Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  “Goodbye, darling,” he wailed, “goodbye. I love you so much. You know how much I lived my whole life for you.” It took four men to pull Elvis out to the limousine for his departure. Overcome, Elvis cried out again, “Oh, God! Everything I have is gone.” In truth, of course, he had not lived his whole life just for her. He would not give up one iota of his career nor even a part of his two-week vacation on the Gulf Coast beach to stay with her.

  Early that evening, Dixie drove down to Graceland to leave word at the gate that she could not come over to visit that night but would come the next day. She planned to leave her message at the gate and not go in. She was in shorts and her hair was up in curlers. Dixie parked at the gate and delivered her message to the guard, who called up to the house. She got in her car to leave, but the motor would not start. While she was sitting in the stalled car, one of Elvis’s cousins came and said he was waiting for her at the house. Elvis met her at the door. He had shooed all the other guests away. He had the maid bring lemonade for them. They sat in the living room and talked, not a sound coming from the crowd of mourners who had disappeared toward the back of the house.

  They talked about Gladys and their lives together. Elvis told about one of his backup singers who had given up the sin-filled world of show business to devote his life to the Lord. Dixie suggested that he could do the same. Elvis said no, it was too late. They went into the music room. Elvis played the piano and sang for her. One song was “I’m Walking Behind You on Your Wedding Day.”

  The next evening, “all dressed up,” Dixie came and paid her respects to the whole family.

  Europe

  Elvis went to Europe on the USS Randall in September 1958. Another draftee, Charlie Hodge, was on the same ship. Charlie was a gospel singer who had met Elvis in 1955 backstage at Ellis Auditorium during one of those all-night sings that he so loved. Charlie sang with a gospel quartet, the Foggy River Boys. Short, animated, and eager to entertain, he often played the part of the country clown, joking and telling humorous stories. Charlie arranged to bunk just above Elvis during the voyage, and together they organized entertainment for the troops. Elvis only played the piano. He was never introduced, and he never spoke. Charlie later wrote a book, Me ’n Elvis, in which he said he comforted Elvis at night when he cried over the loss of his mother. He claimed he could hear Elvis thinking about his mother in his bunk even when Elvis was lying there silent.

  Charlie clearly loved Elvis. Often he was jealous of the attention that Elvis gave to other guys, and sometimes he went away for a while. But always he came back. He was the only person from whom Elvis ever took anything resembling singing lessons. For all his natural talent, Elvis never had professional instruction in how to use his voice. Charlie had attended the Stamps-Baxter School of Music in Dallas, Texas. He taught Elvis to use some of the techniques he had learned. Toward the end of Elvis’s life, when he was so weak he could no longer sustain certain notes, Charlie, who played rhythm guitar behind him, said that he sang them for him, blending in so smoothly that no one knew that it was Charlie, not Elvis, whom they heard. At least in those moments, Charlie was one with Elvis for the whole world to see. For twenty years, Charlie lived much of his life in Elvis’s very household, as he later proudly declared. He never married, and in the final years he had a room in one of the buildings behind the mansion at Graceland.

  The Elvisian Universe

  In Germany, after the ship docked in Bremerhaven, the soldiers mounted a train that took them south. Elvis soon set up a household in Bad Nauheim, close to the army base on which he was stationed. This began the curious ménage in which Elvis would live, with variations, for the rest of his life. Gladys was gone, and Elvis took her place at the center of the Presley home. He was the sun, and everyone else became planets and moons whose movements were determined by his gravity. Yet Elvis, without Gladys, was not a whole person. There was no steady core, no center of being, only fragments trapped somewhere in that beautiful voice and body that so many people adored. It was as if the sun itself—Elvis—was never at rest in the heavens, but rather always shifting about. After the demise of Gladys, in the Elvisian universe nothing was fixed, nothing was certain.

