Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [322]
They fantasized about having a child together, and Elvis wanted a son. They talked about everything from the way he would look to what his name would be—Elvis had always liked John Baron Presley—“and even our pet names for him. And then we would pretend that he was out somewhere, and we were looking for him. We just had funny games going.”
But Elvis would also talk to Linda about his hang-up, telling her “the whole notion of a baby passing through there just made it an unsavory place to be.” She found it “very odd. It didn’t make me anxious to have his child.”
When Elvis got out of the hospital, Drs. Knott and Fink went to Graceland a couple of times, where Dr. Nick and Joe had already been to search Elvis’s bedroom and to throw out large bottles of pills, including Dexedrine and Seconal. But Elvis refused to get into anything deep with the physicians, who had hoped to persuade him to enter Dr. Knott’s drug treatment program. As soon as they started talking about “iatrogenic and volitional polypharmacy,” and he found out precisely what kind of doctors they were, he turned them away. Says Dr. Nick: “He didn’t want anybody getting into his brain.”
Even after Elvis stabilized, his recovery was slow. But little by little, he felt better. Dr. Nick dropped by every night after work, and they felt like a team—Elvis, Dr. Nick, and Linda—working to restore him to health. One problem at home was getting him to bathe on a regular basis. Left on his own, he would just eat the dark green Nullo tablets that Linda used to keep down menstrual odor. Though recommended for problems with bowel control and colostomy, “Elvis thought they’d kill any type of body odor, from bad breath to butt, even underarm,” remembers Billy Smith. “He ordered bottles of ’em.” As time went on, “That was his bath.”
When he went to Vegas on January 26, 1974, the Las Vegas Sun reported that he was back “at the top of his form, in good humor . . . extremely generous time-wise, and a jam-packed Hilton main showroom responded warmly.”
But at Dr. Nick’s suggestion, the engagement was cut from four weeks to two, with one show on the weeknights, and two on the weekends, “because the more shows he did, the more medications he needed. And I tried to get Dr. Ghanem out of it, because the medications that were giving Elvis the most trouble were the ones he was prescribing him.”
The Colonel didn’t like the idea—fewer shows meant less money—and he particularly didn’t like Dr. Nick telling anybody what to do. Parker was much more comfortable around Dr. Ghanem, with whom he shared a lot of friends: Ghanem was deeply connected to the Mob. Dr. Nick would later lose his license for overprescribing to a number of patients over a period of years, but Dr. Ghanem was just as loose with a prescription pad, and the general feeling among the guys was that he never really tried to help Elvis. Kathy Westmoreland saw it, too.
“When Dr. Ghanem was there, Elvis was worse. When Nick was there, everything was in more control.” Besides, Kathy thought, there was something unsettling about Dr. Ghanem. “I think he had an Elvis complex. He thought he was Elvis in a way. He dressed like him a couple of times, put on his jumpsuits and had his dark hair. He’d come into the dressing room like that, and Elvis didn’t really laugh that much. I don’t think he thought it was that amusing.”
But Elvis was not acting like a man who had kicked a drug habit. He was becoming more peculiar, erratic, and dangerous, and he was not as patient with the fans as he had been at previous engagements. When one girl tried to yank off his necklace as a souvenir, he snarled his worst epithet at her: “You son of a bitch!” At another show, he kicked at a fan who got too close.
He had a new bass player now, thirty-year-old Duke Bardwell, who replaced Emory Gordy Jr. at the last minute. Duke, a Louisiana native who grew up loving Elvis, was “nervous as a chicken in a yard full of roosters” about the idea of playing with his hero. But on the day Elvis auditioned him, at the RCA Studios in