Death in Memphis

Elvis’s girlfriend Ginger and Jo hit for a little while, and then the guys got out on the court, but Elvis tired rapidly, and soon the game degenerated into a game of dodge ball, with Elvis trying to hit Billy with every shot. Eventually he hit himself on the shin with his own racquet and quit. "Boy that hurts," he said, lifting up his pants leg to reveal an ugly welt. "If it ain’t bleedin’," said Billy employing one of his cousin’s favourite sayings, "it ain’t hurtin’." And he and Jo burst out laughing as Elvis threw his racquet at him.

Back at the house Billy helped Elvis wash and dry his hair, while Elvis idly glanced at [a] book on the Shroud of Turin. Billy left just before Ricky Stanley arrived with the first of three packets of prescription drugs, or "attacks" that Dr Nick left for [Elvis’s nurse] Tish Henley to dispense each night. Each packet consisted of varying amounts of Seconal, Placidyl, Valmid, Tuinal, Demerol, and an assortment of other depressants and placebos which generally allowed Elvis to get several hours of sleep at a time.

Elvis was still awake a couple of hours later when Ricky brought him his second "attack," but when he called down for the third, Ricky had disappeared, even though he was supposed to be on duty till noon. Tish had already gone to work, so Elvis had his aunt Delta call her at Dr Nick’s office, and after conferring with the doctor, Tish gave her husband instructions to bring Delta the third packet, made up of two Valmids and a Plandyl placebo. When she arrived with the medication, Elvis informed his aunt that he was planning to get up at around seven o’clock that evening. Not long afterward, he told Ginger that he was going into the bathroom to read.

Ginger awoke around 1:30pm, rolled over, went back to sleep for a few minutes, then called her mother. How was Elvis? her mother asked, and Ginger said she didn’t know, he had never come back to bed, maybe she had better go check on him. She washed and put on her make-up in her own bathroom, then knocked on Elvis’s bathroom door. When there was no answer, she pushed on it and discovered him lying on the floor, his gold pyjama bottoms down around his ankles, his face buried in a pool of vomit on the thick shag carpet. In a daze she called downstairs and asked to speak to someone on duty, and the maid put Al Strada [one of Presley’s staff] on the line. She thought there was something wrong, she told him. He had better come quick.

Al was bending over Elvis when Elvis’s friend and associate Joe Esposito came bounding up the stairs, and together the two men managed to turn the body over and Joe tried to breathe some life into him. It seemed for a moment as if time were suspended, but then everything started happening all at once, as the bedroom quickly filled with people and Elvis’s father Vernon arrived on [Elvis’s cousin] Patsy Presley’s arm, his face a mask of fear as he cried out, "Oh, God, son, please don’t go, please don’t die."

Joe worked desperately on the body, but there was little doubt in his or anyone else’s mind that Elvis was gone - his face was swollen and purplish, the tongue was discoloured and sticking out of his mouth, the eyeballs blood red. Lisa arrived in the midst of it all. "What’s wrong with my daddy?" she demanded, as Ginger closed the bathroom door. "Something’s wrong with my daddy and I’m going to find out," the little girl declared defiantly, and someone quickly locked the other bathroom door as Lisa ran around to try to get in.

People were wailing and screaming when the two firemen EMTs arrived with an ambulance from Engine House No 29 in Whitehaven, just minutes from Graceland. The ambulance attendants witnessed what they later described as something like a scene of carnage, with up to a dozen people surrounding the almost unrecognisable body and begging them to do something - wasn’t there anything they could do?

There were no vital signs, and there seemed little doubt of the outcome as they loaded the body onto a stretcher and with help carried it out the front door to the waiting ambulance. Vernon tried in vain to join them but was gently restrained. "I’m coming. son," he called out desperately "I’ll be there."

Dr Nick showed up in his green Mercedes just as they were coming down the drive. He was in such a frenzy that he drove into the gate, then leapt out of his car and joined Joe and Charlie in the back of the ambulance. "Breathe, Elvis, come on, breathe for me," he kept calling, as he frantically worked on the body the whole seven-minute ride to Baptist Memorial Hospital.