  Elvis struggled earnestly and ceaselessly to pull himself together after his mother died. In doing so, he surrounded himself with certain chosen persons whom he required to perform for him in certain ways. All together, he used these people to wall away the outside world and create a protected space within which he lived and sought to define himself. In effect, he shaped three institutions in which many individuals came and went, but the institutions continued. Each of the three was already in his life in embryonic form before Gladys died. The first included certain family and clan members, Smiths and Presleys, that he chose to attach to himself. The second consisted of “the boys,” “the guys,” the men who eventually came to sometimes boast the title of “the Memphis Mafia.” Finally, there were the girls who shared his bed.

  The Presley and Smith families had come together in East Tupelo in the 1920s and 1930s when they, like millions of other rural Southerners, fled the depressed countryside. Some moved as families into Tupelo proper, and during and after World War II over to Memphis. When Elvis moved into Graceland, he virtually turned it into a Presley-Smith compound, a safe house, surrounded by walls and guards. While he was in the army, he left it intact, like a family bastion, under the guard and charge of his relatives. When he went to Germany, he took his father and his grandmother with him. Indeed, they flew in only three days after he debarked from the USS Randall in Bremerhaven, a port on the North Sea, on October 1, 1958. Had Gladys lived, he would have brought her to Germany too, and the house in Bad Nauheim would have been her home, her Graceland in Germany.

  Elvis also brought two of his young men, Red West and Lamar Fike, into his household in Germany. For the rest of his life, “the boys” would always be with him, still called “the boys” when they were in their thirties, before they finally sometimes rose to the dubious dignity of being called “the guys.” Almost all were on his payroll, and some he simply allowed to attach themselves to him. Strenuous denials to the contrary, most would hardly have given him the time of day were it not for his fame, his excessively generous gifts, and the leftover girls. Elvis knew this, and it pained him greatly to weigh the real extent and nature of his isolation. His greatest fear, he often confessed, was that his fans would desert him, he would have no money, and he would be alone.

  Eventually he delighted in dubbing his guys “the Memphis Mafia,” a term coined by a Las Vegas journalist. It suggested that they were “blood brothers,” sworn to lifelong loyalty, secrecy, and whatever violence was necessary to protect “the boss” and promote his interests. Elvis liked that and he needed that. On one occasion he decided to dress the guys in identical dark mohair suits and sunglasses, and, later, to strike a medallion they all conspicuously displayed. The medallion featured a streak of jagged lightning and the letters TCB, standing for “Taking Care of Business.” The idea of the lightning symbol might have been borrowed from the insignia of the Third Armored Division, the men who in 1944 and 1945 courageously faced the superior armor of the Panzer Corps and drove into Germany. As a soldier, Elvis belonged to the Third Armored Division, though his primary duty was to drive not a tank but the jeep in which his sergeant rode.

  “Taking care of business” meant whatever business Elvis happened to have in mind at the moment—be it having a party in Las Vegas, Hawaii, or Colorado, a night at the movies, the amusement park, or the skating rink in Memphis, or protecting his body or his psyche from attack, real or imagined. “Mafia” suggested that his guys were capable of forceful, violent, and, if Elvis wanted, even illegal action.

  Elvis’s insistence that his guys were a “Mafia” worked directly to counter his fear of desertion. Their loyalty was to him above all others. He would even come before their wives, lovers, girlfriends, and children. Frequently, Elvis tested their dedication by making sudden, capricious, and
outrageous demands upon them. For instance, after his engagement in Las Vegas was over he might decide to keep them there doing nothing until only hours before Christmas while their families and friends waited in Memphis with Christmas trees lit and presents wrapped, or suddenly whisk them away to Palm Springs on the spur of the moment, thus trashing any other plans the families might have. But nothing they did was ever enough to relieve his fears of desertion. Recurrently, he had evidence that some among those closest to him would betray him, just as he always feared.

