Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [358]
“Precious,” he said, “I’m going to go in the bathroom and read for a while.”
“Okay,” she murmured, “but don’t fall asleep.”
“Don’t worry,” he called back. “I won’t.”
Behind the bathroom door, Elvis paged through a book. But it was not The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus, as is usually reported, but either a slim volume of pornography—a combination of sex and astrology with graphic drawings, as one investigator described it—or as Ginger remembers, the more high-minded Sex and Psychic Energy, by Betty Bethards. Then he waited for the pills to take effect, at some point calling Marian Cocke to say he had four tickets for her for his August 27 show.
As Elvis’s day was winding down in Memphis, the Colonel’s was already well along in Portland. At the Dunfey Sheraton, Parker held court to oversee every detail of Elvis’s two-day engagement, and barked orders at promoter Tom Hulett, Lamar Fike, RCA’s George Parkhill, and Tom Diskin.
Things were still quiet at Graceland, and just before noon, Billy walked over to the house and spoke with Al Strada, who was packing Elvis’s wardrobe cases. Billy asked if anyone had seen the boss. Al said no, that Elvis had left orders with David Stanley that he wasn’t to be awakened until four P.M. under any circumstances. Billy knew that Ginger didn’t watch Elvis like Linda did, and wondered aloud if anyone had checked on him. For a moment, he started up the stairs. “No,” he thought. “If they ain’t heard from him, God, let him rest. He needs it.”
Finally, at 2:20 P.M., Ginger turned over in Elvis’s huge bed and found it empty. Had he never come back to sleep? She noticed his reading light was still on, and thought it peculiar. Ginger knocked on the bathroom door.
“Elvis?”
There was no answer, and so she turned the knob. “That’s when I saw him in there,” she said days later.
Elvis was slumped on the floor, angled slightly to the right. He was on his knees, his hands beneath his face, in a near praying position. His pajama bottoms bunched at his feet. Elvis had seemed to fall off the toilet. But why was he twisted into such a grotesque form? And why hadn’t he answered? He laid so still, so unnaturally still.
Now Ginger bent down to touch him. He was cold, his swollen face buried in the red shag carpet, his tongue, nearly bitten in half, protruding from clenched teeth, his beautiful skin now mottled purple-black. Elvis’s death had not been quick. Nor had it been painless. But if Elvis had called out, Ginger likely would not have heard him, so deep was her drugged sleep.
At first, she thought he was just unconscious, that he had suffered a seizure of some kind, and had fallen.
“I slapped him a few times and it was like he breathed once when I turned his head.” She forced open a shuttered eye. A cloudy blue pupil stared at things that Ginger could not see. She tried to move him, and could not.
Ginger was in a state of shock, and tried to stave off thoughts of the worst. “I didn’t want to think he was dead. God wouldn’t want to take him so soon.” And so she threw off thoughts of the obvious: Elvis Presley had died of polypharmacy in the bathroom at Graceland at the age of forty-two.
Now a frightened Ginger picked up the phone, which rang in the kitchen. Nancy Rooks, the afternoon maid, took the call. Breathless, Ginger asked, “Who’s on duty?”
“Al is here,” Nancy answered, and passed the phone to the bodyguard. “Al, come upstairs!” Ginger cried. “I need you! Elvis has fainted!” Al rushed upstairs, took one look, and with fear in his voice, called down for Joe. Elvis’s old army buddy bounded up the stairs and turned the body over. It was stiff with rigor mortis, though Joe was able to stretch it out a bit and pound on Elvis’s chest to try to get him breathing.
Joe already knew the awful truth—Elvis had crawled several feet and vomited before dying—but he didn’t want Ginger