Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994

by David Hepworth

  In August 1977 his bed was shared with Ginger Alden. Ginger was a former holder of the Miss Traffic Safety title. Elvis was forty-two, Ginger was twenty. She had been introduced to Presley’s court initially in the capacity of a first reserve. Once she had passed muster he told his people to send Linda Thompson, the incumbent girlfriend of the previous few years, home. Alden was then promoted from her own bedroom to the master suite. This was the sole area of the court of Elvis where there appeared to be a succession plan.

  Elvis’s mother had died in 1958. His wife had left him in 1972. By 1977 Elvis had grown steadily more needy. Like a small child he had his bedtime routine. Before settling down he had to have his hair washed and blow-dried by one of his body servants. Members of his staff would be commanded to sit with him and talk, often disregarding whichever girl happened to be in bed with him at the time. Jo Smith, the wife of Elvis’s cousin Billy, who lived in one of the trailers out back, was even called upon from time to time. She remembered, ‘The girls would just lie there and smile, with their little negligees on.’ One of her jobs might be to explain to the girl that there would be no sex, because Elvis needed to preserve ‘his bodily fluids’ because of an upcoming tour.

  Elvis Presley had a pressing need to own people body and soul. He couldn’t bear the idea that anybody might need anything he couldn’t provide. In 1977 he even cajoled his Palm Springs dentist into marrying his fiancée, providing the officiant from among his circle of friends and standing as witness himself; then, apparently overcome by the emotion of the ceremony, he announced to Ginger that he would like to marry her. By that time he had inveigled his way into the affections of her parents, even offering to pay for their impending divorce. Ginger’s mother, like the relatives of many of his girlfriends over the years, was very much alive to his cash-dispensing qualities. In March he extended huge loans to Doctor Nick. While he was in the mood he made out a new will. His plan was to take Ginger away for a short trip to Hawaii. It was intended to be just the two of them. That didn’t quite work out. They ended up taking thirty people.

  Ginger didn’t have any overpowering interest in getting married. She didn’t love Elvis. She didn’t wish to spend her life in this gilded prison. She was of a different generation. For her, 1977 was the year of Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Bill Murray in the cast of Saturday Night Live. This was a world Elvis knew not. However, Ginger was not immune to the attractions of having a fuss made over her. Elvis had been planning to get married anything but quietly, as he had been required to do when marrying his first wife Priscilla in 1967. His idea was to announce it during the string of dates which were due to start in the middle of August. There was much talk of new beginnings, most of which didn’t get beyond talk. He knew he had to get his weight down from the 200lb he was carrying in order to get into the jumpsuits he wore on stage. His idea was to go on a diet. An all-jelly diet.

  Elvis was incapable of imagining a life different from the one he had designed for himself. When Linda Thompson made the unexpected suggestion that the two of them should turn their backs on the show-business lifestyle and go away and live on a farm, he had said, ‘Now why the hell would I want to do that?’ Similarly, when one of his boys suggested he might be happier dating women nearer his own age, he said, ‘Now what could a forty-two-year-old woman do for me?’ Everything that needed fixing in Elvis’s life required Elvis giving up something. Slimming would mean curbing his appetite. Marriage would involve fidelity. He wanted to be closer to his young daughter Lisa Marie but resented any demand she made on his time. If he stopped doing live shows he would no longer have the funds that financed the expensive business of simply being Elvis. He couldn’t get by without the downers that Doctor Nick prescribed to get him to sleep at night. Therefore he made sure Doctor Nick increased the dose. The real answer to his problems lay in having less of everything. Elvis’s preferred solution always involved his having more of everything.

  On the night of 16 August 1977 he had the usual three packets of pills prescribed by Doctor Nick. In the middle of the night, when he was starting to think about settling down, he called Doctor Nick, complaining of pain in his teeth following a recent dental procedure. The doctor gave him a prescription for six doses of Dilaudid, a powerful painkiller often given to patients in the later stages of cancer. Ricky, the personal factotum who was on the night-time shift at Graceland, was sent to the all-night pharmacy to collect it.

