Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [332]
Sheila was also perplexed. He’d given her the ring just before the performance, “and I was a little frightened, because I thought maybe he was going to ask me to marry him. It was a crystal ring with diamonds set on the top, and it was huge! I was excited by it, and then disappointed when I realized what it was all about. It was so he could introduce me and have Priscilla turn green with envy. When he said, ‘Show them the ring, baby,’ I mean, he made that ring big enough for the entire showroom to see from the balcony.”
Sheila was confused about all of it, including where she stood in his life. They went to Palm Springs together for five days afterward, and then Elvis went home to Memphis, to Linda, who wasn’t certain about her role, either.
While he was there, he bought Billy and Jo Smith a 1975 Woodcrest doublewide trailer with three bedrooms, and installed it in back of Graceland. The entourage of old hardly existed anymore—the guys were all getting older now, and they had different priorities and families of their own.
Out in California, Elvis had called Patti Parry, who was engaged to be married and living in Malibu with her fiancé. “He said, ‘You’ve got to come up here now.’ I said, ‘Elvis, I’m moving.’ He said, ‘No, no, I need a haircut.’ I said, ‘I just cut your hair.’ He said, ‘Please.’ So I left, and when I got up there, he gave me a mink jacket. I said, ‘You’re not losing me. You’ll never lose me.’ He got nervous, because he didn’t have that many friends. Not really.”
Elvis had added some new guys to help with costumes and security in recent years—Al Strada, karate expert Dave Hebler, and soon he’d bring in Dr. Nick’s son, Dean. His stepbrothers, too, had taken on some of the old responsibilities. But Elvis didn’t feel the loyalty from them that he had from the old gang. And Red, who Sheila considered to be the only real friend Elvis ever had, knew that the Stanleys numbered among Elvis’s drug connections, along with a member of the backing group, Voice. When Red found out the singer was supplying Elvis with hard drugs, his famous temper rushed to the fore. “I kicked the door in, I stomped the guy’s foot and broke [it], said, ‘You keep bringing them, I’m just gonna work my way up.’ ” Everybody thought it was a good idea if Billy Smith were just a little closer, to keep an eye on things.
Elvis had now reached a critical level of drug use. On September 27, 1974, before a show at Cole Field House in College Park, Maryland, Tony Brown, Elvis’s new keyboard man who joined the show that fall as part of Voice, watched in anguish as Elvis fell to his knees getting out of the limousine. (“I don’t even know how we got him on the plane,” Red told Sonny.) His performance that night reflected his woozy state, and fans and reviewers alike expressed dismay.
In the audience was Barbara Hearn, Elvis’s Memphis girlfriend from 1956. She was living in the Washington, D.C., area with her husband, James Smith, and they attended the show with two other couples.
“Oh, I was so sad! I had planned to go down and to speak to Mr. Presley, and I would have gone back to say hello to Elvis, too, but after sitting through the show, I didn’t want to. I had wanted my friends to see how special he was, but he was anything but special.”
Elvis and Diana Goodman depart the hotel for his concert at the Nassau County Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Uniondale, New York, July 19, 1975. Diana, Miss Georgia USA, later enjoyed a short stint on Hee Haw, as Linda Thompson had before her. (Ron Galella)
Chapter Thirty-Three
Flickering White Light
In October, Elias Ghanem became increasingly concerned about Elvis’s distended colon and ordered a series of tests. The results were not extraordinary, but Elvis was now traveling with a trunk of Fleet’s enemas, which some of the guys groused about carrying, and his bowels were so unpredictable that he would often sleep with a towel wrapped around his midsection.
Lamar saw that “he would be so