In the midst of the squabble about Bernie Grenadier’s bills and the pressure to marry Priscilla, Elvis found respite on 150 rolling acres of land across the Tennessee border in Walls, Mississippi. The original owner had given it the quaint, and slightly fairyland, name of Twinkletown Farm—something Elvis would change to the Circle G [for Graceland) Ranch and eventually to the Flying G when he learned the name was already taken by a rancher in Texas.
Almost immediately, the Circle G became a symbol of Presley’s increasing spending sprees, which he was now using, like drugs, for escape. The tremendous expenditure, which grew daily with Elvis’s improvements on the land, may have spurred Vernon to bond with the parsimonious Priscilla in hurrying up the wedding, in hopes that Elvis would quickly abandon his folly.
“The happiest we ever saw Elvis was when he first bought that ranch,” remembers Ray Walker, of the Jordanaires. “He had some horses down there, and he was exercising, and he looked great, and he felt great. As I remember, he even let his hair go back to its natural color for a while. He walked in one day, and he had a tan, and we couldn’t get over how good he looked. We just stood there and stared at him. Finally, he broke into a smile and said, ‘Shall we dance?’”
MARTY LACKER: The ranch was a natural evolution, you might say, of other things that were going on at Graceland in ’66. It started when Elvis bought Priscilla a four-year-old black quarter horse, Domino. But she complained that she didn’t have anybody to ride with, so Elvis bought himself a palomino. Rising Sun, which Jerry found for him somewhere. One day, he saw everybody standing around watching them ride, so he went wild and bought everybody a horse, even Vernon. I didn’t want a horse. But he outfitted all the guys, arid their wives or girlfriends, in chaps, and boots, and hats. Billy says it was like a Roy Rogers–Dale Evans look-alike contest when everybody got together, and I guess it was.
Elvis would go out in the barn every day and every night. This barn, which he called House of the Rising Sun, a pun on the name of his horse, hadn’t been used in years. He fixed up a little office for himself and wrote the names of the horses on the stalls with a big red marking pen. He’d write notes to himself like “What I’m Going to Buy Tomorrow” and “What I’m Going to Do Tomorrow.” And he would clean up the barn and buy new tack. He just loved it.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis would go at everything in a big way. And when he got the horses, it was no different. That’s why we bulldozed the house back of Graceland, to make a little riding area.
MARTY LACKER: Graceland was only thirteen and three-quarter acres, and the neighbors complained. It really was too small for all those horses. Red accidentally ran Elvis down one day on horseback and dislocated some cartilage in his chest.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis didn’t just stop at horses. He also got into all this farm equipment. One night he was in the mood to go shopping, and he decided to go to Sears. We loaded up the car and went to the Southland Mall. People just fell over, you know, to see Elvis Presley in the hardware department at Sears, gathering up hammers and nails and hinges for the pasture gates.
On the way out, Elvis spotted a little twelve-horsepower lawn tractor with a small loading wagon. It was the display model, but he had to have it, and when we got home, Elvis wanted to take everybody for a ride. That wagon wasn’t big enough to fool with, but Priscilla, and my wife, and Jerry’s new wife, Sandy, and Alan’s wife, and another girl, and even Chief, big as he was—Elvis hadn’t fired him yet—got in that thing. And Elvis drove. I tried standing on the wagon bar behind him, but it was too small and I couldn’t hold on. Elvis said, “Try the front of this thing, Billy. See if you can stay up there.” So I mounted the hood and held on to the gas cap.
Of course, since the tractor was new, there wasn’t much gas in it, so Elvis headed out the front gate and went right across the street to a service station. You should have seen the look on the attendant’s face when he seen Elvis driving. And me on the hood and a wagon full of people behind. Elvis liked to startle people, so on the way back, he drove through the subdivision behind Graceland, all of us just a-singin’ “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” There were some people having a party, so he just pulled the tractor up to their window and we serenaded the whole bunch. Then Elvis tipped his hat, and we drove off. All those people just stood there with their mouths open.
MARTY LACKER: They got back to Graceland, and Elvis started riding the back pasture like it was the Wild West.
