There was a man who worked for Elvis as a general valet, or more accurately, something of a gofer. The boys in Elvis’s crew had given him a nickname related to the fact that he seemed to be continually fetching things for Elvis and the others. Let’s just call him Fetchit. I actually liked him and felt rather sorry for him, as he was slightly delusional, fancying himself to be an insider in Elvis’s world and a bit of a gangster. We all found it amusing the way Fetchit would posture, arching his eyebrow to his hairline as if he were a real villain. Although I thought he was harmless, Elvis found him annoying, and then began to be suspicious of him, and finally fired him. We were in Vegas at the time, so Fetchit went to the airport to return to Memphis. It was then that Elvis discovered that some compromising private photos and a ring had gone missing. He gathered his troops and charged off to the airport to commandeer the perpetrator from his flight.
Elvis actually managed to stop the plane he believed to be carrying Fetchit on the tarmac by flashing the federal narcotics badge President Nixon had given him. Fetchit was not on the plane, though, and I can only imagine the passengers’ shock when Elvis Presley roared up and down the aisles in search of his betrayer. Back in the airport, a couple of the bodyguards had found Fetchit before he could board his plane, whisking him back to the Hilton, where he was met in the Presidential Suite by a livid Elvis.
I don’t believe Elvis cared about the ring he found in Fetchit’s possession so much as he did the Polaroids, which were of a very personal nature, showing one of his former loves engaged in a simulated sex act with another woman. The image was fairly explicit and both women’s faces were visible and recognizable. Elvis had shown me the photos, which he’d taken, explaining to me that the women had posed to please and excite him. The women were by no means lesbians, but the photos would seem to indicate otherwise. So the chivalrous side of Elvis’s personality, dedicated to protecting a woman’s honor and reputation, was provoked into an incredibly angry, violent reaction. With several members of his entourage and me watching, Elvis slapped and punched poor Fetchit senseless. We all knew how dangerous Elvis’s rage could be and Fetchit was rightly terrified. It was horrible to behold, and I began to cry.
“Please don’t!” I yelled. “Please!”
Fetchit was, after all, a simple man who’d made a terrible mistake. I couldn’t bear to see him brutalized and humiliated by Elvis in his wrathful state.
Elvis was too consumed by his anger to hear me. He threw a glass Mountain Valley mineral water bottle at Fetchit’s head, and then another and another, grazing his brow and drawing blood.
“Please, please stop!” I pleaded. “Just let him go back to Memphis. You have your photos and your ring back! Please, I’m begging you, don’t hit him anymore!”
I hate violence and can’t stand to see someone else hurt. Even if Fetchit had been wrong to do what he did, the punishment had not fit the crime in my estimation, and I was a wreck by this point. Finally, Elvis realized how upset I was, and he stopped and grew still. Fetchit sat cowering and shaking on the floor, and Elvis visibly softened toward him. Once the heat of his anger had cooled, he clearly felt sorry for what he had done to poor Fetchit.
“Here, let me help you out,” he said, indicating that one of the guys should give Fetchit the money to cover his plane ticket back to Memphis.
“I’m sorry,” Fetchit whimpered, still recovering from his frightening ordeal.
“It’s okay,” Elvis said, accepting his apology. “Good luck to you.”
By the time Fetchit was escorted out into the hall, Elvis had returned to his normal, jovial self. But the rest of us were still very aware of the chill that had just passed over the room in the form of Elvis’s blind rage.
As disturbing as episodes like this were, it was often easy—perhaps a bit too easy in retrospect—to forgive them, or at least forget them, because he was who he was. His stature, along with my love for him, made it possible to adjust to all kinds of behavior, even when it came to his problems with pills.
While we were in Los Angeles, he asked me to accompany him on an errand—to the dentist—and because he and I were inseparable during that time, I didn’t think anything of it. I piled into the car with Elvis and Charlie Hodge, and both of us even accompanied Elvis into the room where he had a quick filling done. Then, as if they had some kind of a wink-and-a-nod agreement, the dentist left the room and Elvis immediately opened the cabinet under the sink and took out a gigantic jar of pills. Without hesitation, he began taking handfuls of pills and stuffing them into random pockets.
