Late in ’67, in a rare move, Elvis acquiesced to Priscilla’s request to accompany him on location for a film, in this case, to Arizona for Stay Away, Joe. While there, Priscilla read an ad in Variety for a house at 1174 Hillcrest Drive in L.A.’s exclusive Trousdale Estates. To Priscilla, it must have sounded ideal: a completely furnished, split-level, French Regency–style home, with three bedrooms, security, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and guest cottage.
Part of Priscilla’s thinking was to move Elvis to an environment he had not shared with the entourage—a fresh start for a new life together. The couple moved in at the end of the year.
Only six years old, the $400,000 house was the first residence Elvis owned in California. When he and Priscilla moved away three years later, Elvis left the house intact, allegedly saying, “This home is so perfect that not even an ashtray should be moved.” The subsequent owner sold the furnishings at auction.
BILLY SMITH: In September of ’67, Elvis took me, and Joe, and Charlie to Nashville to record. He cut “Guitar Man,” “Big Boss Man,” “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” and a few other songs that had some teeth to them—some blues or country blues. “Big Boss Man” and “Hi-Heel Sneakers” had been recorded before, but Elvis’s versions didn’t sound like nobody else’s. He put his own stamp to ’em. I guess this recording session laid the groundwork for the Memphis Sessions in ’69. Elvis was just hungering for that kind of release.
“Guitar Man” was a Jerry Reed song. Jerry had put it out himself just a couple of months before, and it started his singing career. Well, when Elvis was doing it in the studio, the musicians couldn’t really get the groove. Particularly the guitar sound, which was double important on this song. They had three guitar players on that session—Scotty Moore, Harold Bradley, and Chip Young, but Elvis wasn’t satisfied. He told somebody, “Call Jerry Reed. Maybe he could tell one of these guys how he gets that sound.” Jerry was on a fishing trip, but somebody found him. And Jerry said, “Better yet, I’ll come on over there.” So he played on the session and got that hot-wired sound on the track.
That’s how Elvis was in the studio in the old days. He kept on until he got it. I remember him talking to Bob Moore on this session, saying, “Bring the bass out, Bob.” Or he’d say, “Let’s don’t use a bass guitar. Let’s use an upright [bass]. I want to hear that slapping noise.” And, “I need a saxophone. Boots [Randolph], give me this sound here.”
That next January, he recorded in Nashville again. He brought Jerry Reed back to play on “Too Much Monkey Business,” the Chuck Berry song. And he recorded another one of Jerry’s tunes, “U.S. Male.” That one got him back into the Top 30 again. And, boy, that had to feel good.
MARTY LACKER: When Clambake came out in November of ’67, The Hollywood Reporter said, “Elvis can’t continue for long to rely on the same scripts and songs which have become anachronistic in the increasingly sophisticated and ever-changing world of pop music and pulp films.” Everybody saw the handwriting on the wall.
BILLY SMITH: In ’68, Elvis’s [five-year contract] with MGM was up, and Colonel started reevaluating things. In the early years, when Elvis was hot, Colonel told him, “You’re Elvis Presley. You’ll get $1 million a picture and sometimes a percentage. All you got to do is show up on time and take the money and run.” Even the studio heads said, “Good ol’ Elvis. He’ll ride a damn hog through a blizzard if that’s what the script calls for.”
There’s an old saying in California: “If you don’t make a profit, you don’t work.” The problem for Elvis was that even the worst pictures made damn good money. Some of ’em more than others. I couldn’t understand Kissin’ Cousins making as much money as it did. But by ’68, the pictures weren’t making so much money anymore. Elvis’s fans had outgrown ’em.
The Colonel saw two things. One, that the pictures had worn out their welcome and Elvis was getting hard to sell. And two, that Elvis was flat refusing to do any more. He told Colonel he’d quit the business before he’d sign another movie contract. And the Colonel saw that he was dead serious. Elvis said, “I want to go back and do concerts and personal appearances.” He wanted to see if he still had what it took because he hadn’t been on a live stage since that U.S.S. Arizona benefit in ’61.
