CHAPTER 44

SPIRAL

MARTY LACKER: In ’72, when Elvis turned thirty-seven, we went out to Graceland for a little birthday celebration. Somebody asked him about Priscilla and Lisa, and he said Priscilla had decided to stay out in California for a while. He made it sound kind of offhand, but it was obvious they were separated. She wasn’t even staying in the Monovale house. Turned out she and Mike Stone were living together.

LAMAR FIKE: Elvis went back into Vegas at the end of January with a new male backup group—J. D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet, a gospel act. J.D. had one of those real low bass voices—like a guy with five balls, you know? Elvis used to say he could go down four keys off the piano. He used to sing with the Blackwood Brothers Quartet. Elvis had known him since he was sixteen. J.D. used to let him in the backdoor of the gospel sings at Ellis Auditorium. At the time, Elvis thought he was God.

MARTY LACKER: The gospel singers, just like the evangelists, present themselves as Goody Two-shoes, and some of them are anything but. J.D. and the Stamps Quartet were no different. When I went on tour with Elvis to Cincinnati, J.D. had his little gospel groupies visit him.

Since Elvis died, J.D. acts like he was around Elvis all the time. The truth is, he was there when Elvis went on tour, and that was it. And even then, the two camps were separate.

LAMAR FIKE: After a few shows out in Vegas, Elvis started cutting ’em short again. He’d barely wait for the applause to end before he’d start another song. Or he’d get on these long, rambling jags where he’d just talk.

After one of those, we got in another fight. He did forty-five minutes and left the stage, and I roared into that dressing room. I said, “Well, you topped yourself. You did the lousiest show I’ve ever seen you do in your life!” He turned around real quick and said, “I’ll fucking kill you for that! You’re fired, Lard-ass!” I said, “Fuck it! That’s fine with me!” So I went upstairs and started packing.

In a little while, Elvis came up to the penthouse. He yelled, “Lamar!” I said, “What is it?”

Joe came around the corner and said, “Elvis is in the foyer and wants to talk to you.” I said, “Fuck him! I don’t give a shit. I don’t want to talk to him.”

Elvis was around the corner, listening to all this. And he yelled, “Look, you son of a bitch, we need to talk this over!” And I yelled back, “I don’t need to talk to you! I’ve already quit. What are you going to do, whip me?”

He said, “Will you meet me at the end of the hall? I’ll come down to the end of the hall and meet you halfway.” I said, “No, I’m up to here with this shit!”

I turned around and went back in the bedroom and closed the door. And I heard him scream, “I’m down at the end of the hall. What are you going to do about it?” I screamed back, “Just stay at the end of the hall!” Joe was in the middle, saying, “Will one of you guys give in?” I said, “I’m staying here in the fucking room. I ain’t coming out.” Well, Elvis kept on yelling until I had to come out. It was so funny. We met literally halfway and hugged, and Elvis said, “Look, I love you, Lamar.” So we made back up.

But this stuff went on all the time. One night—this was a few years later, probably ’75—we’d been arguing about something, and he really got me mad. I said, “I’m going to tell you something, buddy. I call the lights, and you’re going to have a bad problem tonight. You’re going to have to find the light.”

Well, I ran him all over that stage, chasing the spotlight. He’d walk into the light and I’d move it. He was from one side of that place to the other. He screamed, “Do you mind?” It was like a routine.

He was standing in the dark one time, and he said, in front of everybody, “Lamar, would you mind putting the light on me?” I was in the balcony, shouting to him on the stage, see. I said, “Nope.” He said, “Nope, you’re not going to put the light on me, or nope, you don’t mind doing it?” I said, “I’m not going to do it.” People were in stitches.

There were a couple of instances like that. It got so we left it in the show for a while. We would yell back and forth at each other, and people didn’t know what to think.

MARTY LACKER: About ’72, Elvis started getting more erratic. One day in Vegas, he got mad at Joanie Esposito and threw a butter knife at her.

Elvis’s routine in Vegas would be to get up about five or five-thirty P.M. and have breakfast. He’d eat it out in the den. There was a big, long coffee table out there in front of the television, and he knew when he got up that his breakfast would be there waiting for him. He’d eat and watch the news or flick stations.

This day, a few of the guys were sitting up in the suite. Joanie said something in a joking way, but Elvis was in no mood for games.

Elvis said, “Goddamnit,” and flung that butter knife in her direction. It was heading straight for her face. Sonny happened to be sitting right in front of her. And luckily, he reached out and caught that knife in midair. Otherwise, it would have hit Joanie in the face and gone clean through her head. Elvis paid absolutely no attention to it.

LAMAR FIKE: In the early seventies, and up to the end, Elvis got really mean. The drugs made him that way. I also think he felt a lot of his fame slipping, and he didn’t like it. He started hating Vegas so bad, and eventually, he just detested the business. But nobody bothered him when he went onstage. That’s where he controlled it all. And that’s the only place he felt he could control who he was.

In ’72 or so, Wolfman Jack came backstage one night. We were sitting in the dressing room, and Wolfman just offhandedly said to him, “What’s it like to be Elvis Presley?” And Elvis said, “I’ll tell you what, Jack, it’s very, very uncomfortable.”

Bored. That’s what he was. Bored to tears: Getting a group around and talking to them. Getting loaded and going to bed. Waking up. Doing two shows a night. Felton Jarvis went looking for him one time when they were recording in Memphis. He couldn’t find him in the studio, so he went outside. Elvis was there in the dark. And Felton said, “Why are you sitting out here, Elvis?” And he said, “I’m just so tired of being Elvis Presley.”

Those last five years, he was close to being somebody else. He was just a tormented person. He couldn’t get his shit together. He didn’t know how to stop the drugs. And he didn’t want to.

