by Alanna Nash
As the quartet went to get in their cars, a fan took a picture of the swirl of activity in the driveway. Several of the wives were there—Patsy Lacker, Jo Fortas, Joanie Esposito, and Jo Smith, pregnant and in maternity clothes. Later, it turned up in a magazine with the headline, “The Night Elvis Shared His Women with the Beatles!”
“Jo laughed like crazy,” says Billy Smith. “She saved that for a long time.”
After they were gone, Elvis turned to Larry. “Man, I really liked those guys,” he remarked, though at thirty, he wondered if his time had come and gone. Out at the gate, the thousand or so fans shouted their allegiance, chanting, “Elvis, we love you!” or “The Beatles! The Beatles!” Elvis couldn’t quit thinking about it. “That was quite a battle out there with the fans.” And then a pause. “I guess it was a tie, huh?” Larry knew he felt self-conscious. “I think you won, Elvis,” he said. Elvis brightened. “Do you really think so?”
He burned to be back onstage again, and he envied that about the Beatles even more than their chart dominance. The year before, the quartet had paid homage to him by putting the Bill Black Combo on their U.S. tour, where Elvis’s friend Jackie DeShannon was also an opening act. Now Bill, Elvis’s first bass player and one of the architects of his original Sun sound, lay dying of a brain tumor, and would succumb that October at age thirty-nine.
Despite the Beatles’ prominence in the music world—and the fact that Elvis’s record sales were down 40 percent from 1960—that fall, the Colonel renegotiated his RCA contract on considerably improved terms. The new agreement guaranteed $300,000 against a 5 percent royalty, with 75 percent going to Elvis, and 25 percent to the Colonel.
Even RCA was amazed at his longevity, according to Joan Deary, the label’s first female executive, and an employee for more than forty years. “In the very beginning, they thought he’d have a tremendous rise, because he did go up like a rocket. But most artists who go up like a rocket come down the same way. I don’t think in a million years they expected that he would go on forever the way he did.”
To keep up musically, he continued to expand his knowledge of current acts, listening to folk music, primarily Peter, Paul, and Mary, Ian and Sylvia, Odetta, and interpretations of the songs of Bob Dylan, whose voice proved too shrill for him. But mostly he spent his free time plunging deeper into the escape of mysticism. In October construction began on the Meditation Garden just beyond the swimming pool at Graceland. Marty Lacker’s sister and brother-in-law, Ann and Bernie Grenedier, designed it after the Self-Realization Park, with stained-glass panels, Italian marble statues, and a fountain with underwater light formations.
According to Larry, during the Christmas holidays, Elvis took a bigger step on his path to enlightenment, finally dropping acid under Sonny’s controlled supervision.
It was a group trip, of sorts, and began with everybody sitting around the conference table. Elvis split up some tabs—Lamar got his own 750 milligrams—and soon, when Jerry looked at Elvis, he had morphed into a child, first a plump, happy boy, and then a big, chubby baby. Everybody started laughing, and the next thing Jerry knew, he was sitting on the floor in Elvis’s closet, eating dates hand over fist.
Priscilla, who had never shown much interest in Elvis’s cosmology, joined in. But suddenly in the middle of a mellow trip, Larry wrote in his memoir, If I Can Dream, “Priscilla began sobbing. She fell to her knees in front of Elvis and cried, ‘You don’t really love me! You just say you do!’ Elvis . . . tried to convince her she was wrong, but nothing he said worked. Next thing we knew, she was saying to Jerry and me, ‘You don’t like me.’ When she started telling us that she was ‘ugly,’ I worried she might be having a bad trip.”
She snapped out of it, though, and later Larry, Priscilla, Jerry, and Lamar walked around outside, talking openly and unashamedly about how much they cared about one another. They were all exhausted then, and called it a night, but not before Lamar tried to dive into the hood of the 1964 Cadillac limousine, thinking it was a swimming pool. (“The black was so deep.”)
On his trips to California, Elvis continued to visit Sri Daya Mata, who tried to help him attain self-control and work toward the highest spiritual existence through meditation. He read her book, Only Love, and kept it close around him, as Billy Smith remembers. “He called her ‘Ma,’ which I guess was short for ‘Mata.’ But Priscilla used to say she looked like Gladys. So maybe that was part of it, too.”
