A Little Thing Called Life

by Linda Thompson

  “Honey, what if somebody does recognize me?” he said. “Then they’re going to be disappointed that I’m dressed like a slob.”

  When Elvis did want to go out and be among friends, he rented the Memphian Theater for midnight screenings, just like the night we met. One night, Elvis and I were walking from our car to the Memphian when we crossed paths with a couple who happened to be walking down the street at the same time.

  “Oh my God, you look just like Elvis Presley,” the girl said. “You look like Elvis.”

  Elvis stopped short. I was standing right behind him.

  “Well, honey, I am,” he said.

  “Oh my God, no,” she said. “That’s impossible. No, you can’t be.”

  She was just incredulous, so he turned to me.

  “Honey, tell this girl who I am,” he said. “Honey, tell her. Tell her.”

  “You’re not pulling that Elvis Presley crap again are you, Charlie?” I said to him.

  I stepped up and spoke to the girl.

  “This is Charlie,” I said. “He gets that Elvis Presley thing all the time. Come on, Charlie. Let’s go.”

  “No, no, I want her to know it’s me,” Elvis said. “Tell her …”

  Then he started laughing, and I started laughing, and we finally came clean.

  “Yeah, it is Elvis,” I admitted to the girl.

  We were all laughing as hard as we could by that point.

  Elvis always loved that I dared to prank him in such ways, and he often told that story to others, laughing just as hard as when it happened.

  Another night, after going to the Memphian Theater, this time with the full entourage, he looked at Sonny and Red with a devilish twinkle in his eye.

  “Let’s go to the Memphis Funeral Home,” he said.

  “I’m not going in,” I said.

  “You don’t have to, but I’m going to go in,” he said.

  Now, this was something I knew he’d done before, even though I couldn’t figure out what had motivated him to do such a thing.

  “I’ve walked through there and there’s these bodies just laid out in there,” he’d said.

  “Ew, why would you do that?” I’d asked him.

  He could never give me a reason why, but I knew that he’d always had this fascination with death, and with dying, and with corpses. I don’t know where that came from, but maybe he liked the dark thrill of it, like living out a bad dream. Not me. I don’t even watch scary movies. The Exorcist was literally the last scary movie I saw.

  And so, while Elvis and the guys went in, I sat in the car in the parking lot of the Memphis Funeral Home, and even that was enough to give me the heebie-jeebies.

  Oh, God, what are they doing in there? I thought. Why do they have to do this?

  There’s no way in heaven or hell you’ll find me in a funeral home, unless a loved one, or me, myself, and I have passed on.

  Thankfully most of our adventures were not nearly as morbid. When my sister-in-law, Louise, gave birth to my darling niece, Jennifer, just after midnight on September 19th, Elvis was excited to accompany me to the hospital to see the baby. We were allowed through the side entrance at four in the morning, even though visiting hours were long over. I was very moved by this show of tenderness and love from him. Of course he created quite a stir in the maternity ward, with one woman in labor remarking she was hallucinating that she was seeing Elvis Presley. Another woman in labor forgot her pain long enough to get Elvis to autograph her pregnant belly, asking him to lay his hands on her tummy to bless her baby. That’s the effect Elvis had on women even when he wasn’t on stage gyrating. Louise’s roommate in the hospital remarked the next morning that she’d had the best dream that Elvis Presley had been visiting them in their room. Louise assured her it was not a dream.

  On another occasion, in early fall 1974, he came racing upstairs to find me, as excited as he could be.

  “Honey, look what I got you,” he said. “Come outside. It was just delivered.”

  I went downstairs with him, where a bright yellow 1971 Ford Pantera, which very much resembled a race car, was parked in the driveway. He knew I loved the color yellow.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Oh, wow, honey, it’s beautiful. That looks like a fast race car.”

  “Yeah, it is beautiful,” he said. “It’s sleek. It looks like you.”

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” I said.

  “I’m just going to take it around the block with the boys,” he said. “I want to see how it drives, and then I’ll come back and let you drive it.”

  He took it out and drove it, and when he came back, he had a different perspective.

  “Honey, I’m not going to be able to give you this car,” he said.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I didn’t ask for this car. I don’t need a car. I’ve got a car.”

  “It’s too fast, and I’m afraid you’ll get killed if you try to drive it. I know how to drive it, but I’m afraid you won’t. It’s too squirrely. You can consider it yours, but you can’t drive it.”

  “That’s fine, honey,” I said. “Let it be yours.”

  He drove it a few times after that. And then one night, we were getting ready to go out to the movies at midnight, and we climbed into the Pantera. He was driving, of course, and I was sitting in the passenger seat. Well, the car wouldn’t start. He tried it again and again, until he’d tried to start it about five times in all, but still, nothing.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “Honey, let’s just take another car,” I said.

  “Hell no,” he said, and he tried to start it again. “This son-of-a-bitch piece-of-shit motherfucker.”

  “It’s not worth it,” I said. “Don’t be upset. Let’s just take another car. We’ll get it checked out tomorrow.”

  “Hell no,” he said, clearly in one of his moods. “This son-of-a-bitching car is not cooperating with me. Honey, step out of the car.”

