Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  Elvis should not have expected Red to take this lying down. Red quickly saw a way to strike back with devastating effect and earn a lot of money at the same time. He would lead his two colleagues in writing a book that would tell all of Elvis’s dirty secrets to the world. For years, the tabloids, such as the National Enquirer, had tried to penetrate Elvis’s organization to get salaciously scandalous stories about him. But the discipline within the coterie was amazingly effective. Nobody inside ever said anything to journalists about any negative occurrences in Elvis’s private life. The rule of silence was often expressly and sometimes forcefully stated. Even those guys who left told no tales. Suddenly and unfairly expelled from the privileged circle, “the bodyguards” who knew all would tell all.

  Very soon Red found a publisher to advance $125,000 to finance the process of writing and pay a royalty on the sales of the book. None of the bodyguards possessed great literary skills, but a professional tabloid writer, Steve Dunleavy, was added to the team.

  Elvis’s Response

  Elvis’s informers and friends picked up rumors of the book project almost as soon as it was conceived. In late August 1976, while on tour, Elvis summoned his staff to his hotel room in Mobile, Alabama. They found him sitting cross-legged on his bed, holding a sheaf of papers in his hand. Already he had a copy of the outline of the book.

  “They’re trying to kill me,” he cried to the room at large.

  “Who’s trying to kill you?” someone asked.

  In response, Elvis held up the papers. Friends in the publishing world had learned that a contract had been signed, and they had managed to obtain a copy of the proposal.

  “I don’t know how those guys could do this to me,” Elvis wailed, verging on tears.

  Over the next several weeks, rumors came in that the book would expose in detail Elvis’s large, various, and perverted sexual appetites, especially for sex between girls and young women, his drug addiction, and his fits of violence. As with Priscilla’s departure, Elvis could not imagine that he had done anything wrong to bring about this vicious betrayal. Also as with Priscilla’s departure, he became obsessed with the matter. He “was completely absorbed by the book,” a member of the inner circle, David Stanley, later recalled in his own tell-all book. “It was all he wanted to talk about.”

  During the fall of 1976, Elvis struggled desperately to get his ex-bodyguards to cancel the project. The book would destroy his image, he feared. His fans would turn away from him in revulsion, this monster “Elvis” that the book depicted. He could not believe that he could not somehow persuade his ex-friends to abort the project.

  There was some thought at first of threatening them physically, for instance, of somehow using Frank Sinatra’s Mafia connections to pressure them into giving up on the venture. On occasion, Sinatra had announced his willingness to share his underworld contacts with Elvis. Wisely, Elvis retreated to try a more conventional approach—bribery. He sent his private detective, tough-talking John O’Grady, to offer each man $50,000 if they would give it up. No luck.

  This Is Elvis

  Then, in October, about three months after the firings, Elvis telephoned Red himself. Unknown to Elvis, Red recorded the conversation on tape. He got the call at 7:00 a.m. in his motel room in Hollywood. Elvis was attempting to entice Red—and probably Sonny too—to come back into the fold and hence abandon the book project. He admitted that in the firing “maybe I did lose sight of … especially you, your family, and everything,” but it was only “because of a lot of things that piled up on me.” There followed a lengthy and rambling litany of the numerous ways in which he, Elvis, had been treated unfairly by both alleged friends and others. Whenever Red attempted to make the point that Elvis had treated him unfairly, Elvis rushed in with another example of the gross abuses he had suffered. Red’s firing was not really his fault; it was all these other things. He seemed simply unable to say to Red that he was responsible for the callous manner of his firing and that he had done him wrong and was sorry.

  Red had guessed correctly that Elvis would call him. Two days earlier, someone had phoned and asked the boys to put off writing the book. On the next day, Red called Graceland and talked to Charlie Hodge. Charlie then talked to Elvis. The following morning Elvis telephoned Red, who was ready and waiting with the tape recorder. He included a loosely transcribed and edited version of the exchange in his book. That transcript is a very fair representation of the conversation, and it is a rare opportunity to hear Elvis speaking directly for himself. This is the real Elvis at some length.

