Elvis The Last 24 Hours (Albert Goldman)

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The sizzling, sensational love story that starts where
Priscilla Presley’s bestselling autobiography left off!
PRJSOLIA
ELVIS
DR ^E
an
MICHAEL EDWARDS
Michael Edwards’ passionate romance with Priscilla Presley
burned hot and fast. From the early, heady days of sexual
passion and romantic bliss, to the terrible fights sparked by
Lisa Marie’s blossoming womanhood, Priscilla, Elvis and Me
is a love story that is wrenching in its honesty and unflinching
in its telling—an intimate look at a “perfect" love in a frozen
moment of time...in the shadow of a legend.
With 16 pages of intimate photos!
PRISCILLA, ELVIS AND ME
by Michael Edwards
91643-4 $5.95 U.S. _ 91644-2 $6.95 Can.
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LIBERACE: THE TRUE STORY
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'0
Tfc-a SfeT? d Jerry Lea Lets®

fe; Leras eh5 E3mw §8^
Here's te complete r.a-holds-bamed truth about Jeny Lee Leras—a

bootlegger’s son who became a Rock W Roll Hal! of Ferner and Elvis'
closest rival, told by his child bride and wife of thirteen years, ftftyra
Lewis. It's al! here: ths devilish sprees of drunkenness, assaults,
divorce, scandal and hard rockin', piano-bashing music...The God
fearing spates of repentance, generosity, and Bible quoting... And the
indelible m-stt he left on pep music with such wrarfd-shaking hits as
"Grest Balls of Fire" and “Whale Lot of ShoSon’Get ready for an
incredible rock 'n' roller-coaster ride through love, fame, hard times
and amazing triumphs rath the greatest fireball of them all...Jerry
Lee Leras.
Pto a major motion picture starving

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GBF10/C9
THEAUTOBIOGRAPHYOF
by Sidney Zion
“FASCINATING!”—New York Post
There were no neutrals in Roy Cohn’s life.
His Mends saw him as a patriot, a loyal pal, a fearless
attorney and a party-thrower nonpareil
His enemies knew him as a native fascist, Joe McCarthy’s
brains, and the legal executioner of Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg.
Renowned journalist, lawyer and author, Sid Zion was a
trusted friend of Cohn’s for over 20 years. During the last
years of his life, Cohn worked closely with Zion to
fashion this book. The results are explosive.
With 8 pages of candid photos.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ROY COHN
by Sidney Zion
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York, N.Y 10010.
ELVIS: THE LAST 24 HOURS
Copyright © 1991 by Albert Goldman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written per
mission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Mar
tin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Printed in the United States of America
St. Martin's Paperbacks edition/January 1991
10 987654321
©EATH ©F A KSNS
Ginger, who has been drifting in and out of
sleep, awakens again after nine. She notices some
thing strange: normally, by this time, Elvis has
become groggy and nodded out. But Elvis is not
1
only awake, he appears extremely restless. He is
lying on his side of the bed dressed in pajamas
and reading a book about psychic energy. Ginger
attributes his mood to anxiety about the upcom
ing tour.
Suddenly, Elvis gets up. Looking down at Gin
ger, he says, “Precious, I’m gonna go in the bath
room and read for a while."
"OK,” she sighs. "But don't fall asleep.”
He smiles. "Don't worry. I won’t."
The next time Ginger awakes is at two in the
morning. Elvis's place on the side of the bed
nearest the door is still empty, but the reading
lamp is on.
After making a couple of phone calls, Ginger
gets up, unsure where Elvis is. She knocks on the
bathroom door. Receiving no response, she
knocks again and again. "Elvis? ... Elvis?" Reluc
tantly, she finally opens the door a little and peers
inside. What she sees is startling....
also by Albert Goldman
WAGNER ON MUSIC AND DRAMA

(with Everett Sprinchom)
THE MINE AND THE MINT
FREAKSHOW
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN—
LENNY BRUCE!!
CARNIVAL IN RIO
DISCO
GRASS ROOTS
ELVIS
THE LIVES OF JOHN LENNON
For
Jere Herzenberg
*
I
THE
LAST
►
24
WE
CentenSs
1. 3 IN THE BACK OF THE LIMO 1
2. 3 SIGNALING SUICIDE 13
■ 3. a THE LIFERS 27
4. S SUSTAINING THE ATTACK 33
5. Bl GETTING THE LEAD OUT 43
6. s TREADMILL TO INSOLVENCY 51
7. 3 KISS AND KILL

► 3. TENT SHOW ON TV
61
75
9. Q KITH AND KIN 83
10. ■ GINGERBREAD 97
11. 3 A CRACK IN THE KING'S CROWN 111
12. Bl TAKIN’ CARE OF BUSINESS 115
13. THE BRIDE WORE GLASS 121
vii
ALBERT GOLDMAN
14. RACQUETS AT DAWN 133
15. □ "BREATHE FOR ME!” 143
16. D.O.A. 157
17. □ ELVIS—WHAT HAPPENED? 161
18. □ AFTERWORD 177
Acknowledgments 191
viii
In the Back
of the Limo
Monday, August 15,1977:
Memphis is in the grip of a
heat wave. Every morning, after a warm,

moist, semitropical night, the temperature
begins a rapid climb toward the century
mark. The windows of air-conditioned houses
are misted with condensation. The air feels
gummy. The heat shimmers off the pave
ment. The sun glares like a broiling ring.
At Graceland, a conventional suburban
1
ALBERT GOLDMAN
house glamorized by the white columns of an

antebellum Southern manse, nothing is mov
ing. There is no building or fixing. No party
ing or playing. At most there is an occasional
childish squeal as Lisa Marie, Elvis Presley’s
nine-year-old daughter, buzzes around the
driveways in her customized, powder-blue
golf cart.
Upstairs in the master bedroom, on a nine-
by-nine-foot, double-king-size bed, her fa
1
mous father is laid out cold. He has been
unconscious for ten hours. Now, at 4 p.m., he
is accustomed to rising.
I
The room he lies in feels like a meat locker.
Outside, a passing thunderstorm has driven
the temperature down to 78 degrees, but it
will soon start to climb back. Inside this
room, it will remain a steady 68 degrees. In
addition to the cold air blowing through the
air-conditioning ducts, a massive window
unit next to the bed labors around the clock
to keep this chamber chilled. Elvis earns his
bread by the sweat of his brow. When he's
cooling out, he doesn't want to feel any heat.
He doesn’t want to see any daylight either.
The large windows designed to offer sweep
ing views of Graceland’s sunlit lawns have
2
been permanently sealed. The panes are bur

ied under the same stuff that shrouds the
walls: long strips of black fake suede studded
with black buttons. The only illumination is
provided by the soft glow of cove lights shin
ing on a ceiling covered with black-speckled,
r
golden-green Naugahyde.
Confined inside this upholstered shell re
sembling the back seat of a limousine, Elvis
lies for days on end, drifting in and out of
consciousness. He seeks in oblivion an escape
from all the sorrows that have made his life
unbearable. The explanation for his strange
existence is found in a phrase that is con
stantly on his lips: "It’s better to be uncon
scious than miserable.”
The key to oblivion is narcotics. Elvis has
long been a drug addict, even a hard addict.
Now he is a terminal addict. His whole life
revolves around drugs, and there isn’t the
slightest possibility that he will ever get off
them. When one of his drug doctors recently
denied his request to be knocked out for three
days straight, Elvis stepped onto a cocktail
table, whipped out two .45s, and started fir
ing into the ceiling of his suite at the Hilton.
"I’ll buy me a god-damned drugstore!" he
cried—and went out to make the purchase.
3
ALBERT GOLDMAN
Every night when he retires, he takes

enough pills to stun a horse—ostensibly be
cause he suffers from chronic insomnia. To
deal with this complaint, Elvis's personal
physician, Dr. George Nichopolous, has de
signed a bizarre drug protocol that has be
come the primary ritual of the King’s court.
At 4 a.m., the earliest hour at which Elvis
can consider going to sleep—his whole life
having been that of a noctambule, a man who
lives by night—he will get into his blue,
green, or yellow nylon pajamas (assuming he
ever got out of them that day) and lie back in 4
bed with his head elevated by three pillows.

When he stretches out under his crimson
coverlet, he resembles a big pregnant woman,
because his 250 pounds are concentrated in
his belly. Elvis at 42 bears a striking resem
blance to his mother, Gladys, who died at 46.
His dyed, blue-black hair and puffy, moon
shaped face are reminiscent of hers. The eyes
are especially alike, set deep in their sockets,
where the skin is so dark that it appears to
have been tinted. This physical similarity
suggests the deep spiritual identity between
mother and son. It is as if after a lifetime of
feeling an extraordinary closeness to her, El-
4
► ELVIS: THE LAST 24 HOURS
vis had finally become his mother. Where

Gladys was a surreptitious drinker and alco
holic, he is a secret drug addict. She damaged
her health so badly that she went to an early
grave, just as he will do. Off in one corner of
the room on an easel is her sepia-toned pic
ture. As he lies here, he often contemplates it,
recollecting his past but also foreseeing his
doom.
When he has settled himself in bed, he says
to his aide, "Gimme my first attack." He uses
this word for his sleeping pills because he
wants them to knock him out.
The aide, always a muscular young man
long accustomed to this service, produces a
little Manila envelope stuffed with eleven
pills and three small, disposable syringes
loaded with Demerol. These drug packets are
dispensed by Dr. Nichopolous’ head nurse,
Letetia "Tish" Henley. She works all day at
the doctor's office, but in the evening she
returns to a mobile home on the grounds of
Graceland (which she shares with her hus
band, Tommy, a handyman on the estate),
where she resides for the express purpose of
monitoring Elvis's drug consumption.
Now the aide pours the brightly colored
5
ALBERT GOLDMAN
pills and capsules—Elvis calls them "my lit

tle jewels”—into his boss’s cupped hand.
Then he stands back as Elvis downs the drugs
with quick, practiced motions, chasing them
with sips from a glass of spring water.
When Elvis has swallowed all the pills, he
rolls out of bed and removes his pajama top.
The aide examines Elvis’s acne-blotched
back for a good place to inject the Demerol.
Elvis likes to get jabbed under the shoulder
I
blades next to the spine. There isn’t a spot on <1
his back or his hips, his buttocks or his
thighs, that hasn’t been punctured countless
times. This constant needling has so cal
loused his hide that its leathery surface some
times makes the needle bend.
The pills are mostly central nervous system
depressants, primarily the barbiturates Amy
tal, Carbrital, Nembutal, or Seconal. All are
habit-forming and all lose their effectiveness
quickly as the user develops tolerance, which
obliges Elvis to step up the dosage. This pro
gression is fraught with danger because the
increase in tolerance is not matched by a
comparable increase in the level at which the
dose becomes lethal. Every drug textbook
contains a diagram showing how these two
6
lines approach each other until they meet. At

that point, the user dies.
The little envelope also contains Placidyl
and Quaalude, chemically different from the
barbiturates but similar in effect—and just
as dangerous. There is also Valium, the tran
quilizer that has become America’s most
abused drug, and Valmid, a hypnotic usually
prescribed for insomnia. Demerol is a seda
tive and painkiller, a common substitute for
morphine but no less addictive. Elvis's pain
is entirely psychological.
Mixing any of these drugs requires caution.
Taking them all at once is insane. It amounts
to laying your life on the line every time you
lay your head on the pillow. To take this risk
daily, as Elvis has done for years, is an act
that appears to have no precedent in medical
history. Norman Weissman, Ph.D., director of
operations at Bio-Sciences Laboratories in
Van Nuys, California, which made an assay of
the chemicals found in Elvis's body at death,
testified that he had never seen so many
drugs in one specimen.
The enormous volume and variety of these
drugs cannot be explained exclusively in
medical terms. They express Elvis Presley’s
7
ALBERT GOLDMAN
essential character as a creature of boundless

and insatiable appetite. Once likened to a
young Dionysus, driving his demented fol
lowers into screaming ecstasies, Elvis is ac
tually a lot closer to the infant Gargantua,
I
that giant baby whose prodigious appetites
for food and drink are matched by an equally
awesome craving for creature comforts, like
the voluptuous satisfaction of using the soft,
downy neck of a goose to wipe his ass.1
(
I
NOTES
1. Elvis's addiction to drugs has tradition

ally been traced back to a U.S. Army sergeant
in Germany who gave his men pills to keep
them awake on night patrol. The implication
of this story is that Elvis was innocently
hooked on drugs in the course of doing his
duty. The fact is that Elvis was running on
speed for years before his induction; the only
question has been when and how he got
started. Recently, Colin Escott, the author of
a forthcoming book on Sun Records, pub
lished an interview in Goldmine with a man
8
named Jimmy Denson, who knew Elvis well

during his teenage years in Memphis. When
Escott asked Denson what had transformed
the shy, mute, passive "Baby Elvis” of those
years into the Hillbilly Cat, he replied:
"Drugs. He needed ’em to come out of him
self. Dewey Phillips (the first DJ to play an
Elvis record [and a notorious speed freak])
gave them to him.... He took amphetamines,
Benzedrine, to give him energy.” The critical
moment in any man’s drug history is not,
however, the day he starts taking drugs but
the day drugs start taking him. For Elvis, this
moment came in the wake of his breakup
with Priscilla Presley in 1972. From that time
on, Elvis was hopelessly drug-dependent and
increasingly addicted to a wide range of
drugs, especially barbiturates and narcotics.
A few years after Elvis’s death, in January
1980, Dr. Nichopolous was summoned to a
hearing by the Tennessee Board of Examiners
to face a complaint that he had overpres
cribed drugs for twenty patients, including
Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley. The board
found Nichopolous in violation of its pre
scribing rules in ten cases, suspending his
medical license for three months and putting
him on probation for three years. In May he
9
ALBERT GOLDMAN
was indicted on twelve counts of overpres

cribing by a Shelby County grand jury. He
was tried in October and defended by James
F. Neal, the Watergate prosecutor. After a
trial of five weeks, Nichopolous was acquitted
on all charges. Legal observers attributed the
verdict partly to the skill of the defending
lawyer and partly to the blunders of the local
prosecutors. Neal's basic defense was the
“Good Samaritan" argument, i.e., that Ni
chopolous had undertaken the treatment of a
difficult, perhaps hopeless case, recognizing
the danger to his professional reputation but
impelled by the feeling that it was his duty
as a physician to save his patient from the
dangers posed by less scrupulous practition
ers or by the acquisition of drugs from illegal
sources.
Another line of defense was the contention
that Nichopolous had prescribed such large
quantities of drugs—over 19,000 doses in the
last 3P/2 months of Elvis’s life—on the as
sumption that these drugs would be shared
by other members of the entourage but that
the bill would be paid by Elvis. Apart from
the fact that this defense rests on the admis
sion of conduct that most would condemn, it
10
does not square with certain other facts. Ni-

chopolous did prescribe for members of the
entourage under their own names, as is evi
denced by another count in the same indict
ment, that concerning Marty Lacker, who
received in eleven months 1,745 Placidyls, or
roughly five pills a day. Furthermore, the
total number of doses that Elvis would have
required to maintain his sleeping protocol at
the point he had reached when he died yields
a figure of 5,110 for a single year. If to this
number is added all the additional drugs
required for Elvis's maintenance both at
home and on the road, where his needs were
greatly increased by the demands of daily
performance, the tally of 19,000 doses in 31V2
months does not seem unreasonable for Elvis
alone.
11
Signaling Suicide
Elvis is lucky to be alive. Time
and again he has overdosed and been hauled

back from the grave by frantically summoned
doctors or paramedics. The mounting num
ber of these crises coupled with the steady
increase in his drug intake makes it almost
certain that sooner or later he will die from
drugs.1 That in the face of these warnings he
plunges ever deeper into drugs is a sign of his
13
I—
ALBERT GOLDMAN
yearning for death. As he often observes, "It’s

so easy to die and so hard to live.”
Recently, he has alarmed many of his clos
est associates by acting as if he might be
thinking of killing himself. Suicide runs in
the family. Two of Elvis's cousins, Junior and
Bobby Smith, took their own lives, the latter
by swallowing arsenic. Elvis talks about
death constantly. When he went onstage in
June to be filmed for his upcoming TV spe
cial, he said to his men, "I may not look good
now, but I’ll look good in my coffin.” When
his fiancee's grandfather died in January, El
vis attended the funeral. Contemplating the
body, he remarked, "It won't be long until
I’m there.” Elvis speaks enviously of the ka
hunas, the Hawaiian sorcerers and healers
who claim they can predict the precise mo
ment of their dissolution. "His overall atti
tude was die, die, die,” recollects David Stan
ley, Elvis’s stepbrother. “He talked himself
into death.”
Even the most consoling moments of El
vis’s current life turn grim when he reviews
them. Recently he visited his ex-wife, Pris
cilla, at her home near Benedict Canyon in
Beverly Hills. They had a moment of comfort-
14
ing intimacy. Elvis was gratified, but as he

drove home, his conversation assumed a som
ber tone. "Everything's all right,” he told
David. "Lisa will be fine.”
"Why are you talking like that?” asked
David, sensing the finality of Elvis’s words.
"You'll see her again.”
"We'll see,” replied Elvis.
All this talk about death is perhaps a warn
ing, a sign that Elvis is not only working up
his nerve to do the deed but at the same time
signaling those around him that he wants to
be stopped. If that is his purpose, he has
succeeded, because the members of his inti
mate circle are very concerned about him—
but there is virtually nothing they can do to
save him.
A little Caesar, he has made himself all-
powerful in his kingdom, reducing everyone
around him to a sycophant or hustler. No
body has the authority to address Elvis Pres
ley as an equal. Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s
manager, comes the closest, but the two have
never been friendly and in recent years their
relationship has become increasingly distant
and hostile. Elvis has threatened to fire the
Colonel, and Parker has been seeking recently
15
ALBERT GOLDMAN
to sell his 50 percent interest in everything

Elvis earns.
Love has no more influence on Elvis than
money. His closest female companion after
the breakup of his marriage was Linda
Thompson, a former Miss Tennessee, who was
in many ways the ideal woman for Elvis be
cause she had the unique ability to suit her
self to all his moods and fulfill all his needs.
One moment, she would be the sexy Southern
belle, the next, the consoling mother, croon
ing over her "baby buntin’ ” in the same style
as Elvis's desperately missed Gladys. Linda
was no weakling and no fool. She saw where
the drugs were taking Elvis, and she sought
to reason with him—to no avail. On the tours,
Elvis would get zonked and Linda would be
left to her own devices. She would knock on
David's door and say, "I need some atten
tion.” Eventually, she got involved with El
vis's piano player, David Briggs. He wasn’t
anything special, but at least he was awake.
Elvis always heeded his mother, but his
father he scorns. A weakling, a malingerer,
always averse to work and responsibility,
Vernon forged a check when Elvis was three
and was sent to prison. Subsequently, he was
16
kicked out of his hometown, Tupelo, Missis

sippi, for moonshining. As a youngster, Elvis
resented his father and resents him still un
der his show of concern for the old man, who
is now so ill with heart disease that the doc
tor has forbidden him to walk more than fifty
feet without a rest.
Recently, Vernon’s second wife, Dee, left
him because she discovered that he was car
rying on with a muse in her forties named
Sandy Miller, whom he takes out on Elvis's
tours. Sandy is a kind and caring woman,
very suitable for Vernon, but Elvis wants his
father back with his lawful wife. Just the
other day, he said to David, "Tell Dee I’ll give
her $10,000 if she'll come over here and talk
about getting back with Daddy.” The rela
tions of father and son are reversed in the
Presley family: Vernon is the black sheep, and
Elvis bears all the paternal responsibility.
The man who should be the most con
cerned with Elvis’s addictions is Dr. Nicopo-
lous. He does try to cut off the flow of drugs
to Elvis from other sources, and sometimes
he reduces Elvis’s intake slightly by substi
tuting placebos for the real thing.2 But on
those occasions when Dr. Nick has quit his
17
ALBERT GOLDMAN
job, Elvis has simply taken up with another,

more compliant doctor. Medicine is a busi
ness as well as a profession. Elvis is a good
customer. There are plenty of doctors who
would jump at the chance to be the court
physician.
As for Elvis, he regards drugs as his only
consolation. Though the world delights in
picturing him as the man who has every
thing, Elvis has always suffered from feelings
of deprivation. Though pampered as a child,
he felt humiliated by his family’s poverty and
their status as residents in a city project that
also housed blacks. A hapless student, who
was ostracized because of his bizarre clothes
and hair styles, he dreamed of becoming a
gospel singer, which has always remained his
favorite form of music. But he soon aban
doned gospel because the money was in rock
’n’ roll.
His first two years in the big time were
crowned with such stunning success that no
matter what his reservations about the music
he was singing, he had to regard himself as
the luckiest boy in the world. But his best
years were followed immediately by his worst
years, when he was drafted into the army and
sent to Germany.
18
Even more galling than the fear that he

would never regain the position he com
manded before he entered the service was the
thought that he had been tricked by Colonel
Parker into putting himself into- the hands of
the military. Parker, fearing perhaps that he
was losing control of his famous "boy,” had
persuaded Elvis to volunteer for a physical
examination even before his number had
been called by the local draft board. Once he
was classified 1A, he was soon obliged to
11 serve. His mother was distraught over the
enforced separation. Soon she sickened and
died of hepatitis. She had been Elvis’s life
long confidante, the only person he trusted
completely. Her death affected him pro
foundly and marked the second great turning
point in his life.
When Elvis was discharged from the army
in 1960, he went out to Hollywood to resume
his career in pictures. Feeling bereft and vul
nerable, he instituted the "Memphis Mafia,”
those companions of the feed bucket who
became Elvis’s living bulwark, shoring up his
ego and insulating him from the alien envi
ronment of Hollywood. Though he was now
in a position to realize his greatest ambition,
19
ALBERT GOLDMAN
to be a major film star, his movie career ran

down swiftly under Colonel Parker's crassly
exploitative direction. The Presley beach
party picture became the laughingstock of
the industry. What was worse, the quality of
the music—written to order by hacks who
were willing to surrender one-third (later a
quarter) of their royalties to Elvis—declined
to such a low level that he went for years
without placing a new recording at the top of
the charts.
During this period, as if to compensate
himself for his failings in this world, Elvis
immersed himself in the study of spiritual
ism and developed messianic yearnings. Tak
ing his amazing success as a pop star as a
sign that he was the divinely appointed
"one,” he felt it was his fate to lead mankind
on to its next stage of development. (This idea
can be discerned in his futuristic costuming
in the Seventies and even in the selection of
Richard Strauss’s apocalyptic theme from
Thus Spoke Zarathustra as the Elvis fanfare.)
To the last moment of his life, Elvis suffered
from the failure of his destiny to lead him out
of the entertainment world and into some
higher sphere.
20
When the radical change in popular cul

ture that characterized the late Sixties finally
got through to Hollywood, one of its first
victims was Elvis Presley, who was now seen
as hopelessly out of date. He was banished
from the studios; his career stood in jeop
ardy. Even more alarming was the fact that
Elvis was broke. The man who used to make
three pictures a year at a million bucks
apiece had gone through all his money. He
and his manager, so different in every way,
were alike in one thing: both were spend
thrifts, the one blowing his money on cars,
houses, and expensive toys, the other on rou
lette.
The revival of Elvis’s stage career at Las
Vegas in 1969 signaled an upturn, but it com
pleted his alienation from rock 'n' roll, which
was no longer simply a music for teenagers
but a whole new youth culture that conferred
upon its heroes wealth, fame, and power of a
sort never imagined by entertainers in any
other era. Elvis could have claimed his share
in this world, which he had largely created,
but instead, hypocritically, he turned away in
disgust from the long-haired, dope-smoking,
sexually liberated youth of the day to concen-
21
ALBERT GOLDMAN
trate on the now archaic show-biz world of

