard and I had to lean Alan against the car so he could stand upright while we went after her. I grabbed her wrist with the gun, and Richard grabbed her other arm. And I said, “Goddamnit, Jo, drop this gun! Don’t be stupid!”
Jo’s a little-bitty hyper woman, but she was so angry that she was strong. And she said, “I’m not dropping anything!” And finally, I just got up in her ear, and I said, “Jo, much as I hate to, if you don’t drop this gun, I’m going to break your fuckin’ arm.” And I grabbed the gun from underneath, and I felt there was no clip in it. I said, “Richard, there ain’t no clip in this gun.” And then I called Jo a nasty name because she’d scared the pee out of me.
I don’t think Alan was ever really happy, except in the early days. There was just always something missing.
LAMAR FIKE: Alan was a very stoic individual, and he hid behind this happy-go-lucky facade. But he was always sad. Alan cried all the time. You just didn’t know it.
Nothing ever really worked for Alan. And if you want to know the truth, nothing ain’t really worked for any of us. But not because of the drugs. Our psychological scars are worse than that.
BILLY SMITH: I assume Priscilla was taking stuff, too. She says in her book that she took diet pills and sleeping pills to keep up with Elvis. Everybody around Elvis was at one time or another.
MARTY LACKER: About ’65, Priscilla began playing a bigger role in things. And part of it had to do with Joe coming back. There always was a little clique in the group, especially when Joe came into it. But when Joe came back, the group really began to splinter into separate camps. Jerry started gravitating more to Joe, and Joe would make sure Jerry got this and that. Schilling sort of rode on Joe’s coattails. Joe and Jerry just thought they were better than everybody else.
LAMAR FIKE: That’s where that whole thing tilted, when Jerry went with Joe. That caste system got really strong. With the couples, it was Joe and Joanie Esposito and everybody beneath them. It just galled Billy and Marty. I wouldn’t put up with it. I just told them all to go fuck themselves. Joe started it, and everybody hated him for it. But Elvis let it happen. It became like the First and Second Family routine.
BILLY SMITH: People always say to me, “I guess you took a lot of pictures of Elvis that nobody’s ever seen.” No, I didn’t. Only a couple of people were allowed to take pictures—Joe and Priscilla. And then, after they took them, you couldn’t even get a copy of them. Same with the home movies.
MARTY LACKER: All those years, the only two people Priscilla really paid any attention to were Jerry and Joe. Joe’s wife, Joanie, was like Priscilla’s shadow. Priscilla was always pushing Elvis to be with Joe.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis had so much shit goin’ down that it’s kind of amazing he had the presence of mind to even make those godforsaken movies. In the spring of ’65, he did Frankie and Johnny at MGM, with Donna Douglas. She was Elly May from The Beverly Hillbillies. She was a former Miss New Orleans, but this was one costar he didn’t try to date. Because Donna was a smart cookie. Elvis laid that religious stuff on her, and she knew about as much as he did, so they talked books and religion. Nothing like what he did with Deborah Walley in ’66 on Spinout, though. Whew! He spun her head around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.
MARTY LACKER: The movies were pretty much a blur during this time. Paradise, Hawaiian Style was supposed to be a sequel to Blue Hawaii, but it fizzled in comparison. Elvis was steamed about this picture, because Blue Hawaii had grossed all those millions, and the talk in Hollywood was that Hal Wallis used the profits to finance Becket, with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. Meanwhile, Elvis kept getting stuck in these crappy beach-and-bikini pictures.
There was a lot of tension on the set. The director, Mickey Moore, was unhappy with Elvis because he thought he looked fat. This was the first time a director had ever actually said anything about it. His face might have looked a little fuller, but I didn’t think he looked fat. But if he did, it might have been because he’d started experimenting with downers. Seconals. Yellow jackets.
Every once in a while, when we’d go to a new doctor, Elvis would say to Richard and me, “Would you check out the offices?” That meant he wanted the latest edition of the Physician’s Desk Reference, with all the pills listed in it. So we’d walk around the hallway and look in the offices. One time, we spotted one at a clinic, and Richard looked at me and grinned. I went in and I grabbed it, and we went out the backdoor.
