CHAPTER 43
MARTY LACKER: In January of ’71, the Junior Chamber of Commerce named Elvis one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men in America. It was the only award Elvis ever received in person in front of a group. Normally, he didn’t go for stuff like that. But Bill Morris explained that the Jaycees took strong political positions in countries threatened by Communist movements. And he told Elvis no other entertainer had received the award before. The year Elvis got it, [Nixon aide] Ron Ziegler was named, for example. So that appealed to Elvis.
He told me he wanted me to handle everything. He said, “Find out where I go and where all the entrances are.” He was just going to fly in the night before, from Vegas.
Then he said, “I don’t want to stay at Graceland. I’d rather be somewhere close to the auditorium.” So I arranged for him to have the whole top floor of the Rivermont Hotel. And then he did something completely out of character. He said, “I’d like to do something for the other honorees.”
So we came up with the idea of doing a dinner. I said, “Let’s have a big cocktail party at Graceland and then go to the Four Flames,” which was this terrific restaurant. He said, “Great, but I want to do it first-class.” And I repeated one of his old sayings: “That’s the only way to go.”
We had Graceland done real sharp, and we decided that one of the guys would meet each honoree at the door with his wife and take them on a personal tour.
Elvis was really happy. Except for one thing. In the middle of dinner, the side door opened, and in walked Al Capp, the cartoonist who drew “Li’l Abner.” Well, nobody had invited him. And the sheriff’s deputy at the door said, “I’m sorry, sir. This is a private party. You can’t come in.”
In a loud voice, Capp said, “I’m part of this ceremony, and I should be here.” It turned out that Capp was going to be one of the speakers at the awards. But we didn’t know that. And Capp was drunk, and he started yelling, in a raspy, obnoxious voice, “I don’t know why I wasn’t invited. I’m Al Capp . . . ”
Finally, one of the big-shot Jaycees told him he was going to have to leave. Capp yelled all the way out the door. And he didn’t even go to the ceremony. Elvis said, “Who gives a shit?” But it hurt him, and it put a damper on his evening.
BILLY SMITH: The part of Elvis’s speech everybody remembers is, “I learned very early in life that without a song, the day would never end. Without a song, a man ain’t got a friend. Without a song, the road would never bend—without a song. So I’ll keep singing the song.” That was the last part. In the first part, he said, “When I was a child, ladies and gentlemen, I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream that I ever dreamed has come true a hundred times.”
Well, one of the comics he read when he was a kid was Captain Marvel, Jr. And if you go back and look at a drawing of Captain Marvel, Jr., it looks a whole lot like the seventies Elvis—one-piece jumpsuit, wide belt, boots, cape, lightning bolt and all. Even the hair is the same. Elvis just had bigger sideburns.
Captain Marvel, Jr., was “the most powerful boy in the world.” He went after Captain Nazi during World War II. And he had this dual image—normal, everyday guy and super crime fighter. Sounds like Elvis, don’t it?
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis always believed you acted the part. You didn’t see Hopalong Cassidy walk around in slacks and a sport shirt, for Christ’s sake.
The first time he put that cape on, I said, “Man, we ought to put a wire on you so you can fly over the audience.”
MARTY LACKER: When Elvis would open in Vegas, a lot of celebrities would come. Some were old friends, like Sammy Davis, Jr., and Juliet Prowse. There were times when B. B. King would be playing in the lounge, and Elvis would be playing in the big room, and Elvis would invite B.B. up to the suite after the shows. He liked B.B. And B.B. liked him. During Elvis’s early years, he’d go down to Beale Street and see B.B. perform.
Cary Grant used to come to some of the shows, too. I think the hotels had a list of celebrities, and every time somebody opened in the big showroom, they’d bring them in. Because people like Grant were always there for openings. And Ernest Borgnine came a number of times. He was a really nice guy.
Not everybody in Vegas was nice. Karen and Richard Carpenter came backstage to the dressing room one time in the early seventies. She was totally domineering. Elvis came out, and she had this stuffed animal, and the first thing she said to him was, “Sign this,” real haughty and demanding. Elvis said, “Well, I’ll be more than happy to, if you ask me in a different way.”
Elvis had a similar experience with one of Johnny Carson’s sons, also in the early seventies. Carson had one of his people call to get his son a table and arrange for him to meet Elvis backstage. When he came back, he was completely obnoxious. Later, Johnny called Elvis and apologized for his kid’s behavior.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis was always crazy about Johnny Carson. But then a few years later, Johnny was doing his monologue one night, and Elvis was watching him, and Johnny said something about Elvis being “fat and forty.”
And, boy, Elvis turned against him after that. He wouldn’t hardly watch him anymore. Elvis took stuff like that hard. That’s why we kept the bad reviews from him. Joe would cut that page out of the paper. If Elvis saw it anyway, he’d stay mad the whole damn day.
MARTY LACKER: About ’71, Elvis told Priscilla he thought she should stay away from Vegas except for the openings and closings. He didn’t want her there because he had other company. Sometimes he’d go seven weeks without seeing her.
His excuse was that he was still worried about security. And a couple of times, Red and Sonny hit some people who tried to get into Elvis’s room. That’s what they were paid for—not to hurt people, but to protect Elvis.
