Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  While Ginger occupied a room on the floor below the suite, Elvis told Linda she looked as if she weren’t feeling well. Maybe she should go back to L.A. to rest, he said. When Linda replied that she felt just fine, Elvis launched into Plan B, and called Larry into his bathroom. He was shaving.

  “All right, listen,” he said, looking into the mirror at the curve of the razor, and then glancing over at Larry. “Here’s what’s happening. You’ve got to tell Celeste and Judy they can come on tour anytime they want, but I’m sending them back to L.A. now with Linda on the JetStar. I’ve met someone else. She’s here now, but don’t tell them what’s up.”

  Judy thought it was odd, because the next date was Anaheim. Why didn’t Elvis wait until L.A. to send all the women home? It didn’t make sense. But she just shrugged her shoulders. “You did what the King asked.”

  Elvis, meanwhile, told his girlfriend of four-and-a-half years that he was flying out to Vegas right after the Anaheim date, and that they would meet up there. But Larry knew it would never happen, and that the couple was finished: “That was the last time he ever saw Linda.”

  In Anaheim, Elvis gave one of his better performances, and Larry, seeing him perk up onstage, told Elvis that Ginger inspired him.

  She would stay with him the entire two weeks of his Vegas engagement that December 1976, though Ginger’s charms could not continue to work miracles. Elvis flagged as the nights wore on, hurting his ankle and seeming tired.

  “I hate Las Vegas,” he said out of the blue during one late night show, baffling the crowd.

  Everything about him signaled that Elvis was in deep trouble, physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Sandy Ferra, Elvis’s little Hollywood pal, went backstage with husband Wink Martindale one evening. “When we left, I commented that Elvis didn’t look good at all,” Wink says.

  Priscilla’s family, including her parents Paul and Ann Beaulieu, was also in attendance that engagement, and Elvis invited them to his dressing room. He spoke to Michelle, Priscilla’s sister, about his hands. “He was self-conscious that they were so bloated. I patted his hands, as if to reassure him.”

  But Priscilla had noticed them three years earlier on the day they met in the judge’s chambers and signed the final divorce decree. As they sat with their fingers entwined, seeming more like an old couple than adversaries who were about to be legally parted, Priscilla grew alarmed at how puffy Elvis was. “I knew something was different; something was wrong. I could see it in his eyes, I could feel it in his hands.”

  Now in Vegas, Paul sensed that “he didn’t want to let us go. He kept thinking of topics that would prolong the conversation . . . he kept asking us what we needed and wanted. We told him that we were just fine. We had everything we needed. But he insisted that we accept something.”

  Finally, Elvis wrote out a personal check for $10,000 and handed it to Ann. She didn’t want to take it, but he seemed to need her to accept it. After the divorce, Elvis had called her and said, “Please speak with Cilla,” and begged her to try to convince his ex-wife to come back to him.

  “It was a very sad conversation. I felt how desperately he wanted to keep his family together.” Ann knew that her daughter was determined to move on with her life, but she told Elvis that she would do what she could.

  “Please do,” he pleaded. “I want you all to be part of my family.” It was like a sword through her. “Elvis,” she said, “we’ll always be part of your family.” But when they left after his performance that December, “I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.”

  Priscilla, who the fans blamed for Elvis’s deterioration and the breakup of the marriage, knew Elvis held out hope that they would reunite.

  “I’d take Lisa over to his house and he’d say, ‘Cilla, go do what you have to do now. Go see the world. But when you’re forty and I’m fifty, we’ll be back together. You’ll see.” But she would later say that in the last year of his life, “We underestimated his emotional pain. And he lacked the means to fully express that pain.”

  Early in that same Vegas engagement, even as Ginger was by his side, Elvis reached for a pad he kept by his bed and scribbled a note that spoke to the core of his emptiness.

  “I feel so alone sometimes. The night is quiet for me. I’d love to be able to sleep. I am glad that everyone is gone now. I’ll probably not rest. I have no need for all this. Help me, Lord.”

