Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [357]
As they talked, Elvis returned to his constant fixation, Elvis, What Happened? First he yelled wildly about the betrayal of his friends, how good he’d been to their families, and how they’d now hurt his own. Then his mood dampened, and he rehearsed a speech he planned to give from the stage if his fans turned on him in concert. “They’ve never beat me before,” he said, “and they won’t beat me now.” Billy knew what he meant: “Even if I have to get up there and admit to everything.”
Now he cried pitifully, shaking. Billy petted him, cooed baby talk to him. “It’s okay,” Billy soothed. “It’s going to be all right.” As Billy went out the door, Elvis collected himself again. “Billy . . . son . . . this is going to be my best tour ever.”
At 7:45 A.M., Rick Stanley brought Elvis his second “attack,” or yellow envelope of sleeping pills. He had already brought the first about 6:30 as the sun rose. Four hours earlier, Elvis sent his twenty-three-year-old stepbrother to Baptist Memorial Hospital’s twenty-four-hour pharmacy to pick up six Dilaudid tablets. Dr. Nick had prescribed them after Elvis complained of tooth pain. Dr. Hofman, the dentist, had given him codeine, Elvis said, but it wasn’t helping him. At some point, Pauline Nicholson, a cook and maid at Graceland for fourteen years, asked Elvis if he wanted anything to eat, but he declined, saying he wasn’t hungry.
Rick found Elvis holding the bodyguard book, and once again, Elvis was in a state of agitation. “How is Lisa Marie gonna feel about her daddy?” he blurted out, his voice heightened, full of despair. He asked Rick to pray with him, and together they got down on their knees.
“God, forgive me for my sins,” Elvis pleaded. “Let the people who read this book have compassion and understanding of the things that I have done. Amen.”
Rick would later say that after he and Elvis prayed together, he went downstairs and got high, zoning out. That left fifty-three-year-old Aunt Delta to deliver the third packet around 9 A.M., and to call over for more medication when Elvis complained he couldn’t settle down. Nurse Tish Henley reportedly sent over two Valmids and a Placidyl placebo.
Sometime around 8 A.M., Elvis climbed in bed with Ginger, who hated seeing her aging boyfriend once more under the influence. Over time, though, she had come to realize that “the core problem Elvis had was what most of us take for granted—the ability to simply lie down, close our eyes, and go to sleep at night.” Dr. Nick, knowing that Elvis could rest only two or three hours before he’d pop up wide awake, had tried to get him to go to a sleep clinic in Arkansas. But his patient had refused, and asked instead for more sedatives.
Joe Esposito thought Ginger “didn’t know Elvis that well . . . she saw him in a period of time when he was drugged out,” and certainly she was in no position to stage an intervention. Such confrontations were not commonly done outside the medical community in the late 1970s, and Elvis had already rebuffed Drs. Knott and Fink. But Ginger often questioned Elvis’s medication use, she would say later, and tried to get him to not take the packets that Dr. Nick prescribed and Tish Henley doled out like clockwork. It was, in fact, the reason for some of their arguments.
“Although I asked him to try not to use the medication that I thought he did not need, and there were times that he didn’t, I truly believed that in time I would be able to convince him.”
However, on the morning of August 16, Ginger had no opportunity to reason with him because she was heavily medicated herself. She had menstrual cramps, and about 6:30, Elvis had called Tish Henley and asked her to bring up something so Ginger could sleep. The beauty queen would later say she took Quaalude tablets, but the nurse, who kept her drugs in an overnight bag under lock and key in her trailer, would insist she sent up one Dilaudid pill, though the opiate was far more powerful than anything Ginger could have needed for menstrual pain.
Whichever drug it was, Ginger was unused to taking it, and