But these people sued. And, of course, they didn’t sue Red and Sonny. They sued Elvis. After I quit working for Elvis, he rented Jack Warner’s house in Palm Springs, instead of the Alexander House. One time during this period, Priscilla and some of the wives went out to Palm Springs while Elvis was in Vegas. And when she looked in the mailbox, there were all these letters from girls who’d obviously had a wild time there.
Well, Priscilla hit the ceiling. But Elvis had his explanation together. He said they were just big fans with bigger imaginations.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis would move people around like chess pawns. The girls would come, and we’d play and party. And they would come by later on, after we left for L.A., and slip notes in the mailbox. And some of those notes were pretty hot. One of the girls called Sonny “Lizard Tongue.”
I was standing there when Priscilla read one of the notes to Elvis on the phone, and I could see the blood drain from his face. Then he started hollering and ranting and raving. But Priscilla kept right on.
He got off the phone, and he said in this real serious voice, “Lamar, the end is near.” I said, “‘The end is near’—my ass! We’re all doomed. Let’s just get one divorce attorney, and let him handle the whole thing and give us a group rate.”
That little liaison eventually cost Joe his wife, cost me my wife, and cost Elvis his.
MARTY LACKER: In March, Elvis’s glaucoma flared up while he was in Nashville doing a recording session. He had to wear a black patch for a while, and it meant he couldn’t tour that spring. When he felt better again, in May, he went out and chartered a Bach 111 twin-engine jet and a full-time pilot. For $470,000 a year. He decided he had to get over his fear of flying and travel like a superstar.
BILLY SMITH: That plane seated twelve people. The pilot was young and didn’t always make the wisest decisions. Like, he’d stayed up most of the night partying and drinking the night before he flew Elvis somewhere one time, and when he got ready to land, he misjudged the length of the runway, and the control tower began to shout over the radio, “Abort, abort!” The pilot panicked and set the plane down so hard that he threw it back into the air on its side. Shook everybody up, and Elvis was scared to death it was going to crash. Elvis decided then and there he was going to buy his own damn plane and get a crew he knew and trusted.
MARTY LACKER: For a long time, I’d been thinking that the city ought to name something in honor of Elvis. In the summer of ’71, there was a big brouhaha about whether to name what’s now known as the Mid-South Coliseum after him. And it was embarrassing the hell out of Elvis because it got to be a public debate. People were writing in, “No, you shouldn’t” and “Yes, you should.” We were watching the news one night, and he said, “I wish they’d cut this out, because I’m not asking them to name anything after me.”
Well, I did a lot of maneuvering behind the scenes, and I finally got the city to act on my suggestion, which was to change the name of Highway 51/Bellevue Boulevard to Elvis Presley Boulevard. That was the street in front of Graceland. I said, “If it wasn’t for him, there wouldn’t be anybody out there anyway.”
It didn’t become official until January of ’72. The area they renamed is a twelve-mile stretch, and it took a while to get all the signs up. The problem was, people would steal them the same day. They had to keep replacing them, and finally they put them up over the intersections on wires instead of poles. That was the only way to keep people from snatching them as souvenirs.
BILLY SMITH: Between ’69 and ’71, when he was at Graceland, Elvis used to go down to the gate quite a bit and cut up with the fans. Sometimes he’d even let ’em come inside. When Harold [Loyd] was on duty, he’d time it to about an hour and fifteen minutes, and then Elvis would go back up to the house. But he’d have a ball with everybody, and, of course, they would with him.
Now, when Vester was working the gate, all this made him nervous. There used to be a little stump down there where Elvis would stand for the fans to take pictures. And he’d sign autographs for two or three hours. But it would cause the traffic to get so bad, they’d have to call the cops. In fact, there was a lot of wrecks while Elvis was down at the gate. So he had to stop because the people around there complained. I think ’71 was the last year he did it.
One time, this really pretty lady was standing there looking at Elvis, and he walked over and kissed her. Well, when he done that, she run right out into traffic. Vester had to go catch her. She just went crazy.
MARTY LACKER: In July of ’71, Elvis played his first engagement at the Sahara Tahoe Hotel. This was in Stateline, Nevada. He played twenty-eight shows and set a new attendance record. After that, he went back almost every year. He liked it there. Of course, Tahoe’s a lot smaller than Vegas and not as glitzy. But Colonel got just about as many people in the showroom as he did in Vegas—just under two thousand—by putting eight people at a table that normally seats four.
LAMAR FIKE: Tahoe’s an interesting place. Used to be so loose there the waiters would get tipped with vials of cocaine.
Elvis was sitting down in the living room of the suite one time eating. And we both looked out at the mountains and the pine trees at the same time, and he said, “If you say one more fuckin’ time how pretty those goddamn pine trees and that lake are, I’ll throw this chair through the window.”
But that place is really rough, with the altitude. It’s 6,200 feet at the lake. Shit, water won’t even boil, it’s so high. It just beat him up to sing.
MARTY LACKER: That year, ’71, was when the overdoses started. The worst one happened after a show at Tahoe. Sonny told me about it. Elvis saw this girl in the second row, and he was really taken with her. She was a teenager. Real innocent. A nondrinker, nonsmoker. Didn’t even wear makeup. And she was crazy about Elvis Presley. She and her mother would drive to Vegas to see him. And her mother was with her at the Tahoe show.
