Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [202]
Billy went over and touched him.
“God, Almighty! He’s dead!”
Now Billy ran in to his parents.
“I said, ‘Daddy! I think Junior’s dead!’ He said, ‘No, he’s all right.’ Then he went in and I heard him say, ‘Oh, my God, he is!’ ” Junior had choked on his own vomit.
Travis called Elvis, who hurried over with Anita. “We were the first there,” she says. “A terrible sight, but that was just the first tragedy that happened in that family.”
Within the next few years, there would be more, some macabre. Billy’s brother, Bobby, who had gotten a Section 8 in the National Guard for swallowing safety pins and puncturing his intestines, would be unable to handle Elvis’s fame, and take rat poison and die. And Junior and Gene’s brother, Robert, who worked for a chrome-plating company, fell up to his waist in a vat of hot liquid chrome. It cooked him.
Billy would remember that Elvis was “extremely hurt” by Junior’s death. It was too soon to be having another funeral in the family, and Elvis thought he should have done more for him. Still, he was glad Junior was finally out of his private hell. At the house, Eddie Fadal remembered, “He just kept saying, ‘It’s all over, Junior. It’s all over.’ ”
“It affected Elvis,” says Joe. “He started to stay away from booze.” Pills were one thing, because the doctor approved them. But drinking had killed his mother and now Junior, and other relatives on the Smith side.
Junior’s death had a ripple effect with Elvis: a fascination with cadavers, and a thirst for knowledge about death. When Junior was still at the Memphis Funeral Home, being embalmed, Elvis and Billy made a nocturnal visit.
“We went up about 3 or 4 A.M. The door was locked, but a guy let us in the back way. We viewed the body, and then Elvis said, ‘Let’s ease on back and see how they do this.’ ”
They went on down a dim hallway, passing through a casket display room, and followed a noise through the dark. Billy became frightened, but Elvis led him on, and finally they happened on two morticians. One was working—he had rock-and-roll music playing—and the other was lying in a casket, snoring.
“May I help you?” asked the one.
“I’m Elvis Presley. You’ve got my cousin up there, and I was just fascinated by all this.”
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said. But because it was Elvis, he and Billy got a tour and a brief education on the fine points of embalming.
After that, Elvis would sometimes take new girlfriends to the funeral home in the middle of the night. It was a test, of sorts. He’d whip back the sheets covering the corpses, and if they could handle that, they could handle anything.
Joe puts it down to Elvis’s interest in the unknown, part of his exploration of God and heaven and the afterworld. But, he also admits, “He would do things to shock people, anything out of the ordinary.” Bottom line, says Joe, “Elvis was not a normal human being. He was just bizarre.”
Elvis’s romance with Anne Helm on Follow That Dream, shot in Florida in the summer of 1961, wouldn’t survive once they returned to California. But she remained impressed with how he treated his fans, calling his kindness “One more thing to love Elvis for.” (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
Chapter Twenty-One
Going Under
While Elvis was busy with his twin obsessions—music and movies, pills and women—the Colonel worked feverishly to polish his client’s image as a patriot. When Elvis was first discharged from the army, Parker had wrangled Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver into reading a tribute to the new sergeant into the congressional record. “To his great credit this young American became just another G.I. Joe,” the senator said in puffed-up prose. “I for one would like to say to him yours was a job well done, soldier.”
Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington and Memphis mayor Henry Loeb now joined forces to declare February 25, 1961, “Elvis Presley Day.” It was historic in more ways than one: At a special luncheon