MARTY LACKER: You know the waterfall that’s in the den, now the Jungle Room, at Graceland? My brother-in-law, Bernie Grenadier, did that. Actually, he redid it, in ’66. Vernon got this cheap-ass plumber—some $4-an-hour guy—to do it originally, and the guy botched the job. That whole wall leaked, and the water would flood the backyard. So Elvis asked Bernie to fix it. He was an interior designer, and my sister, Anne, was an interior decorator. They worked together.
Elvis was so pleased with what Bernie did with the waterfall that after that he said, “I’d really like to have the gardens done.” Because there was nothing out there but an old broken-down birdbath and some columns that had fallen down and rotted out.
And Elvis said, “It would be great to have someplace where I could go just to meditate, someplace that’s really pretty and peaceful where I could think and be by myself.” He wanted something like the Self-Realization Park in California.
So Elvis went to California to do a movie. And Bernie worked day and night. He went to Italy to get the stained-glass windows and the statues. He got the brick for the wall from Mexico. He redid the arches, and planted the bushes, and built that huge fountain with all the different sprays and light formations. When he finished, he’d transformed a 100-by-140-foot eyesore into the Meditation Garden.
Vernon didn’t like it that my sister and brother-in-law were Jewish. By this time, I was living in the apartments while Bernie was building my house. But when I was living at Graceland with my family, my mother and father used to come see me and my family on the weekends. Elvis didn’t mind. Elvis liked my parents.
One time, Elvis was there when they came, and my mother brought me this big jar of homemade chicken soup. Elvis saw it and asked if he could have some, and he loved it. To the point where he said to her, “Hey, do me a favor, forget about Marty, just bring this for me.” So not too long after that, while Anne was there working on the garden, Daisy, the cook, asked Anne for the recipe. And Anne brought up the Molly Goldberg cookbook. And a couple of days later, Vernon came out with the book in his hand and threw it at Anne and yelled, “I don’t want no Jew book in this house!”
It got worse. When my mother used to come up, she’d go in and talk to Elvis’s grandmother. Grandma was always nice to me and my whole family, especially my son. When we lived there, he was just a little kid, and she got him hooked on biscuits and molasses, and she’d sit out in the kitchen with him. After we moved, she’d sit in her room all the time by herself. So my sister would go in to see her every day when she was there working on the garden. Anne liked her a lot.
Elvis really appreciated it because he cared a lot about his grandmother and he knew she was lonely. But one day, Vernon went out to the garden and got mad about something, and told Anne, “And another thing—I want you to quit going in there and bugging my mother!” My sister was really hurt over that.
When we came back from California, Elvis said he wanted to go outside by himself. He wanted to be the first one to see the garden at night all lit up. So he went out, and when he came back in, he cried, he thought it was so beautiful.
After all that, the really sad thing is that Vernon questioned Bernie’s bills for labor. The Meditation Garden cost $22,000. Anybody else would have charged them $50,000 or $100,000. Vernon and Elvis called me into the dining room one night, and Vernon started this crap, and I just blew up. I told them Bernie was barely making a profit, which was true. I said, “All of this stuff he’s done, including the waterfall, has been for the sheer pleasure of doing it here at Graceland for you.” And I said, “If you think Bernie’s trying to cheat you, you take it up with him.” And I turned around and walked out. As I did, I heard Elvis tell his father, “Write the check.”
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis was the kind of guy who could give away a Cadillac at the drop of a hat, but I don’t think he really shared much of himself.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis felt that women were more trustworthy than men. But he never found exactly what he was looking for in a woman. He probably should have been a bachelor.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis never saw any reason to stop looking at pretty girls. In ’66, he had a couple of dates with Cybill Shepherd. He was thirty-one, and she was seventeen. She says it was later, when she was twenty-two. Either way, she’d already been named Miss Teenage America, and he always had a weakness for beauty queens. He thought that was a big deal.
BILLY SMITH: About getting married . . . Elvis used to have a saying about that: “Why buy a cow when you can steal the milk through the fence?” Or sometimes, we’d be going somewhere where there were a lot of women. And we’d say, “Elvis, you got a date tonight?” He’d smile kind of funny and say, “Why take a sandwich to a banquet?”
MARTY LACKER: In ’66, Elvis started getting heavier into downers— Seconals, yellow jackets. They made him groggy sometimes. Made his footing unsure, and his equilibrium wasn’t good, anyway. One reason he took them was because he was under a lot of pressure to get married.
LAMAR FIKE: At Christmas of ’66, Elvis officially proposed to Priscilla and gave her a diamond ring big enough to choke Marilyn Chambers.
The way that whole thing went down is that Elvis had markers called in on him, pure and simple. Priscilla was twenty-one years old now, and Captain Beaulieu figured it was time Elvis fulfilled his obligation.