Elvis waved to her from the stage, and after the show, he told Sonny to bring her backstage. She sent her mother home, and she stayed with Elvis that night and, actually, for quite a bit of his engagement. He’d give her pills so she could keep up his hours.
One night after the show, they went to Palm Springs. Elvis was taking Hycodan, which is a narcotic, analgesic cough syrup. In large doses, that stuff’s dangerous. Elvis and this girl were drinking it out of champagne glasses. They didn’t go to bed until about four A.M., and when they did, they took their Hycodan with them.
By one o’clock the next day, Elvis wasn’t up. Sonny banged on the door. And when Elvis didn’t answer, he went inside. It was like a meat locker in there, Elvis kept the temperature so low. Sonny said Elvis was sprawled across the bed lengthways, and his breathing was real erratic.
Well, Sonny freaked out and went and got Hamburger James. And it took a while, but they eventually got Elvis up, and slapped him back to consciousness. Then he took some Ritalin and came out of it.
The girl was another story. She was in much worse shape. They couldn’t slap her awake, and she barely had a pulse. Sonny said she was dying right there in front of them.
They phoned Dr. Kaplan and he came up there and called an ambulance. He was shocked at how far gone she was, and he warned them that she probably wouldn’t make it. She was already turning blue. Elvis was telling him what to do, you know, “Just give her a shot of Ritalin and shell pop out of it.” I think everybody was pretty disgusted by that. But he used to just hand out Ritalin tablets to all of us in the late sixties. Elvis was just Ritalin nuts. He always thought no matter how bad you got, that’s all you needed. He also thought it was a good way to wake up.
Charlie was there, and he and Sonny followed the ambulance to the hospital. They pumped the girl’s stomach and hooked her up to life support, but Dr. Kaplan was still saying he didn’t think she’d live. But Elvis just waved it off. He said, “I told her not to drink so much of that.” And he went in the bedroom and called Colonel Parker and John O’Grady, I think, and Dick Grob, to make sure the Palm Springs police stayed out of it and that it didn’t hit the papers. And then they came up with this plan that if she did die, Charlie would take the rap. He’d say she was his date, and he’d given her the stuff.
Well, something like seventeen hours later, the girl came to. Charlie and Sonny went to the hospital, and Sonny said when he touched her arm, she came halfway off the bed and started hissing at him like a wild animal. It scared the shit out of him. The doctor said she was suffering from oxygen deprivation to the brain. Elvis paid her hospital bill, and he had Joe get in touch with her mother and offer her some money. But the mother wouldn’t take anything. She said they’d never sue. They didn’t want to hurt his image.
The thing is, Elvis never got in touch with that girl. Didn’t go to the hospital and didn’t call her when she got out.
Later on, Joe ran into her and her mother again in Vegas. They were there for the show, sleeping in their car. He got a room for them at the hotel, and Elvis paid for it. Sonny went to see her, and she told him she didn’t hold Elvis responsible. But Sonny said her whole personality had changed.
LAMAR FIKE: I think this thing with the girl in Palm Springs got really close to Elvis, and the fact that she almost died scared the water out of him. And I think he thought, “Holy shit! I really got off lucky here! So let’s not bring this up anymore. I don’t want to think about it.”
But pretty soon he was back to his old ways. Elvis could pick out a girl in the third row, six chairs over, and say, “She’s going to go down tonight.” And he’d be right.
BILLY SMITH: He had a lot of fear there. At first, it was fear that “God, if she had died!” And then it was, “That dumb bitch! She could have jerked me down right with her and ruined my career!” He totally denied the fact that he was the cause of it.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis was a very selfish person in some regards. He did what he wanted to do, and he didn’t give a shit the way it affected anybody else.
BILLY SMITH: I think to some extent Elvis lost touch with the feelings of other people. He changed from humble to hard. Deep down, Elvis was a good person. He was just a victim of a lot of things that changed him and made him the way he was. He got more depressed in later years. The drugs enhanced the pressures, made them seem a lot worse. But he didn’t deal with them directly. Instead, he chose to take more drugs.
There were a lot of times I hoped he would snap out of it and become the strong individual that I’d seen in the earlier days. When he really wanted to, he could still focus and say, “Hold it. This is the way it’s going to be.” But he did that less in the later years.
MARTY LACKER: When Elvis went back to Vegas in August of ’71, they had him playing three shows a day because of the overflow crowds. When he finished his engagement, he’d broken his own attendance record.
By ’71, I was a partner in a company called Mempro, Inc., which was a general service company for the recording and publishing industry. And I’d also become one of the founding members of the Memphis chapter of NARAS, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. That’s the group that awards the Grammys. Eventually, I became an alternate trustee to the national board of governors.
I was talking with Esposito one day, and he mentioned that Colonel had said that NARAS had called. They wanted to give Elvis a Lifetime Achievement Award, which is a living legend honor. I think Sinatra had gotten one, and the Beatles. And as big as Elvis was, he hadn’t won any Grammy Awards except for his gospel records.