BILLY SMITH: He almost threw me off the front of the tractor a couple of times. I was yelling, “Ride ’em, cowboy!” And the more I yelled, the faster he went, trying to throw me off. We went down this one dip and up a hill, and everybody in the wagon let out a scream. Elvis stopped and looked back, and there they all were, piled up. The wagon had done broke loose and tipped up, and all the girls were on the ground yelling, ‘cause Chief was on top and he had ’em trapped. All 350 or 400 pounds of him. He was laughing so hard, he couldn’t get up. We had to just pull him off.
The next day, we went shopping for a bigger tractor. Elvis bought a Case. But he didn’t think it was fast enough, so pretty soon he went to International Harvester and got a really big one. Elvis said, “If this big son of a gun don’t do it, we might as well give up.”
He had some of the workmen there at Graceland build a trailer out of a truck bed and fill it with hay so he could carry everybody around. But he still wanted me to ride the front. I said, “Wait a minute.” And I went to the barn and come back with my saddle. Elvis said, “What in the hell are you going to do with that?” I threw the saddle over the hood and cinched it up. I said, “I’m going to ride this big bucking son of a bitch, that’s what.”
MARTY LACKER: One day in the fall of ’66, Elvis was out riding in the car with Alan and Priscilla when he saw this big ranch for sale on the corner of Highway 301 and Goodman Road in Walls, Mississippi. He liked it, and that night, he went back to look at it again. What he didn’t see in the day, but which was really beautiful at night, was a lighted bridge that spanned a fourteen-acre lake. And better yet, a fifty-foot lighted cross behind it. Well, of course, with all this religious stuff in his head, Elvis looked at the cross, and he thought it was a sign from God that he was supposed to have the place.
BILLY SMITH: The way he told it, he just stood there a few minutes without saying anything. Then he said, “This is the most beautiful sight. It’s so peaceful. I think it’s a good omen.” Elvis met the owner, Jack Adams, and told him he was interested. Adams was smart. He invited Elvis to come spend the weekend in the ranch house, to see how he liked it. Of course, we all went.
MARTY LACKER I said, “Elvis, what are you going to do about beds? There’s only one bedroom in this damn place.” He said, “Well, me and Priscilla will be in the bedroom. The rest of you can stay in here. We’ll get some blankets, and sleeping bags, and stuff.”
LAMAR FIKE: Oh, that was horrible! I looked at that house. I said, “Where am I going to sleep, man?” But he loved everybody together.
BILLY SMITH: Lamar got the couch, and the rest of us started scratching for chairs and, finally, just a vacant spot on the floor. To get up for a glass of water was like going through an obstacle course. And there were only two bathrooms. Elvis and Priscilla got one, so the rest of us stood in line the next morning.
MARTY LACKER: Jack Adams also owned an airstrip, which was about ten miles away from the ranch, and Elvis sent me and Alan down to his office to talk to him. The ranch was 150 acres, with another thirteen acres across the road, but the price was inflated: $375,000, or $535,000, if you believe the [Memphis] Commercial Appeal. Two days earlier, my brother-in-law, Bernie, had a Mississippi surveyor come out. Adams was asking $2,300 an acre, and the surveyor said it was only worth $1,200. So we were going to try to get the price down because Adams was really trying to take Elvis.
Alan and I started dickering with him, and I brought up the cattle. There were eighteen head of Santa Gertrudis on the ranch. I knew damn well Elvis didn’t need the cattle, and they cost too much to take care of, and we weren’t going to be at the ranch that much, anyway.
I asked Adams how much the cattle were worth. He said, “They’re worth $75,000 easy, but they’re in the price.” I said, “I’ll tell you what. You keep the cattle and knock the seventy-five grand off.” He said, “I can’t do that. What am I going to do with them? The auction is three months away.” I said, “We’ll keep them for you for three months if you’ll come off the price.”
Just when I thought I had him talked into it, the phone rang. I heard him tell Elvis, “I thought we had a deal. You shook my hand.” Then he said, “Elvis wants to talk to you, Marty.” I got on the phone, and Elvis said, “Don’t say another word. I’ll pay him the money.”
