Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [347]
In Anaheim, Elvis gave one of his better performances, and Larry, seeing him perk up onstage, told Elvis that Ginger inspired him.
She would stay with him the entire two weeks of his Vegas engagement that December 1976, though Ginger’s charms could not continue to work miracles. Elvis flagged as the nights wore on, hurting his ankle and seeming tired.
“I hate Las Vegas,” he said out of the blue during one late night show, baffling the crowd.
Everything about him signaled that Elvis was in deep trouble, physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Sandy Ferra, Elvis’s little Hollywood pal, went backstage with husband Wink Martindale one evening. “When we left, I commented that Elvis didn’t look good at all,” Wink says.
Priscilla’s family, including her parents Paul and Ann Beaulieu, was also in attendance that engagement, and Elvis invited them to his dressing room. He spoke to Michelle, Priscilla’s sister, about his hands. “He was self-conscious that they were so bloated. I patted his hands, as if to reassure him.”
But Priscilla had noticed them three years earlier on the day they met in the judge’s chambers and signed the final divorce decree. As they sat with their fingers entwined, seeming more like an old couple than adversaries who were about to be legally parted, Priscilla grew alarmed at how puffy Elvis was. “I knew something was different; something was wrong. I could see it in his eyes, I could feel it in his hands.”
Now in Vegas, Paul sensed that “he didn’t want to let us go. He kept thinking of topics that would prolong the conversation . . . he kept asking us what we needed and wanted. We told him that we were just fine. We had everything we needed. But he insisted that we accept something.”
Finally, Elvis wrote out a personal check for $10,000 and handed it to Ann. She didn’t want to take it, but he seemed to need her to accept it. After the divorce, Elvis had called her and said, “Please speak with Cilla,” and begged her to try to convince his ex-wife to come back to him.
“It was a very sad conversation. I felt how desperately he wanted to keep his family together.” Ann knew that her daughter was determined to move on with her life, but she told Elvis that she would do what she could.
“Please do,” he pleaded. “I want you all to be part of my family.” It was like a sword through her. “Elvis,” she said, “we’ll always be part of your family.” But when they left after his performance that December, “I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.”
Priscilla, who the fans blamed for Elvis’s deterioration and the breakup of the marriage, knew Elvis held out hope that they would reunite.
“I’d take Lisa over to his house and he’d say, ‘Cilla, go do what you have to do now. Go see the world. But when you’re forty and I’m fifty, we’ll be back together. You’ll see.” But she would later say that in the last year of his life, “We underestimated his emotional pain. And he lacked the means to fully express that pain.”
Early in that same Vegas engagement, even as Ginger was by his side, Elvis reached for a pad he kept by his bed and scribbled a note that spoke to the core of his emptiness.
“I feel so alone sometimes. The night is quiet for me. I’d love to be able to sleep. I am glad that everyone is gone now. I’ll probably not rest. I have no need for all this. Help me, Lord.”
Later, he crumpled it up and threw it in the waste can, where someone—one of the guys, a maid—retrieved it. It was remarkably similar to another desperate note he wrote in the Hilton suite: “I don’t know who I can talk to anymore. Or turn to. I only have myself and the Lord. Help me, Lord, to know the right thing.”
The pattern of both notes would later fuel rumors that Elvis had contemplated suicide. Though some believe they are forgeries, or fakes, Priscilla included them in her family memoir, Elvis by the Presleys, an indication she believes they are authentic.
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