The one thing that might have made a difference was playing Europe. In the first part of ’72, it was heavily rumored he was going to go over and play London and Paris. Tom Diskin always denied there was any truth to it, but we were hoping there was. We thought maybe Elvis would get himself back together again. And I think he thought it would turn him back into what he was in the fifties.

He didn’t talk about it in those terms, of course. He wouldn’t have acknowledged it. But I think a tour abroad would have completely revitalized him. Elvis was a person who, if he had a real challenge, would face it and meet it. The last great frontier for him was the world outside the United States and Canada. But the Colonel would always talk him out of it.

BILLY SMITH: After the threats on Elvis’s life, Colonel would say, “Our security just won’t be good, and we don’t want something to happen over there. Besides, I can make you just as much money here. Let’s just increase the tours in the States.”

LAMAR FIKE: In February, when Elvis was getting ready to close the engagement, Priscilla came to Vegas. In between shows, she told Elvis about Mike Stone and said she wanted a divorce. Elvis knew why she’d come, and he told Red to go down to the restaurant and get her, that he wanted to talk to her.

She says in her book that he told her she was out of her mind, that she had everything a woman could want. But she didn’t back down. And she told Red’s wife, Pat, that Elvis forced her to have sex. She writes that in her book, too. I think she uses the term “very forcefully.” She said it was uncomfortable and she cried. Now, she never uses the word “rape,” but she pretty well suggests he raped her.

I think that’s a crock. It wasn’t in his nature. Maybe she just thought it was rape. I don’t know. It’s just so abhorrent to me that it’s hard for me to think Elvis would ever resort to that. But maybe he did, out of anger.

He called us all in after the second show and told us, “Another man has taken my wife.” Somebody said something to the effect of “I thought you wanted to get rid of her.” And he said, “Not that way, man.”

MARTY LACKER: I remember when Elvis told me she was going to divorce him. I went out to California on business, and I went up to the house. Elvis was outside. I got out of the car, and we hugged. And he said, “Marty, I’ve got a problem. Priscilla’s leaving me. She wants a divorce.” And he said, “Man, it hurts.”

I told him I was sorry. And he said, “What am I going to do?” I said, “Let me ask you a question: Are you going to change?” And he said, “Hell, no. I ain’t doing that for nobody.” I said, “Well, much as it hurts, Elvis, you’re just going to have to live with it. Because if you change just to make her happy, you’re not going to be happy. So you’re going to have to accept it.” He said, “Yeah, I guess you’re right. But it’s kind of hard to take.”

This whole conversation surprised me because usually he didn’t talk a whole lot about things like that. And this was the first thing out of his mouth. But then this might have been right after he got to the Monovale house and saw that she’d moved out. That shakes anybody up.

I’ll tell you how much he cared about Priscilla—he never remembered her birthday. The day before it rolled around, one of us would say, “Elvis, tomorrow is Priscilla’s birthday.” And he’d say, “It is? Well, you know what to do.” And we’d send flowers for him. So with the divorce, he wasn’t upset because he was losing her. He was upset that something was being taken away from him. And he didn’t like the way it looked to his fans.

BILLY SMITH: In one of these TV movies, they’ve got Elvis chasing after Priscilla, begging her to come back. He looked like an idiot in this thing: “Don’t say anything in front of the guys . . .” That would be typical of Elvis, except for one thing. When Elvis got to that point, he was bitter. He hated as much as he loved.

Now, I imagine he may have said at one time or another, “Why don’t you come back to me?” Because they stayed pretty close in touch about Lisa Marie and even done some things together. But I have a hard time believing that he would go as far as she said, then or any other time. She said in Glamour magazine that Elvis hoped they’d get back together again when he was fifty and she was forty, and that it wasn’t out of the question.

I never heard him say that. Elvis was not one to cross the same road twice.

MARTY LACKER: Priscilla says he came over to her house one time and talked to her about coming back. Now, knowing Elvis, he might have been screwed up, and he might have looked at her and thought, “Well, maybe I want a little [sex] tonight.” So he might have talked to her about coming back. But I think that if he got her in bed, he wouldn’t have done anything. Because the thought of her being with someone else would have turned him off.

It was devastating to him that a woman—especially his wife—would leave him, and especially leave him for somebody who had nothing. Elvis felt, “I’m giving you everything, and we have this family.” I think that was the only divorce in his family, other than his grandfather, Jessie. And he would have thought of that.

BILLY SMITH: I think Priscilla would have been more willing to give it another chance than Elvis because he wouldn’t give up the women. But there was still something there on both their parts. She says they were best friends after the divorce, after the strain was out of the relationship. She tells this story about him even calling her about his girlfriend troubles. She says, “You aren’t going to believe this, but sometimes he would hand the telephone to a girl and ask me to tell her how to handle him.”

But their marriage just couldn’t work. Not with their different thoughts and attitudes. Elvis would have liked to keep Priscilla like a bird. Elvis’s attitude towards all of us was like “Keep them there, take them out and play with them when you get ready, and then throw them back in the cage.”

MARTY LACKER: Ed Hookstratten handled the divorce. He represented Elvis and then picked Priscilla’s attorney for her. Somehow, Vernon got Priscilla to accept a lump sum of $100,000, plus $1,000 a month for her own expenses and $5,000 a month in child support. Which is amazing. They told her, “Well, you won’t have to pay a lot to your lawyer because Hookstratten will draw up the papers.” That’s pretty stupid. But she was so tight with her money that she wanted to hang on to every penny she got. And she later said that her lawyer—the one Hookstratten got for her—asked her to sign a letter saying she hadn’t hired him to advise her about Elvis’s assets or income.