  Among the people closest to Elvis there was a feeling that a form of slow suicide might be being acted out before their very eyes. When he had left a Nashville recording session earlier in the year blaming a throat problem for not having put anything on tape many of the musicians assumed that this would be the last time they worked with him. Linda Thompson had greeted the end of their affair with secret relief: she knew he would never change and thought it likely he would kill himself. Around the same time Colonel Tom Parker, in an unguarded moment, told some fans from the UK, ‘My artist is out of control.’ Columnist Bill Burk, who had been covering Elvis for the Memphis Press-Scimitar for twenty years, went to see his Vegas shows at the end of 1976 and wrote, ‘One walks away wondering how much longer it can be before the end comes, perhaps suddenly, and why the King of Rock and Roll would subject himself to possible ridicule by going on stage so ill-prepared.’ Among the diminishing number of people who actually cared about Elvis Presley there was a feeling he was running out of road.

  Hovering above it all was the prospect of the imminent publication of what was known to all in Graceland as ‘the book’. Three of Presley’s bodyguards, all of whom had been let go in a round of cost-cutting the year before, had signed a deal to tell their stories. The book was called Elvis: What Happened?, and the blurb went as follows: ‘A devoted son. A generous friend. A model Army recruit. A gifted entertainer. A beloved hero to millions. This is the Elvis Presley the world knew – and cherished. Brooding. Violent. Obsessed with death. Strung out. Sexually driven. This is the other side of Elvis – according to the three men who lived with him through it all.’

  Elvis knew the implications. A lurid but fundamentally reliable account of the secrets he kept from the world would finally be in the public domain. His biggest secret was his utter dependence on drugs. Of all the untruths on which the Presley myth had been based, the most serious one was the drugs. Here the gap between the message he sent out to his public and the reality of his nocturnal life was big enough to drive a reputation-destroying bus through. His public posturing about drugs was so far removed from the reality of his habits that it almost amounted to a form of grim comedy. When Presley had talked his way into an audience with President Nixon at the White House in 1970 he had assured his Commander-in-Chief of his steadfastness in the war on illegal stimulants. Furthermore he had almost refused to leave the Oval Office until he’d been given a badge which he could claim identified him as a government agent fighting against the pharmaceutical tide. Now the truth was about to come out. He sent an intermediary to offer the exemployees $50,000 each not to publish. They declined. Their declared line was that by going public they were staging a high-profile intervention that might have the effect of saving him from himself.

  Elvis felt personally betrayed. In addition he was distraught over the damage about to be done to his image, an image of perfection so huge and all-pervading he almost believed in it himself. These revelations would finally allow daylight to flood in on the magic in which he had dealt since he’d stopped driving a truck. When it came to drugs his heartland audience would not be of a mind to cut him any slack. What worried him more than the absence of any close friends in his life, the manager he didn’t trust, the father he didn’t like, the girlfriend who had her thoughts on a man nearer to her own age, his gathering health problems, his money troubles and his damned weight was the thought that the people whose love sustained him, the millions out there in the dark who had worshipped him for the last twenty years, whose adoration had lit his way, migh
t finally fall out of love with him.

  Like all superstars Elvis alternated between utter certainty and crippling doubt, spending very little time in the region between the two where normal human beings live out their lives. Elvis had always been vain. Vanity was his driving force. Vanity was something he understood. Now that he looked in the mirror and saw the ruin he had become his vanity suffered a wound that would never heal. He had always judged by appearances. He knew full well his fans did the same. During his live performances the one minute that truly mattered was the one when he walked on stage. In that moment his audience coldly weighed up the damage time had wrought and decided whether they could live with it or not. He could see it in their eyes. He knew he was slipping.

