Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [359]
Suddenly, the upstairs was a mass of people. Charlie was crying and begging Elvis not to die, and Vernon, still recuperating from his own heart attack only months earlier, collapsed on the floor, moaning, “Don’t go, son! You’re going to be all right!” Now Lisa Marie peered wide-eyed into the scene, and Joe yelled at Ginger: “Get her out of here, quick!” Eighty-eight-year-old Minnie Mae consoled her, all the while wondering how Elvis could die before his own grandmother.
“What happened to him?” asked Ulysses Jones, one of the emergency medical techs. Al blurted out the truth. “We think he OD’d.”
Dr. Nick attended him all the way to the hospital, performing CPR and screaming “Breathe for me!” at a man who was long past hearing. At Baptist Memorial, the Harvey Team attempted every heroic measure, and then, to no few tears, finally gave up. At the end, Marion Cocke, who had been paged to the emergency room, wiped off the once handsome face and kissed Elvis’s cheek.
Dr. Nick, his skin ashen, shuffled into the private waiting room where Joe sat with Charlie, Al, Billy, and David Stanley. “He’s gone,” he said, his voice breaking. “He’s no longer here.”
The men cried shamelessly and held on to each other as Dr. Nick asked Maurice Elliott, the hospital spokesman, not to make the announcement until he’d informed Vernon. He worried that the old man’s heart might not be able to take the shock, and immediately left for Graceland to perform the grim duty, riding back in the same ambulance that had taken Elvis away.
Jo Smith was there when the doctor walked up to Vernon and shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, his face a mask of grief. Suddenly, as Jo remembered, the whole world “was at a standstill.”
Ginger, too, was struck with “an overwhelming sense of sadness, disbelief, and feeling as if Graceland had also died.” But Elvis’s fans would cut her no slack, forever branding her as the woman who had not saved him, and despising her mother, Jo, who ultimately filed and won a lawsuit against the estate to pay the mortgage on her home as Elvis had promised.
Later that afternoon, Vernon would leave the chaos inside the house and stand on the steps of Graceland to tell the world, “My son is dead.” Already suspecting that Elvis would not be coming home, he had tried to prepare Lisa Marie. But the child was confused, and strangely mimicked the reactions of the media. “She stood there and put her hands on her hips like an adult,” reports Larry Geller. “She said, “I just can’t believe it! Elvis Presley is dead!’ ”
Yet when Sam Thompson got his sister, Linda, on the line, the child, standing nearby, was simply Elvis’s daughter. Sam gave her the receiver. “It’s Lisa,” the small voice spoke into the phone. Linda cooed. “I know who it is, you goobernickel.” Then came the words that she had dreaded for so long: “Linda,” Lisa said, “Daddy’s dead.”
Before he left the hospital, Joe asked Maurice Elliott for some privacy, and the public relations man led him into a conference room off the ER. There, Joe called the Colonel in Portland. George Parkhill answered, and handed the phone to the big man.
“I have something terrible to tell you,” Joe began, his voice wavering.
In the moments before the word went out on radio, television, and teletype wire, the women who knew Elvis best heard the news.
In Los Angeles, Priscilla was meeting her sister, Michelle, for lunch on Melrose Avenue. “I left the house knowing something was wrong,” Priscilla would remember. “The air was wrong. The sky was wrong. Something was putting me on edge.” She saw Michelle’s face, and her stomach tightened.
“A call came in from Memphis,” Michelle started.
“This big shock went through me,” Priscilla would say. Lisa was in Memphis, so she was sure something bad had happened to her.
No, Michelle said. “It’s Elvis. They have him in the