I said, “Elvis, you don’t have to.” He said, “Don’t say anything else. Just come on back here.” So I slammed the phone down, and Alan and I went back to the house. Elvis was sitting in the den with his father. He said, “Daddy wants the cattle, and I want the place. We’ll pay the price.”
It was okay for Vernon to use Elvis’s money, but not for Elvis to use Elvis’s money. Vernon wanted to be the gentleman farmer because he never amounted to anything on his own. Here was a guy, in charge of all of Elvis’s personal business, who could barely read and write, and who prided himself on being a big horse trader. But he couldn’t trade anything. I think they even put Graceland up for collateral.
The day before we went to talk to Adams, Alan and I called Elvis’s attorney, Charles Davis. We told him we were going to try to negotiate with the owner, and we wanted him to go with us. And Davis said, “What do you want me for? I’m just his attorney.” That’s the kind of person Vernon chose to represent Elvis.
It ended up being a quick deal. We first went down there in the fall of ’66. And we were practically down there every day after that when Elvis was home.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis was so funny when he bought that ranch. He said, “Good God, I’ve moved back to Mississippi!”
MARTY LACKER: There were guys to take care of the horses and the cattle. But they didn’t know how to take care of the office, and they didn’t know Elvis’s likes and dislikes. So Elvis made Alan the overseer, which solved two problems. Alan wanted his wife, Jo, around all the time, and Alan was really wanting to come home.
Alan didn’t know anything about running a ranch, but there was nothing much to do, just be sure the grass was cut. Elvis liked everything manicured like a golf course. And he wanted the cattle to be fed—he didn’t want them to graze. So Alan took care of all of that. But he was always full of pills down there. Alan had a different personality when he had too many pills in him.
One time, Bill Leaptrott, a photographer from one of the Memphis papers, went down there, and Alan almost got in a damn fight with him.
BILLY SMITH: Alan used to have this little-bitty riding mower, a tractor. He was bad about taking sleeping pills, and one day he took a bunch of them and got on the tractor and went plumb to sleep. Fell right off that sucker.
MARTY LACKER: Not too long after he got the ranch, Elvis got on this kick that everybody should have a truck. Not just a pickup truck, but these miniature Ford Rancheros and Chevy El Caminos.
LAMAR FIKE: He bought twenty-two trucks in one day. And three one other day. He was just overspending. He was giving trucks to everybody—even the carpenters and electricians who were working on the place. And a bunch of us had trucks. He gave me a Ford Ranchero and gave Alan one. Tried to give Alan two. This truck salesman from Hernando, Mississippi, had all these things lined up, and Elvis said to Alan, “Pick one out, man.” And Alan said, “I already have one, Elvis.” So Elvis was kind of exasperated, and he pointed to the truck salesman and said, “Well, give it to him.” And Alan said, “He’s got one, too.” So Elvis was just completely undone. He said, “Hell, find somebody to give the son of a bitch to.” He’s probably the only guy in the world who tried to give a truck to a truck salesman.
MARTY LACKER: The truck spree happened after we’d come back from California and Bernie had redone the upstairs at Graceland. Elvis had a couple of months before he had to go do his next picture, which was Clambake, and he spent almost every day down at the ranch. It was winter. We had a little office by the stable, and I remember, at two o’clock in the morning, we were standing outside there. It was snowing, and Elvis was on a small tractor, pushing the snow and mud out of the way.
Some of us were just standing there, watching him do this. And Vernon walked out of the office and came up to me with an adding machine tape in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He was, like, whining. He said, “Marty, look at this! He’s spent $98,000 on trucks and given them away.” I said, “What do you want me to do? He’s your son.”
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis was a freewheeling spender. If he overspent, he’d just say, “Get a ninety-day note and cover it.” It meant nothing to him, he had such a cash flow. But it scared Vernon to death.
Elvis was also pouring a fortune—anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000—into that ranch. And it wasn’t a working ranch, so it wasn’t producing any income. He built a barn, and got all these graders, put roads in, and put in a gasoline tank. That damn wooden fence he put up at the front of the house against the cyclone fence cost God knows what. And he gave three of those carpenters a truck!
