by Alanna Nash
But again, he rallied. As he stepped out on stage in Tempe, Arizona, on March 23, his first night of the tour, he whispered to Billy, “You didn’t think I’d make it, did you?” Billy couldn’t believe what a “hell of a show” he put on, and marveled at where he found the energy. Yet when the group reached Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on March 31, Elvis was unable to go on, and canceled the performance, as well as the last three sold-out shows of the tour, in Mobile, Alabama, Macon, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida.
Back home in Memphis, Elvis checked into Baptist Memorial Hospital on April 1. When Dr. Nick discharged him four days later, Priscilla and Lisa Marie flew in to be with him. Bill Hance of the Nashville Banner had written, “The singer’s new girlfriend is absolutely running him ragged.” Elvis’s ex-wife could see it was true.
“For the last six months, he was really preoccupied with trying to make a go with this relationship,” Dr. Nick says. “He was very protective of her, and would really treat her like a child. I felt if we could work [things out with Ginger] that we’d be 70 to 80 percent ahead of the game in getting other things accomplished.”
But Ginger didn’t seem all that keen on moving ahead with any of Elvis’s plans. She wouldn’t move into Graceland, claiming it was immoral, she didn’t like to spend the night, and she certainly didn’t appear to be overly fond of making love with her fiancé. Elvis complained to Shirley that Ginger was always in her menses. “He said, ‘That damn girl’s going to bleed to death.’ ”
“Why the hell do you put up with her?” Billy Smith asked his cousin. “Because,” Elvis answered wearily, “I’m just getting too old and tired to train another one.”
Billy was almost as frustrated with the situation as Elvis. He and the guys had to chase her down half the time, and they’d even followed her once. “If Elvis had ever known that, God, he’d have fired all of us. But she was in a nightclub dancing with a guy.”
Elvis’s pet name for Ginger was “Gingerbread,” but Billy was so ticked off at her that he began referring to her as “Gingersnatch.”
“Sometimes she wouldn’t come up for a few days, and Elvis would get all agitated and sullen and say, ‘Where is she, man? Why don’t she stay here?’ And when she did come, she’d get up and go home after Elvis went to sleep.” The night she refused to go to Nashville for Elvis’s recording session, he followed her out of Graceland and fired a pistol over her head several times, but still it didn’t stop her. Eventually, Elvis resorted to more childish methods, letting the air out of her tires, and once, instructing Billy, “Keep the gate closed! Don’t let her out!”
“I said, ‘Goddamn, Elvis! Open the gate and let the girl go home, man. This is not a prison!’ I was mad and fed up with it. One night, God, they were into it. She hadn’t been up there in two or three days, and he was trying to keep her from leaving. Finally, she got to go home, and Elvis asked me, ‘What do you think about Ginger? Do you think I should find somebody else?’ I said, ‘I think she’s everything in a woman that you always hated.’ He stayed mad at me for three days.”
In April, after another fight with Ginger, Elvis had a new girl at the house, twenty-year-old bank teller Alicia Kerwin, who received her introduction through George Klein. Alicia, ebony-haired, vibrant, and fresh-faced, had never been a fan, and knew nothing about Elvis other than the fact that he had a daughter. Their first meeting, about 10 P.M. upstairs at Graceland, lasted about two hours. The room was full of people, though the only one she recognized was Charlie Hodge.
“They were fixin’ to go on tour, so it was hectic, very hectic. And we just talked.”
When she and Elvis next met, in Lisa Marie’s bedroom while stylist Arelia Dumont was cutting Elvis’s hair, Rosemary Alden walked in. “She was real inquisitive and very rude, and she wanted to know who I was and what I was doing there.”
Rosemary was just “bein’ a female,” as Alicia put it, but it made her feel strange, and the following day, Elvis called and invited her back. “I said no. I had a date. He thought I should break it.” When she refused, he hung up on her, and then “two seconds later he calls back and he says, ‘Well, what about tomorrow?’ ” He also asked her if she could get a few days off from work.
