CHAPTER 51
BILLY SMITH: At the end of December ’76, Elvis started his ninth tour of the year. He was just working too damn much. On New Year’s Eve, he played Pittsburgh. And then early that morning, he decided he wanted to fly on back into Memphis. It was snowy, and gall dang, it was cold. And Elvis got a bomb threat.
Some wacko called and said he’d planted a bomb on the Lisa Marie. We had to evacuate the plane there in Pittsburgh and wait until they checked it all out. Dick Grob got with the police up there, and they found the guy and locked him up.
One of the reasons Elvis wanted to get back home was because Ginger’s grandfather had died, and he said he’d take her to the funeral over in Arkansas.
Elvis made a lot of concessions to Ginger. Normally, he didn’t attend funerals because they were such a downer. But he did it for her. And that was the complete reverse of how he acted when Linda’s grandfather died. It was the day Elvis was supposed to go on tour, so, naturally, Linda didn’t go with him. Elvis said, “Goddamn, he’s got bad timing! Don’t he know I got a tour?”
LAMAR FIKE: Albert Goldman wrote that when Elvis went to Ginger’s grandfather’s funeral, he said, “It won’t be long before I’m there.” Albert uses it as support for his theory that Elvis killed himself. Goldman also says that sometime around this period, Elvis broke down and sobbed, “I wish I’d been a better father.” Are you kidding? Elvis was not a person who thought about what he should have done or what he should not have done. None of that poignant bullshit. There was no cry for mercy that I remember.
MARTY LACKER: During the third week of January, Elvis went to Nashville to record at Creative Workshop. But he was ticked off about something, and he just stayed over at the Sheraton South for three days, then flew home without ever singing a note. He’d lost all interest in that, and he was sending a message to Colonel.
From what I understand, he was also mad at Ginger because she wouldn’t go with him. Felton Jarvis would go over to the hotel and take him demos to listen to. But Elvis supposedly spent most of his time in the hotel room calling Ginger. And he just let the musicians sit around the studio and wait.
BILLY SMITH: Before we ever went over there, Elvis said to me, “I’m not going to do it. If I have to, I’ll say I’m losing my voice.” Well, that’s what he done. He was getting back at Colonel and RCA.
MARTY LACKER: From what Billy and the other guys tell me, Ginger probably added to Elvis’s downfall. First of all, she didn’t care anything about him. Second, she was too young for him. And third, the way I saw it, she was there for what she could get. She forced her whole family on him. He ended up buying them a house with a swimming pool. And he bought them cars, and he took them on trips.
Ginger was always disappointing him. She didn’t love him—she didn’t even want to be around him. She wouldn’t move into Graceland, she didn’t like to spend the night, and she didn’t want to go on all the tours. She didn’t seem interested in pleasing him much at all. And she certainly didn’t watch him until he went to sleep like Linda did or make sure he didn’t choke while he ate.
One night, she started to go home, and Elvis fired a pistol over her head. But it didn’t stop her. So he started seeing other women. Even a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Rise Smith. But he really wanted Ginger. Billy asked him one time, “Why the hell do you put up with her?” And Elvis answered, “I’m just getting too old and tired to train another one.”
BILLY SMITH: I think Ginger was the first woman he’d run across other than Priscilla who rejected him. You could tell they were having problems. Sometimes she wouldn’t come up for a few days, and he’d get all agitated and sullen and say, “Where is she, man? Why don’t she stay here?” And when she did come, she’d get up and go home after Elvis went to sleep. One time, he even told one of the guys, “Let the air out of her tires so she can’t leave.”
Another time, about six o’clock in the morning, Elvis called me, and he was real upset because Ginger was fixin’ to go home. He said, “Don’t let her out! Keep the gate closed!”
I said, “Goddamn, Elvis! Open the gate and let the girl go home, man. This is not a prison!”
I said it because I was mad and fed up with it. One night, God, they were into it. She hadn’t been up there in two or three days. And he was trying to keep her from leaving. She finally got to go home. And Elvis asked me, “What do you think about Ginger? Do you think I should find somebody else?” I said, “I think she’s everything in a woman that you always hated. And you’re just tolerating it.” Well, I saw his jawbone go to flexing. And I figured, “This is it.” I thought he’d fire me. He didn’t, but he stayed mad at me for three days.
LAMAR FIRE: Ginger didn’t give a rat’s ass about him. I’ll tell you something else. At the end of January, something like nine weeks after they met, Elvis gave her an eleven-and-a-half-karat diamond. Cost something like $70,000. But when Elvis gave a woman a ring, it didn’t mean a damn thing.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis was not going to marry her. But she thought he was. We even took her out window-shopping for wedding dresses once, about midnight. We’d drive by a store, and he’d say, “Hey, there’s one.” And he would describe what he wanted Ginger to wear on her head—that thing that stands up that the Spanish women wear. And a long train on her dress. And Ginger believed all this. But he’d also say, “Yeah, and when we get married . . . ” and then turn to Jo and me and say, real low, “Whenever that is.”
The reason he give her an eleven-and-a-half-karat ring isn’t what everybody thought. He saw the need to buy her again. She come over one night, and she hadn’t been up in a few days, and about one A.M., Elvis wanted to get her an engagement ring.
