Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [319]
Barbara Eden followed Elvis into several venues when she was singing, and one of them was Tahoe.
“The man who hired the talent up there sent me to a doctor one time in the mid-1970s, because I had a terrible cold and sore throat. He said, ‘Use him for this one job, but don’t use him for anything else.’ I asked why. He said, ‘He’s very proud that he took care of Elvis, but I was there when he treated him. Elvis’s rear end was like leather, it had been poked so many times with needles to keep him going.’ ”
It was so very sad, she said. “Elvis was like a racehorse that you work too hard and then lose.”
When Elvis returned to Memphis, the Colonel, furious about the canceled dates, called Vernon about the open dialogue between Elvis’s friends and family concerning his abuse of prescription medications. His rant fell on deaf ears.
Dr. Nick saw that Vernon’s relationship with Elvis wasn’t good enough for him to hold any sway. And Vernon, who had a girlfriend and would separate from Dee the following year, didn’t truly realize what was going on. Vernon “was wrapped up in his little world. And he didn’t really want to accept that his son needed any help. That was one big problem.”
But even Lisa Marie, who often saw her father guzzling pills, knew that something was wrong: “One night when I was about five or six, we were watching TV. I looked up at him and said, ‘Daddy, Daddy, I don’t want you to die.’ And he just looked down at me and said, ‘Okay, I won’t. Don’t worry about it.’ I said that to him several times when we were alone together . . . I guess I was picking something up.”
Finally the Colonel convinced Vernon to let Ed Hookstratten, Elvis’s lawyer, open an investigation with John O’Grady to uncover Elvis’s source. But Elvis had doctors all over the country—George Nichopoulos in Memphis, Thomas “Flash” Newman and Elias Ghanem in Las Vegas, George Kaplan in Palm Springs, and Max Shapiro, the dentist, in Los Angeles. And without his cooperation, nothing could be done.
He was into heavy narcotics now, Dilaudid, or synthetic heroin, not just Demerol, and sticking Q-tips soaked in liquid cocaine up his nostrils. He’d get whatever he needed wherever he could, even if it meant self-mutilation: Digging a hole in his foot under the guise of an ingrown toenail, or picking at a spot on his hand until “you could have parked a truck in it . . . really you could see the bones,” according to Lamar. “The last five years were just horrendous.”
He failed to show at a recording session that July 1973 at the legendary Stax studio on McLemore Avenue, only a few doors down from where he and Dixie Locke had attended the old Assembly of God church. The next night, he arrived late, decked out in outrageous “Superfly” clothes, a white suit, black cape, and Borsalino slouch hat, with Linda and Lisa Marie in tow. The musicians were shocked at his weight (“It was the first time I ever saw him fat,” says drummer Jerry Carrigan), and most had never heard him so slurry.
Erratic and moody, he recorded little of use over several nights of sessions. At one point, Felton couldn’t find him and went looking outside. Elvis was there in the dark. “Why are you sitting out here?” Felton asked. The response was soft and slow: “I’m just so tired of playing Elvis Presley.”
He was back in Vegas in early August, adding only one new song, a cover of actor Richard Harris’s divorce weeper, “My Boy,” and receiving devastating reviews of his opening night. The Hollywood Reporter called it “one of the most ill-prepared, unsteady, and most disheartening performances . . . it is a tragedy . . . and absolutely depressing to see Elvis in such diminishing stature.”
Pop singer Petula Clark was in the audience that night. She had seen him once before, at a preopening show some years earlier, going with her friend Karen Carpenter. He had been “great, absolutely fantastic. He was really on form, and very