Elvis found another little sister in Deborah Walley on his next picture, MGM’s Spinout, which went into preproduction in February 1966. The lightweight musical comedy again spotlights Elvis as a race car driver, this time fronting a band in his spare time. Deborah, best known for her iconic teen movies (Gidget Goes Hawaiian, Beach Blanket Bingo), plays his androgynous drummer who vies with Shelley Fabares and Diane McBain for his attention.
The bouncy redhead had not particularly wanted to work with him, being a Beatles fan, not an Elvis fan. (The camps rarely overlapped.) But when she first met him on the set, he was so captivating (“like getting hit with a tidal wave of charisma”) that she immediately changed her mind. By the time the film was over, Elvis had become one of the most influential people in her life.
“We had a very close relationship, a spiritual relationship,” the late actress said. “I really have to say he changed my life.”
He had been studying new books of late, going down to Gilbert’s Book Shop at Hollywood and Vine and buying The Changing Conditions of Your World by J. W. of Jupiter, and Billy Graham Presents Man in the 5th Dimension.
His thirst for spiritual knowledge was almost unquenchable now, and he was eager to talk about it with anyone who would listen. It was all new to Deborah, who had grown up in the Catholic church. Her earlier experience “was a turn-off . . . I was not on good terms with God. It was a void of not feeling one way or the other.”
She had lunch with Elvis in his trailer every day, and he took her for motorcycle rides on the back of his Harley. Just as Larry Geller mentored Elvis, “In a kind of odd way, Elvis was a guru to me, and I was a very eager pupil.” The guys made light of it (“Whew! He spun her head around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist,” Lamar said), but Deborah was profoundly grateful.
“I think Elvis found in me an empty vessel into which he could pour all the knowledge that he had acquired. We talked about Buddhism, Hinduism, and all types of religion. He taught me how to meditate. He took me to the Self-Realization Center and introduced me to [the teachings of Paramahansa] Yogananda. We talked a lot at either my house or his house . . . eating big bowls full of ice cream.”
One day when she was at the house, he showed her Priscilla’s picture. He told her that they were going to get married, but “he didn’t talk much about her,” and she couldn’t say that he sounded like a man in love.
When the picture wrapped in mid-April 1966, Elvis got behind the wheel of his new customized Greyhound bus, and the usual caravan of cars followed him for the drive home. They traveled by night and slept by day. When they checked into the Western Skies Motel in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he asked the guys to carry in his heavy Sony Betamax video machine, one of the early models.
“Every time we’d stop, Elvis would have the video recorder taken off the bus,” Marty remembers. “He’d sit up there and watch sex tapes.” Some were the ones Alan had commissioned for him in L.A. Others were of Priscilla wrestling in bed with another girl, both clad only in bra and panties. And still others were of girls he went out with once or twice.
They’d barely checked into the motel when Elvis called Marty’s room.
“Have someone go out to the airport and meet this girl coming in from L.A.”
“What’s she doing here?”
“I called her before I left and told her to meet me here.”
Marty let out a groan. “We had to stay four damn days while they played around with the video in the room. We were all pissed off, because we wanted to get home to our families.”
Elvis
had been in a foul mood since they left L.A., with two pieces of news weighing on his mind. The first was professional: Hal Wallis had opted not to renew Elvis’s contract past their next picture, Easy Come, Easy Go, scheduled for the following year: “It’s not so much that Elvis is changing, but that the times are changing. There’s just not the market for the no-plot musicals that there once was.”
In a way, Elvis was relieved. But Wallis was the producer who brought him to Hollywood. He remembered how excited he had been when Wallis first came calling. He was still a kid then, bursting with ambition, eager to learn, and even more passionate to show what he could do. Back then, when he lay on the pillow at night, he dared to dream of winning an Oscar some day.
