A Little Thing Called Life

by Linda Thompson

She had nothing to gain

  But a way out of pain

  With her song and dance

  She lost romance

  The world had gone insane.

  ’Cause when she danced

  I lost my innocence

  I loved her then

  I always will

  She left with me

  A burning memory

  She took with her

  A part of me.

  Looking back I’m not sure

  If I won or lost the war

  But when she danced with me

  Our hearts were free

  As far as I could see.

  And when she danced with me

  Our hearts were free

  As far as I could see.

  LYRIC: LINDA THOMPSON

  Chapter Eight

  You’ll Always Be Safe with Me

  While our life together had taken on this new and sometimes painful dimension, it was still very much a life together. I continued to be Elvis’s near-constant companion. In the spring and summer of 1974, this meant going on the road with him a great deal, as he took a six-month break from Las Vegas in order to bring his music and magic to fans elsewhere in America.

  Our touring crew generally included most of his entourage and the same musicians and backup singers from his Vegas show, with one noticeable addition: Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s longtime manager. These trips on the road were among the few times I saw the Colonel, as he accompanied us for at least part of every tour. But though I would sometimes cross paths with him at a venue, I did not interact with him much. We did not go out to dinner with him or socialize with him in any way—their relationship was strictly business, all based on a handshake, as has become legendary.

  However, I got the distinct impression that the Colonel might have held Elvis back in later years. And I think Elvis was aware of this, whether or not he wanted to admit it. For one thing, Elvis very much wanted to tour Europe and Asia, and Colonel Parker always declined, claiming he couldn’t provide appropriate security for Elvis overseas. But, as has become public knowledge in later years, some people believe the Colonel, who was born in the Netherlands, did not have legal citizenship in the United States, or at least he wasn’t sure he did. It has been rumored that, because he was not sure he would have been able to secure a passport to travel with Elvis, he therefore put off any arrangements for international travel with any excuse he could fabricate.

  Whatever the truth may be, Elvis also felt stymied because he wanted to do more movies and did not always feel that the Colonel was fully supporting his cinematic aspirations. Elvis had a tremendous talent for acting, and I believe he thought of himself as more of a Marlon Brando type and would have relished an opportunity to show off his greater depth as an actor. But it was very difficult for him to move beyond his image and be given opportunities to grow as a serious actor.

  Indeed, there may have been some truth to the idea that the Colonel held Elvis’s acting back. The following year, Elvis received a backstage visit from Barbra Streisand and her boyfriend, Jon Peters. They wanted to talk to Elvis about a film they were producing, A Star Is Born, and hoped that Elvis might be interested in starring opposite Barbra. They described how the film would be a remake of two earlier movies, updated to tell the story of an up-and-coming singer-songwriter who falls for a self-destructive rock star, only to find that her career is soon eclipsing his. Elvis thought it was a great project and really wanted the male part. A formal offer was presented to him, and he was thrilled at the prospect of finally having the opportunity to really immerse himself in a role and reveal new dimensions of his acting talent.

  Unfortunately, even with Elvis’s clear enthusiasm for the project, the Colonel made a negative assessment of its potential. According to what Elvis told me, the Colonel thought it was a bad idea for Elvis to play a character that might be viewed by some as a loser, saying that Elvis had an image to uphold. When the Colonel made his counteroffer later that month, it was rejected, and the role of course ultimately went to Kris Kristofferson.

  Not being given the opportunity to display his acting ability opposite the incomparable Barbra Streisand was a real disappointment to Elvis. Having later become friends with Barbra, I think it’s a shame they never got to work together. I’m sure they would have challenged each other in productive ways, as they were both strongly opinionated people, and she would be the first to admit that she’s a perfectionist. Perhaps Elvis would have had his moments during which he wanted to have the final say, but I think he would have appreciated her perfectionism and compromised. Barbra is very savvy, too, and beneath her exterior strength, she’s a very feminine, sensitive, vulnerable person, so I think she and Elvis would have enjoyed the process.