They arrived at 2:55pm, 22 minutes after the initial call. Trauma Room No 1 had been prepared, and a team of doctors and resuscitation experts was standing by, but there was little to be done, and finally they stopped by mutual consent. It was 3:30pm. Joe and Charlie and some of the other guys, who had come over on their own, were all waiting in Trauma Room No 2 when Dr Nick walked through the door.

"It’s all over, he’s gone," said the physician, though his look alone would have been enough to tell them, and everyone started to cry. Charlie stumbled toward the door as if he needed to escape, but Joe stopped him. They had to be composed, Joe said through his own tears, before they went out and faced the world.

Joe and Dr Nick both had immediate business to take care of. Joe asked hospital administrator Maurice Elliott if he could use his office and, with the door closed, called the Colonel in Portland. Colonel’s reaction was impossible to read: there was a moment of what Joe could only interpret as stunned silence, then the old man started to enumerate all the things they would have to do, starting with cancelling the tour. Joe was scarcely surprised as he ran down the list; in the 17 years of their association, he had never known Colonel to linger on death.

Dr Nick meanwhile had elicited a promise from Maurice Elliott that the death would not be announced until Nick was able to inform Vernon Presley personally. Elliott said he didn’t know how long he could hold off the reporters who were already starting to gather at the hospital as word got out that Elvis had been brought in with "severe respiratory distress," but Nick hitched a ride back to Graceland with the ambulance attendants, whom he feared he might need when Vernon heard the news. He was carrying an autopsy consent form for Vernon to sign, something he and Maurice Elliott had determined would keep the state coroner’s office from becoming involved and prevent the autopsy results from becoming public without the family’s agreement. Joe would stay at the hospital to make the announcement as soon as Nick called to let them know that Vernon had been informed.

Lisa was crying when Dr Nick waked in, and Vernon froze when he saw the bag full of Elvis’s personal effects in the doctor’s hand. "Oh, no, no, no,’ he cried. "He’s gone." Nick walked up to Vernon and nodded. "I’m sorry," he said, as the bereft father’s wails could be heard throughout the house. "What am I going to do?" Vernon cried, as the two medical technicians stood by "Everything is gone."

The room, as one of the EMTs, Ulysses S Jones, Jr, described it, "was filled with hysteria. People were running all over the place crying and screaming and moaning. Vernon was shaking and trembling ... he couldn’t sit still. The doctor took him into the kitchen … Lisa was running all over the house and crying, ‘My daddy is gone!’ … Ginger was walking around in a daze, but she finally calmed Lisa Marie down and gently took her into another room and closed the door."

There were fans already gathered outside the gates by the time that Joe and Charlie returned to Graceland, courtesy of a lift from the police. At the direction of Elvis’s security force, there had already been a complete clean-up in the bedroom, with the bed stripped and remade, the bathroom scoured, and everything put back in place as if no untoward incident had ever occurred.

Joe was in charge of the funeral arrangements, but Vernon made clear his preference on every one of the significant details. The original plan was to conduct the service at the Memphis Funeral Home, where Gladys Presley’s obsequies had been held, but Vernon insisted this time that the ceremony be at home - just as he and Elvis had wanted for Elvis’s mother. He wouldn’t budge in his determination to give the fans a chance to see the body either - they had remained loyal to Elvis throughout his career, and had always said that without them he would have been nothing. Elvis was to be buried in a white suit that his father had given him, and Vernon asked Charlie and Larry Geller to do his hair so he would look good for the fans. Larry and Charlie reported to the funeral home in accordance with Vernon’s request early the next morning. Charlie trimmed and coloured the sideburns, while Larry cut and styled Elvis’s hair, and then they consulted on the makeup job.

Joe saw to it that all the furniture was removed from the living room before the casket arrived in a single white hearse, preceded by a motorcycle escort, shortly before noon. The crowd out front, which had grown to an estimated 50,000 by now, clamoured for a glimpse as the copper casket was carried up the steps and in the front door.