Joe said that Colonel told NARAS, “That’s very nice of you.” And they said, “We wanted to ask how many numbers he’d like to perform on TV at the awards.” And Colonel said, “What do you mean, ‘perform’?” They said, “Since he’s going to be there to accept the award, we thought it would be great if he’d be on the show.”
Colonel said, “How much are you paying?” And they said, “Well, we don’t pay for performances.” And Colonel said, “Elvis don’t appear without being paid. I don’t know that he’ll appear anyway.” So they went round and round, and NARAS really showed their ass. They said, “Well, if he’s not going to be here, we’re not going to give him the award.”
When I heard that, I really got fuckin’ upset. Because if you’re going to give somebody an award on merit, you give it to him whether he’s there or not. Here’s Elvis Presley, the guy who made the whole rock ’n’ roll movement what it was, and fifteen years later they weren’t willing to give him a Lifetime Achievement Award.
One night, my partner, Don Burt, and I took Ron Alexenburg, the vice president of CBS/Epic Records, to catch a plane back to New York. Ron knew that I had been with Elvis, and he asked me how he was doing. I said, “Fine.” And then I told him the story about NARAS and the Lifetime Achievement Award. Ron said, “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.” And he said he’d see what he could do.
About six months later, in the fall of ’71, I opened Billboard, and I saw a picture of Bobby Vinton and [music industry executive] Allen Klein presenting Elvis the Lifetime Achievement Award in his dressing room in Vegas. They still wouldn’t do it at the award show.
All the time I was running my business, by the way, I was stoned. I was still taking about ten or more pills a day, which is what I was doing when I worked for Elvis. But I always functioned, even taking sleeping pills during the day. At the time they were a nice sensation. I look back now, and I thank God I got through all of that without doing real damage.
LAMAR FIKE: Those shows in Vegas in August of ’71 . . . that’s when you saw the first signs that things were starting to fall apart. Elvis would be so ripped his tongue would be thick, and he’d tell the audience, “I’m sorry, folks, I just got up. I’m not really awake yet.” Or he’d walk funny—he’d spread his legs out to keep his balance until he got into it.
One time his show was just real bad. He was so fucked up. He went onstage, and he’d start a song and he wouldn’t finish it. He was doing about fifteen bars of a song and stopping, then doing another song.
And he’d go into this karate demonstration instead of singing. He was just entertaining himself, and entertaining the people onstage, and not the audience. Well, about eight hundred to one thousand people walked out. I was sitting by the soundboard in the middle of the place, calling the lights, and people were walking out in droves. He did a thirty-five-minute show. He was supposed to do an hour and a half. The maître d’ came up to me and said, “Lamar, we got all kind of complaints.” I said, “I know it.”
He came off that stage, and, boy, I flew back in the dressing room and I lit into him like a circular saw. In front of everybody. All these people were saying, “Oh, you did a good show,” and this and that. And I said, “That’s the worst show I’ve ever seen in my life. You ought to be shot for what you did.” And, boy, he got mad. He said, “I want to see you in the back.” And I said, “Fine.”
We got back there, and I said, “You’re probably the best showman that ever walked the face of this earth. But you ought to be ashamed of yourself for what you did tonight.”
He said, “I knew that was coming, you son of a bitch!” And then he went crazy.
I stormed out and went upstairs and threatened to fly home. But Elvis made sure I came back down for the second show, and he did a great second show. He ran thirty minutes over—he did a full two hours—which drives the casino crazy because the people won’t come out and gamble.
I went backstage and he said, “How was that, Lamar?” I said, “God Almighty! But you’re not doing it for me, are you?” He was trying to prove to me he could do it when he wanted to. I said, “You’ve got two thousand people out there. Prove it to them.” So we’d fight and make up.
Later on, we were talking, and I said to him, “Look, this thing is a trick bag here. You’re doing two shows a night, sometimes three, for four weeks.” I said, “I don’t think Superman could do that, but you’ve got to make the best of it.” And he said, “Well, I just got giddy.” I said, “Everybody does. You get tired.”
I think Elvis had planned on firing me just before he died. Charlie told me he was going to fire me after that [’77] tour because we were always fighting and arguing. But Elvis would say that every day about somebody, and it never came to pass. He was rough on Charlie, too. Elvis liked to beat Charlie to death. Just figuratively, of course. Onstage, he would correct him real hard and embarrass him in front of everybody. It wouldn’t be Charlie’s fault, but Elvis would slam-dunk him. You see, with me, I would set myself up for an argument. He’d start something with me, and I’d just rot ’til I got it finished. I wouldn’t just lay down and let him walk on me. He wasn’t right all the time. I never saw him walk across Lake Mead, you know.
MARTY LACKER: When Elvis incorporated karate into his moves onstage, he was the first to do it. He did more for karate than anyone in this country.
BILLY SMITH: He took his karate real serious. In ’74, he started producing this karate movie. Supposed to be called The New Gladiators. It was never finished. But that was Elvis’s dream—to do an educational karate documentary.
LAMAR FIKE: Somebody asked me the other day, “Was he actually any good at karate?” I think Elvis was an honest second- or third-degree black belt. Anything else he got was just awarded. I remember one time in Vegas, we were sitting downstairs in the dressing room, and Elvis had gotten a red-and-white belt, which is a very high honorary degree.