MARTY LACKER: The fence went up when the neighbors began complaining that Elvis was making all these changes and causing a lot of racket. A woman across the street started bitching, and she tried to come over to walk around and see what was going on. And Elvis said, “There ain’t nobody coming on here. Matter of fact, we’re going to build a wall around this friggin’ place.” It was about eight or ten feet high. You couldn’t see over it.
Then the woman started complaining that the fence was an eyesore. So Elvis said, “Goddamnit. If she doesn’t like it, and the rest of them don’t like it, I’ll buy all their damn properties so they can’t say anything.” But these people figured they could soak him. Some wanted six figures for their property, when everything they owned was worth about twenty thousand bucks.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis got depressed about shit like that, but not enough to let anything spoil his fun. He’d get out there every day and play cowboy, wear all that western crap, the chaps, the hat, the boots, the rancher coat. He had a vivid imagination. My mother used to call it “being dressed for the part.” Elvis dressed for every occasion. When he flew, he’d put a scarf around his neck and fly the plane. At Graceland, we’d joke about it. I’d say, “Alan, where’s Elvis?” And Alan would say, “He’s upstairs. He’s in the middle of the bed with his helmet and shoulder pads on, watching Monday Night Football.”
MARTY LACKER: In early December of ’66, Elvis was at the ranch. This was when it was snowing, and he’d really gone nuts, buying all these trucks and giving them away. One day, he asked me to call Dr. Max Shapiro. I got on the phone, and I said, “We need this, we need that, and we need a prescription for Demerol.” And Shapiro said, “Well, I’m not going to mail it to you. You’re going to have to come get it. This week, I’ll be in Vegas.”
Elvis said, “Well, I want you to go.” I said, “You want me to fly all the way out there for one little-bitty bottle of Demerol?” And he said, “No, tell him to give you three prescriptions.” I said, “Elvis, it’s a Nevada prescription. If I have three prescriptions filled in my name in one day, and they check on that, what do you think that’s going to look like?” He said, “Then just get two.” So I flew all the way out to Las Vegas, and took the prescriptions to two different drugstores, and I flew home. I was full of sleeping pills because I don’t like to fly.
By the time I got off the plane, I was pretty well shot. But I went right out to the ranch and gave him the stuff, and then I went home.
About three hours later, the phone rang. Elvis said, “Look, you didn’t get me exactly what I need. I want you to go back out to Vegas.” I said, “Elvis, I just got home!” He said, “I need you to go out again. Call Dr. Max and tell him what I need.” It wasn’t my fault. Elvis just decided he wanted something else. But I went back out. And both times, I was just flying out, getting the stuff, and coming back home.
So after the second trip—the same afternoon I came back—Elvis said, “Guess what?” I said, “No, no. I’m not going back out again.” Elvis thought a second, and he said, “Find somebody to go with you and have Max put the prescriptions in both names. That way you can switch off.”
At the time, Sonny was in California working in the movies. I flew to L.A., met Sonny, got him a ticket, and we flew over to Vegas to meet Shapiro.
Shapiro gave us five prescriptions, three in Sonny’s name and two in mine. We got a cab, and Sonny went to the drugstores I had gone to before, and I found two others.
When we finished, we needed a place to stay for a couple of hours until the plane left. So we went over to the Sahara, and Eddie Warren, the head of security, got us a room to sit in for two or three hours. We didn’t want to go anywhere because we had pockets full of pills, and a whole briefcaseful. I worried about going through the airport with them, even though they were legal.
I flew back to L.A. with Sonny, and then I went home to Memphis. By this time, I was really dead tired. I gave Elvis the pills, and then I said, “I’m going home. Do not call me again.”
I went home and got in bed and went to sleep, and about two hours later, I heard this incredible banging at my front door. I said, “Who the hell is it? What do you want?” It was Elvis. He said, “It’s me. Open up!” I said, “Hell, no! I’m not opening this door.”