  “Charlie [Hodge] told me about the talk you all had,” Elvis began. “I guess I do owe you an explanation.”

  Elvis said that at the time of the firing he was “getting a lot of excess pressure,” all because other people in his entourage, not Red, had done him wrong. Dr. Nick and Joe Esposito, along with a Memphis bond salesman named Mike McMahon, had looped him into a scheme to build two commercial racquetball courts costing $1.3 million dollars, he complained. McMahon was a crooked businessman who had altered the contract, he said, to make him responsible for any debts incurred by the company. “That son-of-a-bitch, he ain’t no good,” Elvis said. Elvis had signed the contract understanding that he was only putting in his name and no money. “I wouldn’t have to put up a dime,” he said. “Wouldn’t be no money or nothin’.”

  Elvis said that Joe, Dr. Nick, and McMahon had all gone on a tour with him and pretended to have an interest in numerology, one of his passions, but they were really trying to get him to invest in their racquetball court venture. McMahon had cut himself into the deal for a management fee of $50,000 a year. He had gone to Nashville promoting the project and saying that he represented Elvis. “They had all these cards and shit printed up—chairman of the board,” Elvis said, but nobody had consulted him. He had balked at putting in any cash, and they were going to court. It did not look good for Elvis, according to his lawyer. “The lawyer read to me the contract where it said that if anything happened I would stand good for the whole thing,” Elvis said. “That was news to me.”

  Elvis was about to be sued for breach of contract by his physician, his road manager, and Mike McMahon. In addition, he was facing a raft of suits from people his bodyguards had beaten up.

  “And those goddamn lawsuits,” he complained. “You know how them lawyers are,” he said. “There were six lawsuits in two years … They were trying to prove us insane.” The problem was “them lawyers,” and the defendant had become “us.” The charge was interesting. He understood from his advisers that if they lost just one case, they might lose them all. He explained that the opposition lawyers were trying to “establish a pattern of insanity and violence. Like me shooting out that lamp up there.” At first Red didn’t know what he was talking about; Elvis reminded him about the time he took a pistol to a chandelier in the Las Vegas Hilton. “Well, we was known as the wild bunch,” Red replied.

  Elvis’s pitiful lament went on and on. “My daddy was sick,” he said. “You know he was nearly dead. My family is strung all over the face of the United States.” Elvis had an extra good reason to be upset by Vernon’s illness. Vernon was not only sick; he had angrily blamed Elvis for his illness, even as Elvis himself was ill. Elvis, of course, was not blameless when it came to his father’s health problems. His obsessive spending had stressed Vernon terribly, and Vernon never hid his distress from his son. Recurrently, Vernon saw himself broke and on the streets of Memphis again, pounding the pavement with holes in the soles of his shoes again, looking for a job. He was not a man to accept a return to poverty stoically. He loved the high life—including his share of the leftover girls—and he felt that he fully deserved it.

  In truth, except for Lisa Marie, Elvis’s “family” was not at all far away or scattered. An awful lot of it was right there in Graceland, on his payroll, and not about to leave. Furthermore, Lisa was gone because Priscilla was gone, and Red had told Elvis the truth when he said that Elvis had driven Priscilla away. Ag
ain, Elvis did not accept the consequences of his own actions. He was victimized and blameless … and clueless.

  Elvis’s litany of his miseries included the immediate and the physical. He and Charlie Hodge had had a songfest for some “little kids” the night before. One of the songs, he said, was “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.” They missed Red harmonizing with them. But Elvis’s exertions for the pleasure of these small children had taken its toll. His fingers were blistered from playing the guitar, he complained, and his voice raspy from overuse.

  “I’m not operating on but one cylinder either,” Elvis whined.

  Red was not rude to Elvis, and even expressed some sympathy for him in his terrible plight. But persistently and patiently, yet unsuccessfully, he attempted to bring him back to the injustice of his firing. Recurrently, Elvis slid back into recitations of his own problems.

