Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  They talked a little bit about music—Glen had told Elvis that Tanya patterned herself after him some—but then things got personal. She’d driven herself crazy picking the perfect gown from the Lillie Rubin shop in Nashville, which catered to women at least twice her age, and when Elvis complimented her footwear (“Man, I love those shoes”), her $250 splurge suddenly seemed worth every penny. Tanya was too nervous to notice, but LaCosta later said, “Oh, God, Tanya, when you turned your head, he was lookin’ you up and down. He thought you were sexy.” All Tanya knew was that it was a great night.

  Soon, someone reminded him that it was time to get ready, and Elvis made his move. “Tanya, you want to come back for the second show?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” she said, suddenly thirteen again. “I’ve got to go home and tell my mama and daddy about this.” Elvis reached over to kiss her, but his young guest surprised him.

  “I just gave him the old side cheek, you know? And he laughed so big and hard when I did that. He thought that was just amazing. Who does that to Elvis Presley?”

  He never forgot her, and two years later, as her professional star continued to ascend, he sent her a TLC necklace through Tony Brown, who Beau had once fired from Tanya’s band. Tanya had continued to go to Elvis’s shows and swoon from her seat, but she had too much of her father in her to graciously accept her gift. “Tell Elvis if he wants to be giving me something, he needs to come give it to me himself.” Today, the mother of a daughter named Presley, she cringes at the memory. “Oh, my God, how stupid! Just too cocky for my own good.”

  Getting the brush-off from yet another teenager seemed to drive forty-year-old Elvis back to women of a more appropriate age range, and before the year was out, he took his wildest shot of all. Hearing that Sonny and Cher had just divorced, Elvis placed a call to the ex-Mrs. Bono, then twenty-nine, and invited her for a weekend in Las Vegas. Cher, who had watched his famous 1957 Pan Pacific Auditorium show standing on her chair as a child, was flabbergasted.

  “My assistant told me he was on the phone, and at first I thought it was a joke. But I was just too frightened. He’d never stopped being an influence on my life, and sometimes you meet your heroes, and you’re really disappointed. I thought it would be much better to just have this fantasy about who he was than to be utterly disappointed.”

  As his depression deepened, he spent money like it was never going to stop coming in. He had three airplanes now, including a $500,000 Aero Jet Commander, and then he bought fourteen Cadillacs in one day, to the tune of $140,000. Minnie Mae cautioned him that if he didn’t stop such craziness, he was going to end up penniless, but he waved her off with a hug and a smile. “It just means I have to do a longer tour,” he said. But then every time he did a tour, every woman he knew got expensive jewelry.

  “He always gave girls rings,” says Shirley Dieu. “That was so common. Oh, my God, we had a ring on every finger. I’ll tell you how much jewelry I had. I remember going to Pip’s, which was Hefner’s private club in L.A., and I was sitting there counting up the jewelry on my hand and all the stuff I wore. I had over $250,000 worth of jewelry on my person, and that didn’t even include the $25,000 watch that Joe gave me. I was twenty-two years old.”

  Not surprisingly, Elvis found himself with a cash flow problem, and at the end of November 1975, he borrowed $350,000 from the National Bank of Commerce, pledging Graceland as collateral. On Christmas Eve, he told Marian Cocke that he had a dream that all his friends deserted him when he went broke. It threw him into such a fury that he refused to go downstairs, and watched the four monitors on his closed-circuit video surveillance system until everyone who had been waiting for him went home.

  The disappointments piled up: The Colonel killed his dream for a karate film, into which he had sunk more than $100,000 over the past year. His beloved orange chow, one-year-old Get Lo, a dog he and Linda raised together, died after three months of treatment near Boston for a congenital kidney ailment. When the end came, Linda remembers, “Elvis was really hurt. We were on tour, and they waited to tell him until we were coming home on his plane. He cried. It was like our little buddy had died.”

  And a huge show on New Year’s Eve at the unfinished Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, while grossing the record-breaking $816,000, turned out largely to be a bust—poor sound, frigid weather (one of the musicians plugged in an electric blanket), and Elvis splitting his pants onstage. “I’m scared shitless,” he told emcee Jackie Kahane as he mounted the stairs, arriving nearly an hour late. In the end, “he didn’t do twenty minutes. I figured they’d kill him. Do you know before we left, they booked him back? That was the magic of Elvis.”