He got Lowell Hays up there, and nothing Lowell had suited him. Elvis said, “I need a bigger stone.” And Lowell said, “I don’t have anything over maybe three carats. But why don’t I go to New York and buy you one and then make a ring?” Elvis said, “How long will that take?” Lowell said, “About a week.” And Elvis said, “That’s too long. I got to have it no later than tomorrow.”
So Lowell said, “Well, you could just take the stone out of your TCB ring, and I could replace it later.” So that’s what they done. And Ginger stayed at Graceland for a little while then. But she went right back to the same old pattern. Elvis kept buying her more jewelry just to keep her there.
MARTY LACKER: I don’t know that there was any way that relationship could work. Ginger wanted to go out and party all the time and show Elvis off. And she wanted him to socialize with her group of friends—all sorts of things that Elvis wouldn’t do.
BILLY SMITH: I was suspicious of some of the things she done. Like, we’d call and she wouldn’t be at home. I’d ask her mother, “Where’s Ginger?” And Mrs. Alden would say, “Ginger’s spending the night at a girlfriend’s house.”
I’d say, “Well, has she got a phone there where I can reach her?” Mrs. Alden would say, “Ah, no. I can run over and tell her, though, and she’ll get back in touch with you.”
It really didn’t make any difference whether she was true to Elvis or not. Elvis thought she was faithful, and that was the main thing. But I was afraid Elvis would say, “Find out where her girlfriend lives, and we’ll just go over there.” And I was leery about what he’d do if it turned out she wasn’t there.
To be honest, we had her followed a couple times. If Elvis had ever known that, God, he’d have fired all of us. But she was in a nightclub dancing with a guy.
His relationship with Ginger pointed up a lot of things. To me, Elvis went through four stages. There was the fifties Elvis, which was a happy-go-lucky, I’ve-got-it-all type of guy. He understood other people’s feelings more during that time, I think. Then there was the sixties Elvis. He didn’t really care about others. He became harder. He was concerned with what Elvis wanted, and that was it. And then there was the seventies Elvis, when he realized that the people around him needed certain things.
After that came the final stage. That’s when he was just reminiscing about the past, about how it had been. And talking about not really having anyplace to go or any new challenges. What Ginger and her friends done to have a good time, we had already experienced so many times. And it wasn’t just a problem with Ginger, but with the newer guys in the group.
MARTY LACKER: After Elvis died, Mrs. Alden sued the estate for $40,000. She said Elvis promised to pay off the mortgage on that house he gave them, but that he’d never had it put in their name. And she claimed he was going to pay for home improvements and even for part of her divorce from Ginger’s father.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis always had a pet name for a girl he was really involved with. Ginger’s was “Gingerbread.” Elvis didn’t know it, but I always called her “Gingersnatch.” And I didn’t stop there. I called her sister Rosemary “Poundcake.” Which was really crude of me, but I couldn’t help it. I was so pissed off at that family.
This one time when we were talking about Ginger, when he asked me if I thought he should stay with her or find somebody else, I said, “There are a lot of nice women your age. Why don’t you find somebody like that? Somebody you can talk to and have a real relationship with?” And Elvis said, “What in the hell could a forty-two-year-old woman do for me?”
MARTY LACKER: Early in February, RCA made another attempt to get Elvis to record. This time, they came back to Graceland and set up a recording studio in the racquetball court. Elvis pulled the same stunt he did in Nashville—complained of a sore throat and left everybody holed up in the motel for days. Finally, Felton called it quits. That was the last time they made the effort to record him.
Right after that, I heard all kind of reports about how erratic his shows were. In Charlotte, North Carolina, at the end of February, he tried to sing “Moody Blue” a couple of times, but he gave up on it. Said the note was too high. He really just didn’t know the song well enough to perform it. He was reading it off the lyric sheet. Finally, he just ripped the lyric sheet in half. But the next night, he got it.
LAMAR FIKE: That was the tour up through North and South Carolina. Elvis was mad at Dr. Nick again and refused to let him go. So Tish Henley went, and Ellas Ghanem.
Somewhere in South Carolina, Elias had to put Elvis in a tub and wash him down in ice to bring him back around. Then we almost lost him somewhere in North Carolina. God, it was just so bad. This one time, I saw him, and I said, “Are you all right?” And he said, “Yeah, I’m fine.” I said, “Man, you can’t keep putting yourself through this.” He said, “Aw, Lamar, I’ll watch them lower your big ass into the ground.” I said, “I doubt that seriously.”
Elvis always thought he would outlive me because of my size. But now that I’d had that intestinal bypass, I was down to 185 pounds, from four hundred. I was losing weight, and Elvis was gaining. I weighed about seventy pounds less than he did.
We came off that Carolina tour, and landed the 880, and he got mad at me about something. And he called me “Lard-ass,” the same way he’d done for years when he got angry. I left him alone for a few minutes, and then when it was time to get off the plane, I walked back in the bedroom and said, “Let’s go, Lard-ass.”
He said, “You son of a bitch, you’ve been waiting twenty years for this.” I said, “You’re right.” And this time he didn’t get mad.
MARTY LACKER: The day Elvis came off that winter tour, George Klein got indicted. He was still working as a deejay. They nailed him for one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, plus three counts of possession of stolen mail, and aiding and abetting a crime. It had to do with, shall we say, “acquiring” Arbitron Radio Research reports and doctoring the listener ratings to make them higher than they were. That was to boost the advertising revenue.
