Lisa Marie nodded her head and scampered back into the suite, already onto something new, as kids always seem to be. Rather than be offended, I actually felt bad for Priscilla in that moment because I knew the situation Lisa had described was quite true. I went everywhere with Elvis, even to the bathroom, in the early days of our romance. He had told me that the wives didn’t go on tour, and that they usually only got to go to the Vegas engagements for the opening and/or the closing shows. His classic line was, “You don’t take your wife to work with you.” So the wives stayed home, but the girlfriends got to travel. That routine was quite obviously not conducive to healthy marriages, and Elvis’s wasn’t the only one that fell apart as a result. My note to self back then: Perhaps I’d be happier remaining a girlfriend with traveling privileges, if as a wife, I’d be tucked away at home in the “wife penalty box.”
My experience of Priscilla during these years was mostly through what I heard from Elvis about her. In the first months of our relationship, he was still in the process of recovering from his perceived betrayal by her, and he sometimes struggled to forgive her. As he was able to finally begin to salve his wounded pride in the wake of their separation, he set out to let go of any lasting animosity he might have had toward Priscilla.
I saw this most clearly one time when he asked me to write down a list of intentions for him. As something of an all-around girl Friday for Elvis, I often took dictation for him, writing everything from short lists of things he wanted to remember, to the breakdown for a karate movie he planned to write, which I’m sure would have been wonderful, given his fervent passion for karate and his fertile imagination. One day he had me take down a list of his intentions on his own personally embossed stationery, with his TCB (for “Taking Care of Business”) logo with the lightning bolt, and “Elvis,” printed at the top. As he spoke, it quickly became clear that he had something much more serious on his mind than the usual flitting fancies he wanted me to capture in writing. Instead, he narrated a series of resolves he swore to keep.
The first: “To love the Lord thy God with all my heart, soul, and body as best I can,” he said.
And then, after pausing again to think partway through the list, he said something that surprised me.
“To wish happiness for Priscilla and Mike Stone,” he said.
I couldn’t help but glance up from my handiwork. He’d been so angry and hurt when they’d first separated that, as has been well documented, he’d once expressed a desire to take a hit out on Mike Stone. And our early conversations about Priscilla had resonated with his pain and frustration. So this intention on his part to do better, which was almost spoken like a prayer, was telling about the honorable man he strove to be.
“To love and appreciate Linda with all my heart and body,” he said, continuing to enumerate items on his list. By the time he was done, he’d pledged to take care of nearly everyone in his orbit. After he’d concluded, he had me sign the paper, “EP,” suggesting his resolve to follow through.
Knowing that Elvis was actively healing from the dissolution of his first marriage made our conversations about the possibility of getting married seem even more layered with significance. And yet, despite the pre-engagement ring he’d given me and my enthusiasm to marry him and possibly have a child with him, he did express a few opinions related to matrimony and family that gave me pause. One night, we were talking in bed in the blue light of the TV when the subject of motherhood came up.
“It’s different when a woman has a baby,” he said. “She’s a different person. It’s just not as much fun to make love to a woman who’s had a baby.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, thinking about how I’d always known I wanted to be a mother someday, and how, more recently, I’d thought about having his child.
“They’re a mother,” he said. “They’ve given birth. They’ve had a child. You just feel like you don’t want to violate that.”
It was almost as if having a baby pass through her made a woman’s body somehow sacred, and he didn’t want to defile that preciousness. And so, I do acknowledge there is some truth to the reports I’ve read that Elvis had something of a Madonna complex. But for that moment, at least, I didn’t think too much about how his beliefs might impact our future life together someday. I was too busy basking in the joy and promise of our love. And in so many ways, I continued to feel as if I was already his wife, especially when we were enjoying the quieter existence that was more common during our time together at Graceland, as we were that winter and spring.
Fun as the road was, at Graceland we could totally relax and be ourselves, without any outside distractions. When were lounging in our bedroom, watching television in the evening, it was common for Elvis to look over at me beseechingly.