Vegas and its audience, the "over-thirties.”
Taking his Vegas showroom act out on the
road in the Seventies, Elvis has devoted him
self ever since to playing hundreds of one-
night stands in provincial stadiums and are
nas. Though he has survived as a great draw,
a man who can sell out any house in any
town, he has declined precipitously as a per
former and as a force in popular music.
His growing distaste for his mechanically
repetitive career has not inspired him, how
ever, to make any improvements in his show.
Rather it has tempted him to cut comers and
go for the gimmicks, turning his act into the
sort of performance that constitutes self
caricature. Now the mere thought of going
out on tours makes him groan. What he
yearns for is a release from the treadmill of
public performance.
Recently, Elvis has begun to settle his
moral accounts, as if in preparation for the
final judgement. A few weeks ago, he sum
moned to his presence Billy Stanley, his old
est stepbrother, whom he estranged years
since. At that time, Elvis was reeling from the
blow Priscilla struck him when she ran off
with karate champion Mike Stone. As if to
22
compensate himself for this injury, Elvis in

vited Billy's wife, Angie, to go motorcycling
with him and took her down to his Circle G
Ranch, just over the border in Walls, Missis
sippi, where he seduced her.3 The incident
destroyed the marriage and Elvis’s relation
ship with Billy, who was banished from
Graceland. Now Elvis craves forgiveness and
has begged for it tearfully from Billy, who
has granted it freely.
Even more troubling, Elvis is starting to
say farewell to all his closest associates. A few
days ago, Elvis said to Rickey Stanley,
"Rickey, I love you, man. I'll always be with
you.” Ambiguous, yes, but there can't be
much doubt about a similar statement made
the same day to David, who had come up to
Elvis's room to say goodbye before taking a
short trip to Nashville.
Instead of receiving a perfunctory wave,
David found himself being given a valedic
tory embrace and an ominous sounding fare
well. "Elvis put his arms around me,” recalls
David, "and hugged me as hard as he ever
had—weeping, crying. It felt like the hug he'd
given me seventeen years before, when I first
met him [as a child just arrived at Grace-
23
ALBERT GOLDMAN
land]. I said, ‘Well, Elvis, take care. Are you

sure you don’t need anything?' And he said,
‘No, I’ll be all right, David. I just wanna tell
you, I will never see you again. The next time
I see you will be in a better place, a higher ■I
plane. I love you very much.’ ”
Yet another disturbing feature of Elvis's
current behavior is the fact that he is con
stantly praying. It is not unusual to walk into
his room and find him down on his knees,
crying out in a loud voice, "God have mercy
upon me! Forgive me! God, help me! I can't
go on!”
NOTES
1. A study of Memphis prescription re

cords yielded the following tabulation of
drugs prescribed for Elvis by Dr. Nichopo-
lous:
Amphetamines Sedatives Narcotics

1975 1,296 1,891 910
1976 2,372 2,680 1,059
1977 1,790 4,996 2,019
24
These numbers demonstrate not only the

growing volume of Elvis’s drug consumption
but also a marked shift in balance between
uppers and downers.
2. Dr. Nick could only substitute placebos

to a limited extent. First, it is very difficult to
obtain placebos from the drug companies
because they don’t have them made up unless
they are running a test that demands then-
use. Second, they will not supply them unless
there is some reason offered that would mo
tivate them to have their manufacturers fill
their patented capsules with lactose, or milk
sugar. Nothing else but these capsules would
serve the purpose, however, because a close
student of drugs like Elvis Presley would in
stantly detect a substitute. Finally, a vastly
experienced drug addict such as Elvis could
not be deceived into thinking that an injec
tion of saline solution, which would produce
no effect, is the same thing as an injection of
a powerful drug like Demerol. Elvis could
have been fooled occasionally but not as a
rule nor to any considerable degree. He knew
exactly what he was supposed to be getting,
what it looked like, how it felt, and how long
25
ALBERT GOLDMAN
it was supposed to last. Woe to the man

caught cheating him!
3. In his book, Elvis My Brother (1989),

Billy Stanley identifies his wife by the pseu
donym "Annie.” Her maiden name was An
gela Payne and her nickname, "Angie” (like
wise the given name of David Stanley’s wife).
26
The Lifers
ernon Presley has grown

alarmed by his son’s recent behavior. Re
cently, he summoned his stepsons and told
them how troubled he was at the idea of Elvis
spending so much time in his room alone.
"Don’t leave him alone," he warned. "Get
yourself in there! Make yourself seen!"
Vernon’s fears are founded on an earlier
suicide attempt by Elvis. This was in 1967 on
27
ALBERT GOLDMAN
the eve of his marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu,

with whom he had been living for years. Elvis
despised matrimony, which would interfere
with his debauched lifestyle and saddle him
with the responsibilities of a husband and a
father, roles that were totally out of charac
ter. He sought through every means possible
to delay the dread event, but finally Colonel
Parker warned him that he was risking his
career by defaulting on his promise to Pris
cilla. Such a failure might incite her stepfa
ther, Colonel Beaulieu, to expose Elvis as a
man who had cohabited with a sixteen-year-
old girl whom he had lured to his side by
means of a commitment that he had now
violated.
Shame is a feeling that bites deep into
Elvis’s tender soul, and fear of besmirching
his image has been always his greatest buga
boo. It was by arousing his fear and shame
that Colonel Parker had coerced Elvis into
becoming the perfect G.I. Joe. He applied the
same pressures remorselessly to compel Elvis
to marry.
Roiling under this coercion, Elvis got into
a violent quarrel with Priscilla just before the
wedding. Temperamentally incapable of con-
28
fronting anyone face to face over a serious

issue and working out a solution, Elvis did
what he always did when the chips were
down—he threw a tantrum. Instead of smash
ing something or hurling a knife or firing a
pistol, he turned his uncontrollable rage back
on himself. Seizing a bottle of barbiturates,
he gulped down the contents and soon passed
out. He was found unconscious in his bed
room and the alarm was raised.
David Stanley remembers Vernon answer
ing the phone in their home and then scream
ing at the family, "My son tried to kill him
self!” Herding everyone into the car, Vernon
roared off to Graceland, where he ran up
stairs bawling, "Son, please don’t die! Don't
die!" David saw Elvis laid out in bed, coma
tose and ghostly pale. A tank of oxygen was
always kept in the house; when the paramed
ics arrived, they administered the gas to Elvis
and worked relentlessly to bring him around.
They were successful, but the memory of that
scene haunted Vernon.
The dangers posed by Elvis’s multiple drug
addictions have long been recognized in the
Presley circle, and drastic measures have
been taken to guard against them. For years
29
ALBERT GOLDMAN
now Elvis has been kept under full-time sur

veillance. Four men are currently assigned to
this duty, which is performed in 24-hour
watches that run from noon to noon, followed
by two or three days of liberty. The guards
sire highly conscious of the fact that they hold
Elvis’s life in their hands—hence their name
for themselves, the "lifers."
The lifers comprise two of Elvis’s three
stepbrothers, Rickey and David Stanley; his
wardrobe man, Al Strada (a Mexican security
guard from Elvis's house on Monovale Avenue
in Beverly Hills); and Dr. Nichopolous' son,
Dean, a college dropout. Never for a moment
dining his shift is a lifer supposed to be
beyond the call of his charge. Often the
guardians spend the entire time when Elvis
is asleep seated beside him.
Nobody outside of a hospital is more
closely watched or more frequently scruti
nized by medical personnel than is Elvis
Presley. His doctor looks in on him almost
every day, and a nurse is at his beck and call
all night.
Even the strictest watch, however, cannot
prevent a man from killing himself. These
precautions simply make it harder for Elvis
to commit suicide. Not only must he find a
30
way to stockpile all the pills he will need to

do the job, he must also find a way to elude
his guardians. Neither requirement presents
any great difficulty, but together they make
it unlikely that Elvis will knock himself off
impulsively in a momentary fit of depression.
To die, he will have to act with deliberation.
31
4
Sustaining
the Attack
u~'After he has taken his drugs,

Elvis eats his supper. It would be safer to take
the drugs after the meal, but experience has
shown that their effect is blunted if they are
taken on a full stomach. Elvis is always ex
tremely full after a meal because he is a
glutton. Though his entourage is always try
ing to make excuses for his obesity, blaming
it on retention of fluids or mysterious dis-
33
ALBERT GOLDMAN
eases, the fact is that Elvis has long been

grossly overweight from his prodigious con
sumption of all those foods most likely to put
fat on a man. Not only does he eat enormous
meals, he is an inveterate snacker who has a
small refrigerator in one of his bedroom clos
ets filled with Eskimo Pies, Fudgesicles, and
Nutty Buddys.
The only difference between Elvis today
and Elvis years ago is that now he can no
longer conceal his weight problem as he did
in the past by going on a crash diet before
every movie or public appearance. Now he is
out on the road all year long. What’s more,
he is so miserable and broken down that he
hasn’t the will power necessary to deprive
himself of one of his few remaining pleasures.
Elvis’s approach to eating is identical with
his approach to any source of enjoyment. His
attitude is “show me the good parts.’’ You
won't find him eating anything that isn’t fun.
So these days, he has gotten his supper down
to the essentials—three big cheeseburgers
and five or six banana splits. The food is
brought up from the kitchen—manned 24
hours a day—by one of the lifers or one of the
cooks, Mary Jenkins or Pauline Nicholson.
34
Set across Elvis’s thick thighs on a bed tray,

the dishes get cold quickly and sometimes
have to be replaced.
When Elvis eats, he is accustomed to talk
ing, often with his mouth full. This habit
increases the chances that he will choke on
his food, which is likely in any case because
the drugs numb the nerves in the throat that
control the swallowing reflex. When it fails,
the food goes down the wrong way. Countless
times Elvis’s attendants have saved his life by
reaching down his gullet and pulling out the
chunk of meat or bread that was strangling
him.
Elvis can't linger over his meal because the
drugs soon begin to take effect. As he gets
groggy, his eyelids droop, his tongue thick
ens, and his head nods. The guard is watching
Elvis closely, hoping that he will tip forward,
because when he tilts his head backward he
is most likely to choke. The trick now is to
get the tray away from him before he nods
out.
“Elvis, that’s enough!” warns the aide.
“No, ’s not,” mumbles Elvis, who can
barely speak. Finally he falls forward, and
the man grabs him, props him up, and lifts
35
ALBERT GOLDMAN
the tray off the bed. Then he seizes Elvis by

the ankles, pulls him down to a normal sleep
ing posture, and draws the coverlet over him.
Now the guard is free to kick back and relax
in the armchair near the bed. Turning his
attention to the 26-inch RCA console that
stands on a low, red-carpeted platform be
tween the windows in the wall facing the
bed—a set that is never turned off but gener
ally plays without sound—he turns up the
volume. Elvis is so drugged that the noise
does not disturb him.
Around 8 a.m. he will begin to stir. He’s too
stoned to talk, but he can move a little. He
may slip his foot out of bed toward the floor
or tug at the guard's shirt or pick a syringe
off the night table and waggle it. The first
task is to get him out of bed and into the
bathroom.
It would be dangerous to allow Elvis to
stand up and walk this short distance be
cause in his stupefied condition he could eas
ily stumble and fall. In fact, he is always
falling because his coordination is bad and
his attention unfocused. Once he cut his face
so badly that he had to go into the hospital
for plastic surgery. (The surgeon also tight-
36
ened up his sagging facial tissue and removed

the bags under his eyes.) Instead of allowing
I,
Elvis to stand, the guard will seize him by
the wrists, hoist him onto his back in a fire
man’s carry, and haul him into the bath
room. Once Elvis has relieved himself, he will
be dragged back to bed.
Now it is time for his second attack. An
other little yellow envelope stuffed with pills
and syringes is produced. This time the aide
has to play a more active role because Elvis
is virtually asleep. Each pill must be inserted
in his mouth and washed down carefully lest
he choke. Then he must be turned over so
that the guard can inject him in the buttocks.
Soon Elvis is out cold.
A few hours later, he begins to stir again.
This time when the guard hauls him out of
bed, he may discover that Elvis has soiled
himself. Incontinence is a natural conse
quence of knocking out all the bodily systems
that normally control muscles like the anal
sphincter and the bladder. On the average of
twice a week, Elvis has to be cleansed of the
feces or urine that has made a mess of his
pajamas, a duty that falls to the lifers.
When the guard gets Elvis back into his
37
ALBERT GOLDMAN
bed (changed meantime by the maid), he will

administer the third attack, identical to the
other two. This raises the question of why the
medication is not more effective. If a man
takes enough drugs to render him speechless
and incontinent, why shouldn't they at least
assure him a sound night’s sleep?
The answer lies, most likely, in the para
doxical character of Demerol, which is the
trade name for meperidine. Taken in small
doses for a short time, meperidine acts like
morphine to relieve pain. Taken in large doses
over a long period, it produces radically dif
ferent effects, including agitation, insomnia,
anxiety, and even seizures. The reason for this
reversal is the buildup in the body of another
drug, normeperidine, a product of the meta-
bolization of meperidine. Normeperidine is a
stimulant. So the irony of Elvis’s drug proto
col is that while it endangers his life, it is so
badly designed that it barely fulfills its pur
pose of rendering him unconscious for the
length of a normal night’s sleep.
Yet even if Elvis could sleep like a babe
every night of his life, he would not be satis
fied with his so-called medications, because
what he really craves is not rest but escape.
38
t ELVIS: THE LAST 24 HOURS
That is why every time he becomes pro

■X
foundly depressed, he orders up his private
four-engine jet, the Lisa Marie, and takes off
for Las Vegas, where he has a doctor who can
give him what he craves.
Dr. Elias Ghanem is a charming young
Lebanese, whose office stands behind the Hil
ton International, where he is the house doc
tor. A specialist in celebrities, Dr. Ghanem
has long applied himself to the peculiar prob
lems of his favorite patient. He has designed
a number of special treatments for Elvis,
including a remarkable rest cure.
To create the perfect setting for the cure,
Dr. Ghanem built a new bedroom suite be
hind his own on the second floor of his Span-
ish-style house in an exclusive development
adjacent to the greens of the Las Vegas Coun
try Club. The room is thickly carpeted with
shag and furnished with a large bed on a
dais, reflected in overhead and headboard
mirrors. The windows facing the golf course
are covered with heavy black shutters. The
bathroom is equipped with a large oval tub
in black plastic with gold fixtures, as well as
a Jacuzzi. Opposite the bed is a sink in a
similar style. The bookshelves under the win-
39
ALBERT GOLDMAN
dows are filled with Elvis's favorite spiritual

ist texts, including the blue-bound tracts of
Paramhansa Yogananda’s Self-Realization
Fellowship. Soft, dark, and quiet, the room
reflects Dr. Ghanem’s luxurious tastes while
echoing Elvis's bedroom at Graceland.
David has brought Elvis to this house five
or six times to take the cure, but the last time
they arrived, late in 1976, he was astonished
by how abruptly it began and how long it
lasted. On the flight to Vegas from Memphis,
Elvis was unusually cheerful. As David re
calls, "Elvis was up, talkin’, smokin’ a cigar,
cuttin' jokes—great flight out to Vegas!"
When the plane landed at a private facility,
“two black Mercedes pull up. Ghanem comes
aboard and goes into Elvis’s bedroom. We
have to literally carry Elvis down the steps
and put him in the back of the car!” The two
cars took off for Dr. Ghanem’s white-stuc
coed, red-tiled hacienda, where the aides car
ried Elvis upstairs and laid him out in bed.
For three whole days, he lay there uncon
scious. David was on hand the entire time but
was given no special instructions. He noticed
that Elvis breathed lightly but regularly, his
color normal but his skin cool. There were no
40
intravenous drips, but Elvis was most likely

catheterized. Dr. Ghanem would come in oc
casionally to look at his patient. At night,
usually, he was out. On the third day, David
resolved to ask what was happening.
"Is he dead?”
Dr. Ghanem smiled and shook his head.
"Elvis,” he explained, "just needed a rest.”
As odd as this "cure” may sound, in fact it
corresponds closely to a technique widely
used in Europe to get drug addicts through
the first and most difficult days of kicking.
Hospitalized, they are injected with sodium
amytal and knocked out for several days
while the body adjusts painlessly to its new
drug-free condition.
In Elvis's case, when he awoke from his
prolonged sleep, he would thank Ghanem
and leave for his own vacation house at Palm
Springs, where he would resume immedi
ately his usual immoderate consumption of
every drug that could get him up or down.
He would also reward his physician: in the
last few years, Dr. Ghanem has received from
the King a $42,000 Stutz-Blackhawk, a
$16,000 Mercedes, and a $40,000 horseshoe
shaped diamond ring.
41
► □ 5
Getting the
>
Lead Out
/hen Elvis finally comes out

of his nightly coma, in the late afternoon, he
is a wreck. Far from being refreshed, he is
groggy, disoriented, and barely able to func
tion. His skin is gray and greasy. His eyes
look like road maps. He desperately needs
help. His succor comes from the same source
as his slumbers—drugs.
Grabbing the phone beside his bed, he hits
43
ALBERT GOLDMAN
the button for the kitchen. When the cook

responds, he rumbles, "I’m up.” That's the
signal for the kitchen staff to turn to the
preparation of Elvis’s breakfast—a big order,
but one they will have plenty of time to fill.
In fact, they have already brewed up a carafe
of Elvis's special coffee, which is so strong
that it has the consistency of syrup.
Elvis, meantime, gets out of bed and cau
tiously crosses the room past the table with
the three monitoring screens (on which he
can view any part of the house and the front
lawn down to the gate) and into the room
that is jokingly called his "office" because he
spends so much time there and uses it to
conduct private business.
Unlike the bat-cave bedroom, the master
bathroom is a bright, efficient-looking space.
Covered in black and gold tiles, it is lit by a
bare window and rows of dressing-room
bulbs framing the big mirror above the sink
counter equipped with dual basins and gold
fixtures. The room is also provided with a
large circular shower stall and a low-slung,
black, modernistic toilet with a padded seat.
There's a chrome and black leather chair and
a standing lamp so that Elvis can read here—
44
!
the only truly private place in his fishbowl

.world.
The moment he enters, he reaches inside
his foot-high makeup kit, a miniature chest
of drawers with a carrying handle that he
takes everywhere he goes. Opening the
drawer containing his uppers, he grabs a
r handful of Dexedrines, little golden hearts
that he swallows like peanuts. Then he pulls
a pinch of cotton wool off the ball and soaks
it with liquid pharmaceutical cocaine. Stuff
ing the wad up one nostril, he quickly pre
pares a second. The instant the nearly 100
percent pure coke makes contact with the
thin nasal membranes, a searing flash flies
up his nose and explodes in his brain like a
nasal orgasm. By leaving the balls in for the
next hour or two, he can keep his motor
running until it warms up. Any time he wants
a fresh jolt, all he need do is give his nostrils
a tweak.
Elvis's next concern is with his bowels.
Though he may suffer from incontinence
while he sleeps, his basic problem is consti
pation. Heavy downers paralyze the bowel by
making certain muscles go into spasm,
thereby destroying the synchronicity of peri
stalsis—the waves of involuntary contraction
45
ALBERT GOLDMAN
that cause the bowel to expel its contents.

