Me and a Guy Named Elvis

by Jerry Schilling

  After a run of Beach Boys dates in the fall of 1976, I was back in L.A. and decided to treat myself to some spa time at a fitness club in Century City. In the sauna, I ran into John Irwin, an attorney I knew as a former partner of Elvis’s lawyer, Ed Hookstratten. Irwin had become involved in overseeing a deal for a book that Red, Sonny, and Dave Hebler were writing. He told me that he’d just closed the deal and that the book was going to happen.

  I’d first heard about the book a few weeks before, when I got a call from Sonny. He’d told me that he and Red and Dave were writing something on their experiences with Elvis. I could tell from the conversation that they were interested in making me a part of it, too, though I was never directly asked. It wasn’t something I wanted to get involved in. But it was happening, Irwin told me. Sonny, Red, and Dave had teamed up with a writer named Steve Dunleavy, who worked for the tabloid The Star. The deal for the book was signed. I felt it was something Elvis should know about as quickly as possible.

  Elvis didn’t have a Los Angeles home anymore—the Monovale house had been sold. But he’d gotten an L.A. apartment for Linda Thompson, and sometimes stayed there. I’d heard from Joe that Elvis was going to be in town. I hurried over to the apartment.

  Elvis was in a good mood, and remarked how much he liked the Beach Boys tour jacket I was wearing. He asked if I could get tour jackets like that made up for his tours, and I told him I would. Then I let Elvis know I had some information for him—information he wasn’t going to like. I told him everything I knew—that Sonny had called me, that I’d run into Irwin, that the book was being worked on, and that a deal with a publisher was done. Elvis took it all in and became very upset. Rumors of the book had been out there, but he, and a lot of us, had assumed that it wouldn’t really happen, that Sonny and Red wouldn’t follow through. Elvis didn’t want to believe that the rumor had become a reality.

  I went out for some more dates with the Beach Boys in early October, and when I was back in L.A., I got a call. Elvis wanted me to come back over to Linda’s place. This time just he and Linda were there. It was nice to be with them, and at first it felt like a regular social visit. But after a while, Elvis got very serious.

  “Jerry, I just want to tell you. I want to thank you for not getting involved in this book thing.”

  It didn’t seem to me that not getting involved in a book I didn’t want to be part of required much of a thank-you.

  “Elvis, it wasn’t a big deal.”

  “It was to me, Jerry. It meant a lot to me.”

  Our visit was interrupted by the arrival of John O’Grady, the private detective who’d worked for Elvis a few times over the years. O’Grady seemed to go out of his way to present himself as the tough-talking, no-nonsense gumshoe, and always seemed to assume that his involvement with Elvis was the most important thing in Elvis’s life. The very first time I’d met him, years before in Las Vegas, he’d come up to Elvis’s suite and started telling stories about some of the celebrity clients and cases he’d worked on. Elvis, like any great storyteller, enjoyed hearing a good story, and he enjoyed O’Grady’s lurid tales. But I had an uneasy feeling about the detective. After O’Grady left the suite, I asked Elvis, “If that guy’s telling us everything about all those people, what’s he going to tell people about you?” But my opinion of the detective hadn’t stopped Elvis from hiring him over the years.

  “I need to speak privately with Elvis,” O’Grady now announced.

  The room was quiet for just a moment, then Elvis spoke. “Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of Jerry. I want him here.”

  O’Grady wasn’t happy about that, but he went ahead and gave Elvis the news he’d brought. Red, Sonny, and Dave had turned down Elvis’s offer of substantial sums of money to walk away from their book deal. They’d been willing to meet with O’Grady, but had already accepted an advance and had no choice but to complete the book. It would be published the following summer.

  Elvis had felt bad about the way things had ended with Red and Sonny, and realized they probably did deserve some decent severance pay for all their years of service. But he was still very concerned about what they were going to put in their book. Elvis was used to being a public figure, and had been praised and panned throughout his career. He’d still managed to maintain a degree of privacy in his private life, though, and now he was enraged that insiders were going to expose the most personal details about him, his family, his girlfriends, and even his doctors.

  “Every goddamn thing’s already been written about me, but they’re going to hurt people around me,” he said. “What went on is between me and them. But my family’s going to get hurt, and my eight-year-old daughter’s going to get hurt, friends are going to get hurt, and professional people around me are going to get hurt. Damn it, that just isn’t right. It isn’t right.”

  There wasn’t anything I could say to him to make the situation any better. O’Grady left. Linda, Elvis, and I talked some more, but I could tell he was still distracted and unhappy. At the end of the night, I told him that I was going back out on the road again with the Beach Boys.

  “Thanks for being here, Jerry,” he said.

