Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [334]
In late December, the Colonel canceled Elvis’s January 1975 engagement in Vegas, citing health reasons. It was a prophetic call. About 7 A.M. on January 29, Elvis and Linda were sleeping at Graceland when “I woke up and I felt something wasn’t right. His breathing was strange, so I shook him and I said, ‘Honey, are you okay?’ He said, ‘I can’t get my breath.’ So I called for the nurse, and she brought some oxygen over, and we had to rush him to the hospital.”
Again Linda stayed with him for two weeks during which time Elvis grew a beard. And while the Colonel issued a statement that Elvis was undergoing tests on his liver, Dr. Nick once more tried to find a way to control Elvis’s use of prescription drugs. In the middle of that chaos, Vernon suffered a heart attack and was admitted to Baptist Memorial Hospital, where he recuperated in the room next to his son.
When Elvis was discharged on Valentine’s Day, either Dr. Nick or nurse Henley came by each afternoon to dole out a controlled amount of medication. By March, their patient was feeling well enough to record again, flying out to Los Angeles and going into RCA’s Sunset Boulevard studios on the tenth. He brought along both Lisa Marie and Sheila, to whom he sang Don McLean’s “And I Love You So,” begging his girlfriend to “step up, let me sing to you, baby.”
On the eighteenth, he began making up his Vegas dates, and ten days into the engagement, he received actress-singer Barbra Streisand and her boyfriend Jon Peters, formerly her hairdresser, in his dressing room. The pair hoped to interest him in their updated remake of A Star Is Born, casting Elvis as the aging rock icon in love with the rising young starlet. Elvis was gleeful at the challenge, hungering for a serious role that would make everybody forget his string of celluloid humiliations.
He was poignant in his discussions with Kathy Westmoreland, telling her it was his last opportunity to prove himself on the screen. “People aren’t going to remember me, because I’ve never done anything lasting. I’ve never made a classic film to show what I can do.” But to the guys, he was more upbeat, excitedly saying, “Can you believe that Barbra Streisand wants me to be with her in that movie?”
Yet after much back and forth, the Colonel denounced it as too cheap a deal, saying Streisand and Peters were only trying to take advantage of him. Once he got over his initial disappointment, Elvis, too, came to that decision, and worried that a loser’s role might actually make him seem like a loser. “He was really more upset than most people know,” Priscilla says. The Colonel, who would never allow his client to accept second billing anyway, helped him save face in the press: “There was never no plan for him to do A Star Is Born. He told me to make the contract stiff enough where they would turn it down, ’cause he did not want to do it.”
That spring Sheila came home with him to Graceland, where he talked to her about moving in. He was finished with Linda, he said. It was not precisely true, even though he bought her a house in Memphis and an apartment in Los Angeles so that she could pursue an acting career. Linda was furious that Sheila was in Memphis, and when she started spending a lot of his money in retaliation—$30,000 on his MasterCard alone—the words gold digger floated around the group. (“She was a beauty queen, and she knew how to get what she wanted,” Sheila says.) But Linda had her defenders, too, Billy suggesting she’d earned it, and Marty insisting Elvis encouraged her to spend money so she’d be away and he could do as he pleased.
Sheila, meanwhile, found Elvis increasingly difficult