  He started pulling the gun he always carried out of the waistband of his pants.

  “No, come on,” I said.

  “Honey, step out of the car and step away from it,” he said.

  “Buntyn, please don’t,” I said. “Please let’s just take another car.”

  “I’m going to tell you one last time, step out of the car and step away from it.”

  “Okay,” I said, resigned to the impending fate of that beautiful car.

  I got out of the car, and then he did, too. I stepped away from the vehicle, and once he saw that I was safely out of range, he shot that car five times. All the guys had come out of the house and their caravan of cars in the driveway, and were circling us by this point.

  “No, boss, no!” they shouted.

  They all loved that car. It was beautiful. Thank God he didn’t hit the gas tank, I thought. Well, I guess maybe he knew what he was doing after all, because he didn’t cause it to explode, but he did put five bullet holes in his Pantera.

  The rest of us all looked at each other and shrugged. Okay, fine, we thought. He’s in one of those moods. He’s just going to shoot something up.

  A guy who worked for him got into the car, turned the key, and it started right up. It was like the car knew: All right, boss. All right, I got the message. I’m going to start now.

  We all died laughing. The car is in a museum now, with the bullet holes still in it.

  Elvis had a penchant for shooting things up, and that never changed. Another time we were at Graceland, watching the console television in our bedroom. This is another story that’s gone around and transmuted through the years, but this is how it really happened. Robert Goulet was singing “Camelot,” or “If Ever I Would Leave You,” or something like that, in this operatic way that was a little affected. It’s not that Elvis didn’t like Robert Goulet or his singing. It was just his particular mood on this particular night; he was not in the mood to hear Goulet’s voice.

  “I can’t stand to hear that son of a bitch sing that song right now,” he sai
d. “It sounds like he’s trying too hard. Stiff. I just can’t stand watching this. In fact, honey, step out of the room.”

  As he spoke, he was already pulling out his gun.

  “Honey, don’t do that,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Sweetheart, step out of the room,” he said. “Close the door behind you.”

  “Buntyn, put the gun away,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous. That’s just silly. We’ll just change the channel. I can change the channel. We have that technology.”

  “Step out of the room,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you again.”

  Okay, I don’t want flying glass to come at me, I thought. I stepped outside and closed the doors to our room, which were padded in thick black Naugahyde.

  Boom, boom, boom, I heard through the doors.

  “Okay, honey, you can come back in now!” he shouted.

  I opened the door, stepped inside, and found that the television was shot to hell.

  “Now get somebody to come up here and get this piece-of-shit TV out of here and get me a new one,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said, reaching for the phone to call the guys downstairs.

  “Elvis has shot the TV,” I said into the receiver. “This one’s dead. We need to get a live one.”

  That was Elvis for the most part: unapologetic and more than a little impetuous … even dangerous at times. There’s a reason he wore an ID bracelet with “Elvis” spelled out in diamonds on one side and “crazy” inscribed on the back. I used to think that if he’d ever gone to a psychologist, they would have had a field day with him. Of course, looking back, I can see moments like these were most likely fueled by his drug use. When he was on a stimulant, he was more irritable and irate, and he was more prone to do something wild like shooting out a TV set. When he was on downers, he was more prone to give things away.

  “You like this ring?” he might say, his voice relaxed. “Here, you can have it.”

  Sometimes simply being with Elvis meant death-defying excitement. One night at the Hilton in Las Vegas, he and I got into the elevator with thirteen of his guys, including Lamar Fike, who weighed more than three hundred pounds. Between the twenty-ninth and thirtieth floors, the elevator got stuck. Remaining calm, Elvis pulled out a little book, ironically titled The Way Out, and read quietly while the guys tried to attract attention to our predicament. Thirty minutes later, understandably panicked, Red West and Ricky Stanley broke open the doors, revealing a roughly three-foot space at the top, between the twenty-ninth and thirtieth floors. It was decided the guys would lift me up to climb out. My two concerns were that I was wearing a long, formfitting white jersey dress, which had caused me to leave off my underwear. And more alarmingly, that the elevator might suddenly start, crushing me. Thankfully, I was able to climb out, followed by one of the guys, and we were all soon laughing about our ordeal, comfortably ensconced in the Presidential Suite on the thirtieth floor.

  There were few dull moments with Elvis, but in the unusual times when they arose, his family was often there to fill in the blanks. I think that presence of his family, whom he continued to feel a great responsibility for, was a huge part of keeping Elvis from getting lost in his fame. Even though our life at Graceland was quieter than it was in Las Vegas or on tour, it was certainly never boring.

  His aunt Delta was a cantankerous, vocal presence at Graceland, though she softened in the years after Elvis’s death. Aunt Delta always had a little bottle tucked away, which is probably a part of the reason she had such a loose tongue. Then there was Elvis’s grandmother, Minnie Mae Presley, or Dodger, as we called her. She’d lived with him most of his life, and he always took care of her from the time that he was able. Dodger dipped snuff and had a little can by her chair that she would gingerly lift up to spit in, and then admonish herself.

  “Ain’t that awful?” she would say.

