Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  But even Lisa Marie, who often saw her father guzzling pills, knew that something was wrong: “One night when I was about five or six, we were watching TV. I looked up at him and said, ‘Daddy, Daddy, I don’t want you to die.’ And he just looked down at me and said, ‘Okay, I won’t. Don’t worry about it.’ I said that to him several times when we were alone together . . . I guess I was picking something up.”

  Finally the Colonel convinced Vernon to let Ed Hookstratten, Elvis’s lawyer, open an investigation with John O’Grady to uncover Elvis’s source. But Elvis had doctors all over the country—George Nichopoulos in Memphis, Thomas “Flash” Newman and Elias Ghanem in Las Vegas, George Kaplan in Palm Springs, and Max Shapiro, the dentist, in Los Angeles. And without his cooperation, nothing could be done.

  He was into heavy narcotics now, Dilaudid, or synthetic heroin, not just Demerol, and sticking Q-tips soaked in liquid cocaine up his nostrils. He’d get whatever he needed wherever he could, even if it meant self-mutilation: Digging a hole in his foot under the guise of an ingrown toenail, or picking at a spot on his hand until “you could have parked a truck in it . . . really you could see the bones,” according to Lamar. “The last five years were just horrendous.”

  He failed to show at a recording session that July 1973 at the legendary Stax studio on McLemore Avenue, only a few doors down from where he and Dixie Locke had attended the old Assembly of God church. The next night, he arrived late, decked out in outrageous “Superfly” clothes, a white suit, black cape, and Borsalino slouch hat, with Linda and Lisa Marie in tow. The musicians were shocked at his weight (“It was the first time I ever saw him fat,” says drummer Jerry Carrigan), and most had never heard him so slurry.

  Erratic and moody, he recorded little of use over several nights of sessions. At one point, Felton couldn’t find him and went looking outside. Elvis was there in the dark. “Why are you sitting out here?” Felton asked. The response was soft and slow: “I’m just so tired of playing Elvis Presley.”

  He was back in Vegas in early August, adding only one new song, a cover of actor Richard Harris’s divorce weeper, “My Boy,” and receiving devastating reviews of his opening night. The Hollywood Reporter called it “one of the most ill-prepared, unsteady, and most disheartening performances . . . it is a tragedy . . . and absolutely depressing to see Elvis in such diminishing stature.”

  Pop singer Petula Clark was in the audience that night. She had seen him once before, at a preopening show some years earlier, going with her friend Karen Carpenter. He had been “great, absolutely fantastic. He was really on form, and very handsome and exciting.”

  She and Karen had gone backstage, where he was his usual charming self. Then, quite suddenly, “The dressing room was empty except for Elvis, Karen, and myself, as the entourage had left rather strategically. He was very seductive and very heavily flirted with us. Karen was younger than me, and I felt a little bit responsible for her, and after about half an hour, I thought, ‘Wait a minute.’ I said to Elvis, ‘We have to go,’ and I took Karen’s hand and we left.

  “We had a laugh about it, because I think that Elvis was rather looking forward to having a threesome with us, and I didn’t think that was a good idea, even though there was a bit of a spark there.”

  Now, in 1973, Petula had been looking forward to another terrific show, but she saw a very different Elvis that night. “He obviously wasn’t the same man. He was fooling around onstage, and he was sloppy in his work, not singing everything all the way through.”

  Again, she went backstage, but when Elvis came into the dressing room, Petula was chagrined to see “he was out of it, and there were people hanging around telling him what a fantastic show it was, and it wasn’t. I stayed about ten minutes, and it was a very, very sad ten minutes. The Elvis that we all knew just wasn’t there.”

  Mary Ann Mobley and her husband, actor Gary Collins, also went to see him around this time. He took them back and showed them some of his new wardrobe, but as they talked, Mary Ann realized he was clinically depressed.

  “He could see no change in his life. It was just going to Vegas, going back to the house, maybe renting out the movie theater, and that’s it. No new interests. That’s what keeps you going. No one said to him, ‘Look, we’re going to get out of this rut. We’re going to charter a plane and fly to Capri or Nice, and we’ll have plenty of security, and you’ll see new places.’ What good is it to make all that money and to have the following he had and not be excited to get up every day?”