So Colonel started to look elsewhere for places to take him. Elvis had three more movies to do in ’68—Live a Little, Love a Little, Charro!, and The Trouble with Girls, but he’d only contracted for one in ’69, Change of Habit. So Colonel quickly wrapped everything up, and he started looking to television. That’s how The Singer Special was born. Colonel announced it in January. That was probably the most important performance of Elvis’s life.
LAMAR FIKE: Boy, there was a lot of excitement going around about that time. Elvis had the TV special coming up, and then Lisa Marie was born on February 1, which was exactly nine months to the day after the wedding. I don’t care what anybody says—Elvis didn’t like the idea of Priscilla being pregnant so soon. He told Billy, “I made a mistake and didn’t pull out in time.”
But then, as the delivery date got near, he started playing the big “Get her to the hospital,” macho-Daddy role. He called me in Nashville the day before the baby was born, and he said, “You get your ass up here.” I said, “Why do I need to be there?” He said, “We’ve all got to be here for this thing.” I said, “Priscilla’s having a baby. It’s not the Second Coming of Christ!” But for weeks before Lisa was born, Elvis put the guys through these damn practice drills to get Priscilla to the hospital.
The plan included a couple of decoy cars that would speed out of Graceland and go to Methodist Hospital. Then another car would take Priscilla and Elvis to Baptist. Well, they changed it a couple of times, and by the morning Priscilla woke up with labor pains, Jerry was confused.
Joe and I took off and led everybody to Methodist. Jerry and Charlie were supposed to take Priscilla and Elvis to Baptist, but Jerry headed for Methodist, too. Priscilla was in labor, and the son of a bitch was taking her to the wrong place! Charlie finally convinced him Baptist was right, and they got on over there.
Lisa was born at five o’clock in the afternoon. She was a pretty little baby. Looked mostly like Elvis. She had that real black hair. Real black. Elvis was happy about that, see, because his “perfect child” had to have black hair. He gave her that middle name, “Marie,” for Colonel’s wife.
MARTY LACKER: I see that in books all the time, but “Marie” was a name Elvis always liked—“Marie,” “Maria”—because it was prominent in one of the Amigos’ songs, and he loved the way they pronounced it. When I named my daughter Maria Angela, it pissed Elvis off. He said, “You cocksucker, you stole my name!”
The moment Lisa was born, oh, Elvis was so excited. Everybody except Billy, I think, went to the hospital and waited for the birth. Elvis was talking that baby talk big-time.
In the beginning, the baby changed him some. He settled down a little. He loved Lisa, and he loved having a baby and being a father and part of a family. But then the newness wore off, and he was back to being the old Elvis again.
LAMAR FIKE: Lisa was just another trophy for him. Parenthood didn’t change Elvis at all.
About a month after Lisa was born, Elvis turned to me and said, “You know, I really don’t like Priscilla anymore.” I said, “You’re going back to that original thing, aren’t you?” He said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “You know what I’m talking about. You never liked a woman who’d had a baby.” That was a total turnoff to him.
Priscilla wrote in her book that for months after Lisa was born, she couldn’t get Elvis to touch her. At first, he said he just wanted to make sure she’d healed. But after that, she says she wore a black negligee and snuggled up to him while he read, and tried everything, but he just let his sleeping pills kick in. She also says they’d had a pretty passionate sex life until the last six weeks of her pregnancy. Which, actually, I doubt.
But anyway, once that kid got here, Elvis didn’t want any more to do with Priscilla. He didn’t even want to sleep in the same bed with her. Elvis slept with his mama when she was sick, but he didn’t want to lie near his wife once she became a mother. You figure it out.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis told everybody he never wanted to have sex with a woman who’d had a child. He always said, “For some reason I can’t do that.” He never said why. Everybody theorizes because of his mother. I don’t buy that shit. It was just one of his quirks.
BILLY SMITH: Let me tell you something. If it had been a woman he’d been really attracted to, he wouldn’t have cared if she had a litter. He’d make a pass in a minute. Elvis lost interest in Priscilla because it was not in his nature to be married. It was over with, and he didn’t want any more kids. Not with her.
