Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [356]
“When I stayed at Graceland, I could see he was struggling. I could feel that he was very sad. He’d come into my room walking so unsteadily that sometimes he’d start to fall and I’d have to catch him.”
As the hours dwindled down, he got on the phone with Kathy Westmoreland. “I’m so tired,” he told her. “I don’t want to go on this trip.” But he had to, he said. “The Colonel owes $8 million.”
On the evening of August 15, 1977, Elvis slipped out of his blue nylon lounging pajamas, and with Billy’s help, changed into a white silk shirt, a black sweat suit which boasted a Drug Enforcement Agency patch on the jacket, and a pair of short black patent boots. He reached down to zip up the sides, and found that he couldn’t—his ankles were too puffy.
At 10:30 P.M., after a night of motorcycle riding, Elvis stuffed two .45 automatic pistols in the waistband of his pants. Then he donned his blue-tinted, chrome sunglasses and slid behind the wheel of the Stutz. With Ginger beside him, and Billy and Jo in the backseat, Elvis steered his way to the East Memphis office of his dentist, Lester Hofman. A crown on Elvis’s back tooth seemed loose, and he wanted to tend to it before he left the next evening for Portland, Maine, the first stop of his twelve-day tour.
Around midnight, when the foursome returned to Graceland, Elvis and Ginger went upstairs, and the Smiths retired to their trailer. By now, Elvis had managed to gear himself up, and sometime around 2 A.M., he spoke with Larry, who reported he was “in a very good mood, looking forward to the tour, and making plans for the future.”
Ginger would later echo that (“He had earlier told me that he had been off too long”), and report that after they returned from the dentist, they sat in Lisa Marie’s bedroom, where they had met the previous November. They discussed their wedding then, planning a Christmas ceremony, and Elvis promised he would announce the engagement at his August 27 concert in Memphis. “He and Ginger had wonderful plans,” her mother would say.
Around 4 A.M., Elvis went looking for Lisa, who was supposed to be asleep. “He found me,” she remembers, “and said, ‘Go to bed.’ I said, ‘Okay,’ and I think he kissed me goodnight and I ran off.”
Later, he went in her room to tuck her in, and kissed her again.
Afterward, he still felt frisky enough for a game of racquetball, and phoned Billy and Jo to join him and Ginger. As they went out the back door and down the concrete walkway to the racquetball building, a light rain began to slicken their path.
“Ain’t no problem. I’ll take care of it,” Elvis said, and put out his hands as if to stop it. Amazingly, Billy says, the rain let up. “See, I told you,” Elvis boasted. “If you’ve got a little faith, you can stop the rain.”
Out on the court, they’d barely gotten into it when Elvis found he didn’t have as much energy as he’d thought. He’d been on a Jell-O and liquid protein diet for several days, the latest in a series of desperate attempts to fit into his stage costumes, and he’d had no real food in the last twenty-four hours.
The couples cut up more than they concentrated on their game, and mostly swatted each other with the ball. After ten minutes, they took a break, then returned to the court. But they quit for good when Elvis misjudged a serve and hit himself hard in the shin with his racquet.
He limped into the lounge then, Billy teasing him, and fixed himself a glass of ice water. Then he moved to the piano and began singing softly, ending with “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”
Ginger estimates it was about 6 A.M. when they went upstairs in the house, where Billy washed and dried his cousin’s hair. Elvis was particular about who saw it up close, as his hair was now as white as his father’s, and according to Larry, half an inch of growth poked out from