Clearly, this was not the first time he had been to this dentist to procure the pills he needed. He might have been acting like all of this was totally natural, but I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Oh, he knows I’m doing this,” Elvis said. “It’s fine. This is just Seconal. It’s sleeping medication. It’s just so tough to get prescriptions from doctors all of the time.”
“Well, that’s going to last you a lifetime, I would think,” I said.
Having lived with him for more than a month, I knew he had to take sleeping pills to go to sleep, and something else to wake up, as well as oftentimes something to pep him up to go onstage. Elvis claimed he’d first been given Dexedrine when he was in the army to keep him awake on his post overnight. He’d never been without pills since then, but he believed prescription drugs were perfectly healthy and saw no reason to stop taking them or to more carefully monitor his intake. And I knew it to be true that he had always suffered from insomnia, since he had spoken often about it, and also about his sleepwalking when he was a teenager.
I was still very naïve about what it really meant for someone to take such quantities of “medication” every day. I knew about Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe, and a few other people I’d read about, but this was before there was as much transparency around prescription drug abuse as there is now, and so I had no idea what I was really witnessing. Maybe that’s just showbiz, I thought.
Another aspect of show business I’d quickly had to become familiar with was the entourage. Anytime Elvis and I weren’t alone in our bedroom, we were around the same thirteen men who formed the entourage we rolled with, and we all traveled everywhere together. Before Elvis bought his own airplane, he would either charter a plane or take over the whole first-class section of a commercial flight. And I was usually the only woman in the mix. The other guys couldn’t always bring a girlfriend or wife along, but Elvis always had me with him, at least in the beginning.
The guys quickly came to think of me as one of them, and I saw things, including the occasional mistress or affair. Of course, this made it extremely uncomfortable for me when I’d meet a girlfriend, and then the wife came around, especially because I was very green at first. In fact, early on, I once came right out and asked Elvis about one of his entourage members.
“Isn’t he married?” I said.
“Honey, I’m really not sure,” Elvis said.
Oh really? I thought. This guy’s worked for you for how many years, and you don’t know if he’s married or not?
They all kind of covered for each other, as I learned over time, which I guess was all a part of the rock-and-roll reality. I will say this, though: While their first loyalty was of course to Elvis, they showed me a great deal of compassion and kindness through the years. Elvis expected them to cover for him with me, but they didn’t always keep me completely in the dark about what was really going on, and I appreciated it.
Although I was comfortable with the guys, I did sometimes feel somewhat self-conscious about living out my private life in front of them, which Elvis was completely accustomed to by now. During one dinner at the Monovale house, there were about eight of the guys there, including Red and Pat West, and Jerry Schilling, as well as his wife at the time, Sandy, and Lisa Marie. Elvis was at the head of the table, and I was at his left. As the housekeeper served us, we were all talking and socializing. Out o
f nowhere, I felt this searing stare, coming from my right.
I looked up at Elvis, and he was staring at me with heated intensity. I saw the look in his eye, the one he would call “that lean and hungry look.” Without a word, he reached for me under the table, took my hand, and led me upstairs, leaving everybody behind at the table. He didn’t excuse himself, and I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t, either. Everybody sat hushed, and just kind of watched us get up from the table. But I think they’d probably seen the way he’d been staring at me while we were talking, and noticed the look in his eye, too. When the moment hit, his passion overtook him, and there was no denying him what he wanted. He rushed us upstairs to our bedroom, but we never made it to the bed.
The way Elvis kissed was also the way he made love, with his whole being, giving the experience, and his partner, his absolute undivided attention. He was in the moment, and he got lost in our connection in the deepest, most incredible way.
Obviously, he was much more experienced than I, but he found it very endearing that I had so much catching up to do. He was fond of mirrors in the bedroom. If I looked like Elvis Presley, I’d be fond of mirrors, too. He also had a few porn movies, including The Devil in Miss Jones and Behind the Green Door.