He said, “Open the damn door or I’ll bust it in!” I said, “I’m not going nowhere, if that’s what you’re here for.” He said, “Just open the damn door.” I opened the door, and all I had on was my underwear and a pair of house slippers. Elvis was standing there with Red. I said, “I ain’t going to do it!” And they burst out laughing. Elvis said, “No, come outside for a minute.” I said, “I’m not dressed. There’s snow on the ground, it’s freezing out there.” He said, “Just come out for a second.”
I followed them downstairs and went outside and stood there shivering in my underwear. There was this Ford Ranchero parked next to Elvis’s Cadillac. Elvis threw me the keys to it, and he said, “Here. I want to give you this for what you did the last three days.”
I said, “You’ve got to be crazy.” And I opened the door, and it had Priscilla’s initials in it. He’d given me Priscilla’s truck, the same way he’d given Alan her Corvair.
LAMAR FIKE: Not too long after he found the ranch, Elvis got it in his mind to sell Graceland and relocate. He said, “Lamar, I’m tired of all this. I want to move out.”
BILLY SMITH: It wasn’t that he didn’t love Graceland. He just wanted a more modern place.
MARTY LACKER: The house at the ranch was too small. But Elvis liked it so much there that he decided he’d just build a new community, starting with a home for him and Priscilla near the cross and the big lake.
At first, he wanted to build a replica of Graceland. But then he remembered this house in Trousdale Estates in L.A. that was owned by Jim Nicholson, who was one of the partners in American International Pictures. Nicholson had built this beautiful custom house way up in the hills, but he’d never lived in it because by the time it was finished, he and his wife had decided to divorce. It was really gorgeous. It had columns on the walls. And it was so well planned that the dining room had pin lights in the ceiling that shone directly on each place setting.
Elvis really liked that house, and one day just before Christmas of ’66, he said to me, “Why don’t you take Bernie out to California and show him the Nicholson house?” So we went out, and Bernie said, “No problem. We can duplicate it.” This was a $550,000 house, and Bernie thought he could build it for $175,000 to $200,000.
Right after that, Elvis and I and Joe and Joanie went for a little ride on the property, down to Goodman Road. We started walking around, and Elvis said to Joe and Joanie, “You know, I’m going to build a house down here.” And then he said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had our own community here?”
I said, “Elvis, for Christmas, why don’t you give each of the guys an acre of land and the down payment to build a house right here?” Because that’s essentially what he’d done for me. I’d just moved into my new house.
Well, Elvis loved that idea. His face just lit up. He said, “Man, that’s fantastic! Let’s do it!” And Joe and Joanie were ecstatic, just jumping up and down. Because nobody in the group had a home of his own except Lamar and me.
We started talking about exactly how it would work, and I said, “What you do, Elvis, is have a contract drawn that stipulates that if anybody leaves, he has to sell the house back to you. That way, you’ll hold on to your land and keep the outsiders out.”
The next day, Elvis told the guys, and then he told Vernon what he was going to do. I could see Vernon’s face tighten up, and I knew he was going to try to throw a wrench in it.
About two days later, I said, “Elvis, Bernie’s starting to draw the plans on your house.” He said, real low-key, “Well, let him go slow.” And then he said, “By the way, I can’t give the guys the land.” I said, “Really? Why not?” He said, “Daddy doesn’t think it’s a good idea. He says it will mess us up.” I said, “How’s that?” And I mentioned the agreement about making the guys sell the house back to Elvis if they left.
Elvis said, “Marty, you don’t know how much I want to do this, but I can’t.” I said, “Because of what your father says?” He said, “That’s it in a nutshell.”
A couple weeks went by, and I said, “Elvis, Bernie’s really coming along on the plans for your house.” And he said, “You’ve got to tell him to stop.” I said, “Elvis, it’s all you’ve been talking about. You like it so much down here.” And he said, low and slow, just emphasizing every word, “Marty, I can’t build the house. Just let it be.”
LAMAR FIKE: That’s when it all stopped. God, just like BOOM! But you couldn’t say anything. If you bad-mouthed Vernon, you had your hands full. God Almighty! Vernon would do stuff beyond reality.
BILLY SMITH: Vernon used the excuse that he’d talked to a lawyer and an accountant, and they said the zoning laws and other restrictions wouldn’t let him do it. But it would have been so easy to do that.