The Colonel certainly wasn’t one to soothe over hurt feelings, but he pointed out that Elvis’s new MGM contract, while backing off from the $1 million hallmark, called for four films at $850,000 each, with the profit participation raised to 50 percent. Elvis didn’t talk with Priscilla about it, other than to say that Wallis had bailed. In her view, “He insulated himself from his own feelings. Whenever he was scared, or doubtful, or guilty, he’d say, ‘I can’t feel that way.’ ”
However, his second disappointment was harder to dismiss, for the larger ache was the news that Ann-Margret had become engaged to actor Roger Smith. He knew they saw each other, but he had refused to believe it was serious. He’d told Marty, “Roger calls her, and she goes out to dinner with him, but there ain’t nothing there.”
They had parted some time before, as pressure mounted from Priscilla, her father, Colonel Parker, and even Vernon to follow through on Elvis’s implied promise of marriage. It was building again, especially as Priscilla was about to turn twenty-one. There was also the fact that “Elvis never would have had a superstar as a wife,” Joe says. But Elvis couldn’t quite shut down his feelings or even tell Ann-Margret to her face, and so he did nothing.
It confused her. She thought about the time when her parents were living with her in her one-bedroom apartment on Cañon Drive. Her landlords were a Danish sea captain and his wife by the name of Jorgensen. Elvis had met them, and after Mr. Jorgensen passed away, Elvis suggested they go see Mrs. Jorgensen on her birthday, to try to cheer her up. “He was just so sensitive and considerate, and he knew about honor, and manners, and respecting your elders, and being civilized,” she would say. So where was he now?
Marty and Joe ran into her on Sunset Boulevard one day when she was out riding her motorcycle. Marty blew the horn, and she pulled over.
“What the hell is wrong with your boss? One minute we’re in love, and the next minute I don’t hear from him again. He won’t even take my calls.”
But as time passed, she was able to rationalize it: She was independent and wouldn’t take orders from anyone, and Elvis required slavelike devotion. For so many reasons, then, as Ann-Margret puts it, “Both of us knew that no matter how much we loved each other, we weren’t going to last.”
Lamar believes the truth is that Ann-Margret shut Elvis down because of his commitment to Priscilla, and that she never intended to marry him. On the other hand, Larry thinks that when she couldn’t get a commitment from Elvis, she began dating Roger with an eye toward a reliable future, even though she and Elvis still occasionally saw each other. Either way, says Lamar, when Elvis learned she was engaged, “He got real upset about it.”
More than forty years later, Ann-Margret refuses to talk about the relationship in depth, other than to say that she and Elvis found something deep and primal in each other that she still feels compelled to protect. Whether she is also shielding the feelings of her husband and Priscilla, who she never mentions by name in her autobiography, she seems to grieve for Elvis like a recent widow. When she went to make Tennessee Williams’s The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond in 2007, the cast and crew were told that no one was to make a reference to Elvis while she was on the set. And in 1994, when television interviewer Charlie Rose pressed her for details, she teared up: “Our relationship was extremely special. It was very strong, and very serious, and very real. We went together for one year. And he trusted me, and I do not want to betray his trust even in death.”
He was home for several weeks in May 1966, but the bad mood hung on. When soul star James Brown, in town for a performance, repeatedly tried to reach him by phone, he was told each time that Elvis was asleep. Elvis sent his guys on alone to the show and screened movies at the Crosstown Theatre.
At the end of the month, he traveled to Nashville for his first nonsoundtrack recording in more than two years. He had a new producer now, a thirty-year-old Georgian named Felton Jarvis, who’d made a name for himself with rhythm and blues.
“I’d just come to work for RCA. Elvis came in to record, and Chet Atkins said, ‘I’m going to carry you over to Elvis’s sessions. Elvis likes to record all night long, and I don’t like staying up like that. Y’all are about the same age. Maybe you and him’ll hit it off and become friends.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”
They spoke the same musical language, and Elvis seemed rejuvenated, eager to get into his contractual task of delivering two singles, a Christmas song, and a religious album during the four-day sessions. The religious recordings, highlighted by the presence of the gospel group the Imperials, would win him his first Grammy and count among Elvis’s proudest achievements.
