• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

They’d run through the songs for about an hour or so, and then during the break, Duke found himself standing next to Elvis. He’d noticed the big, nickel-plated pistol that Elvis pulled out of his belt and handed to one of the guys.

“I know you have a lot of martial arts training,” Duke ventured, trying to break the ice, “so I was wondering why you carry a gun.”

Elvis put his top lip up a little and answered, “That’s to handle anything from six feet out. Six feet in, I got it covered.”

Duke was thinking about that as Elvis turned to walk away. Then suddenly he spun around and threw a punch that stopped with one of his big rings resting on the end of Duke’s nose. “I never saw it coming, but it left me with a red face and a racing heart. He could have missed by a half inch and driven my nose bone through my brain.”

Elvis’s behavior grew even more unpredictable once he got to Vegas. One night he shot out a chandelier in the suite, and another night, he fired randomly when he couldn’t find Dr. Ghanem. Already, he had narrowly missed hitting Linda while trying to pick off a porcelain owl with a .22-caliber Savage revolver. She had been in the bathroom, and remarkably, though shaken, kept her wits about her as the bullet tore through the wall, nicked the toilet paper holder, and shattered a hanging mirror: “It was crazy, but he didn’t take it as casually as some people said he did. He was just having a little target practice, but he was really upset.”

The Colonel had invited Bob Finkel, the executive producer of the ’68 special, to attend Elvis’s show one night, and afterward, Joe took Bob and his wife, Jane, up the private elevator to the penthouse and left them alone to go in by themselves.

When Bob opened the door, he was startled to find that “the suite was pitch-black, except for the light from the television set. There was a western on, and Elvis was sitting there. After all we went through together, all he said was, ‘Hi, Bob,’ and then he fired at the television with a pistol. He was killing the bad guys, I guess, but it scared the shit out of me. Jane and I got right back in the elevator and went down.”

The shooting of televisions started one afternoon at Graceland, when Elvis was eating breakfast and the polished face of actor-singer Robert Goulet suddenly filled the TV screen. It took him back to the memory of Anita Wood’s going on tour with Goulet when Elvis was away in Germany. She was writing him a letter one day, when Goulet stopped and scribbled a postscript, something to the effect of, “Hey, Elvis! Don’t worry! I’m taking pretty good care of Anita!”

It was just a joke, but it always gnawed at him, and he had been thinking more about Anita lately. In what would be their last conversation, she called him in Vegas to tell him her father had died, and to say that for the first time she understood how sad it was for him when his mother passed away. Now, seeing Goulet just brought it all back, and Elvis flashed in anger, pulled out his .22, and blew a hole through the set. Then, as Marty Lacker tells it, “he calmly picked up his utensils and said, ‘That’ll be enough of that shit.’ ”

Elvis’s reliance on pills tended to be worse in Vegas than anywhere else, because the playground of his twenties had become the trap of his thirties (“Vegas is a terrible place”), and he chose to get wasted rather than have to deal with it. “It’s better to be unconscious than miserable,” he’d offer with a tinge of black humor.

“If we were at home,” Linda says, “he could just sleep for days and it didn’t matter.” But in Vegas he had to get up again for the shows, so it was a continuous cycle of uppers and downers. “They shot him to go to sleep, then they’d have to shoot him to wake him up,” Jackie Kahane said. “I saw him wiped out. Wiped out. I mean crawling on the bloody floor! It was very sad. Very, very sad.”

“There were a good five or six times that he got so fucked up that he almost died,” Lamar remembers. Usually it was from the sleeping pills. Then he