He put it on and walked over and showed it to me. And he flipped the top down and it had a bunch of Chinese writing on it. He said, “Do you know what that means?”
I said, “Yeah, with six you get egg roll.” It looked like a damn Chinese menu to me. He got so mad he wouldn’t speak to me the rest of the afternoon. It was a good line. I couldn’t pass it up.
BILLY SMITH: In November of ’71, Elvis went on tour and did fourteen shows in twelve days. He’d done twenty-eight shows in fourteen days at Tahoe and fifty-seven performances in twenty-nine days at Vegas. He’d had some time off before this tour, but he was tired. And I’m sure he was taking a lot of downers.
Of course, things were so different then. I was gone, Marty was gone, Alan was gone, and Richard was gone. Vernon fired him sometime in ’71. Elvis hated to lose an older person in the group. It hurt him. But the group, the original Memphis Mafia, was pretty much dead. It didn’t finally die until a few years later, but it was pretty dam sick in ’71.
LAMAR FIKE: It became so tedious with Elvis because of his drug problem. But then, once you got away from him, you missed it, so you went back. He had such control. Some of those guys had been with him for twelve years. Shit, if you were selling Fuller brushes for twelve years, and you weren’t selling them anymore, you’d miss it. But anyway, they were gone. That’s why Elvis brought those new kids in.
MARTY LACKER: When Richard left, Elvis brought Ricky Stanley into the entourage. He was seventeen and still in high school. Elvis made him his personal aide. Not out of love, but convenience. And because Vernon asked him to do it—Ricky was getting in so much trouble that Vernon wanted him out of his way.
Dee had a fit when Ricky joined the group. She wanted him to go to college and become a doctor. Elvis told her he’d get tutors and teachers for him on the road, if you can believe that. But Dee knew that if Ricky joined, then Billy and David wouldn’t be far behind. And Dee knew what Elvis’s lifestyle was like. Even Joe and Red argued against bringing Ricky into the group. That’s probably because they knew what was in the back of Elvis’s mind. The Stanleys would be his drug runners.
Billy Stanley tells this story, that as soon as Ricky got on the plane for the first tour, Elvis, who was still talking about tutors for him, sat down, put his arm around Ricky, and said, “I might as well tell you now. I’m the teacher.”
LAMAR FIKE: We called the younger guys “The Wrecking Crew.” We’d say, “Wrecking Crew! Get up here.” And they would come and pack Elvis up and get everything together. Eventually, it was Ricky and David Stanley, and Hamburger James, and starting in ’74, Dean Nichopoulos, Dr. Nick’s son. They were a real contrast to the rest of us.
BILLY SMITH: In the earlier days, we were a real tight-knit group. We didn’t leak things to the press. Then, as people filtered in and out of the group, things changed. The new group wasn’t as reliable. The emotional ties weren’t as strong.
MARTY LACKER: In the last years, the guys didn’t hang out at Graceland much, except on the eve of a tour. Elvis started getting tired of everything and everybody. And also he was paranoid.
LAMAR FIKE: As a rule, we hung out during the day, but not at night. I’d drive that trip from Nashville to Memphis like I was blindfolded. But the camaraderie had changed dramatically. The guys from the original group had families. And of course, Elvis hated that. That’s one reason he went on tour—to forget about how things had changed.
BILLY SMITH: The routine on tour was this. Dick Grob worked security. He’d fly ahead, and he’d look at the route going in and out, and the stage area, and whatever surrounded it. He saw what needed to be done, and who needed to be placed where, including the hotel. This was a bigger job than it sounded because a little later on, Elvis would go out for twenty days at a time. They tried to keep the cities no more than three hundred miles apart, but they couldn’t always do that.
That first night, they’d all get to town, do the show, grab a little sleep, and then go on to the next town in the morning. And you’re talking about moving one hundred people here. There were three truckloads of stage and sound equipment, and the roadies traveled with that. They went on ahead with Colonel. Then the musicians went on ahead, too, to set up and do a sound check in the afternoon. Then Elvis and the entourage left. He usually got there in the late afternoon, and then he slept until time to get ready for the show.
MARTY LACKER: Colonel played the advance man on the tours. He could have stayed in L.A. But the Colonel wasn’t going to let anything go on without him being there. If the checks weren’t sent to his office before the show, he picked them up from the promoters, or from the venue. One of the guys, usually Sonny or Lamar, went with him to set up security, transportation—which was two limos and a bus—and the rooms.
The Colonel actually got the hotels, but Sonny would tell the hotel staff, “We need half the floor, and you have to have somebody man the elevator, so nobody can get off.” By the time Elvis and everybody else got there, the group was assigned a room, and the room assignment sheet was hanging out with all the room numbers.
LAMAR FIKE: The preparation began the day before we left. Usually, they took as many concert suits as possible. They always had eight or nine carrying cases for Elvis’s stage wardrobe. Once all that shit was packed, we had two pickup trucks to carry all the luggage. Two or three of the guys would go with the trucks to load the plane.
When it came time for Elvis to go, they had two cars ready and waiting at the front door of Graceland. Elvis went in a car with two or three security guys. But before he came out, he’d say goodbye to his father, if Vernon wasn’t going on the tour, and Aunt Delta, and to Grandma. He always spent a few minutes alone with her. Then he’d come out and say, “Let’s roll ’em, boys!” And it was off to the airport. Once he got the airplane, the Lisa Marie, he’d walk on, go back to his bedroom, and put on his pajamas.
