Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  Elvis’s jeweler, Lowell G. Hays, later told the story behind the ring. About 1:00 a.m. on the night of the engagement Elvis called him at home. He wanted an engagement ring with a giant diamond for Ginger, and he wanted it that night. Lowell said that he did not have such a diamond in his store but would get one the next day. Elvis, as usual, said now or never. The jeweler devised a creative solution. He reset the 111∕2-carat diamond that Elvis had in his own TCB (“Taking Care of Business”) ring to produce the $50,000 piece. Nesting the ring in a green velvet box, he delivered it to Graceland before sunrise.

  Elvis was so pleased with Lowell Hays’s work that he gave him a new Mark V Lincoln Continental as a bonus. He also gave him an extraordinarily personal gift, his own highly treasured paperback book on the meaning of numbers. “It was as well read as any book I ever saw,” the jeweler recalled. “It was obvious he had thumbed through it time and again for hours on end.” Lowell found out something about himself that he never knew before. He was a four and Elvis was an eight. Hopefully he never looked up the Cantonese meaning of a four, or he would have discovered that he was thought to be “unlucky.” Elvis’s eight, on the other hand, indicates “sudden fortune” and “prosperity.”

  The Wedding Plan

  After Elvis’s demise, Ginger told a detailed fantastic yet convincing story about how Elvis envisioned their marriage ceremony. It would be presided over by a justice of the United States Supreme Court rather than a minister of the Gospel. Honored guests would include FBI and federal narcotics agents and members of police departments from all across the nation. Unlike his wedding to Priscilla, which was not announced in advance at all, this one would be announced well beforehand to allow Elvis to milk the event fully for favorable publicity. One can almost see Elvis’s mind working out the scenario, glorious in itself but also the solution to his problem with the bodyguard book. All those policemen in attendance at his wedding and a Supreme Court justice presiding would more than counterweigh slanderous tabloid stories about how he was a violent and drugged-out man who considered himself above the law. In consenting to preside over the marriage ceremony, a judge of the highest court in the nation would, in effect, declare him innocent of all charges.

  Elvis’s second marriage would be his own creation. He did not need the Colonel. Regardless of what he said publicly about their relationship, Elvis had long been bitter about the restraints that he felt Colonel Parker had placed upon his artistic creativity. He was not allowed to take a truly dramatic role for a movie comeback and enjoy a brilliant film career as had Frank Sinatra. Barbra Streisand had offered him a great role in A Star Is Born, and the Colonel had turned it down. Parker continued to keep him on a short leash. He would hardly even talk about a European tour, or one in Japan or Australia. Even as he passed into middle age, the Colonel continued to refer to him as his “boy,” and he managed him accordingly.

  Since the late 1960s, Elvis had wanted to fire the Colonel, but Parker had bound him hand and foot financially. Elvis made millions, but he had no millions to buy Tom Parker out. If he fired the Colonel he would essentially be broke. More recently, Parker had added insult to injury. There was a rumor, almost certainly true and probably deliberately leaked by the Colonel himself, that he was thinking of selling his management contract with Elvis. “Elvis was a lot of trouble,” he was saying. In April or May 1977, he did tell Sam Thompson, Linda’s brother and one of the bodyguards, that he intended to sell Elvis’s contract. Now Elvis was going to take charge of his own life. To hell with the Colonel.

  He would choose the woman he would marry, really marry, and his brilliant management of his image in these proceedings would put the Colonel’s management of his previous marriage in the shade. His marriage would save his image and career. Besides, he loved Ginger and wanted her by his side. He had courted her and her family assiduously, proposed to her on bended knee, and she had accepted. He was a romantic of the highest order, not a pervert or a womanizer. He would marry her and have children, especially, he hoped, a son.

  Already his fans loved Ginger. He had her stand up in the Showroom of the Hilton and had the spotlight shine on her. He put on his usual show. “Turn around,” he commanded. The audience had applauded with sincere warmth. Ginger began to speculate about her relationship to Elvis. “Maybe that’s why I was put on Earth. If I could make Elvis happy, I would have served my purpose.”