LAMAR FIKE: In our camp, the PDR was like a Bible. Elvis thought hotel rooms came equipped with them, like the Gideon Bible. He read the PDR like I do a damn motor magazine.
MARTY LACKER: In ’64, when the Beatles first came to the United States, they wanted to meet Elvis. But it couldn’t be arranged. Then in ’65, the Colonel said Brian Epstein called, and the Beatles were going to be in California, and they really, really wanted to see Elvis.
Colonel knew what he was doing. He said to Elvis, “If you’d like, you could go to their house.” And Elvis said, “No, no. Let them come over to Perugia Way.” Elvis told us we could bring our wives and kids over to meet them if we wanted.
BILLY SMITH: Jo couldn’t believe the Beatles were coming to meet us. We were all real excited. We’d say, “The Beatles, hell, they’re hot! This is a big thing!” But around Elvis, we knew not to let on too much because he’d get really pissed.
MARTY LACKER: Somehow, the word got out about the meeting. And it caused a problem because Perugia Way is a very small circle. Before the Beatles even got there, the entire cove was packed with people hoping to see Elvis and the Beatles. The Bel Air police had to come so the Beatles could get their limousine in the courtyard.
When they came in the house, Elvis and some of the guys waited for them in the den. He wasn’t going to go to the door because he didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. So they came in the den, and when they met him, it was like they were in a trance, just looking up at him and shaking his hand. On TV, they were so boisterous, and here they were real quiet. After they said, “It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” they didn’t know what to say. So Elvis said, “Let’s go sit down.” He had on a red shirt and gray slacks, and he sat in his usual place on the couch in front of the TV. And the Beatles sat on chairs around the room, as did our families.
BILLY SMITH: At first, they didn’t know what to do. They were just sittin’ around staring at Elvis. Everybody was looking at each other like “What the hell’s going on here? Who’s going to do something?”
MARTY LACKER: Finally, Elvis looked at one of them, and he said, “Hey, I didn’t mean for this to be like the subjects coming to the king.” And then he said, “Quite frankly, if you guys are going to stare at me all night, I’m going to bed. I thought we’d talk a while and maybe jam a little.” And when he said that, they went nuts. They all went to the piano, and Elvis handed out a couple of guitars. And they just started singing—Elvis songs, Beatles songs, Chuck Berry songs. Elvis played Paul’s bass part on “I Feel Fine,” and Paul said something like “You’re coming along quite promising on the bass there, Elvis.” I remember thinking later, “Man, if we’d only had a tape recorder.”
BILLY SMITH: We tried to join in the fun as casually as we could, without paying too much attention to ’em. Ringo wanted to shoot some pool, so we did that. Alveena, this heavy maid, brought some drinks and little hors d’oeuvres, and she stepped on Ringo’s foot. He screwed up his face like he was in all kinds of pain, and he said, “I think she’s broke my bloody toe.” He was funny. He’d get up there with Elvis and impersonate him with a cue stick for a guitar. Then he’d shoot the ball. It turned into a real good night. Seemed like everybody had fun.
MARTY LACKER: In a little while, Colonel Parker walked in. Which meant it was casino time. Because we had this coffee table that could be converted into a gambling table. You reversed it and turned it into a roulette wheel. So Joe and Alan and Colonel opened up the casino in what we called the “round den” because it used to be an outside courtyard. Alan said Colonel was throwing money around like crazy. And I remember Colonel and Joe bragging that they took Brian Epstein to the cleaners, that he owed ’em about two or three thousand dollars.
They didn’t leave until about two o’clock in the morning. Colonel used to have a thing about covered wagons. He used one as a kind of logo for his company—he had one on his stationery, I remember. And as souvenirs, he gave the Beatles these little covered wagons that lit up on the inside.
BILLY SMITH: Jo was pregnant with our second child, and, of course, she was wearing maternity clothes, and her stomach was sticking out. We were all standing outside when the Beatles were leaving in their limousine, and somebody took a picture of Jo, and Patsy Lacker, and Jo Fortas, and Joanie Esposito. And it turned up in some magazine, with the headline THE NIGHT ELVIS SHARED HIS WOMEN WITH THE BEATLES! Jo laughed like crazy, man. She saved that magazine for a long, long time.