This is a problem common to all junkies, but
Elvis’s case has been exacerbated by the ha
bitual use of strong laxatives that have seri
ously damaged his colon, which has enlarged
to two or three times the normal diameter
and lost its elasticity.
To achieve a daily bowel movement—an
urgent problem for a man who eats as Elvis
does—he employs a Fleet enema. Elvis often
finds its prescribed usage unavailing. His
remedy is to lie in a hot tub, which gradually
softens the impacted material; then, remain
ing in the tub, he employs the enema.
Washing himself is not something that
would normally cross Elvis's mind. He has a
notorious aversion to soap and water that has
its origin in his childhood. Gladys was so
fearful of losing Elvis, whose twin brother
had died at birth, that she dreaded he might
drown in the tub. Though he sweats readily
and has a naturally oily skin, he showers only
once a week. Generally, he prefers a quick
wipe under the armpits and around the
crotch, followed by a heavy dousing with
Brut.
His hair is another matter; it requires more
46
it(
frequent attention, but he washes it only

when he showers. The more common proce
dure is for one of his men to soak a towel and
rub off the sheen. Elvis is prematurely gray,
as was his father. Gray hair is not unbecom
ing to him, but he has it dyed regularly along
with his eyebrows and eyelashes, except
r
when he is at home.
During the hour he customarily spends in
I
I
the bathroom before facing the day, Elvis
gets a good look at himself in the mirror that
covers the wall above the long black wash
I counter. What he sees is not only a man who
looks much older than his age, but a great
sex hero whose famous features—once com
pared with statues of Apollo and Hermes—
have subsided into facial fat like lumps of
butter into a stack of pancakes.
When Elvis returns to his room, he always
finds some of his men awaiting him. They can
size up his mood quickly. If they say, "Good
morning, Boss,” and he growls, "What’s so
good about it?” they know they have their
work cut out for them. On this particular
Monday, he is greeted by Rickey Stanley.
Rickey is the second-oldest of Elvis's three
stepbrothers, but he was the first to go to
47
ALBERT GOLDMAN
work for the King. At sixteen, he was a good

looking, blonde schoolboy completely iriiiu • - ~ 1
cent of life. Now at 22, he isn’t a kid any
more. In fact, his years of service have trans- J
formed him completely. Having descended I
the drug ladder a lot faster than his master— i
who had no mentor to teach him the ropes
and offer him easy access to every pill in the 1
Physician’s Desk Reference—Rickey fell in
with a bad crowd of street junkies two years
ago and was arrested for “busting scripts”—
forging prescriptions.
That night is still vivid in David’s mind. He
was with Elvis at the Memphian Theater
around 4 a.m., when he heard a loud knock
ing on the door. Opening up, he was con
fronted by two cops, who told him they had
his brother Rickey down at the Memphis City
Jail. David alerted Elvis, and they left imme
diately.
Entering the jail, Elvis flashed his deputy
sheriff's badge and demanded to be taken to
the holding cell. "This is gonna kill your
mother,” he said to Rickey. “Next time you
hang!”
A couple of calls from Elvis, and Rickey's
charge was reduced to malicious mischief
48
and his punishment to a $50 fine—though the

script he had forged was for a Schedule I
narcotic.
Elvis had reason to be lenient. Rickey's
street smarts have been useful to him, be
cause though Elvis confines himself generally
to prescription drugs, he does like to experi
l
ment with the illegal stuff, and Rickey is the
hippest drug scorer in town. According to
David, "Rickey could score Angel Dust when
nobody had heard of it in Memphis.”
49
— ® ■ -0
Treadmill
to Insolvency
matter how wretched Elvis

feels, he can always cotton to a good hot
meal. As soon as one of his men has helped
him slip into an emerald green or purple robe
of ecclesiastical cut with big bell sleeves, he
walks slowly out of his room, staring down at
the floor because he doesn’t trust his balance.
He never goes downstairs for breakfast any
more; in fact, he never goes downstairs at all
51
ALBERT GOLDMAN
except to go out. His whole life is passed in

his bedroomand'the~adjoiDiiig_^rpoms: 1
bathroom and dressing room; his office; and ~~
Lisa Marie's room, which serves him as a
breakfast room, a place where he can wile
away a few hours after awaking while one of
the maids cleans his room.
Lisa’s room is generally empty but always
kept in readiness for the child's visits. It is
furnished with a round white bed covered
f
with a fur-trimmed canopy. Everywhere you
look there are dolls and stuffed animals. Elvis
sits in a chair facing the TV with a folding
game table before him on which his food is
served. His men sit at his elbow on a sofa.
Breakfast is customarily a pound of crisp-
fried bacon, a half-dozen eggs scrambled, a
platter of butter-soaked biscuits with sau- *
sage, and great quantities of black coffee.
Sometimes he rounds off the meal with diet
ice cream bars or many cartons of yogurt. As
he warms to his work, he begins to talk.
In the old days, he would get so wired up,
so intent on being the star of the breakfast
show, that the food would get cold and have
to be replaced not once but repeatedly. Now
he is much less loquacious and never quite
52
gets up to speed. As it is his custom to use

this time to skgtchxjutcheday's activities, his
companions take the opportunity to suggest
the few recreations that he still enjoys: “Hey,
how about riding the bikes!” or "How about
a movie?”
Elvis is a man who has dedicated his entire
life to having fun. “Are ya havin' fun?"—
that's what he always asks people. If you're
not, in his eyes you're crazy. But nowadays,
he has lost his knack for enjoying himself.
Instead of rising to the bait his men are
dangling, he turns inward and falls silent,
brooding on his insoluble problems. Upper
most in his mind today is the thought of his
next tour, which has been obsessing him for
weeks. Now he has only one more night at
home. Tomorrow night, Tuesday, August 16th,
he will have to leave.
The drill is this: At 1 a.m., his six-door
Mercedes—Der Grosse Pullman, as the manu
facturer calls it—will be out front. When El
vis gives the word, his men will jump out of
their chairs in the so-called Jungle Room,
where they have been watching TV while
awaiting the Boss, and gather at the foot of
the front stairs to escort Elvis into the car. Or
53
ALBERT GOLDMAN
he may elect to drive one of his Stutz-Black-

hawks out to Meflftphis-AeEQ^_a_private facil-
ity, where he will board his flying hotel suite.
He has a lavish bedroom in the back of the
Lisa Marie set up exactly like his bedroom at
Graceland. When he arrives at his destina
tion, he will be conveyed from that bedroom
to the hotel bedroom, which has been ar
ranged in precisely the same manner. From
there he will be ferried to the arena. After the
show the process will be reversed. In the
whole round of 24 hours, there is only one
hour when Elvis has to stand up—that’s
when he does his act. For the rest of the time,
he can remain horizontal.
Tomorrow night’s destination is Portland,
Maine, where he is scheduled to play two
dates, on the 17th and the 18th. Then will
come a short string of one-nighters in Utica,
Syracuse, Hartford, and Uniondale, New
York; Lexington, Kentucky; Roanoke,
Virginia; Fayetteville, Tennessee; Asheville,
North Carolina; and, finally, Memphis, where
he will play for two nights at the Mid-South
Coliseum. That's only ten nights away from
home, but Elvis has said repeatedly that he
is not going out on this tour. He’s been saying
54
it ever since he came back from his last cir

cuit. Still, he has a_reputation for saying one
thing and doing another.
In any case, nobody has taken Elvis’s re
fusal to tour seriously. How can they? If Elvis
doesn't go out on the road every other month,
the whole Presley organization will collapse.
Everybody will lose his job and be reduced to
scratching out a living the hard way. That’s
the perspective of the little guys. As for the
big shots like Colonel Parker, they stand to
lose a bundle, because Elvis Presley is a
money machine that has been running relent
lessly for the past twenty years. Even though
Elvis is half-dead already, nobody is pre
pared for the moment when the machine will
actually stop.
Even if everyone were to agree with Elvis,
he couldn't stop touring because the road is
his last source of income. Everything else has
been sacrificed to the Colonel's lust for "now
money.’’ All of his movies were made for a fee
plus a percentage of the net profits, but none
of them has ever paid him a dime—thanks to
Hollywood's notorious system of bookkeep
ing. On Colonel Parker's advice, Elvis relin
quished virtually all his record royalties in
55
ALBERT GOLDMAN
1974 for a lump sum that was reckoned in

the millions but whicfr~netted- him;_after the^
Colonel’s exactions and those of the IRS, only
$750,000.' He has no investments, no prop
erty save what he lives on (and a tract across
the highway from Graceland evaluated at
$241,700), and no savings. In fact, even if he
does maintain his current level of earnings,
his expenditures and prior commitments will
make him a candidate for the bankruptcy
court.
Elvis's entourage estimates that he bums
up a million a year on drugs and the doctors
who prescribe the drugs. Dr. Nichopolous'
services have been extraordinary, but they
have not come cheap. The doctor is currently
receiving $800 a day for traveling with Elvis.
When he is out of town, Elvis must pay the
medical group to which the doctor belongs
for the loss of his services. Dr. Nick has also
obtained $280,000 in loans from Elvis to
build a lavish home in East Memphis,
equipped with a swimming pool and racquet
ball court. His big payoff, however, was in the
form of a business deal.
He persuaded Elvis to lend his name to a
chain of racquetball courts, whose proto-
56
types would be built in Memphis and Nash-

v. viHe-_ Titled Prealey-Center Courts, they were
, built not only on Elvis's name—which he had
never lent to any business enterprise—but on
Elvis's money. In exchange for 25 percent of
the stock, he agreed to underwrite the costs
I of construction with a $1.3 million loan se
cured upon Graceland. Recently, when the
costs ran over the original estimates, Elvis
refused to honor the guarantee. He was sued
by Nichopolous and his two partners, Joe
Esposito, Elvis's "crew chief,” or road man
ager, and Mike McMahon, a local real estate
man and bond salesman. Elvis retaliated by
firing Dr. Nick, but soon found himself in so
much trouble with his medications that he
was persuaded to take him back. No matter
what they cost, Elvis's drugs are Elvis’s life.2
Money problems have never meant a thing
to Elvis because every time he went broke, he
could always go out and play a string of dates
that would pay the bills. Now he simply
hasn’t the strength to work two shows a night
for a month at Vegas or go out on the road for
weeks on end. Elvis is running down, and the
day of reckoning is nigh. For the first time in
his life, he faces the prospect of not being
able to make a living.
57
!
ALBERT GOLDMAN
What is making him brood this afternoon,

however, is not his financiaLpFoblems-but-a—
much more immediate danger. The real rea
son why he doesn't want to go out on this
new tour is because it will oblige him to face
the public for the first time since the publi
cation of a sensational new book that he fears
will destroy him.
NOTES
1. On the day Elvis died, RCA Records’

executive board was holding an emergency
meeting. The company—which had been
badly managed for years and was up for sale,
with no bidders—was in desperate financial
straits. They could not meet their bills and
were considering declaring bankruptcy. The
meeting was about to conclude when one of
the accountants, Louis DeAngelis, went to the
men's room. On the way back, he heard that
Elvis had died. "Here’s some more bad
news," he declared as he walked into the
room. “Elvis just died." The vice-president
for finance asked, "Do we have a policy on
Elvis?” “Yeah," somebody answered, “we got
58
$2.5 million.” "Whoopee!" yelled a high offi

cial, throwing his papers in the air. "We made
the month!”
Next day, Handelman, the big rack jobber,
placed a $4 million order. In the course of the
following year, RCA grossed $25 million on
its Elvis records, most of it royalty-free.
2. Dr. Nichopolous spent many years in and

out of school before obtaining his medical
degree at the age of 32. After an initial sum
mer at the University of Alabama, he dropped
out and joined the army, in which he served
two years as a medical corpsman. Subse
quently, he attended Birmingham Southern
for a year and then got a football scholarship
to the University of the South in Sewanee,
Tennessee, from which he was graduated
with a B.S. degree. For three years he worked
toward a Ph.D. in clinical physiology at the
University of Tennessee in Memphis, but
failed to write his dissertation. Then he was
readmitted to Vanderbilt's medical college,
in Nashville, where he had been enrolled for
a year prior to his work at U.T. but from
which he had been dropped because of low
grades. This time he obtained an M.D., serv-
59
/
(
ALBERT GOLDMAN
ing his iritfernship and residency at a couple

of hospitals in K^hviiYe.~£n JL963, he joined
the Medical Group in Memphis, where he was
practicing when he met Elvis in June 1967.
The King was spending his honeymoon at
Circle G. Dr. Nichopolous agreed to drive
down to the ranch to treat the star for saddle
sores. Soon he found himself being bom
barded with calls and requests and demands
that eventually changed the whole course of
his life and practice.
60
4
□
Kiss and Kill
Elvis: What Happened? is that

rare thing—a "tell-all” book that actually
delivers. Written by Steve Dunleavy, a Rupert
Murdoch tabloid journalist, with information
provided by two of Elvis’s closest compan
ions—his bodyguards, the cousins Bobby G.
"Red” West and Delbert "Sonny” West—plus
another bodyguard, Dave Hebler, the book is
designed to destroy Elvis's image by blowing
61
ALBERT GOLDMAN
the lid off his carefully concealed private life.

Instead of presenting an Elvis who is the
all-American boy, good to his mother, deeply
religious, and guilty at most of enjoying the 1
things all boys enjoy—pretty girls, fancy cars,

flashy clothes—this Elvis is a drug addict, a
sex freak, a gun fetishist, and a morbid per
sonality who likes to visit mortuaries late at
night to inspect the stiffs and discourse know
ingly on the technique of embalming.
The basic question about Elvis: What Hap-
paned? is how did it happen? The story goes
back to July 13, 1976. On that fatal day,
Vernon Presley summoned Elvis's three body
guards and told-them they were being fired
to save money. Their dismissal—with three
day’s notice and one week's pay—was not
only abrupt and callous, it was, at least in
the case of the Wests, unjust. No provision
was made to compensate them for their long
years of sometimes dangerous service. Red
West had been guarding Elvis ever since the
future King was a frightened teenager at
Humes Vocational High in Memphis. For
twenty years Red had served Elvis with a
dogged loyalty that knew no limits. When
Elvis wanted to kill Priscilla Presley's lover,
62
Mike Stone, he had handed this dirty job to

Red, who, after stalling in the hope that Elvis
would drop the idea, went so far as to price a
hit through a connection he had with the
Mob. (The going rate for a murder was 25
grand.) At the last minute, Elvis backed out,
but Red had done his duty.
Sonny West didn’t go back that far, but he
had been working for Elvis, on and off, since
1960. Especially in recent years—when Elvis
had become paranoid in the wake of the Man-
son murders and sought to surround himself
with the same kind of security as that pro
vided the President—Sonny had turned him
self into a combat soldier who lived with an
automatic pistol shoved up his armpit in a
quick-release holster.1
Sonny and Red were Elvis's first line of
defense. They were exhorted to be vigilant,
aggressive, and ready to go to the limits. Said
Sonny: "Elvis was proud of the fact that he
had someone there who would die for him
the same way soldiers die for their country.”
But the downside of this paranoid vigilance
was the potential it created for overreacting.
One notorious case was that of a California
real estate man who had paid $60 to a mem-
63
ALBERT GOLDMAN
ber of the entourage to be admitted to a party

at Elvis’s suite atop the Sahara Tahoe. Sonny
and David Stanley were both named in the
$6 million suit that the real estate man filed
against Elvis for "severe laceration of his lips,
loosened teeth, possible fractured jaw, injury
to the left ear, and brain concussion.”
According to David, "We were up on the
top floor and a guy starts banging on the back
door, which is the emergency exit. Then he
finds the circuit breakers and turns off all the
lights in the suite. I grabbed my piece and
was out there quick. Elvis went straight to
his room and grabbed his. Lisa was with him,
and this was right after the Patty Hearst
kidnapping. Elvis was freaking out. When I
opened the door, I found a guy standing
there.
" 'What are you doing?'
" ‘Man, I’m just trying to get to the party. I
was invited.'
“ 'There's no party, and I don’t understand
what you’re doing.’
"Well, he just kept on and on. Finally, I
said, 'You have to leave'—and he pushed me.
I was about to shut the door and call security,
when Sonny insisted on playing the badass.
64
Before I could say another word, this guy’s on

the ground, half dead. I have never seen any
body in my whole life hit as hard as Sonny
West hit that man in the face.”
Sonny viewed the incident differently.
When he heard that a man was trying to enter
the blacked-out suite through the rear door,
he ran to the scene. "The guy had his hand
on David Stanley's chest and a fist drawn
back. He said, ‘I’m coming in!' I just knocked
his arm away and hit him and dropped
him. . . . We were taking him down to the
security room on the fourteenth or sixteenth
floor when Elvis came out.... He called Elvis
a 'motherfucker.' Elvis tried to get that ele
vator door to open to get at him. Elvis is
punching buttons, [yelling] 'Get an elevator
up here!’ We got another one and go down
stairs—me and Red and Elvis and Jerry
[Schilling and David Stanley].... [The secur
ity men] had him [in a room] under the stairs
. . . and the guy said, ‘If I didn’t have these
handcuffs on me'. . . .” Then, according to
David, "He looks up at Sonny and says, 'You
sonovabitch!' Red hit him in the mouth
again."
At the time, Elvis wasn't troubled by this
65
ALBERT GOLDMAN
violence. As he was returning to his suite, he

kept telling Sonny, "I wish I had killed the
sonovabitch!”
When word of the firings was flashed to the
house at Palm Springs—where Elvis was hid
ing out while his father did the dirty work—
Elvis’s crony Lamar Fike asked for an expla
nation. Elvis replied, “I'm tired of the law
suits and I’m tired of their bullying attitude.
Red's a bully and Sonny’s a bully and Hebler
is. They intimidate you guys.” David inter
preted it differently: “The main reason Elvis
fired them was because they were tough nuts,
and they were knocking the shine off Elvis.
Elvis was supposed to be the baddest guy in
the group. But these guys were coming on as
badder, and it blew his ego."
Elvis's decision thrilled Vernon, who told
David, "For the first time in twenty years, I'm
happy. I'm finally getting rid of those ass
holes. I hate their guts.”
The bodyguards, middle-aged men with
families to support, were intent on making
good their financial losses. They cut a fast
deal with the Star, which then licensed a
quickie mass-market paperback to Ballan-
66
tine Books. The book was scheduled to ap

i
pear in August the following year, 1977.2
The first time the entourage heard about
the bodyguards’ book was on August 30, 1976,
in Mobile, Alabama, at a dramatic meeting
held in Elvis's hotel suite. When the hastily
summoned men entered his quarters, they
found the Boss sitting on his bed, crying.
Holding in his hand a sheaf of typewritten
pages—a copy of the book proposal—Elvis
blurted out the thoughts and feelings that
were to obsess him for the last twelve months
of his life. In a voice choked with emotion, he
cried out, "I've been betrayed! My life is over!
My career is ruined!"
After explaining briefly what had hap
pened, Elvis started going around the room
asking each man, “What have you got on Red
and Sonny?" This was the signal to denounce
the traitors. Every man let fly with grievances
against the villains. The meeting ended with
all the guys feeling a renewed solidarity be
cause they all felt threatened by exposure.
This was small consolation for Elvis, whose
paranoia now had something real to feed
upon.
67
ALBERT GOLDMAN
Any way he looked at it, the book promised

disaster. Elvis was horrified at the thought of
how Lisa Marie would react when she read
about her father’s drug binges and his efforts
to murder her mother’s lover. Or how the
fans would feel when they realized that the
man they had worshipped like a god had
lived like a devil. If Elvis had still been a rock
'n' roll star, the problem would not have been
so severe; but now that he had become the
idol of that God-fearing, church-going, Bible
quoting public that took sin seriously, the
prospect was terrifying.
The terror was guaranteed to grow worse
all the time because Elvis had in his employ
a private eye named John O’Grady,3 whose
contacts enabled him to get hold of the man
uscript at various stages as it made its way
toward publication. The more of the text that
Elvis read, the wilder he became. Eventually,
he started negotiating with Red and Sonny
on the phone. He offered a bribe of $100,000
to kill the book, but the authors were already
under contract. Besides, if they had taken the
money, they would in effect have been guilty
of blackmail. The line they took when the
book came out was that they had not written
68
it to revenge themselves upon Elvis but to

shock him into an awareness of how far he
■
had drifted from his true character.
On a night in late September, Elvis finally
cracked. He had been spending a couple of
days at Linda Thompson’s apartment in
Santa Monica. David was asleep when he
suddenly heard a loud banging on the door
to his room. The next moment, it was kicked
open.
There stood Elvis, looking as though he
T were playing a scene in a movie. He was
\ wearing a black jumpsuit with a Drug En
■i
forcement Agency patch. Around his waist
was one of his gladiator belts, inside which
he had stuffed two ,45s. In his hand he held a
Thompson submachine gun, which he had
obtained through his friends in the Chicago
Mob. David could see the cotton balls inside
Elvis's nostrils.
"David!” he shouted. "Get up! Were goin’
head huntin’."
"Yeah,” answered David, "what the hell’s
goin on?”
"Were gonna kill these sons of bitches!"
"Kill who?”
"Red and Sonny. We're gonna kill 'em. Get
your piece on.”
69
ALBERT GOLDMAN
David jumped up and pulled on his jeans

and a T-shirt. Then he strapped his quick
release holster over his left shoulder and
checked his 15-shot, 9-millimeter automatic.
"Put one in the chamber and take the
safety off,” ordered Elvis.
David did as he was told and followed his
boss down to the street, where they jumped
insjde Elvis's new black Dino Ferrari Spider.
Elvis shot off down the Santa Monica Free
way, heading for the Hollywood motel where
Red and Sonny were holed up. As they rock
eted through red lights and screeched around
curves, Elvis kept hollering, "How could they
do this to me? They betrayed me! I paid for
Red’s education! I bought his wife a home!”
David had no idea where they were going
because he didn’t know where Red and Sonny
were living. Yet this outburst didn’t take him
by surprise because Vernon had called him
and warned: "Watch him. He might try some
thin’ stupid. Whatever you do, talk him out
of it.” David had only so many minutes to
deflect Elvis from the target of his rage. First,
he tried to make fun of their mission.
"I'll kill 'em, I’ll kill 'em dead,” he echoed.
"But the only thing I want is a TV, a refriger
ator, and a case of beer in my cell.”
70
“Chickenshit,” sneered Elvis through

