One day, he asked me to come into his bathroom at Graceland.
“Honey, can you give me a vitamin B shot?” he asked, holding out the syringe in my direction.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I can’t give shots. I’m not a nurse. And besides, I’m needle-phobic.”
“There’s nothing to it,” he said. “The doctor left it for me—vitamin B is good for you. Here, just pull down my pants.”
After I did so and I drew close to take the needle from him, I noticed that his buttocks were scarred. I had never inspected his naked posterior that closely before in the bright light of the bathroom, and I was admittedly taken aback.
“Oh my God, what happened to your butt, baby? You have scars and lumps.”
For the first time in our relationship, Elvis seemed embarrassed.
“It’s just a little scar tissue, honey, from B12 shots and stuff like that, you know.”
The sight was disturbing to me, as clearly these types of injections were something he’d been doing for a long time, long enough to give him scar tissue that had formed into hard knots. I knew enough by this point to understand that he hadn’t always been getting injected with vitamins. In fact, while I did squeamishly give him the B12 shot that day, as he’d requested, when he would subsequently ask me to give him shots of other medications, I simply refused.
I had never done any kind of drug and found it difficult to understand why someone would basically mutilate himself that way. Despite their prevalence in our house, taking drugs never occurred to me, honestly—they didn’t seem like fun. To witness someone become incapacitated and even rendered unconscious: That didn’t seem like something I’d want to get into. Let me tell you, watching him destroy his health with prescription drugs was the best deterrent. If I had ever needed one to keep me from doing them myself, that was it. So I led a squeaky-clean, drug-free existence and hoped it would make it easier for him to do the same, but my efforts were mostly futile.
Of course, those scars, like some of his emotional ones, Elvis kept hidden. And even though Elvis and I had many blissful days still in front of us, the troubled moments would become more frequent. Whatever struggles he was going through were only going to get worse.
“I’m Only Here for a While”
I ask myself what’s lasting
What will go with time
Everything I touch while I’m here
It all seems to be mine
But life slips through our fingers
Just like grains of sand
The world revolves without our help
It’s all part of God’s plan
When this world and I must part
My legacy will be my heart
I’ll try to leave some love behind
To ease a troubled mind
I’m only here for a while
What will I leave behind me?
I’m only here for a while
Shouldn’t I act kindly …
With love and tenderness …
Over and over again
The same stars shine on every man
If I’m only here for a while
Why not help someone else’s heart to smile?
It only takes a minute
To look up at the sky
And reaching out you might touch a soul
Or at least say you tried
I’m only here for a while
What will I leave behind me?
I’m only here for a while
Shouldn’t I act kindly …
With love and tenderness …
Over and over again
The same stars shine on every man
If I’m only here for a while
Why not help someone else’s heart to smile?
Searching for answers together
Leaving this world a little better
I know we’ll find all the answers
Look inside your heart
I’m only here for a while
What will I leave behind me?
I’m only here for a while
Shouldn’t I act kindly …
With love and tenderness …
Over and over again
The same stars shine on every man
If I’m only here for a while
Why not help someone else’s heart to smile?
LYRIC: LINDA THOMPSON
Chapter Seven
A Little Breathing Room
In October, Elvis traveled to Los Angeles, and for the first time since our relationship had begun more than a year before, he didn’t ask me to accompany him. While I felt slightly uneasy about not being there to take care of him, a part of me was worn down from the more pronounced nursing duties I’d been taking on of late. I was exhausted.
When Elvis and I reunited, my joy at seeing him was tempered by my now-constant concerns about his health. I was perpetually listening to Elvis’s breathing patterns and making sure he didn’t get up while under the strong influence of sleeping medication and perhaps fall and hurt himself. In fact, I felt as if I were caring for a newborn baby, and I began to sleep very lightly.
One morning that autumn, when we were back together at Graceland, we were still in bed. It was around 7 A.M. I woke up and could just feel that something wasn’t right. Elvis’s breathing as he slept sounded shallow and labored, as if he was struggling to catch a deep breath. I became so concerned I shook him awake.
“Honey, are you okay?” I said, unable to keep the concern out of my voice. “Your breathing sounds labored.”
“I can’t get my breath!” he said, sounding fragile and frightened.
I called his daddy and summoned a nurse we had on call with an explanation of what was happening, and she brought over some oxygen. That wasn’t enough. Elvis’s father and I agreed we should call for an ambulance, and so we had to rush him to the hospital. During the ride there, my mind was racing—struggling to understand how this could be happening. But in truth, I knew exactly how, and why. All I could do was hope that this terrifying moment would be enough to inspire him to stop abusing prescription drugs.
When we got to Baptist Memorial, Elvis was diagnosed with pneumonia and admitted immediately. Since we did everything together, I essentially checked into the hospital, too, even though I was twenty-three years old and in perfect health. He insisted that I be near him at all times, so they brought in my own hospital bed and he had them push it right up against his. I’m sure we broke every protocol there was, but this was Elvis Presley. And if he was the King all around the world, this was doubly so in his hometown of Memphis.