Klein called Elvis and asked him if there was anything he could do to help him out because he was looking at a sixty-day federal sentence in the Shelby County jail.
Elvis tried his usual contacts, and nothing happened. So he decided to go to Jimmy Carter, who’d just been elected president. Elvis liked Carter. He used to come to the shows a lot. The first time Elvis played the Omni, in Atlanta, Carter came back to see him, and then when he was running for president, he came back to see Elvis twice. So Elvis felt like he was a friend.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis didn’t know how to contact President Carter. So he asked me, “Do you think you could get in touch with him?” I said, “I don’t know, but I’ll give it my best shot.”
First, I called a friend who was an FBI agent in Memphis. And he give me a number to the White House. That just got me to a secretary. But I said, “This is Elvis Presley’s cousin calling. I’m calling for him. And it’s not a joke. Would you tell the president that Elvis Presley wants to talk to him the first chance he gets. In the next day or two, if possible.” I said, “In a few hours, Elvis’ll be gettin’ up, so late afternoon is the best time to get him.”
Well, they passed on the information, and Elvis got a call one afternoon about five o’clock. It was Chip Carter, the president’s son. Elvis answered, and Chip asked for me. Elvis said, “He’s not here, but this is Elvis Presley. Can I help you?” Which I thought was kind of funny. Anyway, I don’t know what good it done. George had to do that jail time after all.
LAMAR FIKE: George was guilty of falsifying the WHBQ Radio logs—changing the numbers—but in this situation, I think George was a dupe. He probably didn’t know what the term “mail fraud” was.
MARTY LACKER: In March of ’77, I moved to California and went to work as a salesman for a food company. I’d been off the drugs five months, and I wanted to get away from everything.
Just before I left, I sent Elvis a letter, through Billy. I explained that I’d been off drugs all these months and that I hadn’t felt that good in years. I was hoping two things would happen: that he’d be happy for me and that he’d think about getting off drugs himself.
I heard later from a friend of my nephew who worked for Malco’s Theatres that the night Elvis got the letter, he started screaming about me in the Memphian. He said Elvis got up and said, “Goddamn Marty, trying to reform me!”
Billy says it never happened, but maybe he was trying to spare my feelings. Because I was selling everything I had, including my house, and for only the second time in all those years, I asked Elvis if he’d loan me some money to start over in California. And he didn’t give it to me. This kid said Elvis was yelling about that, too. I never heard back from him about it. Not a word.
BILLY SMITH: That winter, Elvis got it in his mind to have his will updated. He was fixin’ to go on vacation to Hawaii in March, and he had the tours coming up right after that. So February was his only chance to do it. He’d say to me, “Get Daddy on the phone. I need to talk to him about my will.” This went on for a couple weeks.
I never heard their conversations, but Elvis told me and a couple other people, “You’re in the will, so if anything happens to me, you can be assured you’ll be taken care of.” Which is what he promised me when I give up my job at the railroad. Of course, Aunt Delta and Grandma were in it, also.
Well, on the night of March third, they brought the will up to him to sign. I was upstairs in his room. We were going out motorcycle riding a little later, and I was getting his stuff ready.
I forget who all was there—Vernon, and Beecher Smith, the lawyer, and his wife, Ann, I know. And the witnesses, which were Ginger and Charlie. Anyway, they stayed about six or seven minutes—hardly any time. They didn’t read it to him. He was just briefly told that they had done everything he’d requested and all they needed was the signature.
When everybody left, Elvis handed the will to me, and he said, “Put this in a safe place. And remember where it is.” And then he said, “If you want, you can read it.” I said, “I don’t want to read it.” He said, “Well, you might ought’a read it—you’re in it.” And I said, “I don’t like to think about wills. They’re morbid to me. So I’ll just put it up.” And I did.
A couple of nights later, he got it out and showed me a section of it. He said, “This is what I’m leaving everybody.” I remember it mentioned the sum of $50,000 for two or three people and cars to certain people, like Aunt Delta. I don’t know what all to Grandma. And then it mentioned five or six of the guys. He was providing for everybody, and he was proud of it. That’s why he was showing it. I only saw it quickly and only one section of one page.
MARTY LACKER: The truth is, there were two wills at the time. Joe Esposito never told this to anybody except some of the guys, but Elvis had another will. It was handwritten. And Joe always carried it around in his briefcase. Vernon knew about it, but he couldn’t get it out of the briefcase. So he pretended it didn’t exist.
BILLY SMITH: When it was just me and Elvis up there in his room, we talked about a lot of things he never told anybody else.
I was spending twelve to eighteen hours a day, every day, up there, unless Ginger come over. Elvis was kind of withdrawn because of all that had happened, and he was leery about who he could trust.
At times, I knew that something was bothering him. He’d hint around at things without talking about them. He talked about the future, things he wanted to do. He had his heart set on touring worldwide. I don’t know how he thought he was going to get around Colonel, but it didn’t stop him from talking about it.
One of the things he came back to a lot was how much he wanted a male child. He was obsessed with it. He loved Lisa to death. But he still wanted a boy.
He got into a lot of detail. He said, “He’ll have my eyes and, of course, my face.” With his ego, Elvis thought he was the most handsome man in the world. So it just had to be a beautiful kid. He’d say, “Can you imagine what he’d be like? He’s got to be an entertainer, and my gosh, if I have him with the right woman, he’ll be the best-looking and the most perfect kid in the world.”
