















"Elvis: The Final Years"



by Jerry Hopkins



Elvis Presley's final years were full of paradox. He was the rebellious

king of rock & roll who returned again and again in the Seventies to play

Las Vegas, home to such "establishment" entertainers as Sammy Davis Jr. and

Frank Sinatra. He crisscrossed the nation on grueling tours, setting box-

office records for performances that became increasingly sloppy and

listless. He was often unprepared at recording sessions, and even when it

was apparent on disc, everything RCA released scaled the charts. With the

help of manager Colonel Tom Parker's finely tuned Presley machine, Elvis

projected an image of the courteous Southern gentleman -- always answering

reporters' questions with a "yes, sir" or "no, ma'am," and lavishing

expensive gifts of cars and cash on strangers -- but often abusing his aides

and bodyguards and friends.



Most telling of all, Elvis was the most popular entertainer in the world,

a figure of constant attention who came off as the boy next door while his

life grew increasingly bizarre. He was fascinated by guns, and in his last

years rarely went anywhere without carrying one. He became a nocturnal

creature who would rent an amusement park outside Memphis so he could ride

the roller coaster at night -- alone except for his entourage. He covered

hotel-room windows with aluminum foil to keep daylight out. His appetite for

-- and dependence on -- uppers and downers and painkillers was incredible.



Elvis didn't play out his final years alone. There were other actors in

the drama. The Colonel. His father, Vernon, and his daughter, Lisa Marie.

The women -- his former wife, Priscilla, and his girlfriends Linda Thompson

and Ginger Alden. His bodyguards, Red and Sonny West, and his aides, Joe

Esposito and Charlie Hodge. And his doctor, George Nichopoulos.



But by 1974, Elvis was a very sick man. And it seemed that none of the

people he gathered around him could do anything to stop him from slipping

away.



What follows is excerpted from Elvis: the Final Years by Jerry Hopkins,

published in 1980 by St. Martin's Press. - The Ed.



---------------------------------------------

September 1974 - January 1975

---------------------------------------------



It was a bad time for Elvis. Everything seemed to be coming apart. His

father and his stepmother, Dee, separated after ten years. "Vernon treated

me like a child; he kept me in a cage," Dee said.



It was a familiar theme. Priscilla had felt suffocated and restricted,

too. Now, as Dee was packing up and leaving Vernon's house nearby, Elvis

watched as his friend Linda Thompson moved her things out of Graceland.

Their relationship was an emotional one, and there would be flare-ups for

years to come.



Elvis had also lost his longtime piano player, David Briggs, who was being

paid $3000 a week by Elvis but wanted to return to Nashville's recording

studios.



Elvis' health plummeted as his weight ballooned. Just how much weight he

had put on, and how quickly, became apparent when he arrived at the

University of Maryland on September 27th. So great was the change, some of

the boys in the band had trouble recognizing him.



Tony Brown, who had taken Briggs' place in the backup band, remembered

watching Elvis arrive. "He fell out of the limousine to his knees," said

Brown. "People jumped to help and he pushed them away, like, 'Don't help

me!' He always did that when he fell. He walked onstage and held onto the

mike for the first thirty minutes like it was a post. Everybody was scared."



Guitarist John Wilkinson was standing a few feet away from Elvis. "The

lights went down," he recalled, "and Elvis came up the stairs. He was all

gut. He was slurring. He was so fucked up. It was obvious he was drugged,

that there was something terribly wrong with his body. It was so bad, the

words to the songs were barely intelligible. He could barely get through the

introductions. We were in a state of shock. I remember crying. He cut the

show short, yet it seemed like it went on forever."



The rest of the tour was, as Brown put it, "uphill." For three nights, in

Detroit, South Bend and St. Paul, Elvis seemed in control. His eyes were

bright and the shows were energetic, giving hope to those around him. Back

in Detroit for another show, he slipped again.



"I watched him in his dressing room, just draped over a chair, unable to

move," said Wilkinson. "So often I thought, 'Boss, why don't you just cancel

this tour and take a year off?' I mentioned something once in a guarded

moment. He patted me on the back and said, 'It'll be alright. Don't worry

about it.'"



The cities rolled by, all of them very much alike, all noisy and somewhat

numbing. Dayton, Wichita, San Antonio, Abilene... Limousines, hotel rooms,

huge auditoriums and the chartered Playboy jet that took him from town to

town became the only environments he knew.