LAMAR FIKE: Priscilla says [in her book] that she wrote in her diary, “I am beginning to doubt my own sexuality as a woman. My physical and emotional needs were unfulfilled.” So she started a life of her own, and part of that was taking dance lessons. Pretty soon, she started jumping the dance instructor. She had an affair while Elvis was making Live a Little, Love a Little, in ’68. She didn’t waste any time after the baby was born.
BILLY SMITH: That was a short affair, I think. She calls him “Mark” in her book. That wasn’t his real name.
LAMAR FIKE: Do you know who Priscilla flirted with? That black singer, Little Anthony, of the Imperials.
MARTY LACKER: That supposedly happened when Priscilla went up to New York with Joanie Esposito and Schilling. Jerry came back and told me. Quite frankly, I think Elvis sent Schilling up to New York to see if something would happen between them.
I heard Elvis say, “Well, I’m going to give ’em enough rope.” And it so happened that Little Anthony was up in New York at the time, and they met at a disco and danced together.
BILLY SMITH: Priscilla had this desire to see somebody in New York. She was looking at other people, just like Elvis was. I remember she got pretty involved with somebody in the entertainment field.
LAMAR FIKE: Priscilla came back from that trip, and Elvis found out about her dancing with Little Anthony. And, boy, that started a bunch of shit! Because Elvis already thought she had something going with Schilling, and I guess the idea of her flirting with Little Anthony put him over the edge. That night he caught Jerry and Priscilla [talking] in the kitchen, Schilling panicked like you don’t know what panic is. Elvis walked up the steps, and he came by me, and he said, “I wouldn’t put it past the son of a bitch.” I said, “Well, then, what’s your problem? You know what to do.”
Priscilla realty preferred dark-skinned, black-headed guys. Still does. In a Vanity Fair interview, she said, “There is a certain strength I feel with dark men. They’re very virile.” Like the guy she’s living with now [screenwriter-turned-computer-programmer Marco Garibaldi]. He’s Brazilian, of Italian heritage. That’s her thing.
MARTY LACKER: In May of ’68, after Live a Little, Love a Little wrapped, Elvis and Priscilla went to Hawaii with Esposito and Schilling and their wives for a little vacation. Elvis used the time to get in shape for the TV special. He lost that weight he’d gained on the ranch, and he got a good tan, and I heard he even slacked off on his drug use a little bit. He knew what he had to do.
The next day after they got to Hawaii, by the way, they went to the Karate Tournament of Champions. That’s where Priscilla saw her first karate studs. One of them was Mike Stone, who was just her type. He’s Hawaiian, but he’s dark. He even wore an Afro hairstyle for a while.
LAMAR FIKE: The day that Robert Kennedy got shot—June 5, 1968—my phone rang about midnight. Elvis said, “Turn on your television set.” We both sat there watching television with a phone in our hands for four hours. Finally, I said, “Elvis, it’s four o’clock in the morning! I’m ready to pass out.” But he just had to talk about it.
Towards the latter part of the conversation, he got back on the Jack Kennedy tear. He talked about what it would feel like to actually take somebody out like that—to both give the order and pull the trigger. But he was also freaked about somebody killing him, and that just fed it. By the time we hung up, he was sure that the guy who killed Kennedy was somebody close to him. The Judas theory.
BILLY SMITH: One night we were sitting around talking about gangsters. Elvis used to say the Perugia Way house was the one where Bugsy Siegel got killed. Marty says that wasn’t true, that Bugsy Siegel was killed in [girlfriend] Virginia Hill’s house, which was on North Linden Drive. But Elvis would say, “Man, I’m telling you. He got blown away with a shotgun, right here.” Now, he believed this because he used to go see a doctor who was supposedly Bugsy Siegel’s brother. Elvis said Dr. Siegel told him that the Perugia Way house was where it happened.
