Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [307]
One night after the show, he took her to Palm Springs. He was drinking large doses of Hycodan, a narcotic, analgesic cough syrup, and serving it to Page in champagne glasses. She had a headache, and Elvis gave her pills to ease the throb in her temples. That night, they both nearly died. When Sonny found them the next day, the room was freezing, and Elvis’s breathing was erratic. The Hycodan bottle was almost empty.
“Boss! Boss, snap out of it!” Sonny yelled and shook him by the shoulders. “Wake up, Elvis!” He made a moaning sound, so Sonny moved on to Page. She let out a short rasp, but when Sonny shook her, she didn’t come to, nor when he slapped her face hard. Charlie called for Dr. George Kaplan, one of Elvis’s regular suppliers, who arrived within minutes.
A shot of Ritalin brought Elvis around, but Dr. Kaplan made no promises about Page. At the hospital, she was placed in intensive care.
“I told her not to drink that much,” Elvis said. His voice sounded guilty, Sonny thought, and he paced the floor and sent a Bible verse to the hospital. The guys called John O’Grady and a contact with the Palm Springs police to keep the cops at bay. They came up with a plan that if she died, Charlie would take the rap. “He’d say she was his date, and he’d given her the stuff,” Marty reports.
Colonel Parker went into damage control, getting everybody out of Palm Springs and arranging to pay $10,000 to the ambulance crew for their silence. Elvis picked up Page’s medical bills, but though he talked to her on the phone several times, he didn’t want to see her again. Still, she and her mother came to Vegas. “I’m sorry to say that Page wasn’t the same person,” Sonny wrote in his memoir, Elvis: Still Taking Care of Business. “Her personality wasn’t as radiant as before.” After Elvis’s death, the episode would be reported in the addendum papers to the Drug Enforcement Agency’s investigation of his addiction.
When Joyce attended his Vegas engagement in August—the International Hotel was now the Las Vegas Hilton—she was ticked off not to have been invited to Tahoe. She thought that Elvis was punishing her. She’d overslept on Placydils when she was at Graceland and raced out for her plane, leaving him alone in bed. But all was forgiven. He had the flu, or at least Vegas Throat, and although he’d seen Dr. Sidney Boyer for it, he wanted to be babied. That led to a natural subject, and Joyce inquired about Lisa Marie, and about Priscilla, too. And then Elvis uttered the words that stopped her heart: “She’s a mama. She does the mothering. A mother is different. Once a woman is a mama, she changes.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Well,” he said, “when a woman has a child, it’s a gift from God. It’s God’s way of telling her she’s not a little girl anymore. She’s grown up, you know? Now it’s time to be respected and all.”
Joyce wasn’t following it. He didn’t respect his wife until she had a baby?
No, no, he didn’t mean it that way. He just didn’t think a mother should try to be sexy and attract men. “It’s just not exciting and it’s not supposed to be,” he said frankly. “Trust me on this, Joyce. I know I’m right.”
He didn’t say he had no trouble with Susan Henning, and he didn’t say that he was currently involved with Barbara Leigh, both of whom had a child at home.
But six days after Elvis made his declaration, Joyce sat in her doctor’s office arranging to abort his child. On September 3, 1971, laying on a gurney, she was wheeled down a hospital corridor and into a bright white operating room. Everything was sterile, including the faces of the team that attended her. She felt the chemicals flow through the tubes, and then counted back, “A hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, . . .” She never told Elvis a thing.
“I was so all-consumed with him I was afraid he would leave me. And I didn’t want to jeopardize my relationship with him, no matter what.”
Within seven months she would change her mind. By