  “Yeah, it was cold,” Red said, trying to focus Elvis on the nature of his dismissal. Elvis replied by declaring that he loved Red’s wife, Pat, “and your family and everything.”

  “We gotta get back to my problem,” Red said. “I just know about my problems.” Again Elvis immediately began to talk about his own many problems.

  Red tried once more. He said that the firing “was a shock to all of us.” They had no warning. Suddenly, they had no income and they were all broke. “I sold my house. I hated to do that,” Red said.

  “You sold your house?” Elvis responded incredulously. Houses were important to him. At last, it seemed that Red had gotten his attention.

  It was a “bad time,” Red said.

  “It was bad for me, too,” Elvis responded, sliding away again. He complained that at the time he himself had just gotten out of the hospital and, “My daddy … I almost lost him.”

  Red declared that he wished Elvis himself had told him he was fired. “If I’d just heard from you, it would [have] been … it would have been easier to take,” he said.

  Elvis responded hesitantly. “I don’t … I don’t do that.” Such things, he declared, were his daddy’s business.

  Red demurred. Certainly it was not his daddy’s business in Red’s case, and Elvis knew that Red was not just another employee. He had been one of Elvis’s closest friends for over two decades and had served him loyally, literally body and soul. He did not deserve such treatment. Elvis excused himself on the grounds that he had to go off to Palm Springs to think about the racquetball court thing, and then he slid into a lengthy and bitter indictment of Dave Hebler.

  He had been wrong about Hebler, he was really a bad guy, not one of the gang. “He hated all you guys,” Elvis said, and for two years his comments on who he hated “just burned into my ear.” Dave “was underhanded and sneaky.”

  If Elvis could split Red and Sonny, his old friends, away from Hebler, the newcomer, it might kill the bodyguard book. Further, if he could rehire Red and Sonny and leave Hebler out in the cold, they would abort the book, and they might make a scapegoat out of Hebler. Dave Hebler, a karate companion, was really the violent one, the story would run. It was he who was responsible for all the damage to those poor victims they had beaten up. With no money for a lawyer, Hebler would be vulnerable. Elvis was into his usually successful tactic of dividing and ruling.

  In truth, Elvis was wrong about Hebler. He was not at all underhanded and sneaky in his response to being fired by Vernon. Of the three, he was the only one who pressed on relentlessly for a face-to-face confrontation with Elvis. After the dismissals, each had sought unsuccessfully to talk to Elvis in person. Each had attempted to contact him by phone, but he could not be reached. True to character, just before the firings Elvis had disappeared, flying to Palm Springs for a three-week rest.

  Dave went after him. In Palm Springs, he discovered that Elvis had gone into even deeper seclusion by retreating to the special quarters that Dr. Elias Ghanem had built at his home in Las Vegas to accommodate his celebrity patients. At Dr. Ghanem’s house, Dave knocked on the front door. When the doctor answered, Dave said, “I want to talk to Elvis.”

  Dr. Ghanem politely asked Dave to wait while he told Elvis he was there. After several minutes he came back.

  “I’m sorry, but he doesn’t want to see you,” he said.

  Elvis absolutely hated facing any criticism of his behavior. A confrontation with Dave was exactly the kind of thing that Red and Sonny had protected him against over the years. If karate champion Hebler lost control and got physical, Elvis would be in trouble. His refusal to confront Dave was probably prudent, if not courageous or honorable.

  Elvis’s indictment of Hebler to Red was lengthy. “I’d become a dollar sign to him,” he said. “I’d become an object, not a person. But you know, I’m not that thing. I’m not that image that’s built up. I’m myself.”

  Red rejected Elvis’s thinly veiled invitation to turn against Hebler. Elvis had grossly misjudged the situation. Red was sorely wounded and still in pain.

  Red wanted to know why they had picked him out for sacrifice. “All the other … a lot of other guys … ,” he said, “man, I thought I … that I was more important to the organization than they were. But I guess I wasn’t. But I’m glad I found that out.”