  The Trouble with Ginger

  The real trouble with Elvis’s plan for a new life with Ginger came from Ginger herself. It turned out that she was not as pliable as one might think on first impression. She had a mind and a will of her own, and she acted accordingly.

  When Elvis set out on his first tour of 1977 on February 12, he insisted that Ginger come with him. He made the most of Ginger’s presence on the tour. It was the usual routine that he relished so much. She would be publicly introduced as his girlfriend, the very image of love fulfilled. Affecting alarm, Elvis would command, “Sit down. You’re hogging the spotlight.” The fans loved this charming play. They melted into the romance; they were a part of it. The King had found his Princess. Elvis fans had come to yearn for Elvis’s remarriage. Ginger later said that “they always would come up to me and say, ‘You’re what he’s searched for a long time.’ ” They wanted him to find a girl to marry and have children with her.

  Ginger was very young and bewildered by the bizarre world she had tumbled into. For starters, her fiancé was a generation older than she. He had experienced a life hardly imaginable for a girl who had grown up in post-Depression, postwar, prosperous Memphis. The heavy drugs all around, the guys, the tensions, and, most of all, the seclusion she had to endure to be with him taxed her severely.

  Understandably, she began to yearn for the youthful sybaritic life she had before Elvis. She liked going to the bars and clubs frequented by people her own age, where racy guys like popular disc jockey George Klein hung out and handsome young men with trim, firm bodies flirted with her and asked her to dance. She must have been shocked by how quickly Elvis’s charm could turn to anger and rage and his gifts into demands for her to perform as if she had no life and will of her own.

  Elvis, of course, wanted her always with him or else waiting for him. She was supposed to go with him on tours and love it, love his fans, love the show business life as he loved it. She was supposed to be in his bed whenever he wanted her there, on the road or in Graceland, for as long as he wanted her there, and always when he was trying to go to sleep or waking up. But Ginger was not willing to follow Elvis every day for almost two grueling weeks of touring during each month of March, April, May, and June 1977. She did not want to lie in his bed in Graceland every morning when he was trying to go to sleep and be there every afternoon when he woke up no matter what else she wanted to do.

  On one occasion Ginger simply balked at spending the night with him. They argued. She made ready to leave. Elvis insisted that she stay. As she got into her car and drove off, Elvis fired shots over her head, but she didn’t stop. On another occasion, he ordered one of his minions to let the air out of her tires. Another time he threatened to lock the gates so she couldn’t leave, but Billy Smith talked him out of the idea.

  Elvis could not understand Ginger’s desire to be apart from him sometimes. He suspected that she was seeing her old boyfriends. He put the guys on her trail. They came back with no evidence at all of infidelity. She would go to the clubs, but there was no other man out there to rival Elvis.

  The truth was that Ginger liked the social life she had already been living, and she was deeply attached to her mother and two sisters and simply liked being with them. Eight days into the February tour, to keep Ginger happy, Elvis flew some of her family to Johnson City, Tennessee, and carried them on to Charlotte, North Carolina, for the last two days on the road. In Charlotte, he pulled a reluctant Terry Alden onto the stage and had her perform a classical piece on the piano. In early March, he continued wooing the Aldens by taking Ginger and her sisters on vacat
ion to Hawaii.

  Ginger absolutely refused to go on the next tour, which began in Tempe, Arizona, on March 23. By then Elvis was in such bad shape that Dr. Nick had to put him on an IV, and Billy Smith had to load him onto the plane like some cumbersome bundle of cargo. His attire onstage during the tour was limited to the only two jumpsuits that he could squeeze into. His weight had swelled to well over two hundred pounds. He really was, as he had said to Red in October, “not operating on but one cylinder.”

  On the ninth day, in Baton Rouge, at the last minute he decided he could not go onstage at all. That show and the last three scheduled for the tour in Mobil, Macon, and Jacksonville had to be canceled. During the early morning hours of April 1, Elvis flew home. After stopping off at Graceland, he checked into Baptist Memorial Hospital. This certified his illness and allowed interested parties to collect insurance on the canceled performances. Even with the cancellations, the tour grossed almost a million dollars. Elvis and the Colonel got $375,000 of that. In spite of the new equal agreement, Parker allowed Elvis to keep two-thirds of their earnings, some $245,000.

