by Ginger Alden
I thought it was a little odd that Elvis wasn’t asking me to visit with him. (Not until after Elvis’s death, would I hear that when Elvis had taken ill in Baton Rouge, he was informed that three of his former bodyguards were going to publish a potentially damaging book filled with hurtful stories about him. Looking back, I strongly feel that Elvis had been discussing this book with others while he was in the hospital and didn’t ask for me, because he didn’t want me to know about it then. It wouldn’t be until much later, that Elvis would mention the book to me.)
Elvis called the following day, too. This time he let me know he had an intestinal flu but was feeling better. “I want you to come to the hospital tomorrow and show my nurse your engagement ring,” he said.
Before leaving Graceland to go home, I had tucked the ring back into my jewelry box for safekeeping. The next evening, my sister-in-law drove me over to get it. When I rang the front doorbell, Charlie answered. I stepped inside the foyer and, noticing movement in the kitchen doorway, I glanced that way and was surprised to see Lisa peeking her head out at me.
“Hi,” I said.
Charlie smiled and said, “Priscilla’s here, too. They’re in town visiting. Would you like to meet her?”
“Sure,” I said, caught totally off guard. I followed Charlie toward Dodger’s bedroom. Suddenly I remembered how, when I was a child, I’d sometimes pass Graceland and imagine Elvis, Priscilla, and Lisa inside. How bizarre it was that I was here—and so was Priscilla!
I hastily reminded myself that Elvis had told me I was the “lady of the house” now, but it was still surreal to walk into Dodger’s bedroom and find her in bed, with Priscilla sitting in a chair beside her.
“Hello,” I greeted Dodger.
Then Charlie introduced me to Priscilla, a petite woman with chin-length hair.
I sat on a chair near the foot of the bed, and Priscilla and I began to talk. She was friendly and at ease.
I relaxed a little, figuring Priscilla must have seen Elvis with other women before me since their divorce. Maybe this situation felt more natural to her than it did to me. At any rate, she seemed like a nice person, and I was glad about that because becoming Elvis’s wife would essentially mean Priscilla would be in my life, too.
At one point, we got into a conversation about dogs. I told her about Odyssey, my new Great Dane, and Priscilla said she had owned a couple of Great Danes in the past. They were great dogs, Priscilla said, very gentle.
“But don’t get too attached to them,” she warned. “They don’t live very long.”
Lisa had joined us in the room. She had been sitting on the floor, but now she stood up, walked over to me, and began playing with my hair. It was an awkward moment, to say the least.
Finally, Priscilla said, “Lisa, Ginger may not want you to do that.”
I looked at Lisa and smiled. “It’s all right,” I said.
But Lisa obediently walked away and sat down on the floor again.
I suddenly remembered that Elvis was waiting for me; my thoughts returned to getting my ring. But how could I make a graceful exit? It hardly seemed like good manners to jump up and say, “Excuse me, but I have to go get my engagement ring.”
At last, I decided to keep it simple. “I just stopped by to get something,” I told Priscilla. “It was nice to meet you.”
Then I said good-bye to Lisa and Dodger, rushed upstairs, retrieved my ring, and quickly left the house.
At the hospital, I was relieved to find Elvis looking better and in good spirits. He called his nurse into the room and proudly showed her my ring.
After the nurse left, he said, “Priscilla’s in town.”
“I know. I just met her,” I said, and explained about stopping by Graceland to get my ring.
Elvis laughed. “I wish I could have seen that,” he said. Then, after I’d told him that Priscilla and I had talked a little, he seemed to approve. “It’s important that Priscilla and you are friendly for Lisa’s sake,” he said.
He would be leaving the hospital soon, Elvis added, and Priscilla and Lisa were coming to see him. Not ready for what could be another awkward encounter, I stayed just a short while longer and then left.