  Later, he crumpled it up and threw it in the waste can, where someone—one of the guys, a maid—retrieved it. It was remarkably similar to another desperate note he wrote in the Hilton suite: “I don’t know who I can talk to anymore. Or turn to. I only have myself and the Lord. Help me, Lord, to know the right thing.”

  The pattern of both notes would later fuel rumors that Elvis had contemplated suicide. Though some believe they are forgeries, or fakes, Priscilla included them in her family memoir, Elvis by the Presleys, an indication she believes they are authentic.

  According to Larry, Linda sent letters to Vegas, but Elvis refused to read them or take her calls. If she hadn’t immediately been wise to the situation in San Francisco, she soon learned from her brother, Sam, who had quit his job with the Memphis Sheriff’s Department earlier that year to work tour security after Red and Sonny’s dismissal. As a favor to Linda, Elvis had recently helped Sam and his wife, Louise, buy a house. When the group arrived in Vegas, Elvis took him aside.

  “Sam,” Elvis said, “I love your sister, but I am not in love with her, and I’ve found someone else. I just want you to know that it’s not going to affect your job. I respect what you do, and if you want to work for me, you have a position.” Sam elected to stay.

  Ginger, meanwhile, was learning what every other woman in Elvis’s life already knew, that being on the road and staying cooped up in Vegas was not the heady trip that it appeared. Once the glamour wore off, Ginger was homesick for her mother and her sisters. And, Elvis learned, she missed a young man she had been seeing in Memphis.

  Shirley and Joe were in their bedroom in the Imperial Suite one day when Elvis and Ginger appeared at the door. Shirley could see that Elvis was upset, that he seemed frustrated and adrift. She rarely saw him like that, and asked what was the matter.

  “Elvis found out that Ginger had a boyfriend, so he told her to call him and tell him that it was over, and she wouldn’t do it. She kept saying no.”

  He and Ginger exchanged heated words, and then in anger, Elvis picked up a glass of orange juice and threw it across the room. Shirley had just taken the plastic off her dry cleaning, and now it was covered with sticky pulp.

  “Oh, I was so mad! But he felt bad about it, I could tell. It was sad. Linda had taken off with David Briggs, and he wanted to show her that he could get someone who was prettier and younger.”

  Shirley thought Elvis seemed all too desperate to make the romance bloom, while others in the group accused him of keeping Ginger a virtual hostage. On December 10, because she had complained she needed to go home to see her family, Elvis flew Ginger’s parents, sisters, and her brother and his wife to Vegas. That same day, the Memphis Commercial Appeal quoted Jo Alden as saying that Elvis had given Ginger a Lincoln Continental, though “she doesn’t think it was an engagement gift.”

  The strain of the relationship only added to Elvis’s lackluster performance and ill health. Two days later, Bill E. Burk of the Memphis Press-Scimitar boldly wrote, “One walks away wondering how much longer it can be before the end comes.” That night, Elvis met with evangelist Rex Humbard in his dressing room, and in telling the preacher he felt his life lacked all meaning, Elvis wept.

  After a two-week rest, however, he was more like himself, and gave a well-received ninety-minute concert on New Year’s Eve in Pittsburgh. He seemed to be in high spirits, in part because he had both his girls there, Ginger and Lisa. Ginger sat in a chair near the stage and held up the squirmy eight-year-old so she could have a better view of the performance.

  Clearly Ginger’s family encouraged the r
elationship. When her parents’ often-troubled marriage appeared to be over, Elvis met with them to see if they could reconcile, but then offered to pay for their divorce and buy Jo a new house.

  More and more, there seemed to be nothing Elvis wouldn’t do to win Ginger’s affections. He went to her grandfather’s funeral in Arkansas on January 3, 1977, flying her family to Harrison, Arkansas, and then accompanying Ginger on the twenty-mile drive to Jasper for services in a tiny rural church. Afterward, he, Ginger, and Rosemary flew to Palm Springs for Elvis’s forty-second birthday on January 8.

  He was more impetuous in all matters of love now. On January 9, he spurred his dentist, Max Shapiro to marry his young fiancée, Suzanne, in Palm Springs that very day, waking Larry in the middle of the night to come perform the ceremony. Larry, who was licensed to marry couples in the state of California but had never actually done it, nervously grabbed a couple of candles, some incense, and his Bible, and ran for the flight. Elvis bought the rings, and Ginger stood in as maid of honor.