  Linda and I met again not too long after that, this time professionally. I’d finished my fall tour with the Beach Boys, the Sweets were on the road with Elvis, and I had time to make a brief return to my acting career, lining up some parts through Rick Husky and my old assistant director friend, Chris Morgan. Rick called me in for a part on a police drama he was producing and writing for, The Rookies, and when I showed up on set I was pleasantly surprised to find that Linda was part of the cast as well. I was to be one of the bad guys that week—an evil Hollywood-player type—and Linda was the well-meaning young actress who’d gotten romantically involved with me. We were both a little surprised to discover that in one scene the script called for us to kiss. We were sitting together before the first take of our romantic moment when she whispered, “What’s Elvis going to think about this?” We laughed about it—but we were a little worried, too. As a guy who’s worked at everything from manning a cotton gin to loading trucks to hauling film reels, I can say that kissing Linda Thompson is very easy work. And as it turned out, we didn’t have too much to worry about—to our relief, Elvis never saw the episode.

  In the spring of 1977, I was managing the Sweet Inspirations and taking the occasional acting job (I also had the pleasure of being a bad guy on Charlie’s Angels). One day I got a call from Carl Wilson. I hadn’t dealt much directly with Carl before, but being on the road with the band, I had started to feel a connection with him. I could see that, in the Beach Boys’ world, he was the kind of levelheaded peacemaker that I’d often tried to be in the Elvis world. He was nothing like any of the Memphis guys I’d spent so many years with, but for some reason I found him very easy to talk to.

  This wasn’t just a friendly call, though. Carl wanted to know if I’d come back to work with the band as their tour manager. It was a great offer. But I didn’t like the idea that I was going to take the job from Rick Nelson—the guy who had brought me into the Beach Boys organization in the first place. I told Carl I didn’t want to take Rick’s job from him. But Carl told me Rick wasn’t with the band anymore. Carl had suggested me to the band as a replacement, and the members had agreed I was the right one for the job. That made it easy to say yes to the offer. In addition to managing the Sweets, I’d now be working for the Beach Boys full-time.

  On paper, the Beach Boys were still one of the biggest rock-and-roll bands in the world. They played huge concerts to sellout crowds, and their records still charted (they’d just had a Top 5 hit with a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Rock ’n’ Roll Music”). In March of 1977, they signed a huge, $8 million contract with CBS Records. On a personal level, though, the band was in turmoil. After years as a near recluse, Brian Wilson was functioning and capable of appearing on stage with the band, but there were doubts about whether he could return to greatness as the band’s producer and prima
ry songwriter. Dennis was the sex symbol of the group, and brought a fierce energy to the stage that fans loved, but his wild lifestyle made him an unpredictable and sometimes undependable bandmember. Mike and Al, the meditation enthusiasts, had embraced a clean-living philosophy, and were scornful of Dennis’s and Brian’s indulgences. Carl tried to put the music ahead of all the personal clashes, but he was having a rough time handling the pressure of the situation.

  It was amazing to me that a band known for such sweet, musical harmony could have so much tension and disagreement behind the scenes, and more amazing still that when the band got out on stage, the music did rise above whatever had been going on backstage. I started watching what the group did on stage, and I became a fan, too. I began to think that if you could roll together Brian’s musical brilliance, Dennis’s sex appeal, and Carl’s gentle spirit and intelligence, you might have an Elvis.

  In addition to troubles between band members, there was trouble with the group’s management. Steve Love, Mike’s brother, had been managing the band for a while, and from what I could see had done a very good job for the group. But there were disagreements over some money issues, and Steve was fired. With the CBS deal signed, the band was about to embark on a major European tour that would include a concert at a major CBS Records convention in London, but they no longer had a steady management organization to make a tour like that run smoothly.

  Elvis was out on a series of short, eight-or nine-date tours that spring and summer, and I was checking in with Myrna to see how things were going. A couple of the concerts were going to be filmed for a CBS television special, and I called Myrna after those dates to see how the shows had gone. She said that Elvis was looking good for the special—that he’d lost some weight and given strong performances. I also heard that my brother had been in touch with Elvis. When Sheriff Roy Nixon was elected mayor of Shelby County in 1976, my brother was bumped up from number-two man to number-one man in the Sheriff’s Department. He hadn’t been on the job long before Elvis came to see him. Elvis showed Billy Ray the deputy sheriff’s badge he’d gotten back in 1970, and said he felt he was ready for a promotion. Billy Ray told Elvis that the only higher badge available was the one he was wearing. Elvis repeated that he wanted the promotion, and said, “Billy Ray, you don’t want me to run against you, do you?”

  Billy Ray handled the situation perfectly. He gave Elvis his badge (he eventually found an identical backup that he could carry). And Elvis thought it was only fair that if he was being promoted, he should turn in his old badge—which, in the six years he’d had it, he’d customized with diamonds and gems. At Elvis’s insistence, Billy Ray received the jeweled badge, and the next day put it in a safe-deposit box, thinking he’d give it back to Elvis at some future date.