MARTY LACKER: Hamburger James would get to the hotel before Elvis and prepare his bedroom and bathroom. Albert Goldman says he had the instructions written down in three notebooks. But that’s bullshit, quite frankly.
I do know that Hamburger and Ricky, or one of the other younger guys, would put aluminum foil on the windows, so it would always be dark, and Elvis could sleep. And they fixed his bed, and got all his stuff unpacked, and turned the thermostat down to sixty degrees, so it would be like a tomb in there, dark and freezing.
BILLY SMITH: About the three notebooks . . . it wasn’t that complicated. You knew what Elvis had to have—everything from aspirin to Fleet’s enemas. On his bedstand, you had a jug of ice water. And in his refrigerator, some Pepsis. The costumes were kept in a whole separate room. Elvis didn’t call for those until he got ready to go to the coliseum. So that’s it. Except he always had his books with him—Cheiro’s Book of Numbers, you know, numerology. And The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus. See, he didn’t really give up all that stuff.
LAMAR FIKE: You had to haul those damn books around. They weighed twelve tons. It was like carrying an anvil. He wanted them put beside his bed. Everything had its place—even his toothpaste. See, his rooms were created, whether they were on an airplane or a hotel. Once he got the plane the way he wanted it, Elvis did not go from place to place in a seat, he went in a virtual bedroom. He never had to get out of his comfort zone.
By the way, you know what else he took on tour? That Jaycees trophy.
MARTY LACKER: That was kind of funny. He carried it everywhere. With a ribbon around it. Showed it to everybody.
LAMAR FIKE: In ’71, Dr. Nick started going on the tours with us. He was really eaten up with the whole celebrity thing. Nick loved that. He used to use Jerry Lee Lewis’s plane. It was the whole “Golden Greek” routine. Nick’s a high roller. He loved to be on the high side of it. Although you wouldn’t know it from the way he dresses. He’s “The Polyester Kid.”
BILLY SMITH: About ’70 or ’71 was when Elvis started seeing Dr. Nick on a continual basis. He’d go on the tours and give Elvis his medication. He’d have to have medication to get up for a show, and to come down after the show, so he could sleep. Then the next morning, he’d have to have medication to get up. And he’d get medication on the plane, then more to take a nap before the show, and then it would start again before and after the show.
But Dr. Nick was real limited in certain areas to what he could do. People don’t understand—he tried to control what Elvis got. He really was trying to help him, I think. But Elvis outsmarted him. Like Dr. Nick said in an interview, at the time Elvis died, he was prescribing four different things that Elvis was taking, yet there was fourteen drugs found in Elvis’s body.
LAMAR FIKE: I’ve seen Dr. Nick come in before we went on tour with a brown grocery sack full of stuff. Now, that was drugs, but it was also shit like first-aid supplies and com plasters and eyedrops, the works. He was a walking drugstore. Mainly for Elvis, but for whoever else needed it.
Dr. Nick was in practice with a bunch of other doctors. And at first, Elvis just paid Dr. Nick to go on the tour, but then the other doctors got pissed because they were having to see his patients. So then Elvis had to pay the group $800 a day for Dr. Nick’s services while he was gone.
Dr. Nick would go on those tours to do two things—hand out pills, because he was the proverbial pill roller, and chase women. He’d hang out with Joe—Joe and Dr. Nick were big buddies. And he wouldn’t hang around with the rest of the guys. At the time Elvis died, Joe was making $40,000, plus bonuses and cars. And he made sure you knew it.
BILLY SMITH: Everybody wanted to be number one with Elvis. And when Dr. Nick come in, it just got worse. Where Elvis went, Joe went, and he took Joanie, and they went in the Rolls-Royce, no matter if they were playing a game, or going to a movie, or going to the fairgrounds. Priscilla and Elvis were number one, and Joe and Joanie were number two, and everybody else was behind them. Patsy Lacker says Elvis thought “wife” was a four-letter word. But he didn’t think everybody’s wife was. That’s the class separation. That’s why I hated it.
MARTY LACKER: Dr. Nick got caught up in that life. And he got himself into a situation with his partners where he needed a great deal of money, and he was also greedy. Dr. Nick was in terrible financial shape. And Elvis knew it and took advantage of it.
Every time Dr. Nick got in trouble, Elvis was the one to bail him out, either with big gifts like a new gold Cadillac and a gold Mercedes or loans. At one point, in ’75, Dr. Nick went to Elvis and asked him to loan him $200,000 to build his house. And Elvis did it. Two years later, he borrowed another $55,000 from him.
When we found out about it, we were just astonished. It was nothing for Elvis to give somebody $5,000 or $10,000, but to loan somebody a quarter of a million dollars—and to give him expensive cars and jewelry—was totally shocking to us. I’m sure Elvis did it because he felt he’d have Dr. Nick in his pocket.