After that, Elvis didn't work for five months.





It didn't get any better in 1975. On January 8th, Elvis celebrated his

fortieth birthday. He worried that he was "getting up there," and that hurt.



Twenty days later, Elvis entered the hospital for, among other problems,

an enlarged colon. At least that's what the press was told. And it was true.

But it was also true that Elvis was there for another detoxification. This,

too, would be confirmed years later by Dr. Nick [George Nichopoulos]. At the

time, however, Nichopoulos merely stated that Elvis had been sick for

several days but was reluctant to go to the hospital. He said it had

required several more days of talking before Elvis submitted to the

physician's wishes, during which time a suite was held for him on the

Baptist Hospital's eighteenth floor.



Finally, on January 28th at five a.m., the telephone rang at the nurse's

station. Dr. Nick said he was leaving Graceland with Elvis and would be

arriving in fifteen minutes. Elvis, wearing navy blue pajamas and a few

days' beard, showed up with his father, Joe Esposito, Linda Thompson and a

few bodyguards.



were two serious problems

treated during his three-week stay. Another more serious problem -- one

never discussed publicly -- showed up in a liver biopsy. Later, Elvis would

joke about the long needle that was stuck into his side to extract a sample

of liver tissue, but the findings weren't at all amusing. There was severe

damage to the organ, and it was clear to attending physicians that the

probable cause was drug abuse.



The colon problem was caused by Elvis' poor eating habits, Dr. Nick said.

Elvis loved fried foods and sugar, and needed an almost complete change in

diet.



As usual, Elvis was cheerful and obedient, promising to mend his ways. Of

course, he didn't.



--------------------------------------------

December 1975 - January 1976

--------------------------------------------



This was the first time Elvis ever worked during the winter holidays. In

the 1960s, it was always written into his contract that he was not available

until after January 8th, his birthday. Why did he break tradition? And why

did he agree to perform on New Year's Eve in the huge Silver Dome in

Pontiac, Michigan, which seated 80,000, when he knew it would be too big to

give his fans the show they paid to see? The answer, of course, was money.

Elvis needed money, desperately. His bank accounts were empty, and he had

borrowed money against future earnings, using Graceland for collateral. As

difficult as it was to believe, Elvis was broke.



Every way except economically, the show was a disaster. The sounds of

"Thus Spake Zarathustra" echoed through the gigantic hall. As Elvis entered,

he looked confused. Where were his sidemen? Where were his singers? Finally,

he spotted them below him, on another level. He was surprised, then angry.

Why hadn't anyone told him he'd have to sing alone?



In the middle of the show, his pants ripped, splitting at the seams

because of his extra poundage.



The temperature made it worse. It was so cold, the members of the band

were playing in their overcoats. "The trumpet players' lips were so cold

they could barely blow their horns," said John Wilkinson. "It was so cold

our strings kept changing key. Oh, we were glad to get out of there."



On the way home, Elvis exploded, cursing and blaming everyone he could

think of for the show. So black was his mood, Linda Thompson just sat there

and let it happen. Normally, she would have made a face at him or fed him

some gooey sweet and cooed him back to serenity with baby talk.



A few days later, a story in the entertainment trade papers reported that

the concert grossed $800,000, believed to be a world's record for a single

night by a single artist, beating out the Beatles' take at Shea Stadium in

1964. Elvis kept about half of it.



The Colonel pulled off another coup at about the same time, selling to RCA

Records the rights to all material recorded by Elvis through 1972.

Obviously, this represented a huge body of product -- more than 350 songs,

nearly fifty albums' worth, almost all of it still in the catalog and

selling slowly but steadily. One RCA executive claimed that the Colonel's

motivation for the deal was "greed, pure and simple," and said the record

company went for it only because it figured it'd get the money back, and the

big price tag was worth paying to keep Elvis and the Colonel happy.



The price? A nice, round $6 million.



--------------------------------------------

February 1976 - May 1976

--------------------------------------------



Elvis was losing control.



He hadn't recorded any new material in almost nine months, and with RCA

wishing to maintain its three-album-per-year release schedule, new songs

were sorely needed. Elvis ignored pleas to go to Nashville or Hollywood to

record and didn't want to go back to Stax in Memphis, either. So, in the

first week of February 1976, RCA began moving $200,000 worth of recording

equipment into Elvis' Graceland mansion. If Mohammed wouldn't go to the

mountain, then the mountain would go to Mohammed.



