Baby, Let's Play House

by Alanna Nash

  Two weeks before Lisa Marie arrived, Elvis did his best to corral Ginger, who continued to come and go. On July 13, he gave her a Triumph sports car, and on August 6, he made a trip to the home of her mother. There he sang hymns “and some of the old songs” at the piano. But his real reason for going was to check out the progress of the landscaping of her home and the installment of a swimming pool, which he had agreed to finance, as well as pay off Jo’s mortgage. Then in the early hours of August 8, he rented out Libertyland, the renamed Fairgrounds, as a treat for Lisa Marie and Ginger’s niece, Amber. Without the old group, the fairgrounds held little allure for him anymore. He started to back out at one point, but Ginger convinced him the kids would be too disappointed.

  He was due to start touring again August 17, and he made the most of his last days of leisure, screening movies, and spending time with Lisa. He had his own chair in her bedroom, where he’d sit, watch her TV, and smoke cigars. She was nine now, old enough to recognize that things were not all right with her daddy.

  “When I stayed at Graceland, I could see he was struggling. I could feel that he was very sad. He’d come into my room walking so unsteadily that sometimes he’d start to fall and I’d have to catch him.”

  As the hours dwindled down, he got on the phone with Kathy Westmoreland. “I’m so tired,” he told her. “I don’t want to go on this trip.” But he had to, he said. “The Colonel owes $8 million.”

  On the evening of August 15, 1977, Elvis slipped out of his blue nylon lounging pajamas, and with Billy’s help, changed into a white silk shirt, a black sweat suit which boasted a Drug Enforcement Agency patch on the jacket, and a pair of short black patent boots. He reached down to zip up the sides, and found that he couldn’t—his ankles were too puffy.

  At 10:30 P.M., after a night of motorcycle riding, Elvis stuffed two .45 automatic pistols in the waistband of his pants. Then he donned his blue-tinted, chrome sunglasses and slid behind the wheel of the Stutz. With Ginger beside him, and Billy and Jo in the backseat, Elvis steered his way to the East Memphis office of his dentist, Lester Hofman. A crown on Elvis’s back tooth seemed loose, and he wanted to tend to it before he left the next evening for Portland, Maine, the first stop of his twelve-day tour.

  Around midnight, when the foursome returned to Graceland, Elvis and Ginger went upstairs, and the Smiths retired to their trailer. By now, Elvis had managed to gear himself up, and sometime around 2 A.M., he spoke with Larry, who reported he was “in a very good mood, looking forward to the tour, and making plans for the future.”

  Ginger would later echo that (“He had earlier told me that he had been off too long”), and report that after they returned from the dentist, they sat in Lisa Marie’s bedroom, where they had met the previous November. They discussed their wedding then, planning a Christmas ceremony, and Elvis promised he would announce the engagement at his August 27 concert in Memphis. “He and Ginger had wonderful plans,” her mother would say.

  Around 4 A.M., Elvis went looking for Lisa, who was supposed to be asleep. “He found me,” she remembers, “and said, ‘Go to bed.’ I said, ‘Okay,’ and I think he kissed me goodnight and I ran off.”

  Later, he went in her room to tuck her in, and kissed her again.

  Afterward, he still felt frisky enough for a game of racquetball, and phoned Billy and Jo to join him and Ginger. As they went out the back door and down the concrete walkway to the racquetball building, a light rain began to slicken their path.

  “Ain’t no problem. I’ll take care of it,” Elvis said, and put out his hands as if to stop it. Amazingly, Billy says, the rain let up. “See, I told you,” Elvis boasted. “If you’ve got a little faith, you can stop the rain.”

  Out on the court, they’d barely gotten into it when Elvis found he didn’t have as much energy as he’d thought. He’d been on a Jell-O and liquid protein diet for several days, the latest in a series of desperate attempts to fit into his stage costumes, and he’d had no real food in the last twenty-four hours.

  The couples cut up more than they concentrated on their game, and mostly swatted each other with the ball. After ten minutes, they took a break, then returned to the court. But they quit for good when Elvis misjudged a serve and hit himself hard in the shin with his racquet.