clenched teeth. “If you won’t do it, I will!’’
“What about your dad?” snapped David,
trying another tack.
"Fuck daddy!"
"How about Lisa Marie? I’d much rather
that she read you were on drugs than she
read you were a killer.”
In the middle of an intersection, doing 100
mph, Elvis slammed on the brakes and
nearly threw them both through the wind
shield as the car skidded sideways to a halt.
"You'll do what?" barked Elvis, swinging
himself around to confront David face to face.
"I'll tell her you're a killer. You are a killer,
Elvis.”
"I'll kill you, godammit!” he burst out.
Then he started to cry.
"What am I gonna do, David?” he sobbed.
"My career is ruined. I loved these guys. Why
would they do this? Why would they betray
me?”
"Lemme drive you home, answered
David.
They changed sides. David took the wheel
and drove Elvis back to Linda's apartment.
When Elvis got upstairs, David and Linda
71
ALBERT GOLDMAN J
worked hard at calming him down. Finally,
they persuaded him to take his pills and get
under the covers. Soon he was sound asleep.
This incident didn’t put a period to Elvis's
fantasies of killing Red and Sonny. Far from
it! To his dying day, Elvis would hatch one
plan after another for doing them in.
Elvis would doubtless have survived the
scandal of the book—but he didn’t see it that
i way. Having been brought up in a time when
the public was quick to condemn entertainers
who stepped over the line, he was convinced
that he would be destroyed. He could still
recall vividly how Jerry Lee Lewis’s career
had been stopped short when he revealed that
he had married his fourteen-year-old cousin.
Elvis’s problem was that he lived at too great
a remove from reality to realize how much
things had changed.
The public had not only lost its sense of
moral superiority but had become so deeply
implicated in all its pop heroes' vices that it
was more inclined to identify sympatheti
cally with an avowed alcoholic or drug addict
than it was to pass judgement. Far from being
ruined, Elvis could have made a confession
that would have won the hearts of the fans
72
and perhaps even provided the impetus for a

full-scale comeback.
NOTES
1. Elvis’s bodyguards were, like their boss,

deputy sheriffs of Shelby County. They bore
badges and credentials that authorized them
to carry concealed weapons anywhere in the
country except New York City.
2. Elvis’s death, two weeks after the official
publication date, assured the book’s success.
It sold 3.5 million copies.
3. It was ironic that O'Grady should wind
up working for the biggest junkie in the his
tory of the music business because he had
been a fanatical antidrug crusader through
out his years as a narcotics detective in the
Los Angeles Police Department. The terror of
the local jazz musicians, he was the kind of
cop who would threaten to smash a musi
cian's mouth so that he could never play
again. O'Grady sought to square his princi
ples with his paycheck by identifying Elvis’s
drug doctors and reporting them to Vernon,
but his efforts went for nothing. He was far
73
ALBERT GOLDMAN
more successful as a raconteur. Night after'

night, he would sit in Elvis's bedroom enter
taining his cacked-out client with thrilling
tales of undercover detective work and dra
matic drug busts.
74
Tent Show on TV
Elvis's fears are by no means
confined to the bodyguards' book. Even more

frightening is the CBS-TV special that will be
seen nationally by millions of people in the
fall of 1977. It is a sign of how desperate for
money is the Presley organization that Colo
nel Parker would even consider such a pro
gram, because it is bound to have a very
damaging effect on Elvis's image. The only
75
ALBERT GOLDMAN
reason the image has survived this long is

because in recent years Elvis has been con
fined for the most part to audiences of rural
and small-town folk who are much less de
manding than those in the big urban centers.
Nor has there been any media coverage of
these tours, apart from the occasional picture
in the local press or the National Enquirer.
The public as a whole has no idea of Elvis's
deterioration.
The fans may read that he is overweight or
has been obliged to cancel a concert or spend
a little time in the hospital, but if they see
him on the tube, it’s old footage: he is the
Elvis of yesteryear, slim, handsome, and at
the peak of his powers as a performer. But
the CBS special will show Elvis looking as if
he had just swallowed a watermelon, bulging
from the front of his futuristic white jump
suit. With his great shag of blue-black hair
looking like a wig held on by his scimitar
shaped sidebums, with the sweat streaming
down his forehead into his shadowed, half
shut eyes, and his lips blithering lyrics that
sometimes go skittering off into sheer stream
of consciousness, he will glow on the living
room screen like a bizarre but haunting ap
parition.
76
The temptation to grab $750,000 for allow

ing the CBS cameramen to tag along on the
latest tour proved too tempting for the old
Colonel. He knows he is playing an end
game—everybody around him is speculating
on how long Elvis can last. So the manager
made his move without concerning himself
unduly about its effects. Elvis knows, how
ever, that the TV special will go a long way
toward confirming the truth of the body
guards’hook.
When the producers of the show, Gary
Smith and Dwight Hemion, got a glimpse of
their star, they were appalled. They had
signed up to do Elvis Presley; what they got
was closer to Liberace or Jackie Gleason—or
the Pillsbury Doughboy. Elvis looked gro
tesque. His voice was shot. His speech was
slurred. His memory was so bad that he had
trouble recalling the words to songs he had
been singing for twenty years. So out of con
trol was he that there was no predicting what
he would do from one minute to the next. The
only consistent feature of his performance
was the droopy-eyed smile that wreathed his
face and plainly said, "I'm stoned.”1
Though the format of his current act is no
77
ALBERT GOLDMAN
different than it was during his heyday in Las

Vegas, its spirit has altered drastically. In
stead of being a flawlessly produced bur
lesque show starring a gorgeous hunk of male
cheesecake that inspires the women to tear
off their panties and hurl them at the stage,
this show looks like it should be under can
vas. It's redolent of minstrelsy and vaude
ville, Ringling Brothers and the Wheeling
Jamboree.
Though canonized as the archetypal figure
of rebellious youth, "the boy who dared to
rock,” Elvis has always been a profoundly
conservative character. He loves that ole time
religion and that ole time music, all those
country crooners with their hard “r”s, those
histrionic black gospel shouters, holding up
their hands to testify, those hillbilly shouters
with their nasal whine and their twangy gui
tars. Now at the end, he has gone back to his
roots in country and gospel, dragging along
his Las Vegas showroom orchestra like an
outworn and tawdry souvenir of another life.
The few rock songs he still performs are old
chestnuts from the Fifties. They come across
like spoofs.
In fact, when you examine his perform-
78
ances close-up through the eyes and ears of

the TV apparatus, you soon see that every
thing he does these days is undercut by self
mockery. He has routines in which he makes
fun of his trademark gyrations. He parodies
the lyrics of his old songs. At every opportu
nity, he will desert the melody to sing the
accompaniment or mimic the sound of an
instrument. He is constantly teasing the mu
sicians and singers around him, playing to
the band instead of the house. He is full of
mischief and cunning, intent on pleasing
himself more than his public, acting as if he
were at a rehearsal or at home in his living
room putting on a show for his friends and
neighbors. With every move he says, "I don't
take myself all that seriously—why should
you?”
This don’t-give-a-damn attitude brings the
Elvis of the CBS special a lot closer to the
real Elvis than anything that has ever been
put on the screen.2 It makes his hapless per
formance endlessly fascinating, a study in
decay that far exceeds the efforts of even the
most extravagant impersonator. An unwit
ting masterpiece of cinema verity, it will
stand forever as the supreme document of
79
ALBERT GOLDMAN
Elvis at the end. And that is why it will be

relentlessly suppressed by the Presley estate,
intent upon preserving and promulgating the
Elvis myth. Actually, nothing could make El
vis more sympathetic than his sometimes
comical, sometimes pathetic struggle to
break free of his imprisoning image.
To Elvis on his last day, however, the CBS
special did not have any redeeming qualities.
It was simply the second barrel of the shot
gun aimed directly at his head.
NOTES
1. Stories abound concerning Elvis's ec

centric behavior onstage during his last
years. Sometimes he would sit down and
spend the evening chatting with the folks out
front. On one occasion, finding an audience
unresponsive, he gave away thousands of dol
lars worth of jewelry to arouse them. He also
sometimes let his habit of teasing the other
members of the troupe in public get out of
hand. One night he turned to the three black
women of the Sweet Inspirations and
snapped, "I'm tired of seein' ya sittin’ down.
80
Ya got watermelon breath!” Offended, two of

the women walked off, but Elvis won them
back with lavish gifts.
2. Not the usual highly cosmeticized show

biz documentary, the special was simply the
record of a slightly better-than-average per
formance on June 21, 1977, at Rapid City,
South Dakota, with a take of "My Way”
dubbed in from another show on June 19 at
Omaha.
81
I
I
I
i
V
Kith and Kin
^/'■/hen Elvis gets back to his
bedroom after breakfast, he calls for Lisa. A

pretty little blonde who bears a striking re
semblance to her father, especially about the
eyes and mouth, Lisa is bright, energetic, and
only half-spoiled. Priscilla, who came from a
military family, is a great believer in disci
pline. Elvis has always been the Lord of Mis
rule, the embodiment of total self-indulgence
83
ALBERT GOLDMAN
and prodigality. When Lisa visits her father,

all the training she has received at home is
tossed out the window, and she is treated like
a visiting princess whose every whim must
be fulfilled.
What she loves more than anything else is
speed. Her Harley-Davidson golf cart, which
bears her name in script lettering, has been
governed down so it can't reach high speeds,
but Lisa can always persuade her Uncle Da
vid, who is often detailed to play with the
child, to take her around the grounds on one
of the other golf carts. They have a great time
bouncing around the 14-acre estate, cutting
around trees, racing along service roads, and
even taking little hills so fast they experience
the thrill of flying off the ground. They range
from the back pasture with its bam, silo, and
feeder, to the chicken house and car shed and
on toward the back gate, where the mobile
homes are located. Lisa’s especial delight is
to play hide-and-seek at night in the golf
carts. She drives off in the dark to hide, and
then a couple of the guys comb the property
searching for her.
Elvis has never been much of a parent to
Lisa because he is too self-involved to have
84
I;
i; more than a passing thought for anyone who

isn’t the target of his immediate desires. Like
most rich men who are conscious of neglect
ing their children, he tries to make amends
by buying her costly toys and giving her spe
cial treats. It is customary for her to be flown
to Las Vegas on Elvis’s opening nights so that
s> she can see her father in all his glory. Her
visits to Graceland always entail a night on
which they rent Libertyland, the local
amusement park, and enjoy it as a private
playground.
Elvis is not the kind to play with children
or to do anything for them that demands
time and effort. Whenever something has to
be done for Lisa, one of the staff is delegated
to do the job. Elvis, for his part, confines
himself to greeting her every afternoon and
exchanging a few words, all of them reduced
to his habitual query, "Are ya havin’ fun?”
Lisa has never known her father to behave in
any other fashion, and so she is perfectly
content to pop in his room for a few minutes,
hop up on his big bed for a kiss and a hug,
assure him she's having a good time with her
playmate, and then scoot out the door to
continue her games.
85
ALBERT GOLDMAN
Elvis isn't wholly satisfied with this ar

rangement, and recently, especially when he
is depressed, he has sometimes burst into
tears and sobbed, "I wish I could be a better
father!” But his guilt has had no perceptible
effect on his behavior toward Lisa Marie. Ac
tually, this recent visit was Priscilla's idea.
She has been troubled, like all of Elvis's inti
mates, by his current state of mind, and she
felt it might cheer him up to have Lisa.
Around 7 p.m. Elvis’s closest sidekick
knocks on the padded double doors of the
bedroom and enters his boss’s presence. Lit
tle Billy Smith is the son of Gladys’s brother
Travis. About 37, though looking older, espe
cially since he grew a mustache, short and
solidly built, with receding hair and bugged-
out eyes, Billy looks in his jeans and K mart
sneakers like one of the handymen.
Billy is a good reminder of the world from
which Elvis emerged, because his family
moved from Tupelo to Memphis shortly after
the Presleys and shared their hard lot in the
early years. Elvis has always treated Billy like
a kid brother, taking him along on his visits
to the West Coast and, later, out on tour.
Despite their closeness, Billy has struck most
86
people until recently as a minor character

standing dimly in the background of Elvis's
life. For some years he worked on the rail
road; now Elvis has him on the payroll at
I Graceland, even though he has no fixed du
ties. Like Tish Henley, Billy lives in a big
mobile home in the backyard with his wife,
Jo, and his two little boys, Danny and Joey.
Billy has proven his worth to Elvis in re
cent years as a companion and confidant. The
privileged position he occupies today reflects
a basic change in Elvis’s lifestyle. In the old
days, the Boss surrounded himself with his
henchmen, the Memphis Mafia. Today, he pre
fers the company of his family. Virtually
everyone around him at Graceland is a rela
tion. His paternal grandmother, Minnie May,
whom Elvis calls Dodger, is an emaciated old
lady who lives in what was once Vernon’s and
i Gladys’s room on the first floor. One of her
daughters is Graceland's housekeeper, Delta
Mae Biggs, a squat, square-jawed woman
with frizzy iron-gray hair. Another daughter,
Nashville Pritchett, lives with her husband,
Earl, the estate's maintenance man, in an
other of the mobile homes and helps take
care of her mother. The chief gatekeeper is
87
ALBERT GOLDMAN
Vernon's brother, Vester, and one of Vernon's

secretaries is Vester’s daughter, Patsy Ruth
Gambill, whose husband, Gee Gee, has been
Elvis’s valet. Elvis has developed in recent
years some of that distrustfulness for which
his father is notorious. Clearly, the people he
trusts the most are his kinfolk.
"What took you so long, Marble Eyes?”
jokes Elvis as Billy walks into the bedroom.
Elvis is sitting cross-legged on the bed,
dressed in dark-blue pajamas with a light
blue stripe under a dark-blue robe with gray
stripes. Elvis’s first request is that Billy call
Ginger Alden, Elvis's fiancee, and advise her
that Elvis has made a 10:30 appointment for
them that evening with his dentist, Dr. Lester
Hofman.
Elvis is always visiting dentists, podia
trists—any sort of medical professional to
whom he can present a symptom or a story
that justifies a drug prescription. If all else
fails, he will rip out a filling or dig around
his toenails with a scissors or a file. The
professionals are usually awed by Elvis’s
presence, charmed by his practiced line of
bullshit and often hungry for his money or
favors. They oblige him to the extent of their
88
powers and professional ethics. You can't get

the heaviest narcotics from a dentist, but you
can obtain the lesser pain killers, including
Percodan and codeine. The real question,
however, is not how Elvis gets drugs out of
these people but why he needs them at all.
Isn’t he well-provided by Dr. Nick and his
other physicians?
As it happens, on this very day Dr. Nicho-
polous has stocked up for the forthcoming
tour. According to the record prepared for his
hearing, he has prescribed the following
drugs:
Amytal-. 100 3-gram capsules and 12 half
gram ampules. Amytal is a barbiturate that
in high doses produces a strong hypnotic
effect. It is not marketed in ampules, which
suggests that the compiler of this record may
have confused Amytal with Amytal Sodium,
which is packaged in half-gram ampules (for
injection) that are sold in boxes of six. Amytal
Sodium is a much more powerful drug,
whose proper medical use is in the treatment
of convulsions, meningitis, tetanus, and
strychnine poisoning.
Biphetamine-. 100 20-milligram capsules.
Known to drug users as “black beauty,” this
89
ALBERT GOLDMAN
central nervous system stimulant is sur

passed in effect only by the injectable varie
ties of speed, like Methedrine.
Dexedrine- 100 5-milligram tablets. The
most familiar form of speed.
Dilaudidi 50 4-milligram tablets and 20 ccs
of 2-milligram solution. The liquid prepara
tion was prescribed in a multiple-dose vial
instead of a fixed-dose ampule, which enables
the doctor to inject as much as desired. Dilau-
did is an extremely powerful narcotic: five
times the strength of morphine, two-and-a-
half times the strength of heroin. Its use is
restricted generally to numbing the pain of
extensive burns, deep knife wounds, or ter
minal cancer.
Percodan: 100 tablets. Unlike the other
drugs on this list, Percodan is a combination
of five different drugs that act together to
relieve pain. The principal ingredient, oxyco
done, is a narcotic with effects similar to
morphine.
Quaalude; 150 300-milligram tablets.
Known colloquially as “wall bangers,” ludes
produce the slurred speech and loss of mus
cular control that were conspicuous features
of Elvis’s behavior in his last years.
90
f
i
I
Most of these drugs are not part of Elvis's
sleeping protocol; they belong to his tour
protocol. They also testify to his insatiable
craving for every sort of drug, no matter how
redundant or dangerous.
Junkies always push against the limits im
posed by their suppliers or by their own bod
ies. Excess is their essence. Elvis is the most
excessive of junkies. When he meets with re
sistance from Dr. Nick, he turns to other
suppliers, particularly at his favorite resorts:
Las Vegas, Vail, and Hawaii. Ordering up his
plane, he will take off for one of these loca
tions and return with a fresh supply of drugs
that owes nothing to his personal physician.
Building up a secret stash is standard be
havior for Elvis. And as far as the entourage
is concerned, a late-night visit to the dentist
is something that happens so regularly that
it is hardly cause for notice.
Elvis and Billy chat amiably for a couple of
hours, touching on the upcoming tour and a
projected holiday at Vail. The only thing that
Billy will record subsequently about Elvis's
mood on this night or the preceding one is
the restlessness his boss always exhibits on
the eve of a tour.
91
ALBERT GOLDMAN
When night falls, Elvis finally decides to

see a movie. Ever since the years of his first
success, it has been his custom to rent a local
cinema after closing hours—generally the
Memphian, a small, 1940s' art deco house
about fifteen minutes from Graceland in the
Overton Square area, known for its hangout
bars—and fill it after midnight with his
friends and fans. Like everything the King
did, the late-night movies swiftly became an
invariable ritual.
Elvis would sit enthroned in the center of
the twelfth row. On his right, a little table for
his cigars, chewing gum, and Pepsi; on his
left, his girlfriend. Nobody was allowed to sit
in the rows before him. The theater’s staff
would be on duty and all the customary
amenities would be observed, including the
provision of an unlimited supply of hot but
tered popcorn and soft drinks. Later, junk
food would be brought in from local diners,
and Elvis would dig into his usual burgers
and fries, served at his table.
Nowadays, this routine has been drasti
cally curtailed. Only a few friends are invited,
only a projectionist and a single attendant
are employed, and Elvis eats nothing until he
92
S
gets home and into bed. Though he still

smokes cigars, his gum is now sugar-free, and
his beloved Pepsi has been replaced by bot
tled spring water. Yet the movies remain to
the end one of Elvis’s greatest pleasures. On
this evening, he orders Rickey to obtain a
I print of MacArthur.
Elvis has been looking forward to seeing
this film ever since it was first announced. He
loved Patton, particularly the scene in which
the general stands in front of a mirror while
he is dressed for battle. From that time forth,
Elvis had himself dressed before a full-length
I mirror whenever he went on stage. But the
story of General MacArthur has special mean
ings for him that go much deeper.
Back in December 1956, when he was pre
paring to make his second motion picture,
Loving You, he sought to impress the director,
Hal Kanter, by reciting Douglas MacArthur’s
famous farewell address to Congress. Tonight
he must see in this speech and its occasion an
exact parallel with his own plight. For isn’t
he just like the famous general—a great
American hero who has given his whole life
to the service of his country and now, at an
age when he should be regarded with honor
93
ALBERT GOLDMAN I
and esteem, is about to be disgraced and
I
dismissed from the public arena by an in
credible act of betrayal? How eagerly must
he be anticipating that scene in which the old
warrior, reflecting upon his youth at West
Point, recalls a popular song of the day and
concludes his speech by whispering its most
poignant line: “Old soldiers never die—they
just fade away.”
Meanwhile, Rickey rings up American In
ternational Pictures, the principal film ex
change for the Mid-South, and asks Bill
Minkus if he can lay hands on the film. For
more than an hour, Minkus tries to find a
print, but finally he calls back to say that
none is available. Instead, he suggests send
ing over One On One. Rickey tells Minkus to
hold the line while he consults with Elvis.
When he comes back on the phone, he says
that the group is planning to leave on tour
the following evening but sometimes the
schedules are altered at the last minute. He
asks Minkus to prepare for a screening of
MacArthur tomorrow at midnight.
When the time grows near for Ginger’s ap
pearance, Billy helps Elvis get dressed in his
standard outdoor costume: a white silk shirt
94
with ruffles worn under a black exercise suit

with a DEA patch on the back, and a pair of
patent-leather boots, unzipped because Elvis
suffers from swollen ankles. As the final
touch, Elvis puts on his sunglasses and
I thrusts two .45s into his waistband. His par
anoia has grown so great in recent years that
he goes nowhere without his weapons.
The next consideration is what car Elvis
will drive. Motor vehicles have always been
the King's favorite playthings. At the mo
ment, the car shed behind the house boasts a
nice assortment of sedans and sports cars,
motorcycles and off-the-road vehicles. The
collection comprises two go-carts, five snow
mobiles, and five golf carts; two Harley-
Davidson 74 King of the Highway motorcy
cles and three motortricycles; two pickup
trucks, a Chrysler station wagon, a yellow
Pantera 351, a black Dino Ferrari Spider, a
white Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce, a light-blue
Mercedes 600 sedan, a white Mark II Lincoln
Continental, a pink 1955 Fleetwood Cadillac,
and a blue, six-door, Mercedes Grosse Pull
man.
This impressive roll call testifies not just to
pride of possession but to the fact that Elvis
95
ALBERT GOLDMAN
Presley never felt more comfortable than

when he was seated behind the wheel of a
powerful motor vehicle. As he used to say,
"They’re buildin' ’em smaller, but I’m gonna
keep buyin’ ’em bigger.”
Actually, there is little choice because the
only car Elvis will drive these days is a Stutz-
Blackhawk. Its combination of vintage design
and modem technology suits Elvis so well
that he owns two of them, one for Memphis
and one bought originally for Los Angeles.
Now the man is dressed. The car is ready.
There is only one thing lacking—the girl.
96
&OLONEL TOM PARKER'S passion for "now money"
prompted the sale of Elvis' record royalties and other deals that
condemned the King to sweat out his last years on the road.
(Frank Edwards, Fotos International/Pictorial Parade)
G^) OU ARE WHAT
YOU EAT Always
a glutton and prone
to obesity, Elvis
concealed bis weight
problem with crash
diets before each
public appearance.
In thefinal years be
let it all bang out.
(Boh Deutscb,
Globe Photos)
^fyR. ELIAS GHANEM constructed a bedroom atop bis Las
Vegas bousefor Elvis' special sleep cure. (APAVide World Photos)
^Z>R. GEORGE
NICHOPOLOUS,
Elvis'personal
physician, who
prescribed over
19,000 doses of
drugs during the
last 31 1/2 months
of the King's life,
(lames R. Reid)
i
DECK
GINGER'S DRESSING
I TCP FRONT ENTR^Y