After Elvis left the hospital, he had a little over two weeks before his next tour began. Lisa remained at Graceland for a few days and, weather permitting, she was often outside, driving around in a pale blue golf cart with her name written on its side, a birthday gift from Elvis. Lisa would come into Elvis’s bedroom sometimes, always curious to see what he and I were doing. You could see Elvis’s joy when she was around.
During this visit with his daughter, Elvis took Lisa and me out for a ride on one of his three-wheelers for the first time. It was a cycle with one wheel in the front, two in the back, and a passenger seat. With Lisa sandwiched between us, we rode to the airport and looked at planes.
Lisa loved being at Graceland, and I was glad she and I had gotten to be around each other a little. When it was time for her to return to Los Angeles, Lisa didn’t want to leave; she hid and the bodyguards had to look for her, eventually finding her near the meditation garden.
Elvis just wanted to spend the rest of the time before the tour relaxing. Late one night, he decided he wanted to take a small group of us to see the new Peter Sellers film, The Pink Panther Strikes Again. He rented a theater for the viewing and it was a wild feeling to walk in, knowing we had the entire theater to ourselves. Elvis and I took seats in the center of the auditorium, with the rest of the people in our group either sitting in the same row or behind us.
When everyone was settled in, Elvis looked over his shoulder toward the projectionist, and shouted, “Roll ’em!”
Before I knew it, we were all in hysterics. That film turned out to be one of my all-time favorite comedies.
But the jovial mood would be interrupted a few days later when Elvis and I were sitting in his bedroom talking when the commode in his bathroom began to make a noise. It was very early in the morning. As we talked, the noise continued. Elvis glanced toward the bathroom every few minutes, clearly becoming increasingly annoyed.
Before long, he quietly got up and left the room. He returned moments later with a machine gun in his hand. I thought I must be imagining things as Elvis walked right past me with the gun and went into the bathroom.
“Elvis, what are you doing?” I screamed.
He answered with a deafening barrage of gunfire, blasting his toilet to smithereens.
This was upsetting and completely unacceptable. I was more shocked than anything else by this action. I felt a cool stillness come over me.
Then I got angry, really angry. How could he think that this was okay?
Sometimes it seemed like Elvis was playing a game of “see what I can do” in order to watch people’s reactions. His cousin Billy would later say in a book that he thought this was funny. It wasn’t. I decided to leave before Elvis could exit the bathroom.
As I hastily descended the front stairs into the foyer, I glanced up and saw water running from the ceiling onto the chandelier. I walked out the front door and got into my car. My hands were shaking on the wheel as I drove home. I could only hope that, by leaving Graceland, I might be sending a message to Elvis that this sort of behavior wasn’t right.
I had hoped to enter my parents’ house quietly, without disturbing anyone, but as I pulled into the driveway, our dogs started barking and woke my mother. I never wanted to burden her, as she and my dad had enough going on with work and their marital problems, but I couldn’t hide my feelings. I was too rattled.
My mother tried to comfort me as I told her what happened. I also explained the incidents in Palm Springs and Hawaii that had troubled me. I had kept these events from her before, but now everything came spilling out. She couldn’t believe it and was clearly disheartened.
“I don’t want you being in any situation wher
e you could get hurt by someone else,” she said, adding no matter who the person was, I came first.
I knew she wanted to protect me, but I explained how strongly I felt that Elvis would never really hurt me. At the same time, I had come home because I needed to clear my head and touch base with all the goodness in Elvis and everything that had drawn me to him.
My mother could see that I was trying to work things out. “Whatever you decide to do, I’ll support you,” she said at last.
We both left it at that and went to our rooms. I lay in bed for a little while, worrying that Elvis might come over. I wasn’t ready to talk. He wouldn’t like me walking out on him—I could predict that based on his reaction in Hawaii when I left while he was talking to me—but I couldn’t just sit by and let him do something that I saw as terribly wrong.