Elvis' road band was flown in from Los Angeles, and several top Nashville

studio men -- David Briggs piano, Bobby Emmons on electric piano and Norbert

Putnam on bass -- were called. Everyone was waiting for Elvis to come

downstairs and sing.



Felton Jarvis was producing the sessions as usual, and he kept moving

nervously back and forth between the den and the big RCA mobile truck parked

outside. The jokes never stopped, but by midnight, everyone was getting

anxious. Elvis sent word that he was sick and had a doctor in attendance.

Red and Sonny West and Dave Hebler explained Elvis' behavior another way. In

their book, Elvis: What Happened?, they tell of a sinister story about a

plan Elvis had to kill the city's top narcotics dealers. They contend this

is what kept Elvis holed up in his bedroom.



Red said Elvis summoned him to his room, where he had a huge arsenal of

automatic weapons, pistols, rifles and rockets strewn all over the floor.



Elvis handed Red a list of names and a packet of photographs and implied

that they'd been given to him by the Memphis police. "Elvis had it all

planned," Red wrote. "He wanted myself and Dave Hebler and Dick Grob, the

former cop [who had gone to work for Elvis some years earlier], to go out

and lure them, and he said he was going to kill them."



Elvis told Red and Dave that he would use the recording sessions as his

cover. They'd set up the target, he'd sneak out of the house the back way,

make the hit and return swiftly to Graceland, where he would then go

downstairs and sing. Red shook his head and said it was pretty heavy.



"Hell," said Elvis, "the cops want them."



Somehow, Elvis was diverted, chemically or conversationally. His fantasy

was set aside. And the recording session finally began.



In seven days, Elvis sang a dozen songs. It wasn't easy getting even that

much out of him. Ten of the songs appeared on the album From Elvis Presley

Boulevard . The lyrics, as a lot, were sad, and Elvis' performance, though

adequate, clearly showed his failing strength and health.



Elvis' moods continued to swing wildly. When he first saw the recording

setup in his den, he said, "Let's leave it, I like it better this way than

with furniture." A few days later, he stood in the den facing the huge

playback speakers, his eyes glazed, pointing a shotgun. "The sound's no

fuckin' good in those things!" he croaked. "I'm gonna kill the motherfuckers

and put 'em out of my misery." He cocked the shotgun and took unsteady aim.

Some of the musicians got the gun away from him, and a few minutes later the

session was cancelled. Some nights, he seemed remote, disconnected. Other

nights he failed to show up at all. Finally, on February 9th, RCA packed up

its gear and returned to Nashville, happy to have what it had. The enlarged colon and drug detoxification



--------------------------------------------

March 1977 - April 1977

--------------------------------------------



Elvis' small fleet of jets was aimed at many of the cities where his

oldest and most loyal constituency lived -- Phoenix, Amarillo, Norman,

Abilene and Austin. This was the territory he traveled in the Fifties when

he drove from city to city with Scotty Moore and Bill Black ("the Blue Moon

Boys") to appear in noisy, crowded honky-tonks and on the backs of flatbed

trucks. This is where he was a young star on the "Louisiana Hayride" radio

show. It was this region -- the panhandle of West Texas, Arkansas, north

Louisiana -- that gave little Sun Records an entire galaxy of stars besides

Elvis: Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Jerry Lee

Lewis and Johnny Cash.



That was 1955. Now it was 1977. More than twenty years had passed and, to

the people who lived in the region, Elvis had come to epitomize the American

dream. They, too, were -- or had been -- poor. Generally, they were working-

class people, and they wished to get out of their box, to live the fantasy

life that Elvis had come to represent. He was what every woman wanted and

what every man wished to be. It didn't even matter that he had grown fat.



At first, the tour was just like the others. Some shows were good, some

were fair and some were miserable. Elvis did his best, but nowadays his best

was much less than it was when he was younger. At some concerts, Elvis

performed like an old man. At times it seemed he had only the loosest

control of his voice and muscle coordination. He dropped lyrics, mumbled

introductions and very nearly stumbled around the stage.