1 SHOWER
2 REFRIGERATOR
3 SECURITY MONITORS
BELOW
4 4 GUN CASE
0 I 2 8 FT
5 WARDROBE
6 VIDEO & AUDIO TAPES. ETC.
7 STEREO. ALBUMS, BOOKS. ETC.
I
8 DRESSER
O Oi
GRACELAND 9 STEREO. ETC.
SECOND FL IO o 10 BODYGUARDS BED
11 FOOTLOCKER FULL OF BOOKS
.//wie of the millions of visitors to Graceland have ever been >

allowed to see his private quarters nor are there any available I
photos. Thisfloorplan is approximate and the drawing ofElvis t
is slightly overscale. I
.-/^CJlNDEE
MILLER, model and
movie actress, was
one ofElvis' last
girlfriends.
(Photo Mark Leivdal-
Shootine Star)
INGER ALDEN,
Elvis'fiancee, is
pictured here as she
looked when be met
her, just past her
twentieth birthday
and bisforty-second.
(AP/Wide World
Photos)
a/fd ISA MARIE did not look so somber when she visited her
daddy at Graceland and spent the day scooting around
the grounds in herpowder-blue golf cart. (Photo Ron Galella)
i^/hE MUSIC GATES barred the fans all during Elvis' lifetime,
but he kept bis eye on them from bis bedroom by means of a

remote-controlled video camera. (Pboto Ron Galella)
Gingerbread
CBinger Alden arrives at Grace
land about 9:30. A natural beauty of twenty,

tall and voluptuous, Ginger has a heart-
shaped face with big sloe eyes, full lips, a
slightly cleft chin, and thick, wavy hair,
which she dyes black in imitation of the color
Priscilla adopted to please Elvis. When the
three Alden girls were brought to Graceland
last November by Elvis's practiced procurer,
97
ALBERT GOLDMAN
George Klein,1 everybody was betting that

when "E” exercised his right to the pick of
the litter, he would choose Kitty, the current
Miss Tennessee, because she would be the
perfect successor to Linda Thompson, who
had also won the crown.
The wiseguys were surprised when Elvis
chose Ginger, but no decision, could have
been more characteristic: Elvis was always
drawn to young, innocent girls whom he
could mold to his tastes. That was his think
i
ing when, in Germany, he began courting the
fourteen-year-old Priscilla, whom he brought
to Graceland when she was a sixteen-year-
old schoolgirl. To Elvis, Ginger was just a
sweet young hometown girl who would never
pose any problems. That’s why he called her
"Gingerbread.”
On their first date, Elvis picked up Ginger
in his racy Stutz-Blackhawk and drove
straight to Memphis Aero, where he invited
her aboard his plane, which to her astonish
ment took off immediately for Las Vegas.
Within nine weeks, he proposed marriage,
going down on bended knee in his bathroom
to slip an 11!/? karat, $70,000 diamond on her
long, slender finger. Ginger offered no resis-
98
tance to his first moves or to his proposal;

but when he demanded that she move into
Graceland, she drew the line, or rather the
first line, for there were many more to follow.
Next, she declined to accompany Elvis on
some of his tours. There were many reasons
why a young woman might object to them:
they were run in an uptight military manner
that was adopted to achieve the maximum in
r efficiency and security but which created an
aggressive macho atmosphere. They were
also very boring because they consisted of
nothing but incessant movement in and out
of planes, airports, cars, hotels, and sports
arenas. But the primary reason Ginger dis
liked these expeditions was that they con
fined her to Elvis’s side, and most of the time
he was non compos mentis. She would say to
David, "What’s wrong with Elvis? He's al
ways stoned. Why does he need so much
dope?” The only answer she got was the stock
reply: “That’s Elvis."
If the tours were like a military operation—
with a lot of tough, uniformed, armed men
moving on command and peering in every
direction as if anticipating attack—increas
ingly they were even more like a field hospital
99
ALBERT GOLDMAN J
with but one patient. The only way to get
Elvis through even the shortest tour was to
constantly ply him with drugs. When he was
hauled out of bed at four in the afternoon,
groggy and disoriented, the first words he
would mumble were, "Where's Nick?” That
was the cue for the white-haired, flashily
dressed, jewelry-bedecked doctor to pop into
the bedroom with his medicine kit. Everyone
would leave the room while he ministered to i
his patient. When they were readmitted, they
found Elvis wide awake. Once Elvis had
breakfasted, he would ask again, "Where's
Nick?” Again, the doctor would make a quick
call. No sooner would Elvis arrive in his
I
dressing room at the arena than he would
make the same request. Another private visit
would follow. When the concert had ended
and Elvis was being borne back to the hotel
or the plane, sometimes in a state of collapse,
he would mutter his mantra: "Where’s
Nick?” Finally, the doctor would appear to
prepare his patient for sleep. Now, how does
a naive, twenty-year-old girl from a middle
class family in Memphis fit into this picture?
Ginger was dismayed to discover that the
100
legendary hero was actually a badly deterio

rated junkie. This was particularly disillu
sioning because even more than most girls in
Memphis, she had been reared to think of
Elvis as a demigod. When she was still a
toddler, her mother took her to the Music
Gate at Graceland, where she saw Elvis ride
down the hill on his beautiful palomino, Ris
ing Sun, to sign autographs for the fans.
When she was a little older, her mother took
her to Libertyland on one of those nights
when Elvis rented the whole park. He had
patted her on the head and taken her aboard
the roller coaster. So awed was Ginger at the
prospect of finally meeting Elvis as a young
woman that she expected his appearance
would be heralded by trumpets blaring his
theme song, from the movie 2001.
Yet instead of rejecting Elvis, Ginger has
chosen to negotiate the terms of their rela
1 tionship to preserve her independence and to
avoid too much contact with the squalor of
his condition. When she has served him sup
per and seen him nod out, she may go to sleep
herself on the opposite side of his immense
bed; but when he gets his head up the follow-
101
ALBERT GOLDMAN
ing afternoon, invariably he finds her gone.

One of his constant complaints is that she is
never present at his breakfast. (He's also
galled by her taste in music—she's a Paul
McCartney fan.)
Nobody has ever witnessed any authentic
exchange of affection between the pair. In
fact, the entourage is convinced that Elvis
and Ginger are not intimate. The drugs have
rendered Elvis practically impotent, and reg
ular injections of testosterone have not re
stored his virility.
Ginger's refusal to dance attendance on
Elvis infuriates him because all his life, from
childhood up, he has been accustomed to the
attentions of doting females who have stud
ied to fulfill his needs and accommodate his i
slightest whim. Above all else, Elvis Presley
is a man who knows how to get what he
wants—but he's had no luck with Ginger.
Inevitably, her withdrawals and withhold
ings have provoked violent and destructive
scenes.
Once when Elvis went to record at Nash
ville, Ginger refused to accompany him, ex
plaining that she disliked the city. Elvis was
so infuriated by her refusal—and so deter
mined to bring her to heel—that he spent all
102
his time holed up in his hotel suite, either

phoning her, raging against her, or sinking
into comatose states of drug intoxication. For
three days the engineers and musicians sat
around in the studio waiting for the star.
Finally they gave up, and the sessions were
l cancelled.
On another occasion, Ginger refused to
spend the night at Graceland. When she left
to get into her car, Elvis ran after her bran
dishing a pistol, which he fired over her head.
That brought her back, but it did not solve
their problem. Now, while she waits pa
I tiently for the date of their wedding to be
announced, he rocks back and forth in the
I grip of an unresolvable conflict.
One night he tells the guys how much he
loves Ginger and how determined he is to
make her his wife, seizing her hand and ex
hibiting for everyone’s admiration the glitter
ing engagement ring. The next night, when
he awakes to discover that she has come to
the house and, finding him asleep, watched
TV for an hour with the guys and left, he goes
crazy: “I hate her! 1 cant stand her! Her family
is a bunch of leeches!" This last remark is a
reference to his promises to renovate the Al-
103
I
ALBERT GOLDMAN
dens’ house and retire their mortgage, and

even pay for the divorce of Ginger’s mother,
Jo LaVeme, from her father.
“Romance equals finance” is a basic prin
ciple with Elvis, who is accustomed to lay a
new car on every new girl he meets. (Gaining
intimate access to minors by corrupting their
families is also an inspiration for giving.) But
when his extravagant presents fail to inspire
a properly beholden attitude, the legendary
Presley generosity peels off, revealing its true
motive as the desire for absolute control. El
vis is also apt to exchange his hearts-and-
flowers rhetoric for the vulgar, boastful tone ■
of the macho, declaring—or fantasizing?—

(I
"She gives the best head. She’s got such long
legs. I like to wrap them around my head.”
Over and above his ambivalence and her
resistance to his demands looms the crucial
question—does Ginger love Elvis? She sits at
his side like a windup doll that has been
designed to do an engaging turn, but she
never offers any spontaneous signs of attach
ment. David sums up the relationship neatly:
"Elvis was desperately trying to win this girl,
and he was bummed out that he couldn’t do
it. It made him realize what bad shape he
104
was in. She didn’t like being around him at

the end—nobody did. He felt that she was
just using him. She didn't love him, that was
obvious.”
Elvis doesn't confine his anger and frustra
tion to words: he consoles himself by seeing
other women. After all, no matter how bad he
looks or how decrepit he is, he is still the
King. Women don’t see him as a man—they
see him as a dream that suddenly becomes
attainable when he singles them out. Behind
Ginger’s back, he comforts himself with old
flames or with new discoveries brought to
him by his aides. Minde Miller, a Los Angeles
model who appeared later in Brian De Pal
f ma’s Body Double, belongs in the first cate
gory.
Minde's dark good looks and sexy figure
appealed to Elvis. His obvious need for help
appealed to her maternal instincts, but she
soon realized that there was no coping with
his drug addiction. She had slept by his side
at Dr. Ghanem’s house while Elvis took his
sleep cure. Then she had seen him revert
immediately to his old ways when they went
down to the house at Palm Springs. At that
point, she recognized that Elvis was a hope
less case.
105
ALBERT GOLDMAN
J
Alicia Kerwin is another of Elvis's back
ups—a hefty but good-looking girl of twenty-
one who works as a teller in a bank in the
vicinity on Elvis Presley Boulevard. She ac
companied Elvis on his last flight to Las
Vegas, where he went to pick up a load of
drugs. He’s given her a car and a diamond
ring (which for Elvis is no evidence of inti
macy and she says that they were never inti
mate). She hasn't been around recently, but
Elvis keeps in touch.
Elvis has always preferred adolescent girls
to adult women. His ideal is a fourteen-year-
old or, better, three or four fourteen-year-olds
in an orgiastic trio or quartet with himself as
the leader. In recent months, he has been
enjoying a flirtation with Rise Smith, a fif
teen-year-old who was introduced to Elvis by
Rickey. Says David: "Elvis went nuts over
Rise. He dug her chile. He dug her butt. He
went over to meet her family. Then he bought
her a high-performance sports car, a silver
Pontiac Trans Am. She was his last great shot.
Tall, long thick blonde hair, with a very sexy
voice.”
No matter how many other women he toys
106
with, Elvis cannot resolve his conflict over

Ginger. Just a week before, they had a test of
strength, and she won. The occasion was a
promised night at Libertyland. Elvis had said
he would rent the place after closing and
open it to all the kids in the family, including
Lisa Marie and her playmate Amber, the
daughter of Ginger's brother. As often hap
pened, when the time came to fulfill the
promise, Elvis tried to back out. When he
offered Ginger the lame excuse that "every
body out there has already gone home,” she
came back with an answer that put him on
his mettle: "Why Elvis, I thought you once
told me you could do anything!”
Elvis made good on his word, and all the
kids had a wonderful time. But when the
King got into his car to drive home, he was
seething. Turning to his chief of security, Dick
Grob, he snapped, "She’s out! I can't stand
this fuckin' family. She's gone!”
NOTES
1. George Klein, a local DJ, was never on

Elvis’s payroll, but he qualified as a member
of the Memphis Mafia. On February 22, 1977,
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ALBERT GOLDMAN
he was indicted on one count of conspiracy to

commit mail fraud and three counts of pos
session of stolen mail and aiding and abet
ting the crime, which also involved a Mem
phis mailman. (The scam turned on the
interception of Arbitron Radio Research re
ports and the falsification of their listener
ratings.) Klein appealed to Elvis, who was
accustomed to using his influence to get his
friends and relatives out of the hands of the
police. But this was a federal case that went
well beyond his normal sphere of influence.
After considering the matter, he decided to
take his problem to the top. President Jimmy
Carter was an Elvis fan. He had come back-
stage twice when Elvis played Atlanta, once
when he was governor of Georgia and again
when he was running for president.
One day David answered Elvis's private
phone in the bedroom and heard an unfamil
iar voice say, "This is a White House aide. Is
Mr. Presley in?” David went to the bathroom
door: "Elvis, this is the call you were expect
ing—it’s the White House!” Elvis swaggered
out with a look that said, “What did I tell
you?” Then he mumbled, "This is kinda
heavy—I better take it alone.” As David left
108
the room, he heard Elvis address the presi

dent as "Mr. Carter.”
Later, when David asked about the call,
Elvis brushed him off: "It's been taken care
of.” This implied that the fix was in—but
according to other sources in the entourage,
Carter said that the matter was before the
court and there was nothing he could do.
Klein was brought to trial on November 29,
1977, and convicted of conspiracy to commit
mail fraud. He was acquitted of the other
three charges. He served sixty days in the
Shelby County Jail.
109
11
A Crack in the
King’s Crown
eOust before Elvis, Ginger, and

Billy leave for the dentist’s (the King never
travels without a retinue), they are joined by
Charlie Hodge, the little guitar-picker who
loops the scarves around Elvis's neck so that
they touch his skin before he throws them
from the stage to his fans. Charlie is the only
member of Elvis's touring company who lives
at Graceland.
111
ALBERT GOLDMAN
Charlie's arrival is the signal for the whole

party to troop down the stairs and get into
the car. Driving down the curving approach
to the Music Gate, Elvis sees the usual gaggle
of fans hanging around in hopes of catching
a glimpse of their hero. As the gates swing
open under the control of the guard, he waves
graciously. Elvis is always very considerate
of his followers because he was taught that
without them he would be nothing. Only a
couple of weeks ago, he tore into Aunt Delta
I
Mae for making derogatory remarks about
the fans, who had clustered around Elvis’s
plane as he was about to board it.
Now he takes off along Elvis Presley Bou
levard, heading for the dentist’s office, about
a half-hour distant. As the car hums along, it
fills with the odor of Elvis’s amber-tipped
Daniello cigar, mingling nicely with the rich
smell of the expensive red leather that lines
the interior. A good driver, who has criss
crossed America many times, Elvis has only
one eccentricity on the road—he always
keeps his turn-signal on.
Arriving in the dentist's affluent neighbor
hood in East Memphis, Elvis exhibits a rare
cheerfulness. When he greets Dr. Hofman, a
112
pudgy man in his fifties wearing a white

smock over his dress clothes, Elvis gestures
toward the beauteous Ginger and asks, "Isn’t
this an ugly girl here?" Then he introduces
her to the doctor, explaining that he would
like to have her teeth examined after they
have dealt with his problem.
What is his problem, exactly? According to
Billy Smith, Elvis said, "Look Doc, I broke
the permanent crown on my tooth a few
weeks ago, and I just keep putting it off get
ting it fixed. Just put a.temporary crown on
it now until I get back from the tour.” That’s
a good suggestion because it will soon create
the need for another visit to the dentist. Elvis
is the inventor of the permanent temporary
crown.
Elvis is on very cozy terms with Dr. Hof-
man, an old friend who drives a Cadillac that
is a gift from the King. According to Hof-
man's own account, on this occasion he
cleaned Elvis's teeth and filled two: the upper
right bicuspid and the upper left molar. He
also X-rayed Ginger's teeth and suggested she
make an appointment for further work. Dr.
Hofman has never volunteered any informa
tion about what drugs, if any, ,he gave Elvis
on the night of the fifteenth.
113
ALBERT GOLDMAN
When it comes time to leave, Elvis turns on

his charm and asks after the health of the
dentist's wife, Sterling. Elvis also talks with
pride about his new Ferrari, the kind of ma
chine that makes the locals gawk. When the
visit comes to an end, Dr. Hofman makes a
request. "Listen,” he drawls, "next time
you're goin' out to California, I'd like to
come. It would be a nice surprise if I could
drop in on my daughter out there.”
"Sure,” replies Elvis, "there's always room
on the plane—you know that!” Elvis is but
tering up the doctor. The last thing he would
want aboard his plane is an outsider who
could be sizing him up from the medical
standpoint. Stroking doctors, however, is sec
ond nature to Elvis. He always puts them
away because he knows he will need them
again.
It is 1:30 a.m. when the dentist closes his
file drawer, having made a note about a dam
aged crown that will soon need repair.
114
Takin’ Care
of Business
o'Ground 2 p.m., Elvis gets

back to Graceland. A few "gate hogs” are still
standing at the guard house, which is
manned 24 hours a day. Robert Call, from
Pierceton, Indiana, has brought his wife and
four-year-old daughter, Abby, to Memphis in
order to photograph them standing before
the backdrop of Graceland. When Mrs. Call
sees Elvis approach in the Stutz, she lifts up
115
ALBERT GOLDMAN
her little girl so she can get a good look at the

great man. Elvis waves perfunctorily. Mr.
J
Call presses the button on his $20 Instamatic,
getting the last picture of one of the most
photographed men in history.
When Elvis enters the house, he and Ginger
go upstairs, while Billy and Charlie go off to
their quarters to sleep. The first thing Elvis
does is to call Dr. Nichopolous, waking him
in the middle of the night, as he has done
countless times. Later Dr. Nick will complain
that he never got a good night’s rest in the
whole ten years he worked for Elvis; but
nobody who serves the King's pleasure can
expect to lie undisturbed at night, because
this is the time when he is most active.
Elvis complains that he can't sleep. He’s
just come from Dr. Hofman’s office and is
suffering from an abcessed tooth. After all
these years, it doesn't take many words for
patient and doctor to come to an understand
ing. Nichopolous offers to write a prescrip
tion for six Dilaudids.
Instantly, Rickey is dispatched to the doc
tor s house on the outskirts of Memphis to
pick up the script, which he will then take to
the all-night pharmacy at Baptist Memorial
116
Hospital—the same place where he was ar

rested two years ago for presenting a forged
prescription. Though Elvis will have his pills
in less than two hours, he is not the kind to
brook delay. Once he has sent Rickey off on
his mission, he calls up Tish Henley.
Henley is a graduate of nursing school, but
she has never taken the state licensing exam
ination. Her principal qualification for work
ing with Elvis Presley is long years of experi
ence. She knows her patient thoroughly, and
during the two years she has been stationed
at Graceland, she has monitored virtually all
the drugs he has received at home from Dr.
Nichopolous. These preparations are kept in
a locked satchel secreted in her home. Every
evening one of Elvis’s men comes around to
pick up the three attacks. On other occasions,
the pills and injections are dispensed ad hoc.
Tonight Elvis tells his nurse that Ginger is
suffering from severe menstrual cramps. He
asks for something to relieve her pain. Nurse
Henley obliges by sending over one Dilaudid
tablet.
Cheered by this winning parlay, Elvis uses
the intercom again to speak to one of his
security men, Sam Thompson (Linda's
117
ALBERT GOLDMAN
brother), who is downstairs awaiting the or

der to return Lisa Marie to her mother in
Beverly Hills. Elvis gives him the go-ahead.
Now Dick Grob, a tall, bearded ex-sergeant
of police from Palm Springs, arrives at the
second-floor office to report on the prepara
tions for the tour. Colonel Parker and the
advance party, he announces, are already in
Maine, checking out the Portland hall and the
publicity. The musicians will be leaving Los
Angeles this evening aboard Elvis’s chartered
Electra. Joe Esposito will be arriving at
Graceland early tomorrow afternoon. As al
ways, everybody is living up to the motto of
the Presley organization, “TCB”—takin’ care
of business. What’s more, all the houses are
sold out.
Elvis says that he has made up a list of five
or six songs that he would like to try out. He
tells Grob to have Charlie Hodge dig out the
lyric sheets. Then, as the conversation contin
ues, it drifts around to the recent reports in
the papers saying that Elvis is in bad health
and the ugly gossip that has been inspired by
the bodyguards' book.
This time Elvis appears utterly unper
turbed by these threatening developments.
118
"Dick,” he says, exuding the confidence of an

old pro, "we'll just show them how wrong
they are. We'll make this one the best ever.”
By 4 a.m., Rickey is back at Graceland with
the six Dilaudids, one of Elvis's favorite
drugs. As it is the customary hour for the first
attack, Rickey takes the little yellow envelope
upstairs with the vial of small white pills
from the all-night pharmacy. He finds his
boss in the bedroom, displaying signs of agi
tation. Holding up the pages of the book man
uscript, Elvis asks, "How are the fans gonna
take this stuff? How is Lisa Marie gonna feel
about her daddy?” Rickey has no answers for
these questions. Nor has Elvis.
Suddenly, he orders Rickey to get down on
his knees so that they can pray together. "God
forgive me for my sins,” Elvis pleads. “Let
the people who read this book have compas
sion and understanding of the things I have
done. Amen.”
Rickey leaves the bedroom without seeing
Elvis take a single pill. This isn’t typical, but
it does happen from time to time. Elvis will
put his medications aside and take them
when he is ready, injecting the Demerol in
his hip.
119
ALBERT GOLDMAN
Now, having relieved his anxiety for the

moment—and fortified himself, most likely,
with a couple of Dilaudids—Elvis walks into
his office where Ginger is awaiting him. His
mood changes again. After all, he’s got his
stash, and the night is young. Why shouldn’t
he indulge in one of his favorite pastimes and
talk to his fiancee about the upcoming cere
mony?
120
A
The Bride
Wore Glass
Elvis has been talking to Gin-
ger about the wedding since their first date.