Anyway, this particular time, Elvis said, “You guys are here to protect me, and you do. But how far would you go? It would be easy for somebody to walk up and shoot me, especially onstage. If you saw somebody getting ready to blow my head off, what would you do?” And a couple of ’em said, “I’d step in front of you, man, if it come to that.”
I think this was one of them loyalty tests. Because he turned to me and said, “What about you?” I said, “Hey, my life’s important to me, too. I ain’t stopping no damn bullet for nobody.” He said, “You little son of a bitch!” And then Elvis died laughing. He said, “I didn’t figure you would, you dirty little bastard!”
MARTY LACKER: The funny part was that Billy turned the tables on him. He said to Elvis, “Let me ask you this. If somebody was shooting at me, would you stand in front of me?” And Elvis said, “Oh, hell no! It might hit me in the face.”
BILLY SMITH: In April or May, just before The Singer Special, I quit working for Elvis. There were a lot of reasons. The way things had changed. And my kids were getting ready to start school, and I didn’t want ’em to have to spend three or four months in Memphis and then three or four months in California. So I had to make a decision. And I chose Memphis because my daddy was real sick with liver trouble from all those years of drinking.
Elvis had retired him. He worked down at the ranch for about three months, and after that, all Daddy done was just come down there and fish every once in a while. But all my family drank home brew and rotgut. And they took pills.
To tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it financially. But I had to live my own life.
I went to work for Thurston Motor Line, and I worked there just about a year. Then I got on at the railroad [Illinois Central], and I worked for them until sometime in ’70.
Once, Elvis was trying to get me to come back with him and I wouldn’t do it because I didn’t want to travel no more. And he tore the whole damn kitchen up at Graceland. He was mad at me, and he was mad at his daddy, too. He threw dishes, and beat the refrigerator, and jerked the curtains down over the sink. He was unhappy, boy.
LAMAR FIKE: People were just bailing out because of the caste system. Joe was a pretty arrogant asshole.
MARTY LACKER: Just before I quit working at the ranch, I was offered a pretty good position, the opportunity to start Pepper Records. And with that, I started getting involved in the music industry in Memphis. During that time I discovered Rita Coolidge. She was singing background and doing jingles. We cut her first records.
I was also doing a lot of record production with [producer] Chips Moman over at his American Sound Studio. Back then, you could cut an album for $12,000. We were cutting records on a little eight-track tube board, using Chips’s rhythm section. They were all white guys, but to hear them play, you’d swear they were black. They worked with the biggest names and cut some of the biggest hits. All those guys are up in Nashville now: Reggie Young, who plays the shit out of a lead guitar, Bobby Emmons and Bobby Wood on organ and piano, Gene Chrisman on drums, and Tommy Cogbill and Mike Leech on bass. Tommy’s dead now. He was one of the best session players there ever was. He was on a lot of the original Aretha Franklin hits, playing both guitar and bass.
Chips had a hell of a run, cutting 122 chart records in three years. And fifty-three of them were million sellers. Like “The Letter” by the Box Tops.
I watched Chips in the studio, and I saw what a vast difference it was from the way Elvis worked. Chips’s way of working was to lay the rhythm track down, do a rough demo vocal with the rhythm track, and overdub the final vocal, the background voices and horns and strings. It gave him so much more control over the sound levels and the final mix. Elvis was still recording the old way, having the whole band in the room while he stood in the middle singing. When I saw how things were being done, I was amazed and embarrassed that Elvis was so behind the times.
It really irked me because Elvis never should have had a slump. And the only reason he did was because of the terrible songs and the production, both in Hollywood and Nashville. Today, Nashville is a different ball game. But back in the sixties, it was still real down-home country, and they played what I call “shit-kickin’ music.” That might have been perfect for the Kissin’ Cousins soundtrack, but it was not Elvis Presley. Elvis could sing good country songs when he was allowed to, and he did later. But the crap that he’d been given to record so far was terrible.
That’s one reason I was keeping my fingers crossed for this television special. Because with a string of shitty movies, and records that didn’t really satisfy anybody, a flop with the TV special might have finished off his career. This was his moment of truth, and it could have gone either way.