  I tried to get ahold of Elvis at Graceland at one point when I was on the road. Billy Smith answered the phone, and after we talked for a while, I told him I wanted to speak with Elvis if he was available. Billy went to check, and then got back on the line.

  “Hang on, Jerry—Elvis says he wants to talk to you.”

  I waited for Elvis to pick up. And waited some more. After about twenty minutes of silence, I gave up and hung up the phone. It seemed a little strange, but I just figured something must have come up to pull his attention away from the phone call. I would just call back later.

  The Beach Boys’ summer European tour was set to be my first chance to show what I was capable of as a tour manager. But the tour never happened. Without proper management, none of the extensive paperwork that needed to be in place for an overseas tour had been properly executed. It all fell through, before there was anything for me to manage. The only gig that was booked was the appearance at the CBS convention on July 30. That event looked like it could be a really positive one for the band, a way for them to rally back together as bandmates and show their enthusiasm for their new record company. After sets from other CBS talents such as Boz Scaggs and James Taylor, the Beach Boys would be presented as the headliners—the newest addition to the CBS roster. And they’d be performing primarily for a roomful of CBS executives—people who had believed in the band enough to sign them, and who wanted nothing more than to believe that their $8 million had been well spent.

  The band got a phenomenal welcome when they took the stage, and again, despite all the personal tensions that still lingered among the members, the group pulled together and began delivering fantastic versions of hit after hit. Label executives usually make for a pretty jaded crowd, but this time, the roomful of people were up on their feet, singing along. Brian was on stage with the band, but wasn’t counted on to do much—the setlist had been designed so that he contributed a few spotlight vocal lines, but was really more a presence than a performer. At one point during the concert, he sat at his grand piano looking like he had tuned out of the show entirely. That sight enraged Mike. He ran across the stage and gave the piano a hard shove, startling Brian and nearly rolling the piano into the audience. The room went dead. And a lot of executives must have worried that they’d just spent a lot of money on some very bad vibrations.

  After trying to tour-manage a tour that didn’t happen, and trying to keep things calm among the splintering Beach Boys, I needed a break. Instead of flying back to the U.S. with the band, I headed for Monte Carlo, where a week of sunshine and Bordeaux put me in a much better mood.

  Back in L.A., I was working out of the Beach Boys’ production offices in Santa Monica. I was beginning to consider Carl Wilson a good friend as well as an employer, and we had some long talks about the band. I was impressed with his insight, and his ambitions for his career. He could see the group’s problems as clearly as anyone could, but he still felt the band was capable of better records, better tours, and better music. Brian had been described for years as the “genius” of the band, but I came to believe that there wouldn’t be a band at all without Carl. Carl and I were both excited about the band’s next tour, which would give everybody a chance to put the European fiasco behind us. The tour would include some very high-profile East Coast gigs, including a huge free concert in New York City’s Central Park. The tour was set to begin on August 17.

  On August 16, I was out on the balcony of the hillside house that Elvis had given me. The phone had been ringing all day as I worked through all the last-minute preparations for the Beach Boys tour. I’d managed to pull things together and had set up what looked to be a solid, productive time on the road. All arrangements had been taken care of. All we had to do now was get on the first plane, and I’d begin my first proper tour as the tour manager of a major rock-and-roll band.

  I looked down at the parched hillside below my home. Southern California had been suffering through a drought the last few years, and I wondered how long the cactus and eucalyptus and scrub brush could survive in the dry heat. The phone rang again. I was tempted to ignore it. It felt good just to enjoy the house and the view for a moment. But I went in and answered. I barely recognized the distressed voice on the other end. But I made out that it was Pat Parry, the woman who’d been a friend of Elvis and us guys over the years.

  “Elvis is dead,” she said.

  I hung up the phone. I started to cry. I went back out on the balcony.

  It started to rain.

  15

  BELLS

  He was only forty-two. And now he was gone. I didn’t doubt that this was true, but it didn’t feel real to me, either.

  The Lisa Marie had been ready to take Elvis out on his next tour, also scheduled to start August 17. Now, Vernon was sending the big plane to Los Angeles, so that Priscilla, her mother and father, her sister Michelle, Joanie Esposito, Joe’s girlfriend Shirley Dieu, and I could fly back to Memphis for Elvis’s funeral.

  Rick Husky picked me up to give me a ride to the airport. There wasn’t much for Rick and me to talk about. He put on the car radio softly to fill the silence. The station was playing Elvis. A ballad. At the end of the song, the DJ said, “One of the great ones, by the late
Elvis Presley.” The late Elvis Presley. That hit me hard.

  It was real. He was gone.

  When I got to the airport, the Lisa Marie was there waiting. But the crew wasn’t on the plane. And Priscilla and the others hadn’t arrived yet. The stairs were down, and the doors were open, so I went aboard.