CHAPTER 50
MARTY LACKER: Colonel probably had a clearer picture than any of us that the end was near. In January ’76, he demanded more money. Instead of a third commission of the net profits of the tours, which he’d been getting since ’72, he now took half. And half of all the money from television specials and merchandising, too.
Now, why did he do this at this particular time? Because the Hilton was fed up with Elvis’s behavior. He just didn’t give a damn anymore, so he’d get up and sing half a song. And after he did that a couple of times, the Hilton wouldn’t buy him. In fact, Elvis didn’t play the Hilton in January.
LAMAR FIKE: That January, we all went out to Vail, Colorado, for Elvis’s forty-first birthday. This was supposed to be a dream vacation, but Elvis was just stoned out of his mind the whole time. He was threatening to kill people right and left.
I guess it’s because he was doing a lot of Dilaudid up there. He stayed ripped every day. He flew Dr. Nick in a couple of times to get more prescriptions. He said at least he could control the situation. I say if he could control it, why did Elvis die?
Elvis was doing a lot of uppers, too. And when he did uppers, everything was magnified. Sometimes I think he had a little movie in his head and that he gave stuff away because it was in the script. But he was that way when he was a kid. He would give money away to other kids and buy ’em presents.
When we were out in Vail, he wanted to see his Denver cop friends, Jerry Kennedy and Ron Pietrofeso, who were basically narcs. Elvis was feeling good, so we drove over to Kumpf Lincoln-Mercury, and before the night was over, Elvis had spent nearly $70,000 on five Lincoln Continental Mark IVs, at $13,000 apiece. One was for Captain Kennedy, and another was for Kennedy’s wife. Then Pietrofeso got one. Even the police doctor, Gerald Starkey, and Bob Cantwell, of the Crime Strike Force.
The next day, Elvis told Dave Hebler in these real hush-hush tones that the real reason he went into Denver was to go on a drug raid with the narcs. He said he sneaked up on this guy holding a sawed-off shotgun, and the guy heard him and turned around real quick and was ready to blast him away, and Elvis delivered a karate chop to the neck and killed him.
He told me some other version of this story, and he said, “What do you think about that?” I said, “I think I just sat through an episode of Dragnet.”
BILLY SMITH: I don’t think he went on a drug raid in Denver. But he wanted to get involved in stuff like that so bad.
MARTY LACKER: Sonny said Elvis went on his own little drug bust in Memphis after that. Dave Hebler supposedly went with him. Elvis had his .22 Savage, and his holster, and his flashlight, and his badges. And it was like “All right, let’s get me a criminal.” He even put on a ski mask. And a jumpsuit, with a parka and gloves over that, even though it was something like 73 degrees out. And he topped it all off with a hat and a cigar. Because he said, “I’m going incognito.” Like nobody would notice him like that.
He supposedly had this all worked out with the Memphis cops. But when they got there, the bust had already gone down and the suspects were in custody. Elvis was real disappointed. Dave said they just sat around the police station, talking to the cops. And every once in a while, Elvis would give the suspects a dirty look.
LAMAR FIKE: One of the classic Elvis stories about how whimsical, or extravagant, he was is the one about him taking the [Convair] 880 [the Lisa Marie] to Denver to get a peanut butter sandwich. I put that deal together. It was February of ’76, right after he got the jet.
I said, “Man, let’s do something. Let’s go somewhere and just kind of get away.” He said, “What have you got in mind?” I said, “I don’t know. Let’s go to Denver, for lunch. There’s that great place out there [the Colorado Gold Mine Company] that has those big peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Italian bread loaves.” I said, “They’ll cater the plane and everything.” Elvis said, “Sounds like a good idea. Let’s do it.”
So eight of us got on the plane, and we called in our order, and we flew to Stapleton Airport and parked. And sure enough, they catered the airplane with twenty-two loaves. We had Moët champagne and Perrier water, the whole works. And all the narcotics guys—Kennedy and Pietrofeso and their pals—came on board. We stayed there about three or four hours and flew back.
Let’s see . . . It’s a four-engine jet, and he had two pilots, an engineer, and a flight attendant. I’d say that trip cost anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000. Elvis got a kick out of that.
BILLY SMITH: I didn’t go. But Elvis went there more than once, and neither time was it just to get a damn peanut butter sandwich. Best I remember, he wanted a badge from the Denver police.
LAMAR FIKE: On one of these trips, Elvis was on Dilaudid. And he pulled his ingrown toenail stunt again. I think it was like the other self-mutilations—it became this gross, infected thing. So Elvis called the Denver police doctor, Dr. Starkey. I guess he asked him for more Dilaudid and showed him his prescription.
Whatever happened, Starkey figured Elvis was using, and he showed the prescription to his undercover friends. I’m sure Kennedy and Pietrofeso had already guessed that by the way Elvis looked and acted, but it was a tough spot for everybody.
They were prescription drugs, so they couldn’t really do anything. But they tried to talk to him about it, in a Denver hotel. They wanted Elvis to go in and dry out someplace and told him nobody had to know about it. They were concerned about him, and they were embarrassed that he was flaunting his [drug] use right in front of them. When Elvis realized they were onto him, he checked out of that hotel in a heartbeat. He didn’t want to hear about it.
MARTY LACKER: Just a couple days after that, Elvis was making the From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee album at Graceland. And he got it in his head that he was going to kill all the drug pushers. He called Red up to his bedroom, and Red said he had this big arsenal spread out on the floor. Just everything, from automatic weapons to rockets.
Red said he gave him a list of names and even some police file pictures—some head-and-shoulder shots of guys he said were pushers. And I’m sure it’s true because Elvis had shown me part of the list in the lobby of the Memphian Theatre a couple of nights before. Elvis said, “These sons of bitches need to be wiped out.” He wanted Red, and Dick Grob, and Dave Hebler to lure them all back to Graceland. And then he was going to kill them.
He told Red he would sneak out the back and make the hit and then sneak back in. That way, it wouldn’t be traced back to him.
BILLY SMITH: The cop stuff lasted a good while. But mostly, he’d stick to the little stuff. Like, he’d put on his uniform and go out and stop traffic—pull a guy over, tell him he was driving too fast, and give him a safety lecture.
I can imagine what the person thought. Like he goes home and says, “You are not going to believe this, but Elvis Presley stopped me for speeding.” Elvis would wind up giving them an autograph, since he couldn’t write a ticket. But he got so wrapped up in it that we all had to have the special blue police lights.
LAMAR FIKE: He and I would get in the light blue Mercedes, and Elvis would say, “Here we go, Lamar. Out to serve law and order.” And he’d put his blue light up on top of the Benz and chase people down the interstate—stop ’em, pull ’em over, and tell ’em to watch their speed. I’d just slink down in the seat and go, “Oh, dear.”
BILLY SMITH: He never left Graceland without his blue police light, his long flashlight, a billy club, and at least two guns.
LAMAR FIKE: You remember that segment of Laugh-In where the Keystone Kop came out and hit somebody over the head with his club? Elvis thought that was a mockery of law enforcement. He told Bill Morris he got that taken off the show. Morris also says Elvis helped get a couple of drug abuse centers opened, one in Denver and one in Los Angeles.
MARTY LACKER: At the end of ’75, and all through January of ’76, RCA tried to get Elvis to record another album. But he just didn’t want to fool with it. Finally, somebody suggested bringing the portable recording truck to Graceland. The first week of February, the truck rolled in, and Billy, and Earl Pritchett, and Mike McGregor, and Ricky Stanley turned the den into a recording studio.