  “When Elvis met Ginger,” Larry observed, “something came over this guy. Part of it was beautiful, because he just so desperately wanted a real relationship. The next morning, he said to me, ‘Man, I can’t believe this girl! I look at that woman’s eyes, and it’s my mother’s eyes.’ So for the first month, he was really just nuts over Ginger. But to me, it was unrealistic.”

  It was an improbable pairing to others, too. Ginger was a sweet person, but her personality was monochromatic. Like Debra Paget and Priscilla before her, she hardly ever said a word, which intrigued Elvis all the more. Whether she was petrified or a blank slate, as Shirley believes, the girl was a mystery.

  Not only that, but aside from the fact that she already had a boyfriend, she didn’t seem to really care for Elvis. Ginger would later say that wasn’t true, that she loved him deeply, even if others insisted she rarely seemed affectionate toward him. In Vegas, out of the corner of her eye, Shirley had caught him taking Ginger’s hand and putting it between his shoulder and neck. Then he placed his own hand on top of hers, and patted it. “See Shirley,” he said, “she loves me just like you love Joe.”

  It broke Shirley’s heart, but it also worried everyone as to how far Elvis might go. Nothing about his involvement with Ginger indicated rational thinking.

  In Palm Springs, especially, Elvis seemed to have almost no control over his impulses. After Larry winged the ceremony and pronounced the Shapiros man and wife, Elvis signed the certificate, and then hurriedly turned to his friend.

  “Lawrence, come with me right away,” he implored. “Ginger, you, too.”

  He took them into his bedroom, where Larry chose a chair and Elvis and Ginger sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Ginger,” Elvis began, “I know we haven’t talked about this, but that was the most beautiful ceremony I’ve ever seen in my life. That’s what a real marriage ceremony should be. This is what I want us to have. What do you say?”

  Larry couldn’t believe his ears. Ginger, too, seemed astonished.

  “She very, very demurely, said, ‘Yeah. Yes.’ Elvis looked at me and said, ‘You can’t tell anyone about this yet. We are going to do this later in the year. We’ll do it at Graceland.’ But in my heart of hearts, I knew there was no way this was going to happen. He was riding a wave of euphoria, and all of the stardust was going to blow away and he was going to realize that she was too young and not for him.”

  Ginger was a symbol, Larry thought, someone against whom Elvis could project his dreams in relation to what was going on in his life at the time: his health problems, his waning youth, his father’s second heart attack in December, his conflicts with Colonel Parker, everything.

  She had a ring, though, that was true. On January 26, 1977, Elvis came to her and proposed, she said. “It was like old-fashioned times . . . he was on his knees. He asked me to marry him, and I said, ‘Yes.’ ” She was sitting in his black reading chair in the upstairs bathroom at Graceland, and he pulled out a green velvet box and produced a stunning eleven-and-a-half-carat diamond worth $70,000. He was in such a hurry for it, in fact, that jeweler Lowell Hays took the stone from Elvis’s own TCB ring until he could find a replacement. Ginger was now the second woman to whom Elvis had proposed in a bathroom.

  Her mother was overjoyed.

  “When he flew my family to Las Vegas,” Jo Alden says, her voice full of tulle and lace, “he told me he had loved people, but he had never been in love before. He said that when he found Ginger, he found what he had been searching for, and that he knew God had led him to her.”

  In Mrs. Alden’s version of the story, both Elvis and Vernon were so taken with Ginger that they saw her as nearly a celestial being. “His father told him that Ginger was an angel sent from heaven. In fact, Elvis wanted to say that to Ginger, but as he told me, ‘How do you go about telling an angel that?’ ”

  However, Elvis didn’t seem like a man who was planning a future with a new bride, angel or not. Ginger was a witness to the signing of his Last Will and Testament in early March 1977, and yet the document excluded her.

  Shirley believes she knows how the confusion arose, because Ginger sought her advice at the time.

