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He toured one-nighters all through the spring and hid from the Colonel, not wanting to talk with anybody, really, except Billy and Jo. When Lisa Marie visited for ten days in June, he saw almost no one else. One night Elvis took three or four sleeping pills and said to the Smiths, “Let’s go put Lisa to bed.”

They all went in her room, Billy remembers, and Elvis leaned down to kiss her good night. “When he did, his penis fell out of his pajamas. Elvis didn’t notice it. He was telling us, ‘Oh, ain’t she sweet. She’s my teddy bear.’ And Lisa said, ‘Daddy, your goober is hanging out.’ ”

It embarrassed him.

“ ‘Lisa, you don’t say things like that, goddamn it!’ ”

Then everybody broke up, even Elvis.

One of the things that bothered both Priscilla and Linda was that Elvis wasn’t much of a participatory parent and that he never took on any of the real responsibilities of fatherhood. He slept during the day when Lisa Marie was up and playing, for example, and didn’t take her to school or pick her up, not even when she was in preschool. Billy could see that the child was starved for her father’s attention, but Elvis’s biggest response was to indulge his daughter’s every whim.

He and Priscilla butted heads over their differences in parenting, Elvis giving the eight-year-old a diamond ring, and Priscilla insisting “there’s no way I will allow her to wear a diamond ring at the age of eight.” The child was pulled one way and then the other, so much so that when she went home to her mother in California, she would throw tantrums, screaming, “I wanna go back to Graceland!”

“She was a terror when I got her back,” says Priscilla. “You cannot imagine.”

From the age of three, Lisa had listened to records in her room instead of playing with other children. But in Tennessee, she had a whole other life. She could eat anything she wanted, squish frogs, spook the security guards at 4 A.M., sign rude autographs at the gate (“Fuck you, Lisa Marie Presley”), and race around the grounds in her own golf cart, sometimes with playmates Patsy and Peggy Lynn, the twin daughters of country singer Loretta Lynn, who had met Elvis when they were both in the hospital in Memphis.

If Elvis wasn’t much of a disciplinarian, JoCathy Brownlee spent enough time around them to know that “he loved it when Lisa was there, and he would get very sad when it was time for her to leave. I can remember him talking to Priscilla on the phone and just begging her to let Lisa stay a couple of more days.” And to Mindi Miller he admitted that Lisa had “really softened him and opened him up to being something other than a performer and a man-of-the-world. He said, ‘I never thought it, but she has turned out to be the love of my life.’ ”

It was clear to everyone that Lisa idolized her father, and that even at her young age, she realized his power and position in the world. One night before JoCathy left, the teacher promised Lisa she would ride the golf cart with her when she returned. But the next afternoon, when JoCathy and Elvis were upstairs, “Lisa came running up and said, ‘Daddy! The golf cart has a flat tire!’ I said, ‘Oh, Lisa, I’m so sorry. We can’t ride the golf cart today.’ And Lisa said, ‘J. C., my daddy has millions more golf carts.’ ”

George Klein kept sending girls up to the house, but nobody seemed right, and Elvis asked Jo Smith to check them out. He still liked finger sucking—and toe sucking—and “he’d say, ‘You know if I’d like her or not. If her fingernails are dirty, or if her toenails are dirty, she’s a definite out.’ ”

If the girl passed muster, Jo would say, “Step this way.” But then a lot of times she or Billy would have to sit upstairs with them and talk. Elvis didn’t seem interested in much more than companionship, telling his guests, “I need to have all my bodily fluids to heal myself.” Billy thought it was wild, but “we were expected to say, ‘Yeah, that’s right. He always saves his bodily fluids before a tour.’ ” Often, Elvis’s little cousin wondered, “What the hell does the girl think?” But