Elvis actually filed for the divorce, in August. Supposedly, he filed as a favor to her. Whoever files has to have his address on the public document. And Priscilla didn’t want her address out. She might have been afraid of the fans.

LAMAR FIKE: I think the divorce weakened his resolve. When all this brewed up, Elvis got more into downers and started gaining weight.

The seventies were when he started getting really bad, see. Because he got into sleeping pills in a big way. Elvis loved downers. It was nothing for him to have all this stuff in his system at one time, like a Valium, a Placidyl, a Valmid, some Butabarb, phenobarbital—all of which are downers, sedatives—and some form of codeine. So he started looking to other things—things past Percodan and liquid Demerol, even.

Later on, in the mid-seventies, he started using Dilaudid, which is synthetic heroin, drugstore heroin. You’re talking about extremely strong shit here—five times stronger than morphine and two and a half times stronger than heroin. Doctors prescribe it for terminal cancer patients.

It was in pill or liquid form. Elvis would inject it. But he wouldn’t inject it himself because that’s what a junkie did. And he made a great distinction between himself and a junkie. A junkie did heroin. Not Dilaudid. And a junkie mainlined. So he seldom shot himself up. He’d have one of us do it. And he wouldn’t have us shoot into the vein, or into his arm, because he didn’t want needle tracks. He wanted intramuscular injections. He’d make us shoot into his hip. Dilaudid became his favorite drug.

BILLY SMITH: Elvis was scared of heroin. And, of course, it wasn’t prescription. As long as things were prescription, it was okay. He had his own doctor, so that made it all right. Elvis would be the first to tell you, “I don’t want street drugs, or even marijuana, around me. And I don’t want to hear about anybody in the group that’s bein’ it, either.”

LAMAR FIKE: I sat down and talked to him one night. I said, “Elvis, what the hell do you think Dilaudid is? Who are you fooling? Do you understand what’s happening to you?”

He said, “You don’t understand—I need this stuff.” It was a total psychological dependence. I said, “Nobody needs the stuff you take except advanced cancer patients.” And he said, “I’ll tell you what. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. And if you say anything more, I’ll knock the shit out of you and fire you at the same time.”

BILLY SMITH: Elvis never admitted that he had a problem or that he needed to get off of anything. I look back at him now, and I think, “God, how did he make it at times?”

LAMAR FIKE: One time, I looked at him and I said, “Elvis, you know who’s going to get the blame in the end? We’ll get the blame.” And, of course, we did.

But shit, we all liked it. When we went to Vegas, I started right back taking stuff with him. But I couldn’t handle the hangover the next day, so I quit.

I had a scare or two out there. The worst one was in ’70 or ’71. I had taken about six or seven pills. Well, right before you pass out, you get really hungry. You basically eat the refrigerator ’til it gets light. So I ordered a cheeseburger and French fries to the room.

This was about five-thirty or six o’clock in the morning, which was our normal time to go to bed. And I took two big bites of cheeseburger, and it stuck in my throat. I couldn’t get it out, and I couldn’t breathe.

Really, I was dying. I was turning blue. I thought, “What can I do?” And I had the presence of mind to get up and walk towards the end of the bed and run as hard as I could backwards into the wall. I must have been doing five miles an hour. And when I hit the wall, BOOM! The hamburger shot out of my mouth and flew clean across the room. I looked over there, and it was a hunk of meat about the size of a golf ball. I went, “Holy shit!”

It scared the hell out of me. I called everybody and I said, “Well, I liked to died last night!” And they said, “Okay,” and they hung up. I said, “Well, you motherfuckers . . .”

MARTY LACKER: In May, after a bunch of road dates in April [1972], Elvis and some of the guys went to Hawaii on vacation. He wanted to attend a karate demonstration, and he wanted a tan.

Early in June, he was set to play four shows in three days at Madison Square Garden. Elvis never had felt comfortable in New York, going back to when he auditioned for Arthur Godfrey and didn’t get on the show. So he was nervous about it. And this was a big event, with a press conference and a live album coming out of the shows.

Well, that place seats twenty thousand people. And all four shows sold out in a day. All kind of rock legends were in the audience—Bob Dylan, John Lennon, George Harrison, David Bowie, Art Garfunkel.

LAMAR FIKE: I wasn’t there. But I read the review in the New York Times. He slayed ’em up there. The reviewer for the Times, Chris Chase, said he “looked like a prince from another planet.” She compared him to Joe Louis and Joe DiMaggio. She said he was the kind of champion “in whose hands the way a thing is done becomes more important than the thing itself.”

MARTY LACKER: I remember that review, too, and it made him out to be more of a nostalgia act than anything else. You know, language like, “It was 1956 again.” And “Time stopped, and everyone in the place was 17 again.” But he did contemporary songs at those performances, like “Proud Mary” and “Never Been to Spain.” They were covers of other people’s hits, but they were recent songs.

He also did a press conference there at the New York Hilton. That’s where you saw how with-it Elvis was. He skirted the questions about politics, but some woman asked him about being a shy country boy, and he had that comeback with “Oh, I don’t know, I’ve got this gold belt,” and he stood up and opened his jacket and showed off that monstrosity the International gave him.

BILLY SMITH: He was pretty high there, but he wasn’t stoned. His wit was real sharp that day.

LAMAR FIKE: Let me tell you where Elvis’s humor was at its best. Watch the outtakes of his press conferences. I have never heard anybody deflect as quick and as good as he could, except maybe John Kennedy. Elvis was very intuitive. He picked up on stuff quick as a flash—almost like he plucked it out of the air. His humor was so unusual, and so hip and inside, that few people caught it. He would do things, and people would walk off saying, “What the fuck was that?” And we’d be on the floor laughing because we knew what it was.