On March 31st, following a so-so show in Alexandria, Louisiana, Elvis'

private plane took him to Baton Rouge for a concert at Louisiana State

University. As was customary, the show started before he left the hotel for

the coliseum. All the usual acts performed: the Sweet Inspirations first,

then J.D. Sumner and his youthful Stamps, and finally Jackie Kahane, with

the predictable jokes. Elvis usually arrived during the intermission that

followed the comedian's monologue. Tonight he didn't.



There was chaos backstage. Elvis' hotel room was called.



A half-hour passed. There were more calls. Finally, it was decided to

cancel the rest of the show, to say that Elvis was too sick to go on, that

he was under a doctor's care and was being flown back to Memphis to be

hospitalized.



It wasn't untrue. Dr. Nick returned with Elvis to Memphis on the "Lisa

Marie." Within hours of arriving, Elvis checked himself into a two-room

suite on the sixteenth floor of the Baptist Hospital. This time, Maurice

Elliott announced to the press that Elvis was being treated for

"exhaustion."



That wasn't entirely untrue, either. Elvis had been taking so many uppers

he hadn't slept much. He ate poorly, exercised not at all, and the live

performances, however listless, took what little he had.



Dr. Nick watched Elvis closely. For a long, long time -- more than two

years -- Elvis had been using drugs daily rather than periodically. His use

of them was now, in fact, rampant -- a runaway pattern that could lead to a

fatal overdose.



Elvis had nearly overdosed on several occasions. Linda Thompson recalls

times she found him unconscious or unable to get his breath. Red and Sonny

West tell of a time when a girl Elvis took to Palm Springs was hospitalized

after they'd spent an evening swilling Hycadan, a codiene cough syrup.



Elvis was an experimenter. Just as he wanted the newest automotive

extravagance, he wanted the latest drug. The best and newest on the

marketplace. Valium. Ethinamate. Dilaudid. Demerol. Percodan. Placidyl.

Dexedrine. Biphetamine. Amytal. Quaalude. Carbrital. Cocaine hydrochloride.

Ritalin.



He had once turned to Red West's wife and said, "Pat, I've tried them all,

honey, and believe me, Dilaudid is the best." Dilaudid is a painkiller

usually given to terminal cancer patients.



Elvis regarded his many prescriptions as medicine. He had real problems --

pain, insomnia, a tendency toward obesity -- and he was taking real medicine

to take care of those problems. And that was it.



Except that wasn't it. Not all of it. He also knew that those drugs made

him feel good. Dilaudid was best. That one brought on the cushiony surfboard

ride, that friendly blotto that wiped out all the psychic injuries and

brought on a dreamy somnolence.



It was from a very peculiar position that Dr. Nick watched Elvis dry out

in the hospital, because he knew that the pills Elvis was so strung out on

had come from him. As early as January, Dr. Nick had become Elvis' primary

supplier. It wasn't greed or ego that put his small, white-haired physician

in that place. Up until January, Elvis had solicited his prescriptions from

dozens of doctors, stretching from Beverly Hills and Palm Springs to Elvis'

Graceland neighborhood. Dr. Nick, who had been one of them, figured that if

he could become his patient's only source, he could gain control and, with

time, wean Elvis off drugs completely.



But the quantity and variety Dr. Nick prescribed challenged all

credibility. Two years after Elvis' death, a computer check of prescriptions

issued in the Memphis area showed that in the final seven months of Elvis'

life, George Nichopoulos prescribed 5300 uppers, downers and painkillers for

Elvis. That's an average of about twenty-five pills or injectable vials a

day.



Elvis checked himself out of the hospital after five days and went home,

where he resumed his routine of being given a packet of eight or nine pills

to go to sleep and another packet upon waking up.



--------------------------------------------

August 1977

--------------------------------------------



If Elvis reflected on his recent years, he had much to be proud of. In

1968, after years spent hidden away in Hollywood making lightweight

musicals, he had climbed into a black leather suit and, in a single

television special, launched a comeback that really never stopped peaking.

His return to public performing in 1969 in Las Vegas and the following year

on the road were significant musical events. In 1971, he won the prestigious

Bing Crosby Award. In 1972, he filled Madison Square Garden for four shows

in a row, breaking all attendance and box-office records. In 1973, he gave

his Aloha From Hawaii satellite show, which reached a billion people; he won

a Golden Globe award for the documentary Elvis On Tour ; and he won his first

Grammy (after nearly fifty albums and ninety singles) for his gospel LP, He

Touched Me .