He had about five types of women in mind. Each one was a model of some of the women he had been with. But he hadn’t really picked the woman yet.
He didn’t want to get married again. Or, at least, not right away. So he even thought about frozen embryos. He talked about that a lot and about freezing the sperm. That was in case he didn’t find the perfect woman before he died. Immortality fascinated him. He was real intrigued with cloning, and he was fascinated by how far medicine had come. He’d read that somebody had invented an artificial heart. So he was automatically going to have two put aside—one for him and one for his daddy. But it was just all talk. I guess he was thinking, “I’ll do it when I need it.”
Mostly, he talked about the olden days. People who had died. You know the one thing we didn’t talk about? Him growing old.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis had this dream one time. He was apparently on trial for his life. He saw the whole courtroom. Colonel was the prosecuting attorney. And Red and Priscilla were the witnesses for the prosecution. Elvis said nobody would defend him, not me, not any of the guys. The only people who were sympathetic to him were two members of the jury, Sol Schwartz and Lee Ableser, the jewelers out in Beverly Hills who made his TCB stuff. I don’t know who the judge was, but he didn’t wear a black robe—he wore a white one. And he had a little black medical bag with him all the time. Elvis told me and a couple of the other guys about it. I said, “What the shit does that mean?” Elvis said, “It means the end is near.”
It got so the guards—the guys who looked in on him—started calling themselves “The Lifers” because they were always rescuing him. They pretty much held his life in their hands.
MARTY LACKER: Right around the time I left for California, in March, Vernon had another heart attack. I’m sure Elvis was real freaked out about it because all the foundations were crumbling.
BILLY SMITH: I think one reason Elvis wanted me with him all the time had to do with my brother, Bobby. Elvis still had some guilt about that. Also, in ’76, he lost another cousin that he had been close to growing up—Bobbie Jane Wren. Her parents were Lillian Smith, who was Gladys’s and my daddy’s sister, and Charles Mann.
Anyway, Bobbie Jane committed suicide, at thirty-eight.
It hurt to have to tell Elvis. We were on tour. I waited ’til after the show that night. By then, so many of the relatives had died. Elvis took it hard. He said, “I’d just as soon go myself as to have to see anybody else in the family die.”
MARTY LACKER: When Elvis went back out on tour the third week of March, the reviews made a big point of saying that he’d lost a lot of weight compared to how he looked in the summer of ’76. It got so they talked more about how he looked than anything else.
I’m a little thin-skinned about all these fat jokes about Elvis. The people who talked about how fat he was never would have said it had they been around him. They would have been awestruck, just like everybody else was. Even when he was heavy, no celebrity liked to be in his presence because it made them seem so much less charismatic.
The man was ill. Not with bone cancer, like Dick Grob and Charlie Hodge told everybody. And not with serious heart trouble. The blockage of his arteries was mild, and the blockage of the aorta was minimal. But he was sick, absolutely.
BILLY SMITH: Jo says Elvis started looking exactly like my daddy did right before he died. And she’s right. Elvis would always sit in his bed, slumped, with his feet crossed. And his stomach was swollen. My daddy had the same problem with his liver and all, and his stomach just all of a sudden puffed out there. Same thing with Elvis’s mother. There were times you wondered how he could function. But he pulled off some unbelievable acts.
We were getting ready to go on tour that March, and he didn’t look like he could make it. He had a bunch of shows, starting in Tempe, Arizona. He was at Graceland, and we were supposed to leave late that night. Tish was talking to us outside. She said, There’s no way he’s going to make it. If he was my son, I’d have him in the hospital.” Vernon said, “Well, do what you can. He’s got to make this.” So Dr. Nick put all these IVs in him, trying to get him built up. Tish said, “I can’t believe they’re doing this.”
All the way to the airport, Elvis sat slumped with his hat over his eyes. He didn’t say anything. Then when he got on the plane, he was just groggy, slurring his words. We thought, “This is one time he really won’t make it.” All the way there, we thought the same thing. And when we got to the dressing room there at the Coliseum, I said to Jo, “There ain’t no way.” Then right before he stepped out on the stage, he stopped and looked at us and said, “You didn’t think I’d make it, did you?” And he put on a hell of a show.
He did that another time, too. We were getting ready to go on tour, and he was so out of it that he couldn’t find his hand in front of him. I was wondering if we should go ahead and cancel. And what little Elvis could speak, he said, “Just get me to the damn city, and I’ll take care of the rest of it.” And that night, when he come out of that damn dressing room, you would have thought he was a whole new person. When it come to his performances, he could reach down and pull it out of himself. I don’t know how he did it.
LAMAR FIKE: At the end of March, he canceled four dates—in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Mobile, Alabama; Macon, Georgia; and Jacksonville, Florida. We had to add them onto the next tour. But he wasn’t really incapacitated. He was in a fight with Ginger, and he just didn’t want to do the shows. We flew him back home to the hospital to give him an excuse because we’d have had the shit sued out of us.
MARTY LACKER: Once they got him into Baptist, they said it was for gastroenteritis, mild anemia, and a problem with his back. And he did have some, gastroenteritis, from what Billy said. But they also tried to detox him again, drain some of that shit out of him.