MARTY LACKER: I guess Elvis could have just said, “No, I’m not going to marry her.” But I think Colonel made it clear that’s what he should do. And I think her father made it clear that’s what he should do. Plus I’m sure Elvis talked to his father about it. They were worried about Elvis ruining his career, à la Jerry Lee Lewis.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis had been with Priscilla about five years. If anything, he thought it was time to get away from her. But Priscilla presented him with a couple of problems. Colonel was laying down the law. And Priscilla was spilling her guts to the only people she could, her mama and daddy. If Elvis dropped her, and Priscilla was asked why she was let out of his life, she was going to tell her story. Or at least that’s the way Elvis put it to me. And I think Elvis was also worried about it becoming a common-law marriage.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis sat down and talked to me one night. He said, “What do you know about common law?” I said, “I’m not a fuckin’ attorney, Elvis, but a common-law attorney told me it starts one day after she moves in. It don’t mean that seven-year shit.” I said, “So you’re guilty of it, no matter what.”
Vernon might have mentioned that to him. Priscilla couldn’t stand Vernon. But I think they colluded on this marriage deal. Vernon figured if Elvis got married, he’d stay at home more and stop running around the country with all these guys. And the size of his payroll would go down.
But what finally got Elvis to the altar was he wanted a kid. A son. And he wanted to name him John Barron Presley. He got on this “J. B. Presley” thing.
BILLY SMITH: From ’64, ’65 on, Elvis obsessed about having this child. He wanted a woman with dark hair to be the mother. She had to resemble him, and she had to be beautiful, so they could produce the perfect child. Which had to be a male. And I think he thought Priscilla would be the one he’d have it with. But she made it dang well clear that she didn’t like the name John Barron, so even if Lisa Marie hadn’t been a girl, Priscilla never would have named the baby that. Finally, my wife got a Great Dane, and Elvis named it “Barron.” Priscilla thought that was real funny.
MARTY LACKER: Sometime in the summer, after my brother-in-law did the Meditation Garden, Elvis had him build the slot-car room. Then he said he’d like for him to redecorate the whole upstairs. He said, “We’re going to go do another movie,” which was really probably two movies, Double Trouble and Easy Come, Easy Go, because he did them back-to-back, with just a week off. Anyway, he told Bernie, “You can do it then. Keep in contact with Marty. He’ll tell me if you need anything.”
That sounded fine, except it meant that it was more or less taken out of Vernon’s hands. While we were gone, they worked upstairs. And Vernon would come up and say things that were different from what I told them to do, based on my conversations with Elvis. But Vernon had started getting the bills, and what Elvis wanted probably cost a little more than what Vernon wanted. So they argued back and forth. Then Vernon and my sister got into it full force one day.
Finally, she said, “Mr. Presley, I’m not trying to be disrespectful. I’m just doing what Marty said Elvis wanted. I suggest you go back and talk to Elvis.”
In a nice way, she told him to stay the hell out. And he told her she had the same foul mouth as her brother, and he said, “Neither one of you is going to be around Graceland much longer!”
After that, Vernon just manufactured things to get back at her. One day, Daisy, the cook, saw one of the workers carrying out garbage bags with scraps of the black velvet and white padding. She thought they were part of Elvis’s teddy bear collection, which was stored upstairs. Daisy mentioned this to Vernon, and he went nuts.
By the time we got back to Memphis, it was the end of November and the renovation was finished. We all went upstairs to see it. When Elvis opened the two double doors and looked at his room, he said, “Man, I ain’t seen nothing like this before.”
And for his taste, it was beautiful. They upholstered the walls in pleated black-and-red velvet and put green leather, or Naugahyde, on the ceiling, where they’d installed two television sets so he could watch from bed. He was so overjoyed that he cried, like with the Meditation Garden. Vernon was standing there, and seeing Elvis so thrilled over what they’d done made him even madder.
The next afternoon, I came back over, feeling good because I thought Elvis was happy. Elvis and his father were sitting in the den, and when Elvis saw me, I thought maybe he’d compliment my family for doing a great job. But instead, in front of a couple of the other guys, Elvis started screaming, calling my whole family names, from my mother to my sister and brother-in-law.
That’s the way he was. He would be supernice one minute and totally different the next. Vernon had fed him a bunch of lies about Bernie and Anne. Like that they’d stolen his teddy bears.
At first, I was going to let it slide. But then he started getting really nasty. And it burnt a hole in me. I got up and I said, “Hey, fuck you! And fuck your father, and fuck your whole goddamn family! You don’t talk about my family that way! They haven’t done anything but good here. And you can kiss my damn ass.” And I left.
If that had been anybody else, I probably would have killed him. And I mean that literally. I was so upset that I took three sleeping pills and stayed in bed for three days.
BILLY SMITH: There’s not really an excuse for the way Elvis lit into Marty that day. But how can you think when you’re constantly being fed this line by the two people you look up to most in life? Vernon and Colonel tried to poison him about us. The guys were just a bunch of leeches, or hangers-on, in their opinion. And Elvis listened to all this bullshit from both sides, and at some time or another, he had to think that maybe that was true.
