Fans showed up at their doorstep, neighbors complained about the traffic, some girls set up a booth by the side of the road on Elvis’ route home with a sign declaring “Please Stop Here, Elvis,” and one day Elvis did. Eddie Fadal ferried fan club presidents back and forth to the bus stop in Temple, and Mrs. Presley was never less than courteous, but as the summer wore on she started to feel more and more poorly, her color was bad, and she wasn’t able to keep anything down. She called her doctor in Memphis, Dr. Charles Clarke. “She said to me, ‘Dr. Clarke, tomorrow’s Wednesday.’ I said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ She said, ‘Ain’t you off on Wednesday? Well, I want you to fly out here to see me, ’cause I’m sick.’ I said, ‘Mrs. Presley…’ I jumped around for some excuse. I said, ‘I’m not licensed to practice in Texas.’ She said, ‘You ain’t?’ She said, ‘Well, I’ll just have to get somebody to drive me up there. I need to get Elvis a mess of greens out of the garden anyway.’ That was just the way she talked. She was a very sweet person. I remember sometime back she was having a lot of stomach trouble, and I had put her on what we called a ‘soft diet.’ She came back sometime later and said, ‘Doc, I done just what you told me. I ain’t put nothing in my stomach. I’ve been very careful—I ain’t put nothing but Pepsi-Cola and watermelon.’ That was her soft diet!”
Elvis put his parents on the train for Memphis in Temple on August 8, a Friday. On Saturday Gladys was admitted to the hospital. Dr. Clarke was not sure just what was the matter with her: “It was a liver problem, but she was not jaundiced, as I recall. It wasn’t a typical hepatitis. I called every consultant we could latch on to, and we tried our best to diagnose it. Apparently she had some sort of clotting phenomenon that involved her liver and internal organs.”
By Monday he was still unsure of the diagnosis, but he knew that it was serious. He telephoned Elvis, who had just begun his six weeks of basic unit training and was unable initially to get leave. Elvis called practically every hour for news of his mother, and “finally he said, ‘If my leave doesn’t come through by tomorrow morning, I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon anyway.’ I said, ‘Now, Elvis, don’t go AWOL. All the young men in the world are watching you. You’re a model. Don’t do that.’ I said, ‘Give me the name of your colonel, and I’ll get you out if it’s come to this.’ I said, ‘I know the chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. I’ll call him.’ So he gave me the name of his colonel, and I called the colonel. The colonel said, ‘Well, Doctor, if it was anyone but Elvis Presley, we’d let him go, but let Elvis go and they’ll say we’re giving him special privileges.’ I simply said to the colonel—these are my very words—I said, ‘Look, Colonel, I’m having to sit down with the press of the whole world here and talk to them every day. Now if they say you gave him special privileges, I will back you to the hilt if you let him go.’ But I said, ‘Furthermore, Colonel, if you don’t let him go, I’m going to sit down with them, and I’m going to burn your ass.’ I told him that in so many words. I spent five and a half years in the army myself. I was chief of cardiac surgery at Walter Reed during World War II, and I knew how to handle colonels. Elvis was here in a matter of hours. The colonel saw the handwriting on the wall.”
Elvis and Lamar flew from Dallas on Tuesday evening, August 12, and Elvis went straight to the hospital. “Oh my son, oh my son,” exclaimed Gladys, who had already expressed concern about his flying to come see her. He spent an hour or so in the hospital room and found her a little better than expected. Her condition was still grave, said Dr. Clarke, but his visit had done her a world of good. He left his father at the hospital, where Vernon was camped out on a folding cot beside Gladys’ bed. The pink Cadillac was parked so she could see it from her window. “I walked in one morning,” said Dr. Clarke, “and she said, ‘Look at that pink Cad out there in the parking lot.’ She said, ‘I like that special, ’cause Elvis give it to me.’ The thing she was proudest of in her whole life was working as a nurse’s aide at St. Joseph’s Hospital.”
Elvis came back early the next morning and spent several hours with her, then returned in the late afternoon with a bunch of friends, who hung out in the waiting room while he visited with his mother. She was in better spirits than the day before and spoke volubly about a wide range of subjects. He stayed till nearly midnight and promised her he’d be back early the next morning to take some of the flowers home.