MARTY LACKER: Elvis and Priscilla didn’t formally separate until late July, but by late June, everybody in Memphis knew they were getting a divorce. And since they both had the same lawyer, and this wasn’t going to be a prolonged fight, they were both pretty open about doing what they wanted. Mike Stone was married, with two kids, see. His wife sued him for divorce that same year, ’72, and got the house and kids.

One of the girls Elvis dated during all this was Barbara Leigh. He’d seen her off and on for a little while. He more or less stole her from Jim Aubrey, who was the president of MGM. Jim was supposed to have been the model for the Robin Stone character—the great lover—in Jacqueline Susann’s The Love Machine. Barbara was a would-be actress, and Jim brought her backstage to meet Elvis in Vegas after a show in ’70. Elvis figured he had to see her again and asked her for her phone number right under Jim’s nose.

He had her to Graceland a couple of times. I went over there one day, and I saw this woman standing at the dining-room table with her back to me. She was wearing this sheer, almost see-through, yellow gown. She turned around, and Elvis introduced us. She was a beautiful girl. But the gown surprised me because nobody dressed that way at Graceland. It stopped just above her breasts so that her shoulders were bare. That relationship didn’t last long. He gave her a Mercedes-Benz, and I don’t know what else. Then she was gone. There was just a parade of girls. And none of them meant anything.

LAMAR FIKE: In July, Elvis went to the midnight movies, and George Klein introduced him to the current Miss Tennessee, Linda Thompson. Linda was making the most of this beauty queen stuff. She’d been Miss Memphis State and Miss Liberty Bowl. Elvis liked her, and it wasn’t any time until she moved into Graceland.

When Elvis first started seeing her, we didn’t think she could chew gum and walk at the same time. It was amazing when we found out she could. She had a real good spirit. But she also had that beauty queen mentality. She was the kind of girl who put Vaseline on her mouth so her lips would slide easy over her teeth. You know, the beauty queen smile. I said to Elvis, “That’s interesting.” Elvis said, “Yes, it is.” And we laughed like hell. But she turned out to be the best one of the group.

Linda’s a good lady. A lot of fun. Scattered, but smart as they come. She was a speech and drama major at MSU [Memphis State University]. I guess she was the only one of Elvis’s women who was educated. She’d play the dumb role, and be subservient to a degree, but she’d get what she wanted. And she’s done very well in everything she’s done, from acting to writing songs.

Elvis only went with two strong women. Ann-Margret was the other. And Linda might have been stronger than Ann. Linda was very motherly. And from that standpoint, I think she was very good for Elvis. Now, as to what he gave her as a person . . . I think once everything had boiled down to a good thick broth, he probably would have been able to give more of himself later on. Maybe. But not as he was. After a little while, Linda didn’t think he was all that hot a lover, either. She said, “Once in a year . . .” But Linda was quite happy being there.

MARTY LACKER: When Linda came on the scene, she was with Elvis everywhere he went. That tells you that if Elvis wanted Priscilla with him, she would have been there. Linda started traveling with him from the very beginning.

The difference in Priscilla and Linda was the same as the difference between Priscilla and Ann-Margret—neither one of them felt threatened by anybody or anything. And neither one was trying to change him. Linda, to a certain extent, tried to change him in regards to the pills. She hated to see what they were doing to him and what he was doing to himself. But she wasn’t trying to change him as a person.

She spent four years basically taking care of Elvis—and I mean taking care of him. She was like a mother, a sister, a wife, a lover, and a nurse. She understood that he saw other girls when she wasn’t around. But from the last part of ’72, when Linda started, to ’75, he didn’t fool around that much on the road. Because she was with him all the time.

It hurt her when he did that, but her attitude was “What am I going to do about it? Say, ‘Hey, Elvis, you can’t do that or I’m going to leave?’ He would have said, ‘Adios.’”

BILLY SMITH: Linda wasn’t the usual type of woman Elvis liked. She was kind of thin, but she was tall—5'9". And she was pretty, but her personality made her beautiful.

LAMAR FIKE: Linda babied him. She’d do that whole baby-talk routine, use the same secret language as Gladys did with him. Pretty soon, she was using it with Foxhugh, her poodle. She sent Elvis a Mailgram when he was in Beverly Hills one time. Becky Yancey, who worked in the office with Vernon, saved it because it was all in that baby talk. It’s amazing. Becky wrote a book right after Elvis died [My Life with Elvis by Becky Yancey and Cliff Linedecker], and she put it in there:

Baby gullion, you are just a little fella. Little fellas need lots of butch, ducklin’, and ittytream, sure. Sure I said it. Iddytream. Iddytream? Grit. Chock. Chock. Shake. Rattle. Roll. Hmmmmm . . . Grit. Roll again. Hit. Hit. Pinch. Bite. Bite. Bite. Hurt. Grit. Whew. My baby don’t care for rings, da, da, etc. etc. Pablum lullion (in or out of the hospital). P.S. Foxhugh will bite sooties if you say iddytream again. Grit. Grit.

Ariadne Pennington (3 years old)

You know what’s funny about this? I recognize some of the words. “Iddytream” was ice cream. “Butch” was milk. “Ducklin’” was water. “Sooties” was feet. And Ariadne Pennington was the name of a character, a little girl, in Follow That Dream. Elvis just had Linda adopt that persona, I guess, for their little games.

MARTY LACKER: I think we all liked Linda. She was nice to everybody, including my wife, and she helped Patsy finally understand Elvis. When Linda came around, Patsy’s resentment disappeared, and Patsy and Elvis got to be good friends. As a matter of fact, she and Linda used to sing background with him in the car and in the house.