  He limped into the lounge then, Billy teasing him, and fixed himself a glass of ice water. Then he moved to the piano and began singing softly, ending with “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

  Ginger estimates it was about 6 A.M. when they went upstairs in the house, where Billy washed and dried his cousin’s hair. Elvis was particular about who saw it up close, as his hair was now as white as his father’s, and according to Larry, half an inch of growth poked out from under his last color job.

  As they talked, Elvis returned to his constant fixation, Elvis, What Happened? First he yelled wildly about the betrayal of his friends, how good he’d been to their families, and how they’d now hurt his own. Then his mood dampened, and he rehearsed a speech he planned to give from the stage if his fans turned on him in concert. “They’ve never beat me before,” he said, “and they won’t beat me now.” Billy knew what he meant: “Even if I have to get up there and admit to everything.”

  Now he cried pitifully, shaking. Billy petted him, cooed baby talk to him. “It’s okay,” Billy soothed. “It’s going to be all right.” As Billy went out the door, Elvis collected himself again. “Billy . . . son . . . this is going to be my best tour ever.”

  At 7:45 A.M., Rick Stanley brought Elvis his second “attack,” or yellow envelope of sleeping pills. He had already brought the first about 6:30 as the sun rose. Four hours earlier, Elvis sent his twenty-three-year-old stepbrother to Baptist Memorial Hospital’s twenty-four-hour pharmacy to pick up six Dilaudid tablets. Dr. Nick had prescribed them after Elvis complained of tooth pain. Dr. Hofman, the dentist, had given him codeine, Elvis said, but it wasn’t helping him. At some point, Pauline Nicholson, a cook and maid at Graceland for fourteen years, asked Elvis if he wanted anything to eat, but he declined, saying he wasn’t hungry.

  Rick found Elvis holding the bodyguard book, and once again, Elvis was in a state of agitation. “How is Lisa Marie gonna feel about her daddy?” he blurted out, his voice heightened, full of despair. He asked Rick to pray with him, and together they got down on their knees.

  “God, forgive me for my sins,” Elvis pleaded. “Let the people who read this book have compassion and understanding of the things that I have done. Amen.”

  Rick would later say that after he and Elvis prayed together, he went downstairs and got high, zoning out. That left fifty-three-year-old Aunt Delta to deliver the third packet around 9 A.M., and to call over for more medication when Elvis complained he couldn’t settle down. Nurse Tish Henley reportedly sent over two Valmids and a Placidyl placebo.

  Sometime around 8 A.M., Elvis climbed in bed with Ginger, who hated seeing her aging boyfriend once more under the influence. Over time, though, she had come to realize that “the core problem Elvis had was what most of us take for granted—the ability to simply lie down, close our eyes, and go to sleep at night.” Dr. Nick, knowing that Elvis could rest only two or three hours before he’d pop up wide awake, had tried to get him to go to a sleep clinic in Arkansas. But his patient had refused, and asked instead for more sedatives.

  Joe Esposito thought Ginger “didn’t know Elvis that well . . . she saw him in a period of time when he was drugged out,” and certainly she was in no position to stage an intervention. Such confrontations were not commonly done outside the medical community in the late 1970s, and Elvis had already rebuffed Drs. Knott and Fink. But Ginger often questioned Elvis’s medication use, she would say later, and tried to get him to not take the packets that Dr. Nick prescribed and Tish Henley doled out like clockwork. It was, in fact, the reason for some of their arguments.

  “Although I asked him to try not to use the medication that I thought he did not need, and there were times that he didn’t, I truly belie
ved that in time I would be able to convince him.”

  However, on the morning of August 16, Ginger had no opportunity to reason with him because she was heavily medicated herself. She had menstrual cramps, and about 6:30, Elvis had called Tish Henley and asked her to bring up something so Ginger could sleep. The beauty queen would later say she took Quaalude tablets, but the nurse, who kept her drugs in an overnight bag under lock and key in her trailer, would insist she sent up one Dilaudid pill, though the opiate was far more powerful than anything Ginger could have needed for menstrual pain.

  Whichever drug it was, Ginger was unused to taking it, and it plunged her into a deep sleep. Still, she roused when Elvis came to bed, and then again about 9:30 when Elvis got up, too keyed up to sleep, and preoccupied with the tour and the fan reaction to the bodyguard book.

  “Precious,” he said, “I’m going to go in the bathroom and read for a while.”

  “Okay,” she murmured, “but don’t fall asleep.”

