Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [343]
Not surprisingly, Elvis found himself with a cash flow problem, and at the end of November 1975, he borrowed $350,000 from the National Bank of Commerce, pledging Graceland as collateral. On Christmas Eve, he told Marian Cocke that he had a dream that all his friends deserted him when he went broke. It threw him into such a fury that he refused to go downstairs, and watched the four monitors on his closed-circuit video surveillance system until everyone who had been waiting for him went home.
The disappointments piled up: The Colonel killed his dream for a karate film, into which he had sunk more than $100,000 over the past year. His beloved orange chow, one-year-old Get Lo, a dog he and Linda raised together, died after three months of treatment near Boston for a congenital kidney ailment. When the end came, Linda remembers, “Elvis was really hurt. We were on tour, and they waited to tell him until we were coming home on his plane. He cried. It was like our little buddy had died.”
And a huge show on New Year’s Eve at the unfinished Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, while grossing the record-breaking $816,000, turned out largely to be a bust—poor sound, frigid weather (one of the musicians plugged in an electric blanket), and Elvis splitting his pants onstage. “I’m scared shitless,” he told emcee Jackie Kahane as he mounted the stairs, arriving nearly an hour late. In the end, “he didn’t do twenty minutes. I figured they’d kill him. Do you know before we left, they booked him back? That was the magic of Elvis.”
Sometime that year when Linda was away, Elvis sneaked Barbara Leigh into the Monovale house. They hadn’t seen each other in a long time, and it made her sad to see him so overweight and lost. She could tell how chaotic his life was and that he wanted peace. Lisa Marie played with her doll and sang her daddy’s songs, and Elvis mostly quoted the Bible. Then he started choking, falling asleep while eating Mexican wedding cookies.
“I grabbed his head and held it up and slowly made him drink milk. When I told Joe about it, he said, ‘Most everyone in Elvis’s life has saved him at least once.’ ” She left around 4 A.M., feeling hopeless.
“He was way past my help or anyone’s at that time. It was like his spirit was beaten down. His white light was flickering. I think in many ways he was ready to leave this earthly plane.”
Actress Deborah Walley spoke to him in roughly this same period. “He told me that he wasn’t going to be around for very long. He was very clear about what he was saying. He said he wasn’t going to live a full life, that he was going to exit early. He was done.”
In January 1976 he spent his forty-first birthday in Vail, Colorado, with Linda and fifteen others, including his friends on the Denver police force. But what should have been a joyous time turned into one of dissension, with Elvis’s moods fluctuating so rapidly that people walked on eggshells, afraid to say anything around him. Jerry even threatened to quit. Then as Elvis’s disposition improved, he started buying Cadillacs and Lincolns for everybody, including his police pals and Linda and Shirley. Total cost: $70,000.
At home, work was completed on the racquetball court in back of Graceland, and Jo and Billy Smith would often play with him there. He sequestered himself with the Smiths more and more when he was in Memphis, not wanting to leave the cocoon of home. Even there, he verged on psychosis, his behavior fueled by polypharmacy and professional and personal turmoil. When RCA, needing an album, sent a mobile truck to Graceland in both February and October, Elvis was erratic, showing up the first night in his policeman’s uniform, and brandishing a Thompson submachine gun at the latter session. Not much got recorded, especially in February, when he retreated to his bedroom with Red and Sonny to plot a