“Honey, have you ever seen a porn?” he asked me, early in our relationship.
“You mean a pornographic movie?” I asked. “No, of course not.”
“Well, would you watch one with me?”
“I don’t know. Is it sexy?”
“Yes, it’s very sexy.”
So he put on The Devil in Miss Jones, and we settled in to watch.
I was so innocent and naïve that it didn’t take long for me to be shocked.
“She doesn’t have any clothes on!” I said. “Oh my God. You can see her … You can see everything! Look! Oh! Oh my God! You can practically see all the way up to her tonsils! Is this legal for people to get naked, and do things on camera like that? Can’t they be arrested for this? That’s gotta be illegal, isn’t it?”
Elvis was laughing so hard, he was crying. This was not a sexy moment. It was a hysterical moment, and it definitely dampened our foray into the world of watching porn. I guess I was too much of a Goody Two-shoes at the time to get into it like Elvis may have hoped I would.
Elvis was uninhibited in pretty much all areas, except for one. At the beginning of our relationship, I came out of my dressing room one night wearing a see-through negligee and glided over to where he was lying on the bed.
“You going to wear that to bed?” he said.
“Yeah, I though it was sexy,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s sexy as hell,” he said. “But what if there’s a fire, and we have to leave the premises? You need to wear something a little more modest, just in case we have to dart out of the house quickly. I wouldn’t want anyone else to see you in a negligee!”
I looked at him and noticed he was wearing a set of men’s silk pajamas, as usual.
“I’m not gonna be naked,” he said. “I don’t want you naked. I don’t want you in that sexy lingerie. Let’s just go to bed pretending there’s going to be a fire, so we will be dressed for it.”
I went and changed as I’d been ordered.
Of course, in any new relationship, there’s an adjustment period during which both partners get used to each other’s quirks, particularly when you live together and are in each other’s company 24/7 almost immediately. In our case, the adjustment period was helped by the fact that I made it a point to be accommodating of nearly all of Elvis’s desires (if not porn) in every moment. I was that Southern belle who lived for her man and catered to his every whim. I was pretty much a perfect fit for him “right off the rack”—few alterations necessary.
We’d been splitting our time between Las Vegas and Los Angeles for nearly six weeks before we finally returned to Graceland. It was the longest I’d ever been away from home at one stretch, and so I was excited to see my family and Jeanne again. But I didn’t want to be separated from Elvis, and he clearly felt the same way about me.
“I think I’ll go see my mama and daddy today,” I said one morning.
“Well, I’ll come with you,” he said.
I felt relief knowing he wouldn’t be alone while I was gone. Not only did I always want to be near him, but even at this early stage, I’d become aware that the quantities and variety of medication he took could endanger his health. During those initial weeks together, I’d seen him so incapacitated by sleeping pills as to cause me alarm. I was so protective of him that I always wanted to be there to make sure he was breathing okay or not in danger of hurting himself.
While I was excited for my family to spend time with Elvis, I was a little embarrassed about the fact that he and I were living together—and sleeping together—without being married, not because it bothered me, but because I’d been raised in a very proper, religious household. I worried my mama might be upset by this arrangement. It was a relief to find that she wasn’t judgmental. However, she was very protective of me. It didn’t matter that he was the King of Rock and Roll, as far as she was concerned. I was her daughter, and she was a very strong-willed woman, and she wanted to make sure he was treating me well.
When we went over to their house, and she and I went into the kitchen together to bring out iced tea for everyone, she pulled me aside.
“Are you happy?” she asked.
“I’ve never been so happy, Mama,” I said. “I love him so much, and he really loves me, too.”
My mother could tell I was genuinely loved and cared for, and this alleviated her anxiety somewhat. Elvis was always on his best behavior with my parents and came to sincerely care for my family.
Having my family so close to Graceland made it that much more magical for me. Graceland was simple. Life there was simple.