After Elvis died and Priscilla took over Graceland, she started bad-mouthing Linda and her taste. Elvis redecorated Graceland in ’74. He and Linda looked at stuff, and she said, “Oh, yeah. That’s pretty. Let me show you this, let me show you that.”

But it was always Elvis’s choice. The original color scheme was blue, white, and gold, and most of the furniture on the first floor had been custom-made in the fifties. And in ’74, Elvis bought a lot of faux French Provincial furniture and changed the color scheme to red—it was red crushed-velvet everything, and red satin drapes, and red shag carpet. Real kitschy. It looked like a French bordello.

Well, Elvis liked it. But when Priscilla started redoing Graceland, she said she was going “to put it back the way it was when I was there.” And she and [Graceland manager] Jack Soden started doing a little campaign on Linda, which I personally resented, only because I knew how good Linda was for Elvis.

LAMAR FIKE: Let’s face it—Elvis’s taste sucked. But you couldn’t come right out and tell him that.

Linda tried to teach him that red shag carpeting wasn’t befitting a man of his income bracket, but she wasn’t successful. He got what he wanted.

One time, we were at the Century Plaza Hotel, and Elvis walked in his room, and he said, “Lamar, all this furniture—it’s really cheap.” I went, “Holy shit! This is the Presidential Suite.” He was used to such overblown opulence that this was not up to his standard.

Elvis and Liberace had two things in common, other than the fact that they were both musicians. They were both twins who lost their brothers at birth, and they both loved opulence. So if something wasn’t overdone, it was abnormal to Elvis. He never understood the concept that less is more. We were riding in the car one day, and Elvis said, “I hope they keep making the cars smaller and smaller because I’ll start buying them bigger and bigger.”

MARTY LACKER: When Elvis went back into Vegas in August of ’72, the hotel had been bought by Barron Hilton, and it was now called the Las Vegas Hilton. And Elvis got another death threat. This time the maître d’ told Joe he’d gotten word that some crazy woman in the audience had a gun and was going to shoot Elvis during the performance. Red and Sonny positioned themselves in front of the stage the whole time Elvis was on.

Elvis stood way at the back to perform, in this sort of sideways pose so he’d make himself a smaller target. But nothing happened. He’d gotten a bomb threat when he played Roanoke, Virginia, a couple of months before, too. Nothing happened there, either. But with this second Vegas threat, Elvis got kind of cocky. He liked to brag that the guys were so loyal they’d take a bullet for him. He’d say, “That’s the kind of loyalty I can get.”

LAMAR FIKE: When there were celebrities in the audience at Vegas, usually we’d write their names down and hand them to Elvis so he could acknowledge them from the stage. But he didn’t know who half of them were.

He’d do a false exit and come offstage, and he’d say to either Joe or me, “Who’s out there?” One night, Elvis said, “There’s a name here, Arnold Palmer. What does he do?” I said, “He’s a golfer.” He said, “How do I introduce him?” I said, “Call him the Babe Ruth of golf.”

Elvis went out there and said, “I’d like to introduce you to the Babe Ruth of baseball, Mr. Arnold Palmer.”

MARTY LACKER: Once Elvis started performing out there, he didn’t go to as many shows. But he loved to go see Joan Rivers. He thought she was just crazy. Because she would say anything about anybody, and that’s what he liked. He loved her humor. He’d go backstage and see her. But mostly he’d go to see singers.

Elvis never stopped attracting celebrities. One night, Jim Nabors came down to the dressing room. Actually, he came down two or three times. There were other people there, too.

Elvis received people in the living area. There was a bar there, and a huge round table in the center, and couches against the wall. Jim came in after Elvis had already changed clothes. Elvis was sitting at the round table, and Jim sat down next to him. And in talking with him, Jim put his hand on Elvis’s knee.

When he did that, Elvis sort of flinched. Because first of all, Elvis didn’t like any man putting his hand on him, period. But he’d also heard rumors about Jim. And Jim didn’t take his hand off Elvis’s knee. He just left it there.

Well, Elvis quickly made an excuse to get up. He said, “Uh, I’ll be right back. I’ve got to get something,” and he went in his dressing area. And when he came back out, instead of sitting back down at the table, he sat on the couch.

About fifteen or twenty minutes later, Elvis got up and said, “Well, it’s time for me to go on upstairs. Thank you for coming.” Which was always the cue for visitors to get the hell out. So everybody left, and as soon as he was sure that Nabors was upstairs, boy, he started screaming. He yelled, “That no-good fuckin’ fag! Putting his hand on me!” He looked at all of us, and he said, “Goddamnit! I don’t know if I’m ever going to let him back down here! But if somehow he does get back down here, and the chairs on either side of me are vacant, I want one of your asses in those chairs! I don’t ever want to be embarrassed like that again!”

Well, something like two weeks went by, and Elvis saw Jim Nabors on television. He was on a variety show, performing with his big, booming singing voice. Elvis picked up his glass of water and threw it right at the TV set. He said, “That phony son of a bitch!” Because both of his voices are put on, see—the high, Gomer Pyle voice and the big virile singing voice. Every time Elvis saw Nabors singing on television after that, he threw something at the TV.

LAMAR FIKE: The drugs would get him on all kinds of tangents. He wouldn’t go to sleep. He’d get up and want to keep everybody awake. You’d be walking around like a zombie, trying to stay awake, and he was just wired to the wall. He fought insomnia until he died—a combination of nightmares and his day-for-night schedule. And then he still walked in his sleep.

MARTY LACKER: If he really didn’t have a whole lot of pills in him, and he was sleeping, a mouse could walk across the thick carpet and he’d wake up. And because he always kept a gun on him, it got tense a couple of times.