BILLY SMITH: I remember those sessions. They put up a partition because Elvis didn’t want anybody to watch him on certain songs. He’d just tear up something awful.
MARTY LACKER: There were two groups of sessions, one in February and another in October. RCA pulled two albums out of them—the From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee album and the Moody Blue album, although Felton pieced the Moody Blue album together from various recordings, because Elvis wouldn’t give him any more studio time.
The song “Moody Blue” came from the February sessions. And “Way Down,” where J.D. hits that really low note, came from the October sessions. From listening, it’s obvious how sick Elvis was. And how tired.
BILLY SMITH: For some reason, Elvis played bass guitar on “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” Felton bragged on him, I remember.
He had fun on those sessions. When J.D. hit that real low note on “Way Down,” Elvis just fell out laughing. He walked over to J.D. and put his arm on his shoulder and said, “J.D., that’s lower than whale shit.”
MARTY LACKER: Elvis sounds so bad on “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” They never should have released it. The four songs they got in October—“Way Down,” “It’s Easy for You,” “Pledging My Love,” and “He’ll Have to Go”—are better than what they got in February. But it still hurts to listen to it.
BILLY SMITH: During the first sessions, they took a break, and Elvis and Joe went upstairs and put on these big wide-brim hats and black coats and sunglasses. And Elvis had two submachine guns that had been plugged up—you couldn’t actually fire ’em. And they come down lookin’ like mobsters. Elvis yelled, “I’ll stop all this damn stuff! I didn’t want to do any recording in the first place! I’ll give you five seconds to clear out of here, and then we’re going to shoot up all this equipment!”
Well, we all knew it was a joke. But the guy out in the sound truck didn’t. And the next day, it was all over Memphis and Nashville that Elvis went plumb crazy and shot up the place and all the recording equipment, too. This was one time he didn’t.
MARTY LACKER: When Elvis went back on tour in March, he had to read some of the words from a cue sheet. He also started wearing a corset. He didn’t get really, really heavy until the middle of ’76. But when he gained weight, he had to get in those jumpsuits some way.
LAMAR FIKE: He came on tour, and it was horrendous. I told the Colonel, “My God, are you blind as a bat? Look at him! He weighs 250 pounds!” One time I told Elvis, “If that damn metal starts flying off your outfit, you’ll kill the first five rows from shrapnel.” And he laughed himself into a spasm. He thought it was hilarious.
I blame his fans for a lot of this. Because they accepted him, even seventy pounds overweight.
MARTY LACKER: In the last year or so, Sherrill Nielsen hit a lot of Elvis’s high notes for him, the notes he couldn’t sustain anymore. And Larry Strickland [of the Stamps] sang a lot of his low notes. Not every night, because Elvis still had a tremendous voice.
But on “It’s Now or Never” and “American Trilogy,” Nielsen doubled him. Elvis would hit it to a certain point, and Nielsen took over. And then Elvis would start singing again, and the audience never knew the difference. On [the record of] “Unchained Melody,” the last four notes are Nielsen’s. Felton just dubbed Sherrill over Elvis.
LAMAR FIKE: I don’t think Elvis understood why he was bloated like a sow. We were talking one day, and I said, “Elvis, your mother went through the same thing you’re going through. You realize that, don’t you?” And he said, “Sometimes I think about that.” He looked so much like her, like the way she looked when she died. It was like he missed her so much, he just became her. And I said, “Well, man, I’m telling you, you need to do something about this.” The physical deterioration was just horrible.
I don’t think Elvis knew he was dying. Just like all of us think we ain’t going to die. You think, “Shit. I’ll make it.” Until you wake up and go, “Holy shit, I’m dying here!”
BILLY SMITH: The drugs didn’t help a bit, but Elvis was a strange eater. At times he would eat, and you’d think he wasn’t ever going to stop—maybe three cheeseburgers and several banana splits at a time. But then he would go for days and not eat that much. And when he started eating again, he’d eat so much junk food that he’d put on weight just quick.
He always thought he’d take it off before tour time. And now that I look back, I see how hard he tried to get it off. But he just wasn’t physically able. He was so tired that just anything exhausted him. By ’76, he’d just abused his body beyond its limit.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis liked sweet stuff, and he loved to eat, which is one reason he put on weight. But in the final years, it was more illness than food. The food contributed, of course. But since he had that intestinal blockage, they were shooting him with cortisone because his colon was two or three times its normal diameter and it had lost its elasticity. He even had to lie in a tub of hot water to take that Fleet’s enema. The cortisone was one of the big reasons he blew up like he did. And he couldn’t do anything about it.
LAMAR FIKE: The unraveling was absolutely astonishing. His system was really fucked up. He would go from enormous bouts of diarrhea to bouts of constipation.
BILLY SMITH: When we’d get ready to go on tour, in addition to all the scarves and things that Elvis needed, they had to pack just trunks of Fleet’s enema. Tons of ’em. Because he had to have ’em. He had that bowel problem with a twisted colon, or a paralyzed colon, which kept him from going to the bathroom.
Albert Goldman wrote that a lot of times Elvis lost control of his bowels in the last couple years. He makes it sound like he was practically in diapers.
Most of the time, Elvis could control it. He was still quite proud, and he was cautious about things like that. When it did happen, it was almost like he broke down. He was embarrassed, and it was best you didn’t talk about it. Sometimes, Elvis would say, “Look, I couldn’t help it.” Usually the excuse was “I took Ex-Lax before I went to bed.”
LAMAR FIKE: I think the diapers have been exaggerated. But that’s not a lie. They put towels down to keep him from defecating in bed. He would be so damn drugged up, he couldn’t make it to the bathroom.
That’s a clue to a person losing it. By late ’75, early ’76, it became a real problem. Everybody just tried to ignore it. But I would tell Colonel and Dr. Nick, “God Almighty, this guy is really, really sick. He’s going on us!”
BILLY SMITH: One time, he messed in the bed at Graceland, and one of the maids cleaned it up. And she suggested, just in case it happened again, to put a towel under him. But Elvis would never have been wrapped in a diaper or had a towel put around him. From then on, he always walked to the bathroom. But even that was dangerous. Because it was not unusual for him to fall asleep in the bathroom. He would take sleeping pills and get up and go to the bathroom, and the first thing you knew they’d hit him, and he never would make it back to the bed. He’d fall right there in the floor and go sound to sleep. If there was nobody there to help him, he would just lay there until somebody found him. But many times, they’d buzz me, and I’d have to come out and help get him up.
Goldman said we used a fireman’s lift to carry him to the bathroom. That’s the biggest crock of shit. The only lift I know was a 5’6”, 145-pound lift, and that was me. And it was hell at times, when I was the only one there. I’d have to drag him. But I never would call anybody ’cause I didn’t like for them to see him that way and make fun. Like “What’s he done, passed out again on the damn bathroom floor?”
I couldn’t stand the thought of anybody degrading him. That was his home. And it was his right to do whatever he wanted to do in his home, without somebody else criticizing him for it. So I’d just get him up myself and not comment on it. Linda was a lot like that. That’s the reason I thought so much of her.
LAMAR FIKE: It was really bad. You’ve been around people who are dying. You know it. We all knew it. But we wouldn’t say it, even though it was just tearing us up, ripping us to shreds.