  And of course, there was his father, Mr. Presley, who was not an easy man to win over, and who doggedly did everything in his power to protect his son. Until the end of his life, Mr. Presley took care of Elvis’s finances, even though he only had a fifth-grade education. I give Mr. Presley a great deal of credit for trying as hard as he could to keep Elvis in good shape financially. But his lack of a more nuanced understanding of money definitely contributed to the fact that Elvis had a fairly down-home approach to his income, no matter how rich and famous he became. For one thing, he paid 50 percent of his income as taxes, straight across the board, without taking a single deduction. He was patriotic and felt grateful to live in this country he loved so deeply and to be as successful as he was, and so believed it was his duty to help contribute.

  “I never want to have a problem with the IRS,” he said on more than one occasion. Elvis really tried to be law-abiding. As much as he harmed his own body with the drugs he took, they were all legally … well, mostly legally, prescribed to him by doctors and dentists. Similarly, he didn’t ever want to get in trouble with the IRS. “I’m an American. I’ll pay my taxes. If I make a million dollars, Uncle Sam can have five hundred thousand of it.”

  At the same time, he did not feel it was his place to be political. While so many entertainers use their celebrity as a platform for good, which is commendable, he didn’t think that would be the right move for him.

  “I want to remain apolitical, because I don’t think it’s right for me to use my celebrity and my fame to persuade other people to think like I do,” he said. “I think everybody should make their own decisions about how they vote. They shouldn’t need me to tell them how to vote.”

  While Mr. Presley may have limited Elvis’s financial fortunes somewhat, there was no one who could have protected Elvis’s interests with more fierce determination. He had come across as a rather formidable figure of authority to me. He had an air of feigned arrogance at times, I believed, to mask his insecurities about the world into which the fame of his only child had thrust him. People used to call him a tough old bird, and I could see why. He didn’t trust anybody, and he was not someone who would go out of his way to make you feel at ease. I had always called Vernon “Mr. Presley,” and he was nice to me, but some of the guys didn’t like him because they thought he was cranky and caustic.

  Mr. Presley handled Elvis’s money, but he couldn’t handle Elvis, not really. Elvis was going to do what he wanted to do. Occasionally, Mr. Presley might try to reason with him.

  “Son, you’re spending too much money,” he would say.

  “Daddy, I work my ass off,” Elvis would reply. “If I want to spend every dime I make, that’s my business, not yours.”

  Elvis delegated most of the responsibility to other people. Sometimes his dad or Joe Esposito would come in and give him an update about something, and of course, Elvis always had the final say. If there was a matter he really took exception to, he made that known. For the most part, though, he let them make the decisions. They were expected to Take Care of Business. Thus his logo of “TCB”—“Taking Care of Business.”

  Tough as he was, Mr. Presley always made me feel like a part of the family, even if he wasn’t overly demonstrative about it. And the rest of Elvis’s kin did, too. It was a colorful time with a colorful cast of characters, and with the outside world out of reach at times, we needed all of them.

  Around the end of 1974, one of his doctors suggested marijuana to relieve his eye pressure from secondary glaucoma, which he’d been diagnosed with sometime before we’d met. Of course, there was no legal, medicinal marijuana back then. Nor any rhyme or reason to why or when Elvis did something. All he needed to hear was that a doctor had recommended it, and he was all for it, getting some from his own source. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time he’d used marijuana, but it was the first time he wanted to use it with me.

  “Yeah, but it’s not legal, honey,” I said.

  “I know that, but if it keeps me from going blind …” he said.

  He smoked marijuana for about three months. Of course, I was completely straight dur
ing that time, but one night we were sitting in our bedroom at Graceland and he tried to get me to take a hit. Of course I told him I wasn’t interested, but he was persuasive.

  “It’s just relaxing,” he said. “It will just relax you.”

  I resisted, but he’d touched a nerve. For more than a year now, as I’d struggled with his infidelity and the anxiety it produced in me, I didn’t have any kind of meditation practice or other relaxation techniques. And so I had nothing to help me relieve the pressure inside me, and frankly, the thought of relaxing was appealing. After about forty-five minutes of his constant badgering, the temptation finally wore me down. I relented, hoping something could soothe me and silence my inner worries.

  He instructed me on how to inhale and hold the smoke in my lungs. Apparently I did it correctly because we were suddenly both very silly, laughing outrageously and finding humor in every stupid little thing either one of us did. I collapsed beside him on the bed, where we lay side by side.

  Then, all of the sudden, I panicked, sitting up abruptly. Why do I feel so out of control, crazy like this? I thought. I’m out of control. My heart was racing, and I felt like the blood had all rushed to my face and my neck. I retreated to my dressing area, flung open the window, and in my own version of Scarlett O’Hara’s dramatic moment from Gone with the Wind, proclaimed, “God, I know you’re punishing me for smoking marijuana. And if you’ll just let my brain come back to me, I’ll never do that I again. Do you hear me, God? Never again.”

  I’ve been offered pot many times since then but have always refused, answering, “I promised God I wouldn’t, and you can’t renegotiate with God.”

  I went back into the bedroom, where I told Elvis what was going on and he held me and rubbed my back and neck, attempting to comfort me.