“Honey, Gullion’s a little hungry,” he said. “Will you go downstairs and make me some food?”
Now, of course, we had four housekeepers at Graceland, who all cooked. And so, before I knew better, my first instinct was that any one of them could probably create a much finer feast for the lord of the manor than the few dishes I knew how to make.
“Honey, do you want me to get Lottie to make it for you, or Pauline?” I asked.
“No, Mommy, it tastes better when you make it because you make it with TLC,” he said. “You make it with love.”
“Okay, honey, what do you want?” I asked.
“I want to have some bacon and eggs,” he said.
While I was down in the kitchen, at least one of the housekeepers would always come out to offer their services to me. And I always had to turn them down because sometimes Elvis would actually stand at the top of the stairs, peering down into the kitchen to make sure I was really doing the cooking myself, putting in plenty of TLC.
The first few times I cooked for him, without thinking there was any reason to do otherwise, I made a single portion—two or three pieces of bacon, a couple of scrambled eggs, and two pieces of toast—and carried it up to him in bed on his usual tray.
“What is this?” he asked, looking down at the plate. “Ariadne, I need more food than this.”
“No, that’s a good amount of food,” I said.
“Mommy, I need more food than this,” he said. “I grew up poor. I had to be rationed when I was a kid. Now I don’t. I want to see a feast in front of me, even if I don’t eat it all.”
After that, I quickly learned my lesson. From then on, whenever he asked me to cook for him, I made sure to prepare a pound of bacon, a six-egg omelet, and five or six pieces of toast. It was like cooking for an army. When I took the enormous portion up to him on his tray and put it in front of him, as he’d predicted, he didn’t ever eat all of it. So, no, he didn’t eat oversize portions every night. But sometimes he did eat too much, especially in the wake of Aloha from Hawaii, when he was recovering from the deprivation of that 500-calorie-a-day diet. He just wanted to know that he could have more than he could consume, whenever he wanted to, proving that he had pulled himself out from under the grinding deprivations of poverty. That mindset bled over to his fashion choices. He would never, ever wear another pair of blue jeans, he decisively declared, because when he was dirt poor that’s all they could afford. So blue jeans, to him, represented a time when he and his family were impoverished. He would have no more of that.
On other nights, what he craved was his now famous peanut butter and banana sandwiches. If they were not made exactly the way he required, he would not eat them, and he had no hesitation about sending them back.
“Make it the way I want it,” he would say to whoever had brought up the food.
Elvis was well aware that I knew exactly how to make his PB&B sandwiches to his liking, and so he more often than not sent me down to the kitchen to do just that. Now, I know that this is a very famous and much-discussed sandwich, with a great deal of folklore surrounding it, so I think it’s well worth including the recipe here, as it was taught to me by Elvis himself.
The first, secret and crucial, step
is to mash up the bananas, and mash up the peanut butter, and then blend them all together and put the mixture on the bread. Then put the sandwich together by placing the other slice of bread on top. Melt one stick of butter. That’s right, one whole stick of butter. Saturate one side of the sandwich completely in the butter, and then saturate the other side, cooking the bread like a grilled cheese sandwich, until all of the butter is absorbed. And then cut it in half, and serve. I have to be honest, I tried to cut back on the butter as much as I could without incurring Elvis’s wrath, but he never let me eliminate too much.
When I brought Elvis in something that he really loved to eat, he was adorable, sitting up against the pillows, cross-legged in his men’s pajamas. He had this cute little dance he did in bed, where he rocked from side to side, sometimes with his eyes closed, with this beatific smile on his face, almost like Stevie Wonder. That’s how much he loved his favorite foods. It tasted so good to him and made him so supremely content. I can still see him rocking left to right in bliss, enjoying his food.