On that evening, they had flown to Las Vegas
and taken a top-floor suite at the Hilton. In
short order. Ginger found herself in bed with
Elvis, wearing an identical pair of pajamas.
Instead of seducing her, he had extended his
hand to grasp hers. Then, she remembers him
closing his eyes blissfully and saying in a
121
ALBERT GOLDMAN
dreamy tone, "I can see you in a white bridal

gown.” Shortly thereafter, he fell sound
asleep.
That abrupt reference to marriage startled
Ginger, but when she became Elvis’s fiancee,
the wedding came to be one of their most
common topics of conversation. The problem
was that Elvis would never set a date for the
great event. He would tell Ginger and her
mother, "God will let me know when the time
is right, when I’m supposed to tell you that it
is time to do the wedding.” That was as far
as they had gotten because Ginger was loath
to raise the subject, lest Elvis think her
"pushy.”
Tonight, it is clear Elvis has been giving the
ceremony a great deal of thought. First, he
announces that he wants to start making the
arrangements with his factotum, Joe Espos
ito, and therefore it is important that he
receive her suggestions. He is at pains to
show that he wants to respect her wishes and
tastes and not simply impose his vision on
her. He asks, for example, whether she has
any preferences as to the color of the limou
sines? Actually, he wants her thoughts not
just on the wedding but on the redecoration
122
of Graceland. He is determined to do the

whole house over as a sign that he is begin
ning life anew.
The last time the house was redecorated,
Elvis was in the midst of his four-and-a-half-
year affair with Linda Thompson. They
drowned Priscilla's demure blue decor with
great gouts of harlot red, giving the down
stairs rooms the look of a New Orleans bor
dello. (When Priscilla got control of the house
again years later, she had these rooms done
over in pristine white. What people see today
is not Elvis’s Graceland but Priscilla’s.) Now
Elvis is groping for a new color scheme, one
that will symbolize his relationship with Gin
ger. How would she feel about green, the
healing color?
Ginger is delighted by the suggestion be
cause she is always badgering Elvis to take
better care of his health: to stop putting so
much salt on his food and to eat dried fruits
instead of ice cream—even to take a little air
at sunset by sitting with her beside the pool.
Now when he asks her how she would like to
modify the interior decor, she suggests add
ing aquariums and plants.
This absorbing discussion lasts for almost
123
ALBERT GOLDMAN
an hour. Ginger recalls it ranging over every

conceivable aspect of the wedding and being
interrupted only by Elvis stopping occasion
ally to exclaim, "God! To think that for the
first time in my life, I'm in love!” Then he
would shake visibly. At those moments, Gin
ger feels that he is in the grip of a higher
power. But what touches and impresses her
most is when Elvis says, "Mama should come
alive again!"
What is unmistakable in Elvis's descrip
tion of the wedding is his determination this
time to have everything exactly as he wants
it. When he married Priscilla, all the arrange
ments were made by Colonel Parker, with
scant concern for Elvis's wishes. In fact* you
could say it was the Colonel’s wedding, be
cause it was he who demanded that Elvis get
married, and he who chose the Aladdin Hotel
in Vegas as the site (where he could stick the
owner with the bill, his close friend Milton
Prell—the front man for the Detroit Mob).
The Colonel even controlled the guest list
(which gave him a chance to humiliate Elvis’s
guys, whom he regarded as parasites) and
picked the judge, another crony. Priscilla had
annoyed Elvis by tinkering with the marriage
124
vows, making them read "to love, honor, and

comfort." She had also vexed him by buying
a cheap gown and stitching a train on it
herself, a typically parsimonious act. This
time, Elvis was determined to dress his bride
like a fairy-tale princess.
In loving detail he describes to her how she
will look on her wedding day. She will wear
a white gown embroidered with rose buds
sparkling with beaded drops of gold. She will
be crowned with a tiara. The most fantastic
idea concerns her feet. Her little "sooties”
(Elvis’s baby-talk for "footies," part of the
language of love he shared with Gladys and
later taught to the women who mothered
him) will be encased in glass Cinderella slip
pers.
As for the ceremony itself, Elvis sees this
event as an ideal opportunity to dramatize
his unique status in American society. In
stead of a justice of the peace and a hotel
suite sparsely filled with a handful of rela
tives and friends, he wants a justice of the
Supreme Court and a public arena, ideally
one shaped like a pyramid, in order to focus
the spiritual energies upon him and Ginger.
As for the guests, they will number countless
125
a
ALBERT GOLDMAN
men of power and prestige, including some of

the foremost law-and-order officials in the
I
United States—police chiefs, district attor
neys, officers of the FBI and DEA. As he men
tally surveys this impressive array of super
cops, he suddenly bursts out, "God! It’s gonna J
blow all this stuff sideways!”
Clearly, he is thinking of the bodyguards’ ii
book, which has been available for a month
and is already causing a sensation among the i
fans. Elvis has been straining for weeks to

come up with some brilliant stroke of
counter-propaganda. He has thought of all
sorts of schemes, committing some of them
to paper. He has even written a speech to
deliver during his concerts on the upcoming
tour, in which he concedes that he has a
"problem” with prescription drugs and
promises to seek treatment. That's one way
to defuse the issue—but it entails making an
admission that is totally out of character for
the King. How much better to simply sink
the book under an enormous wave of Elvis
mania! Suppose he were to announce the
wedding at the end of his current tour when
he plays the Mid-South Coliseum at Mem
phis? That would be the perfect place to
126
break the news. As for setting a wedding

date—why not Christmas?
By 4:30 in the morning, Elvis is cooking.
The Dilaudid has made him euphoric. He has
Ginger enthralled, pouring forth that stream
of frank sentimentality that has made him
the darling of millions around the world.
Now he swings into his latest conversation
with his father.
The old man had asked about Ginger,
"Does she do little things for you, son?” Then
they had gotten into the topic of age differ
ences between a man and his woman. Elvis is
twenty-two-years older than Ginger. Will it
matter? Vernon assured his son that it would
matter a lot if the shoe were on the other foot
and Ginger were Elvis's age. After all, he said,
"What could a sixty-year-old woman do for
me?”
Elvis winds up his rap by telling Ginger
something so touching, so essentially Elvis
that she is overwhelmed. "You know what my
father said to me?” he confides with his boy
ish smile. "He said he had never seen me so
happy as a man. I looked so happy to him, he
said, that I reminded him now of that little
boy he put overalls on back in Tupelo.”
127
ALBERT GOLDMAN
That was a mighty sweet thing to say to

Ginger, but it concealed the darker side of
the father-son exchange. Elvis had confided
that he was worried Ginger and David were
carrying on behind his back. This fear came
to light in a conversation conducted the day
after Elvis's funeral by Vernon, who had
asked to see David in private.
When Vernon and his stepson were face to
face, the old man said, "The last thing my
son said to me was that he was afraid you
and Ginger were having an affair. Did you
kill my son?”
David was astonished by this off-the-wall
accusation and told Vernon in so many words
that he had lost his mind.
Vernon persisted: "You and she are the
same age and you spent a lot of time together.
It’s not such a crazy idea. David, I'm just
lookin' for answers.”
David assured Vernon that he had not been
having an affair with Ginger (who would have
been outraged at the thought), and that he
certainly did not kill Elvis. Vernon continued
to vent his suspicions.1
When Elvis ends his great flight of fantasy,
it is only an hour before dawn. This is the
128
time when he usually retires. Tonight,

though, he is so high and having so much fun
that he wants to keep going. A half-hour be
fore, he called up Billy Smith, who had long
since gone to sleep. He told Billy to wake up
his wife, Jo, and come over to the house.
Maybe the four of them will play a little
racquetball.
NOTES
1. These suspicions finally emerged in a

book proposal offered in 1990 by Dr. Nicho-
polous and titled Who Killed Elvis Presley?
The synopsis suggested that Elvis may have
been killed by a karate blow that broke his
neck. Leaving no mark (dead bodies don’t
bruise), it was somehow missed during the
autopsy. David is not directly implicated in
this hypothesis—though it is said that there
were a number of people around Elvis who
might have wanted him dead—but it was
well-known in the Presley circle that David
was a first-degree black belt in Kenpo karate.
(Al Strada and Billy Smith were also trained
in karate.) As it is virtually impossible that
129
ALBERT GOLDMAN
such a gross injury would have been over

looked in the exhaustive autopsy performed
on Elvis, Dr. Nick’s speculation cannot be—
and has not been—taken seriously. Clearly,
he is seeking to escape the imputation that
he was responsible for Elvis's death by sum
moning up a phantom murderer.
David attributes Elvis’s suspicions to a pro
jection of his own desires for David's wife.
Just a week before Elvis's death, he sum
moned David and his estranged wife, Angie,
to his room in order to urge them to recon
cile. When they appeared, he took Angie into
his dressing room and remained closeted
with her for at least twenty minutes. This
behavior made David uncomfortable because
he saw it as a repetition of the play Elvis had
made for his brother Billy's wife years before.
When Elvis and Angie emerged, she dis
played Elvis's white-gold and diamond wed
ding band on her ring finger. Elvis explained,
"I’m giving you both this ring to heal your
marriage." Then he asked them to pray with
him, invoking God to bless the marriage and
repeating the admonition, "Let no man put
them asunder." Then he dismissed Angie,
telling her that David would be down in a few
minutes.
130
No sooner was she out the door than Elvis

turned to David and said, "She’s not coming
back.” David was so hurt by those blunt
words that his eyes began to mist. Elvis drew
David to his feet and, putting his arm around
his shoulders, led him to one of the blacked-
out windows, where they stood as if they
could see through the covered panes. “Son,”
said Elvis, “just remember this: somewhere
out there is an eighteen-year-old piece of ass
just waiting for you.” On that note they
parted—with David even more convinced
that Elvis was up to no good.
131
□
Racquets
at Dawn
IThe racquetball court is a re-
cent addition to Graceland. A windowless,

cast-concrete building of modem design, it
resembles a military bunker. On the ground
floor is a lounge in brown and tan, complete
with a bar, chairs and sofas, jukebox, hi-fi
system, pinball machine, upright piano, and
various exercise devices. A stairway beside
the bar leads to the second floor, which con-
133
ALBERT GOLDMAN
tains a Jacuzzi and two dressing rooms, each

with its own shower and steam room. There
is also a viewing balcony. The roof is fitted as
a running track and sun deck.
When Billy and Jo get up to Elvis’s room,
they find him eager to go out and play. Billy
follows Elvis into the dressing room and
helps him put on a sweat suit. Then they all
go down the service stairs and out the back
of the house, where there is a covered walk
way leading to the court.
It is still raining lightly, and Billy and Jo
express their impatience to see it end. Elvis
steps out in the open, holds his hand above
his head as if in supplication—and the rain
stops! When everyone stares at him in amaze
ment, Elvis smiles knowingly and sighs, "You
never know, Billy, you never know.”
Racquetball calls for fast reflexes, sudden
bursts of energy, and abrupt lateral move
ments. For a man in Elvis’s condition, it is
nearly unthinkable. Instead of crouching in
readiness, he always stands bolt upright. In
stead of hustling after the ball, he shuffles
about, displaying an embarrassing lack of
coordination. Everyone coddles Elvis, but it’s
hard to make him a winner.
134
}
Tonight, the two couples are matched—the
arrangement Elvis favors because it's less
strenuous than singles. All the same, he soon
grows tired and withdraws from the court
with Billy, while Jo and Ginger play on.
When Elvis has recovered himself, he re
turns to the court, ostensibly to play Billy,
but actually to clown around. Every time
Billy serves, Elvis tries to hit him with his
return. Soon Billy is ducking and bobbing
like the guy at the carnival with his head
sticking through a hole in the tarpaulin. Elvis
is having fun and showing off for Ginger.
I
Every time he does something goofy, he
swings around to see if she is watching and
applauding him. The horseplay ends when he
j takes a mighty swing on a serve and bashes
i himself on the shin.
Billy and Jo pull up his pants leg to inspect
g
the damage. When they see a lump, they look
in his face and cite one of his favorite prov
erbs: "If it ain't bleedin', it ain't hurtin’
Billy starts laughing so hard that he can’t
stand up. Elvis throws his racket at him and
goes into the lounge to cool off.
Seating himself at the piano with a tall
glass of ice water he begins to chord out and
I
135
ALBERT GOLDMAN
sing some of his favorite songs. How many

nights he has wound up this way, singing out
his soul, either surrounded by the guys or his
gospel quartet! The song that most impresses
Billy is an old country weeper recently re
vived by Willie Nelson—"Blue Eyes Cryin’ in
the Rain."
When Elvis and his friends emerge from
the racquetball court, it is nearly 7 a.m. and
broad daylight. Entering the house, they all
troop through the kitchen and up the back
stairs, except Jo, who remains behind to chat
with Mary Jenkins. The cook is troubled be
cause Elvis has refused to eat, which is com
pletely out of character. The previous night—
after going motorbiking with Ginger, Billy
and Jo, and Al Strada, and then watching
Peter Sellers videotapes—Elvis had eaten at
dawn a hearty meal of hamburgers and
french fries. In fact, he had so enjoyed Mary
Jenkins’ cooking that he had urged Billy to
join him, exclaiming, "This woman can make
the best hamburgers in the world!” The cook
has tried to cajole Elvis into eating this morn
ing, but he won’t take a bite of food. Strange.
Upstairs, Ginger goes off to her dressing
room and Elvis to his with Billy. Taking a
136
£
damp towel, Billy cleans Elvis’s hair and

blows it dry. Meantime, Elvis talks about a
new book on the Shroud of Turin, The Scien
tific Search for the Face of Jesus, which his
f spiritualist hairdresser in Los Angeles, Larry
Geller, has sent him. Then he drifts into the
topic of the tour. For the first time he dis
closes to Billy that there has been a change
in his plans.
Ginger is not able to go on the first part of
I the tour, he says, and so he is thinking of
taking another girl. Billy has never disclosed
who she was, but Dick Grob later told a
reporter for the Star that Elvis was planning
f to take Alicia Kerwin, who was packed and
ready to leave that day.1
Next, Elvis swings around to his betrayal
by Red and Sonny. Never the sort to keep
anything to himself, no matter how compro
mising, he gradually unfolds an elaborate
plan to lure the traitors to Graceland, where
Elvis plans to kill them with his own hands.
Billy is impressed by how thoroughly Elvis
has developed his plot, but having known him
all his life, he is not in the least fearful that
the crime will be committed. Elvis is notori
ous for making terrible threats and then not
137
ALBERT GOLDMAN
carrying them out. As Gladys used to say,

"Don’t pay him no mind—he's jes’ talkin’
from the mouth out.”
By the time the conversation has come to
its close, Elvis's anger has taken its usual
course and subsided into depression. He is
very blue when he takes leave of his cousin.
In fact, he is back in that valedictory mood
that has been so conspicuous during the last
couple of weeks. "Billy,” sighs Elvis when it
is time to part, “take care of yourself. You
won’t see me again. It's all over.”2
Billy is no more troubled by this ominous
farewell than he is by Elvis's threats of mur
der. He goes back to his mobile home about
7:30 intent on getting a few hours of sleep,
convinced that one way or another, he will
see Elvis again before he goes off on tour.
By now Ginger is back in the bedroom,
where she has thrown herself down on the
bed, still dressed in her exercise clothes. She
is utterly exhausted because she was up till
dawn the previous morning and after only a
few hours' sleep had gone home to take care
of her own affairs. Alternately dozing and
waking, she watches Elvis’s restless actions.
Now he calls downstairs for Rickey, who
138
comes up promptly to deliver the second at

tack.3 As Elvis is clearly not in the mood to
take his pills and nod out, Rickey leaves the
packet on his night table, just as he did after
his first delivery. Elvis’s last words to Rickey
■
are: "Tell David [due at noon] not to disturb

me until four o’clock—under any circum
t
stances.”
About 8 a.m. Elvis calls Tish Henley at Dr.
Nichopolous' office. He tells her that he is
anticipating a very trying day, what with
7
Lisa Marie going home that afternoon and his
own departure after midnight. It is essential
that he get a good day’s sleep. Can she help
him out with a tranquilizer and a pain killer?
She agrees to provide some additional medi
cation. Ringing up her husband at home, she
tells him to take out of her drug satchel two
Valmid tablets and a Placydil placebo.
Tommy Henley delivers the pills to Aunt
Delta Mae.
Before nine, Elvis phones downstairs again
to get his third attack, but Rickey has gotten
loaded meantime on Demerol and sunken
into a drugged sleep on the bed in the base
ment. When Delta Mae is unable to rouse
him, she takes the packet of pills and carries
them upstairs to Elvis's room.
139
ALBERT GOLDMAN
Ginger, who has been drifting in and out of

sleep, awakens again. She notices something
strange: normally, Elvis takes his pills as
soon as he gets them, then quickly becomes
groggy and nods out. This morning Ginger
has seen Billy deliver drugs to Elvis twice,
the first time many hours ago, but he is still
wide awake. Not only that, but he appears
extremely restless. At the moment, he is lying
in bed dressed in pajamas and reading a book
about psychic energy. She attributes his
mood to anxiety about the forthcoming tour.
Suddenly, Elvis gets up. Looking down at
Ginger, he says, “Precious, I'm gonna go in
the bathroom and read for a while.”
"OK,” she sighs. "But don’t fall asleep.”
He smiles. "Don’t worry. I won't.”
NOTES
1. Before he went out on tour, it was Elvis’s

practice to keep all the women in the entou
rage dangling until the last minute. Then he
would either say it was OK for the guys to
bring their wives or girlfriends or he would
say "no wives,” which meant that backup
140
girls would be brought along. Ginger's behav

ior—described in the next chapter—suggests
that she was planning to go on the tour and
was looking forward to enjoying the compan
ionship of her best friend, Cindy Mies. Elvis
might have been contriving a last-minute
switch to put Ginger in her place. The last
time she had refused to travel with him, when
he went out to Las Vegas to pick up his drugs,
he had taken Alicia Kerwin instead.
2. This account of Billy Smith's last eve

ning with Elvis is based primarily on a remi
niscence titled "The Last Days” published in
Elvis: The Record (Memphis: May 1979). In
the article, Elvis's last words are: "Billy . . .
son . . . this is going to be my best tour ever."
In a conversation years later with the Elvis
collector John Dawson, Billy offered the very
different—and more plausible—speech that
appears above. In a recent publishing pro
posal, he added the information about Elvis’s
plot to kill Sonny and Red West.
3. Over the years, Rickey Stanley’s recol

lections of his drug deliveries on the last
night of Elvis’s life have been inconsistent. In
141
ALBERT GOLDMAN
one version he said that he made two deliv

eries, in another only one. Sometimes he has
said that Elvis gave strict orders that he was
not to be disturbed until four that afternoon;
sometimes that Elvis said he would call
Rickey when he needed him. The fullest ac
count of Elvis’s last night is provided by
Ginger, who has always said that she saw
Rickey make two deliveries, although she
places the first one’too late, around 6 a.m.,
whereas it is more in accordance with the
evidence that Rickey made his first delivery
around 4. Ginger's placing the second deliv
ery around 8 makes good sense both in terms
of the general chronology and the daily rou
tine of drug deliveries.
142
□
“Breathe
for me!”
\/\/.hen Ginger next awakes, she

glances at the electric clock across the room
and sees it is 2 p.m. Elvis’s place, on the side
of the bed nearest the bedroom doors, is
empty, but the reading lamp extending from
the wall is lit. She decides to call her closest
friend, Cindy Mies, who has just taken up
with David Stanley. Ginger has been trying
to arrange matters so that Cindy can accom-
143
ALBERT GOLDMAN
party David on the tour, which would relieve