BILLY SMITH: I believe Dr. Nick talked him into going back in the hospital to run some tests on his colon. Because I remember they took X rays of his stomach area. He always had dark spots on the X rays, and he was concerned. He said, “Well, what is this?” The doctor give him some long explanation. And Elvis said, “What does that mean?” And the doctor said, “Well, you might refer to it as an unborn fart—trapped gas.” And we all had a big laugh.
He stayed for four days, and then he’d just had enough. I went up there, and he said, “Get my stuff together, and let’s go.” I said, “Has Dr. Nick released you?” He said, “I don’t need his damn release. I’m releasing myself.” Well, I tried a couple of things to get him to stay, but finally, out the door we went.
It was funny. Elvis walked right by my car because he thought I was in my Lincoln, and I was in the little red Corvair. I said, “Here’s the car.” We started down the expressway, and he said, “I don’t like this little son of a bitch. It feels like my ass is scootin’ on the pavement.”
I laughed, and he said, “Would you give this car to me?” I said, “Why would you want it if you don’t like it?” He said, “I’m going to burn this little bastard. It looks like a tomato can.”
We made it to Graceland, and I said, “To show you how nice a guy I am, I’ll pull in the front gate.” And Elvis said, “Not in this son of a bitch, you won’t. I’ll kill you first. You go to the back.”
I wish I could have gotten him to stay in the hospital that time. That was probably the last real chance we had to do something.
LAMAR FIKE: The sad thing about this whole situation is that none of us could do a fucking thing. We went through such hell and frustration that it was unbelievable. The self-recrimination . . . Nobody in the world could have heaped on us what we felt. It was like watching a goddamn runaway Peterbilt truck. We’d all look at each other and just shake our heads. So we sort of made a vow. We said, “We’ve got to keep him going as long as we can.”
I made a speech to him one time. I said, “You know, you’re doing the worst thing on this earth.” Elvis said, “What’s that?” I said, “You’re abusing talent. God gives very few what you’ve got, and you’re blowing it out the window.”
He looked at me, and he said, “I can’t help it.” I walked away shaking my head. I said, “Jesus Christ.” I told Marty later, “How do you fight that?”
BILLY SMITH: Nothing was going to stop him from taking the stuff. And he didn’t care who it hurt. In ’77, me and Jo were in the limousine, going to the airport to leave on tour. We started to get out, and he said, “Jo, bring this sack right here.” She said, “Okay.” He said, “Don’t even stop. Just come straight back to my room [on the plane] and bring it.” Of course, it was a sack full of drugs. Jo asked me later, “Why would he do that to me?” And I said, “To get past Dr. Nick. Because you would have had the sack, and Dr. Nick would have been looking for Elvis to get on the plane with it.”
MARTY LACKER: From what Billy told me, Elvis would promise Ginger the world just to keep her there, but he was seeing other women at the same time.
BILLY SMITH: About the second week of April, Elvis met this girl named Alicia Kerwin. She was a bank teller in Memphis. Alicia was twenty-one, I think. George Klein told Elvis about her. He’d just had another fight with Ginger, and he told George to send her. She come over by herself, about ten o’clock.
That first night, Elvis wanted Jo to talk to her a little bit, make sure he’d like her and all, before she went up. Jo would always go up to the room with him and the new girl for a little while, ’til they got acquainted. She had to back up his stories. And he could show a girl, “Look, I’ve got everybody at my beck and call.”
Elvis liked Alicia. She was a really nice girl. Jo liked her a lot, too. A few days after she first come up, Elvis invited her to go to Las Vegas and Palm Springs with him. It was Elvis and Alicia and me and Jo. The real reason he was going out to Las Vegas was to get more prescriptions from Ghanem. I remember Elvis wanted Alicia to be dressed up so Dr. Ghanem could see how beautiful she looked. This was one of the times Elvis was hacked at Dr. Nick. So we flew out there, and Elvis got what he wanted from Ghanem, and we flew on to Palm Springs.
Everybody was just beat by the time we got there. So Elvis went to bed with Alicia, but he wasn’t sleeping right. He just kept waking up and breathing funny. Alicia came and got Jo, and she went in there—I don’t know where the heck I’d gone—and it shook her up. Jo couldn’t see him breathe. Alicia was scared to death, and so was Jo. And Jo come and got me, and shit, he was totally out of it, man.
I thought he had overdosed. It scared me real bad ’cause you couldn’t have stirred him with a stick. Jo thought he was going to die. We called Dr. Kaplan there in Palm Springs, and he come over. I’ll never forget him sneaking in. He didn’t want to be seen there.
What happened was, Ghanem give Elvis these Placidyls, and hell, Elvis would take two or three at one time. He felt like “Aw, that’s nothing,” but usually, they would wipe him out. And when he’d get that way, he’d talk ’til he fell asleep. And when he fell asleep, he breathed so shallow it scared the hell out of you.
We called Ghanem in Las Vegas to find out what the hell he’d prescribed. And even he got scared. He flew on out there. He checked him out, and he said, “No, he’s all right. He’s just got too many sleeping pills in him.”
It turned out that Elvis had been hiding a lot of stuff out there. He had him a nice little stash. And he was mixing it. He’d taken some muscle relaxer along with sleeping pills, and God, that’s a damn no-no. And he must have taken ’em all at one time.