  In October, two days after the divorce decree was finalized in Santa Monica, Elvis had trouble breathing. He and Linda flew home to Memphis on a chartered jet, but on the plane, a worried Linda watched as his breathing grew even more labored, despite a constant administration of oxygen. Dr. Nick came out to the house and was shocked to find Elvis swollen almost beyond recognition. The physician left his office nurse, Tish Henley, more or less on permanent duty at Graceland, but when Elvis worsened in the next few days, the physician put him in Baptist Memorial Hospital, where he underwent extensive testing for all of his health concerns.

  He was having occasional problems controlling his bladder and bowels, he said, conditions that would sometimes leave him incontinent. Dr. Nick asked every question in the world, and that’s when he learned that the “acupuncture” Elvis received in California had been administered with syringes filled with Demerol. Elvis remained in the hospital for two weeks to detox.

  Linda stayed by his side, both because she loved him, and to keep him from charming the nurses into bringing him all the drugs he wanted.

  Sheila Ryan was initially shocked by Elvis’s emotional regressions, but felt she had to stay. “I knew that I had been sent there for the downfall.” (Courtesy of Sheila Ryan Caan)

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Where Does Love Go? ”

  One morning in 1974, Elvis woke from a deep Placidyl sleep and groggily struggled to focus on the face of the woman beside him. Linda was exhausted, having survived one of the most frightening nights of her life. It started out like any other. Elvis was eating some chicken soup for dinner, and Linda went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. She took her time cleansing her face and changing into her nightclothes, and when she came out, she saw a terrifying scene: Elvis was facedown in the hot soup, suffocating in the bowl.

  She yanked him out and tried to revive him, and when that failed, she frantically called Dr. Nick, who raced in and gave Elvis a shot of Ritalin.

  Now, after sleep, it took him an unbearably long time to get out what he wanted to say.

  “Mommy?” he said.

  “Yes, honey.”

  “I-I-I-I had a dream last night,” he muttered.

  “What did you dream?” Linda asked.

  “I dreamed that you were my twin, and I came out first and you smothered.” His voice was weighty, gluelike, his pauses interminable. “You let me be born. But in the process, you died saving me.”

  A chill ran over her. She tried to tell him that he’d had a problem breathing, and she’d had Dr. Nick come in and give him a shot. But no, no, he didn’t want to talk about that. She was his twin. She’d saved his life.

  “Well, it was just a dream, honey,” she said. And then he fell back asleep.

  Dr. Nick says he had not realized that Elvis was a hard addict until the Demerol incident. He got on the phone to the doctor in California who administered it and angrily told him Elvis was a very sick man, that he was filled with fluid and that his condition was grave. His patient had an extreme reaction to the Demerol, Dr. Nick said, and asked if the California practitioner was also giving him steroids, as Elvis was now cushingoid. Well, yes, crackled the voice from the West Coast, he’d mixed some cortisone with the Novocain to help with the healing. That might have aggravated Elvis’s glaucoma, Dr. Nick thought.

  Now the physician consulted with Drs. David Knott and Robert Fink, addiction specialists who worked with alcohol and drug rehab patients. They recommended Dr. N
ick immediately put Elvis on phenobarbital to help with withdrawal symptoms, and then after dropping by the hospital to evaluate Elvis themselves, they suggested Dr. Nick start him on methadone, a treatment normally associated with heroin addiction.

  The next step was to call in Dr. Larry Wruble, a gastroenterologist, who ordered X-rays and found that Elvis had a bowel ileus, or enlargement of the intestine, and that it was packed full of fecal material, a common side effect of long-term opiate abuse. “He would be so distended,” says Dr. Nick, “that a lot of his potbelly was just his enlarged colon and his inability to get it to function.”

  Elvis also had degenerative arthritis in his neck and lower back, so Dr. Nick asked him to cut certain songs and gyrations out of his show. A larger problem was what his liver biopsy showed. Testing found damage consistent with toxicity, and the organ contained a great many fatty cells, a condition likely brought on by both his eating habits and medication abuse. He had a diabetic tendency, but his diabetes was not so advanced that he needed to be treated with insulin.