BILLY SMITH: He could take three or four sleeping pills, and if he was wired up, two hours later, he could be leaving to go somewhere.

LAMAR FIKE: When Elvis did a lot of downers, and especially when he started doing Dilaudid, he would eat big plates of Popsicles. At four o’clock in the morning, he’d send Hamburger James out to buy $100 worth of Popsicles, Fudgsicles, and Dreamsicles. And then he’d get constipated. We should have bought stock in Fleet’s enemas. We’d have made a killing.

People on Class A narcotics can’t hold anything solid on their stomachs. It makes them throw up. But the body accepts sweets. That’s why they drink a lot of Kool-Aid and eat a lot of sugary things. So we’d keep maybe one hundred cartons of yogurt in the suite in Vegas because Elvis would eat twenty to thirty at a time.

The suite at the Hilton was enormous, and it had this big kitchen. Elvis would wake up and go out his door, walk across the foyer, and go into the kitchen and get some yogurt. He liked it with fruit, so we kept a big bowl of fruit in there, and we kept some fruit in his room.

One day, he called us into his bedroom, and he said, “I’ve got a gash in my foot.” And he did. He’d cut a big slit in it. I said, “How did you do that?” He figured out that he was walking over to the kitchen to get some yogurt, and he was eating a peach, and he finished it, and he just dropped the pit. Who else could cut the shit out of his foot on a peach pit in a $3,000-a-day suite with three-inch carpet?

So odd things would happen. But they became normal.

At first, I’m not sure Nora, my wife, knew what to make of it. Elvis would call at ten o’clock at night and say, “There’s a plane on the way to pick you up.” I’d say, “God Almighty, I just got home!” But I’d have to go. If I’d said no, he would have fired me again.

Nora would say, “You’re going again?” I’d say, “Yeah.” It just sort of got out of hand because Elvis became more clingy the older he got. So I began taking Nora out to Vegas some.

But in Vegas, see, Elvis would wander around the halls at night and go visiting in the suite. Nora and I would be in bed asleep, and Elvis would unlock the door and come in and get in bed with us. I’d look over and go, “Holy shit, Elvis! Give me a break here!” He’d say, “I want to talk about something.” He’d be lying there, and he’d get into these rambling dissertations. I’d say, “Look up in the mirror. Isn’t that a picture? All three of us in bed. This is really great here.” But he’d fall asleep talking. Then he’d wake up and leave and go back to his room. Or if he got mad at me, he’d say, “Well, you ain’t no fun to talk to.” And then he’d go get in bed with Joe and Joanie. He was like a bat. He would flit around at night at the Hilton.

One time in Vegas, I was asleep, and I had my door open, and Elvis came in the room. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon. I woke up and Elvis was in the bed with Nora and me again. I raised up and said, “Is this the start of something?” He said, “Good idea. We might could do that.”

I said, “You know what? Let me tell you the bad thing about you.” He said, “What?” He knew I was nailing him. I said, “You want this to happen so bad, but you ain’t figured a way to push the button.” He said, “Have you got any suggestions?” I just got mad and shut up. There wasn’t anything I could do. Then later on, he came up and said, “What do you think about that?” I said, “Well, everybody can be bought.” His mind went on more different tacks than anybody I ever met. You never knew what was going to come out of his mouth.

It’s like when he bought the ranch and wanted to start a commune. I said, “I know what’s in the back of your mind.” He said, “Oh, no,” real innocent. And he walked off saying, “Um-hum.” He was devious, man. He said to me one time, “You have no idea what I think about.” I said, “No, don’t you start that crap! I know what you’re thinking!”

MARTY LACKER: In September of ’72, Elvis brought Linda out to Vegas for the first time. He was still seeing three or four girls at once, but I think he knew she was special. This was apparently the first time they’d spent the night together. Linda hadn’t been around addicts before, and she hadn’t been around people who took a lot of sleeping medicine. She saw him taking fifteen to twenty pills every night and powerful narcotics on top of it. And she saw who gave it to him—Flash Newman, the Hilton doctor, and another doctor that the Hilton used, Ellas Ghanem, and Dr. Nick, although she never did blame Dr. Nick for anything. I believe the very first time she was there, Elvis passed out with food in his mouth and started to choke. She had to clear it out of his throat and turn him on his side to get him breathing again.

Since Elvis’s death, Linda has said that she went to Dr. Nick and told him how concerned she was and asked him how they could get Elvis to stop taking all that stuff. Dr. Nick told her the best thing would just be to leave. But she cared enough about him to stay.

LAMAR FIKE: Elias Ghanem became as big a player in Elvis’s life as Dr. Nick. Ellas was a good person, but as slick as they come. He’s Lebanese. I think he was about thirty-seven years old when Elvis met him. He was boyish-looking, but also swarthy. Very intelligent. He always aligned himself with the right people.

Consequently, Elias has a great practice in Las Vegas. He’s a very wealthy man. He has medical centers and emergency-room franchises all over, or he did. And he had an interest in an air service, Jet Avia, with a heart surgeon out there. They had a $300,000-a-year contract with one of the casinos to bring gamblers into town. In one day, in ’76, Ghanem lost two aircraft. Frank Sinatra’s mother got killed when her plane went into a mountain, and that afternoon, another of his planes got caught in a wind shear and cartwheeled down a runway in Detroit.

Elias liked Elvis a lot, but he got caught up with Elvis like Dr. Nick and everybody else. I don’t know where the line starts and where it ends for a doctor, or where it crosses over. I’ll tell you one thing—Elvis couldn’t buy Elias the way he could Dr. Nick.

But Elvis knew how to manipulate Ghanem. He gave him a Stutz, and a Mercedes, and some other stuff.

