Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Lamar saw that “he would be so damn drugged up, he couldn’t make it to the bathroom. Or he’d get in there and start back out, and be so groggy he’d fall down on the floor. That’s where they’d find him.”

  Dr. Ghanem had recently added a new wing onto his house for celebrity patients and suggested that Elvis come there for a “sleep diet,” for which he would be sedated and take only liquid nourishment. The idea was to force Elvis to rest, and in the process, let him lose fifteen pounds before his next tour. Sheila took the first shift, staying about a week. Linda would return with him for a second stint in December.

  Elvis originally told Sheila about it when they were lying in bed on Monovale. She didn’t like the sound of it, but “he said, ‘Baby, Ghanem’s got the sleep diet,’ and it was the first time that he and I were making a decision together, and I didn’t want to nix it.”

  There was no way that Elvis could be kept totally asleep without general anesthesia, Sheila learned, and Dr. Ghanem was often not there.

  “It was the worst time that I ever endured,” she says. Elvis often woke up in the middle of the night and wanted a papaya shake, but it wouldn’t be time for it, or he would spill it, and as soon as Sheila changed the sheets, he’d soil them. Then she’d get him up and take him to the bathroom, but “he would have to crawl. I would stay awake all night. I had my entire face break out from the stress.”

  In September, when Elvis was home in Memphis, he met fourteen-year-old Reeca Smith, a friend of Ricky Stanley. His fortieth birthday loomed in January, and Elvis was doing everything he could to stave off depression. It was the number he had set for himself to deliver his “message” to the world, and he felt defeated, that he still hadn’t found his purpose. Reeca, with her long, thick, blond hair, was just the sort of young girl he always delighted in mentoring.

  “He was dating Linda at the time, but he mentioned that I reminded him of Lisa, because we both had blond hair. He came over to my house and met my parents, and my dad just loved him, because he was so friendly and such a gentleman. Elvis told him, ‘With the age difference, you probably think it’s crazy for me to see your daughter. But I think she is a wonderful girl and I have great intentions.’ ” He called her his “Li’l Lioness” for a jacket she wore with a big fur collar. “He said he loved the way it framed my face.”

  The relationship lasted only a few months, and mostly they spent time just hanging out and watching television downstairs at Graceland. He needed somebody to keep him company, and he took delight in buying her nice outfits, including a long, ornate suede-and-leather coat that fed her dream of becoming a model. (“When he gave me the clothes, he was just like a kid. He was so excited, seeing me happy.”) Elvis also counseled her about the dangers of prescription drugs, saying he didn’t ever want to catch her taking them. “In fact, Ricky tried to give me something one time, and Elvis heard about it, and oh, my goodness, he hit the ceiling.”

  Overall, Reeca considered Elvis to be extremely protective.

  “He didn’t take advantage of me. He kissed me, but they were just sweet, innocent kisses. There were a few make-out sessions, and we would make out for a long time, but that’s all, nothing where he would try to go any further. I remember he would kiss me and say, ‘You are just a beautiful little girl.’ ”

  Her father, Ed Smith, let her accept the silver Trans Am Elvis bought her, even though she wasn’t old enough to drive, but when Elvis wanted to take her on a plane ride to Nashville, Ed drew the line. Reeca was ready to end it anyway, which she did in February 1975.

  “I saw the decline in his health, and it scared me. He had gained a lot of weight over that period, and he just didn’t seem as happy. It upset me, just knowing his situation. I got to where I would tell my mom I didn’t even want to take his calls, because I just felt helpless, and it was sad seeing it happen.”

  One day when Reeca was there, Elvis called everyone in the house to his room, where he held a meditation—a séance, really—to talk to Gladys. Reeca hated hearing him “slurring . . . just really kind of out of it,” since he tried to be alert whenever he was with her. “It broke my heart. He told his mother how much he missed her, and that he loved her, and that he couldn’t wait to see her. I got a weird feeling when he was talking to her, because it was like a sadness came over the room. Then he wanted to be alone for a little bit, and everybody left.”