And now that I think about it again, I think he knew it, too. Because it was a thread that permeated everything he did. He was getting rid of money like it was going out of season at sundown. He would always talk about his mother’s death at forty-two—even though she was actually forty-six—and the lifeline on her side being very short.
One time, we were having a very philosophical conversation, and I said, “Can I give you a very blank statement?” He said, “What’s that?” I said, “I can never see you old.” He said, “You’re saying that you don’t think that I’ll be around a long time.” I said, “Yeah, I think that’s it.” And he said, “Lamar, I’ll never be an old man.”
BILLY SMITH: When we went back out on the road in ’76, Elvis would come to my room a lot of times on tour. He had a list of where everybody was, and I was in the room next to his. Well, after a while, Joe started putting me way down the hall. I guess because he had to have a suite, just like Elvis did.
Well, one morning, Elvis got up about three o’clock and looked on his sheet and saw my room number. But he couldn’t find the room. He was wandering up and down the hall about half drugged, and he had to ask Dick Grob where it was.
There was this pounding on the door. Me and Jo was in bed, and he come in, and he sat down on the edge of the bed and started talkin’. He said, “Man, something unbelievable just happened. I dreamed I saw the face of God.”
He said it was just a white light, so bright he almost couldn’t look at it. And it startled him. He had to get up and walk around to get it off his mind.
Well, the next thing I knew, he was on the other side of me, laid down in the dadgum bed with us. Of course, I didn’t say nothin’ about him barging in on us. I was more interested in what was bothering him.
He talked for about an hour and a half. And then in the next minute, he was sound asleep. I looked at Jo, and she looked at me, and I said, “I guess I’d better take him back down to the room.”
The next day, he said, “What in the hell were you doing way down the hall?” I said, “That’s where they put me.” He said, “Okay, I’ll take care of that.” I went back to my room, and I left my door open, and I jumped up real loud and said, “Today, the limousine and tomorrow the damn hotel suites!” And from then on, Elvis made sure I was right next to him, or right across the hall.
MARTY LACKER: That April, when Elvis was on tour, they broke ground for Elvis Presley Center Courts, Inc., in Memphis. This was supposed to be the first of a franchised chain of racquetball courts. Dr. Nick talked Elvis into it. Him and Joe.
Presley Center Courts was going to be fifty courts nationwide. And Elvis was supposed to underwrite it for $1.3 million, which would have taken forever to make back. He was getting 25 percent of the stock.
But, see, Elvis didn’t understand that. He thought he was just lending his name to the project, even though he signed the contract. Elvis said later that he did it as a favor to Nichopoulos. He probably figured he could get whatever he wanted from Nick if he did it.
Anyway, Elvis didn’t realize he had to put up all this money, and pretty soon, they came asking for $80,000, as a starter. And Elvis backed out of the deal.
LAMAR FIKE: There were all kinds of problems. Number one, Elvis had never endorsed anything in his life, except Southern Made doughnuts in an early radio jingle. You can imagine what Elvis’s endorsements would cost. Boy, the Colonel went ballistic! If the Colonel had been a moon shot, he’d have gone to Mars!
That was about July, I think. And we got on the plane and flew to Palm Springs, and Elvis fired everybody. He said, “Fuck the sons of bitches! Get rid of the wop, and get rid of the doctor. I never want to see ’em again in my life. They conned me.” I said, “Holy shit, man, calm down.” He didn’t relent on Nick for a long time. Wouldn’t let him go on the tours. He took Ghanem instead. But I talked him into taking Joe back. And I shouldn’t have.
MARTY LACKER: As likable as Dr. Nick was, he could take advantage of Elvis. Harry Levitch, the jeweler, told me that Elvis had somebody call him and ask him to bring some rings out to the house one time.
When he got there, he was told to go on up. He knocked softly on Elvis’s bedroom door, and then he opened it. And he saw Dr. Nick sitting on the side of the bed with a syringe in his hand. He was sort of holding it away from Elvis, and he was saying, “My wife needs . . . ” And when he saw the jeweler, he changed the subject. It was almost like “My wife needs such and such. Now do you want this shot or not?”
BILLY SMITH: Elvis had so many things weighing on him about that time. The pressure was really starting to get to him. At the end of April, he was supposed to go to Lake Tahoe. And when they were loading the plane, he was crying. Vernon was sick—he’d gotten down to about 165 pounds. And Elvis was scared to death something was going to happen to him. You could tell Elvis didn’t want to go. He hugged me and Jo, and he said, “I’ll see you all in a few days.”
He had a full engagement booked, but sure enough, a few days later, he was back in Memphis. He said he got out there and got sick. And this particular time, I think he was just not capable of performing. We could tell when he got back home that he was drugged and exhausted.
LAMAR FIKE: When we were in Tahoe, Elvis had an oxygen tank beside the stage. Every entertainer does, not only him. They’ll do a false exit and take two or three shots of it. That picks ’em back up again, and they’ll come back out.
Well, Elvis had done it about eight or nine times. He kept coming back and forth. Finally, I said, “Why don’t you just take the damn cart and bottle back out there with you?” I was only kidding. But he said, “Okay.” And he just grabbed hold of the handle, spun it around, and walked back onstage. Then he put the mask on his face and pulled that son-of-a-bitchin’ tank behind him.
And everybody just cracked up. He was talking through that clear plastic tube, and he said, “You always wondered how I keep my strength up at this altitude. Here it is.” That was the last time he was ever out there.
MARTY LACKER: In July, everything blew apart. Elvis went out to Palm Springs for what was supposed to be a three-week rest. He fired Joe over the racquetball deal then, but, of course, he took him back. But after that, he did something we didn’t think we’d ever see in this lifetime—he had his daddy fire Red, Sonny, and Dave Hebler.
It started on July 5, which was Sonny’s birthday. Elvis finished a tour by doing his last show in Memphis. He drove to the Coliseum with Red and Esposito. And Elvis was acting kind of weird. He hardly talked to me or anybody else. He got out of the car, and went to the dressing room, and stayed in there until time to do the show. And then he got right back in the car and went home.
Eight days later, I got a call from Sonny. He said, “Man, you won’t believe what just happened.” He said Vernon called him that morning, and said, “I need you to come up and talk about an important matter.” And Sonny said, “Can’t we talk about it on the phone?” And Vernon said, “Well, things haven’t been going too well lately. Our expenses are getting too high, and we’re going to have to cut back. I’m afraid we’ll have to let you go.”
Well, Sonny was totally stunned. He said to Vernon, “What do you mean, you’re going to have to let me go?” Vernon said, “Don’t feel bad. You’re not alone.”
You have to understand how long Red and Sonny had been with Elvis. Red went all the way back to high school with him. He would have given his life for Elvis. And he and Sonny were hurt even more so because Elvis hadn’t told them himself.
They were just out in the cold. I felt bad about both of them. All they had to their name was one week’s pay. After all those years and all the things they had done.
BILLY SMITH: It surprised the hell out of me. I’m sure a whole lot of it had to do with the fact that Sonny and Red confronted him about the drugs. Red, especially. And a lot of times, they intercepted stuff coming in.
MARTY LACKER: At first, they tried to figure out what to do. They tried calling Elvis. And Elvis wouldn’t talk to them.
Vernon’s excuse about expenses didn’t really hold water. It was Colonel, Vernon, Charlie, Dr. Nick, and Joe saying that Red and Sonny were causing too many lawsuits by hitting people. But Red and Sonny were just trying to protect Elvis. They were just doing their jobs.