BILLY SMITH: It was like everybody blamed Dr. Nick. Hell, he was a contributor. But he was not the only one that done Elvis in. I mean, let’s get all them suckers, if that’s the case, and take ’em all right down the tubes. Don’t just blame one doctor.

LAMAR FIKE: Elias was there to the end. But it got really difficult for him. His contacts were very, very wealthy individuals, like Adnan and Esam Khashoggi. Adnan’s the Saudi billionaire businessman who’s been in the news lately. He’s an arms dealer who collected funds for the new Palestinian Authority and helped Libyan pilgrims visit Israel. So with friends like that, Elias really didn’t have to rely on Elvis’s wealth to get him by.

I think Elias got off in pretty good shape. Most people it would have hurt. But Nevada operates by another set of rules.

MARTY LACKER: Ghanem later became the Las Vegas boxing commissioner. He’s tied in with all those people in the World Boxing Association. And he’s a smooth operator. He’s a Palestinian Arab. He was born in Haifa, Israel, but he had passports from both Israel and Lebanon.

Ghanem was also a reserve policeman. That’s another reason Elvis liked him.

LAMAR FIKE: Elvis started getting prescriptions in my name, and Joe’s name, and Charlie’s—even in Lisa Marie’s name. Elias would do it, and so would Nick. And I put a stop to it. They had me with thirty-five different prescriptions. I said, “Fuck that!” I told Elvis, “You just quit it. I don’t want my name used on all this stuff.”

Sonny did the same thing. He said that Max Shapiro sent Elvis a bottle of liquid Demerol in Sonny’s name, and that he took it back to the drugstore and said, “Don’t you ever put any prescription in my name again.” They wrote ’em in Judy West’s name, too. And even in Sonny’s kid’s name, Brian. Nobody was immune.

MARTY LACKER: It started getting more out of control. Sonny said that Dr. Nick was up at Graceland one night, and Elvis told him he’d tried to get some stuff out of Dr. Nick’s medical bag, but it was locked. Elvis told him that from now on, whenever he came up, he wanted him to leave his bag open. And Dr. Nick said he wasn’t going to do that. Sonny said Elvis looked at Nick and told him, “If that’s the way you want it, next time you’re up here, I’ll just blow that son of a bitch apart and get what I want.”

LAMAR FIKE: One fuckin’ day, at Graceland, Vernon was upstairs, and Elvis called me. He said, “Get your ass up here!” As I was going up the stairs, Vernon was coining down. Vernon said, “I just got fired.”

I said, “Oh, shit!” And I went in, and Elvis fired me, too. He called me up an hour later, and he said, “Fire Dr. Nick while you’re at it.” I said, “How do you fire a doctor?” He said, “You just do what I tell you to do, goddamnit, and fire him.” I called Nick up. I said, “You’re fired.” Nick had no reaction. He knew it wasn’t over. Elvis fired him about three times, usually when Nick would tell him to cut back on the drugs or complain about the packages coming in from Vegas. To get back in, Elvis would make him apologize. Then he’d tell him to get back to work.

BILLY SMITH: Dr. Nick shut Elvis off many a time. And when he did that, bang! Elvis was gone. Dr. Nick was standing over there a damn outcast.

MARTY LACKER: They went ’round and ’round at times. Nick told him at one point, “I’m not going to give you anything anymore.” And Elvis told Nick, “Fuck, I don’t need you! I’ll get it from somewhere else.” He always knew he could get what he wanted. Dr. Nick came back to try to control the situation.

The fact is, even with Nick’s control, Elvis was still getting stuff from other people. Linda Thompson has said that Ghanem used to ship amphetamines back to Memphis to him. And Elvis would get drugs from Max Shapiro. And other doctors in Palm Springs.

You know the incongruity of all this? Elvis also took vitamins. Especially vitamin E, because he’d heard it retarded aging. Here he was poisoning his system with this other stuff and then taking handfuls of vitamins.

LAMAR FIKE: The same month Elvis filed for divorce—August—he opened again in Vegas. People were surprised that Priscilla and Lisa came to several of his shows. But Elvis and Priscilla were trying to be civilized about this, and Elvis wanted Lisa there.

Elvis had a big hit on the charts then, “Burning Love.” That was his highest charting record since “Suspicious Minds,” in ’69. “Burning Love” got to number two. People always remember that song, for the “hunka, hunka” part, I guess. The Elvis impersonators have a field day with it.

MARTY LACKER: In September of ’72, the morning after Elvis closed in Vegas, Colonel held a press conference at the Hilton to announce that Elvis would do a big concert on January 14, 1973. They were calling it Aloha from Hawaii. This was the big satellite show—everybody in the world was going to be able to see it, although not exactly at the same time. Colonel was smart enough to have Elvis be the first entertainer to take advantage of the new technology. And he was also smart enough to find a way to let him “tour” Europe and Asia without ever leaving the U.S.

LAMAR FIKE: As soon as Colonel announced that satellite special, Elvis said he was going to get in shape. He went home for a week, and then he flew to L.A. and went out to Ed Parker’s karate studio in Santa Monica. That’s where he met Dave Hebler. Dave was a karate champion, and he became another karate connection for Elvis. And in ’74, he became a bodyguard in the truest sense.

MARTY LACKER: Dave was blind in his right eye. Somebody shot him with a BB gun when he was a kid. But he was deadly as far as the martial arts are concerned. He could kill you in a second, but he was also a supernice guy. Elvis liked that combination.

It’s funny—Dave was the third author on Red and Sonny’s book. He wrote in there that when he first met Elvis, he was surprised at how little Elvis actually knew about karate. At first, he tried to make Elvis look better than he was because Linda and the whole entourage were standing there. Elvis was so doped up that he was moving slow and kind of stumbling around.