  In late December, the Colonel canceled Elvis’s January 1975 engagement in Vegas, citing health reasons. It was a prophetic call. About 7 A.M. on January 29, Elvis and Linda were sleeping at Graceland when “I woke up and I felt something wasn’t right. His breathing was strange, so I shook him and I said, ‘Honey, are you okay?’ He said, ‘I can’t get my breath.’ So I called for the nurse, and she brought some oxygen over, and we had to rush him to the hospital.”

  Again Linda stayed with him for two weeks during which time Elvis grew a beard. And while the Colonel issued a statement that Elvis was undergoing tests on his liver, Dr. Nick once more tried to find a way to control Elvis’s use of prescription drugs. In the middle of that chaos, Vernon suffered a heart attack and was admitted to Baptist Memorial Hospital, where he recuperated in the room next to his son.

  When Elvis was discharged on Valentine’s Day, either Dr. Nick or nurse Henley came by each afternoon to dole out a controlled amount of medication. By March, their patient was feeling well enough to record again, flying out to Los Angeles and going into RCA’s Sunset Boulevard studios on the tenth. He brought along both Lisa Marie and Sheila, to whom he sang Don McLean’s “And I Love You So,” begging his girlfriend to “step up, let me sing to you, baby.”

  On the eighteenth, he began making up his Vegas dates, and ten days into the engagement, he received actress-singer Barbra Streisand and her boyfriend Jon Peters, formerly her hairdresser, in his dressing room. The pair hoped to interest him in their updated remake of A Star Is Born, casting Elvis as the aging rock icon in love with the rising young starlet. Elvis was gleeful at the challenge, hungering for a serious role that would make everybody forget his string of celluloid humiliations.

  He was poignant in his discussions with Kathy Westmoreland, telling her it was his last opportunity to prove himself on the screen. “People aren’t going to remember me, because I’ve never done anything lasting. I’ve never made a classic film to show what I can do.” But to the guys, he was more upbeat, excitedly saying, “Can you believe that Barbra Streisand wants me to be with her in that movie?”

  Yet after much back and forth, the Colonel denounced it as too cheap a deal, saying Streisand and Peters were only trying to take advantage of him. Once he got over his initial disappointment, Elvis, too, came to that decision, and worried that a loser’s role might actually make him seem like a loser. “He was really more upset than most people know,” Priscilla says. The Colonel, who would never allow his client to accept second billing anyway, helped him save face in the press: “There was never no plan for him to do A Star Is Born. He told me to make the contract stiff enough where they would turn it down, ’cause he did not want to do it.”

  That spring Sheila came home with him to Graceland, where he talked to her about moving in. He was finished with Linda, he said. It was not precisely true, even though he bought her a house in Memphis and an apartment in Los Angeles so that she could pursue an acting career. Linda was furious that Sheila was in Memphis, and when she started spending a lot of his money in retaliation—$30,000 on his MasterCard alone—the words gold digger floated around the group. (“She was a beauty queen, and she knew how to get what she wanted,” Sheila says.) But Linda had her defenders, too, Billy suggesting she’d earned it, and Marty insisting Elvis encouraged her to spend money so she’d be away and he could do as he pleased.

  Sheila, meanwhile, found Elvis increasingly difficult to be around and worried that he might be having a breakdown. At the Memphian one night, she asked him a technical question about film, and coming on the heels of the Streisand debacle, it seemed to
open a floodgate of anger and resentment about the mismanagement of his Hollywood career. He insisted they immediately leave the theater, and on the way home, he stopped at a drugstore, where they pulled a Bonnie and Clyde, Sheila distracting the druggist with questions about menstrual products while Elvis cleaned out the pharmacy. Later, he mailed the druggist a check.

  That same spring, Elvis met twenty-four-year-old model-actress Mindi Miller through Ron Smith, who later became well known for establishing the Celebrity Look-Alikes firm. Ron was another of Elvis’s friends who promised to be on the lookout for girls, and ran into Mindi at a Hollywood disco called the Candystore. Elvis had just broken up with Linda Thompson, Ron told her, and invited her to a party at the Holmby Hills house. But when Mindi arrived, she found only Elvis’s guys, who proceeded to screen her as their boss’s potential new girlfriend.