  He was on an almost never-ending tour, generally to cities in secondary markets: Palm Beach, Johnson City, Savannah, Montgomery, even Duluth, where Buddy Holly had played on his last tour almost twenty years earlier. People wondered why he put himself through a ritual he seemed to find wearing and irritating. Surely he couldn’t need the money? People always need the money. Record royalties were not flowing as they once had (in 1973 he had sold RCA all his rights in all his recordings up to that year for a paltry $5 million) and expenses grew all the time. His incomings were still massive but they were no match for his outgoings. He lived an existence that was both opulent and hand-to-mouth. For every dollar he made the Colonel made the same, which he needed to fund his massive gambling addiction. But even the Colonel knew that he couldn’t milk his cash cow indefinitely. He would drop in occasionally to see a show or receive reports from members of the entourage that the show was slipping to a point where promoters might stop accepting his money demands. He would call off a few dates and Elvis would fly back to Memphis to recuperate. He would manage a few reasonable shows after that, then follow them with a performance that seemed to have been phoned in from some distant planet.

  Before he turned in, just as 16 August was dawning in Memphis, Tennessee, Elvis assured his cousin Billy Smith that the forthcoming tour, beginning that night in Maine, was going to be the best ever. There was no reason to believe this but he said it all the same. Billy left him and Ginger together in the bedroom. After a while Elvis said he couldn’t sleep and was going to read in the bathroom.

  The next Ginger knew it was two in the afternoon and she was alone in the bed. After phoning a friend for a chat and doing her make-up she decided to find out where Elvis was. She opened the bathroom door. Elvis was on the floor as if in the act of prayer. His pyjamas were around his knees. He wasn’t breathing. Beside him on the floor was the book he’d been reading: The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus.

  The Colonel was contacted in Maine, where he was with the team preparing for Elvis’s two-night stand. When he was given the news he said nothing for thirty seconds. Then, like the stone-hearted carny he was, he switched into action mode and issued orders. The plane bringing the band from Los Angeles was contacted in Las Vegas and sent back. The promoters were told the shows were off. Then he flew not to Memphis but directly to New York, where he had meetings with executives at Elvis’s record company RCA and his merchandising partners. The message to both was the same: the King is dead, long live the King – prepare for unprecedented demand. (The resulting boom was so great that an RCA factory in the UK that was on the brink of closure was reprieved and put on full capacity.)

  When he arrived at Graceland the following day Parker’s hard-headed practicality was in marked contrast to the tears, wailing, frantic efforts to cover personal tracks and inevitable jockeying for position of everyone in the wider Presley family. (When the medical investigator had arrived on the day of Presley’s death he found the bathroom had been tidied up. There wasn’t even an aspirin to be seen.) There were some who were surprised to see Parker at all. Nobody could remember him ever having attended a funeral before. He took Elvis’s father Vernon aside and impressed upon him the paramount importance of securing the rights to the sound and image of his late son at this delicate moment when all kinds of other sharks might be getting ready to make a move. ‘Elvis didn’t die,’ he said, ‘the body did. This changes nothing. It’s just like when he went in the army.’

  The passing of Elvis Presley was a surprise rather than a shock. It wasn’t a shock because most people rarely thought about him. Only the people who had tickets to see him on his upcoming tour had him on their radar. Even when he was dead, Time magazine didn’t put him on their cover. Nor did People. They didn’t think he was big enough, in the sense that they felt he no longer reached into people’s hearts. Elvis was just a rock star who wasn’t hot any more. Then, as the days turned into weeks and the news programmes continued to run footage of distraught middle-aged people talking about what Elvis had meant to them, the reality began to sink in. The late Elvis, as opposed to the living Elvis, was the one thing they could agree on.

  Now that he was dead everyone was free to worship the Elvis of their choice. The music magazines venerated the great American originator whose heart was always in the right place no matter what strange places his head might have wandered to. The tabloids mourned the bejewelled figure in the white jumpsuit. The high-end fashion magazines celebrated the young style icon. Even the punk rockers who were the story du jour in the UK claimed him as the originator of the mayhem they sought to perpetuate.