At 3:30 A.M. the phone rang at Graceland. “I knew what it was before I answered the telephone,” Elvis said. Vernon had been awakened by what he described as his wife “suffering for breath.” He propped up her head and called for a doctor, but before the doctor was able to get there she was gone. Elvis arrived within minutes and sank to his knees, with his father, beside the bed. When Lamar brought Vernon’s mother, Minnie, to the hospital just minutes later, “we got off the elevator, and I could hear Elvis and Vernon wailing. I had never heard anything like it before in my life—it was like a scream. I came down the hall, and Elvis saw me and he grabbed hold of me and said, ‘Satnin’ is gone.’ ”
They waited at the hospital for the hearse to come and take her away. Elvis was inconsolable, touching the body over and over, until hospital attendants had to ask him to stop. From the hospital Elvis called Sergeant Norwood at the base, and Anita Wood, who was in New York to do The Andy Williams Show. It was 5:30 in the morning, and her mother answered the phone. Elvis could barely speak, said Anita. She promised she would come right after the show that night.
When reporters came to the house at mid morning, they found Elvis and his father sitting on the front steps of Graceland, utterly bereft. They had their arms around each other and were sobbing uncontrollably, oblivious to the presence of anyone else. Elvis was wearing a white ruffled dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, khaki continental pants, and unbuckled white buck shoes. His mother’s death, he told reporters without embarrassment or shame, had broken his heart. “Tears streamed down his cheeks,” wrote the Press-Scimitar reporter. “He cried throughout the interview. ‘She’s all we lived for,’ he sobbed. ‘She was always my best girl.’ ” Looking down the curved driveway, he said, “When Mama was feeling bad we used to walk with her up and down the driveway to help her feel better. Now it’s over.”
Hundreds of fans had assembled outside the gates and were keeping vigil when they moved the body to the house in the early afternoon. Elvis had announced that he wanted the funeral at home, in the traditional manner, because his mother had always loved his fans, and he wanted them to have a chance to see her. The Colonel overruled him, however, citing security, and the viewing at Graceland was limited to friends and family. The body was placed in a 900-pound copper, steel-lined coffin and lay in state in the music room. Gladys was clothed in a baby blue dress which her sister Lillian had never seen her wear, and Elvis struggled with tears once again as he recalled his mother’s simplicity, her imperviousness to the blandishments of wealth and fame. “My mama loved beautiful things, but she wouldn’t wear them,” he declared with bitter emotion.
Nick Adams was flying in from the Coast, Cliff Gleaves was coming from Florida, and Vernon’s father, Jessie, was riding the bus from Louisville. When Dr. Clarke arrived at the house (“I mean, they insisted that I come out and be with them at the home”), he found a chilling scene. “The expression of grief was just profound. He and his dad would just be pacing around, walk up to the front door with their arms locked around each other, and I remember the father saying, ‘Elvis, look at them chickens. Mama ain’t never gonna feed them chickens no more.’ ‘No, Daddy, Mama won’t never feed them chickens anymore.’ Just that sort of abject grief.”
All day there was a mounting crescendo of tears and emotion. Some of Elvis’ relatives, according to one source, were dead drunk in the kitchen. As Dr. Clarke saw it, the Colonel was doing his best “to make an extravaganza out of it.” When Alan Fortas came in, “Elvis was in a daze. His voice was small and strained. ‘My baby’s gone, Alan, she’s gone!’ ‘I know, Elvis,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. She was a nice lady.�
� Then he took me over to view the body…. Except when he got up to greet visitors, he just sat there with her, almost as if they were the host and hostess of their own little party. It was a pitiful thing to watch.” Junior picked up Eddie Fadal at the airport, and Elvis led him to the casket. “Just look at Mama,” he said. “Look at them hands, oh God, those hands toiled to raise me.” He couldn’t stop touching her, Gladys’ sister Lillian said. He would hug and kiss her and rock back and forth, whispering endearments, pleading with her to come back. “They couldn’t get him to stop, until they were afraid for him, you know, and finally they had to cover over the coffin with glass.” Telegrams arrived from Dean Martin, Marlon Brando, Ricky Nelson, Sammy Davis, Jr., Tennessee Ernie Ford, and present and soon-to-be Tennessee governors Frank Clement and Buford Ellington.