Another time, he was with Alicia, and he was eating red Jell-O squares. And he took his sleeping pills, and the Jell-O squares melted in his mouth, and she thought he was hemorrhaging. It scared the fool out of her. When Elvis got out of it and just babbled on, it had to be a shocker to see him like that. And young girls just couldn’t understand it. It upset them.
Elvis could have cared about Alicia, I think. He bought her a new Cadillac in Palm Springs, and somebody drove it back for her. But that didn’t win her over. She told Albert Goldman she was never intimate with him; and I imagine that’s true. She said to Jo, “I really like him, and I care a lot about him, but I can’t handle that lifestyle. I’d rather just be a friend.”
MARTY LACKER: At the end of April, the Nashville Banner ran a story saying Colonel was putting Elvis’s contract up for sale. The reason—Colonel was supposedly in bad health with his heart, and had been for a while, and he also needed money. The paper said he’d gambled away $1 million just in December. Supposedly a group of “West Coast businessmen” were interested in the contract.
Sam Thompson says Colonel told him, “Elvis is getting to be more trouble than he’s worth.” Sam says Colonel specifically mentioned Elvis’s drug abuse—even named the doctors who supplied him. And he talked about Elvis’s erratic performances. But he wouldn’t say who the prospective buyers were. That kind of candor was pretty rare for the Colonel. Now he denies ever saying it.
LAMAR FIKE: It was flying apart like a two-dollar watch. And Colonel just got to the point where he was paranoid about the whole deal. I mean, you don’t walk away from a multimillion-dollar income very easily. Colonel didn’t want to walk away at all. But he didn’t know how to handle it.
BILLY SMITH: The Colonel may have been trying to get rid of Elvis, but I think Elvis was trying to get rid of the Colonel, too. He told me so. But he died before he ever got around to it.
MARTY LACKER: It wasn’t just Colonel Elvis wanted rid of. The last year, Billy arranged the schedule because Joe didn’t want to come to Memphis anymore. He stayed in L.A. So unbeknownst to Joe, Elvis was about to fire him and let Billy run everything. Elvis asked Billy one night, “Do you think you can run this show?” And Billy said, “Yeah, if that’s what you want.” And Elvis said, “Well, I’ve had enough of Joe. I’m going to tell him to stay home.” Joe was on his way out.
There were really no big emotional ties, except with Billy and Lamar, and Elvis didn’t see Lamar all that much because he was working advance for the tours and then he would go back to Nashville afterwards to be with his family. But Elvis really wanted to clean house, from Colonel to Joe.
LAMAR FIKE: Early in May, Joe, Dr. Nick, and Mike McMahon, their other partner in the racquetball court chain, sued Elvis for backing out of the deal. And for refusing to let them use his name. They wanted $100,000 or $150,000 in damages.
Elvis ended up settling with them. And he got stuck with borrowing the $1.3 million from the National Bank of Commerce and putting Graceland up as collateral. He didn’t need any more money problems. And Elvis raved about that until the day he died.
MARTY LACKER: Two days after Dr. Nick and the others sued Elvis over the racquetball deal, Vernon filed for divorce from Dee. They’d been married almost seventeen years. Elvis never had accepted her. But three years before, when Dee left after she caught on about Sandy Miller, Elvis offered her $10,000 to come back.
Towards the end, the only reason Elvis was civil to Dee was because Vernon asked him to try to talk her into not demanding a whole lot of money. Elvis could turn on the charm anytime he wanted to, even with Dee. So he called her and said, “Well, I know you’ve been good, and you don’t want to hurt my dad. So if you want to be set up in something, I’ll give you the money.” But that was strictly to get her to back off. She ended up getting a quarter of a million dollars.
The divorce was final in November. They got it in the Dominican Republic, the same place Lisa Marie [later] went to get a quickie divorce from [musician] Danny Keough and marry Michael Jackson.
LAMAR FIKE: At the end of May, Elvis played Baltimore, and he was in no shape to be performing. He fell onstage during the first half, and then right in the middle of the show, he completely left the stage for thirty minutes. J.D. said he was just having trouble with his colon, but they had a doctor look at him. Boy, the press got all over him. Said he looked high on drugs and everything else.
The next day, some broad who called herself a psychic got on the radio in Boston and said Elvis would die soon. Then another woman said the same thing on TV in L.A. in July. I don’t believe in that shit, but this one guy in Philadelphia, Marc Salem, was pretty scary. On August 12, he not only predicted Elvis’s death but the exact headlines in all three of the Philadelphia papers. He wrote ’em down and put ’em in an aspirin box and had it baked inside a fuckin’ pretzel.
MARTY LACKER: On June 19, CBS started taping Elvis in Omaha for their Elvis in Concert TV special. This is the one that was shown in October, after his death. Most of it was shot in Rapid City, South Dakota, a couple days later in June.
That whole thing never should have happened. When I saw what Elvis looked like, tears came to my eyes. And I got angry at the greedy bastards who let that go on the air—Colonel and Vernon—just because CBS waved $750,000 under their nose.
They professed that they loved this man, and then they allowed him to be shown like that—so big and bloated, forgetting the words to songs, slurring his speech. He was like some kind of clown, making fun of himself in this self-mocking way. You look at it, and it’s shocking. There’s no other word for it.
They made Elvis a laughingstock. I’ll give the estate credit—that’s the one video they won’t license for distribution. But even then, Elvis’s voice, like on “How Great Thou Art,” was still strong. His talent never faltered.