I suppose most anything can become normal after a time, and so it wasn’t long before we’d established our own routine. It actually wasn’t that much different from our life at Graceland, but with a few special touches. When Elvis raised and lowered his hospital bed, he expected me to raise and lower my own bed in sync with his, so we were always totally level with each other. Later, when he lowered his bed, he looked over at me.
“Okay, sweetheart, you’ve got to lower your bed now,” he said, glancing at his control. “We’re at forty-five degrees; now we’re going to be down at thirty-three degrees.”
Of course, looking back, all of this seems just a little beyond the type of sustainable, balanced relationship that allows both partners to thrive and grow (and sit up at the angle that’s most comfortable for them in bed). But I must have been somewhat flattered by the notion that he needed me this completely, and I was willing to defer to Elvis in most matters, at least for a time. Still, there’s something telling about the fact that he demanded such togetherness and total submissiveness that it even extended to the position of our beds. While at the time it didn’t bother me to cater to his tastes and moods, looking back it’s clear that it became harder for me to acquiesce in such situations, the more I grew up. At a certain point, I would have to become my own person. But for the time, I actually found it sweet that he wanted to be so connected to me.
Despite the ridi
culousness about the hospital beds, there were ways in which the hospitalization was actually a relief—with Elvis’s pill consumption monitored by the nurses, I no longer had to keep such a close watch on him. I was able to relax more than I had in months. Elvis hated hospital food, so we had all of our meals prepared by the housekeepers at Graceland and brought over by the guys. When we were lying side by side, eating Mary’s soul food and watching TV, it really was almost like home. And always, we were just happy to be together, even under extraordinary circumstances.
We had two rooms at the end of the hall. Elvis and I stayed together in his hospital room and used the sitting room across the way for the guys. From there they could run out and procure anything Elvis might need, or come over to provide him with their usual jocular distractions. Mostly Elvis and I relaxed and watched TV alone together. When the programming went off at midnight, we contemplated the image of an Indian on the screen, which the station left up all night until the first show of the day resumed again in the morning. And then, every night we switched over to the nursery channel and watched the babies, picking out the ones we thought looked like they could be ours when we had a baby together someday. He wanted a son, so we tried to find a little boy for him.
“I like the name John.”
“I know you do, Gullion,” I said, well aware that John was his pseudonym when he checked into hotels on the road or otherwise needed to obscure his identity.
Elvis rolled over on his side and brought his focus to my eyes.
“If we ever had a baby, it would probably just be one big eyelash,” he said. “We might have to name it Eyelash. Yours and my eyelashes are so long, and it’s the same for everybody in your family. Yep, I’d say our baby is going to be one big eyelash, between yours and mine.”
Listening to Elvis joke about babies, it was hard to deny the improvement in his health and well-being. He seemed so much clearer and more himself, although I’m sure he was never completely off sleeping pills.
Still, I faced a troubling reality: Elvis’s drug abuse had landed him in the hospital. No matter how much Elvis wanted to deny it, prescription drugs, as we now are more aware, are every bit as addictive as street drugs. The distinction he made for “legal” drugs that a doctor had prescribed allowed him to not think of himself as an addict. Indeed, there was a stigma attached to drug addiction that Elvis would have been very embarrassed by. Making things harder was that, during this time, there was not the plethora of rehab centers found today. Addiction was a shameful thing to be dealt with in private, if at all. Whenever news got out of one of Elvis’s hospitalizations, the official reason was stated as pneumonia, or exhaustion, or another innocuous ailment.
That silence about addiction held for me as well. I certainly would never have spoken about it with anyone else in our entourage or even with my own family. I was already good at keeping Elvis’s secrets, deepening my desire to protect him, often from himself. The scenario that landed him in the hospital was exactly the kind of thing that kept me lying awake listening to his every breath, and it highlighted a problem that was growing worse. Drug addiction is not pretty for anyone, but when it came to Elvis, the pressure was on me to try to maintain a semblance of normalcy.
This first hospital stay was eye-opening, but as we prepared to leave the hospital after a little over two weeks, my impression was that he was taking fewer and milder sedatives, and they were enough to help him sleep and leave him well rested, without incapacitating him in any way. For this alone, I felt like it had been time well spent—something of a detox, before that term existed—and I hoped that the rejuvenating power of Graceland would only add to this.
There was always something magically soothing as Elvis and I walked through the doors into Graceland and returned to the cozy homestead he’d created. Even though we had wonderful adventures when we were in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Graceland truly felt like home—especially during the holidays, which were rapidly approaching.
After that crazy year of 1973, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about giving him a Christmas gift. I wanted to get him something special to show him how much I loved him and appreciated his generosity to me. But the only money I had was the American Express card Elvis had given me, and of course, Mr. Presley paid the bill on Elvis’s behalf. Even though it didn’t have any spending limit attached to it, I never wanted to take advantage of our relationship.
More and more throughout the previous year, I had taken to expressing my love and devotion to Elvis by writing him love poems. I’d always written a great deal of poetry, and now, of course, I had the perfect muse. Having Elvis respond with enthusiasm was a wonderful feeling.