The awards and events came less frequently after that, but they came

nonetheless. And still the records sold and sold. Every year, it was his

name that appeared in The Guinness Book of World Records for selling more

records than any other artist in the history of recorded music.



If Elvis was in a reflective mood, he might also have looked back on more

than a thousand personal appearances in eight years. Where hadn't he been in

America during that time? Surely he must have visited everyone's hometown.

Perhaps that was what had made Elvis such a superstar.



The final week in Elvis' life was memorable only because it was the final

week. Elvis saw friends occasionally or talked on the telephone when they

called. He played racquetball in the court behind his house. He watched

gospel shows on television. He talked about the tour that was to begin on

June 17th in Maine. Ginger Alden [his last girlfriend] said they continued

to make wedding plans, claiming that he was going to make an announcement at

a concert in Memphis at the end of the tour. He read his Bible and his

numbers book. He ate his cheeseburgers and took his pills.



On August 14th, he started a fast, something he often did to lose weight

quickly before going on tour. Oddly, he didn't take any Ionamin, the

appetite suppressant he'd favored for so long. Perhaps he believed that

racquetball and fasting were enough. Besides, what difference did it really

make? At 250 pounds, he was grossly overweight, and how much could he lose

in two days?



On August 15th, he awoke at four p.m., and after breakfast played with his

daughter, Lisa, on the grounds, laughing as she ran around and around in her

electric cart.



In the early evening, Elvis called his dentist at home and asked if he and

Ginger could see him. Dr. Lester Hofman had been the recipient of Elvis'

generosity many times; he drove a Cadillac that Elvis had given him. He told

Elvis that 10:30 p.m. at his office would be fine.



Elvis arrived in his customized Stutz Bearcat with Ginger. Dr. Hofman had

never met Ginger. Elvis introduced her, using his pet nickname

"Gingerbread." After the dentist X-rayed her teeth, he filled two of Elvis'

teeth. As was the custom, the fillings were porcelain. Elvis had many

fillings and he didn't want a flash of gold when he opened his mouth to

sing.



Three hours passed. Back at Graceland, Elvis called Dick Grob, one of his

security men, and handed him a list of songs he decided to add to his

concert repertoire. He told Grob to locate the words and music and chord

changes for the new material so that he could brief the band before they

went on (and so he'd have the lyrics onstage in case he needed them). Grob

said that as he left the room, Elvis said, "We'll make this tour the best

ever."



By two or 2:30 a.m., Elvis had changed into a striped workout suit and was

on his racquetball court. Ginger hoped that playing would help Elvis relax

enough to fall asleep easily. Elvis called it quits about four a.m., and

after leisurely working out for a few minutes on an exercise cycle, he and

Ginger retreated to his bedroom.



Ginger soon fell asleep, leaving Elvis alone, reading a book on the bed

beside her. At nine, Ginger awoke to find Elvis still reading. He told her

he couldn't sleep and was going into the bathroom to read. Ginger knew that

meant he was going to take some of his medication. Elvis' syringes were in

the bathroom, and so was some of his personal pharmacy.



"Okay," Ginger said, "just don't fall asleep." With that, she rolled over

on the big bed and went back to sleep herself.



Elvis carried the book with him, his finger stuck into it as a marker. He

might have glanced at himself in the bathroom mirror. Blue pajamas. Puffy

eyes and face. Bad color. No one knows, but it's likely he helped himself to

something from his pharmacy, because as the autopsy would later show, he had

as many as ten different drugs coursing through his body, taking control of

his brain, his heart. Four of the drugs were in what the medical examiner

would describe as "significant amounts." These were codeine, ethinamate,

methaqualone and unidentifiable barbiturates. He had also taken a number of

Placidyl and Valium capsules, both tranquilizers, and unknown quantities of

Demerol and Meperidine, both painkillers. Bringing the amazing total to ten

were morphine and chloropheniramine, an antihistimine that by itself would

make its user sleepy.



Elvis sat staring at the open book in his lap, his eyes glassy, his body

motionless. His chin dropped to his chest, the big body slumped

imperceptibly then shifted and toppled out of the big cushiony chair, the

noise of the fall muffled by the brown shag carpeting.



The room was silent except for the sound of his final breath.





- Rolling Stone, 10/2/80



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