In the evening Sam and Dewey Phillips both came out to the house. Dewey was a mess. He had been fired from WHBQ the month before, and his behavior, under the influence of drink, pills, and congenital eccentricity, was becoming more and more erratic, but he and Sam stayed the whole night and did their best to comfort Elvis, who would not leave his mother’s side. “After a time,” said Sam, “I persuaded him to come to the kitchen, and we sat down, and I just listened to him. He knew I wasn’t going to give him any damn bullshit or try to make him artificially feel good about it…. Elvis kept talking about the body and how he didn’t want to give it up to anyone else. I eventually got Elvis away from the casket and we sat down by the pool. I’ll never forget the dead leaves by the pool. I was able to convince him that he should let his mother go. I knew just enough to know which part of him to touch and in what way.”
Anita finally arrived at 2:30 Friday morning. Everybody was camped out in the kitchen and living room. Nick, who had arrived with a cut over his eye from a fight scene with Frank Lovejoy, set up a makeshift bed next to Elvis’ so he could keep him company through the night. George, Alan, Lamar, and a bunch of the other guys, too, were all set for the duration. Anita found Elvis and Vernon sitting on the steps in front of Graceland. He hugged her when he saw her, and they both cried, and he said, “Come in, Little. I want you to see Mama.” She didn’t really want to, because she’d never seen a dead body before, but he said, “Come on in, Little, Mama loved you. I want you to come and see her, she looks so pretty.” He took her to the music room, “and there was a glass over her covering her up, but the top was up all the way so that the entire length of her body was exposed, and he took me over there and started talking about how pretty she looked, and then he patted on the top of the table where her feet were, and he said, ‘Look at her little sooties, Little, look at her little sooties, she’s so precious.’ ”
The Colonel cleared out most of the stragglers at that point, and Dr. Clarke administered a sedative to Elvis. The Memphis Funeral Home came for the body at 9:00 that morning while Elvis was still asleep.
The funeral was scheduled for 3:30 that afternoon, with the Reverend Hamill presiding. By the time the service started, close to three thousand people had filed by the body, and there were sixty-five police outside to control the crowds. The chapel was filled to overflowing with nearly four hundred mourners jamming the three-hundred-seat hall. Chet Atkins attended, but Bill and Scotty did not. Elvis was wearing a dark brown suit and tie and had to be helped from the limo. Before the service started, Dixie, married and a mother by now, arrived with her aunt and entered the little alcove where the family sat, to pay her respects. “When I went in the room, Elvis and his dad were sitting there, and he just burst up out of his chair and grabbed me before I was in the door: it was like, ‘Look, Dad, here’s Dixie.’ Like I was going to save the world. And we just hugged and comforted each other for a minute—there were twenty or thirty people sitting there, and it was almost time for the service to start—but it was a very emotional thing for both of us, and for his dad, and he said, ‘Will you come out to Graceland tonight? I just need to talk to you.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ll try.’ He was just so shaken over it. It just broke my heart to see him like that.” When the Blackwood Brothers, who were stationed behind the altar room, sang “Precious Memories,” Vernon could be heard to exclaim, “All we have now are memories,” with Elvis sobbing out, “Oh Dad, Dad, no, no, no….” The Blackwood Brothers had been Gladys Presley’s favorite quartet, and Elvis had arranged for them to fly in from South Carolina. Every time they finished a song, said J.D. Sumner, who was singing bass, “he would send a note back for us to sing another one. We were supposed to sing three or four songs, and we wound up singing something like twelve. I never seen a man suffer as much or grieve as much as he did at the loss of his mother.”
