Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [345]
No matter who came around, Elvis couldn’t seem to get out of the dumps. In July 1976, Vernon, with Elvis’s blessing, fired Red, Sonny, and Dave Hebler over several issues—a lawsuit over the rough handling of a fan, the general friction in the group, and Vernon’s ongoing paranoia that Elvis’s friends took advantage of him. The three men, especially Red and Sonny, were deeply offended not to hear the word from Elvis himself, and he seemed too paralyzed to pick up the phone.
Then in October 1976 he got word that they were writing a book, one that would expose, among other things, his deep dependence on prescription medication. They were doing it, they insisted, to try to get him to stop, to turn his life around before it was too late. “That was our intention,” Sonny says, “whether people believe it or not.”
The news devastated him. He cried, ranted, and talked of a plan to kill his friends himself and dispose of their bodies. Then, when he calmed down, he had John O’Grady telephone Sonny and offer the three “overdue severance pay” to cancel the book. O’Grady never named an actual figure, but it didn’t matter. “John,” Sonny told him, “taking the money would make us just like the doctors who give him the medicine.”
While Linda agreed that Elvis had handled the firing “rather unceremoniously,” it was “the major turning point, the pivotal current,” in his decline. Mindi agrees. “He couldn’t sleep at night. He was very depressed about it, an absolute wreck. He was afraid when the book came out that people would view him differently and find fault with him. He talked about that to no end: ‘Can you believe Sonny and Red would do this to me? How dare they put me out there! These are lies, the things they’re talking about, all these supposed drugs. It’s crap!’ All I could do was sit and listen. I’d say, ‘E, I’m really sorry.’ ”
Linda, too, tried her best to comfort him. “Let’s just go away and live in a little shack on a farm and forget fame and fortune and all of the craziness that goes with it,” she pleaded.
“Now, why the hell would I want to do that?” Elvis replied.
“I truly, truly loved him, and I wouldn’t have cared if he were John Doe. I loved him as a human soul. He was really a wonderful person,” Linda says. But after four and a half years, it was time for her to go. She could only do so much caregiving and putting her life on hold.
“There was a lot of me that wasn’t being fulfilled, and I didn’t like feeling like I was just an appendage of someone else. I wanted to do some things on my own and be my own person.” Still, she acknowledges, “To this day, there’s a part of my heart that has ‘Elvis’ written all over it.”
Exactly who did the leaving is a matter of semantics. Linda logged a few days on the next tour, Elvis’s eighth of 1976. But she was already emotionally involved with keyboard player David Briggs, who’d offered a strong shoulder. Elvis had his suspicions, and sent Larry Geller to a restaurant, where he found the couple enjoying a candlelight dinner at 3 A.M. “The band was afraid he was going to shoot me,” David remembers. “I didn’t think he would, because he liked me a lot. I didn’t think he would let a woman get between us.” But Elvis would soon make his feelings clear, pulling the plug on David’s electric keyboard one night toward the end of the tour.
Linda’s affair “broke Elvis’s heart,” says Mindi, “because he had already been betrayed by Priscilla. But he never looked at it that he betrayed anybody else. He just said, ‘She’s going out with my damn piano player.’ ”
On November 19, 1976, George Klein, hoping to lift Elvis’s spirits, brought Terry Alden, the reigning Miss Tennessee, out to the house. Terry was a pretty girl, slim and self-possessed, but she was engaged, and came only because she thought it would be fun to meet Elvis and see Graceland. That’s one reason she brought along her two sisters, Rosemary and Ginger.
Elvis was cordial to Terry and Rosemary, and told them he remembered their father, a public