  While this opportunity ostensibly fell apart over money, acting was never about money for Elvis. He never questioned how much commission the Colonel took on his acting roles, but he did resent that the Colonel would farm him out to do three movies a year for a million dollars a movie, with absolutely no script approval.

  “Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to sing to a fucking bull or a wall?” Elvis said. “I hated those fucking movies … almost all of them. The best one by far was King Creole. I was damn good in that one! That was the most satisfying of all my acting roles.”

  Of course, I protested that as a little girl growing up on Elvis movies, no matter how inane the script, I was certainly entertained. And in an innocent fashion, I might add. Elvis loved that I had total recall of some of his more obscure movie songs, so he would have me sing tunes like “The Walls Have Ears” for him. On many occasions, I used such artful segues to distract Elvis when he was in a foul temper about the Colonel or other unsatisfactory aspects of his career, but there was only so much I could do when his anger and frustration finally boiled over.

  All of this had come to a head the previous September, during one of our stints in Las Vegas. I was never clear on exactly what set Elvis off, but he seemed highly dissatisfied with Colonel Parker and maybe even slightly betrayed by him, like he wasn’t being forthcoming about all aspects of their working relationship. Elvis soon wound himself up into one of his epic tirades. As he paced the room, all of his pent-up fury, possibly fueled by whatever amphetamines he had taken that day, seemed ready to break free.

  “I want to fire him,” Elvis fumed. “I’m going to get new management. I’m done with him. He’s holding me back.”

  My role in such moments was to be a calming influence. I had learned how to identify and track the storm as it began to brew, the anger visibly rising within him. His eyes, which were usually blue and gorgeous and tender, would darken and grow cold. As he disappeared into the maelstrom of his wrath, he became almost unreachable. It was as if he lost his mind temporarily, which meant it took some time for him to calm down. However, once he’d rid himself of his dark temper, he would quickly settle back down. In the peaceful moments that followed he’d apologized profusely to me if we had argued, although I never heard him apologize to anyone else.

  As angry as Elvis had been with the Colonel at this time, they were eventually able to patch things up and continue working together. I think they had their say, then let it go without much more ado.

  Most of the time Elvis’s rage would flare at other people, or even inanimate objects, but in mid-1974, a few months after he began taking his trips away from me, I brought out that wrath. We were at his home in Palm Springs, California, when I decided to confront him about another woman he had been seen with in my absence. Ever since his infidelities had begun, I’d been trying, with difficulty, to conceal the effect they were having on me. But this time it was hard for me to ignore it. It was brought to my attention via the grapevine that Elvis had spontaneously bought some random girl a car. Hurt and angry as I was, I was only able to be slightly passive-aggressive in discussing his indiscretion. I remember sort of needling him and intimating that I knew something, without coming out and openly declaring it. Instead I just ins
inuated deep dissatisfaction and suspicion until he lost it.

  We were sitting in bed, eating spaghetti and salad, and watching television as I continued my string of insinuations. All of a sudden, Elvis jumped out of bed, picked up his plate of spaghetti, and threw it hard against the wall.

  “Just shut up!” he screamed. “I know what you’re talking about! It meant nothing … she meant nothing! No other woman means anything to me! It was just a diversion … a distraction … Don’t you understand that? I’m around the same people all the fucking time! Once in a while I just need a little different stimulation! Different company … that’s all! That doesn’t mean I’m having sex with anybody else! That doesn’t mean I’m falling in love with anybody else! That doesn’t mean jack shit! I start feeling stifled when I can’t have a little interaction in the outside world!”

  Elvis went on with his verbal tirade, and I went to the bathroom to escape it. Of course, he followed me into the small space, where there was no escape. He was lashing out in frustration and anger. He took his open palm and pushed against my shoulders, causing me to lurch backward. He continued to scream at me as I stood there crying.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” I said meekly.

