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When Priscilla got home, she could hear the phone ringing from her front step. “I couldn’t get my key in the door fast enough.”

It was Joe’s voice, delivering the message she never wanted to hear. Suddenly, time stopped. And then, she later said, “The sun went out.”

Next Joe called Shirley. “He just said, ‘Elvis is dead.’ I went, ‘That’s not a funny joke, Joe.’ Then he started to cry. I had never heard Joe cry, so I knew it was no joke. I was out in the alley behind our apartment, just crunched over crying. I scratched my nails against the wall, and just followed it from the top to the bottom.”

Joe asked Shirley to help take care of some of the travel arrangements, and to call Ann-Margret. She had opened at the Las Vegas Hilton the night before, and wondered why Elvis’s guitar-shaped flower arrangement hadn’t arrived. He’d never missed an opening in ten years, and the actress-singer was worried. The switchboard operator told Shirley that the Smiths had a block on their phone. “Well, you need to go through it,” Shirley said. “This is an emergency.”

Roger picked up, and Shirley told him that Joe just called with the dreadful news. Roger turned to his wife and said simply, “It’s Shirley.” Then all Shirley heard was screaming in the background.

Joe then called Sheila Ryan. She didn’t ask what had happened. She knew: Elvis had died of a broken heart. “I turned the world off—the television, the radio. I wouldn’t go to the store. I couldn’t deal with it.”

Now it was all over the media.

Joyce Bova was driving on I-95 with a friend, Carolyn Russo, while Janice was in another car with their mother. Janice heard it on the radio, and pulled up beside her sister blowing her horn and yelling for her to turn on the news. “The first thing I heard was a deejay announcing, ‘The singer of this song is dead today.’ ” Her heart sank when Elvis’s voice wafted out. “I couldn’t even react. I was just in shock.” The family pulled over, got out of their cars, and made a circle, hugging Joyce on the shoulder as traffic whizzed by.

Ann Ellington heard it in a Nashville doctor’s office on the loudspeaker. “I was absolutely devastated.”

Raquel Welch was in rehearsal for a Vegas show when somebody came running into the room and said, “Elvis is dead!” And “everybody went numb. It was the end of an era.”

Suzanna Leigh had just awakened from a dream in which Elvis told her good-bye. Then she got a call from CBS News, wanting comment.

And down in Biloxi, June Juanico was just getting up from a nap. “When I came out of my bedroom, my mother was looking at me really strangely. Finally, she said, “ ‘June!’ And she came over, and she was holding me at arm’s length, and she had tears in her eyes. She said, ‘I just heard on the television that Elvis Presley has died.’ I looked at her and said, ‘That can’t be! That can’t be!’ I went over to the television and just fell to my knees in front of it. All I could do was make grunting sounds. I couldn’t breathe. I honestly think if my mother had not been with me, I might have died. In my heart, I always thought that Elvis and I would be together again, somewhere down the road.”

EPILOGUE

Nearly thirty-three years after his death, Elvis Presley still holds sway, his musical talents shaping the seminal years of an entire genre, his songs (“Love Me Tender,” “Viva Las Vegas”) serving as touchstones for American culture, his legacy a cautionary tale of unbridled excess, combined with too little self-knowledge and too much fame.

His tragedy is not simply that he died too soon, without breaking his dependence on prescription drugs and realizing the enormity of his talent in projects that fed his creative muse, but that he was forever trapped in a loop of dissatisfaction and suffering, stemming from the loss of his twin and the premature death of his mother, with whom he had been lethally enmeshed since childhood. Her passing amounted to a “double death,” in that it forever cut his immediate tie with Jessie Garon, and brought about an acute anguish that he had never dealt with on a conscious level.