Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [261]
Dr. Nick’s ears perked up the first time he heard that Barbara knew Elvis, and he had asked her several times for an introduction. She and George had invited him along to Elvis’s last New Year’s Eve party at the Manhattan Club, but Elvis hadn’t shown up. Now Dr. Nick was only too glad to drive down to Walls, Mississippi, to see about Elvis’s behind.
In time, Dr. Nick would come to love Elvis like a brother, Barbara says. Elvis, who had genuine respect for physicians (he never called Dr. Nick by his first name), would also take a liking to the easygoing, white-haired Greek.
But most of all, Elvis liked what the physician might be able to do for him, since almost no one ever said no to Elvis about anything. Overall, pronounces Dr. Nick, “He was healthy then,” though the physician agreed to call Colonel Parker to explain just how painful Elvis’s ailment was, even as he recognized that a second postponement on the film stemmed more from patient preference than from medical necessity. The Colonel saw right through it, of course, and would forever regard Dr. Nick as an adversary.
In the following days, when Parker couldn’t get Elvis on the phone, he’d label Marty Lacker the same, issuing a stern warning to him to keep the lines of communication open. Otherwise, he wrote, “We will have some proper assignment, whether it be you or someone else, where we have a definite immediate contact at all times.” Elvis was to appear at United Artists Studios on March 6, or else.
In the interest of time—and because so many in the entourage were now too dependent on pills to safely drive cross-country—Elvis boarded a plane for Los Angeles on March 5. With him were Red, Marty, Billy, Charlie, Larry, Ray Sitton, and Gee Gee Gambill, the husband of Patsy Presley, who Elvis nicknamed “Muffin.” Joe was already in place in California.
On March 6, when Elvis met with director Arthur Nadel and producers Arnold Laven, Arthur Gardner, and Jules Levy, everyone at the studio was shocked to discover that Elvis weighed 200 pounds, up 30 from his usual 170. Parker immediately demanded a conversation with his client, instructing Elvis to do everything he could during rehearsals to get his weight down before principal photography began.
Elvis tried burning the weight off with Dexedrine, but on top of the sleeping tablets, the Demerol, his usual arsenal of mood-altering drugs, and restricted food intake, the medications made him dizzy.
Sometime late on the night of March 9, Elvis got up to use the toilet on Rocca Place, tripped over the television cord in the bathroom, and hit his head on the sunken tub. He was woozy the next morning, and the guys could tell something was wrong by the way he staggered to his chair and plopped down. “Oh, man,” he said, and held the back of his head.
“What’s wrong, boss?” Joe asked.
He told them what had happened.
“Feel this,” he said, and each of them went over. He had a lump the size of a golf ball.
“Man, I’d better get back into bed. I’m in bad shape here.”
“I’m calling the Colonel,” Joe announced.
Elvis braced himself for the fat man’s tirade, but no one foresaw how the incident would become such a firing pin in detonating Colonel Parker, or how it would lead to an inevitable powder keg of events.
The Colonel arrived at the house and phoned a doctor, who came out with several white-uniformed nurses. He examined the patient and said he would return the following day with portable X-ray equipment. Elvis could barely hold his head up, but the diagnosis would be only a mild concussion, not a fracture. Still, principal photography would have to be delayed by nearly two weeks, and Larry remembers that “a couple of men in suits came from the studio” to take a look.
Parker, fed up with Elvis’s undisciplined behavior, seized the moment to tighten control, starting with the entourage: “I want to see all of you out