My daughter, Sheri, is friends with Kathy Westmoreland. She talked to her a couple of days after Elvis died, and Kathy told her that when they were taping the CBS special, Elvis said he was concerned about the way he looked. Then he said, “I’ll tell you one thing. I may not look good now, but I’ll look good in my coffin.”
LAMAR FIKE: On June 26, we were in Indianapolis. That was the last show on the tour. We were on the airplane, on the ground, and Elvis walked off to accept some plaque from RCA. And he was so tired. I said, “Boys, I’m going to give you one of my great speeches. He’ll never see the snow fly. I promise you.”
BILLY SMITH: He had nearly two months off before the next tour. Basically, all we did was sit up in his room and talk. During those times, it was always just one-on-one. He didn’t like to get real emotional around a bunch of people. And usually, something was bothering him. A lot of times we’d get into it heavy, and a lot of times we wouldn’t. He’d wait for you to start the conversation.
Sometimes we’d just carry on a bunch of nonsense—just total damn craziness, in a comic way. We were liable to do that for hours, going off on things we’d seen in the Monty Python movies. You know how nutty they are. We used to do that all the time. People would have thought we were plumb crazy if they’d heard us and hadn’t seen the movies. But we knew what we were carrying on about. It made perfect sense to us. That was to relieve his pressure.
When we got talking kind of heavy and all, there were four or five things he focused on a lot. He went back over stuff that he really got into, like the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War—things he discussed in private but never discussed in public because Colonel didn’t like it.
But Red and Sonny’s book was the most important thing on his mind because it was fixin’ to come out in August. He was back to talking about having Red and Sonny killed. He said, “As good as I’ve been to those dirty sons’ of bitches, how could they do this?” He said, “They don’t deserve to live.” He’d just go stark raving mad. But that was total malarkey. He never would have followed through with anything like that in a million years.
Knowing how he was, I played off of it, though. You had to. This one time, I said, “Look, they’re not worth it. And anyway, you know it wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t even change how you feel about them. You know that deep down you still care about them, and that’s what really gets you.”
And he broke down and cried. It wasn’t just a few tears. He was sobbing. And I cried with him because I couldn’t stand to see him in that kind of pain. So I leaned over and hugged him. He said, “You’re right.” But then he said, “Goddamn them! At times, I get so mad I really want to kill them. And if they hurt my career, I will have them killed.”
I had read part of the book, so I knew basically what it said. This one day, he said, “I can’t wait to read that damn book.” I said, “Don’t waste your time. You don’t want to read it.” He asked, “Why?” I said, “It says that you’re a drug addict and a son of a bitch. That’s all it is.”
But I said, “How many things have been written about you over the years?” He said, “I don’t know. Millions, I guess.” I said, “Right. So it’s not going to make any difference. It’ll blow up for a short period of time, and then it’ll be over.” And I think that helped him. Because he did read some excerpts of it, best I remember.
MARTY LACKER: In July of ’77, when I was living in Irvine, California, I had to go up to L.A. on business. And while I was there, I went by Esposito’s apartment to see him. We sat and talked for a while. And through him and Billy, I exchanged messages with Elvis. My business was going slow, and I mentioned it to Joe. And later, Joe was talking to Billy, and he told Billy to tell Elvis. One day, I opened the mail, and Elvis had sent me a damn check for $1,500. And I sent a message of how much I appreciated it. That’s basically the last time we heard from each other.
BILLY SMITH: Close to the end of his life, in the last few months, Elvis was paranoid about everything. By that time, he wanted me there twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes he didn’t even want Jo. And he stopped George from coming up to the house, period. The only time he would see anybody was on tour.
He was starting to get like Howard Hughes. Because now he wasn’t just paranoid about people—he was paranoid about germs. Yet he still didn’t like to bathe. We were playing racquetball one day, and he had this big Jacuzzi upstairs in the racquetball building. I tried to get him to get in it afterwards, mainly because Dr. Nick had said, “Try to get him to take a bath and relax.”
I went up to him and said, “If I put the water in the whirlpool, do you think you might want to get in and unwind?” He said, “Sure.” So we went upstairs, and I got the water going, and Elvis come in and looked at it. I said, “Looks nice, doesn’t it?” And he said, “If you think it looks that damn nice, you get in it. I’m going to my room.” So he went on, with a towel wrapped around his head. He wouldn’t have taken a bath for anything. But he washed his hair constantly. And brushed his teeth.
On August 8, a week before he died, Elvis rented Libertyland, which was the new name for the fairgrounds. Lisa Marie was there, and Elvis always took her to ride the Fender Bender and the Little Dipper. Well, when it come time to actually go, he didn’t want to. Ginger got upset because she was taking her niece, Amber. Elvis told her, “Everybody out there has already gone home.”
And Ginger come back at him with “Why, Elvis, you told me one time that you could do anything.” So he felt like he had to go. But his enthusiasm was gone, and it showed. And it was depressing to him. First, the spark of the old group had left. And now he didn’t feel comfortable around young people anymore.
LAMAR FIKE: I think Elvis had planned to fire me for good after the next tour—the one he never took. According to Charlie Hodge, Elvis said, “I can’t face Lamar. Fire him for me.” So I guess I was out of there, too. Billy says Elvis was tired of hearing me bitch.