MARTY LACKER: As they were saying goodbye, John and Paul said, “We’re staying at this house on Mulholland Drive, and we’d like to invite you all to come up tomorrow.” And Paul looked at Elvis and said, “I hope you’ll be able to come.” And then he looked at us and said, “But if he can’t come, you fellows are welcome.”
When they left, Elvis said, “I’m not going up there.” He said, “I did my duty. I met them, and that’s it.”
LAMAR FIKE: The day after the Beatles visited Elvis at the house, reporters asked Paul what kind of time he had—what he thought of Elvis. He had a one-word reply: “Odd.”
MARTY LACKER: The next afternoon, Jerry, and Richard, and Billy, and I went up to where they were staying. And they were overjoyed to see us. They really were. John pulled me over by the picture window, and he said, “Last night was the greatest night of my life.”
In subsequent years, the guys visited the Beatles three or four times when they came over here. Of course, Elvis never went. In the summer of ’66, we saw Brian Epstein lying out on the chaise longue by the pool. He was zonked out of his brain. And Paul and the other guys were sitting by the pool, and there were people all over the place—girls running around naked, people dropping acid.
About twenty minutes later, the Mamas and the Papas showed up. All four of them—Mama Cass, John, Denny, and Michelle—came marching in a row, like soldiers. And John and George immediately got up and went into the house with them. I was talking with this guy, Mal Evans, who was the Beatles’ road manager and bodyguard. Big guy. And I said, “Where are they going? Are they talking business?” He said, “No, no, they’re just going to get blown out of their skulls.” It was party time.
From ’66 on, the Beatles really changed. They were smashed out of their heads all the time and into their Maharishi trip. And they weren’t nearly as friendly. Just before we left during one of those visits—I can’t remember if it was ’66 or ’67—I went in this side room, where Paul was singing songs and playing piano. He looked up at me and he said, “Do you think Elvis would ever cut one of my songs?” The Beatles were the biggest thing in the universe right then. But that goes to show you, they still thought Elvis was bigger.
BILLY SMITH: By late ’65, Priscilla was getting more and more restless. She wanted to be with us out in California. And she wanted to get married. At the end of ’65, we moved to another house in Bel Air, on Rocca Place. Priscilla pretty much insisted she was going to be there.
Priscilla was a pretty nice person in the beginning. But she changed a hell of a lot when she went to California. She had been secluded at Graceland. And now she saw a whole new world. Hollywood and Elvis changed her.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis always controlled the guys, but starting about late ’65, early ’66, Priscilla started lording it over the wives.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis basically told her to exert more control over the wives and the guys. He said, “They work for me, so if you tell one of the guys to do something, he’d better do it.” She thought it was easy. She’d tell somebody to get her something, and if he didn’t, she’d tell Elvis, and Elvis would blow up. The majority of the guys went along with it, but they left a lot of things unsaid.
MARTY LACKER: Priscilla didn’t want anyone around who didn’t kiss her ass.
BILLY SMITH: Priscilla wanted to use Jo’s credit card one time. Jo said, “I don’t loan my credit card. You’ve got access to more money than I have. You need to bring your own credit card.” And I didn’t blame her. Elvis would have given her anything she needed. But that’s the kind of crap that Priscilla would do. We were just struggling to get by, and she was borrowing from us? It was ridiculous.
Priscilla’s a very materialistic person. But Priscilla is also a very stingy woman. She had a history of borrowing clothes from the wives and never giving them back. She always thought, “If I can get somebody else to pay for it, that’s fine.” That’s always been her way. Hell, she went to a hairdresser one time and left a fifty-cent tip. My God! If you’re the girlfriend of Elvis Presley, you don’t do that.
MARTY LACKER: In the mid-sixties, Elvis started getting interested in pornography. And I don’t mean just looking at people through the two-way mirror that we had on Perugia Way and Bellagio Road.
BILLY SMITH: I don’t remember how he got onto these, but Elvis liked these Danish porno films about women having sex with animals. Now, it wasn’t an everyday thing, but he liked them sometimes. And he liked to watch two girls wrestle in those 8mm films. He had Alan go down on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood and have films like that made. And of two women making love. Why, I don’t know.