  Jimmy Carter, making the first of many statements US Presidents would be called upon to make following the deaths of rock stars in the future, gave a statement that served to elevate him from the tawdriness of the master bedroom at Graceland and put this rock and roll singer in the same category as Mark Twain, Louis Armstrong and F. Scott Fitzgerald. ‘Elvis Presley’s death deprives our country of a part of itself,’ he intoned. ‘He was unique and irreplaceable.’

  Carter didn’t mention that only a month earlier he’d had to take a call from an incoherent Presley. At the time Elvis was trying to get him to pardon his friend George Klein, who was facing charges of fiddling radio ratings numbers. Elvis was worried. Elvis felt he ought to do something. He asked himself, what would Elvis do? He decided Elvis would phone the President of the United States. Only a rock star would have placed that call to a President. Only a rock star could have made the President take the call.

  1977 PLAYLIST

  Wings, ‘Mull Of Kintyre’

  Donna Summer, ‘I Feel Love’

  The Clash, The Clash

  David Bowie, Low

  Fleetwood Mac, Rumours

  Television, Marquee Moon

  Kraftwerk, Trans-Europe Express

  The Jam, In The City

  Bob Marley and the Wailers, Exodus

  Elvis Costello, My Aim Is True

  9 DECEMBER 1978

  LONDON

  A raspberry on top of the charts

  IN 1963 AMERICAN journalist Michael Braun went to Sunderland to write about a new group called the Beatles. As he observed how these four men interacted with the world he began to recognize that their appeal went beyond just music. ‘I began suspecting,’ he wrote later, ‘that I was in the presence of a new kind of person.’

  Over the years pop music has unwittingly introduced many new kinds of people to a wider world. From Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis through Pete Townshend and Janis Joplin to Lou Reed and Bob Marley, pop has introduced young people to personalities they might never have encountered any other way. While the infatuation with punk raging through London’s taste-making community in 1978 wasn’t quite the popular uprising that is commonly painted – the pre-eminent music of this period was actually disco – it certainly brought plenty of new kinds of people to the fore.

  These people were walking, talking, acting-out repudiations of the blow-dried stereotype of superstardom then represented by stars like Peter Frampton, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. These characters seemed to have risen from below. They were promoted from the street rather than handed down from on high. They sprang from the same world as the fans. They were on a human rather than a
show-business scale. They were of the people. You couldn’t easily imagine them stepping out of limos.

  In 1978 in the UK everybody seemed to have been issued with a new set of Happy Families playing cards in which all the old types had been replaced by new types, many of whom had apparently been slightly bent out of shape by life. In this new world Debbie Harry was the neighbourhood Bardot, Johnny Rotten its twisted playground iconoclast, Poly Styrene its proto-feminist with the mouth full of metal, Bob Geldof the garrulous older-brother figure hammering out his many opinions on the family dinner table. All these people were perfectly balanced in the traditional British sense of having chips on both shoulders. All of them challenged conventional notions of glamour. But nobody in 1978 did this more than Ian Dury. He was the very last person anyone would have predicted would turn out to be Britain’s key rock star of 1978, or start 1979 with a million-selling dance-floor hit.

  Ian Dury was thirty-six years old when he finally became a rock star. Those people who had known him in the music business assumed he’d had his chance and missed it with his previous band Kilburn and the High Roads. Dury was certainly a one-off. His upbringing had been initially disrupted by the war and his parents’ turbulent marriage, then by something worse. At the age of six he contracted polio after swallowing infected water at a public swimming pool in Southend. He was immediately put in an isolation hospital. His mother was not allowed to visit him. She could only look at him through the window of the hut where he slept. Polio was one of those risks all parents ran when they had children in the forties and early fifties. Ian was not expected to live, let alone achieve any kind of public prominence. The idea that he might be a star in a trade where the standard currency was glamour of the most able-bodied kind was quite beyond anyone’s imagining.