LAMAR FIKE: Vernon just didn’t want them around. He saw a chance to get rid of them, and he took it.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis had reached the boiling point, and he was just running. And he made it worse by leaving Palm Springs and going to Vegas, where he stayed at Dr. Ghanem’s house. Ghanem had a room he’d built for Elvis. He was going to put him on some kind of sleep diet or some rest cure. It might have been to get him off drugs. But it was bullshit, whatever it was. And he’d done that something like five or six times.
When Dave found out Elvis was there, he flew out to Vegas and went to Ghanem’s house. Ghanem came to the door, and Dave said, “Elvis is here, isn’t he?” And Ghanem said, “Yes, he is.” Dave said, “Tell him I’d like to speak with him.”
Ghanem went in and came back and said, “I’m sorry, but he doesn’t want to see you.”
BILLY SMITH: Ghanem might have had a place for Elvis in case he ever come to visit, but I don’t think Ghanem could get him off nothing or even help him lose weight. I don’t think he cared that much.
LAMAR FIKE: Elias built the room because he wanted to add on to the house, period. He had this Spanish-style hacienda next to the golf greens of the Las Vegas Country Club. And the decor was . . . well, you know the type—shag carpet, a bed on a dais, with mirrors on the headboard and more mirrors overhead. Ghanem put Elvis on a lot of medication and called it “sleep therapy.” He said he’d put Elvis to sleep and he could lose weight.
Well, all he did was keep him fucked up, and he didn’t eat. He stayed up there three or four days. It was really sad. Elvis would shit all over the bed. God Almighty, if they put you in bed and you don’t eat for five fuckin’ days and you’re asleep, you’re going to do something.
MARTY LACKER: One thing that’s been lost in all this was Elvis’s true intention—to teach Red and Sonny and Dave a lesson—that you can’t go around hitting people. He’d told his father to give them $5,000 apiece to tide them over and to tell them that they would be hired back. But Vernon didn’t do it.
LAMAR FIKE: When this thing came up with Red and Sonny, Elvis called Frank Sinatra and told him he’d just lost his three bodyguards. Frank said, “I’ll take care of it.” Elvis said, “No, I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about it.” But Frank offered to help in any way he could. Which was interesting. Both that Elvis called him and that Frank made the offer.
At the end of July, we were playing Hampton Roads, Virginia, outside of Washington, D.C. And Elton John came backstage before Elvis did the show. He had on a suit with shoulders that came up in an arch. An exaggerated zoot suit. Elton dresses very bizarre anyway. He met Elvis, they talked, and Elton shook hands and left. It wasn’t any big parting of the waters.
In 1991, he made a video biography [Two Rooms], and he mentioned this. He said, in essence, “I looked into Elvis’s eyes, and there was no one there. He was vacant.” Well, that’s his opinion. Maybe what Elton saw was a reflection of himself. All these stars think they’re psychiatrists. They’re just dreaming.
MARTY LACKER: When Elvis and the guys came back from Vegas, about the third week of July, I called the house. I was going to go over that night because Elvis was getting ready to start another tour. Billy said to me, “I’m glad you called. I was getting ready to call you, and George, and Richard, and everybody else. I didn’t want you to come to the gate and be turned away.”
I said, “Turned away?” He said, “Yeah, Elvis doesn’t want anybody around here for a while. He’s had enough, Marty. He wants some peace and quiet. He wants to calm down and enjoy the house.” And I respected that.
I said, “Hey, okay. How long is this going to last?” He said, “I don’t know. Probably a month or two.” But it never changed. I never saw Elvis again after that night at the Coliseum in July of ’76.
LAMAR FIKE: Basically, what Elvis said to Billy was, “I’m tired of all these people being around. It’s not fun anymore.” And Billy said, “Look, we don’t have to have all the guys here. We can clean the house out.”
MARTY LACKER: Elvis said, “Well, Billy, I want you here. I need somebody to talk to.” And Billy said, “I’ll be here. But as far as the guys, we can have them come in shifts, just one guy at a time on duty.” Elvis said, “Yeah, that’s what I want.” So Billy set up a schedule for the shifts and told everybody else to stay away.
Charlie continued to live in a converted apartment behind Graceland because Charlie didn’t have any other place to go. But Elvis got tired of Charlie, mostly because Charlie would get drunk and whine. One night, Elvis lost his patience and yelled, “Take this son of a bitch away! Get him out of here!” He’d gone up to Elvis’s room and started crying about something. But Elvis felt sorry for him, even though Charlie had no regard for anybody else. He’d stab somebody in the back and laugh about it.
BILLY SMITH: One night in ’76, everybody was out in front of Graceland. Elvis had already gotten to the point where he was agitated and upset a lot of the time. This was right after a tour. And he was giving Kathy Westmoreland and somebody else—I can’t remember who—a Lincoln Mark IV.
He had us all go out on the steps, the way he always did when he gave a car so we could watch it come up the drive. And he was trying to make it a good time. But Charlie was envious, and he’d been drinking. Elvis asked him to leave a time or two, and he didn’t do it. He kept going on about how he was going to buy a Rolls-Royce—like he could do that! So Elvis got a little perturbed. He said, “You’re envious, and I don’t want to hear it! Go on to your room and get out of my face.”
But Charlie wouldn’t leave. He just kept standing there, gettin’ more and more obnoxious.
Finally, Elvis come across with his hand and slapped Charlie across the face and made his nose bleed. And he had never, ever done that. He popped Sonny that one time back in the sixties. But with Elvis and Charlie, there was a big difference in size. And Charlie hadn’t provoked Elvis except by being obnoxious.
It really upset Elvis. He even cried about it. But he wouldn’t apologize. I don’t think Elvis had the right to hit Charlie, no matter who he was. And it really surprised Charlie, but he kept telling Elvis, “It’s okay. It’s not your fault. I know you love me.”
LAMAR FIKE: When Elvis really cared about you, you knew it. In ’76, I had intestinal bypass surgery. Because I had gotten up to 400 pounds. It was elective surgery, but it was very difficult.
The morning I went into the hospital, Elvis called and kept the line open for forty-some hours, all through the surgery and afterwards. To make sure I was all right. And, of course, he paid all my bills.
MARTY LACKER: About three weeks after Billy told me Elvis didn’t want to see anybody for a while, I was in bed one night, and I reached for some pills, and the bottle was empty. I was also broke at the time. And Tuinals and Placidyls are not cheap.
My wife said, “Let me go borrow some money, and I’ll get you some.” And something just made me say, “No, don’t.”
Patsy said, “Are you sure?” I said, “Yep. I don’t want any more.” I don’t know why I said it. But I started thinking, “Hey, I’ve got to go on and live my life and forget about all this.” I’d been on the stuff fifteen years. And I know that if I’d still been around Elvis, I wouldn’t have stopped.
It took me six months to withdraw, and I did it by myself, with God’s help. I never took another pill. And it’s been nineteen years.
BILLY SMITH: Some people say I was Elvis’s best friend. I guess if anybody knew him at all, it was me. In the last eighteen months, I was with him eighteen hours a day, at least six days a week, usually seven.
LAMAR FIKE: Billy was the closest to Elvis. He was the one Elvis shot the straightest with.
BILLY SMITH: Part of the reason was that I was family. And he wanted to go over old times. And Elvis didn’t feel like the younger guys understood him. He didn’t feel like he could talk to them. And he couldn’t understand why things had gone wrong with the old group. Mostly, he couldn’t understand why they weren’t still loyal. He actually thought the guys were changing and that he wasn’t. He kept saying, “The loyalty. Where’s the loyalty?”