Ginger’s boredom. She learns that in fact
Cindy is about to leave work to go pack for
the tour leaving tonight. After Ginger hangs
up, she calls her mother at home and says
she’ll be leaving Graceland shortly. By now,
it’s just after two.
Unsure where Elvis is, Ginger gets out of
bed and knocks on the bathroom door. Re
ceiving no response, she knocks again and
again: "Elvis? . . . Elvis?" Reluctantly, she
finally opens the door a little and peers in
side.
What she sees is startling. Elvis is hunched
down on the floor about four feet from the
toilet in the position of a praying Muslim. His
hands are under his face, and his head is
turned slightly to the right.
Had Ginger discovered anyone else in such
an amazing posture, she would have been
alarmed. Elvis is another matter. It’s not un
usual to see him unconscious, because he is
always passing out from the drugs he takes.
What's more, when the stuff hits him, he
often keels over, no matter where. He can end
up in any position. So when Ginger discovers
him, her first thought is simply, “Oh, the
144
medication's hit him.” All the same, she is

dismayed to see the great man lying with his
face buried in the bathroom rug.
Walking over to him, she again speaks his
name—"Elvis?” When he doesn't stir, she
leans over to take a closer look. Then she
catches sight of the blow dryer lying on the
floor next to him. Can he possibly have hit his
head on that?
Now she touches him. He’s cold. Well, that
isn't unusual either. Lying for hours in his
chilly bedroom, Elvis often feels cold to the
touch. Glancing about, Ginger sees nothing
else amiss. Elvis has been reading. The book
on the Shroud of Turin is lying on the chair
seat. Kneeling down now, she turns his head
a little to get a better look.
Suddenly, she feels fear. Elvis’s face is pur
ple and Swollen, engorged with blood. His
eyes are tightly closed. His tongue is lolling
out of his mouth and he has bitten down on
it, turning it black. Though she heard what
sounded like a sigh when she twisted his
head, there is no sign that he is still breath
ing,
Ginger raises one of his eyelids. The eye is
blood red and staring vacantly. She tries
145
ALBERT GOLDMAN
slapping his face. No reaction. She leans back

for a few moments, too stunned to do any
thing further.
Finally, she rises and walks in a daze into
the bedroom. Picking up the phone, she
punches the button for the kitchen.
"Who’s on duty?” she asks Pauline.
"Al Strada.”
"Would you tell Al to come up here really
quick?”
Putting down the phone, she goes out
through the double doors into the hall and
starts down the stairs, meeting Strada on the
way up. !
"I think something’s really wrong with El
vis!” she says. "Come and look at him!”
The taciturn Strada doesn't say a word. He
glances at Elvis and reaches for the wall
phone next to the toilet, remarking to him
self, “Let me get Joe up here.”
Joe Esposito has just arrived at Graceland
to take charge of the trip. A swarthy, jowly
man with a preoccupied air, he is accus
tomed to reacting quickly to any crisis. Im
mediately, he comes charging up the stairs to
the bathroom.
Joe is alarmed by what he sees. He recog-
146
!
nizes that Elvis may be close to death. He

knows you are supposed to pump the heart
and give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation—but
how can he do these things? Elvis’s mouth is
clamped shut, and his heart is inaccessible.
Are you supposed to move him? What if he's
already dead?
Joe grabs the phone and stabs out Dr. Ni-
chopolous's beeper number. When he gets the
operator, she tells him that the doctor is at
Doctor's Hospital (five miles from Grace
land), where she will have him paged. Mean
time, she advises Joe to keep his line open.
Calculating how long it will take Dr. Nick to
get the message, call back, and then drive
from the hospital to Graceland, Joe decides
to seek help in the neighborhood.
He rings Dr. Perry Holmes, a doctor used
by the family occasionally for minor com
plaints. He's out, but moments later his col
league, Dr. James Campbell, calls back and
speaks with Aunt Delta. She tells him that
Elvis is having trouble breathing and asks
him to come over immediately. The doctor
suggests they bring Elvis to his office.
Having failed twice to get help, Joe takes a
step that he regards as the last resort. He
147
ALBERT GOLDMAN
calls the emergency number. When the oper

ator answers, he tells her that somebody—he
doesn’t say who—is having trouble breathing
at 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard. Seeking to
the last to avoid damaging publicity, he tells
the woman only one thing: the ambulance
driver should go straight through the gates
and up the driveway to the front door.
Swiftly, the call is relayed to Unit Six of the
Memphis Fire Department Emergency Divi
sion, operating out of Engine House No. 29. i
"Unit Six,” orders the dispatcher, "respond
to 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard. Party having
difficulty breathing. Go to the front gate and
go to the front of the mansion.”
Ulysses Jones and Charlie Crosby, emer
gency medical technicians, are manning the
ambulance. They recognize the address. Of
ten they receive calls from Graceland when
fans faint or suffer injuries milling around
the Music Gate. Once they were summoned
to the house when Vernon suffered a heart
attack. They administered cardiopulmonary
resuscitation and rushed him to the hospital,
saving his life. Now they prepare to do it
again.
At this point, Joe must have called Colonel
148
Parker, because a source in his entourage

reports a call being received from Graceland
at 2:37.
Finally, Joe calls Vernon, who is working in
his office behind the house with his secretary,
Patsy Gambill, and Sandy Miller. Vernon
leaves his desk immediately.
The old man is so feeble that the women
t: virtually have to carry him up the steep
stairs. When he comes wheezing into the
I bathroom, the sight of Elvis hunched over on

the floor terrifies him. It terrifies Patsy even
more, and she runs downstairs and out on
the front lawn, screaming, “Elvis is dead!”
Vernon stands helplessly over the body, wail
ing, “Son, don't die! Son, don’t leave!”
With the aid of Charlie Hodge, who has just
arrived, Joe and Al prepare to turn Elvis over.
Suddenly Lisa Marie is heard calling out as
she climbs the stairs to the bedroom. Ginger
rushes out to intercept her.
"What’s wrong?” asks Lisa.
“Nothing!” snaps Ginger, reaching out to
seize the child.
“Something's wrong with daddy, and I'm
going to find out!” Lisa runs to the other end
of the hall, where she can enter the bathroom
through the dressing room.
149
ALBERT GOLDMAN
"Al!” shouts Ginger, "Lisa’s trying to get

in!”
Al dashes around and locks the door. After
trying it, Lisa runs downstairs to tell Amber
that Elvis is sick.
The next person to arrive is David. When
he came on duty at noon, he found Rickey
down in the basement, looking as if he had
had a hard night. Rickey had repeated Elvis's
orders that he was not to be disturbed until
4. That left David free to shoot some pool
with Mark White, a friend he had brought
along that day.
David’s first intimation that something is
wrong comes when Amber tells him naively,
"Elvis is having trouble breathing.” David
assumes that Elvis has been found uncon
scious, which is not really alarming. To pro
tect himself from being accused of exposing
Elvis to harmful gossip, however, he hustles
Mark out of the house and into his car, and
drops him off at the Music Gate. All of a
sudden the ambulance comes barging in.
Making a screeching U-tum, David roars up
the shorter driveway to the house, which he
enters from the rear. He dashes up the service
stairs and through the dressing room, into
150
the bathroom. Now it is his turn to be

shocked.
Still doubled over on the floor is Elvis, his
lurid gargoyle face half-buried in the carpet.
Vernon is sliding down the side of the shower
stall as his legs buckle under him. Sandy
Miller grabs him frantically, afraid he is hav
ing a heart attack.
Trained to think TCB in any emergency,
David scans the bathroom for signs of drug
use. Instantly he spots an attack envelope,
then two more, as well as four obviously used
syringes. Instinctively, he gathers up the
damning evidence and pockets it.
Now Joe and Al are rolling Elvis onto his
back like a rocker that has tipped forward.
There is a gasp when everyone sees that his
legs remain flexed at the knees. After forcibly
straightening his limbs, they attempt CPR,
while Charlie hollers, “Breathe, Elvis,
breathe!"
Just then, the two medics appear, framed
in the door from the bedroom, holding their
rescue gear. They take in the scene, but nei
ther recognizes the man on the floor as Elvis
Presley.
Ulysses Jones told the National Enquirer:
151
ALBERT GOLDMAN
"As many as a dozen [actually six] people

huddled over the body of a man clothed in
pajamas—a yellow top and blue bottoms.
From his shoulders up, his skin was dark
blue. Around his neck, which seemed fat and
bloated, was a very large gold medallion. His
sidebums were gray. A middle-aged woman
was giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscita
tion, and a young man was pressing on his
chest.
"I knelt down to the body, checked his
pulse, and shined a pin light into his eyes to
see if there was any reaction. There was noth
ing. No pulse, no flicker from the eyes. Elvis
was cold—unusually cold.
"The people around me were weeping. 'Is
there anything you can do?' they cried. I
couldn't give them an answer. A young man i
[David, whom Jones had asked, 'What hap

pened here?'] blurted out, ‘I think he OD’d.'
It was the second time that an overdose had
been mentioned. The first time was at the
door of the house, where a guard had said:
'He's upstairs, and I think it’s an OD.’
"I inserted an airway tube into his throat
and gave the nearest man a squeeze bag for
pumping air into his lungs. Vernon Presley
152
cried, ‘Don't go, son! You’re gonna be all right!’

Then, turning to me, he blurted out, 'Is he
:■ dead?' I just couldn’t tell him.”
Vernon doesn’t need to be told. Tbming to
David, he says, as if in a trance, "My son is
dead ... he’s dead ... he's not cornin' back.”
Then he takes David’s hand and puts it on
Elvis’s cold leg.
Just as David begins to register what's hap
pened, his thoughts are disrupted by Joe Es
posito saying, "David, let’s get him on the
stretcher."
"It took the five of us to lift him,” Charlie
Crosby told the Enquirer. "He must have
weighed 250 pounds. The pajama top was
unbuttoned all the way down, and I could see
the great big rolls of fat on his belly. It looked
like he had been dead for at least an hour.”
The bearers maneuver the stretcher out of
the bathroom, through the bedroom, and
down the main staircase. Vernon Presley hob
bles after them, calling out, "Son, I'm cornin'!
I’ll be there! I’ll be meetin’ ya there!’’ Finally, ■
the old man is forcibly restrained for his own
protection.
When they start down the steep front steps
of the house, David, Al, and Charlie are hold-
153
ALBERT GOLDMAN
ing the top of the stretcher, Joe is at the

bottom, and the two medics are on either
side. Elvis is strapped in, but as the men
struggle with their clumsy burden, his arms
fall over the sides. Finally, they slide the
stretcher into the back of the ambulance.
Joe and Charlie hop in the back with Al
ready to follow when a gold Mercedes roars
up the driveway and screeches to a stop. Out
jumps Dr. Nick, who runs over to the ambu
lance and leaps aboard, slamming the doors
shut.
David runs to the back of the house, where
he encounters Billy Smith, mounting his mo
torcycle. “Let's go!” David hollers, as they
slip into his car and take off after the ambu
lance. Going out the gate, they meet the
guard Sam Thompson driving in. "What's
happening?” he yells.
"Elvis is dead!" shouts David, as he takes
off.
The ambulance logs itself out the Music
Gate at 2:48, screaming for Baptist Memorial
Hospital. Normally the trip takes twenty
minutes; this time it takes seven. Dr. Nick
furiously pumps Elvis's heart, shouting
"Breathe, Presley! C'mon, breathe for me!"
154
“All the way to the hospital,” said Jones,

"the doctor had this look of sheer disbelief
that this could have happened to Elvis.” Or,
perhaps, to himself.
155
D.O.A.
Unit Six nears its destina

tion, Crosby, the driver, radios ahead to the
hospital’s communications center: "Have a
white male, approximately 40, under CPR,
no response.” Moments later, every loud
speaker in the building is blasting, "Harvey
Team report to E.R. [Emergency Room] . . .
Harvey Team report to E. R. . . . Harvey Team
report to E.R."1 In a few minutes, eighteen
157
ALBERT GOLDMAN
nurses, technicians, and doctors have assem

bled in Trauma Room 2.
Elvis is wheeled in and laid out on a steel
table. As one man takes over the job of pump
ing the heart, pressing down on it hard once
every second, another slips a mask over El
vis's face and administers oxygen. An electro
cardiograph is attached to his chest, and a
nurse presses the femoral artery in his groin
to check for a pulse. A needle is inserted in
his hand to connect with a glucose intrave
nous drip, and adrenaline is injected to stim
ulate the heart. For a moment, a pulse ap
pears on the EKG. Then the line goes flat.
As the hospital staff know that Elvis Pres
ley is a drug addict—he has been twice detox 4
ified at Baptist—they decide to pump his
stomach. A tube is inserted in his nose and
threaded down the esophagus. A saline solu
tion is poured into the stomach and suc
tioned out again. The contents, including any
undigested or partially digested drugs, are
destroyed—a routine act, but one that de
prives the pathologists who will conduct the
subsequent autopsy of significant evidence.
Electroshock is not used to start the heart.
Instead, a much more drastic procedure is
158
adopted. Standing in the adjoining room

with Elvis's other men, David sees an orderly
enter Trauma Room 2. When the doors swing
open, there’s Elvis, lying spread-eagled with
his feet foremost. Doctors are working fever
ishly on either side of him. There is blood on
his stomach. Suddenly, a doctor cuts an inci
sion in the left side of his chest and thrusts
his hand inside the body.
"That's his heart!” flashes David. "They’ve
opened him up to get at his heart!” Then the
doors swing shut.
Marian Cocke, a staff RN who has served
several times as Elvis's private nurse, arrives
in time to see John Quartermous performing
CPR. As she later wrote: "The room was full,
and Dr. Nick was there. He just looked at me,
as did John. I read what was in their faces
because I couldn't really see Elvis. I reached
and touched one of the interns on the arm
and moved him aside so I could see Elvis.
When I did, my knees got weak. I said, ‘Please
stop.' It was evident that the soul of this boy
had long since left his body, and I could not
bear to see them continue. John looked over
at Dr. Nick. He told him to hold up on the
CPR, and when he saw that there was abso-
159
ALBERT GOLDMAN
lutely no complex on the EKG, he agreed they

would stop.”
At 3:30 p.m., Elvis Presley is declared dead.
NOTES
1. Baptist Hospital named its emergency

teams after the English physician William
Harvey, renowned for his theory of the circu
lation of the blood.
160
* 17
Elvis—What
Happened?
IThe moment the resuscitation
effort was abandoned, Dr. Nichopolous

walked into Trauma Room 1, where Joe,
Charlie, Al, David, and Billy Smith had been
waiting. Dr. Nick did not announce that Elvis
was dead. He simply shook his head in a
manner that left no doubt about what had
happened. Then he and Joe Esposito warned
the other men to keep their mouths shut.
161
r
ALBERT GOLDMAN
Under Tennessee law, any death that occurs

without a physician being present must be
investigated by the county medical examiner
and by the homicide department of the local
police. Elvis's life had always been kept a
carefully guarded secret. Now his death was
to receive the same treatment.
Dr. Nick huddled with Joe, and they came
to a quick agreement on how to break the
news. Esposito would make the announce
ment at the hospital, which was already be
ing besieged by frantic newsmen; but first,
Nichopolous would go back to Graceland and
inform the family. Taking a bag with Elvis’s
personal effects, the doctor walked out of the
emergency room entrance and found the two
medics who had brought Elvis's body to the
hospital. He persuaded them to run him back
to the house, explaining that there was a
grave danger that Vernon might suffer a heart
attack when he learned that Elvis was dead.
Actually, Nichopolous had another purpose
in view. When he confronted Vernon, he ex
plained that an autopsy could not be avoided,
but that if it were performed at the behest of
the family, it would become a private matter,
and the findings would remain confidential.
162
He soon obtained Vernon’s consent and called

the vice-president of the hospital, Maurice
Elliott, setting in motion the press conference
and subsequent events.1
Normally, the autopsy would have been
performed at the morgue, which was across
the street, but in view of the dangers posed
by the crowd that had collected around the
hospital, it was decided to do the job on the
premises.
! A few hours later, a team of doctors assem
bled in a dissecting room to perform an au
topsy that was later described as more thor
ough than that done on John E Kennedy.
Usually, an autopsy is done by one forensic
I pathologist and his assistant, the pathologist
being an expert at determining the cause of
:■
death and generally an employee of the local

medical examiner's office. Elvis Presley’s au
topsy entailed the efforts of eight patholo
> gists plus ancillary personnel. The fear that
something might be overlooked that would
later prove a cause of embarrassment to the
hospital was behind this extraordinary mul
tiplication of hands and eyes, skills and ex
perience.
Though the autopsy report has never been
163
ALBERT GOLDMAN
officially published, its findings leaked out

immediately. It is clear from reports in the
Memphis press that the pathologists discov
ered virtually nothing that was not already
known or suspected by Elvis’s physicians.
Thus, any chest X-ray would have shown that
the left side of Elvis’s heart was enlarged by
50 percent, a condition associated with the
erratic high blood pressure for which he was
receiving medication. And given his diet, it
could hardly have come as a surprise that he
exhibited, as do most American men of his
age, a significant narrowing of the coronary
arteries. The left anterior descending artery
was constricted by 40-50 percent; 70 percent
marks the point at which the danger of a
heart attack becomes serious.
Elvis’s liver was fatty, a condition that Dr.
Nichopolous associated with his patient’s
penchant for eating Tylenol like candy. (Of
ten taken like aspirin, Tylenol is actually
acetaminophen, a drug that can cause severe
liver toxicity if more than thirty caps are
consumed at a time.) Similarly, his enlarged
and flaccid colon would not have struck the
doctors who had long treated Elvis for this
condition as anything unusual. Nor would his
164
)
i ELVIS: THE LAST 24 HOURS
longstanding glaucoma have been cause for

comment.
The only question that had to be answered
about these findings was whether any of them
singly or in combination with others could
[I . have caused sudden death. The organ most
suspect was the enlarged heart and its nar
rowed feeder vessels. As it happened, the man
!
in charge of the autopsy, Dr. Eric E. Muir-
head, chief of pathology at Baptist, was a
heart specialist. Some years afterward, on an
ABC-TV program, Muirhead’s assistant, Dr.
Joel Florendo, testified that after examining
Elvis Presley’s heart tissue under an electron
microscope, he found no evidence of a heart
attack. Yet on the night of the autopsy, Shelby
County Medical Examiner Dr. Jerry T. Fran
cisco, who had witnessed the examination,
announced that Elvis had died of "cardiac
arrythmia.”
What could have prompted the coroner to
make such an ill-founded and misleading
pronouncement? The proper thing to have
said under the circumstances was that the
results of the gross anatomy examination had
been inconclusive and therefore the determi
nation of the cause of death would have to
165
ALBERT GOLDMAN
wait upon the toxicology report—the tests

that would be performed upon the fluid and
tissue samples removed from the body. Apart
from being appropriate, such an announce
ment would have made good sense because,
as the hospital’s records would have shown,
Elvis was a drug addict, and a chemical anal
ysis of his body was almost certain to reveal
the presence of drugs, perhaps at lethal levels
or in fatal combinations. Yet the coroner went
out of his way to discountenance the notion
that Elvis had died of a drug overdose, and
his speculations were vigorously seconded by
Dr. Nichopolous, who brazenly declared in
the press that Elvis “really didn’t have a drug
problem’’ and that he could not have over
dosed because “I don’t think he had anything
there [at Graceland] to OD on.”
If the motives for Francisco’s behavior were
obscure, the effects of his statement were
obvious. In the first place, he offered Elvis
fans everywhere the consolation of thinking
that their hero had died a natural death, free
from the taint of drug addiction. Secondly,
by ruling that Elvis died of natural causes,
the coroner aborted the mandated police in
vestigation that would have certainly turned
up abundant evidence of drug abuse.
166
Even more surprising than Francisco's

original statement—which he hedged by not
ing that all the data had not yet been exam
ined—was his considered judgement two
months later concerning the cause of death.
In the interim, a highly sophisticated chemi
cal assay had been made of the tissue and
serum samples collected at the autopsy. Bio
Sciences Laboratories in Van Nuys, Califor
nia (which routinely did this kind of work for
I Baptist Hospital) reported finding traces of
the following fourteen drugs in Elvis’s body:2
codeine: a concentration ten times higher
than therapeutic level
morphine: possible metabolite of codeine
methaqualone: Quaalude, at toxic level
diazepam: Valium
diazepam metabolite: close to toxic level
ethinamate: Valmid
ethchlorvynol: Placidyl, close to toxic level
amobarbital: Amytal
pentobarbital: Nembutal
pentobarbital: Carbrital
meperidine: Demerol
amitriptyline: Elavil (antidepressant)
nortriptyline: Aventyl (antidepressant)
phenyltoloxamine: Sinutab (decongestant)
167
I
ALBERT GOLDMAN
These findings were partially confirmed by

other independent laboratories (including
that of the Orange County Coroner's Office in
Santa Ana, California), creating an over
whelming probability that Elvis had died of
polypharmacy, or the combined effect of a
number of drugs.
When Dr. Francisco announced his final
ruling as to the cause of death at a press
conference on October 21, 1977, he conceded
that traces of eight drugs had been found in
the body but said that only four were present
in "significant” amounts, and he discounted
their effect: "Prescription drugs found in his
blood were not a contributing factor.... Had
these drugs not been there, he still would
have died." The coroner's verdict was that
death had been caused by "hypertensive
heart disease with coronary artery disease as
a contributing factor.”
The coroner's ruling was viewed with skep
ticism in the local press because the basic
findings of the Bio-Sciences analysis were
published at this same time by an enterpris
ing reporter, Beth J. Tamke, in a Memphis
paper, The Commercial Appeal. Ms. Tamke's
anonymous source provided her with the ex-
168
I
act concentrations of certain drugs. Accord

ingly, she reported that Elvis’s codeine level
was “108 gammas per 100 milliliters of
blood”—and cited a case in which death was
caused by 120 gammas with no other drugs
involved. There were 3 gammas of morphine,
whose toxic level, she noted, begins at 5. Most
important, she cited a staggering total of
1,940 gammas of barbiturates.
So while the county medical examiner was
announcing that Elvis died of hypertension,
readers of the Memphis press were learning
that Dr. Muirhead, the man who conducted
the autopsy and an internationally recog
nized authority on hypertension, had ruled it
out as a possible cause of death. And while
Francisco was dismissing drugs as not having
in any way contributed to Elvis's death, the
pathologists who had performed the most
exhaustive autopsy ever conducted had con
cluded that Elvis died of polypharmacy.
The subsequent events in the wider inves
tigation of .Elvis’s death lie outside the scope
of this book. What most concerns Elvis’s pub
lic in any case is not the behavior of the
Shelby County medical examiner but rather
the basic question: Did Elvis Presley die ac
cidentally, or did he deliberately kill himself?
169
r 1
ALBERT GOLDMAN
4
The possibility that Elvis overdosed acci
dentally seemed so likely years ago that I
offered it unhesitatingly as the cause of death
in my full-length biography, Elvis, published
in 1981. The reasoning was simple and com
pelling: Elvis took so many barbiturates
every day of his life that it was inevitable he
should have built up a dangerous level of
tolerance and a dangerous level of drug resi
dues in his body. Therefore, it might not have
taken much more than his customary dosage
to push him over the line into a fatal state of
toxicity. This had happened to him repeat
edly in the past, and he had been saved only
by the alertness of his companions coupled
with the ready availability of medical aid. On
his last day, he was simply unlucky. Anxious
about the upcoming tour, he took too much
of his medication and was allowed to remain
undisturbed so long that he died before he
could be saved.
This argument, so plausible on the old
showing, is untenable in the face of all the
data presented in this book. One fact alone
destroys the whole hypothesis—the ex
tremely strong evidence that Elvis did not
take his three attacks spaced across six or
170
eight hours, as he always took them, but all

at once after he entered the bathroom for the
last time. The evidence consists of what Elvis
both did and didn’t do. On the one hand,
nobody saw him take any drugs on the last
morning of his life, nor did he exhibit the
familiar symptoms of having taken an at
tack—the grogginess and deep sleep that al
ways followed the ingestion of this load of
sedatives. On the other hand, the envelopes
from all three attacks were found on the bath
room floor along with a number of the syrin
ges that had been inside those envelopes, the
other syringes being found in the bedroom.
As to whether Elvis could have made a mis
take, it is obvious that nobody could have
swallowed all those pills and given himself
all those shots without knowing that he was
going to kill himself—least of all Elvis, whose
favorite book, apart from the Bible, was the
PDR. If the contents of Elvis’s stomach had
been preserved and examined, they would
doubtless have revealed the residues of so
many pills as to put the matter beyond de
bate.
In addition to these strong signs of a delib
erate overdose, there is a profusion of other
evidence that points to a finding of suicide:
171
ALBERT GOLDMAN
personal history: Elvis attempted suicide in

