Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [251]
After they were gone, Elvis turned to Larry. “Man, I really liked those guys,” he remarked, though at thirty, he wondered if his time had come and gone. Out at the gate, the thousand or so fans shouted their allegiance, chanting, “Elvis, we love you!” or “The Beatles! The Beatles!” Elvis couldn’t quit thinking about it. “That was quite a battle out there with the fans.” And then a pause. “I guess it was a tie, huh?” Larry knew he felt self-conscious. “I think you won, Elvis,” he said. Elvis brightened. “Do you really think so?”
He burned to be back onstage again, and he envied that about the Beatles even more than their chart dominance. The year before, the quartet had paid homage to him by putting the Bill Black Combo on their U.S. tour, where Elvis’s friend Jackie DeShannon was also an opening act. Now Bill, Elvis’s first bass player and one of the architects of his original Sun sound, lay dying of a brain tumor, and would succumb that October at age thirty-nine.
Despite the Beatles’ prominence in the music world—and the fact that Elvis’s record sales were down 40 percent from 1960—that fall, the Colonel renegotiated his RCA contract on considerably improved terms. The new agreement guaranteed $300,000 against a 5 percent royalty, with 75 percent going to Elvis, and 25 percent to the Colonel.
Even RCA was amazed at his longevity, according to Joan Deary, the label’s first female executive, and an employee for more than forty years. “In the very beginning, they thought he’d have a tremendous rise, because he did go up like a rocket. But most artists who go up like a rocket come down the same way. I don’t think in a million years they expected that he would go on forever the way he did.”
To keep up musically, he continued to expand his knowledge of current acts, listening to folk music, primarily Peter, Paul, and Mary, Ian and Sylvia, Odetta, and interpretations of the songs of Bob Dylan, whose voice proved too shrill for him. But mostly he spent his free time plunging deeper into the escape of mysticism. In October construction began on the Meditation Garden just beyond the swimming pool at Graceland. Marty Lacker’s sister and brother-in-law, Ann and Bernie Grenedier, designed it after the Self-Realization Park, with stained-glass panels, Italian marble statues, and a fountain with underwater light formations.
According to Larry, during the Christmas holidays, Elvis took a bigger step on his path to enlightenment, finally dropping acid under Sonny’s controlled supervision.
It was a group trip, of sorts, and began with everybody sitting around the conference table. Elvis split up some tabs—Lamar got his own 750 milligrams—and soon, when Jerry looked at Elvis, he had morphed into a child, first a plump, happy boy, and then a big, chubby baby. Everybody started laughing, and the next thing Jerry knew, he was sitting on the floor in Elvis’s closet, eating dates hand over fist.
Priscilla, who had never shown much interest in Elvis’s cosmology, joined in. But suddenly in the middle of a mellow trip, Larry wrote in his memoir, If I Can Dream, “Priscilla began sobbing. She fell to her knees in front of Elvis and cried, ‘You don’t really love me! You just say you do!’ Elvis . . . tried to convince her she was wrong, but nothing he said worked. Next thing we knew, she was saying to Jerry and me, ‘You don’t like me.’ When she started telling us that she was ‘ugly,’ I worried she might be having a bad trip.”
She snapped out of it, though, and later Larry, Priscilla, Jerry, and Lamar walked around outside, talking openly and unashamedly about how much they cared about one another. They were all exhausted then, and called it a night, but not before Lamar tried to dive into the hood of the 1964 Cadillac limousine, thinking it was a swimming pool. (“The black was so deep.”)
On his trips to California, Elvis continued to visit Sri Daya Mata, who tried to help him attain self-control and work toward the highest spiritual existence through meditation. He read her book, Only Love, and kept it close around him, as Billy Smith remembers.