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis would hole up in that damn bedroom for sometimes a week at a time. He’d just lie on that extra-king-size bed. God, what a room that was! It looked like the backseat of a limo. Had a red shag carpet and a padded ceiling. And, of course, the windows were closed and sealed off from the world, which gave it a sense of timelessness. It’s that same feeling you get in Vegas. It was like a goddamn cave in there. You expected to see bats in it. And that’s pretty much where he spent his last year—his inner sanctum.
MARTY LACKER: When you went up the steps, you saw two black, padded double doors. And as you walked in, you could look into Elvis’s bedroom to the right. But what you were really walking into is what he called his office. And as you walked to the left, there was a bathroom that Priscilla, or whatever female he was with, used.
His office, which was more like his study, was done in a tan color. It had an upright piano in it. On the back wall, there was a couch built into the wall, underneath a double window. Then, to the left, was Elvis’s desk. And he used to have that console TV in there that RCA gave him for selling his first 50 million records. And he had a little refrigerator where he kept his Popsicles, and Eskimo Pies, and Fudgsicles, and yogurt.
Then, if you walked to the right, you went into his bedroom. A rough guess is that it was twenty by thirty feet. He never changed it after my brother-in-law did it over. It had a sort of a jade green, padded Naugahyde ceiling, with two televisions sunk flat in there, so when you were lying in bed, you could look straight up and watch TV. And he had another TV mounted at an angle up in the ceiling.
The walls were all tufted red velvet, except the wall toward the foot of his bed. That was smoked mirrors. And the top of the walls had black velvet borders around them. Real flashy. The bed was custom-built with a black Naugahyde headboard. It had armrests that came out, so you could sit up. And he had two huge, round, imitation-fur lounge chairs in there, one in each corner. And he had a nightstand next to the door, which you saw as soon as you walked in. Of course, the air conditioner was going all the time. It was just freezing in there.
There was a little hallway that led to the bathroom, with two closets, one on each side. Then, in the bathroom itself, to the right of the doorway, was a twelve-foot-long marble counter, with a purple sink built in it. And then there was a dressing mirror, or a makeup mirror, in back of the counter, with oversized lights. I’d say the bathroom was ten by twelve [feet]. Most of it was done in black and gold tiles.
There was another room on the other side of the bathroom. It used to be Grandma’s room. But Elvis broke the wall down and made it into a combination bathroom/dressing area/wardrobe room and he kept all his clothes in there. That room was bigger than the bathroom. He had an Exercycle in there, too, that he used sometimes.
The shower had a circular, curved wall, and it was about seven feet in diameter, done in black, brown, and white tiles. It was in the corner. Oddly enough, he kept a vinyl chair in there. The curved wall was just half a wall, with a shower coming out.
His toilet was black, even after they replaced the one he shot up. It sat close to the floor and had a padded seat. There was a yellow throw rug in front of it. And there were two telephones and an intercom mounted on the wall next to the toilet. And he had another TV he could watch from there.
Everybody hears about this reading chair that he had in there. It wasn’t really a reading chair—it was a barber’s chair. And it was big, and tall, and comfortable, so he just sat in it and read sometimes. He used it when someone did his hair.
Then across the hall was Lisa’s room. It used to be the small conference room. When Elvis had a conference table in it, we used to meet in there a lot and sit and talk. That’s where he and I used to do the Christmas list.
It’s kind of funny. Elvis started out in two rooms in Tupelo. And he ended up in two rooms in Memphis.
BILLY SMITH: The delusions got pretty bad. In ’76, Jimmy Gambill, Patsy Presley’s son, was playing guns with our kids. And he got up on the fence. Elvis happened to be looking out, and he saw him, and he thought Jimmy was somebody looking to assassinate him.
Elvis got a machine gun and went outside and yelled, “Where’s the son of a bitch? I’ll kill him!” And the kids broke running. We had to explain to Elvis that it was just Jimmy. And boy, he pitched a fit. He said, “They don’t need to be playin’ like that!” He was about half out of it on medication.
He didn’t shoot the gun that time, but he did another time. It was probably about seven or eight o’clock in the morning. Al Strada saw this snake goin’ up a tree there at Graceland. He went in and started tellin’ Elvis about it. And Elvis had already taken his sleeping pills, but now he was ready to snake-hunt.
In a few minutes, somebody called me and told me he was out there. I went out, and he was shootin’. And about half the time, he couldn’t even see the snake. I never did see it myself. Anyway, he looked like some kind of drunk. He’d say, “I see it,” and he’d rear back and let fire. And when he’d shoot, he’d go about two steps back, and about ten forward, with the gun just wavin’.
Finally, I got him to sit down on the curb. And when I did, well, he just knew he saw it again. He cocked the gun again, and he shot it, and the old shotgun kicked so hard that Elvis just went right on over in the drive.
I said, “Uh, Elvis, we might ought to go in. There’s some people down at the gate.” And he looked, and he said, “Yeah, maybe I ought to.”
I staggered him on in and got him in the bed. And I told Al, “Man, you’re crazy! Don’t never get him out there with a gun.” The pellets had to be sprayin’ all over the road ’cause that’s the way he was shootin’, just straight towards the road.
MARTY LACKER: I don’t know how long Elvis went before he had somebody call Dr. Nick again, but it wasn’t all that long. And at some point, I think in early ’76, after Marian Cocke left, Dr. Nick had a nurse who worked for him, Tish Henley, move into a trailer there at Graceland with her husband so Nick could keep a closer eye on what Elvis took. He didn’t want him waking up and taking whatever was on his nightstand and maybe miscalculating.
Tish picked up the prescriptions at the Prescription House, which was a pharmacy across the street from Dr. Nick’s office. She also went on the tours with Ghanem when Nick couldn’t go or Elvis wouldn’t let him. She kept all that stuff in an overnight bag under lock and key in her trailer. But Elvis knew how to get what he wanted.
BILLY SMITH: I guess you could say that Elvis had his own pharmacy in the backyard. I don’t know how much of a supply of anything Dr. Nick give her, but he give her enough. So that the Stanleys, or Aunt Delta, or whoever, could go out there to the trailer and pick up Elvis’s stuff and bring it back to him.
In ’76, I went to Dr. Nick and I said, “What in the hell is going on with all the stuff he’s getting?” Dr. Nick told me, “We need to get together as a group around him. I can’t do it by myself, and if I shut him off completely, he’ll just go somewhere else and get it. We can’t stop it, but we can reduce it.”
So I asked him to set up a plan. And we started draining his drugs and substituting things. We’d take a syringe and actually draw liquid out of a Placidyl in capsule form and then blow it back up. Or if it was a capsule you could break apart, we would put sugar or Sweet’n Low in ’em.
You couldn’t hardly do anything with tablets, unless they happened to be the same size as something less harmful. For Demerol tablets, we used phenobarbital about half the time. And with liquid Demerol, we either squirted some of it out or diluted it with saline or just plain water. Or we substituted Talwin—which is a synthetic narcotic and not as powerful—or Elavil, which is a mood elevator, not a narcotic.
You can’t imagine the amount of stuff that we substituted. I even guinea-pigged myself one time to make damn sure Elvis couldn’t tell what we were doing. But like any drug addict, he caught on to the diluted shots pretty damn quick. At first he’d say, “Hey, bring on some more. This ain’t doin’ shit for me.” And then after that, he figured out what was happening, and he started wanting the tablets instead of the shots.
