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Her stomach was in knots. He’d had a very big day. He’d met the president. And soon he would have a really cool new badge. It was no time to disillusion him with confessions.

Elvis and Priscilla at the Junior Chamber of Commerce luncheon, January 16, 1971. Surrounding them are Charlie Hodge (left, clapping), Sonny West (between), Red West (right), and Jerry Schilling (far right, middle). (Dave Darnell/the Commercial Appeal)

Chapter Thirty

“A Prince from Another Planet ”

For his thirty-sixth birthday, Elvis tricked out his new light blue Mercedes with all manner of law enforcement gear—a police radio, a revolving blue light, chemical weapons, and handcuffs. Then he spent the next few days buying $3,500 worth of additional guns and police equipment. If he couldn’t be an officer, at least he could play cop.

In D.C. he’d had the limo driver pull over at the scene of a terrible accident one night on the rain-slicked Baltimore–Washington Parkway. Someone had hit a car and driven it across two lanes, and it ended up a tangled wreck. Inside, an injured woman lay across the front seat. Elvis approached a policeman standing in a rain cape, water pouring down the visor of his cap.

“Officer, can I help with anything? I’m Elvis Presley.”

Joyce was standing behind him and saw the policeman’s stunned expression in the glare of his flashlight, his mouth agape, his eyes fixed in a wide-open stare. Before he could finally find the words, Elvis moved on. Now he was kneeling down beside the woman.

“Hi, ya. How you doin’?” He tried to sound friendly and calm.

The woman was dazed, but whether it was from the accident or who she saw crouched in front of her, Joyce wasn’t sure. She saw her mouth moving a bit.

“She’s trying to say something,” Joyce pointed out.

“Just relax, ma’am,” Elvis said, “and tell me what you need.”

“Are you . . . really Elvis Presley?” Joyce worried the poor woman thought she had died and gone to heaven.

The ambulance was coming now. They could hear the siren and see another policeman waving traffic around.

“You’re going to be all right,” Elvis told her, and then he went on his way.

Now he never left Graceland without his blue police light, his long flashlight, a billy club, and at least two guns. “He’d put on his uniform and go out and stop traffic—pull a guy over, tell him he was driving too fast, and give him a safety lecture,” Billy Smith remembers. Elvis may have been impersonating an officer, but he couldn’t write anyone a ticket, so he carried a pad to scribble out an autograph, and handed it through the car window as if it were a citation.

More and more, he saw himself as a patriot and humanitarian, a person put in an extraordinary position to make a difference, especially after the Junior Chamber of Commerce of America honored him as one of the nation’s Ten Outstanding Young Men of the Year on January 16, 1971. It put him in the company of past winners Leonard Bernstein, Orson Welles, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

That night at the awards ceremony at Ellis Auditorium, he would make his famous acceptance speech. (“When I was a child, ladies and gentlemen, I was a dreamer. . . .”) But at the press conference at the prayer breakfast that morning, he took the chance to say what was really on his mind: “I don’t go along with music advocating drugs and desecration of the flag. I think an entertainer is for entertaining and to make people happy.”

Priscilla was by his side that day, and she would come for the opening and close of his Vegas engagement in January and February. But Joyce was there in between. It was the first time they had made love during a time when he was “Elvis Presley.” She found that “his private nature was to be soft and tender, playful and cuddly rather than boldly erotic,” but that when she went to bed with the “performer,” something of the orgiastic frenzy of the crowd came with him.

Still there was some of that sweetness. He was glad to have met Janice the month before, he told Joyce. “I understood that until