On April 13, Alicia accompanied Elvis and Billy and Jo to Las Vegas on a drug run to Dr. Ghanem. Afterward, they went on to Palm Springs. Elvis was in good spirits and bought Alicia a Cadillac, but then, as she remembered, he got a reprimand from his father on the telephone because he’d told neither Vernon nor the Colonel where he was going. “They had been looking for him for three days and couldn’t find him. So everybody was upset, and in turn, he got them upset. He was being scolded.”
Elvis’s way of dealing with it was to load up on Placidyls and muscle relaxers, and when Alicia woke up and thought he wasn’t breathing, she quickly summoned the Smiths. Even Billy was alarmed: “It scared me real bad, ’cause you couldn’t have stirred him with a stick.” For the second time, Dr. Kaplan came and revived him, and Elias Ghanem flew in to take care of him.
Alicia was shaken, and when she later thought Elvis had hemorrhaged—he only fell asleep with red Jell-O in his mouth—she couldn’t take it anymore, and began to distance herself from him.
Still, he would call her from the road. On one of her final visits to Graceland, she dropped by after attending a family dinner party for her sister’s birthday, and found him in a gloomy mood. “He wished he could go out on Saturday night like everyone else, and he couldn’t. He was just depressed about it. He liked you to tell him about places that you’d been, a club you’d go to. He liked you to describe in detail what it’s like to walk in there and have nobody really know you. We just talked, and then I went home about three o’clock in the morning.”
That June, she cut it off. “It was just too much for a young kid,” she said, “just the idea of Elvis Presley. Too much, too fast. Way too much to handle.” The last time she saw him, she went over about 4 A.M. and stayed until she went to work. “He looked sad . . . I read to him for a long time till he went to sleep.”
The pretty young bank teller would later sob in saying that she and Elvis had never been intimate, especially as he was enmeshed in his troubles with Ginger.
“She came over once, and he wouldn’t see her, so she left. She called a lot when . . . she’d know I was there. She would ring the phone off the hook.” Alicia could tell that Elvis cared about Ginger, but he told her “he felt like she was more or less after his money than anything else.”
Alicia, who had attended Memphis State, was a sweet and unsophisticated young woman with a set of impish dimples. From her high school picture, she seemed destined for little more than a future as a suburban wife and mother. But she had found her first trip to Vegas exhilarating, and after that, west Tennessee proved too dull for her. The pull of the neon soon claimed her, as she would move to the desert, become a blackjack dealer, and get caught up in a lifestyle she could never have imagined, eventually dying of “multiple drug toxicity,” combining three of the drugs—Valium, Placidyl, and Elavil—that made her recoil from Elvis.
Yet in the next two months, before any of that happened, Elvis would attempt to keep Alicia on the string. He planned to ask her to go on the August tour if Ginger backed out.
In the meantime, another young bank teller, Debbie Watts, took Alicia’s place. But Debbie, who also learned bad habits from Elvis—she would later go to prison for dealing methamphetamine—was merely a passing fancy. It was still Ginger Elvis wanted. At a stage when he could no longer summon beautiful young actresses, she was as close as he could get, and her refusal to cater to his whims only deepened his anxiety about aging.
When he went out on tour the third week of April, Ginger accompanied him, but it was obvious she tired of the schedule and that she wanted to go home. On April 29, when he played Duluth, Minnesota, he flew in her mother and sister, Rosemary, to help keep her happy.
His frustrations mounted, and everywhere he looked, someone he loved had his
hand out.
At the end of April, Elvis issued Priscilla a deed of trust to Graceland for $494,024.49, the amount still owed to her in the divorce settlement. In May, Dr. Nick, Joe Esposito, and an entrepreneur named Mike McMahon sued him over his failure to fund a racquetball franchise (Presley Center Courts), to which he believed he was only lending his name. Though the matter would soon be resolved, it threw him into deeper despair. That same month, he shot out his bedroom window at Graceland, and spent most of two and a half weeks sequestered upstairs. Meanwhile, his health continued to plummet.
On May 20, when he went back out on tour, his fourth of the year, he was so bloated he had to wear the same jumpsuit—another white one with a gold Aztec calendar design—for thirteen days straight. Backstage in Knoxville on the first night, a doctor reported “he was pale, swollen—he had no stamina.”