Elvis liked to look at certain things. He had certain sexual fantasies. He didn’t like to see women totally nude. That turned him off more then it turned him on. He preferred they wear white cotton panties and a white bra. Even with the two women wrestling or making love. He wanted the bra and the panties on.
MARTY LACKER: About the white panties . . . I remember he fell in love with Peggy Fleming, the ice skater, on television. He loved to watch her skate because she always wore these white skating outfits. Every time she was on TV, he’d turn the volume up loud and tell everybody to shut up. And then he’d start talking. He’d say, “Man, she’s gorgeous. Man, she turns me on. Look at those white panties, man.”
LAMAR FIKE: Sometimes, he’d masturbate to movies. But I’ve been in the room when he watched sex movies, and he just watched them. I mean, he didn’t masturbate in front of me. Quite frankly, if he’d started, I probably would have started, too. Like I said, Elvis was a great voyeur. He loved to watch.
MARTY LACKER: After a while of watching movies like that, Elvis transferred his interest from 8mm films to real people. In other words, he wanted live girls to do it in front of him.
LAMAR FIKE: Nothing was sacred. Nora, my wife, bent over one time feeding one of the kids and Elvis looked up her dress. I said, “What the hell are you doing?” And he said, “Well, she’s bent over. What do you want me to do?” He was so funny about it, I couldn’t get mad.
I mean, look, he had his hang-ups. He liked to watch girls wrestle with panties on. And he taught Priscilla to do all of that stuff with other women. That was his thing. Like I said, he molded her.
MARTY LACKER: This talk about Elvis having Priscilla engage in lesbian sex . . . Priscilla befriended this girl. She used to come up to Graceland a lot, maybe once every two weeks. And from time to time she would have the girl go upstairs. Most times, Elvis didn’t like any strange women up there, but we noticed that this girl went up time after time.
Actually, this girl used to screw a lot of guys. She was more or less a groupie because she made the rounds at some of the Memphis recording studios. But I saw a Polaroid picture of Priscilla sitting on top of her, and both of them had on nothing but a bra and panties. Now the story goes—and I never saw the other pictures—that Elvis had pictures of Priscilla giving the girl oral sex. And not just pretending, from what I heard from the other guys who saw these.
Elvis took these pictures, and I’m sure he had Priscilla do this. I don’t think she did it on her own. Maybe that was Elvis’s turn-on, but, God, the woman who’s probably going to be your wife?
BILLY SMITH: I think that happened only one time. Let me rephrase it—with one person. They were wrestling, and I don’t know what else. The question is why Priscilla done this. But Elvis could talk you into damn near anything. She wanted to please him because she was hoping he’d marry her.
MARTY LACKER: Towards the end of the year, Elvis started spending more time out in Palm Springs. You might wonder why, especially since it meant he’d be closer to Colonel, the bane of his existence. He did it because Parker suggested it. Colonel said, “You can rest here and get away from Hollywood.” Which was a button to push because Elvis didn’t like Hollywood. In Palm Springs, he could get away without having to go all the way home to Memphis, and he could relax in the sun. Eventually, he found a doctor out there, George Kaplan, who’d give him prescriptions, and that made him happy.
Before he found Kaplan, though, we went to Palm Springs one time and stayed there, and Elvis needed some stuff. He’d go to great lengths to get pills, of course. This time he dug a hole in his foot under the guise of taking out an ingrown toenail. I’m not exaggerating, now, the hole was the size of a quarter. On his big toe. We were sitting in the waiting room, and he took his shoe and sock off, and he said, “Look.” And I looked down at this gaping, oozing, bloody pus hole. I said, “God Almighty, Elvis, what have you done?” And he said, “Bet I get some good stuff now.”
He mutilated himself on three or four other occasions. He always said that he had an ingrown toenail. But the hole he made was in the middle of his toe, way behind the nail. He knew he could always get what he wanted.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis liked Palm Springs because he could go up there and screw around and get away from what he thought were the pressures of Hollywood. So he’d go and have his girls meet him up there. The one thing Elvis didn’t have there was servants. He was afraid they would see something and it would get back to Colonel.