LAMAR FIKE: Dr. Nick looked for the easiest route and took it. He’s a grabber-on-er. He gets what he needs. The Greek community, of course, rallies around him, but he’s as guilty [of overprescribing narcotics] as sin. There’s a band in Nashville called “Dr. Nick.” They’ve got bumper stickers that say, “If you’re feeling sick, call Dr. Nick.” It’s hilarious.
I’d say that Dr. Nick’s professional judgment got clouded. How many doctors do you know who “borrow” six-figure amounts from their patients?
Right after Elvis died, Nick said he was never financially dependent on Elvis, that he was paying the money back to the estate. I don’t know if he was or not, but Vernon made him sign an agreement to repay more than a thousand dollars a month. But let me give you some hard figures. From the beginning of ’70 to the middle of ’77, Elvis made personal loans to Dr. Nick of $275,000. And Elvis paid him $76,000 for professional services, and he paid the Medical Group $147,000 on top of that to compensate for Dr. Nick’s time while he was away on Elvis’s tour. Not bad, huh?
BILLY SMITH: Colonel didn’t like Dr. Nick. He saw what was happening—he had to know. And Vernon liked him even less because Elvis bought Dr. Nick a house and cars. Vernon was afraid Elvis was going to give away the mansion.
I don’t mean to totally run Vernon down. The man had some good to him. But Elvis’s fame created one person who couldn’t handle a lot of pressure—Elvis—who deep down had a heart of gold. And then it turned the other one, Vernon, into a greedy Scrooge that cared about nobody but himself and his son.
MARTY LACKER: When Elvis went back on tour in November, George Klein and I went out for a few shows—in Cleveland, Louisville, Cincinnati, and maybe a few other places. We were going to leave Elvis in Houston and go to a disc jockey convention in New Orleans.
About two minutes before each show, Colonel Parker would walk out in the arena and go into his routine. He’d always be sure he had two or three suckers standing around. And he’d pick one out, and say, “I’m going to tell you how many people are in this house right now because the Colonel is all-knowing.” He’d say, “It’s 11,492. Remember that number. The Colonel knows.”
He’d come back later with the tally. Colonel would hold up the paper, and he’d say to the guy, “How many people did I say were in here?” And the guy would read off, “11,492.” Well, of course, Colonel knew that before he ever walked in the damn place. But he still loved to pull that carny crap.
Sometimes Vernon went on the tours, and part of the reason he went was to screw around. Matter of fact, I happened to catch him in the act in a hotel room in Cincinnati. The woman was, to put it nicely, servicing him. Vernon didn’t know I saw him, and I never told him. I just happened to open the door to the room, and his back was turned because Vernon was standing up.
One night after that, Elvis, and Red, and I were out riding around in Memphis. I was in the backseat. We were talking about stuff in general and being kind of raunchy, actually. And I said, “Yeah, your father ain’t too old yet!” And Elvis and Red both looked back at me. Red said, “Marty, he don’t want to hear that about his father.” And Elvis sort of cringed. So I dropped the subject. But he knew what Vernon was like.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis had plenty of company on the tours. One of the women was Joyce Bova. She says she’s been a staff member of the Armed Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives for twenty-five years. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I think she worked for some big shot in the government, some senator in Washington. She was a secretary. She had a twin sister who worked for the government, too. Joyce was a very attractive girl. She had that long black hair and the heavy eyebrows. I think she was Italian.
Joyce was an interesting person, but there was no torrid love affair there. He met her at the hotel in ’69, and she came out to Vegas a few times more on her own. And then Elvis dated her when he was in Washington, like when he went to see Nixon, and again, I think, when he went to the FBI building. He was in Washington about two or three times after that, and he flew her to Vegas once or twice for a few days. She claims she was with him about three years, but from what I saw, she was about two short.
MARTY LACKER: This woman, Joyce Bova, has written a book [Don’t Ask Forever: My Love Affair with Elvis]. She says she saw Elvis off and on in the seventies—from ’69 to ’72—and that Elvis kept it secret. Well, Elvis dated her, but I don’t believe it was that long.
Elvis did buy her a car, but he bought cars for girls he saw for only two days. Now she’s saying she was pregnant, and she aborted. She also says he got her hooked on drugs, sleeping pills mostly. Maybe she was predisposed. I didn’t see her around him that much.
I will say this—Joyce was one of the best-looking girls he ever dated. She was sweet and nice, and she got along with everybody.
But you almost need a calculator to keep these women straight because they didn’t last very long. Or he’d have one date with them in ’70 and another in ’73. They’d call one of the guys, like Joe, in Vegas, and say they’d like to talk to Elvis or say, “Tell Elvis I said hello.” And Elvis would say to Joe, “Why don’t you call and see if she wants to come out here?”
They were all kinds, too. One girl was a dancer in one of the shows in Vegas. Another one was a radio promotion girl in Philadelphia. He had that one travel with him to two or three different shows on the tour, and he flew her out to Vegas when Priscilla wasn’t around. What he didn’t find out ’til later was that she was posing for pornographic pictures. And, boy, he dropped her quick. Later, we found out that some of his girls were hooking on the side.
LAMAR FIKE: The most money I ever made with Elvis was $365 a week, and that was when he died. I guess I was making $250 a week in ’71. But at the end of a tour he would give us a bonus—a big amount of cash and maybe a car that would be too expensive for us to maintain. The estate says Elvis always paid the insurance on any car he gave you. I don’t remember that. But when it was cash, it would be a thousand here, ten thousand here, twenty here. So you never knew what you were going to have. But Elvis was very generous after a tour. And Vernon liked to shit.