  On April 21, Elvis began his third tour of the year in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Ginger went with him. Elvis had only one jumpsuit he could squeeze into. He was listless onstage, but Elvis fans were indefatigably loyal and were not much bothered by his weight. They filled the house to capacity again and again. If they were disappointed in a performance, they seldom showed it. Nine days into the tour he flew in Mrs. Alden and Rosemary to prevent Ginger’s leaving. On May 3, they all flew home, and Elvis went into seclusion at Graceland for two and a half weeks. On May 6, he shot out a window in his bedroom.

  During this tour, the Nashville Banner ran a story alleging that the Colonel was about to sell Elvis’s contract. Parker immediately denied it, but everyone knew that something was up. The Colonel was a master at leaking information in ways that served his ends.

  Elvis got home on May 4, and on the twentieth he began yet another tour in Knoxville, Tennessee. Ginger began with him, but on the seventh day, when he played in Binghamton, New York, she flew home to Memphis. Elvis was exhausted, physically and emotionally. In Baltimore on the twenty-ninth he began “murmuring” and “swearing” onstage, and then walked off the stage entirely and remained off for about half an hour. The backup singers carried on as best they could. While he was in Baton Rouge on the thirty-first, making up for the performance he had canceled on the previous tour, newspapers abroad began to serialize the bodyguard book two months before its publishers released it in America.

  Financially, this fourth tour of the year was a great success, grossing $2,309,000. Elvis got almost $800,000, two-thirds of the profit, but the Colonel stipulated that at the end of the year Elvis would give him back some $200,000 of that to conform to an agreement they had previously made whereby each would get half of the profits from tours. In effect, the Colonel had been loaning Elvis one-sixth of the profits they made from each tour since they signed that agreement in January 1976. Now Elvis agreed to pay back all those moneys at the end of 1977. It would be, of course, a staggering amount, and Elvis was barely surviving as it was. He was making fewer and fewer records, and none had hit No. 1 and sold a million copies since “Burning Love” in 1972. RCA was reduced to making records of tapes recorded on tour. Furthermore, the Hilton Hotel people were tired of his shenanigans and had not signed him up for another run. Touring still provided him with a large stream of income, but he spent it as fast as he made it. And the drugs he consumed as he kept up the break-neck pace were killing him.

  Furthermore, the course of true love with Ginger was not running smoothly, despite Elvis involving himself thickly with the Alden family. In 1976, when Elvis first met the family, the Memphis City Directory indicated that the Aldens lived at 2999 South Perkins, which in the mid-1990s was the address of a small and very modest red-brick house on a wide and busy thoroughfare in a working-class neighborhood of eastern Memphis. The Aldens soon bought and moved into a larger, classically suburban, low ranch-style house at 4152 Royal Crest Place, a new house in an attractive new development on the southeastern edge of town.

  After having been married for decades, Ginger’s parents chose this particular time to divorce. Elvis stepped in to help Mrs. Alden. He not only made one of his lawyers available to help her secure her divorce; he also repaid Mr. Alden the $5,325 that he had invested in the new house. Further, he engaged a company to install a swimming pool and landscape the yard at a cost of $6,155. After Elvis’s death, Mrs. Alden would sue the estate for the $35,000 she claimed Elvis had promised her to pay off the mortgage on her house. In the lower court she won; in the appeals court she lost.

  Ginger did not respond to Elvis’s generosity by making herself more available to him. She obviously did not like touring with him, and it became increasingly and painfully evident to Elvis that she did not like always hanging out in his bedroom in Graceland either. For days at a time she would not even come out to Graceland. “Where is she, man? Why don’t she stay here?” Elvis would wail to Billy Smith. He desperately needed a girl he could count on, one who would be in his bed when he awoke and when he went to sleep.

  Alicia

  Always on the job, George Klein found him one. She was Alicia Kerwin, another dark-haired Memphis beauty. Alicia was a twenty-year-old bank teller. She had no interest in beauty contests, and she was not even an Elvis fan. She seemed an unlikely candidate for his attention. At first, she declined George’s invitation to visit Graceland, then on an impulse accepted.