LAMAR FIKE: Vernon saw that we were going to get something decent, and he didn’t want anybody getting anything except himself.
BILLY SMITH: No, Vernon saw that these houses were going to cost the hell out of Elvis. That’s what the greedy old sucker saw.
MARTY LACKER: I asked Elvis, “How are you going to break it to the guys?” He said, “I’m not. You are. I can’t tell them.”
LAMAR FIKE: Right after all that fell through, Elvis got this idea that “If I can’t give ’em houses, I’ll give ’em trailers.”
MARTY LACKER: I said, “Elvis, if you buy house trailers, you’ve got to pour concrete pads and put in connections and sewer systems and all of that stuff.” He said, “I don’t give a shit.”
He went out the first day and bought one for Billy. It looked like a cabin. Then he saw one he liked, a three-bedroom, and he bought it for himself and Priscilla and let Alan have the house. Vernon liked the trailer so much he decided it was okay if he had one.
LAMAR FIKE: I guess I started all that trailer shit. We were driving by a trailer park one time, and I said, “God, wouldn’t it be neat to have a trailer?” Well, it was the worst thing I ever said. Elvis pulled into this place called Green Acres, and by the time he was through, he’d bought twelve trailers at about $140,000. Man, they had them coming down that highway to the farm all lined up. It was just trailers everywhere.
I went into a panic. I said, “Boy, the day ain’t come when my ass is going to live in a trailer!” He said, “Why?” I said, “They shake. And it’s all one direction! You never turn.”
He said, “Then we’ll move every trailer around the lake.” And the neighbors raised Cain again and complained to the Hernando County building department that an unlicensed trailer park was going in. And that was hell again for a while, until Bernie got the temporary permits to hook up the trailers. Then Bernie’s electricians and plumbers worked through the night.
Elvis created his world and lived in his world. I always predicted that Graceland would be 150 buildings because he kept adding on. I said, “Pretty soon it’s going to be like a fuckin’ town here, for Christ’s sake. There’ll be buildings everywhere.” That’s pretty much true now. They’re just across the street.
MARTY LACKER: A number of times, we’d be down at the ranch, and Elvis would run out of pills. One night in early ’67 that happened, so he and I and Richard got in the car. I was driving, and Elvis was sitting there eating hot dog buns out of a plastic bag. That was one of his new kicks. He said, “Let’s go over to Walgreens.” There was this pharmacist at the Walgreens drugstore at Whitehaven Plaza who filled a lot of our prescriptions, so we knew him. But this was a Sunday. And I said, “Elvis, they’re not open.”
We pulled into the shopping center, and sure as hell, the store was closed. Right across the street was the little Whitehaven Pharmacy. And they were closed, too. But they had a transom at the top of their door. Elvis looked at me and Richard, and he said, “You know, it’d probably be easy for you guys to get in that store.” But I just kept on driving. There was no way I was going to stop.
Elvis said, “Wait a minute. Does anybody know where the Walgreens pharmacist lives? He’s like a doctor. He’s probably got all kinds of shit at his house.”
I said, “What are you going to do, Elvis? Go to his house, knock on his door, and say, ‘Hi there, I need some stuff?” And Elvis said, “Well, hell, that’s a good idea. Stop at that phone booth. He probably lives right around here, since he works out here.” And sure enough, the man did live out in Whitehaven.
Elvis said, “Do you know where the street is?” I said, “Yeah.” And Elvis just pointed his finger like “Go on.”
The guy opened the door, and there stood Elvis Presley, with this big sheepskin coat on and a cowboy hat. Of course, the man was absolutely stunned. And Elvis relied on that. He used to do that with doctors, too. The pharmacist said, “Elvis! What are you doing here?”
Elvis said, “Uh, I just was wondering if I could talk to you for a while.” So we went into the man’s kitchen and sat down at the table.
Because he knew the PDR so well, Elvis knew exactly what symptoms he needed to fake to get his pills. He said to the pharmacist, “You know, I’ve had these bad aches, and I’ve had trouble sleeping. That’s why my doctor prescribes,” and he named the sleeping pills and uppers he wanted—Tuinals, Placidyls, Dexamil, Dexedrine, Escatrol, and Desbutal. He said, “Except I can’t get ahold of my doctor, and I haven’t slept in three nights.”