His mood was dark and despondent. Around this time, he told Jerry Schilling that he felt so bad and was so beleaguered with health problems that “I can’t wait for 1977 to be over.”
Larry Geller wondered why nobody at the top was trying to help him. “You could look at Elvis and see that there was a problem. I used to go to my room and literally cry. I couldn’t handle it.” Priscilla has said that after the divorce, she was so busy with Lisa Marie and building their new life that she didn’t realize what dreadful shape Elvis was in. Maybe nobody wanted to face what was really happening, she admits. But certainly the Colonel had to see it every night. Why hadn’t he done anything? On May 21, in Louisville, Larry gleaned a better understanding.
At the hotel, Elvis was barely able to sit up in bed that afternoon, and Larry noticed it took him more and more time to get ready for the show each night. About four o’clock, as Dr. Nick administered the drugs that would transform him from a sick and addled man to an energized performer, Larry watched television in the anteroom of the suite. Suddenly, there was a loud knock at the door. Larry jumped—it startled him—and then answered it to find the Colonel, his face twisted in anger, his wobbly body leaning on his cane. Larry was astonished. He’d never known the Colonel to come to Elvis’s room on tour.
“Where is he?” Parker thundered.
Larry said he would let Elvis know he was there. “No,” the Colonel said curtly, brushing Geller as he passed. “I’m going in.”
Parker opened the door to a devastating sight—Elvis, “in a collapsed state, comatose, not even truly conscious,” and moaning. Dr. Nick worked frantically to revive him, kneeling at his bedside, ducking the singer’s head into a champagne bucket filled with ice water.
Parker slammed the door behind him. For a moment, Larry’s heart raced. Then he felt relieved. Finally, the Colonel had seen Elvis at his worst. Surely now he would pull him off the road, take steps to get him help. Yet ninety seconds later, the manager roared out, “You listen to me!” Parker shouted at Larry, slicing the air with his cane. “The only thing that’s important is that he’s on that stage tonight! Nothing else matters!”
And then he was gone.
Larry stood in shock, horrified.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God!’ Why didn’t he wait for Elvis to come to and say, ‘Son, I’m taking over now. You are in no shape. We’ve got to get you to a hospital right now’? I can only surmise he acted out of stupidity and denial. But still, how could he be so callous? Where was his humanity?”
Through the years, fans have blamed Priscilla for not staging an intervention. How could she just stand by and watch Elvis kill himself? “People who ask that don’t know Elvis,” she has written. “Elvis would no more have responded to an intervention than a demand to give up singing. He never considered himself a drug addict. He refused to believe he had a problem. He would have undoubtedly laughed away any attempt at an intervention. There’s no one, including his father, who could have pulled that off.”
By now, audiences braced themselves for the worst. On May 22 in Landover, Maryland, Elvis walked off stage, tossing two microphones to the floor, and announcing he needed to answer “nature’s call.” (“God went to the toilet!” said Jackie Kahane. “Incredible.”) Soon, in Baltimore, he would fall onstage and then again disappear for half an hour. “At the finale,” Variety wrote, “there was no ovation, and patrons exited shaking their heads and speculating on what was wrong with him.”
One thing, of course, was Ginger. On May 26, in Binghamton, New York, they quarreled, as they often did on tour, and he sent her home, telling Larry she was still in communication with her ex-boyfriend, and that she also couldn’t seem to cut the apron strings. “He said, ‘I’ve got to teach her. When we get back after the concert, all she wants to do is get on the phone and talk to her mother. I want her with me.’ He started to have second and third thoughts about her.”
That afternoon, he came out of the bedroom with Dr. Nick and told the guys sitting around the suite’s living room that he and Ginger needed a rest from each other, and that while she was young, if she didn’t grow up and choose between him and her “whole damn family,” there definitely would be no wedding.
Kathy Westmoreland was summoned to stay with him the rest of the tour so he could fall asleep at night and not feel so isolated and alone. But the backup singer, who had always considered Elvis “a long-lost soul I had missed and found,” was so worried about him she could hardly sleep herself. Increasingly, he talked of death.