  Sometime that year when Linda was away, Elvis sneaked Barbara Leigh into the Monovale house. They hadn’t seen each other in a long time, and it made her sad to see him so overweight and lost. She could tell how chaotic his life was and that he wanted peace. Lisa Marie played with her doll and sang her daddy’s songs, and Elvis mostly quoted the Bible. Then he started choking, falling asleep while eating Mexican wedding cookies.

  “I grabbed his head and held it up and slowly made him drink milk. When I told Joe about it, he said, ‘Most everyone in Elvis’s life has saved him at least once.’ ” She left around 4 A.M., feeling hopeless.

  “He was way past my help or anyone’s at that time. It was like his spirit was beaten down. His white light was flickering. I think in many ways he was ready to leave this earthly plane.”

  Actress Deborah Walley spoke to him in roughly this same period. “He told me that he wasn’t going to be around for very long. He was very clear about what he was saying. He said he wasn’t going to live a full life, that he was going to exit early. He was done.”

  In January 1976 he spent his forty-first birthday in Vail, Colorado, with Linda and fifteen others, including his friends on the Denver police force. But what should have been a joyous time turned into one of dissension, with Elvis’s moods fluctuating so rapidly that people walked on eggshells, afraid to say anything around him. Jerry even threatened to quit. Then as Elvis’s disposition improved, he started buying Cadillacs and Lincolns for everybody, including his police pals and Linda and Shirley. Total cost: $70,000.

  At home, work was completed on the racquetball court in back of Graceland, and Jo and Billy Smith would often play with him there. He sequestered himself with the Smiths more and more when he was in Memphis, not wanting to leave the cocoon of home. Even there, he verged on psychosis, his behavior fueled by polypharmacy and professional and personal turmoil. When RCA, needing an album, sent a mobile truck to Graceland in both February and October, Elvis was erratic, showing up the first night in his policeman’s uniform, and brandishing a Thompson submachine gun at the latter session. Not much got recorded, especially in February, when he retreated to his bedroom with Red and Sonny to plot a violent bloodbath on all the drug dealers in Memphis.

  He toured one-nighters all through the spring and hid from the Colonel, not wanting to talk with anybody, really, except Billy and Jo. When Lisa Marie visited for ten days in June, he saw almost no one else. One night Elvis took three or four sleeping pills and said to the Smiths, “Let’s go put Lisa to bed.”

  They all went in her room, Billy remembers, and Elvis leaned down to kiss her good night. “When he did, his penis fell out of his pajamas. Elvis didn’t notice it. He was telling us, ‘Oh, ain’t she sweet. She’s my teddy bear.’ And Lisa said, ‘Daddy, your goober is hanging out.’ ”

  It embarrassed him.

  “ ‘Lisa, you don’t say things like that, goddamn it!’ ”

  Then everybody broke up, even Elvis.

  One of the things that bothered both Priscilla and Linda was that Elvis wasn’t much of a participatory parent and that he never took on any of the real responsibilities of fatherhood. He slept during the day when Lisa Marie was up and playing, for example, and didn’t take her to school or pick her up, not even when she was in preschool. Billy could see that the child was starved for her fath
er’s attention, but Elvis’s biggest response was to indulge his daughter’s every whim.

  He and Priscilla butted heads over their differences in parenting, Elvis giving the eight-year-old a diamond ring, and Priscilla insisting “there’s no way I will allow her to wear a diamond ring at the age of eight.” The child was pulled one way and then the other, so much so that when she went home to her mother in California, she would throw tantrums, screaming, “I wanna go back to Graceland!”

  “She was a terror when I got her back,” says Priscilla. “You cannot imagine.”

  From the age of three, Lisa had listened to records in her room instead of playing with other children. But in Tennessee, she had a whole other life. She could eat anything she wanted, squish frogs, spook the security guards at 4 A.M., sign rude autographs at the gate (“Fuck you, Lisa Marie Presley”), and race around the grounds in her own golf cart, sometimes with playmates Patsy and Peggy Lynn, the twin daughters of country singer Loretta Lynn, who had met Elvis when they were both in the hospital in Memphis.