The Reverend Hamill preached on a theme suitable to the occasion. “Women can succeed in most any field these days,” he said, “but the most important job of all is being a good wife and a good mother. Mrs. Presley was such a woman. I would be foolish to tell this father and this son, ‘Don’t worry, don’t grieve, don’t be sorrowful.’ Of course you will miss her. But I can say, with Paul, ‘Sorrow not as those who have no hope.’ ”
Several times during the service he almost collapsed. “I sat right behind him during the ceremony,” said Anita, “and he would just cry out.” When the service was over and the mourners had filed out, he and Vernon and James Blackwood and his friend Captain Woodward, of the Memphis Police Department, stood by the coffin alone. “He went over to the casket,” said James, “and kissed his mother and said, ‘Mama, I’d give up every dime I own and go back to digging ditches, just to have you back.’ He was sobbing and crying hysterically. He came over and put his arms around me and just laid over on my shoulder and said, ‘James, I know you know something of what we’re going through.’ He said, ‘You don’t know it, but I was in the audience at R.W. and Bill’s funeral at Ellis Auditorium after the crash. So you know what I’ve been experiencing.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do,’ but I hadn’t known that he was there until that day.”
The scene was no less emotional or chaotic at the cemetery. The streets were lined with onlookers as the funeral procession left town on Bellevue, becoming Highway 51 as it reached Forest Hill Cemetery two or three miles short of Graceland. The grave site was crowded with an additional five hundred onlookers. “Some spectators,” wrote Charles Portis in the Commercial Appeal the next day, “seemed to be honestly bereaved, but the majority craned their necks and chattered.” Mr. Presley tried to comfort Elvis, but every time he did, he would himself dissolve in a paroxysm of grief. “She’s gone, she’s not coming back,” he declared hopelessly over and over again. Elvis himself maintained his composure a little better until, toward the end, he burst into uncontrollable tears and, with the service completed, leaned over the casket, crying out, “Good-bye, darling, good-bye. I love you so much. You know how much I lived my whole life just for you.” Four friends half-dragged him into the limousine. “Oh God,” he declared, “everything I have is gone.”
It was a mob scene back at Graceland, with friends and relatives milling around in helpless confusion, Elvis inconsolable, and the Colonel at his command post in the kitchen, when Dixie came out early that evening. She had no intention of intruding on his grief. “I didn’t mean to see him that night, because he was already surrounded by people. I was wearing shorts, and I had my hair in rollers, and I was just going to tell him I’d see him the next night. I stopped at the gate, and none of the Presleys were down there—it was like Grand Central Station, and all these little girls were trying to get in, and I sat there for a minute and watched all the commotion. And I went up to the guard—it was somebody I didn’t know—and said, ‘Will you just call up to the house and tell Elvis that I’m down here, and that I’ll come out tomorrow night to visit with him, if that’s good.’ So the guy says, ‘Okay, I’ll tell him,’ but I was sure he wasn’t going to give him the message.
“Then I went back to get in the car, and my car wouldn’t start, and while I was sitting there one of Elvis’ cousins came up and said, ‘Aren’t you Dixie?’ And
I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Elvis is waiting on you at the house.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want to see him tonight. I’ve got my hair rolled up, and I’m not dressed. I was planning to see him tomorrow night.’ He said, ‘No. You’d better come up. He’s already called down to see if you’re here at the gate.’ He took my keys to the car, and he took me up to the house, and Elvis came out the front door and just enveloped me. We went in the house, and the only person we saw was his grandmother. I said, ‘Where is everybody? I thought you had all these people.’ Because, I don’t think this is an exaggeration, I think there were at least twenty or thirty cars out front. He said, ‘There were—but I told them to get lost.’ And I did not see or hear a soul the whole time we were there, except the maid was in the kitchen and he went in and asked her to bring us some lemonade, and we went in the wing where the piano was and we talked and he sang ‘I’m Walking Behind You on Your Wedding Day,’ and we sat there and cried.
“We talked about his mother and rehashed from the time that I’d met her and all the things that we’d done that were funny and silly. And he expressed how special it was just to be with somebody you knew from those many days back that loved you and accepted you for just what you were back then. He said, ‘I wonder how many of my friends that are here now would be here if it were five years ago.’ He said, ‘Not very many, because they are all looking for something from me.’ And he told me about one of the guys who was singing backup for him at the time who had just given his heart to the Lord. He had been in the world for a long time and was just really messed up, and he told Elvis that he was having to walk away from the life that he was leading, and Elvis said, ‘I wish I could do that.’ It was just so sad. I said, ‘Why don’t you? You’ve already done what you wanted to do. You’ve been there, so let’s just stop at the top and go back.’ He said, ‘It’s too late for that. There are too many people. There are too many people that depend on me. I’m too obligated. I’m in too far to get out.’
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