Within a couple of days, all my anger had turned into a feeling of emptiness. I’d related to Elvis songs on a personal level before, but now I had the awful feeling I was stuck in some lines from one of his heaviest ballads from the fifties: “When you find your sweetheart in the arms of your best friend, brother, that’s when your heartaches begin.” I didn’t think the incident had to mark the end of my affair with the girlfriend (though in fact it did). But I knew for certain that this romantic mess was just unacceptable, even in the midst of the crazy lives we were living. This wasn’t any kind of fun—it just felt sick and depressing.
By the end of May, I was standing in a Glendale apartment, helping Sandy pack up for her flight back to Hawaii. She’d been accepting of my unfaithfulness, was willing to try to work things out, and had thought that maybe a move would help us start with a clean slate. An editor from Paramount I’d gotten close with was leaving his apartment to buy a house, so we moved in. But it didn’t help. We tried to set up a new life in the new rooms, but I couldn’t shake the old guilt and confusion.
Sandy’s middle name was Lilinoe, a Polynesian name meaning “goddess of the mist of the mountains,” and I had always thought that perfectly captured her natural beauty and purity. But I’d let that mist drift away, for no good reason. I’d broken a good woman’s heart. And watching her pack her simple belongings into a few cardboard boxes, it broke my heart to think just how little she’d gotten out of our time together.
Elvis and I were standing in the Meditation Garden at Graceland, drinking iced tea to fight off the heat of a June evening. The Palm Springs incident had brought us up to the edge of what was acceptable within our friendship, but once the hurt and anger had burned out for me, the episode was over. Nobody in that situation came out looking good, and I had no desire to be bitter toward a friend who was sincerely sorry. Now we had a few weeks off between strings of concert dates, and were back to spending days at Graceland and nights at the Memphian.
“Colonel got me a deal,” Elvis said. “A whole lot of money and I don’t have to do a damn thing.”
In all the years I knew him, Elvis hardly ever talked about specifics of the business side of his career, but he seemed excited to do so this day. The deal was a big one—the Colonel had brokered a lump-sum, $5.4 million buyout of Elvis’s rights to artist royalty payments for all the recordings he had made up to that point. At the time, his excitement was at least partially justified. The payment figure was huge, and in the days before golden oldies and classic rock were hot radio formats, it was hard to imagine how Elvis’s back catalogue would ever generate that much money in royalties. Elvis’s recordings had already been repackaged and resold so many times already, it didn’t seem likely that there was much more profit to be wrung from them.
Standing in the garden, I tried to be happy for Elvis, too. But there was something sad and final about cashing in all that great music. Sure it was a lot of money for Elvis, but I didn’t feel like I could possibly put one big price tag on Dewey Phillips playing “That’s All Right,” and “Hound Dog” at Ellis Auditorium, and “I Was the One” at the Stand, and watching the performance of “How Great Thou Art,” and feeling the goose bumps during “If I Can Dream.” His music was a soundtrack to my life, and to lives all over the world. It didn’t feel right to total it up in any lump sum, even $5.4 million.
My mist of the mountains was gone, and Elvis’s music was gone. There was no way we could think of ourselves as a couple of North Memphis kids anymore. We were grown men, living lives that were wonderful in so many regards, but lives that were not immune to frustration, disappointment, and pain. In a couple of weeks, we’d be back on the road, hitting city after city again. But beyond the tour schedule, I couldn’t tell what the future was supposed to look like.
12
BLACK-BELT BLUES
In all my years with Elvis, I never witnessed him go through any elaborate vocal warm-ups before he sang. He’d keep his voice irrigated by washing out his throat with hot salt water, but before a performance you never heard him singing scales or bellowing “mi mi mi”s—he would have been as bored with that kind of exercise as he was with situps. He was a natural talent who simply drew upon his natural gifts whenever he hit the stage. The amazing thing was that even with all the stress and strain of the road, and with all the trouble he was having staying physically healthy, the voice only got stronger. The more he worked in Vegas and out on the road, the more that instrument of his became both more powerful and more nuanced, and he continued to challenge himself by taking on vocally demanding material such as “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” “An American Trilogy,” and “My Way.”