Jerry Schilling was surprised at the depth of intensity Elvis poured into his performance. On the title hymn, “How Great Thou Art,” he sang as if he were standing before his savior, his voice trembling with emotion. When he finished, he was hunched over, nearly to his knees, shaken. A hush filled the room.
“I’ve never seen a performer undergo the kind of physical transition he did during that recording,” Jerry wrote in his memoir. “He got to the end of the take and he was as white as a ghost, thoroughly exhausted, and in a kind of trance.” As Jerry continued to watch, “He happened to look up, he saw me looking back at him, and a beautiful smile spread across his face. He knew I’d seen something special.”
But in the next days, Elvis’s spirits started to sag, and Felton booked a second session starting June 10. By then, though, Elvis had a cold, and for two days, he refused to go to the studio, holing up at the Albert Pick Motel, then a near fleabag that the Colonel recommended to save money. Red made demo recordings, trying to approximate Elvis’s voice and tone, and brought them back for him to hear. Finally, on the third day, Elvis made an appearance at the studio but rushed through three songs in thirty minutes.
Two weeks later, he was back in L.A. for Double Trouble, costarring the eighteen-year-old British actress Annette Day. Elvis took a shine to her, and when he heard she didn’t own a car, he surprised her with a ’64 Mustang. The problem was that it was Jerry Schilling’s car, and Jerry had paid for it himself. But Elvis gave him a Cadillac convertible to make up for it.
Double Trouble, set in the English discotheque scene, might have taken him across the pond for location shooting. But instead, as on Fun in Acapulco, he stayed home. In some ways, the film mirrored his private life: His pop-singer character romances two women but throws over an exotic temptress (Yvonne Romain) for Annette, cast as a seventeen-year-old heiress. The script included the line “Seventeen will get me thirty,” words similar to those he uttered in earnest during his wild Louisiana Hayride period.
Charlie Hodge could see that Elvis was bitterly frustrated not to be going to England: “Everyone else was shooting their pictures outside this country in different locations. He was the only one that wasn’t leaving town.” It was especially galling, in Charlie’s view, since in the early 1960s, Elvis “honest to God, kept Hollywood alive.” But the Colonel wouldn’t hear of it. Recently, in fact, he had turned down an engagement in Japan, saying the star was booked through 1969.
Then came more bad news. The day after he reported to MGM, his uncle Tracy, Gladys’s retarded brother, passed away. Elvis always had a soft spot for him—Tracy’s oft-repeated saying was “I got my ner
ves in the dirt”—and his sudden death was only one in a series of sad family events.
Early in 1966 Elvis changed California houses again, moving to 10550 Rocca Place in Bel Air. As with the Bellagio Road house, his landlord was Mrs. Reginald Owen, the wife of the esteemed British character actor. The modern ranch-style home allowed more privacy for Elvis and Priscilla, though Marty and Charlie, who was no longer working with Jimmy Wakely, would live there, along with Jerry Schilling and his fiancée, Sandy Kawelo. By now, a number of the guys, including Joe, Red, and Alan, had their own residences in Los Angeles.
Even with the new house, Elvis now wanted to spend his weekends in Palm Springs or Las Vegas, primarily for bacchanals. He didn’t seem to care what toll his extremes might take on his relationship with Priscilla, who was often left at home.
“He was way too out of control,” says Joe, “whether he was making movies or later, being on the road and touring. The most important things to him were one, his onstage singing, which he loved more than anything in the world, and two, women. He just loved to be around women.”
One time, Joe remembers, they went to Las Vegas to hang out for a few days, and ended up staying six weeks. “Every night we were out chasing showgirls, partying with them all night, going to all the different lounges, seeing all these great acts, and finally going to sleep in the morning. Then we’d wake up in the afternoon and start all over again.
“We did this for such a long period of time that Elvis started getting nosebleeds. The doctor said, ‘You’re just not resting enough. Your body is telling you to slow down.’ So we rested for a couple days and started over again. Twice, we left Vegas and we were a hundred miles out, and he said, ‘What are we going home for? There ain’t nothing to go back to L.A. for. Shit, turn around and go right back.’ That’s just the way he was. He was very compulsive about that.”