  “Ginger and I were sitting next to each other on the bus, and she said, ‘Elvis asked me to marry him, but I think he changed his mind, because he hasn’t mentioned it anymore. It’s like he never said it.’ ”

  “Listen, if he talked about marriage, you better jump on it,” Shirley told her. “If he hasn’t talked about it, he’s probably already forgotten it.”

  Ginger pressed her for more. “Do you think he really meant it?”

  “I don’t know, Ginger.”

  Rosemary Alden shares her mother’s gauzy view, and insists that Elvis made his intentions clear to all the Aldens. “My most treasured moment with Elvis occurred when he told our family that he was going to marry Ginger, how happy she made him, and how much he loved us as a family while he placed our TLC necklaces around each of our necks.”

  Yet Joe Esposito has a more studied opinion. “Elvis liked Ginger very much, but . . . I don’t think he was going to marry her. He may have told her that he wanted to marry her, so she would stay around, but after awhile, he started to date other women, too.”

  Billy Smith echoes Joe’s observation, saying Elvis kept buying Ginger jewelry and cars—three in all—to keep her there. And he shares the belief that Elvis was not going to marry her, no matter what he said to Ginger or her family.

  “We even took her out window shopping for wedding dresses once, about midnight. We’d drive by a store, and Elvis would say, ‘Hey, there’s one.’ And he would describe what he wanted Ginger to wear on her head—that thing that stands up that Spanish women wear—and he wanted a long train on her dress. And Ginger believed all this. But he’d also say, ‘Yeah, and when we get married . . .’ and then turn to Jo and me and say, real low, ‘Whenever that is.’ ”

  Today, Shirley’s opinion is that Elvis was on sleeping pills when he gave Ginger the ring, and probably meant the proposal at the time. As to whether they were actually engaged, “It depends on how you look at it. But there definitely wouldn’t have been a wedding. There’s no way there would have been a wedding. It was just naiveté on Ginger’s part.” Besides, Shirley says, since Ginger refused to call things off with her old boyfriend, “It sounds to me like she didn’t exactly plan on getting married to EP either, you know?”

  Eventually, Elvis would come to call the Aldens “leeches,” according to David Stanley, Elvis’s stepbrother. “He felt that [Ginger] was just using him. She didn’t love him, that was obvious.” But Shirley is more sympathetic: “She was just a young, stupid girl who didn’t want to be there. It wasn’t even her fault. Her Mom had her claws into Elvis and her hand in his back pocket. Everybody knows that. Ginger was her little pawn.”

  Sometime that spring 1977, Elvis put in a call to Ann Pennington. He had often told her that he thought he would die before he reached his mother’
s age, and perhaps because he was about to sign his will, he seemed to have the end on his mind.

  “I want you to know I had the most fun with you than I did with anybody,” he told her. “You really liked me for who I am, and you never took anything from me.”

  Right after the signing of the will, Elvis took a gang of thirty to Hawaii, first checking into the Hilton Rainbow Tower, and then after two days, moving with the Alden sisters and others to a beach house at Kailua. In the many pictures that Joe and Shirley took of him there, he looks happy—laughing, playing football, and teasing Shirley, putting his tongue in her ear. “Elvis made dreams come true for so many people, and I do think he had a nice time,” she says. “He was so much fun to play with, and it was wonderful.”

  However, one day he got sand in his eye, and scratched his cornea. After that, he cut the trip short, but not before promising Larry that he was going to make big changes in his life—about his health and diet, about cutting the dead wood from his organization, even about firing the Colonel and getting off of pills. “He was so determined and he had so many plans.”

  But then he ran into Sherry Williams, and when she asked about all the old group, he let his guard down.

  “Baby,” he said, “they wrote a book,” and his voice cracked on the words.

  “I know,” she answered.

  Then he looked out over the ocean, and he had such a faraway gaze that nothing more needed to be said.

  When they returned to Memphis the third week of March, Ginger refused to accompany Elvis on tour. She had also begged off going to Nashville with him to record in January, when he mostly sat in his hotel room, dialing her number and leaving town without recording a note. Now Billy could barely rouse him from bed. Dr. Nick put Elvis on an IV, and recognized that Ginger was an emotional factor in his malaise.