I eventually fell asleep. When I woke up that afternoon, I went over the event again with Rosemary. I hadn’t heard from Elvis. I didn’t think my message about his behavior would sink in if I called him first—I definitely felt Elvis owed me an apology—so Rosemary and I went to see some friends.
By the time we returned home later that night, my mother said Elvis had called. When she told him Rosemary and I were out, he had asked to speak with Terry. She had told him Terry was on a college campus in another city, fulfilling a duty as Miss Tennessee, and they hung up. I waited for Elvis to call again, worried about how our conversation might go, but I heard nothing more from him that night.
The following day, Terry returned home. The minute she saw me, she asked, “What’s going on with you and Elvis?”
Startled, I asked how she knew something was up.
“I was sitting in an auditorium last night when a state trooper came in and told me I had a phone call,” she said. “I thought something terrible must have happened to someone, so I followed the state trooper outside.”
The trooper led my sister across a field and into an administrative building with a couple of security guards. “One of them handed me a phone, and Elvis was on the line. He sounded angry, saying that he’d like me to come to Graceland so he could talk about you.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! It sounded like Elvis was making this situation out to be my fault. He had no right to be angry at me. I wasn’t the one who’d done something wrong!
“He wanted to send his plane for me,” Terry continued, “but I told him I couldn’t leave because of the event, plus I had driven Tony’s mother up there with me. Elvis told me to let Tony’s mother drive the car home, but I told him she had bad eyesight and it was an eight-hour drive.”
Apparently, Elvis hadn’t taken no for an answer easily. Terry said it was awkward, as she had to keep saying, “Elvis, I can’t,” in front of the security guards, who had remained in the room.
“When I got off the phone,” Terry added, “the guards asked me if that was really Elvis.” Terry said she was completely rattled by the call and couldn’t wait to get home.
Did Elvis really not understand why I’d left? Did his stance that “no one walks out on Elvis” obscure his ability to see the issue at hand clearly?
I certainly didn’t want to break up with him, but I sincerely wanted Elvis to understand why I had reacted the way I did. Hearing that Elvis had called Terry and sounded angry upset me. I decided not to call him just yet.
The following day, one of Elvis’s aides called to ask me to come to Graceland. I thought things over. I wanted our relationship to work. I still felt Elvis owed me an apology. Then I remembered that he had tried to reach me that first night. Maybe he was trying to apologize after all, I thought, so I went to Graceland.
When I arrived, Elvis was seated in his bed with The Prophet lying open in his lap. I noticed that a new toilet had been installed in the bathroom. It looked as though nothing out of the ordinary had gone on here.
I sat down quietly beside him and waited, knowing The Prophet was one of the books he relied on for words of comfort and wisdom, especially about love.
Elvis turned to me and began quoting a passage from the book, saying, “You know, Ginger, ‘When love beckons to you, follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you yield to him, Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.’”
With love had come hurt, definitely, but Elvis had been going through his books to find an answer. I understood that he had chosen this passage to convey his emotions to me. Elvis and I were learning about love together. Whether through the lyrics of a song or words from a book, I knew this was Elvis’s way of trying to have me understand him sometimes.
Nobody at the house—not the maids, Aunt Delta, Charlie, or the aides—ever asked me why Elvis shot his toilet, leading me to believe that Elvis must have said something to them. Either that, or they had simply witnessed incidents similar to this one before and were used to it by now.
CHAPTER 21
Elvis’s tour was scheduled to begin on April 21. We would be on the road for almost two weeks. This was longer than what I’d experienced before, but, as always, I was excited about visiting cities I’d never seen. Our stops would include Greensboro, North Carolina; Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan; Toledo, Ohio; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Every so often on this tour, Elvis would complain about feeling bloated, but otherwise he seemed to be in good spirits. His eyes continued to bother him after some shows; as usual, I placed a warm washcloth over them to help soothe the irritation.
Concerned about his audiences, many times while we were backstage, Elvis would ask someone to describe what the crowd was like before he went on. After one performance, he said to me, “Man, there were some people in the first three rows who looked like they were sleeping. What are they, dead?”