  “Don’t worry,” he called back. “I won’t.”

  Behind the bathroom door, Elvis paged through a book. But it was not The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus, as is usually reported, but either a slim volume of pornography—a combination of sex and astrology with graphic drawings, as one investigator described it—or as Ginger remembers, the more high-minded Sex and Psychic Energy, by Betty Bethards. Then he waited for the pills to take effect, at some point calling Marian Cocke to say he had four tickets for her for his August 27 show.

  As Elvis’s day was winding down in Memphis, the Colonel’s was already well along in Portland. At the Dunfey Sheraton, Parker held court to oversee every detail of Elvis’s two-day engagement, and barked orders at promoter Tom Hulett, Lamar Fike, RCA’s George Parkhill, and Tom Diskin.

  Things were still quiet at Graceland, and just before noon, Billy walked over to the house and spoke with Al Strada, who was packing Elvis’s wardrobe cases. Billy asked if anyone had seen the boss. Al said no, that Elvis had left orders with David Stanley that he wasn’t to be awakened until four P.M. under any circumstances. Billy knew that Ginger didn’t watch Elvis like Linda did, and wondered aloud if anyone had checked on him. For a moment, he started up the stairs. “No,” he thought. “If they ain’t heard from him, God, let him rest. He needs it.”

  Finally, at 2:20 P.M., Ginger turned over in Elvis’s huge bed and found it empty. Had he never come back to sleep? She noticed his reading light was still on, and thought it peculiar. Ginger knocked on the bathroom door.

  “Elvis?”

  There was no answer, and so she turned the knob. “That’s when I saw him in there,” she said days later.

  Elvis was slumped on the floor, angled slightly to the right. He was on his knees, his hands beneath his face, in a near praying position. His pajama bottoms bunched at his feet. Elvis had seemed to fall off the toilet. But why was he twisted into such a grotesque form? And why hadn’t he answered? He laid so still, so unnaturally still.

  Now Ginger bent down to touch him. He was cold, his swollen face buried in the red shag carpet, his tongue, nearly bitten in half, protruding from clenched teeth, his beautiful skin now mottled purple-black. Elvis’s death had not been quick. Nor had it been painless. But if Elvis had called out, Ginger likely would not have heard him, so deep was her drugged sleep.

  At first, she thought he was just unconscious, that he had suffered a seizure of some kind, and had fallen.

  “I slapped him a few times and it was like he breathed once when I turned his head.” She forced open a shuttered eye. A cloudy blue pupil stared at things that Ginger could not see. She tried to move him, and could not.

  Ginger was in a state of shock, and tried to stave off thoughts of the worst. “I didn’t want to think he was dead. God wouldn’t want to take him so soon.” And so she threw off thoughts of the obvious: Elvis Presley had died of polypharmacy in the bathroom at Graceland at the age of forty-two.

  Now a frightened Ginger picked up the phone, which rang in the kitchen. Nancy Rooks, the afternoon maid, took the call. Breathless, Ginger asked, “Who’s on duty?”

  “Al is here,” Nancy answered, and passed the phone to the bodyguard. “Al, come upstairs!” Ginger cried. “I need you! Elvis has fainted!” Al rushed upstairs, took one look, and with fear in his voice, called down for Joe. Elvis’s old army buddy bounded up the stairs and turned the body over. It was stiff with rigor mortis, though Joe was able to stretch it out a bit and pound on Elvis’s chest to try to get him breathing.

  Joe already knew the awful truth—Elvis had crawled several feet and vomited before dying—but he didn’t want Ginger to see any more, and sent her into the other room. Then he called for an ambulance, and got Dr. Nick on the phone and mumbled something about a heart attack. With the ambulance screaming through Whitehaven, Joe called down to Vernon’s office.

  Suddenly, the upstairs was a mass of people. Charlie was crying and begging Elvis not to die, and Vernon, still recuperating from his own heart attack only months earlier, collapsed on the floor, moaning, “Don’t go, son! You’re going to be all right!” Now Lisa Marie peered wide-eyed into the scene, and Joe yelled at Ginger: “Get her out of here, quick!” Eighty-eight-year-old Minnie Mae consoled her, all the while wondering how Elvis could die before his own grandmother.