“Honey, this is beautiful,” he said, reading the latest verses I had composed for him. “Let me have someone put this to music, and I’ll record this.”
“No, no, it’s private,” I said. “This is my little love sonnet to you.”
In my ignorance and naïveté, I believed it was better to have these lines exist only between us. Looking back as someone who went on to have a three-decade songwriting career, and counting, I wish I had known then about royalties. Not to mention that it would have been incredibly poignant to have had him sing my lyrics. Just to have that for posterity. But at the time I felt I was protecting our privacy. Such praise encouraged my sense of my own prowess and effectiveness as a writer then, and it probably carried over to my future songwriting career. Having this seasoned icon of word delivery love my poetry enough to want to record some of it certainly gave me confidence about my way with words. But I never had an ulterior motive—I just wanted to express my love poetically. I suppose this made him love me more, at least knowing I had no agenda and was truly writing these love poems just for him. I can honestly say I was always there for the right reason.
With Christmas that year being an extra-special occasion, I couldn’t simply write him a poem like I did any other day of the year. I puzzled over what to get him until I sat down and painstakingly sketched out a beautiful Maltese cross, which I chose because Elvis loved crosses, and because it exemplified Christmas. My design specified that the cross would be covered in pavé diamonds, and in the center would be a yellow gold eternity band, within which would be two sideways hearts, one done in emeralds, which is my birthstone, and the other done in garnets, which was his birthstone. The two hearts were connected at the tip with a diamond. The piece was to be inscribed, “Love Linda.”
I brought my design to Elvis’s personal jeweler, Lowell Hays.
“I want to give this to Elvis for Christmas,” I said. “How much will it cost?”
“Well, I can do this for you for eight thousand dollars,” he said.
So I formulated a plan, and I went back to Graceland, where I found Elvis relaxing in our bedroom.
“Honey, I have a great idea for a Christmas present for you,” I said.
“Aw, Ari, you know how I feel about that,” he said. “I already have everything I want, and if I saw something I didn’t have and wanted it, I could buy it for myself. Besides, you know just having you with me is my gift. Your presence is my present.”
But I wasn’t letting go that easily. I persisted, explaining that it was an expensive gift that I would have to put on my American Express card.
“How expensive are you talking about?”
“It’s twenty-five thousand dollars,” I said.
“What? Twenty-five thousand dollars?” He gasped, his eyes widening.
“Now, doesn’t eight thousand dollars sound a lot better?” I asked, smiling broadly at him.
He started laughing his wonderful, infectious laugh.
“What is it, honey, twenty-five thousand or eight thousand?”
“It’s only eight thousand. What a bargain,” I said.
By this point, he was just rolling with laughter.
“Oh that was clever,” he said. “That was clever. Yeah. Eight thousand sounds just fine, sweetheart. If you want to spend eight thousand dollars on your Buntyn, on y
our little Gullion, you go ahead. I’m just a little fella, so I could use a nice big gift like that.”
Lowell Hays made the cross for Elvis, and it turned out even more beautiful than I’d envisioned, a fitting symbol of all that I felt for Elvis. When I gave it to him at Christmas, he just sat there for a long moment, staring at the cross, taking in all the details I had planned out with such emotion and care.
“This is the best gift I’ve ever gotten at Christmas,” he finally said, his voice full of feeling. “In fact, it may even be the best gift I’ve ever gotten. It means so much on so many levels.”
I have no idea if that cross really was Elvis’s best gift ever, but it didn’t matter. Elvis deserved to have many “favorite gifts.”
The cross was such a prominent piece that he tended to wear it for shows more than out and about on a daily basis (not that the size or ostentatiousness of a piece of jewelry or item of clothing ever deterred him from wearing it, obviously). It became an iconic piece that has traveled as part of exhibitions devoted to him and is currently on display at Graceland.
As 1974 dawned, we returned to Las Vegas for another engagement. Elvis had obviously benefited from his hospital stay, and for a time, he appeared healthier and clearer than I’d seen him in some time. However, as he submitted himself to the grueling schedule of his Vegas run, which included two performances a night, I began to notice his pill usage increasing again, even if not to the excessive levels it had been at before. I was beginning to become accustomed to the cycle of our life and how it alternated between the quieter, homey time spent with family and old friends at Graceland, and the fast-paced, glitzy aura of our existence on The Strip.
Elvis had breathed new life into Las Vegas with his multiyear run of shows, accelerating the city’s evolution into the grown-up playground of today. Many of the fascinating people I met during my years with Elvis were in Vegas. Elvis was never overly interested in celebrities, though. He was the largest icon, the biggest innovator, the most notable trendsetter of his time. The celebrated people who were in his orbit in Vegas were often more in awe of and curious about him than he was about them. Everyone from Raquel Welch, to Barbra Streisand, to Bob Hope to Muhammad Ali came backstage after Elvis’s performances at the Las Vegas Hilton. Many more would come up to the thirtieth-floor Presidential Suite for the after party that usually went on until past dawn. We enjoyed sing-a-long gospel sessions with Mama Cass and the Imperials, visits from Bobbie Gentry, Ann-Margret, and too many others to name.
A Little Thing Called Life Page 12