MARTY LACKER: I never thought of myself or most of the guys as vultures. Never. And I knew my family wasn’t like that. I laid in bed thinking about what it all meant. And on the fourth day, I got up. I figured the way I talked to him, especially in front of other people, I’d ended our friendship. But I thought, “I’ll find out. I’ll just go up there and see if I get in.” Because if Elvis didn’t want to see you, he’d have somebody call down to the gate and tell Vester not to let you in.
I got up to the house, and everybody was downstairs in the basement. Richard and Mike were sitting at the soda fountain. They said, “Hey, Marty, how you doing?” and acted like nothing was wrong. And Elvis was sitting on the couch with his father, watching a 16mm print of one of his movies, which he almost never did.
When Elvis heard my name, he got up. I didn’t know whether he was going to tell me to hit the road or what. And I was still groggy from the pills and still pissed off. But he said, “Hey, how you doing?” I said, “I’m all right.” And then he said something that I’d never heard him say to me or anybody else. And that was, “I’m sorry.”
Vernon got up and stood behind Elvis, and he had a half-scared, half-mad look on his face. I don’t think he knew what Elvis was going to do, either. I said, “I’m glad you’re sorry, Elvis, but that really doesn’t excuse it.” And I told him, “Don’t ever do that to me again.” I’d never been that forceful with him, but then we’d never had an argument that harsh before.
Elvis looked at me real intently for a second, and he said, “Come here, I want to talk to you.” And we went and sat on the concrete steps that led from the basement to the den. He said, “Look, I’ve got something to tell you. One of the reasons I acted that way is that I’m under a hell of a lot of pressure.” This was early December, before he’d announced his engagement. I figured he was bullshitting. I said, “Yeah, what kind of pressure?” And he said, “I’m under a lot of pressure to marry Priscilla.” I said, “Who’s doing that?” And he said, “It’s coming from her family.” And he told me Colonel was worried about a lawsuit. And then he said, “So, Priscilla and I are going to be married. And we’ve talked it over, and I want you to be my best man.”
Well, I was totally shocked. I couldn’t think about being mad anymore. My first thought was, “Why me?” I thought of Billy, I thought of Red, and I thought of Joe, and I instinctively knew that Esposito was going to be really pissed because he was such a status seeker. But I really thought of Billy. He should have been the best man. But I said, “That makes me happy.”
BILLY SMITH: What’s really interesting here is the way Elvis dealt with Ann-Margret during all this. I’ve always said it was a toss-up between Priscilla and Ann.
MARTY LACKER: I knew Elvis had to make a decision between them. And I thought if push came to shove, he would choose Ann. But once he gave in to the pressure from Priscilla’s parents and the Colonel, that was it. He just abruptly stopped seeing Ann.
Esposito and I ran into her on Sunset Boulevard one day while she was riding her motorcycle. We blew the horn, and she saw us, and she pulled over to the side. And the first words out of her mouth were, “What the hell is wrong with your boss?” She said, “One minute we’re in love, and the next minute I don’t hear from him again. He won’t even take my calls.”
That’s the way Elvis did things. It was part of his weakness. And none of us had the guts to say, “You ought to give the girl a call.”
LAMAR FIKE: The truth of the matter is that Ann shut Elvis down. She knew he had this commitment to Priscilla. That’s why she started going with Roger Smith. Elvis got real upset about it. But Ann was not going to marry Elvis.
BILLY SMITH: My personal desire was for Elvis to marry Ann. She made his life a little easier because she understood him and didn’t make any demands on him. She even understood his need for us. Priscilla never understood that.
MARTY LACKER: The same month Elvis married Priscilla, Ann married Roger Smith. I read in her book [Ann-Margret: My Story] that she and Roger announced their engagement in ’66. But she also said they split up in March of ’66, and they got back together after that. I think that only happened because she didn’t know what to do about Elvis. She was really, really in love with him.
LAMAR FIKE: When Elvis started playing Vegas regularly, in the seventies, he used to go see Ann’s shows all the time. He’d send her flowers on opening night—always red roses in the shape of a guitar. And then he’d go to see her backstage, and she’d have on that big diamond that Roger gave her, and Roger would be right there. One time, when she used the motorcycles onstage, we went, and she introduced Elvis from the audience. She says in her book that he came onstage and performed with her—slid across the floor or something. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t remember it. But he went, when he could, and always went backstage. In February of ’73, she opened at the Hilton, and he went twice in three days. He still cared.
BILLY SMITH: Ann still cared about him, too. She had a slot machine made for him. Instead of cherries or jokers, it had three guitars that lined up for the jackpot. They’ve got it in the basement at Graceland.
I’m sure he made the first move to get back in touch. I’d heard he’d even proposed to her, after she was already married to Roger. But in her book, she doesn’t exactly say that. She just says he come backstage and got down on one knee and told her he still felt the same way he always had.
MARTY LACKER: Other than Priscilla bitching when she’d read something about Ann and Elvis, I don’t ever recall any negative times associated with Ann, except when we’d go back to Memphis and Elvis was away from her. She used to write him letters and sign them “Bunny,” or “Thumper.” And she’d call Graceland and use the same code.
If Elvis had ended up with Thumper, this whole story might have wound up differently.