MARTY LACKER: By Thanksgiving of ’65, it was pretty obvious that things were changing in a big way. Usually, we came home for Thanksgiving. But this year, we were in Palm Springs, and the Colonel and Priscilla, along with Esposito and his wife, talked Elvis into spending Thanksgiving there. Well, the rest of us bitched and moaned because we wanted to go home. Elvis got in a little huddle with Priscilla and them, and he said, “Look, you guys fly home from here, and then you can come back. Me, and Joe and Joanie, and Priscilla are going to have Thanksgiving with the Colonel.”
BILLY SMITH: I’m sure Priscilla was tickled pink about that. She wanted the two couples to be a foursome, and she was in cahoots, of sorts, with Colonel. We just didn’t know it then.
MARTY LACKER: That Christmas, Elvis was even more generous than usual. He bought an old black lady a motorized wheelchair and took it to her house himself. It was more like a shack, really. It got to him to see how poor she was, how she lived. It took him back to his Tupelo years.
That year, he gave me a white Cadillac because I wouldn’t take a motorcycle when he bought ’em for everybody. It was a 1960 model—not a new car, but compared to the old Ford I was driving, it was like a Rolls-Royce. I got tears in my eyes because that was the first time anybody had ever given me anything like that.
LAMAR FIKE: In ’65, Elvis bought me a house in Madison, Tennessee, just outside Nashville. A pretty big house, $150,000 worth. Actually, he just gave me the money to do it. And he never expected that money to be paid back. How the hell was I going to pay back $150,000?
MARTY LACKER: Elvis didn’t buy houses for everyone. But at the time Lamar came and asked Elvis if he would loan him the money, or let him have the money for his house, I was wanting to buy the property where I built my house at the end of ’66. My family and I lived at Graceland ’til the middle of ’65, and then we moved into these little apartments nearby. We needed some privacy. At Graceland, Elvis wanted us to leave the intercom on in our apartment all night long, so he could talk to me and hear whatever I was doing. Patsy thought that was sort of kinky. We told him there was no way we were going to do that. But in some ways, when we moved, we still weren’t getting away from it all because Joe, Larry Geller, and Mike Keaton and their families lived in the same complex.
My sister’s husband, Bernie Grenadier, who was an interior designer, said he would draw the plans and build a house for me at cost. And the property that I wanted was a piece of undeveloped land in Whitehaven. I had been talking to somebody about it, and evidently one of the guys told Elvis. So when he told me to write out Lamar’s check for the house, he said, “While you’re at it, how much is that property you want?” I looked at him kind of strange because I hadn’t said anything to him about it, and I hadn’t put anybody else up to it through that old third-party trick.
I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I know you want to buy this piece of property out here and build you and Patsy a house.” And I said, “Yeah. I hate to let it go. It’s pretty cheap, $3,200 an acre.” And he said, “Well, write a check out to yourself for $3,200.” And I said, “Elvis, I don’t want you to do that.” He said, “I don’t care what you want me to do. Write it out.”
LAMAR FIKE: If Elvis gave you stuff, he didn’t care what you did with it afterwards. Like if he gave you a car and you sold it. He figured that was his way of giving you money without really giving it to you. A lot of us sold the cars and made extra money. He would buy us these cars that were so expensive we couldn’t afford them. We had to sell them.
The last car he gave me, in the seventies sometime, was a pale blue 600 Mercedes, a four-door sedan, that had actually been his—it had his name on the title. One time, I had to replace one part on it and it was something like $1,000. And you know, at $365 a week and a few bonuses, you can’t do that too many times. I sold that car for nearly $35,000, which at the time was a lot of money. An airplane captain bought it. I heard he sold it for half a million, and then I saw it for sale the other day for $2.3 million. I said, “Boy, that’s pretty good.” But I made a profit. I gave Elvis a dollar for it.
Elvis was always giving me stuff. Jewelry, expensive watches. He liked to give, and he liked to watch people’s reactions. But the elaborate gift giving was also a Band-Aid for the abuse he heaped on you the rest of the time. That was the blessing and the curse of Elvis.