On a good performance night, when Elvis was on and the band was cooking, you could still get goose bumps hearing him hit the high notes, or hearing him put his heart into one of the ballads. But not every night could be a good night, and it was becoming evident that there was something wrong in Elvis’s world.
He still liked to see himself as the hero of the comic books—the Superman or Captain Marvel who could take care of all problems and keep everybody happy. And, generally, he was always able to be exactly that—a rock-solid presence that we could all depend on. Even when he stumbled, all of us around him understood that we were leading extraordinary lives because of one man’s talents and generosity. His moods could shift and his timing could drive you crazy, but you always believed that Elvis would be there for you. If anyone could pull off playing Captain Marvel, it was him. But even a comic book hero has to have new adventures to keep his powers at their peak, and as time went on, and Elvis settled into the routine of Las Vegas engagements and concert tours, his world became as squared off and contained as the panels of a comic page. Hotel suite, showroom, plane, limo, stage. Repeat. There were weeks and months in which that was all any of us saw of the world around us. For a guy who had once jumped off roller coasters for a laugh, and who had once been able to karate kick a pack of cigarettes out of an opponent’s shirt pocket, the confinement of the “good life” Elvis was leading started to feel like a burden. And for a guy who had put together a huge private library of works that explored spirituality, consciousness, and the meaning of life, the routine of his days must have started to feel empty. The strain on him was obvious.
At a Las Vegas show in early 1973, a guy from a table in the front of the showroom climbed up on stage to get to Elvis. Elvis was facing the band, and when the guy came up behind him, Elvis quickly took him down with a hard reverse kick to the midsection—an understandable reaction for an exposed public figure who had received more than one serious death threat. When a second guy from the first one’s table started to get up on stage, I automatically reacted as a bodyguard, rushing from the wings to pick him up and hurl him back down on his table. Red and some of the players from the band got ahold of two others who had come up, and pretty soon hotel security had whisked the four stage-rushers out of the showroom. The chaos and confusion were over in a minute or two, and Elvis got back to his performance.
From the reports we got after the show, none of these men had criminal records and it seemed likely that they hadn’t meant any real harm to Elvis—the first guy had done something stupid and the others had probably thought they were coming to their friend’s defense. Whether they were fans or not didn’t matter to us. Elvis had been hurt in the past by overenthusiastic fans, and this time we’d all done the most basic part of our job: protecting Elvis. But after the show, up in his suite, Elvis worked himself into an increasingly agitated state. He wouldn’t accept that these guys were just dumb, or rowdy, or both. Not only did he insist that they had been out to do him serious harm, he came to the conclusion that they had been sent by Mike Stone, a karate instructor Priscilla had become romantically involved with. Joe, Lamar, Red, Sonny, Linda, and I were all there, and the idea didn’t seem very believable to any of us. But we were more taken aback by the ferocity of Elvis’s anger as he ranted and raged about Stone. We’d seen him angry before, but t
his time, Elvis seemed truly out of control. Nobody was sure if he knew exactly how wild he sounded to us.
I think all of us were aware that Elvis needed a way to vent his emotions, and Stone was the perfect target for all the anger and guilt Elvis felt over his failed marriage. Also, if Priscilla’s new romance might have been an affront to his sense of manhood, it probably hurt even more that Stone was a top-ranked karate master in peak physical condition. As much as karate was still a passionate hobby for Elvis, he had slipped out of practice, and there wasn’t much question that in any kind of match of karate skills, Stone would easily defeat him. All of Elvis’s bottled-up frustrations and disappointments were now focused on Stone, and while his theory sounded irrational and his rage was overblown, it seemed like maybe this was just what he needed to work the turmoil out of his system. He didn’t have a therapist to talk things out with. He wasn’t going to cry on my shoulder, and certainly not on Red’s. If he needed to rage around the room, so be it. Also, you could never discount the fact that Elvis was a performer. And while his anger and hurt were real, on some level he was giving us a masterful rendition of the heartbroken husband.