  When Red became more assertive, Elvis became more aggressive. “I am not fucked up by any means,” he declared. “On the contrary, I’ve never been in better condition in my life.” He enjoyed his work, he insisted, and last winter he had “had a ball” on vacation in Vail, Colorado. He had shared everything with Red, but then Red had “turned around and tried to hurt me.”

  “Well that’s after you hurt me,” Red replied. “You hurt me … me and my family very bad, you know, left us out in the cold, so let’s don’t talk about me tryin’ to hurt you.”

  Nobody was allowed to challenge Elvis like that, but instead of picking up his gun, Elvis slid to the defensive again. Red just didn’t know all that was going on.

  In fact, Red did know what was going on. “You hadn’t been healthy in quite a while,” he said. Red was probably referring specifically to Elvis’s drug problem, but Elvis chose to consider it a reference to his physical health.

  “Oh, yes, I am,” he insisted. He had just “had an absolute physical, head to toe, in the last three weeks.” It was required by his insurance company, Lloyd’s of London. “That thing I had, that lower intestinal blockage, corrected itself,” he insisted. Somehow people just did not understand that he was perfectly well. “I keep hearing this shit about [being] fat and middle aged,” he railed.

  “Suspicious minds” was the problem, he said. “Understanding solves all problems,” he declared, relying as he so often did on the lyrics of his hit songs for words, wisdom, and authority. “Negative vibes” from others, especially Dave Hebler, not from himself or Red, had caused the firing. He had “just reached a boiling point.” He hoped Red would understand. “It was just a temporary thing.”

  Red resisted the implied invitation to return to his job. He was not “really into the psychic thing,” he said. Elvis replied that he wasn’t either. It was just that he felt “terribly alone.” “You know like that number eight.” In numerology, Elvis was a number eight. He and all eights were “intensely lonely at heart,” he indicated. “They feel they’re lonely but in reality they have warm hearts toward the oppressed … But they hide their feelings in life and do just what they please.”

  Elvis said that he understood from Charlie Hodge that Red had said that he, Elvis, was “all fucked up.” Elvis insisted, “I’m not. I got a daughter and a life, you know.” What profits a man if he gains the world and loses his own soul? “I love to sing. That’s been my thing, since two years old.” These things proved that he was all right.

  Finally, Elvis sensed that he would not be able to move Red during this conversation. He ended by declaring that he would help Red job-wise or otherwise, that his help “ain’t got a goddamn thing to do with articles or no publications or none of that shit.” He had heard “bits and pieces,” but no one had laid out th
e whole thing for him. “I don’t know nothing,” he lied.

  It was a long good-bye on the phone that ended as Elvis again slipped into his habit of quoting songs as if they were verses from the Bible. He indicated that you have to “listen to the dull and the ignorant because they too have their story to tell” (from “Desiderata”) and “you never walked in that man’s shoes and saw things through his eyes” (from Hank Williams’s “Men with Broken Hearts”). The relevance of the quotes to Red’s situation was not totally clear, but saying them seemed to help Elvis. He might be inviting Red to understand his position with the shoes metaphor, but it was not at all clear who was dull and ignorant.

  At last, he closed with an expression of open-handed generosity, ultimately his way of begging. “That’s why I [am] saying, anything I can do at all. Worried about the book? I don’t … I don’t think so. Not on my part. You do whatever you have to do. I just want you and Pat to know I’m still here.”

  It was a bizarre performance by Elvis, but bizarre was not unusual for him. He was trying hard to say something that Red wanted to hear. He hoped that an appeal to friendship and the expectation of some huge gift would kill the book project. “Anything I can do at all,” he said, and reached out to embrace Red’s wife with his generosity. Possibly the promise of a new house to replace the one they had lost might lead Pat to persuade her husband to return to the fold.

  Elvis’s insistence that he was not worried about the book was bravado, pure and simple. In fact, he was worried nearly to death about it.