  If Elvis wasn’t much of a disciplinarian, JoCathy Brownlee spent enough time around them to know that “he loved it when Lisa was there, and he would get very sad when it was time for her to leave. I can remember him talking to Priscilla on the phone and just begging her to let Lisa stay a couple of more days.” And to Mindi Miller he admitted that Lisa had “really softened him and opened him up to being something other than a performer and a man-of-the-world. He said, ‘I never thought it, but she has turned out to be the love of my life.’ ”

  It was clear to everyone that Lisa idolized her father, and that even at her young age, she realized his power and position in the world. One night before JoCathy left, the teacher promised Lisa she would ride the golf cart with her when she returned. But the next afternoon, when JoCathy and Elvis were upstairs, “Lisa came running up and said, ‘Daddy! The golf cart has a flat tire!’ I said, ‘Oh, Lisa, I’m so sorry. We can’t ride the golf cart today.’ And Lisa said, ‘J. C., my daddy has millions more golf carts.’ ”

  George Klein kept sending girls up to the house, but nobody seemed right, and Elvis asked Jo Smith to check them out. He still liked finger sucking—and toe sucking—and “he’d say, ‘You know if I’d like her or not. If her fingernails are dirty, or if her toenails are dirty, she’s a definite out.’ ”

  If the girl passed muster, Jo would say, “Step this way.” But then a lot of times she or Billy would have to sit upstairs with them and talk. Elvis didn’t seem interested in much more than companionship, telling his guests, “I need to have all my bodily fluids to heal myself.” Billy thought it was wild, but “we were expected to say, ‘Yeah, that’s right. He always saves his bodily fluids before a tour.’ ” Often, Elvis’s little cousin wondered, “What the hell does the girl think?” But as Jo remembers, “The girls would just lay there and smile with their little negligees on.”

  No matter who came around, Elvis couldn’t seem to get out of the dumps. In July 1976, Vernon, with Elvis’s blessing, fired Red, Sonny, and Dave Hebler over several issues—a lawsuit over the rough handling of a fan, the general friction in the group, and Vernon’s ongoing paranoia that Elvis’s friends took advantage of him. The three men, especially Red and Sonny, were deeply offended not to hear the word from Elvis himself, and he seemed too paralyzed to pick up the phone.

  Then in October 1976 he got word that they were writing a book, one that would expose, among other things, his deep dependence on prescription medication. They were doing it, they insisted, to try to get him to stop, to turn his life around before it was too late. “That was our intention,” Sonny says, “whether people believe it or not.”

  The news devastated him. He cried, ranted, and talked of a plan to kill his friends himself and dispose of their bodies. Then, when he calmed down, he had John O’Grady telephone Sonny and offer the three “overdue severance pay” to cancel the book. O’Grady never named an actual figure, but it didn’t matter. “John,” Sonny told him, “taking the money would make us just like the doctors who give him the medicine.”

  While Linda agreed that Elvis had handled the firing “rather unceremoniously,” it was “the major turning point, the pivotal current,” in his decline. Mindi agrees. “He couldn’t sleep at night. He was very depressed about it, an absolute wreck. He was afraid when the book came out that people would view him differently and find fault with him. He talked about that to no end: ‘Can you believe Sonny and Red would do this to me? How dare they put me out there! These are lies, the things they’re talking about, all these supposed drugs. It’s crap!’ All I could do was sit and listen. I’d say, ‘E, I’m really sorry.’ ”

  Linda, too, tried her best to comfort him. “Let’s just go away and live in a little shack on a farm and forget fame and fortune and all of the craziness that goes with it,” she pleaded.

  “Now, why the hell would I want to do that?” Elvis replied.

  “I truly, truly loved him, and I wouldn’t have cared if he were John Doe. I loved him as a human soul. He was really a wonderful person,” Linda says. But after four and a half years, it was time for her to go. She could only do so much caregiving and putting her life on hold.

  “There was a lot of me that wasn’t being fulfilled, and I didn’t like feeling like I was just an appendage of someone else. I wanted to do some things on my own and be my own person.” Still, she acknowledges, “To this day, there’s a part of my heart that has ‘Elvis’ written all over it.”