All of that we could handle, but as Elvis raged on, the relief never came. He pushed further and further, until he came to a decision that scared the hell out of all of us. He decided that he wanted Mike Stone dead.
It was a losing battle to try to change Elvis’s mind about anything while he was in this kind of state. And we’d all been in situations where Elvis had talked big about something that he knew, and you knew, he wasn’t going to follow through on. The next day, however, when all of us gathered back in Elvis’s suite for a five P.M. breakfast, he was still going on about his desire to have a contract taken out on Mike Stone. Nobody could quite get a read on Elvis—maybe he was still the actor playing the part; maybe he wanted to know just how far he could push our loyalty; maybe he really was in such a state of despair that he wasn’t thinking clearly. It was a very uncomfortable breakfast table to be sitting at. I felt bad for Linda, who wanted to give Elvis her love and support, but who was starting to get worn down by his unpredictability. All of us had always felt we’d do anything to protect Elvis from any and all outside forces, but now I had the sick feeling that maybe we needed to protect him from himself.
The more Elvis talked about Stone, the more Red looked like he was going to explode. Finally Red got up and left the table, heading off into the kitchen to make a phone call. He returned a few minutes later, went straight to where Elvis was sitting, and whispered something in his ear. We knew then that Red had made “the call.” I’d learn later that Red, very much against his will, had already made a contact for Elvis, and had found out that $10,000 would get the dirty job done. When he whispered to Elvis at the table, it was the moment of truth—if Elvis gave the OK, the hit would be carried out.
At the words from Red, Elvis immediately went pale. Suddenly we saw not the raging actor but the Elvis we all knew who, in so many situations, chose to be the nice guy rather than the tough guy. He did know how crazy he’d been talking, and he knew that his words had taken us right up to the edge of a terrifying cliff. He wasn’t going to take us over it.
“That’s a little heavy,” he told Red. “Let’s just leave it alone for a while.”
Elvis had conquered Las Vegas, but it was impossible to be the conquering hero at every single show. To fight off the boredom of being on that same stage every night, Elvis began to talk to the audience a great deal—cracking jokes, telling stories, and generally speaking freely about whatever was on his mind. It was a jolt to the guys—we’d heard him talk that way around our dinner tables or down in the TV room at Graceland, but never up on stage. Priscilla, who still attended some of the shows, would later say that she was shocked at how open he’d become on stage about his private thoughts.
There were many nights when the audience loved seeing a looser, talkative Elvis having fun on stage. But there were nights when the talk and the jokes made the music suffer, and some audiences left the shows obviously disappointed. On one night of the fall 1973 engagement at the Hilton, he had a table of people up front at the early show who responded enthusiastically to his running commentary between songs. As the show progressed, Elvis directed more and more of his performance to that one particular table until he was almost fully engaged in private conversation with that group and hardly singing at all. By the middle of the show, audience members in the back of the showroom who felt they weren’t getting what they’d paid for began leaving.
Elvis had used those natural talents of his to entertain millions of fans by this point, and it was an awful shock to see him lose an audience’s interest. It was even more shocking to see a sight I never thought I’d see: people walking out on an Elvis Presley show. Joe looked as upset as I felt, and we agreed that the situation had to be addressed. Our job was not to tell Elvis he was great no matter what he did—as his friends, we felt we had to be honest with him. And we wouldn’t be worth much as employees or friends if we backed away from telling him a difficult truth. When Red and Sonny joined us backstage, it was clear that they were just as bothered by what they’d seen. And the especially dark scowl on Lamar’s face let us know the way he felt. We decided that when Elvis went downstairs to his dressing room, we’d have a sit-down meeting with him.