  “What happened to him?” asked Ulysses Jones, one of the emergency medical techs. Al blurted out the truth. “We think he OD’d.”

  Dr. Nick attended him all the way to the hospital, performing CPR and screaming “Breathe for me!” at a man who was long past hearing. At Baptist Memorial, the Harvey Team attempted every heroic measure, and then, to no few tears, finally gave up. At the end, Marion Cocke, who had been paged to the emergency room, wiped off the once handsome face and kissed Elvis’s cheek.

  Dr. Nick, his skin ashen, shuffled into the private waiting room where Joe sat with Charlie, Al, Billy, and David Stanley. “He’s gone,” he said, his voice breaking. “He’s no longer here.”

  The men cried shamelessly and held on to each other as Dr. Nick asked Maurice Elliott, the hospital spokesman, not to make the announcement until he’d informed Vernon. He worried that the old man’s heart might not be able to take the shock, and immediately left for Graceland to perform the grim duty, riding back in the same ambulance that had taken Elvis away.

  Jo Smith was there when the doctor walked up to Vernon and shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, his face a mask of grief. Suddenly, as Jo remembered, the whole world “was at a standstill.”

  Ginger, too, was struck with “an overwhelming sense of sadness, disbelief, and feeling as if Graceland had also died.” But Elvis’s fans would cut her no slack, forever branding her as the woman who had not saved him, and despising her mother, Jo, who ultimately filed and won a lawsuit against the estate to pay the mortgage on her home as Elvis had promised.

  Later that afternoon, Vernon would leave the chaos inside the house and stand on the steps of Graceland to tell the world, “My son is dead.” Already suspecting that Elvis would not be coming home, he had tried to prepare Lisa Marie. But the child was confused, and strangely mimicked the reactions of the media. “She stood there and put her hands on her hips like an adult,” reports Larry Geller. “She said, “I just can’t believe it! Elvis Presley is dead!’ ”

  Yet when Sam Thompson got his sister, Linda, on the line, the child, standing nearby, was simply Elvis’s daughter. Sam gave her the receiver. “It’s Lisa,” the small voice spoke into the phone. Linda cooed. “I know who it is, you goobernickel.” Then came the words that she had dreaded for so long: “Linda,” Lisa said, “Daddy’s dead.”

  Before he left the hospital, Joe asked Maurice Elliott for some privacy, and the public relations man led him into a conference room off the ER. There, Joe called the Colonel in Portland. George Parkhill answered, and handed the phone to the big man.

  “I have something terrible to tell you,” Joe began, his voice wavering.

  In the
moments before the word went out on radio, television, and teletype wire, the women who knew Elvis best heard the news.

  In Los Angeles, Priscilla was meeting her sister, Michelle, for lunch on Melrose Avenue. “I left the house knowing something was wrong,” Priscilla would remember. “The air was wrong. The sky was wrong. Something was putting me on edge.” She saw Michelle’s face, and her stomach tightened.

  “A call came in from Memphis,” Michelle started.

  “This big shock went through me,” Priscilla would say. Lisa was in Memphis, so she was sure something bad had happened to her.

  No, Michelle said. “It’s Elvis. They have him in the hospital.”

  When Priscilla got home, she could hear the phone ringing from her front step. “I couldn’t get my key in the door fast enough.”

  It was Joe’s voice, delivering the message she never wanted to hear. Suddenly, time stopped. And then, she later said, “The sun went out.”

  Next Joe called Shirley. “He just said, ‘Elvis is dead.’ I went, ‘That’s not a funny joke, Joe.’ Then he started to cry. I had never heard Joe cry, so I knew it was no joke. I was out in the alley behind our apartment, just crunched over crying. I scratched my nails against the wall, and just followed it from the top to the bottom.”

  Joe asked Shirley to help take care of some of the travel arrangements, and to call Ann-Margret. She had opened at the Las Vegas Hilton the night before, and wondered why Elvis’s guitar-shaped flower arrangement hadn’t arrived. He’d never missed an opening in ten years, and the actress-singer was worried. The switchboard operator told Shirley that the Smiths had a block on their phone. “Well, you need to go through it,” Shirley said. “This is an emergency.”

  Roger picked up, and Shirley told him that Joe just called with the dreadful news. Roger turned to his wife and said simply, “It’s Shirley.” Then all Shirley heard was screaming in the background.