Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [300]
In Dallas, he discovered that his girlfriend was apparently out on a flight. Now flummoxed and hungry, but uncomfortable going into a restaurant by himself, he dialed Jerry about midnight in Los Angeles. Jerry was working at Paramount as a film editor, and Elvis woke him up.
“Jerry,” Elvis said. “I’m coming into Los Angeles.”
His friend was half asleep and didn’t know who it was, partly because it was that unusual to hear his voice on the phone, since “there were always people to do those things for him.”
“Jerry,” he said again. “It’s me. I’m going to be in Los Angeles at 2 A.M. Get a car. Call Gerald and meet me at the airport.” Still groggy, Jerry said, “Fine,” and wrote down the TWA flight number. Before they hung up, Elvis cautioned Jerry to tell no one where he was. He wanted Vernon and Priscilla to sweat a little.
Gerald Peters, Elvis’s new limo driver, swung by Jerry’s apartment and on the way arranged permission to drive out to the plane. When Elvis walked off, Jerry could see “he was really prepared. He came down the steps with a little cardboard box. I said, ‘What is that?’ He said, ‘Well, I had to get some stuff for traveling.’ He had toothpaste, a toothbrush, a bar of soap, and a little washrag.”
Once they got in the light, Jerry noticed that Elvis’s face was “all swollen up, and he was in really bad shape.” He had a rash on his face and neck, worsened by the chocolate he ate on the flight.
“Elvis, what happened?”
“I got a real bad reaction to penicillin,” he answered. “Let’s call a doctor right away.”
While Jerry was on the phone arranging for a physician’s house call at 2:30 A.M., Elvis started chatting up a flight attendant, and then said they had a stop to make.
“Jerry, we got to take her by her place.”
“Okay,” Jerry said, shaking his head. “But I got a doctor up there on Hillcrest for you.”
Suddenly the stewardess was more important than Elvis’s ailment. It was “one of those real cold, misty nights,” as Jerry remembers, but even after they got the girl home, they sat in the car for an hour so Elvis could talk to his date.
The doctor stayed all night, monitoring his patient, so Jerry stayed up, too. The next morning, Elvis was much improved and announced they were going to Washington. “He didn’t tell me why he wanted to go, and I didn’t ask him.” But Elvis needed Jerry to help him find Joyce. He also wanted to see about getting a narcotics agent badge, like Paul Frees’s.
Gerald drove them to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Elvis cashed a check for $500. Then they boarded a nonstop flight from LAX to Washington National that would get them in about 6 A.M.
The airline boarded them first, and then the rest came on—“heavy Christmas crowd, guys in uniform from Vietnam on the way home for the holiday,” as Jerry remembers. One soldier stopped and shook hands with Elvis, and then the two started up a conversation. Suddenly Jerry felt Elvis nudging him in the side.
“Where’s that money?”
“I got it. It’s safe.”
“Give it to me.”
“Elvis, this is our expense money.”
“Jerry, he’s going home for Christmas.”
“Yes, but we won’t have any money for tips.”
Elvis looked deflated. “The guy just got back from Vietnam.”
So Jerry reached in his pocket, and Elvis handed the soldier the money and wished him a Merry Christmas.
Later in the flight, Elvis told Jerry he intended to see Deputy Director John Finlator, who was John O’Grady’s contact at the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. He wanted that badge, and he wanted it bad. And then, flying through the clouds, Elvis had another idea: He would write a letter to President Richard Nixon.
Woozy eyed and shaky, using the pull-down tray as a desk, he told the president that he was writing in his capacity as a concerned American, and that he had met Vice President Spiro Agnew in Palm Springs only several weeks before and expressed his fears