Mostly, he’d confront Dr. Nick. But he outsmarted us right often. When he could get his hands on a whole bottle of something, he started increasing the dose. That way he got the same amount as the shot. And all the while, us saying, “No, you’ve had your amount for the night. That’s it.” That’s when Elvis would fly out of here and get all the damn Demerol pills that he wanted.
It was a vicious cycle that most of the time we didn’t know how to control. But we tried.
MARTY LACKER: One of the things Billy set up with Nichopoulos was these packets of medication. In other words, they doled out Elvis’s drugs to him in little envelopes at certain times of the day and night. And half of that stuff was placebos.
The Stanleys pretty much delivered it. And sometimes Delta Mae. They got the packets from Tish. The Stanleys called them “First Attack,” “Second Attack,” and “Third Attack.” They were real proud of that. They thought that was hip.
BILLY SMITH: With the packets of medication . . . very seldom did it get to three. We tried to keep everything away from him. Usually, we’d put his sleeping medication and whatever else he needed, say, medicine for his blood pressure or his colon, in a little envelope. That was Medication Packet Number One. There might be eleven pills in it at a time. And he’d get that about four A.M.
If the first one didn’t put him out, and he asked for more, the second packet was brought out. That was usually a couple more sleeping pills. Because after he took his initial medication, they didn’t add anything but sleeping pills. Elvis didn’t sleep but about four hours at a time, but I know damn well that a lot of times he fought going to sleep, just to get more. So he might get that about eight A.M. If it got to the third packet, it was maybe a little stronger sleeping medicine, and he got that a few hours later. And, of course, the Demerol and Dilaudid came in between all the pills.
LAMAR FIKE: Ricky, and David, even Linda, would inject him with Demerol or Dilaudid three or four times a night. Used to stick it right in his hip. David said he looked like a pincushion. It was hard to stick a needle in because you couldn’t find a clear spot.
BILLY SMITH: Most of the time, the Demerol and Dilaudid was drawn ahead of time. Dr. Nick would give it to him if he was there or Tish Henley, the nurse. When he started, he always wanted somebody else to do it. But now, he’d got to the point that he was desperate enough to give it to himself. He took enough that it disfigured some portions of his hip and his arms.
MARTY LACKER: From the evidence that the state gathered when it went after Dr. Nick, Elvis’s drug schedule was a lot different when he went on tour. Nichopoulos wrote out a drug protocol in six stages. He kept it in his medical bag. The bag was stolen from his Mercedes just before Elvis died. But Metro narcotics officers recovered it, and they made copies before they gave it back to Nick. The protocols were in his handwriting, so they’re authentic. And the state produced them when they indicted him.
Stage one came at about three P.M., when Elvis got up. Nick gave him a “voice shot” that Ghanem had come up with. In addition, he gave him three appetite suppressants, some medicine for dizziness, a laxative, some vitamins and herbs, and some testosterone.
Stage two came an hour before Elvis went onstage. This was another voice shot, plus a decongestant with codeine, an amphetamine, some kind of treatment for vertigo, and Dilaudid. Stage three, which was timed just a few minutes before Elvis’s performance, was made up of Dilaudid, Dexedrine, and some caffeine. And stage four, which came right after Elvis’s performance, was all to bring him down—a pill to lower his blood pressure, some watered-down Demerol, a tranquilizer or some other kind of sedative, and an antihistamine.
Later on, just before Elvis went to bed, they gave him stage five. That consisted of Placidyl, a Quaalude, three other kinds of sedatives, an amphetamine—why I don’t know, with that many downers—a blood pressure pill, and a laxative. Then, if Elvis couldn’t sleep, Nick would give him stage six. That was Amytal, which is a hypnotic sleeping pill, and more Quaaludes.
Dr. Nick gave him 19,000 doses in the last 31½ months of his life. And not just that stuff. Also Percodan, Nembutal, Carbrital, which is a barbiturate, Biphetamine, which is another upper, Parest, which is a methaqualone like Quaalude, Tuinal, Dexamyl, Ionamin, which is an appetite suppressant, Valium, and Leritine, a narcotic used by people allergic to codeine. Apparently, Elvis couldn’t take codeine in large doses.
LAMAR FIKE: Dr. Nick says he gave Elvis placebos 80 percent of the time. I don’t think that’s right. I think there were more of the real drugs than the placebos.
BILLY SMITH: I don’t know about 80 percent. I would say more along the lines of half and half. But we were doing any damn thing we could. We’d even steal his drugs—take a lot of ’em when he was asleep. If he knew how much of the drugs I stole from him, I’d have been gone, and we’d probably never seen or spoke to each other again. The amount of stuff I flushed down the toilet was just unbelievable. But we still couldn’t stop him.
Maybe I should have been even tougher. But I thought he would fire me. So I had a decision to make. And I chose to stay. I was wrapped up in that world, and I didn’t know how the hell to leave.
MARTY LACKER: In October, Elvis started another tour. When he was out in Tahoe in May, people said he was in such bad shape that he had locomotive attacks where he couldn’t walk across the stage. And he was forgetting the words to his songs again. He looked awful. But by October, people said he’d lost some weight.
BILLY SMITH: His attitude was worse, though. He wouldn’t even rehearse. He’d say, “Hell, I know this. Let’s get it over with.” He never rehearsed in the last year or so, even after he’d been off three or four weeks. And he wouldn’t change the show any, either.
He got around it by saying, “We’re going to a different city, and they haven’t seen that show. It’s different to them.” He never stopped to think that a lot of fans traveled from one city to another.
MARTY LACKER: October was also when Elvis found out for sure that Red, and Sonny, and Dave were writing a book [Elvis: What Happened?]. Elvis called everybody into his hotel room and cried and asked them what they had on Red and Sonny. Originally, the guys had gone to the Star, the tabloid, just for a story. And the Star went to Ballantine Books for a paperback deal.
BILLY SMITH: Red took it heavy for the way the book was written. But I don’t think anybody had more love for Elvis than Red.
MARTY LACKER: They wrote the book to get back at him, and to make some money, so their families could live. And maybe to help Elvis wake up and see what was happening. That’s what they said, and I believe them.
BILLY SMITH: I went up there one day, and he’d done ranted and raved and tore up the damn room, he was so mad. He was in the bed. I went over to him, and I put my arm around him, and I said, “It’s all right. They didn’t mean no harm. You know you still love ’em. This is the only way they could get back. And it’s nothing you haven’t heard before.” I petted him, and I talked baby talk to him. I said, “It’s okay. It’s going to be all right.”
MARTY LACKER: Elvis thought Red and Sonny had betrayed him. But the main reason the book upset him was because he knew people would find out he spent $1 million a year on drugs and doctors.
A lot of performers have contempt for their audience, believe it or not. But not Elvis. He loved his fans. I’ve never seen anybody who cared as much for them. He knew that without them, he had nothing. And he was afraid if they found out he was doing drugs, they wouldn’t like him anymore. Because his fans were conservative, middle-aged Bible Belters, for the most part. He thought he was about to lose the last thing he had.
LAMAR FIKE: At some point in the fall, Elvis was out in California visiting Linda. He’d gotten her an apartment in Santa Monica so she could go on her acting auditions. And he started thinking about Red, and Sonny, and Dave’s book, and he pretty much went nuts. According to David Stanley, Elvis banged on his door in the middle of the night, and when it took him too long to answer, Elvis just kicked it down.