  Exactly who did the leaving is a matter of semantics. Linda logged a few days on the next tour, Elvis’s eighth of 1976. But she was already emotionally involved with keyboard player David Briggs, who’d offered a strong shoulder. Elvis had his suspicions, and sent Larry Geller to a restaurant, where he found the couple enjoying a candlelight dinner at 3 A.M. “The band was afraid he was going to shoot me,” David remembers. “I didn’t think he would, because he liked me a lot. I didn’t think he would let a woman get between us.” But Elvis would soon make his feelings clear, pulling the plug on David’s electric keyboard one night toward the end of the tour.

  Linda’s affair “broke Elvis’s heart,” says Mindi, “because he had already been betrayed by Priscilla. But he never looked at it that he betrayed anybody else. He just said, ‘She’s going out with my damn piano player.’ ”

  On November 19, 1976, George Klein, hoping to lift Elvis’s spirits, brought Terry Alden, the reigning Miss Tennessee, out to the house. Terry was a pretty girl, slim and self-possessed, but she was engaged, and came only because she thought it would be fun to meet Elvis and see Graceland. That’s one reason she brought along her two sisters, Rosemary and Ginger.

  Elvis was cordial to Terry and Rosemary, and told them he remembered their father, a public relations officer for the army. But it was twenty-year-old Ginger, with dark eyes, sculpted lips, and long auburn hair, that Elvis liked best. How could he not? The current Miss Mid-South Fair and former Miss Traffic Safety looked like Priscilla, Debra Paget, and Gladys all rolled into one.

  In March 1977, Elvis took a party of thirty, including new girlfriend Ginger Alden (right) and her sister Terry, to Hawaii. While there, he vowed to make big changes in his life. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Breathe!

  Ginger.

  In rock-and-roll mythology, she is the girl who let him die, knocking the world off its axis. Like his mother, her name sprang from the seventh letter, “G.” Gladys and Ginger, bookending his life. One watched too closely, the other not at all.

  She was born November 13, 1956, the very year that Elvis rose to national fame. Ginger couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t loom large in her consciousness. She got her first glimpse of him at perhaps the age of three, when her mother, Jo LaVern Alden, an inveterate Elvis fan, took her down to the fabled Graceland gates and excitedly instructed her to peer through the bars.

  Then, at five, she met him. One of his uncles invited the Aldens to
join them on an outing at the Fairgrounds, and Ginger had ridden with Elvis on the Pippin, holding tight on the metal bar as the roller coaster made its death-defying dips and turns.

  “Elvis was so kind and cordial,” Rosemary, then 12, remembers. “He shook hands with each of us and patted Ginger on the head.”

  Ginger was five foot nine now, far too statuesque for that sort of treatment. But the night the grown-up Ginger met him, Elvis seemed to be in no hurry to see any of the Aldens, and kept them waiting for hours while he practiced karate. Finally, the three sisters were led upstairs to meet him, where he received them in Lisa Marie’s bedroom.

  “I know this sounds funny,” Ginger admits, “but when Elvis entered the room, I thought trumpets would sound.”

  He entertained them in his usual fashion—taking them on a tour of the house, singing, and reading aloud from his favorite books. “It turned out to be a truly wonderful evening,” Ginger later recalled. By one account, she spent the night, a chaste one.

  The next evening, Elvis took her up in his plane for what was supposed to be a quick flight to see the Memphis skyline.

  “Have you ever been west?” Elvis asked her.

  Ginger shook her youthful head, and suddenly they were on their way to Las Vegas with chaperones Patsy and Gee Gee Gambill. Though she was twenty years old, Ginger seemed incapable of making a single move without her mother’s input. She phoned home for permission, and the couples stayed overnight, returning the next afternoon.

  Eight days later, Elvis asked her to join his west coast tour, and sent his JetStar to bring her to San Francisco, where he would play the Cow Palace. But first, there was a minor matter to resolve. Linda had accompanied Elvis to Reno, Nevada, and Eugene and Portland, Oregon, for the opening dates, along with Larry Geller’s new wife, Celeste, and sister, Judy.