MARTY LACKER: In ’71, Elvis bought his first Stutz Blackhawk. He eventually had two or three of them. This was the first one made for the trade after the prototype car. The story goes that it was originally ordered for Frank Sinatra, but that Elvis talked the dealership out of it so he could have the first one, and Sinatra got the second. Elvis sent it out to be washed one day, and it ended up in a wreck. After that, he just put it in storage. The estate finally restored it.
He loved that car, and he’d go for rides down Sunset Boulevard in it, sometimes by himself. In California, the times he went riding around were really the only times he was out of the house, except when he was making movies or doing concerts. Sometimes he’d say to one of the guys, “C’mon and go with me.” But with the Stutz, a lot of times he’d go out on his own. I think he just liked the kick of driving around in that unusual car and showing it off. Especially with the horn. He used to come back and say everybody recognized him in that car because the horn played “Never on Sunday.” And he’d ride down Sunset and blow the horn at girls. He never stopped being a flirt, not ’til the day he died. Except with black girls. He never flirted with blacks.
I was visiting Elvis out in California at the Monovale house in late ’71, and this one day, I was sitting in the den with a couple of the guys. It was late afternoon, and Elvis had gone out riding in the Stutz by himself.
He came back in a little while, and he said, “Guess what happened? I was driving down Sunset, coming back to the house, and a limousine pulled up alongside me, and the window rolled down.” He said, “It was Diana Ross.” He’d never met her before, just seen her on TV. This was when she had that real skinny look, skinnier even than when she was with the Supremes.
The way Elvis told it, Diana said, “Hi! How you doin’?” He said, “Oh, fine.” And she said, “Where are you going?” He told her, “I’m just on my way back home.” And she said, “Why don’t we go somewhere together?” I can’t remember if he said she wanted to go in the Stutz, or if she wanted him to come in the limo, but she wanted them in the same car. And he said, “I just thought real quick and told her I had a meeting at the house.” And then he said he sped off.
One of the other guys said, “Why did you do that?” And Elvis said, “Man, she’s too damn skinny and ugly for me.”
LAMAR FIKE: When we came off that tour in the middle of November [’71], it was pretty obvious that Elvis and Priscilla were nearly finished. She says touring was the beginning of the end of the marriage, although I’d put it a lot earlier than that. He discouraged her modeling career and whatever she wanted to do in dance and acting, but he did encourage her to take up karate.
That’s how she had that affair with Mike Stone. Priscilla first saw him in Hawaii, when she and Elvis went to Ed Parker’s karate tournament in ’68. And she remembered him. And then in ’71 or so, Stone was a bodyguard for Phil Spector. Phil had come backstage somewhere and Mike was there. And Priscilla used the phrase “their eyes met,” and that was it. She was starting to come out of her shell. And Mike became a big thing.
Everybody knew about the affair before Elvis did. Henrietta, the maid at the Holmby Hills house [on Monovale], told Red that Mike was spending too much time at the house. Or more than he should have been if he was just teaching Priscilla karate. And Lisa Marie told Hamburger James that Mike took them camping. She said, “I saw Mommy and Mike wrestling in their sleeping bag on the beach. They wrestled all night.” Hamburger told Ricky Stanley, and Ricky told Billy Stanley and the whole crowd. So Priscilla was done in by a three-year-old.
The way we finally knew for sure was that Sonny caught them in the shower together. Elvis was in Vegas, and Sonny went to the Monovale house to pick up something, and he heard singing in the bathroom. He turned the corner down that hall to Elvis’s bedroom, and he looked to the right, and there was Mike and Priscilla in the shower. They never saw him.
Sonny came back to Vegas and told me. I said, “You better go to Elvis now, and tell him.” And Sonny went in and talked to Elvis and told him about it. And a few days after they came back, Sonny told Priscilla, too.
Elvis came over to me, and he said, “You son of a bitch, why didn’t you tell me?” I said, “I didn’t want to go through that shit. I just counted on watching this one fly.” And Elvis went berserk. It got real bad.
It wasn’t a case of him losing her, see. And it wasn’t jealousy. What bothered him was that she had the effrontery to screw around on him. He said, “How can she do this to me?”
BILLY SMITH: It hurt his ego more than anything else. He couldn’t understand why any woman would leave him for another guy.
MARTY LACKER: At Christmas of ’71, there was a lot of tension in the house. Priscilla was cooler to everybody than usual, more aloof. Elvis had told her earlier that he was giving her a car for Christmas, and she told him to keep it—she didn’t want it. So he gave her ten $1,000 bills. Those she kept. And she left for L.A. the next day.
Usually at Christmas, Elvis gave us all something real nice. That year, I remember, Bill Morris was there, and so was George Klein. Elvis handed us all these envelopes, and George said, “Thank you, E. You shouldn’t have done that.” He thought he was getting big money, see. And Elvis said, “Oh, it’s nothing. You deserve it.” Everybody opened his envelope, and inside was a gift certificate. It was from McDonald’s, for fifty cents.