  Alicia drove out to Graceland on April 10. She arrived about 10:00 p.m. and was ushered into the drawing room. Jo Smith, Billy’s wife, came down to interview her. Jo thought she was all right and brought her up to meet Elvis. Elvis and Alicia talked for about an hour. He explained his availability. He and Ginger had argued, he said. He was upset. He felt Ginger was too interested in his money. Elvis took a liking to Alicia right away.

  Two days later, Elvis invited Alicia out to Graceland again. This time he received her in Lisa Marie’s bedroom. He said that he was despondent over Lisa’s return to California. Priscilla and Lisa Marie had flown in a week earlier. Priscilla’s visit, apparently, was not purely social. Before the month was out she would hold a $494,024.49 deed of trust on Graceland to secure money still owed her as part of the divorce settlement. In spite of his brag that he had given Priscilla what she wanted, obviously he had not put his money where his mouth was, and wisely Priscilla was taking no chances.

  While Alicia was talking to Elvis, Ginger’s sister Rosemary appeared. “She was real inquisitive and very rude and she wanted to know who I was and what I was doing there,” Alicia recalled three years later. At that time, Alicia—it turns out—was talking to police officers pursuing a criminal investigation into the sources of Elvis’s drugs. Rosemary, it seems, not only had access to Elvis’s private precincts on the second floor of Graceland even when Ginger was not there, she also took a proprietary attitude toward her sister’s fiancé and presumed to equate his engagement to Ginger with fidelity to Ginger. This had to be a shockingly new situation for Elvis. No one could challenge his freedom to invite a new young woman simply to visit his quarters. Neither Linda Thompson nor her relatives had ever dared such presumption. Then again, he had never proposed marriage to Linda.

  On the next day, Elvis telephoned to invite Alicia to Graceland again. She said she had a date. “Break it,” he urged. She said no. She was not overwhelmed by Elvis’s fame. Like many other Memphians in those years, she barely knew who Elvis was—or cared. To them he was something like Beale Street, the famous black street in Memphis. They knew it was there, they knew it was famous all over America, but they didn’t much care. Angrily, Elvis hung up on her. But “two seconds later” he called back and invited her to fly with him to Las Vegas on one of his jets. She accepted, she said, “because I’d never been there.”

  Billy and Jo Smith and some of the guys joined Elvis and Alicia on the trip. First they flew
to Las Vegas, checking into the Hilton International Hotel, and then on to Palm Springs. The Smiths liked Alicia. Early on they had concluded that Ginger was not the right girl for Elvis. During one of Elvis’s temper tantrums over Ginger’s neglect, Billy declared that Elvis should look for a woman his own age. Elvis went wild. “What in the hell could a forty-two-year-old woman do for me?” he retorted angrily.

  For three nights Alicia slept with Elvis in his bed in Las Vegas, and then spent two more in his bed in his Palm Springs house. One night in Palm Springs she thought he had stopped breathing. She rushed into Jo’s room to sound the alarm. Jo said not to worry; it happened from time to time. Then the party returned to Memphis. In all of this there was no sex. Alicia was puzzled and amazed. Here she was sleeping with a man who was supposed to be one of the great sex idols of the world. Nevertheless, Elvis bought her a new car in Palm Springs, a Cadillac, and had it driven back to Memphis for her.

  Three days after the party returned to Memphis, Elvis began his third tour of the year in Detroit. This time Ginger went with him, but on the eighth day Elvis had to fly her mother and Rosemary in to join them in Duluth, Minnesota. During the tour, Elvis called Alicia several times. He had to have a girl in his bed on tour regardless of how things might stand with his betrothed. Alicia, in his mind, was a good candidate in case Ginger defected.

  It was June before Elvis called Alicia again. He needed to talk, he said. She drove down to Graceland. They talked for hours in his bedroom. It was like he wanted to go back in time to where she, at age twenty, then was. “He wished he could go out on Saturday night like everyone else,” Alicia said. He wanted her to tell him all about the clubs she went to at night, crowded with young people. He wanted her to describe what it was like to walk into a club and not be singled out, to browse easily and gaze freely. He was more depressed than she had ever seen him, she said. He wanted her to stay with him until he went to sleep.