Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [316]
He’d been thinking a lot about the first girl to whom he gave a round bed, as that September, Ann-Margret tragically fell twenty-two feet from a platform in Lake Tahoe, breaking her jawbone, and shattering her face, arm, and knee. She required extensive reconstructive surgery, but was back performing in Vegas in late November, and Elvis, who had already sent her flowers, went to talk with her.
One night, as she and Roger entertained friends in the suite, he dropped by unexpectedly. “It was so easy for us to lapse into the closeness we’d always shared,” she wrote, and they monopolized each other until it became awkward with the other guests.
Late that night, the phone rang in her bedroom while Roger was in the living room next door. She knew who it was before she answered. Elvis started out saying how wonderful she looked, and that his prayers for her health and healing had been answered. Then his tone shifted. He was lonely, he said, and wondered if she would see him.
“You know I can’t,” she told him.
“I know. But I just want you to know that I still feel the same.”
As the “Aloha” concert neared in January 1973, Elvis “was so pumped up he could have hit the ceiling,” Marty says. He worked hard to get in shape, losing twenty-five pounds on a crash diet consisting of six hundred calories a day and what Marty remembers as “injections of urine of a pregnant woman.” He worked closely with Bill Belew on the design of what would become his favorite jumpsuit, featuring the American eagle, and exercised enormous discipline in staying off his drug protocol.
“Aloha from Hawaii” would be his last great triumph—the album would stay on the Billboard charts for thirty-five weeks, and become his first number one chart-topping LP in nine years—and many of his old friends came to Honolulu to share the excitement. Felton Jarvis was there, though still weak from an Elvis-financed kidney transplant. And Patti Parry caught a plane at the very last minute (“Get over here, now!”) after Elvis looked at a tape of the rehearsal and decided he needed his hair styled.
It was a remarkable performance and earned the highest ratings ever in Japan, where it was broadcast live. The feedback, all glowing, boosted Elvis’s spirits. The night after the show, he bought diamond-and-emerald rings for all the wives and gave each of the guys a thousand dollars.
He’d stayed straight for two weeks now, and everyone prayed that Elvis had turned a corner. But just before he went on, he’d asked for a shot of vitamin B-12 mixed with amphetamines.
The next morning, they were all supposed to go to the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial. Marty banged on his door at the Hawaiian Village Hotel, and nobody answered. “Finally, Linda came, and she just made a face and shook her head. Elvis was sitting on the balcony, on the top floor of the hotel, stoned out of his gourd. He was sweating profusely, with a towel around his neck, and he could hardly talk. He’d gone right back into it.”
When the special was broadcast in America on April 4, 1973, 57 percent of the television audience watched it, including Joyce Bova. It stirred her emotions, and she called Charlie, just wanting to share the experience with someone close to him. When Elvis himself called back on the “hotline,” the private phone he’d had installed in her home, her palms began perspiring. But it was a sweet call. “I miss you,” he said. “I want you to come to California. Call me in a couple of weeks.” She said yes, and for a second she meant it. Before they hung up, he asked for a copy of a photo of himself with both Joyce and Janice taken in Vegas. She sent it, but she didn’t call. “I couldn’t have gone back to that. I didn’t want to. It wasn’t good for me.”
Elvis watched the show with Linda and Jerry, sitting at home