Elvis’s sanctuary was upstairs in the private suite that included his bedroom, his bathroom, my bathroom and dressing area, and the office where we often sat at the piano, playing and singing. We harmonized together and, always the gentleman, he let me sing lead because I can’t sing harmony. We also listened to a lot of music at Graceland, spending hours playing old records, listening to them closely, and talking about the lyrics. We listened to a lot of gospel music—he loved the Singing Rambos—but we also listened to country and old groups like the Harmonizing Four, which he loved. Sometimes we’d even hear recorded speeches by Martin Luther King. In particular, our discussions about lyrics definitely found their way into the poetry I’d been writing and helped me with my increasing mastery of verse.
As we settled into our domestic routine at Graceland, we spent much of our time in the master bedroom, stretched out on his big nine-by-nine bed, watching TV. As Elvis had informed me when he’d first brought me upstairs to his bedroom, he’d had it specially made. As he later told me, he hated four-poster beds and refused to sleep in one. This was because, a few years earlier, he’d been staggering from his sleeping pills, and he fell against one of the posts and had to get stitches in his forehead. Of course, he couldn’t give up the pills, so he gave up the bed.
In those days, we didn’t have a remote control for the television. We only had me.
“Honey, would you turn the TV up?” Elvis asked.
Without even questioning his request, I crossed the room and raised the volume.
“Is that enough?” I asked. “You want more?”
Once we had the volume where he wanted it, I got back into bed.
“I’m tired of this channel,” he said a few minutes later. “Put it on channel four. Let’s go to NBC.”
And so I got up again and changed the channel. While looking back I’d never do this again (thankfully we also have remotes now), at the time I reveled in the satisfaction of the feeling that this incredible man needed me in every way. I think we had a rather symbiotic relationship in that respect. At least that’s pretty much how I viewed my acquiescence to his needs at this point in our time together—Elvis Presley neede
d me, and I loved being needed by him. I was enraptured by the delirious swoon of my first love. I may have been a twenty-two-year-old college student, but I was innocent enough in matters of the heart to possess the fervor of a teenage girl without any of the perspective or self-preservation of a woman of my age. Having stepped through the looking glass into the greatest romance imaginable, I also may have relished such signs of my usefulness. They proved to me, and Elvis, I was indispensable to him. As such, I would be welcome to stay in this paradise with him forever, as I never wanted to leave or lose this feeling.
While we watched a lot of different things on TV in the bedroom, we watched hour upon hour of the British comedy show Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and I quickly came to see that, as his favorite comedy troupe, Monty Python spoke to Elvis’s deeply irreverent and inventive sense of humor. We would act out our favorite scenes from some of our own well-rehearsed takes on Monty Python sketches, and howl with laughter at their inane insensibility and our own silliness. I think one of the reasons Elvis loved Monty Python is that, like him, they were original. Their humor was offbeat and ridiculous. Similarly, Elvis watched the variety show Hee Haw religiously, in part because it spoke to a different side of Elvis’s humor—his “down home” country side.
Elvis was forever surprising me with his unpredictable humor. On an otherwise quiet night at Graceland, Elvis might come out of his bathroom, all stooped over, with his pajama bottoms pulled up to just below his nipples, and shuffle over to my side of the bed, where he’d pause dramatically and look down at me slyly.
“Honey, I’m ready for bed,” he’d say in the rusty voice of an old, feeble man. “Are you ready to have a little hot sex?”
Our ability to make each other laugh always brought us together, and as someone who adored being silly, I was far from afraid of making an ugly face in order to amuse him. When he got tickled, laughter erupted out of him with tremendous force. It was a joy to watch him laugh, but it was best when I was the cause of his riotous response.
On another occasion, he lost the porcelain crown he’d long worn on one of his front teeth, leaving a gaping black hole in his otherwise immaculate mouth. Instead of being uncomfortable over this dental emergency, or being embarrassed about how he might appear to others, he got right into this new part he was suddenly ordained to play.
A Little Thing Called Life Page 9