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That hadn’t really dawned on her when he started with Bill Belew’s Napoleonic collars, but now there was no denying it. As she continued to simplify her look and uncover her natural beauty, Elvis piled on his own plumage and wrapped himself in ever-increasing flamboyance and fantasy costumes. One white outfit was so fringy and bat-winged that when he raised his arms, he appeared to take flight, and he was already thinking jewel-encrusted capes for next year. When the first one arrived, Bill saw, he “was like a child who had gotten a new toy and couldn’t wait to play with it. He would prance and dance around the floor, twirling the cape, and ask the guys, ‘What do you think? How do you like this?’ ” In a way, Elvis was becoming his own skewed vision of the Priscilla he had dolled up and created, taking her from schoolgirl to Dracula’s party queen overnight.

“It’s true,” Priscilla says. “It was a flamboyance that he didn’t have to do. It was a cry, I think. . . . From that point on, he began to self-destruct.”

The self-destruction manifested itself in several ways, including a return to binge spending that rivaled his out-of-control habits at the ranch.

Four days after signing the mortgage on the Palm Springs house, he bought a six-door 1969 Mercedes limo. He continued to indulge his taste in showy automobiles when he bought a 1971 Stutz Blackhawk—the first of its kind in Los Angeles—and gilded the lily in delivering it to George Barris for customizing. He’d buy more cars as the year wore on—another Mercedes for himself, and one for Jerry, and while he was writing checks, a house for Joe, too.

Then there were the gun sprees. In three nights, he dropped $20,000 on firearms at Kerr’s Sporting Goods in L.A., four salesmen falling over themselves to keep up with him. He bought guns for anyone he could think of—girlfriends, the guys, even people off the street. And he became more obsessed with badges, with all the guys being deputized and armed at all times.

It wasn’t just about power and control, or even for protection when death or kidnap threats came, as several did in Las Vegas, beginning that summer of 1970. Deep down, it was part of his paradox, his lifelong obsession with authority, going back to Vernon’s incarceration, his boyhood visits to the prison, and the shame that made his child’s face flame scarlet.

The latter half of the year also saw more expenses as Elvis began adding to his payroll. First he brought RCA producer Felton Jarvis on the team, inducing him to quit his job and work directly for him. That June they holed up in the record label’s recently refurbished Studio B in Nashville and, as with the television special, blended players old and new. Scotty, D. J., and Floyd Cramer, among other stalwarts, joined newbies Norbert Putnam on bass and Jerry Carrigan on drums. James Burton, the guitarist from Elvis’s show band, held it all together as session leader.

The first night, they captured eight songs in ten hours, running every style and tempo, and by the end of five nights, Felton had thirty-five masters in the can. Nothing rivaled the American Studio masterworks, but Elvis would never have such a productive recording streak again, and the quality rode high—a gospel-flavored cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water,” an impassioned rendition of Dusty Springfield’s ballad “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” and the modern pop of “I’ve Lost You,” Elvis’s next single. The song seemed to speak to his domestic situation, even as outward appearances indicated otherwise.

Norbert Putnam was surprised to see that while the food was catered, and the players were told to order anything they liked, Elvis “was so sheltered that he never learned anything about cuisine,” and always ate the same thing—a cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke. One night, Norbert told him that he learned to find the notes on the bass by listening to Elvis’s first records.

“At the end of the conversation, he looked at me and took a deep breath and said, ‘Well,