Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [311]
Bragging about cunnilingus and fellatio may have simply been a cover-up for what was really going on with him. “He loved cuddling and petting more than he did the actual sex anyway,” one woman noted. “But when the drugs entered the picture, they took over his body and his sex drive took a nosedive, too. I saw the changes starting to happen to him in 1972. It was showing as early as that.”
Despite the early stages of his physical deterioration, Elvis could still summon the full strength of his artistry when the Colonel offered him a challenge.
In June 1972 Elvis became the first performer to sell out four consecutive shows at Madison Square Garden, grossing $730,000 over three days. He had never played New York City before, as the Colonel always believed Elvis appealed more to a rural and small-town fan base than urban sophisticates. Now Elvis was apprehensive, though he tried not to let it show. When his new opening act, comic Jackie Kahane, was essentially booed off the stage opening night, Elvis went to him in his dressing room. “Mr. Kahane, they’re animals out there. Don’t let them bother you. You go out there tomorrow and you kick ass.”
When Elvis emerged to the billowing strains of Also Sprach Zarathustra, Joe Guercio remembers, a great roar echoed through the fabled building, and “so many flashbulbs went off that the Garden was almost lit for a second.”
The New York Times, in a rave, recognized it as a legendary performance. Chris Chase’s review headlined “. . . A Prince from Another Planet.” The writer saw Elvis as a one-of-a-kind talent, “a special champion [like] a Joe Louis . . . a Joe DiMaggio, someone in whose hands the way a thing is done becomes more important than the thing itself. . . . He stood there at the end, his arms stretched out, the great gold cloak giving him wings . . . the only one in his class.”
During their four-and-a-half-year love affair, Linda Thompson was as much Elvis’s nurse and mother substitute as girlfriend. The Memphis Mafia believes he would have died three years earlier had she not been there. (Robin Rosaaen Collection)
Chapter Thirty-One
Buntin’
The success of the Madison Square Garden engagement buoyed Elvis for a time, but he was still shaken by the divorce. On July 26, 1972, Elvis and Priscilla legally separated, and the world at large learned about Mike Stone. Elvis’s lawyer, E. Gregory Hookstratten, drew up the papers and worked out the terms of the settlement, which Priscilla readily accepted: a lump sum of $100,000, plus $1,000 per month for her own expenses and $500 child support. Even though she would reopen the divorce in 1973, seeking more money, they would still walk out of divorce court arm in arm and remain close, in part for Lisa’s sake.
“It was like we were never divorced. Elvis and I still hugged each other, still had love. We would say, ‘Mommy said this,’ and ‘Daddy said that.’ That helped Lisa to feel stable. There was never any arguing or bitterness.”
Elvis recklessly roared around town on his motorcycle, looking terrible, his face unnaturally round and seeming distorted. Twenty-year-old Mary Kathleen “Kathy” Selph, an exotic dancer and singer at the Whirlaway Club and another Priscilla look-alike, was often seen on the back of his Harley-Davidson, her hands around his waist. On June 30, the Commercial Appeal photographed them at the corner of South Parkway and Highway 51 South, which had been renamed Elvis Presley Boulevard a year earlier. Her mother saw the picture, and reprimanded her daughter for dating a married man, later learning that Elvis and Priscilla were separated.
But in less than a month, it was all over. Just before three o’clock on the morning of July 18, 1972, Kathy, whose father, E.B. Selph, was the deputy fire chief, was killed in a single-car accident, when her vehicle struck a cement pillar on eastbound I-240 near Elvis Presley Boulevard. She was alone in the car. The Press-Scimitar assumed she was driving home from work, but perhaps she was en route elsewhere.
“There was a real nice spray of