He was wearing a black jumpsuit with a Drug Enforcement Agency patch on it and one of his gladiator show belts with two .45s stuck in it. And he was carrying his Thompson submachine gun. David said he had cotton balls stuffed up his nose, so he was doing liquid coke. And he got David up and said, “We’re goin’ head-huntin’. We’re going to kill those sons of bitches!”—meaning Red and Sonny. They were staying in a motel in Hollywood.
Elvis told David to get his gun, and they went roaring down the Santa Monica Freeway in Elvis’s new black Dino Ferrari Spyder. Elvis was just raving on about all he’d done for Red and Sonny, and now they were going to repay him by letting his daughter read he was on drugs.
David said, “Better she read you were a druggie than a killer, Elvis.” And David said Elvis slammed on the brakes in the middle of an intersection and broke down crying. David drove him back to Linda’s apartment, and they put him to bed.
Elvis carried that stuff on for months, saying he wanted to do them in and this and that. But he would calm down and say, “You know, I guess they did what they needed to do. But I wish they hadn’t done it.”
He put in another call to Sinatra about it. Elvis made some remark about wanting to kill ’em, and Frank said, “Who do you need?”
Frank was probably kidding. But I think Elvis got scared. Maybe he thought Frank really could have it done. He thought about it a little more, and he said, “Thanks, but I’ll pass.” And Frank said, “Again, anything I can do to help you on it, let me know.”
MARTY LACKER: Because they were scared, Red and Sonny said they put a statement in a safety deposit box, along with what they called extremely damaging photographs and documents. I don’t know what they would have had, unless they were those photos of Priscilla and the girl. Red intimated to me one time that he either saw the pictures or he had a couple of them.
In desperation, Elvis had John O’Grady go to Red and Sonny and offer them $100,000 to stop the book. And they told O’Grady to go to hell. So then Elvis called Red himself. I guess Red taped it because there’s a transcript of the conversation in their book. Elvis was kind of incoherent, but he basically said, “I’ll do anything you guys need me to do for you. You know I still care a lot about you, and I’ll take care of your families or get you a job. Just let me know.” Quite frankly, he was just saying that to stop them. And who knows whether Elvis would have kept his word?
BILLY SMITH: Mostly, Elvis called Red to ask why they were doing it and to lay a pity act on him.
LAMAR FIKE: The book came out two weeks before Elvis’s death. Bad, bad timing. Or great timing, from a marketing point of view. It sold 3.5 million copies. And it’s still in print. I think Red was extremely upset about it. But as he said, they were trying to get Elvis’s attention, and they needed money. But Elvis saw it only one way: The [Memphis] Mafia code of silence had been broken.
MARTY LACKER: Everything started collapsing like a house of cards. In early November, Linda left. She wrote Elvis a Dear John letter and had her brother, Sam, deliver it. Elvis had been easing her out slowly but surely. She saw that he wasn’t going to marry her, and she also saw that he wasn’t going to get off the pills. And she didn’t want to see him that way anymore. She was just tired of it. She wanted a life of her own.
BILLY SMITH: There was also a conspiracy to get rid of Linda. Maybe Vernon and some of the others looked at the house and the apartment Elvis got her and thought, “We can’t stop his spending, but we can stop hers.”
MARTY LACKER: Elvis liked for her to spend money, so she’d be away and he could do what he wanted. Towards the end, he told her, “Just go on and use the credit cards, and buy what you want to buy.”
Well, when Vernon started getting the bills, he came to Elvis and said, “Look what she’s doing!” I think she ran up something like $30,000 on his MasterCard. Elvis told Vernon, “Don’t worry about it.” Evidently, Vernon told people like Joe and Charlie. Because they started calling Linda a bitch and a gold digger.
I can tell you that whatever Linda bought, and whatever Elvis gave her, she earned, and then some.
BILLY SMITH: They couldn’t see that she was good for him. All they saw was dollar signs. Priscilla had always been leery about asking for money, or maybe felt belittled by having to ask. But Linda was right the opposite. If she needed something, she just flat told him. And she didn’t do without anything, and she shouldn’t have, as far as I’m concerned. None of them should have. Whatever they got, they deserved. Except maybe the last one.
MARTY LACKER: Two weeks after Linda left, George Klein brought Ginger Alden up to Graceland with her sisters, Terry and Rosemary. Elvis couldn’t get away from beauty queens. Terry was the reigning Miss Tennessee. And Ginger had been runner-up. But she held her own titles: Miss Mid-South and Miss Traffic Safety, if you can believe that. The day after he met her, Elvis took Ginger to Vegas for the day. Three weeks later, he was buying her a car.
There’s some irony here. Elvis had met Ginger before. When she was five, he’d patted her on the head and taken her for a ride on the roller coaster at the fairgrounds. Her mother, Jo, was an Elvis nut. The whole family was always hanging around the gates. And Ginger’s father, as a sergeant in the army, was in the room when Elvis was inducted into the service.
Ginger was one of the worst choices Elvis ever made. But George is proud he introduced them. He brags about it. He says the only significant woman Elvis ever went with that he didn’t introduce him to was Priscilla. See why we call George a glorified pimp?
BILLY SMITH: Ginger was not a petite woman, but she was a pretty woman. And she looked like Priscilla. Dr. Nick thought something about her, maybe her eyes, reminded Elvis of Aunt Gladys. I don’t know. She had that dark, teased hair and wore a lot of makeup. Ginger wasn’t dumb, but she was kind of shallow and self-centered. She wasn’t a caring, nurturing person like Linda.
I think what it all boiled down to was the fact that she was a pretty woman, she was twenty years old, and Elvis still wanted to be seen with a woman with that virginal look. So he could sort of say, “Hey, I can still get it.”
One day on tour, Elvis stopped me and said, “Billy, do you think Ginger’s a virgin?” Right in front of her! I said, “Well, let me put it this way. What did she tell you?” He said, “She says she is.” I said, “Well, if she told you that, I guess she’s right then.”
I’d say that relationship was more about companionship. In the last year, I don’t think the sex mattered one way or the other.
LAMAR FIKE: Dr. Nick wasn’t giving Elvis testosterone just to make him more virile onstage. Shit, no. He gave it to him for impotence. You couldn’t dope up that much and get a hard-on if Elizabeth Taylor stuck her ass in your face.
BILLY SMITH: I think Elvis was having a problem, yeah. It was caused by the drugs. For about the last year and a half, I think he was incapable of it. And I think he was somewhat limited for a couple years before that. He never told me that, of course. Too macho for that shit.
When he first met Ginger, he put up a front. But from things going around, we knew that he wasn’t making it with a lot of the women he was with. Some of his partners said it was kind of a disappointment.
Every once in a while, he’d say little things to get you to believe that he was still functioning full-tilt, like “We had a lot of fun last night,” or, “Yeah, I didn’t just sleep all damn night, in spite of what you guys might think.”
LAMAR FIKE: There was so much weird shit going on. Like when Jerry Lee Lewis got arrested out in front of Graceland. That was November ’76.
BILLY SMITH: Harold called up at the house, and I answered the phone. He said Jerry Lee was down there just drunk out of his mind, waving a .38-caliber derringer around. He was demanding to see Elvis.
I went upstairs and told Elvis, “Jerry Lee’s down there. He’s been drinking, and he’s got a gun. And he’s saying you called and wanted to see him.” Which I knew wasn’t true. Elvis didn’t want to be around Jerry Lee because of his attitude. He didn’t think he knew how to treat his fans or other people. Elvis would always say, “If Jerry Lee would just play the piano and keep his mouth shut, he’d be a hell of a lot better off.”