  Linda slept on a cot beside him for the first few nights, and Elvis would lower his bed so they could be as close as possible. Then the staff brought in a hospital bed just for her. Since Elvis had to wear a gown, he wanted Linda to wear one, too, so they’d look like patients together.

  They watched a lot of television, especially game shows, and at night, after the Memphis television stations signed off, Linda remembers, “We used to just sit and watch the little Indian head, you know, ‘Bzzzzzzz,’ just because there was a picture on television.” And they’d listen to “High Flight,” the pilot’s creed that came on about 1 A.M. and served as another end-of-programming signal. Then they found they could see the closed-circuit images from the nursery, and look at babies all night long. They came to recognize a few of them as time went on—one baby seemed to be waving at them, and Linda later sent him shoes—and the nurses would tape signs that said, HI, ELVIS! to the cribs and incubators, or come up to the cameras and smile. They got excited when they saw a newborn.

  “Elvis just loved babies and children, and he would become very tender and like a little baby himself and regress back into that infantile state, and I’d have to baby him a little. Sometimes we were like two little babies together. Occasionally, he’d be the baby, and I’d want to be the baby, too, so it would be like, ‘Wait a minute. I want to be the baby, and I want you to be the adult. We can’t both be babies right now!’ We’d get into a silly thing. But it worked for us. It was fine.”

  They fantasized about having a child together, and Elvis wanted a son. They talked about everything from the way he would look to what his name would be—Elvis had always liked John Baron Presley—“and even our pet names for him. And then we would pretend that he was out somewhere, and we were looking for him. We just had funny games going.”

  But Elvis would also talk to Linda about his hang-up, telling her “the whole notion of a baby passing through there just made it an unsavory place to be.” She found it “very odd. It didn’t make me anxious to have his child.”

  When Elvis got out of the hospital, Drs. Knott and Fink went to Graceland a couple of times, where Dr. Nick and Joe had already been to search Elvis’s bedroom and to throw out large bottles of pills, including Dexedrine and Seconal. But Elvis refused to get into anything deep with the physicians, who had hoped to persuade him to enter Dr. Knott’s drug treatment program. As soon as they started talking about “iatrogenic and volitional polypharmacy,” and he found out precisely what kind of doctors they were, he turned them away. Says Dr. Nick: “He didn’t want anybody getting into his brain.”

  Even after Elvis stabilized, his recovery was slow. But little by little, he felt better. Dr. Nick dropped by every night after work, and they felt like a team—Elvis, Dr. Nick, and Linda—working to restore him to health. One problem at home was getting him to bathe on a regular basis. Left on his own, he would just eat the dark green Nullo tablets that Linda used to keep down menstrual odor. Though recommended for problems with bowel control and colostomy, “Elvis thought they’d kill any type of body odor, from bad breath to butt, even underarm,” remembers Billy Smith. “He ordered bottles of ’em.” As time went on, “That was his bath.”

  When he went to Vegas on January 26, 1974, the Las Vegas Sun reported that he was back “at the top of his form, in good humor . . . extremely generous time-wise, and a jam-packed Hilton main showroom responded warmly.”

  But at Dr. Nick’s suggestion, the engagement was cut from four weeks to two, with one show on the weeknights, and two on the weekends, “because the more shows he did, the more medications he needed. And I tried to get Dr. Ghanem out of it, because the medications that were giving Elvis the most trouble were the ones he was prescribing him.”

  The Colonel didn’t like the idea—fewer shows meant less money—and he particularly didn’t like Dr. Nick telling anybody what to do. Parker was much more comfortable around Dr. Ghanem, with whom he shared a lot of friends: Ghanem was deeply connected to the Mob. Dr. Nick would later lose his license for overprescribing to a number of patients over a period of years, but Dr. Ghanem was just as loose with a prescription pad, and the general feeling among the guys was that he never really tried to help Elvis. Kathy Westmoreland saw it, too.

  “When Dr. Ghanem was there, Elvis was worse. When Nick was there, everything was in more control.” Besides, Kathy thought, there was something unsettling about Dr. Ghanem. “I think he had an Elvis complex. He thought he was Elvis in a way. He dressed like him a couple of times, put on his jumpsuits and had his dark hair. He’d come into the dressing room like that, and Elvis didn’t really laugh that much. I don’t think he thought it was that amusing.”