  At five foot eight, Mindi was tall like Linda, and shared a beauty pageant background, but she was also smart, poised, and utterly unimpressed with celebrities, having come from a family of performers. But meeting Elvis was something that intrigued her. She’d seen him driving on Sunset Boulevard sometime before in his Stutz Blackhawk, with his slicked-back hair and EP glasses, and she had a premonition she would some day know him. However, that night, when the guys gave Elvis the signal and he strode into the room in a tennis hat, she didn’t even recognize him. It was a funny bit of business that broke the ice.

  From the beginning, they settled into a natural groove. He looked at her in astonishment when she turned down a ring (“I’m sorry, I wasn’t raised to take an expensive gift from a man like that”), and he was more impressed when she said no to a car, though later she did accept a Trans Am.

  They spent the first night together without even kissing. Mostly, they laughed and talked, and even sang a little bit, both of them, Elvis launching into his new song “T-R-O-U-B-L-E,” just as if he were onstage. (“He just sang his little heart out.”) They discussed mystical matters, particularly numerology and “how everything in the Bible is a dividend of seven, the highest spiritual number that there is,” and he gave her a set of his favorite little books so they could talk about them on the phone.

  Mindi shared his open mind and fascination with such subjects, and she could tell how desperate he was for a real connection. But he was upbeat with her, even when he eventually told her that, “When I die, there will be certain people that I will contact and be in touch with beyond the grave.” He also told her he was afraid of the dark, and thanked her for not laughing at him.

  At 7 A.M., as she was leaving, he put on a karate demonstration for her with the guys and asked if she’d like to learn the discipline. “I’d love to,” she replied. “But I won’t be here. I’m moving back to Rome.” Elvis was shocked. “What do you mean? You don’t live here?”

  She explained that most of her work was in Europe, and that it only made sense for her to live there. Elvis turned to the guys and told them they could go, and then he asked Mindi to come back upstairs to the bedroom.

  “Listen,” he said. “You know I would like to see you again. Do you have to move back to Europe?”

  “Well, I don’t have to, but I just came back to close up my apartment and sell my car. Everything is packed and ready to go. I’m supposed to leave in three days.”

  “No,” Elvis said, shaking his head. “You can’t. I won’t let you.” Then he called downstairs to the guys: “Make sure you get her number and address. She’s coming on the next tour.”

  “Look . . . Elvis,” she said. “I’ll be very straight with you. I have no intention of staying here, but if I did, it would only be to be your girlfriend.”

  “Fair enough,” he countered. “You’re my girlfriend.” But he had to be honest, too. It wasn’t in him to commit to just one woman. He was put on earth to entertain, and he belonged to the world. That might have sounded crazy to a lot of people, but Mindi knew it was true. He kissed her then, and sent her home to get some sleep. But she had hardly gotten home when he was on the phone: “I just wanted to tell you that I’m really looking forward to showing you my life,” he said, and the next day, he wrote her a $5,000 check to retrieve her things from Rome and set up her apartment again.

  She went with him on tour that April, where she made a lifelong friend of Shirley Dieu. But when she landed in Florida, it was the guys who gave her the real indoctrination to life with Elvis.

  “They took me aside and said, ‘There are certain rules you need to follow. First, you don’t leave Elvis alone. If he gets up in the middle of the night and goes to the bathroom, you get up with him. Then you knock on the door to see if he’s okay, and then make sure that he gets back to bed. If for some reason he doesn’t answer or something’s wrong, here’s who to call.’ ”

  Like Linda, Mindi watched him constantly and refused to leave him unattended, laying her head on his chest as he slept to monitor his breathing, and “putting my hand under his nostrils to make sure there was air.” But she never saw him O.D. or abuse medication, and balked at giving him shots of anything stronger than vitamin B-12. “I took care of him, so on my watch, nothing ever happened.”