Elvis said, “I know your store is closed today. And I really do apologize for bothering you at home. But I figured that maybe you had some medication here that I could have.”
And the pharmacist said, “Well, sure.” And he got up to go to his medicine chest. Well, instead of sitting there waiting for him, Elvis followed to see what he had. Even if it wasn’t something he’d asked for, he was going to take it.
We all got up and followed the guy into his bathroom—four people, now, in this little room, standing in front of the medicine cabinet. And it was just full of bottles. The pharmacist pulled one off, and then he thought about it, and he said, “Well, Elvis, the store will be open tomorrow.” And Elvis said, “Yeah, but I might need this, and this . . . ” And he started picking through the bottles.
The guy was a nice old man, really, and he looked at Elvis and he said, “I really shouldn’t be doing this.” And Elvis said, “Hey, if you don’t tell anybody, we won’t tell anybody. And whatever you give me, I’ll get a prescription to cover it.” The guy said, “Well, okay.” And Elvis walked out of that house with a bag full of stuff.
BILLY SMITH: The hot dog and hamburger bun kick was a strange one. He would tie that wrapper around the horn of the damn saddle and ride along eating those things.
A lot of times, he’d take two or three sleeping pills, and he couldn’t sleep ’em off. Because you can’t sleep when you’ve taken five hundred milligrams of something else beforehand. Hell, he’d just get up after two hours and go on about his normal day. Let me tell you, Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou didn’t have anything on Elvis. Because he’d get up on the horse just about the time the sleeping pills took effect, and the faster he rode, the more he leaned.
MARTY LACKER: He’d walk around the ranch blown out of his skull, with his cowboy hat on, gloves, cowboy boots, jeans, and this big, padded pile coat that made him look even bigger. He’d be so stuffed in that jacket that his walk was almost like a waddle. And in his hand he’d have that plastic, see-through bag of hot dog buns. He looked like a little kid, walking around with a sack in his hand.
He’d talk to you, and he’d be slurring his words, and he’d take a bite of the bun, sort of ripping it off. And then you couldn’t understand what he was saying, for sure. It was just this muffled noise, somebody talking through bread.
LAMAR FIKE: He had something in his hand all the time. Billy says it was from nerves. I don’t know. But I do know that when he was down there at the ranch, he ate whatever he wanted—hamburgers, steaks, and all kinds of stuff that put weight on him. But he started blowing up in January and February of ’67, and he had this movie, Clambake, to do in March. I couldn’t believe how big he got.
MARTY LACKER: One reason he started gaining so much weight was because he was depressed about his career and depressed about his father killing his plans for the commune. He was depressed about not having a big house down there at the ranch. And he might have been depressed about having to marry Priscilla.
I still had it in the back of my mind that he was going to find some way out of it. In fact, the wedding was supposed to have been right after the first of the year, in ’67. But it was already early ’67, and he kept postponing it.
LAMAR FIKE: After a while, Elvis lost interest in the ranch. He was tired of hearing Vernon bitch about how it was losing money, and Priscilla didn’t like it when he went down there because he was playing with the guys and not spending enough time alone with her. It broke his spirit, in a way. Eventually, Elvis had Alan just auction stuff off.
BILLY SMITH: The ranch was a bad deal to start with, but it turned out to be a good one. They put it up for sale in ’68, and a guy named D. L. “Lou” McClellan bought it for $440,000 in May of ’69. He was going to put a recreational club on it. Vernon carried the note. McClellan made three initial payments of $50,000, plus he built a swimming pool and another building. But he lost it, and it come back to Vernon and Elvis. They sold it again, in ’73, to the Boyle Investment Company, which paid more because of the additional building and the pool. So Elvis made another $75,000. That was about a $200,000 profit from the original cost.
MARTY LACKER: After Elvis died, it was sold again, or maybe a couple of times. The new owner, a guy named Montesi, started charging people $2 a head to walk over the same ground Elvis walked. Now it’s a cattle farm again.