One night, he showed her a blue jumpsuit hanging on the wall. “He was going to have to wear it, and he said, ‘I’m going to look fat in that faggy little suit, but I’ll look good in my coffin.’ ” Suddenly, Kathy was unable to utter a word. “I knew that it was inevitable and could come at any moment. He told me that he didn’t want me to wear black at the funeral, but white.”
In mid-summer, on what was to be his final tour, CBS-TV shot a one-hour special, “Elvis in Concert,” in Omaha, Nebraska, on June 19, and in Rapid City, South Dakota, two days later. Ginger once again accompanied him, and on one of the nights, he playfully introduced her to the crowd: “I’d like you to say hello to my girlfriend, Ginger. ‘Ginger, stand up, honey.’ ” She stood briefly to applause. “ ‘Sit down, Ginger.’ That’s enough for her.”
The controversial special, which aired after Elvis’s death and in the opinion of many around Elvis, should never have been broadcast at all, revealed a legend colliding with myth. All cartoonish chins, gut and hair, Elvis was often short of breath as he stumbled through his lyrics (“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”), slurred his speech, and perspired like a man on fire. Embarrassed, he poked fun of himself, and while many fans could hardly believe the sad specter that had been their hero, at times, especially on “How Great Thou Art” and “Hurt,” he was still able to evoke glimmers of greatness.
“At the beginning of ‘Elvis in Concert,’ ” Todd Slaughter, president of the Official Elvis Presley Fan Club of Great Britain later said, “you see a very shaky Elvis maneuver his way down the steps of a plane, [and] then ‘cut.’ CBS left out the rest of the scene. I was at the end of the steps, being kept back by Colonel Parker, [who] eventually thrust me forward. What I remember most is the abrupt manner in which he prodded Elvis with his walking stick and said, ‘You give this [award] to him.’ I could tell Elvis was very ill. His eyes were bloodshot, his lip was bleeding, and it looked as if he couldn’t see too well.”
His last night of the tour fell on June 26, the Colonel’s birthday, in Indianapolis, where he again wore the Aztec suit, as he had the night before in Cincinnati. He was weary, though upbeat, and afterward on the plane, before the group broke up and went their separate ways, Elvis began giving out gifts, as was his custom at the end of a tour. Shirley, so thin as to appear “almost anorexic,” was surprised when he handed her $750.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Go buy yourself some chocolate shakes! You’re too darn skinny!”
She wrapped her small arms around him and held him tight. “Oh, Elvis,” she said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he an
swered, “and I know how much you love Joe.” Then he gave her a kiss.
He was to have six weeks off before the next flurry of shows, and while everyone was glad to have the rest, they threw around the casual banter of what they’d do in the interim before they all gathered again for the end of summer tour. Elvis had performances booked through August, and the general assumption was that he would work right up until the end of the year.
Lamar Fike, who worked the road with the Colonel advancing the dates, knew better. “We were on the airplane, on the ground, and Elvis walked off to accept a plaque from RCA. He was so tired. I said, ‘Boys, I’m going to give you one of my great speeches. He’ll never see the snow fly. I promise you.’ ”
Priscilla had her last conversation with him late in the summer. They talked frequently, as he conferred with her on almost everything, from what color to paint The Lisa Marie to the size of his belt buckle. (“I did say to him, ‘You really shouldn’t be wearing those jumpsuits anymore . . . it’s not looking good.’ ”) Elvis never seemed to have any sense of time, calling her at midnight or two A.M. in California, saying he had a song for her to hear, or a new book he wanted her to read. She complained about the middle-of-the-night calls, but she never refused a visit. She knew he was lonely and needed company.
During their final call, it was wildly apparent how different their lives were now. She was about to go on a safari in New Guinea, while Elvis could barely conceive of such an adventure, let alone allow himself to enjoy one.
The highpoint of their conversation was Lisa Marie’s upcoming visit to Memphis, which was to start July 31. But Elvis spoke obsessively to Priscilla about Red, Sonny, and Dave Hebler’s book, “Elvis: What Happened?,” which was scheduled to be published on August 4. Elvis feared it would be the end of him as a performer, he said.
“He told me he was thinking of changing fields—becoming a movie or record producer. I don’t know if he really would have done it—he was always such a fantasizer—but he was grasping for something.”