It wasn’t unusual for Elvis to sit at the dressing-room table with us for a few minutes after the show, before he began to change out of his wardrobe. He’d ask us how the show went, and usually we’d relay to him what we thought were the highlights of the night, and we’d give him a rundown on any technical problems or unusual occurrences. He sat with us again this time, and looked to be in a great mood. The stage lights may have blinded him to the back of the showroom, so as far as he knew, he’d done a great job of connecting with his fans.
“How was the show?” he asked.
Lamar, who never shied away from putting things in the bluntest of terms, spoke up first.
“You know, Elvis,” Lamar said. “About three hundred people walked out tonight.”
Elvis tried to laugh it off, as if Lamar didn’t know what he was talking about. But what came out of him was a forced, hollow laugh. “The people up in front enjoyed it,” he said.
I tried coming at it from a less confrontational approach. “Of course they did, E. They had the star of the show paying attention to them all night. But what about everybody else?”
Elvis’s eyes went cold, and his smile disappeared. I think he knew that if we felt strongly enough about his performance to become critics, there had to be a problem. But he wasn’t going to hash it out with us. His expression got tighter, and he got very quiet. After a moment, he said, “Get the Colonel.”
Whatever went on between them, the shows were better for a while. Of course, Elvis wasn’t going to put on better shows because the Colonel told him to—he was going to put on better shows because that’s what felt right to him. But on the last night of the engagement he again began to indulge in some onstage jokes and pranks, even singing “What Now My Love” as he kicked around on a bed that had been rolled out on stage. The audience was completely with him this night, and enjoyed the fun. But Elvis also had a point to make that he felt was serious. He told the audience that the Hilton was about to fire his favorite waiter, who had prepared so many great meals up in his suite, and he didn’t understand how the hotel could do such a disservice to such a good, hardworking person. He talked disapprovingly of the hotel management, and his remarks started to carry the emotion of a social crusader standing up for the oppressed little guy. His critique didn’t stop when the music started—he got a few further digs in by twisting some lyrics to include off-color anti-Hilton lines.
The Colonel thought he had gotten things under control, but was now outraged. He prided himself on his business relationships, and now, publicly, Elvis had embarrassed him with one of his most important business associates. Not only did he think Elvis’s comments were unprofessional�
��he had reason to take them personally. The Colonel had come to consider the hotel’s owner, Barron Hilton, as a personal friend, and he felt that Hilton had gone out of his way to accommodate every request made on Elvis’s behalf. For the first time in their partnership, the Colonel was in the position of being humiliated by Elvis.
The Colonel was down in the dressing room almost immediately, and he and Elvis went alone into a small private area behind a closed door. All we heard were loud, angry voices. When they emerged, neither looked happy. And nothing seemed settled. But the Colonel went up to his room, and Elvis and the rest of us went up to the suite.
Usually we’d all get together for a relaxed celebration after a final show, but this night Elvis seemed distracted. He’d sung well and left his audiences satisfied that night, but it seemed that he was working over whatever had gone on between him and the Colonel. Things stayed quiet in the suite, and, after a while, Elvis said the words again: “Get the Colonel.”
The Colonel hadn’t calmed down from the earlier encounter, and he was also unhappy about being called out of bed at that late hour. He charged into the room like an angry bull elephant. Right away the two faced off. This was another scene that none of us thought we’d ever see. For so long, the relationship between the Colonel and Elvis had been a strange, complicated dance in which they rarely dealt with each other directly. You never heard them discussing business and you rarely witnessed them expressing raw emotion toward each other. But here they were, going right at each other, not seeming to care at all that there was a room full of witnesses. Elvis was angry with the way the Colonel had talked to him after the show, and he was angry that the Colonel seemed to think it was more important to defend the Hilton than to side with him. But mainly he was angry over the Colonel’s lack of interest in getting an overseas tour together. We’d seen a raging Elvis, but now he was focused and intent, laying out his points forcefully. The Colonel responded angrily in the same loud, gruff voice that had terrified so many of his own staff. But Elvis stayed strong—he wasn’t going to be talked out of his demands by the Colonel’s bluster.
Me and a Guy Named Elvis Page 32