  Elvis retreated to the bedroom, where he took his sleeping pills and dozed off. I gathered a few things, went out into the living area, and summoned Joe Esposito to arrange a plane for me back to Los Angeles. I felt violated and hurt—Elvis had added insult to injury by lashing out at me instead of reassuring me lovingly. I determined then and there that though I might have been hopelessly, helplessly in love with Elvis Presley, I would not allow him or anyone else to treat me that way.

  As much as it tore at my heart to leave him peacefully sleeping there in our bed in Palm Springs, I got on that Learjet and flew back to Los Angeles. I retreated to the Monovale Drive house, where we were staying until he had sold it. A few hours later, I got a call from Elvis.

  “Ariadne, why did you leave me?” he implored in his little baby-talk voice. “Where are you … why did you go? Baby Gullion woke up this morning and Mommy was gone. Baby Buntyn misses his mommy. I don’t know why you left. Why did you leave me?”

  That was typical Elvis. He would display great anger and then be over it in a matter of hours, if not minutes.

  “Honey, don’t you remember how badly you treated me before I left this morning?” I asked. “You were yelling at me. You threw your plate of spaghetti against the wall, and you pushed me in the bathroom when I was just trying to get away from you and give you time to cool off.”

  Elvis was quiet for a minute.

  “Ariadne, you know I didn’t mean any of that,” he said. “I’m so sorry, baby. Please come back. Please, please, I need you. I need you so badly. Please come back and be with me.”

  Try to reserve judgment—as I have learned to do for the most part. Unless you’ve walked in that person’s shoes, you don’t know what you would do in any given circumstance. I was too desperately, devotedly, blindly in love to say no and move on. I understand better now why some people stay on in relationships that might not be healthy or fulfilling. There are so many things that keep you there, not the least of which is the deep, abiding love you feel for that person, the history you share, and the hope that things will get better. Today I am far more realistic, seasoned, and decidedly stronger and more independent, and I would never stay in a relationship that caused me such pain again.

  But back then, I went flying back to Elvis’s arms just as soon as I could get on a plane and get there.

  For every time Elvis caused me to doubt our relationship and future, he made just as many overtures that reassured me. I suppose that’s both the challenge and the gift of being with someone who has little fear of being candid.

  “When I’m with somebody else, it’s ultimately a disappointment,” Elvis said to me on the few occasions he was caught having an affair. “I always think back on you. You are my ideal girl. I don’t love anybody else. Every time I’m with someone else it just makes me realize how much I love you and how much I appreciate you and all you mean to me.”

  He also expounded on his theory about how women and men differed when it came to the affairs of the heart. It was an opinion I believe many men would second.

  “A man can have an affair, and it means nothing. When you hear that I’m going out with somebody else, most of the time I’m not even having sex. Most of the time I’m reading religious books to them, and they’re very disappointed. But on the rare occasion that I have sex with someone else, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just me rubbing up against somebody, breathing hard. It doesn’t mean I’m falling in love with her. But women aren’t built like that. When a woman has an affair, she falls in love. That’s why it’s so important for women to be much more careful about having affairs: because women have a tendency to fall in love.”

  His philosophy didn’t do away with my fears, or appeal to my reason, but being naïve and blinded by love—a term they use for very good reason—I ultimately believed what I wanted to believe. I listened to his words, which supported the uniqueness of our love, instead of his actions, which didn’t.

  In the end, though, none of his words could make up for the fact that I was deeply hurt by his need to be with other women. In many ways, our life was the same as it had always been, and I was almost always by Elvis’s side. But increasingly it was clear that, as long as we remained together, his cheating would be a constant as well. Elvis was never going to get that aspect of his personality out of his system. If we had gotten married, he still would have had affairs—it certainly hadn’t changed his behavior when he was with Priscilla. That’s just who he was. There’s right, there’s wrong, there’s black, there’s white, and then, there’s Elvis Presley.