I said, “Elvis, there’s a lot of other people down at the gate, too. Harold wants to know what to do.” Elvis said, “Tell Harold to either have that drunk son of a bitch locked up, or I’m going down and beat the hell out of him.” So Harold called the cops and had Jerry Lee arrested.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis had gnawed on Jerry Lee’s nerves for years. He was just so jealous of what Elvis had accomplished. Because Jerry Lee thought he was more talented than Elvis. And he knew that Elvis never liked him. To this day, it still eats at him, even though he sometimes talks nicely about Elvis.
A couple years ago, Jerry Lee was on The Arsenio Hall Show, and Arsenio brought that incident up. Jerry Lee looked straight in the camera and said, “It’s a bald-faced lie. It never happened. It’s just a rumor that someone started spreading. I never did that.” All anybody had to do was call the Memphis Police Department and find out that he did.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis buzzed me in the kitchen and said, “Come up here. I want to show you something.” I went up there and sat down beside the bed, and we watched Jerry Lee on the monitors. We’d take that camera and dolly it in on him. Harold must have told him what Elvis said because Jerry Lee got mad, got back in his car, and butted the gate. Elvis said, “That son of a bitch is trying to tear the gate down! He’s lost his mind!” Jerry Lee is a real dog. Always has been.
MARTY LACKER: In December, Elvis went back into the Hilton for ten days. The hotel really didn’t want him, but Colonel said, “Let us have the room, and we’ll take the door.” And he jacked the price up to twenty-nine bucks a person. And it was a sellout. From what I heard, Elvis wasn’t in great form. He’d sing half songs, and be incoherent some of the time, and forget some of the words. I think he had the Stamps sing a couple numbers. And he sat down for several songs one night because he said he’d sprained his ankle.
People got upset. Some of them asked for a refund and said they wouldn’t come back. And Vernon got chest pains and had to be put in the hospital out there.
It was pretty much a disaster. Elvis was too unstable. Like what he pulled with Don Rickles. In the early sixties, Elvis went to see Rickles in the lounge at the Sahara. This was when Rickles was just starting out in Vegas, when he really cut people up just terrible. It didn’t matter who you were.
I wasn’t there, but Elvis told me that when he went in to see him, Rickles said, “Well, look here. Here’s Elvis Presley. Normally, I’d be making fun of him as part of my act. But this is one man I’m not going to say anything about because I know how much he cared for his mother and how good he was to her.” He said, “I have nothing but respect for a man like that.” Because Rickles was well known for his devotion to his mother.
Well, when Elvis played Vegas in December of ’76, he went over to see Rickles at the Riviera. And Rickles introduced Elvis from the audience. The guys said Elvis came up from the audience and went onstage and instead of just saying “hello” to everybody, he started reading from The Voice of Silence, one of his religious books. And Rickles just stood there. He didn’t know what to do.
Finally, Rickles looked at Elvis and gave him this big smile and said, “Hey, Elvis, where are we going with this?” And Elvis asked Rickles to read a few passages. He told him it was important. By this time, the audience was really losing patience. And Rickles was, like, dying. Elvis finally let Rickles quit reading, and he left the stage. And the audience applauded, but just politely, you know.
That got around to the other hotels, the same as the quality of Elvis’s shows at the Hilton. The word was out that Elvis was unpredictable, an embarrassment, and maybe even unbankable.
After that, Elvis never played Vegas again. It was over.
LAMAR FIKE: When Elvis died, Rex Humbard, the evangelist, told his television audience that he met with Elvis at the Hilton that last time. He said that Elvis told him he knew his time was short, or some such. He also said he was surprised at Elvis’s knowledge of the Bible, especially the prophecies of the Old Testament. Elvis supposedly told him, “These are the last days before Jesus comes, aren’t they? We’ve had all of the wars, and we’ve had the pestilence and starvation. The Lord’s coming soon, don’t you think, Rex?”
Well, Rex said tears came up in Elvis’s eyes, and Rex reached out and clasped both his hands, and he said, “Elvis, I want to pray for you.” And Elvis said, “Please do.” And they prayed for five minutes or so, and everybody in the room—J.D. [Sumner] and [Humbard’s wife] Maude Aimee—started to sob and cry and stuff.
Rex said he thought Elvis was “cramming for the Big Exam.”
I don’t know how much cramming Elvis did or what else they did in there. But Rex came by, that’s true. He went into Elvis’s dressing room, and they got back there and had a little prayer session. Rex was a weird dude. He thought I was insane, too. He thought we all were.
BILLY SMITH: I don’t remember that meeting at all. But if Lamar says it happened, I guess it did. It’s just that now that Elvis is gone, so many people had these little meetings with him.
LAMAR FIKE: A couple of years ago, Wayne Newton bought a note from Sotheby’s that Elvis supposedly wrote in Vegas in December of ’76. I never saw it, but I read about it, and I’ve seen pictures of the note. It says, “I feel so alone sometimes. The night is quiet for me. I’d love to be able to sleep. I am glad that everyone is gone now. I’ll probably not rest. I have no need for all this. Help me, Lord.”
The story goes that Elvis wrote it on the telephone pad by his bed, and that he crumpled it up and threw it away, and that one of the guys saved it. I don’t know how it got to Sotheby’s. But it’s got to be worth a lot of money.
Newton wrote a song about it called “The Letter.” And he made a music video on the stage of the Hilton and in Elvis’s suite, and he showed the note on camera, and read the whole thing. Good song.
BILLY SMITH: I don’t believe Elvis wrote that, and neither does Jo. Because he just didn’t write down his feelings like that. Now, he would write down things that he had read in a book, but that’s it.
MARTY LACKER: I think it’s possible. Elvis was into religion full steam at the end. And my experience is that he didn’t write letters, but he used to write a lot of things down. Now, who got it out of the wastepaper basket and sold it, I don’t know. Newton says he bought the note because he was so moved by it, and that he wrote the song to make Elvis’s death less painful to his fans. He said he wanted them to know Elvis wasn’t alone. Give me a break. Newton just saw that he might finally have a hit record for the first time in twenty damn years.
Wayne Newton is sickening. I’ve seen him in about eighteen different interviews say how he used to sit and talk and run around with Elvis in Vegas. Whoopie Goldberg had him on her interview show, Christmas of ’92. She said, “You were a close friend of Elvis Presley, weren’t you?” He answered something like “Yes, we used to talk a lot. He was very troubled and depressed, especially in the later years.” Then he went on to say that Elvis didn’t have any real friends around him, that it was one thing for the guys to “take” his money, but when Red and Sonny revealed his personal life in a book, it was worse.
First of all, Newton was not close to Elvis. They talked briefly a couple of times in Vegas. He had no idea what Elvis was really like. Second, none of us “took” Elvis’s money. We earned it. Third, I’d like to see Newton say what he said about Red and Sonny to their face. And last, since he cared so much for Elvis, why didn’t he just buy the note Elvis supposedly wrote and keep it as a personal memento instead of trying to get a hit record out of it?
It’s tiresome to hear these so-called celebrity friends of Elvis, like Tom Jones and Newton, get on TV and tell the public all this crap. The public doesn’t know it’s not true. After he died, they all started singing his songs and taking on some of his mannerisms. Why? Because they were trying to get Elvis’s fans. They couldn’t carry Elvis’s bags, much less take his place.