  But Elvis was not acting like a man who had kicked a drug habit. He was becoming more peculiar, erratic, and dangerous, and he was not as patient with the fans as he had been at previous engagements. When one girl tried to yank off his necklace as a souvenir, he snarled his worst epithet at her: “You son of a bitch!” At another show, he kicked at a fan who got too close.

  He had a new bass player now, thirty-year-old Duke Bardwell, who replaced Emory Gordy Jr. at the last minute. Duke, a Louisiana native who grew up loving Elvis, was “nervous as a chicken in a yard full of roosters” about the idea of playing with his hero. But on the day Elvis auditioned him, at the RCA Studios in Los Angeles early in January 1974, Duke had another reason to be uneasy.

  They’d run through the songs for about an hour or so, and then during the break, Duke found himself standing next to Elvis. He’d noticed the big, nickel-plated pistol that Elvis pulled out of his belt and handed to one of the guys.

  “I know you have a lot of martial arts training,” Duke ventured, trying to break the ice, “so I was wondering why you carry a gun.”

  Elvis put his top lip up a little and answered, “That’s to handle anything from six feet out. Six feet in, I got it covered.”

  Duke was thinking about that as Elvis turned to walk away. Then suddenly he spun around and threw a punch that stopped with one of his big rings resting on the end of Duke’s nose. “I never saw it coming, but it left me with a red face and a racing heart. He could have missed by a half inch and driven my nose bone through my brain.”

  Elvis’s behavior grew even more unpredictable once he got to Vegas. One night he shot out a chandelier in the suite, and another night, he fired randomly when he couldn’t find Dr. Ghanem. Already, he had narrowly missed hitting Linda while trying to pick off a porcelain owl with a .22-caliber Savage revolver. She had been in the bathroom, and remarkably, though shaken, kept her wits about her as the bullet tore through the wall, nicked the toilet paper holder, and shattered a hanging mirror: “It was crazy, but he didn’t take it as casually as some people said he did. He was just having a little target practice, but he was really upset.”

  The Colonel had invited Bob Finkel, the executive producer of the ’68 special, to attend Elvis’s show one night, and afterward, Joe took Bob
and his wife, Jane, up the private elevator to the penthouse and left them alone to go in by themselves.

  When Bob opened the door, he was startled to find that “the suite was pitch-black, except for the light from the television set. There was a western on, and Elvis was sitting there. After all we went through together, all he said was, ‘Hi, Bob,’ and then he fired at the television with a pistol. He was killing the bad guys, I guess, but it scared the shit out of me. Jane and I got right back in the elevator and went down.”

  The shooting of televisions started one afternoon at Graceland, when Elvis was eating breakfast and the polished face of actor-singer Robert Goulet suddenly filled the TV screen. It took him back to the memory of Anita Wood’s going on tour with Goulet when Elvis was away in Germany. She was writing him a letter one day, when Goulet stopped and scribbled a postscript, something to the effect of, “Hey, Elvis! Don’t worry! I’m taking pretty good care of Anita!”

  It was just a joke, but it always gnawed at him, and he had been thinking more about Anita lately. In what would be their last conversation, she called him in Vegas to tell him her father had died, and to say that for the first time she understood how sad it was for him when his mother passed away. Now, seeing Goulet just brought it all back, and Elvis flashed in anger, pulled out his .22, and blew a hole through the set. Then, as Marty Lacker tells it, “he calmly picked up his utensils and said, ‘That’ll be enough of that shit.’ ”

  Elvis’s reliance on pills tended to be worse in Vegas than anywhere else, because the playground of his twenties had become the trap of his thirties (“Vegas is a terrible place”), and he chose to get wasted rather than have to deal with it. “It’s better to be unconscious than miserable,” he’d offer with a tinge of black humor.

  “If we were at home,” Linda says, “he could just sleep for days and it didn’t matter.” But in Vegas he had to get up again for the shows, so it was a continuous cycle of uppers and downers. “They shot him to go to sleep, then they’d have to shoot him to wake him up,” Jackie Kahane said. “I saw him wiped out. Wiped out. I mean crawling on the bloody floor! It was very sad. Very, very sad.”