1967 and was saved only by the prompt
action of a team of paramedics. It is pos
sible that some of his "accidental” over
doses were actually suicide attempts.
circumstances: Elvis was afflicted by a host

of grave problems for which there were
no solutions, including difficulties with
money, failing health, loss of artistic
ability, and loss of sexual potency.
state of mind: Elvis was chronically de

pressed and constantly seeking relief
from his troubles in the sort of oblivion
that mimics death.
tell-tale behavior: Elvis spoke frequently of

dying. He bade farewell to his closest
associates, telling some of them that they
would never see him again, including the
last man to whom he spoke.
motive: He saw the publication of the body

guards’ book and the imminent airing of
the CBS special as the ruination of his
life and career.
172
occasion: He killed himself within hours of

his scheduled departure on a tour that
would have brought him face to face with
the public for the first time since the
book’s appearance. He had said repeat
edly that he would not go on this tour.
behavior on last day: Elvis spent much of

his last 24 hours building up a private
drug stash. Then he refused food, which
he knew would interfere with the action
of drugs. Most important, he saved up his
three attacks and took them all at once.
This must be viewed as an act of deliber
ate self-destruction.
The final inference is irresistible. On the

last morning of his life, Elvis Presley—who
was of sound mind and not befuddled by
drugs—decided that he could not go on with
his life. Taking the means that lay to hand, he
swallowed and injected a fatal quantity of
central nervous system depressants.
His death was not peaceful. His outthrust,
half-severed tongue suggests a final paroxysm
as the drugs paralyzed his brain. The position
of the body—three feet from the reading
173
ALBERT GOLDMAN
chair and four feet from the toilet—suggests

that he may have risen and moved a couple
of steps before he collapsed just short of the
shower wall. Death would have followed
swiftly. Dr. Nichopolous concluded that Elvis
had been dead for three hours by the time his
body was found. Nothing could have been
done to save him.
NOTES
1. When it came time to announce that

Elvis was dead, Joe was too overcome by
emotion to perform the task. The announce
ment was made instead by Elliott, who had
been holding the reporters at bay by telling
them that Elvis was having difficulty breath
ing.
2. Dilaudid’s absence from this list is sur

prising, but the timing of Elvis’s receipt of
the drug offers a clue to why it did not show
up in the assay. In a fasting male, Dilaudid
ingested by mouth reaches its maximum con
centration in one hour and then diminishes
rapidly. After eight hours, it is extremely
174
hard to detect and may be confused with

morphine, which it closely resembles in
structure. Assuming Elvis took the drug as
soon as he received it, no later than 4 a.m.,
and assuming further that he died about
seven hours later, it is possible that so much
of the drug had left his blood stream that the
traces were overlooked. In any case, Dilaudid
is unlikely to have contributed significantly
to his death.
The discovery of the antidepressants Elavil
and Aventyl is another surprise because they
do not appear in Dr. Nichopolous’ prescrip
tion records (nor were they familiar to David
Stanley). However Elvis acquired them, they
testify clearly to his gloomy state of mind.
Nobody takes these drugs for fun.
175
i
Afterword
This book grew out of an origi
nal intention that extended no further than

the revision of my 1981 biography, Elvis.
When that book was first published, it con
tained a number of trivial errors that in no
wise affected the substance of the narrative
but which were seized upon by Elvis’s de
fenders and held up as proof that my account
of his life was unreliable. These mistakes
177
ALBERT GOLDMAN
were corrected tacitly in the 1982 Avon paper

back, which should be regarded now as the
standard edition. The need for a more drastic
revision did not appear until years later,
when it gradually became clear both from
newly published information and from pri
vate communications that there were a num
ber of episodes or aspects of Elvis's life that
had not been examined as fully as they de 1
served or which, in one case, I had gotten
wrong. This last concerned the manner of his
death.
Originally, my primary source for the
death of Elvis was Ginger Alden. At the time
of writing, I considered her an ideal witness
because she had spent so much time with
Elvis in the last year of his life and because
she was at his side for nearly the entire length
of his last day. Today, I think I was wrong to
rely on her so heavily. Ginger was simply too
naive to comprehend fully what was going
on. What’s more, she had a vested interest in
making her relationship with Elvis appear in
its most favorable light. Her account ended
up sounding like something from a teen
romance magazine. I needed a much more
reliable source, and in 1989 I found one.
178
In August of that year an article appeared

in a British paper, the Sunday Mirror, assert
ing that Elvis Presley had committed suicide.
The report was based on information pro
vided by David Stanley. I had interviewed
David in 1979. He had impressed me as being
more outspoken than many in the Presley
circle, but his story in the British press was
not wholly persuasive. I decided to get in
touch with him again; meantime, I dug out
my old interview. Rereading it, I was aston
ished to come across the following exchange:
Goldman: There's a lot in his death that
suggests suicide.
Stanley: When Elvis took the last pill, he
knew he was going to die. So if you want to
call it suicide, OK, call it that . . . the guy
knew he was going to die. He looked at me
the last time I saw him; he says, 'David, take
care of yourself. I'll never see you again on
earth.. . .’ He said to Rick, three days before
he died, 'Rickey, I love you, man. I’ll always
be with you.' "
Reflecting on these remarks ten years later,
I found myself asking: 1) Why didn’t I harken
to this informant the first time? 2) Why didn’t
he publish this information sooner? The sec-
179
ALBERT GOLDMAN
ond question was highly pertinent because

David had co-authored a book about Elvis
with his brothers and his mother, Elvis: We
Love You Tender (1979), and he was the sole
author of another book, Living With Elvis
(1986). In neither of these accounts nor in any
of his prior exchanges with the media had he
said that Elvis’s death was a suicide.
The answer to my first question was sim
ple: although David had said it was not
wrong to call Elvis’s death a suicide, nobody
else I spoke to in the course of 600 interviews
suggested that Elvis had killed himself. "Yet it
is unlikely that anyone would have offered
such an opinion because loyalty to Elvis's
memory forbade it. This same loyalty, I
learned when I talked to David again, had
sealed his lips for years. In 1983, however, he
and Rickey decided that in light of all that
had been revealed, it no longer made sense to
conceal the truth of their relationship with
Elvis.
Working with a professional writer, David
and Rickey prepared a 42-page book proposal
that was circulated among the major Ameri
can publishing houses by the agent Morton
Janklow. The first words of the proposal pro-
180
claimed the book’s foremost claim to atten

tion: They said that Elvis’s death was neither
the result of a heart attack nor an inadvertent
drug overdose. The true cause was suicide.
The book proposal did not elicit a suitable
offer and eventually the project was aban
doned. But David was not content to allow
the matter to remain buried. He decided to
publish his story in the British press, inspired
particularly by his new vocation as an anti
drug motivational speaker touring the high
schools and corporations of America. When
he agreed to cooperate with me, I began to
work on what I assumed would be a new
version of the death-of-Elvis chapter in my
biography. As the interviews began to unfold,
I came to see that my error was not confined
to the way in which I explained Elvis's death
but included my whole portrayal of his final
phase. With Elvis, I learned, the bottom is a
long way down. Though I had depicted him
in terms that were far too strong for many
fans' stomachs, this new view of his last days
was worse than anything I had imagined.
My first attempt to set the record straight
took the form of a cover story for the May
1990 issue of Life. This piece met with a
181
ALBERT GOLDMAN
response that far surpassed anything I had

experienced in my 31 years as a journalist,
with the sole exception of the prepublication
excerpts from The Lives ofJohn Lennon. Every
American newspaper with a circulation of
over 100,000 carried the story (apart from the
Wall Street Journal), some on their front pages,
and so many network and local TV and radio
programs sought to interview David and me
that I had to limit arbitrarily my own avail
ability.
The most interesting feature of the public
response, however, was not the hunger for
fresh information about Elvis but the ab
sence of the usual howls of protest heard
every time a new and discreditable fact
emerges about some hallowed pop star. The
only strong opposition came from the au
thors of a forthcoming book on the death of
Elvis, Charles C. Thompson II and James P.
Cole—and Rickey Stanley.
Rickey’s denunciation of the suicide hy
pothesis was astonishing in view of his deter
mined efforts to market the idea in 1983.
When I challenged Rickey in a private con
versation, he conceded that there was a “real,
real strong possibility” that Elvis had killed
182
himself, but he insisted that he had never had

faith in the line taken in his own book pro
posal. "I was a seminary student,” he ex
plained, "thinking of dollar signs instead of
ethics.” Perhaps in his new role as a minister
of God in a community where many honor
the memory of Elvis as a good Christian,
Rickey decided it was best to take a new
stand on the side of the angels.
Thompson and Cole were another matter.
It turned out later that they were champions
of an idea that betrays both their ignorance
of drugs and their lack of intimate knowledge
of Elvis's drug history. Seizing on an isolated
report that Elvis had once suffered an aller
gic skin rash produced by codeine, they con
tend in The Death ofElvis (1991) that the high
level of codeine found in his body killed him
not by contributing to a shutdown of his
central nervous system—the obvious cause of
death and the one cited in the autopsy re
port—but by producing a fatal allergic shock.
Anyone familiar with Elvis's patterns of
drug abuse could have told these reporters
that Elvis ate codeine like candy. If he was as
allergic to codeine as Thompson and Cole
maintain, he would have died long before
1977.
183
ALBERT GOLDMAN
In any case, I did not write this book

merely to prove that Elvis committed sui
cide. That is the conclusion, I believe, that
best fits the facts. But what is much more
important is the kind of life that brought
Elvis to his death at the age of 42. What the
examination of Elvis’s last days produces ul
timately is both a larger vision and truer
judgement of Elvis as a man, for it has been
well said that we fashion our deaths through
the manner of our lives.
Elvis's life, early and late, was predicated
on the idea of having “fun.” He was an un
abashed hedonist, and the best thing you can
say about him is that he often enjoyed him
self. At the same time, it is perfectly clear
that from his earliest years he was often
"blue,” a word that appears in many of his
song titles. Late in life he said, "I guess there
never is any really good times." His problem
was what philosophers call the hedonistic
fallacy—the idea that happiness is the sum of
every conceivable pleasure. Actually, to be
happy we have to transcend ourselves. This
was a concept that Elvis talked about con
stantly but was completely unable to fulfill.
Hence his life became the classic demonstra-
184
tion of the futility of self-gratification as a

means to self-satisfaction.
If Elvis had merely lost his ability to have
fun and come to regard life as a burden, his
fate would not have been different from that
of millions of others, although normally peo
ple don’t suffer from world weariness until
they are much older than was Elvis. But the
terrible irony of his life is that his hedon
ism—the relentless pursuit of pleasure cou
pled with a cowardly dread of pain—became
his nemesis, afflicting him eventually with all
the woes of the moribund: loss of health,
strength, and good looks; the destruction of
vital relationships; the dissipation of talent;
and finally the decay of the will to live. If ever
a man dug his own grave, it was Elvis Presley.
Therefore, instead of regarding his life as
the fulfillment of the American Dream, we
should view it as a particularly horrendous
example of the American Nightmare—the
spectacle of a man (or a nation) that is given
everything and then squanders it all, includ
ing life itself. Nor should Elvis’s fate be con
sidered unique. The value of his life lies pre
cisely in its archetypal quality: millions of
people would be Elvis if they could—that is
185
4
ALBERT GOLDMAN
the meaning of the whole Elvis phenomenon.

What’s more, countless pop-culture figures
both before and since the time of Elvis have
described, albeit on a smaller scale, his up-
like-a-rocket, down-like-a-stick life course.
These are the flamboyantly self-destructive
heroes whose recklessness is confused with
daring and whose folly is perceived as inspi
ration.
The type was familiar long since in the
heyday of jazz, but even in the country and
western world Elvis’s demise was strikingly
anticipated by that of Hank Williams, deliv
ered to his last gig stone-cold in the back seat
of his manager's car. There is one great differ
ence, however, between the old heroes and
the new. The great performers of the past
balanced their self-destructive lifestyles with
creative genius in a tension of positive and
negative forces that is genuinely the stuff of
myth and tragedy, as opposed to mass-media
soap opera and bathos.
What is most lacking in the life of an Elvis
Presley is precisely what you see on every
page of the biography of a Charlie Parker—a
passionate commitment to art, to self-expres
sion, to the struggle to put into music the
186
hard-earned wisdom of a life that through its

very extravagance revealed many truths
about the human condition. Elvis Presley
never stood for anything. He made no sacri
fices, fought no battles, suffered no martyr
dom, never raised a finger to struggle on
behalf of what he believed or claimed to be
lieve. Even gospel, the music he cherished
above all, he travestied and commercialized
and soft-soaped to the point where it became
nauseating.
Elvis was a profoundly specious character,
a false messiah. Even in his earliest years, he
spoke about his career with the cynicism of a
jaded old hack. He always went for the money
and then blamed the sellout on his manager.
Like most rock stars, he was a consummate
plagiarist, ripping off everybody in sight, par
ticularly the black stars of the rhythm-and-
blues world and the little-known talents of
the white gospel circuit. Celebrated as a styl
ist, he constantly changed his style to suit his
public and copied the singers on his demo
records so closely that one New York DJ calls
the demo of "Don't Be Cruel" "my favorite
blindfold test.”
What is consistently characteristic of Elvis
187
ALBERT GOLDMAN
is his mania for exaggerating, distorting, sim

plifying—in a word, caricaturing everything
he sings. Occasionally, this impulse produced
something notable, as it did in "Heartbreak
Hotel," his greatest achievement but also his
most singular. Had he continued in that vein,
he might have produced a series of perform
ances that, no matter how hokey their sub
stance, achieved a garish sublimity through
sheer excess.
But Elvis's failure as an artist is precisely
the same as his failure as a man; in fact, there
is no difference between the two, and the one
failure is the obvious cause of the other. Es
sentially, Elvis was a phoney. He imperson
ated masculinity, but he was at heart a fright-
ened child. He feigned piety, but his
spirituals sound insincere or histrionic. He
sought to project the erotic but came off re
sembling a male burlesque star.
What makes men and women real, whether
in life or in art, is the courage with which
they confront their challenges. Elvis evaded
all the real challenges of his career, using as
his excuse the obligation to make money. But
his need for money was entirely a product of
his own profligacy, which brands it as no
188
more than a convenient excuse for not doing

the things he always claimed he most wanted
to do, like making serious movies or singing
real gospel. Ultimately, his talent was not for
art but for artifice, for the tricks of the crowd
pleaser or the knack of refurbishing his im
age. Even this legendary image owed as much
to the public and the press as it did to his
own efforts, for though pop stars invent them
selves, they are quickly reinvented by their
fans, who always have the last word.
If Elvis’s image was his glory, it was also
his doom. It thwarted and imprisoned him
all his life, and when he lost it, he lost his life.
On the other hand, the life his image gave
I. him even in his best years was a poor substi
tute for a real life, because an image is not a
man no matter how many millions it pleases
or how many millions it earns. What you see
at the end of Elvis's life is his fitful but hope
less struggle to break free of his image, a
struggle that he began too late and with too
little will to win.
189
Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the contri

butions made to this book by my principal
sources. Foremost is David Stanley, whose
intimate knowledge of Elvis and his circle
was the basis for the whole endeavor. David
exposed himself to the antagonism of the
Elvis loyalists and the fans, but his witness
has now made it possible to write with confi
dence the last chapter of a life whose end has
always been fraught with mystery. What's
more, he has illustrated the practical value of *
such testimony by presenting it to young
people all over the country as the ultimate
example of what drugs can do to even the
most successful of men.
My principal medical authority on drugs
was John P. Morgan, M.D., program director
of pharmacology at the Sophie Davis School
of Biomedical Education of the City Univer-
191
ALBERT GOLDMAN
sity of New York Medical School. To Dr. Mor

gan, I owe in particular the crucial insights
into the complexities of Elvis's multiple ad
dictions, especially the paradox of the sleep
ing protocol that could not assure more than
four hours of unbroken sleep.
Richard Hoetzel, M.D., of New York City
drew on his experience as an emergency
room physician to explain the procedures
employed to revive Elvis at the hospital.
Architect Andrew Bennett, also of New
York, drew the floor plan of Elvis’s quarters
at Graceland, a job made difficult by the lack
of documentation of these rooms.
Finally, I want to thank my editor, Jim
Fitzgerald, who recognized the value of this
undertaking from the start and facilitated its
progress at every stage.
192
r MEET TME SUPEKSTAIES
I
I
ELVIS IN PRIVATE
Peter Haining, ed.
90902-0 $3.50 U.S.
McCartney
Chris Satewicz
90451-7 90452-5 $5.50 Can.
$4.50 U.S.
HEMINGWAY
Christopher Cook Gilmore
! 91175-0 $3.50 U.S. 91176-9 $4.50 Can.
OPRAH!
Robert Waldron
91026-6 91027-4 $4.50 Can.
$3.50 U.S.
MERYL STREEP
Diana Maychick
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CHER
by J. Randy Taraborrelli
90849-0 $3.95 U.S. 90850-4 $4.95 Can.

Name
Address_____________________________________________
City State/Zip
without notice.
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Elvis trusted most.
f DRUGS8
were such apart of his life that in his last 31% months he
received over 19,000 doses from his personal physician. r
LOVE
proved shatteringly elusive. An impotent Elvis surrounded
himself with a bevy of young wonfen—including
?t
'■ §
a 15-year-old Memphis schoolgirl.
■■
DEATH
had become an obsession. As early as 1967,
Elvis attempted suicide.
THE HUNT FOR
THE TRUTH
IS OVER.
-THE FINAL I
0 44903 00395
CHAPTER OF AN
ISBN 0-315-52541-7
AMERICAN IDOL. I

Elvis The Last 24 Hours (Albert Goldman)

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Tfc-a SfeT? d Jerry Lea Lets®

Here's te complete r.a-holds-bamed truth about Jeny Lee Leras—a

Pto a major motion picture starving

GREAT BALLS OF FIRE

ELVIS: THE LAST 24 HOURS

Copyright © 1991 by Albert Goldman.

WAGNER ON MUSIC AND DRAMA

1. 3 IN THE BACK OF THE LIMO 1

7. 3 KISS AND KILL

9. Q KITH AND KIN 83

14. RACQUETS AT DAWN 133

15. □ "BREATHE FOR ME!” 143

16. D.O.A. 157

17. □ ELVIS—WHAT HAPPENED? 161

18. □ AFTERWORD 177

Monday, August 15,1977:

Memphis is in the grip of a

heat wave. Every morning, after a warm,

house glamorized by the white columns of an

been permanently sealed. The panes are bur­

Every night when he retires, he takes

bed with his head elevated by three pillows.

vis had finally become his mother. Where

pills and capsules—Elvis calls them "my lit­

lines approach each other until they meet. At

essential character as a creature of boundless

1. Elvis's addiction to drugs has tradition­

named Jimmy Denson, who knew Elvis well

was indicted on twelve counts of overpres­

does not square with certain other facts. Ni-

Elvis is lucky to be alive. Time

and again he has overdosed and been hauled

yearning for death. As he often observes, "It’s

ing intimacy. Elvis was gratified, but as he

to sell his 50 percent interest in everything

kicked out of his hometown, Tupelo, Missis­

job, Elvis has simply taken up with another,

Even more galling than the fear that he

to be a major film star, his movie career ran

When the radical change in popular cul­

trate on the now archaic show-biz world of

compensate himself for this injury, Elvis in­

land]. I said, ‘Well, Elvis, take care. Are you

1. A study of Memphis prescription re­

Amphetamines Sedatives Narcotics

These numbers demonstrate not only the

2. Dr. Nick could only substitute placebos

it was supposed to last. Woe to the man

3. In his book, Elvis My Brother (1989),

ernon Presley has grown

the eve of his marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu,

fronting anyone face to face over a serious

now Elvis has been kept under full-time sur­

way to stockpile all the pills he will need to

u~'After he has taken his drugs,

eases, the fact is that Elvis has long been

Set across Elvis’s thick thighs on a bed tray,

the tray off the bed. Then he seizes Elvis by

ened up his sagging facial tissue and removed

bed (changed meantime by the maid), he will

been permanently sealed. The panes are bur

pills and capsules—Elvis calls them "my lit

1. Elvis's addiction to drugs has tradition

was indicted on twelve counts of overpres

kicked out of his hometown, Tupelo, Missis

When the radical change in popular cul

compensate himself for this injury, Elvis in

1. A study of Memphis prescription re

now Elvis has been kept under full-time sur

That is why every time he becomes pro

dows are filled with Elvis's favorite spiritual

work for the King. At sixteen, he was a good

it ever since he came back from his last cir

$2.5 million.” "Whoopee!" yelled a high offi

tine Books. The book was scheduled to ap

The temptation to grab $750,000 for allow

1. Stories abound concerning Elvis's ec

2. Not the usual highly cosmeticized show

Elvis isn't wholly satisfied with this ar

central nervous system stimulant is sur

CBinger Alden arrives at Grace