  The Florida dates consisted of four nights in Jacksonville, Tampa, and Lakeland. In Jacksonville, Jackie Rowland, now all grown up and married with three children, tried frantically to get in touch with Jerry Schilling at the hotel. Ken Floyd, of the coaching staff of Memphis State, had passed along Jerry’s name. Ken told her that Elvis could use her help, that he wrestled with serious drug addiction, and that most of his hospital stays were for detoxing. Jerry was one of the few people around Elvis who tried to act in his best interest, he said.

  Jackie called Jerry’s room from downstairs, but when she got no answer, she asked the desk clerk to ring the room next to it. It was Elvis’s room, but Red answered. She told him about her long association with Elvis, Vernon, and Gladys, and that she had pictures to prove it. Red made remarks she found offensive (“I told him I was a lady and that Gladys would be rolling over in her grave for his being so disrespectful”), and after that, he grew angry, saying if she wanted to see Elvis, she should have called earlier.

  “You don’t need to see him anyway,” he barked. “Elvis has changed. I’m busy trying to get him ready for the show, and he’s nothing but a problem. I have to give him injections in his feet, because there isn’t any place left on him to give them.” Then he hung up, leaving Jackie sad and bewildered.

  The next morning, Mindi received a reprimand as well, only from Elvis, when she turned up at the breakfast table wearing a robe, her hair up in a towel.

  “Uh, honey,” he began.

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t mind the towel or the robe, but next time I want you to put on some eye makeup or somethin’. You’re lookin’ a little scary.”

  They both burst out laughing, and then Mindi asked, “Do I have to do it now?”

  “No, honey,” he told her, “but when you’re done with breakfast, get all made up. Look real pretty.”

  She understood the drill—that Elvis’s girlfriend did not smoke or drink in public, and that she looked like a proper lady at all times. But the brunette drew the line on dyeing her hair black, and when he wanted her to have cosmetic dental work (“You need bigger teeth . . . they’re tiny”), she said a model couldn’t just make drastic changes overnight.

  Their relationship was healthy enough that they could openly discuss all kinds of things, including Elvis’s weight. He told her he was embarrassed about it, and worried that his fans might not still love him. Mindi assured him that they did, but she also pointed out that he had no conception of nutrition, calories, or portion sizes. When he ate a gargantuan salad and insisted, “It’s just a salad, baby. I’m not going to gain weight,” she’d say, “Elvis! Yes, you are! It’s big enough for five people!”

  At another time in his life, they might have made it work. She cared about him, and promised him she would always be there for him whenever he needed her. While she would se
e other men, she took no serious boyfriend, as he had asked. But then Elvis found out she’d been involved with black actor-football star Fred Williamson, and while it preceded their own relationship, he pulled the plug, just as he had on Joan Blackman when he heard she’d dated a black man, too.

  “He wasn’t a racist person,” Mindi clarifies. “That’s just the way he was raised.” And so, she continued to be a part of his support team, if only by phone. The one thing she didn’t miss was the touring, which she considered both grueling and boring.

  Sheila, who didn’t like the road, either, went back on tour with him in June 1975, and found it even more intolerable than before. She knew he was tired of playing the same towns over and over, that he needed the lift of a European engagement or something stimulating to break the routine. But she also suspected that a lot of his moodiness was due to what was in his black bag of pharmaceuticals, which she was in charge of carrying. Elvis was so irritable that the slightest thing set him off. He had a huge tantrum in Mobile on June 2, when he found she didn’t have her slippers. Then when she announced she needed to go home for a mammogram, she could feel the heat coming off of him at the breakfast table.

  “I never would dare say, ‘What’s the matter, honey?’ But his pajama sleeve caught the creamer and tipped it over, and then he cleared the whole table with his arm, and my scrambled eggs, too, and he said, ‘You and your fuckin’ tumor!’ He didn’t want me to go, but I needed the rest. One day with Elvis was like five with anybody else.”

  Gone were the days when they’d check into some crummy motel on the road and make love in the afternoons. Everybody on tour had known about it, because after Elvis’s daily shot of Valium, he’d get so randy that “while all the guys were bringing things in, I had to get in my jammies.”