Right after that, Elvis officiated a little tournament, and since he’d never done it before, Dave whispered to him how to call it. That same day, Elvis showed up at Dave’s own studio in Glendora [California]. Dave was astonished because it was seventy-four degrees out and Elvis had on a big, fat black overcoat and, of all things, a turban.

Two weeks later—the third time he saw him—Elvis gave Dave a Mercedes 280SL. Ten thousand dollars’ worth of car.

LAMAR FIKE: One reason Colonel probably set up the satellite show was that he knew Elvis was tired of Vegas. In November, the Vegas paper said that there was a rumor going around that Elvis would be moving from the Hilton to the new MGM Grand but that it wasn’t true. Colonel was quoted as saying the MGM’s showroom seated six hundred fewer than the Hilton. And he said, “Besides, what hotel could match the Hilton’s generous offer?” Elvis would get so mad.

MARTY LACKER: For Christmas that year, Lisa Marie came to Graceland. Elvis loved to buy things for her. He even bought her a big, round bed, the same as he did for Ann-Margret. A lot of times, he slept in that bed when Lisa was out in California. It was one of those fake fur things, with a round mirror on top and a built-in radio and stereo. It was tacky. But he’d sleep in it because it was unusual.

BILLY SMITH: I think, on the whole, Elvis tried to give Lisa all the stuff he wanted himself. For example, he bought her a golf cart for Christmas, and by the time he got through, he’d spent probably around $2,500 on a $1,200 golf cart. Because he had it painted special, with a little rose put on the side and all.

He gave her everything. But Priscilla was right the opposite. If Lisa got anything, it was very, very minimum. Lisa used to tell her mother, “Let me go to Graceland because I’ll get anything I want there.” She must have been a very pulled child.

One time, Lisa lost a tooth while she was visiting her daddy in Memphis. She told her mama about it on the phone, and she said, “The tooth fairy brought me five dollars.” So Priscilla asked Elvis, “How come you give her five dollars for her tooth?” Elvis said, “Well, that’s what the tooth fairy left her.” Priscilla said, “But five dollars! Fifty cents would have been fine.”

Elvis said, “Look, goddamnit, I don’t know the going rates for the tooth fairy nowadays! I give her five dollars. So what?” That shows the difference between the two of them.

Albert Goldman said that in the later years, Elvis got all weepy and cried, “I wish I could be a better father.” Bullshit. He thought he was a good father.

MARTY LACKER: There were quite a few times when Elvis said to Lisa, “Go back to your mama.” That’s not saying he didn’t love Lisa. He loved her a great deal. But if he was doing something, or talking, or wanted to go somewhere, and Lisa said something like “Daddy, I want you to stay here tonight,” he’d go do what he wanted.

BILLY SMITH: As much as Elvis loved Lisa, he didn’t want to share the attention. Elvis would say, “Now, Daddy’s talking, Lisa, you go on and play.” He didn’t want her to upstage him.

One night, she was at Graceland, and Elvis had taken three or four sleeping pills. There was only two or three of us in the room, and Elvis said, “Let’s go put Lisa to bed.” We all went in her room, and he was going to kiss her good night. Well, he leaned over, and when he did, [his penis] fell out of his pajamas. Elvis didn’t notice it, see. He was telling us, “Oh, ain’t she sweet. She’s my teddy bear.” And Lisa said, “Daddy, your goober is hanging out.”

Elvis said, “Lisa, you don’t say things like that, goddamnit!” Well, we broke up. We couldn’t help it. And it really angered him, the fact that we laughed. But only for a moment. Then he realized he might as well laugh about it because it was the truth.

LAMAR FIKE: Sure, Elvis loved her. But his daughter was still an object. He bought her a mink coat, same as he did Linda Thompson.

MARTY LACKER: When Elvis gave Linda a mink coat that first Christmas, and all this other stuff for everybody else, Vernon got shook. Of course, they argued about money all the time, but there was one argument that really stood out.

Elvis was sitting in the dining room eating breakfast. This was late one afternoon, at Graceland, in the early seventies. There were four of us sitting with him. Vernon knew that Elvis had to have his second cup of coffee before you hit him with any serious business. But he didn’t pay enough attention.

Elvis was still eating, and his father came in and stood against the wall of the dining room. Vernon started talking about a business problem. He rolled out a lot of negative talk, and then he said, “Elvis, we’ve got to do something about this because it’s costing us money.” And when Vernon first said it, Elvis just glanced up at his father and went back to his plate and started eating again. Well, his father said it again, and Elvis looked over at me and the other guys.

You could tell when he was starting to bubble. He’d grit his teeth, and the side of his jaw would tighten up. A lot of times you could see it in his eyes, too. And he mumbled, “I don’t want to talk about it now.” And his father kept going. It was like he was never going to stop.

Elvis had a biscuit in his hand, and, finally, he just threw the damn biscuit across the room. He said, “Listen, goddamnit, how many times do I have to say it? You know better than to bring this negative shit up to me when I just got up!”

Vernon yelled, “Well, goddamn, Elvis, you got to!” And Elvis just exploded. He said, “This is my goddamn house, and you work for me, and I’m the fucking boss around here!” And Vernon looked at Elvis and said, “You’ll never be the man I am.”

Boy, that really got Elvis. He jumped up in his seat and took his plate of food and just threw it across the room against the wall. Then he picked up his chair and threw it, too. And he said, “Let me tell you something. You wish you were half the man I am.”

And then, rather than get into it with his father any further, he said to us, “I’ll see you all later.” And he went upstairs and stayed for a while.

People could look at that as Elvis being spoiled and petulant. But he just wanted some time to be normal, which was almost impossible for him. Especially in the seventies. And it just got worse and worse.