BILLY SMITH: When depression started coming over Elvis, he usually had to get out of it quick. But sometimes he liked to be miserable, and he liked for you to be miserable with him. If you were up, and if he was miserable, he had a way of bringing you right down into his world.
The last day or two before he died, Red and Sonny’s book was on his mind more so, I guess because it had been out about two weeks. He was scared of how his fans and the public would react to it. And he couldn’t sleep.
At times he would put it aside and be happy. Because he was excited about the tour. And then he’d get right off of that, and all the happiness would drain out of him. And he’d be so depressed he’d just go through hell. He was having a real hard time coping.
He started imagining what people were going to say to him about it when he was onstage. He worried about somebody yelling out things like “Hey, drug addict!” or “Aw, hell, you’re wiped out.” So he started thinking of things he would say if that happened.
At first, he thought he’d just say that a lot of things had been written about him, good and bad, and that he was not a perfect person. He still wasn’t going to admit that he abused drugs or even that he was on pretty heavy medication. And then he thought he’d say, “No, I’m not a drug addict. Sure I take certain things, but I need them. And here’s my doctor. He’ll tell you.” And he was going to introduce Dr. Nick. At first, he thought he’d jot something down. And then he decided to play it by ear and hope that everything went well.
He just anguished over this something awful. And finally, he said that if it was necessary—in other words, if he was confronted by his audience—he’d tell them he had a message he wanted to give them. And he had a little speech ready. He didn’t write it down. But he had it in his mind, and he told me about it. He was not going to deny anything. He was going to go ahead and say he had a problem with drugs.
It went something like “I know you’ve read a lot about me over the years. And after this tour, I’m going to take time to get myself straightened out.” Because he finally realized, “The best defense is no defense at all.” He was just going to open up and say, “This is what’s happening.” But only if the audience got hostile—if they started booing and throwing things.
Still, that was a giant step, to say he knew he needed treatment and that he was going to get it. He’d always dealt with things by sticking his head in the sand. But when he realized that the book was real, then he saw, “I’m not beyond striking distance, if somebody really wants to get back at me.” And he faced reality for one of the few times in his life. He was just so desperate.
MARTY LACKER The decision to give that speech was such a turning point for Elvis that it just compounds the tragedy of his death. For the first time, he was going to own up to his problems.
LAMAR FIKE: On August 14, Elvis started a sort of pre-tour fast to lose weight. Of course, he was leaving on the sixteenth, so that didn’t give him a hell of a lot of time. But Elvis was the type of person who would go on a diet today and try to lose fifty pounds by one o’clock. At one point, I think he was eating nothing but no-cal Jell-O ten times a day.
BILLY SMITH: This was only a ten-city tour and not to places where he’d get a lot of media attention—Utica, New York; Lexington, Kentucky; Roanoke, Virginia—but he was thinking, “God, maybe I can get the weight off.” Knowing he couldn’t, but still making an effort. He was just under so much pressure.
At the time he died, he was on a liquid protein diet, which didn’t help matters with all those drugs in him. On the fourteenth, he tried on the new jumpsuit he was going to wear on the tour. It was powder blue, with silver trim and studs. And when he put it on, it didn’t fit. And boy, he was upset, because now he was going to have to wear one of his old jumpsuits on the tour. At first, he blamed it on the people who made the suit. And then he turned to me and said, “Billy, I’m just too damn fat.”
He always got excited before a tour. Got real hyped up. But this time, while he was excited, it was like he was tired, and he was really pushing himself to make it.
LAMAR FIKE: The last time I talked to Elvis was two or three days before he died. I was managing a guy named Little David Wilkins, and I got a deal for him with Playboy Records. And before I flew to Portland, Maine, to meet the Colonel for Elvis’s two dates there on the sevententh and eighteenth, I needed to fly Little David to Los Angeles to sign the Playboy contract. We were going to go out to the [Playboy] mansion to do some stuff with [Hugh] Hefner.
Right before I left, I called Elvis on the hot line. He had a red phone, just like the president, and I think the only people who had the number were Joe and me. He answered, and I said, “How you doing?” He said, “Oh, Lamar . . . hell, you know, I’m tired.” He said, “I don’t feel good. I’m having trouble with my eye again. I got David Meyer [the ophthalmologist] coming over to check it.”
I said, “Elvis, you can cancel a tour twenty-four hours before it starts.” And he said, “Lamar, I need the money. I’ve got to keep everything going.” I said, “Well, I know that. But what if everybody just quits? Let’s shut it all down and take six months to a year off. Let’s go to Hawaii. Do something. Anything. See if we can go to Europe, so you can get it all together.”
He said, “Lamar, I’d love to do it, but I’ve got this obligation.” I said, “Well, man, keep yourself together.” He said, “Yeah, I will.”
I flew on to L.A. And the night before the tour started, I called Joe. I said, “Joe, Elvis is in bad shape. I’m going to tell you flat across the board, we’re not going to make this tour.” I said, “He’s going to die, or something’s going to happen. But we are not going to make it.” And Joe said, “Lamar, he’ll be standing over our graves. He’ll see us all dead.”
I’m not a clairvoyant, but, boy, when everything starts pointing to something, and it’s so blatant that you can’t ignore it, you’ve got to face the inevitable. He was dying by inches, right in front of us.