Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [260]
With his charm and charisma, Elvis had the ability to lead others on a natural high. But he was often on a different kind of high at the Circle G, as he was using barbiturates again to calm himself and tune out his father’s rants. He was also getting heavier into Demerol, the synthetic narcotic normally prescribed for severe pain.
Now Elvis wanted it more and more, in late 1966 flying Marty out to see L.A. dentist Max Shapiro, who gave him two prescriptions for Demerol, as well as other pills. Elvis also got pills from the studios, and when he’d run low, there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to replenish his supply.
One Sunday when his local Walgreens was closed, he halfheartedly suggested that Marty and Richard break in, and then had another thought: “Does anybody know where the pharmacist lives? He’s like a doctor. He’s probably got all kinds of stuff at his house.”
The man opened his door to find Elvis Presley standing there in a sheepskin coat and a cowboy hat. Stunned, he invited him in. Elvis chatted him up for a few minutes, explained his dilemma, and then followed the pharmacist into his bathroom to look in his medicine chest. By the time he left, Elvis was carrying a bag full of pills and promising to get prescriptions to cover them all.
What he needed, he thought, was a local Dr. Feelgood like Max Shapiro, but he hadn’t found him yet. And so he just went on self-prescribing, getting pills wherever he could, sometimes consulting the PDR for dosage and interaction, but more often, throwing caution to the wind.
Many times, he’d take two or three sleeping pills on top of his amphetamines, then get up after two hours of sleep and climb on his horse, a gorgeous Palomino he named Rising Sun. At times, Billy remembers, he comically rode around the ranch looking like Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou, leaning over so far the guys feared he’d fall off and hurt himself.
The pills gave him strange food cravings, and his latest kick was hamburger and hot dog buns, which he ate straight from the plastic bag, tied onto his saddle horn. The constant diet of white bread threw his insulin levels off and made him store fat around the middle. And though he had the movie to do at the beginning of March—Clambake would be his twenty-fifth—Elvis ate whatever he wanted, from cheeseburgers, to mashed potatoes, to sweets. He seemed to have something in his hand all the time, the guys noticed.
Normally, in Jerry Schilling’s view, “He ate out of depression. The movies were boring to him, and when he didn’t have a challenge, he always got depressed.” But now the reason was twofold: The ranch felt like perpetual vacation, offering a quasi–dream state for a boy-man in need of escape. Predictably, the weight piled on.
He was due in Los Angeles on February 21 for the start of the film, but instead, as a stalling technique, he arranged to go to Nashville to record the soundtrack at RCA’s Studio B. Though the distance was an easy four-hour drive, he arrived in a rented Learjet—shades of megalomania—and wore his cowboy clothes, replete with chaps, into the recording session. He demonstrated little interest in the movie songs and instead did twenty-one takes of an Eddy Arnold ballad, “You Don’t Know Me,” putting off recording most of the soundtrack until he got to Hollywood. However, when his second departure date arrived, he balked again, complaining of saddle sores.
Elvis was prone to minor skin infections, as he rarely bathed, taking mostly sponge baths, washing up with a rag and soap and rinsing off. Barbara Little, George Klein’s girlfriend, worked for a Memphis physicians’ practice called the Medical Group, and she recommended that Dr. George C. Nichopoulos come out to the ranch and examine him.
The forty-year-old Dr. Nick, as everyone called him, was a Pennsylvanian by birth, though he grew up in Anniston, Alabama, where his father, a Greek immigrant, ran a restaurant, Gus’ Sanitary Cafe. He’d received his medical degree from Vanderbilt University, but not without an interruption for academic probation. He came to Memphis