I made every effort to help steer Elvis away from overindulging in unhealthy food, and tried to live the example of eating well and exercising. To this day, I eat basically a Mediterranean diet with a lot of fish and vegetables. My preferred diet suffered during those years because Elvis would never allow fish to be cooked at Graceland or anywhere we were. He hated the smell of fish. I did the best I could to influence him to eat more healthfully, but stubborn as he was, it was often a losing battle.
On some nights after dinner, he’d ask me to go downstairs and get him some “iddytream.” He loved all of the flavors, but I’d say that vanilla and chocolate were his absolute favorites. Sometimes strawberry. What he really adored were ice cream sandwiches, and especially Eskimo Pies, the ones with the crispy chocolate coating encasing a square of vanilla ice cream. Sometimes he ate a whole box at once, with me bringing the treats to him one at a time.
That was his personality type, and it applied to food as well as to drugs. As I was beginning to learn, these tendencies could cause tension between Elvis and me if I tried to curtail his indulgences, and for those in his inner circle who were trying to look out for his best interests and keep him healthy.
One time when we were staying at the Monovale house, Elvis sent me down the back stairs to the kitchen to get him a snack. When I got there I met up with Charlie Hodge.
“Hey, Linda,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“He wants another ice cream bar,” I said.
“Well, don’t take it to him,” he said.
“You go up and tell him you’re not going to take it to him,” I said.
“Well, he’s gaining weight,” he said.
“I know, but what am I going to do?” I said. “I tell him but he doesn’t listen.”
Elvis overheard this conversation, and he went ballistic on Charlie.
“Don’t you ever tell her what to do or not to do in my house!” he screamed. “This is my house and she’s doing this for me. She’s tries to tell me, but it’s up to me what I’m eating and not eating. If she doesn’t get me what I want when I want it, goddamnit, then I’ll just get pissed, and I’ll go down and get it myself. So just shut the fuck up!”
At his core, Elvis was an extremely sensitive person, which made his self-destructive behavior even more painful to be around. He knew every molecule of his being was subjected to the most intense—and potentially harsh—scrutiny, and he could be very hard on himself, which was excruciating to witness. Elvis had long since stopped reading any and every review of his shows. He did not have thick skin, and when a critic had negative things to say about him personally or his performances, it cut him deeply.
One night in the months after Aloha from Hawaii, when Elvis was battling his weight and clearly losing the battle, we were at Graceland and Lisa Marie was visiting us. He was standing in front of the mirror in our bedroom, and he just kind of relaxed his whole posture and bearing, not making any more effort to suck it in. As a result, his belly bulged over the waist of his pants.
“Oh God, I’m so fucking fat,” he said.
“Don’t say that in front of her,” I said, nodding toward Lisa Marie.
But before the words were even fully out of my mouth, she chimed in with her sweet little girl’s voice: “Daddy, you’re not fucking fat.”
“You can’t say that in front of her,” I said, through the laughter I couldn’t contain.
He started laughing, too, and the whole mood of the room immediately lightened. She brought so much levity to our lives, even when Elvis was struggling against his personal demons.
He adored Lisa. We both did. She was my first experience at caring for a little child, something I always felt I was meant to do. It fit me naturally, though looking back now, I grow alarmed when I realize how many loaded guns were around her at all times when she was at Graceland and our other homes. Thinking about the accessibility of firearms when any child is around makes my blood run cold. It was grossly irresponsible to have those guns just lying about in the home. Thankfully, she had been taught repeatedly to never touch them and knew better than to ever play with them.
I loved being with Lisa Marie when she visited us, but it didn’t take long for me to become exhausted. Most days, I’d be off, chasing after Lisa Marie as she ran off on some new adventure. She had a lot of energy, and so this made for some very long days. In the late afternoon or evening, Elvis woke up and joined us in our playtime and was with us for the few hours until it was Lisa’s bedtime. And then he was up all night, and my primary undertaking was to be there for Elvis, who often would be awake until around the time Lisa Marie was getting up again. Even if I managed to sneak in a few hours of sleep between the two, it was exhausting.