I knew he was very sensitive about making his fans happy, and I tried to reassure him. “Elvis, it was only a couple of people,” I said. “I’m sure they loved the show.”
Elvis varied the songs in each show, and you never knew what to expect; he would feed off of the audience’s reaction and banter with people. He had more energy for some shows than others, but Elvis always put his heart and soul into delivering the best possible entertainment.
At the end of a performance in Milwaukee, however, there was a small mishap. Elvis exited the stage and, blinded by multiple camera flashes, he fell on the stairs and sprained his ankle. He was piqued when he got into the car and remained angry once back in his room. Dr. Nichopoulos wrapped Elvis’s ankle (which unfortunately would cause him problems at future shows), and later when we were alone, he said, “People just aren’t doing their jobs.” Frustrated, he told me that a bodyguard named Dick “wasn’t where he was supposed to be,” and then he declared, “I’m getting rid of Dick, Joe, and a whole lot more!”
I knew Elvis was in a bad mood because of his ankle hurting him, but I knew there was another recent incident that caused him to express displeasure with a few in his staff: A girl had broken through the crowd and reached Elvis, purposely scratching his hand and making him bleed. Elvis had gotten angry and later complained to me about some in his entourage then too.
Finally settling down for the night and resting as comfortably as he could with his injured ankle, Elvis decided to invite my mother and sisters to come to Duluth, Minnesota. I knew the reason Elvis wanted my mother to join us: A few weeks before this tour, in a somber mood one day, I had confided to Elvis that my father had moved out of our house. I could tell by the look on his face then that this news had bothered him. Elvis had been continually asking me whether my parents were shopping for a new home. They hadn’t been looking, but each time he’d brought the subject up, I’d just told him, “No, they haven’t found anything they like.” I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. A house was obviously a huge gift, too big a present and my parents had expressed to me that they felt awkward about Elvis’s offer on more than one occasion.
Although he was aware that
my father had moved out, Elvis still had his mind set on buying a new home for my family and at the beginning of this tour, he had brought the subject up again, telling me, “I want to talk to your mother about it. I’m gonna invite her and your sisters to see some shows.” I couldn’t believe that in the middle of a tour, Elvis was thinking about my family.
My mother and Rosemary agreed to come, but Terry was unable to make it. He asked them to stop by Graceland to pick up a brace for his ankle, which a nurse would leave for them. Elvis chartered a Learjet out of Nashville to fly my mother, Rosemary, and a girlfriend of Ricky’s out of Memphis.
My family arrived safely, and before the Duluth show, Elvis invited my mother and Rosemary into his room, where they gave him the ankle brace he had requested. Elvis asked how their flight was.
“Good,” my mother answered. “At one point, the pilot told us we were flying at forty-seven thousand feet.”
Elvis wasn’t happy hearing this. He told my mother they never should have flown that high, because the plane could have popped rivets. “I won’t use that company again,” he said.
My mother and sister toured with us for a few days. Elvis invited them to ride in the limo with us, which displaced a few of the staff who usually traveled with him. I hoped this didn’t bother anyone. Sometimes, members of his entourage had to take a shuttle bus from the airplane to the hotel, and once, when my family was directed onto the bus, Elvis quickly ditched the limo and we rode the bus, with Elvis squatting down in the aisle so he could talk with my mother.
When we’d returned to our hotel after Elvis’s show in Chicago, he was ready to talk with my mother about looking at homes and the situation with my father. I left the room to get her and Rosemary, passing Colonel Parker as he entered the suite.
The colonel usually flew out ahead of us, landing in the next city to make sure everything was in order before Elvis performed. I still hadn’t been around him enough to get a feel for who he really was. At one point, however, I had arrived in a city and entered our hotel suite, where I was surprised to see the colonel standing by a mobile cart, wearing a chef’s hat and stirring a pot of soup.