  “The boys”—“the Memphis Mafia,” “the guys”—became an institution that persisted even as a dozen or so individuals came and went. Other people both in and out of the entertainment industry looked upon the Elvis entourage and its behavior as a strange phenomenon. For many, it seemed some sort of irritating hangover from an early and misguided adolescence, a view that gained credence from the guys’ proclivity for low-level practical jokes and mock combat—water fights, cream-pie fights, roller-rink fights, fireworks wars in which they threw firecrackers and shot roman candles at each other, often with painful effect, and enthusiastic football games in which the boys dashed about and called excitedly to each other as the ball spun through the air. Elvis was always the quarterback on his team, and his team always won.

  Jerry Leiber, coauthor along with Mike Stoller of “Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and many other Elvis hits, remembered one occasion at a studio in Hollywood when Elvis got control of the public address system and pretended to be an airline pilot. “This is your captain speaking,” Elvis began, and continued with what he thought was a clever spiel. The guys thought this was hilarious.

  Also, they thought it was great fun when they installed a two-way mirror in Elvis’s house on Perugia Way in Bel Air, one of the houses in which he lived during his early movie years. This “peeping Tom” device enabled them to observe one—or perhaps two—of the guys having sex with one of the always available girls. By their own standards, they improved upon the idea in Elvis’s next house on Bellagio Road. This time they put a two-way, five-foot-square mirror in the cabana by the swimming pool where the girls would change into their swimsuits. In order to arrive at the observation point, the guys had to crawl stealthily under a partition, a challenge they gleefully accepted as a part of this game. When Elvis was with the rising movie star Ann-Margret, they attempted to slide thin mirrors under his bedroom door so as to get a look at the highly talented, marvelously beautiful star unclothed and perhaps engaged in sexual exercises with the boss. Such “hijinks,” as Elvis’s biographer Peter Guralnick called their various amusements, were ordinary for the Elvis entourage.

  Individual Mafiosos could be very mannerly, but together they were at best a menace to ordinary civility, and at worst like playground bullies insulting, intimidating, and physically hazardous to those unfortunate enough to be around them. The sum of their badness, it seems, was greater than its parts. The glue that held it all together, was, of course, Elvis himself.

  Elvis, and Elvis alone, chose each particular member and created the Mafia. It was his monster, created to devour the monsters that would devour him. Elvis molded their collective character, set their agendas, and gave them whatever power they had as a group. Their central role in life was to please him. Most of all, he demanded that they simply be there whenever he wanted them there.

  The guys therefore had two jobs. One job was to entertain Elvis, to perform for him wherever he was and at any time, day or night, just as he entertained his audiences. The other job was whatever.

  Another job, no less vital, was to manifest visibly and palpably the extreme anger and rebelliousness that Elvis felt but dared not show publicly. For example, hijinks on the set were a way for Elvis to express his unhappiness with how the movie people were misusing what he considered to be his great talent as an actor. As he became increasingly unhappy, the Mafia became increasingly violent. They had the numbers, the muscle, the size, the will, and even an eagerness to intimidate. They cultivated the look, manner, and reputation of men who enjoyed beating people up. Often enough the violence was real, and the police looked the other way. In time, they would involve Elvis in lawsuits, not just for black eyes and bloody noses but for smashed teeth, broken bones, and at least one alleged concussion. Elvis’s gang was decidedly juvenile, but it was also dangerous.

  In time, each guy had some specific duty—bodyguard, managing food, wardrobes, housing, transportation, and entertainment—but they spent most of their time lounging around waiting to see what Elvis wanted them to do next. They joined in his games with unbridled enthusiasm, glared at his enemies, laughed at his jokes as if on cue, and called him “boss.” Elvis so loved that title that he had a sign made for his desk in the office next to his bedroom in Graceland that read elvis presley—the boss.