Blissful as our time with Lisa Marie was, as Elvis and I approached the first anniversary of our meeting, it was impossible to deny that his moods were growing more erratic and that prescription drugs were playing a larger role. At times, he’d show visible signs of impairment, and while I kept careful watch over him to make sure he didn’t do any harm to himself or others, he was never an easy man to control.
One day when we were staying at the Monovale house, there was no doubt that he was mildly under the influence of some drug. But, quite honestly, that could very well describe his demeanor nearly every day.
“Honey, you know I’m a fifth-degree black belt in karate,” he said, the words coming out slowly, so that I had to focus to follow the sentence to completion. “I’ve got swords,” he said. “I mean I’m pretty much an expert Samurai swordsman as well.”
“Really, honey?” I said, humoring him, as was my way. “That’s wonderful.”
“Yeah, do you trust me?” he asked.
“Well, to an extent,” I said, trying to keep my tone light and playful.
“Let me show you what I can do,” he said, pointing. “Lean against that wall and remain motionless.”
Now, I had ridden with Elvis on the back of his motorcycle, neither of us wearing a helmet. And I’d ridden with him in his car, with no seat belts on, as he’d sped through the streets of Memphis. And during these adventures, I’d had nothing more to protect me than my prayers and my faith in Elvis. But this time, for some reason, I hesitated. Maybe it was the way his eyes were hanging half-mast like they were, or something about the full implications of the word sword.
“I’m really not that strong-hearted, honey,” I said. “You know that. I don’t even watch scary movies.”
“Honey, trust me,” he said. “I would never do anything to jeopardize your life or your beauty. You know I love you. I would never do anything to put you at risk. Trust me.”
And I did. I trusted him, as I always had before, loving him in such an adoring, almost otherworldly way that I believed in him entirely. He can fix anything, I thought. Whatever gets broken, he can fix it. Even me.
“Just lean against that wall,” he said. “Stay pressed against the wall and remain motionless, with your arms
at your side.”
“Okay, honey,” I said, standing as he’d instructed.
He pulled two swords out of their sheaths and then chose one that looked like a machete. It was long and tapered to a point.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Honey, just stay motionless,” he said.
He began swishing the sword around my body, and my face, showing me the different moves of a Samurai swordsman. I don’t think I breathed at all for at least sixty seconds, knowing as I did that his capabilities were impaired because of the drugs. But he was as good as his word, and he didn’t so much as scratch me, or even touch me.
Finally, he put his sword down at his side, and I took a deep, hungry breath.
“Okay, that was incredible,” I said. “But, oh my God, no more, because I think my luck’s run out.”
Lucky as I was to survive that—and I truly was lucky—it didn’t mask a more troubling reality: In the months following the Aloha from Hawaii special, it wasn’t just his more voracious eating habits and slight weight gain that became noticeable and increasingly troubling. He was visibly impaired more frequently, it seemed to me, both when he was attempting to sleep, and during our waking hours. And yet he didn’t seem to notice any difference in his own behavior or acumen. The guys clearly did, covering for him as they were used to doing, while acting like nothing was out of the ordinary. All of this caused me great concern. Either he was on so many drugs so much of the time that he could no longer distinguish how they impacted him, or he was purposely taking excessive amounts of drugs, not just for their prescribed benefits, but because he enjoyed the feeling. Either way, he was fallible because of them, and it was clearly a problem I began to recognize as the stardust in my eyes began to fade away and tears for this man I loved took its place.
This man, I now understood, needed a lot of care, and so I grew more resistant to always accepting his version of our reality. Maybe I was the one who could see clearly, even though I had the submissive role in our relationship. I didn’t fear for my safety, trusting Elvis implicitly as I did. But I did begin to fear for my sanity, as I understood more and more how I was living a version of “the emperor has no clothes.”
A Little Thing Called Life Page 11