  The confrontation in Palm Springs showed me the stakes of trying to change his behavior, and as 1974 stretched on, I became increasingly uncertain if I could live with the reality of who Elvis was. As much as I loved him, I began thinking about breaking up with him, but I could never quite muster the determination to act. Instead, I talked myself down with reminders about how little of the world I knew. I didn’t know what relationships or life were really like, beyond what I had known with Elvis. All I’d previously seen were examples from my own family—my grandparents had been married for fifty-six years; my parents had been married for forty years; my brother was happily married and faithful to his wife. I had been a very sheltered sorority girl before Elvis had swooped me up into his rarefied realm. Other than what I saw with him, I had active proof that people really can stay married forever.

  And yet, the day-to-day life I now witnessed around me didn’t resemble such stability at all. When I saw people in Elvis’s inner circle committing adultery, saw Elvis’s own dichotomous nature, I thought: Maybe my idea of marriage is antiquated or unrealistic. Maybe this is the real world. Maybe this is what guys do. When I followed the line of thinking that Elvis was just behaving as other men did, there was no advantage to ending things with him. As far as I could tell, I could break up with him and date a shoe salesman, plumber, or a Southern Baptist preacher, and any of them might be unfaithful, too.

  I knew I had a lot of learning to do. I had to sift through all of these new experiences and do my best to figure out what was normal for the real adult world and what was distorted by the anything-goes ethos of rock and roll. While much of my process of trying to discern what was normal, real, and important was confusing and painful, looking back now, I can see that all of this was a distinct coming of age for me. I was growing a great deal at the time, becoming incrementally stronger, but not so strong that I was ready to fly the love nest we’d created for each other, at least not yet. I wasn’t sure I could live with this uncertainty or emotional upheaval forever, but for now, I couldn’t bring myself to leave. It’s not that his other women didn’t hurt or threaten me. My eyes were beginning to open to a possibly different future than the one I had hoped for with Elvis, as my heart began to drift slightl
y away from my total devotion to him, for its own preservation. However, for the time being at least, I chose not to let the other women, or my own doubts, undo me, or us.

  And, looking back, I know that he made the exact same decision about wanting and needing me above any other—even if his heart was occasionally distracted. He never asked me or seemed to want me to leave. I lived at Graceland for as long as I wanted to be there with him because that was his choice. He wanted me to stay.

  Even with all this emotional turmoil, life with Elvis was still life with Elvis, and that, as much as anything, kept me with him because it meant life could be as surprising and fun as only he could dream up.

  One night we went into a pet store in Memphis after it had closed, and as was customary, they were happy to open up after hours to accommodate Elvis Presley. We discovered more than a dozen of the cutest puppies we’d ever seen, all in need of a good home. Of course, Elvis had to buy every single one. Riding home in the car was hilarious, like having momentarily joined a circus peopled entirely by puppies. Sweet puppy breath and kisses abounded, as well as wagging tails and barking. When we got home, we began distributing them to pretty much everyone we knew. My mother and father, Aunt Delta, and of course I kept one for myself, a little white Maltese. Elvis named him Foxhugh, because he thought it was hilarious to hear people call the dog and inadvertently say, “Fuck you.” This harked back to a movie he’d done years earlier in which the director named one of the characters Mr. Foxhugh. Every time Elvis had to say the man’s name, he stumbled.

  “You bastard, you did that on purpose,” Elvis said.

  “Yup, I did,” the director admitted.

  Sure enough, my little niece, Jennifer, used to fall for the setup, much to Elvis’s delight.

  “Aunt Linda, where Fuck You at, where Fuck You at?” she asked.

  “Foxhugh is over there,” I said, trying to resist joining Elvis’s laughter.

  Such trips out and about in Memphis were a rarity, and we did get stir crazy. Elvis would sometimes want to just get in the car and take a drive. Even when we didn’t have a particular destination in mind, and we weren’t necessarily going to see anyone along the way, he usually took the time to dress himself like the Elvis Presley his fans admired. Whenever I tried to convince him he might enjoy his life more if he could find ways to be incognito and have greater freedom of movement, he would disagree.