  Occasionally, their mission astounded observers. For example, on location in Florida in 1961 to make the movie Follow That Dream, his director was having difficulty understanding Elvis’s psyche. He thought he might get to know Elvis better and thus improve his performance by inviting him over for dinner. The Elvis camp was thrown into great consternation. Elvis did not accept dinner invitations. What would he say at the dinner table with intelligent, educated, and articulate people all around him? How would he know which fork or spoon to use? Finally, the reply came to the host that Elvis would come, but only if the guys were invited too.

  The Memphis Mafia gave Elvis a sense of control over a part of his life, be that part ever so tiny. Seldom, almost never, did he venture out of that carefully constructed universe alone, and within it he monitored each person closely not only for behavior but also for attitude. At Graceland, he had surveillance cameras that fed a screen in his bedroom. His guys discovered that he sometimes listened silent and unseen at the top of the stairs to their conversations downstairs. When two of them talked privately within his sight but out of his hearing, he demanded to know what they were talking about. One time, Marty Lacker was in the swimming pool with Sonny West. When Elvis yelled out, “What are you guys talking about?” Marty said, “Nothing.” Elvis replied, “No, dammit, what are you talking about?” Marty then gave him an answer that Elvis liked. Elvis kept them constantly on edge and at war with one another by specially favoring one person over others with his attention, or lavishing gifts on one and not the others.

  Ironically, Elvis’s own worst and most calculated cruelties were directed against individuals among the guys. In effect, he used members of the gang as whipping boys. Lamar Fike was a favorite target. Slightly younger than Elvis, Lamar weighed three hundred pounds and by his own description was “a character.” He was also very bright and quickly articulate. As a child, he lived in Cleveland, Mississippi, with his Jewish mother and gentile father. In that small town in the Mississippi Delta, they were Presbyterians, but when they moved to Memphis, where his father became a relatively well-paid farm equipment salesman, his mom decided to join the elite St. John’s Episcopal Church.

  Lamar loved singing in the church choir. In fact, he loved anything that suggested show business. After his father died, he and his mother moved to Texas. Lamar did not last through his first semester at Texas Christian University and soon was back in Memphis. He dabbled in radio, flashed wads of money to get the attention of local radio celebrities, and got to know George Klein and Cliff Gleaves, both disc jockeys and close friends of Elvis. Through them, he met Elvis, and Elvis liked him right away.

  Returning to Texas, Lamar lied himself into a job as a disc jockey, but soon found it too taxing—all those switches, records to find, play, and restore to their proper places, schedules to keep, entries in logs to make, and rules and regulations. One day, he was on the job alone in the radio station. He put a long-play record on the air, locked up the station, got into his car, and left. Listening to the station on his car radio as he drove away from town, he heard the click—click—click of the needle on the circling record in the deserted studio in the locked building. Lamar drove to Hollywoo
d and straight to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where he knew Elvis and the guys were staying. He joined up with Elvis and stayed with him for the next five years—one year in the movies, two years in the army in Europe, and another two years in the movies.

  At Elvis parties, because of a prejudice against sex with full-bodied men, Lamar found himself at the back of the line in the competition for leftover girls. He fought valiantly to survive emotionally in the swirling flood of feminine beauty and abundant sex, but Elvis was no help in the struggle. In Hollywood, Lamar fell in love with one of Elvis’s lovers, the star Natalie Wood. When Lamar asked Elvis what she was like sexually, Elvis cruelly crushed his romantic fantasy by telling him that Natalie was deficient in feminine hygiene. Rather sadly, it usually fell to Lamar to drive the Elvis girl (or girls) of the evening home in the wee hours of the morning after Elvis had finished with her.

  Lamar’s love life might have sometimes languished, but he was not at all a pitiful creature. He was saved by a razor-sharp mind, a Falstaffian demeanor, and a truly amazing—given this maelstrom of fantasies—grasp of realities and absurdities. He was quick and accurate in his judgments about individual character and personal relations, and he was sometimes wickedly and acidly articulate. Of all the guys, including Elvis, he was probably the quickest of mind, and he was not slow in putting his thoughts into cutting language.