Meanwhile, a number of fans had climbed trees on the grounds of Graceland Christian Church next door, and limbs could be heard snapping as they struggled to get a better view. The coffin was placed in the archway between the living room and the music room on the south end of the house, and family and close friends were given a chance to pay their respects before the public viewing that was to take place at mid afternoon. Vernon’s knees buckled, and Grandma almost collapsed, but the Colonel, who had arrived from Portland early that morning, resolutely rejected any opportunity to view the body. So far as anyone could remember, Colonel had never attended a funeral before - though no-one could recall his ever articulating his thoughts on the subject either. He didn’t really have to. No-one could miss the intensity of his colloquies with Vernon in the kitchen, as he buttonholed the grieving father and tried to impress upon him the seriousness of the situation they were in, the need right now, even in the midst of mourning, to firmly fix their minds upon the future. Vernon’s gaunt handsome face reflected a sorrow almost beyond expression; it was hard to tell how much he was able to take in as he assented almost mutely to the Colonel’s every argument. Things would continue just like they always had, he agreed. Everything would remain exactly the same. He knew the Colonel had their interests at heart.

For the viewing, scheduled to last from three to five o’clock, the body was moved to the foyer, underneath a crystal chandelier just inside the door. White linen was laid out on the floor underneath the casket, and outside, the lawn was a sea of flowers. Wire reports described the scene as verging on mass hysteria, as "four at a time fans filed by the stone lions guarding the door, past the casket and back out the door into the 90-degree heat. Several mourners fainted on the marble floor and had to be carried out. A quarter mile away, down a driveway with a sheriff’s deputy every few yards, a throng, stretching a mile on either side, pushed and shoved to be next through the gates. Hundreds fainted in the heat. Many, revived with rubber gloves filled with ice, staggered back into the crowd and fainted again. Radios blared Presley’s greatest hits [as] three police helicopters hovered over the mansion. Thirty National Guardsmen were called out to help the 50 policemen and 40 sheriff’s deputies."

There were bodyguards on the three exposed sides of the coffin, and Vernon hovered watchfully, as if to protect his son from ever-present dangers. He was no more able to protect him from betrayal in death than in life, though, as one of the cousins got a shot of Elvis in his coffin with a Minox provided by the National Enquirer, which Vernon would discover only when the tabloid ran the picture on the cover of its next issue. In the photograph Elvis looks pale and waxy, but he is still surprisingly handsome, composed and at rest in a way that seemed almost foreign to those who remembered a man rarely at rest. Dedicated diarist Donna Lewis expressed the feeling of many of the fans when she wrote in her journal that Elvis didn’t look like himself at all: "He looked awful. It hurt. It hurt deep!"

After the viewing, the coffin was moved back into the living room, where the service was scheduled to take place the next day, and the evening was given over to a kind of private wake. Charlie seemed almost in a daze, Joe tried to keep an eye on the relatives at all times, and the Colonel was uncharacteristically silent, as Vernon returned to the living room over and over again to pat his son on the head. At nine o’clock the next morning 100 vans began to carry the flowers to the cemetery, a task that took nearly four hours to complete and looked for a while as if it might not be done before the interment began.

At noon guests started to arrive for the two o’clock service. The service began with the playing of Danny Boy on the organ. It was scheduled to take no more than half an hour, but with TV evangelist Rex Humbard’s guest sermon, all of the musical selections, plus a eulogy that comedian Jackie Kahane had asked Vernon if he could deliver, it was clear from the start that the ceremony would run considerably overtime.

Vernon’s racking sobs could be heard throughout the ceremony and afterward the mourners filed up one by one to say a final good-bye. Ann-Margret tried to console Vernon, but instead they both started to cry. Then the nine pallbearers - old pals Joe and Charlie, Felton, Lamar, Jerry Schilling and George Klein, Elvis’s cousins Billy and Gene Smith, and Dr Nick - bore the coffin out the door. Just as they did, a limb on one of the big oak trees out in front snapped and fell, barely missing the funeral party, but Lamar didn’t miss a beat. "We knew you’d be back," he wisecracked. "Just not this soon."

They made the three-and-a-half-mile journey to the cemetery in a cortege made up of 49 cars led by a silver Cadillac, a police motorcycle escort, a white hearse, and Vernon in the first of the 17 white limousines. Both sides of the road were lined with a crowd estimated at 15,000 to 20,000. Once they arrived at the cemetery the pallbearers carried the rose petal-strewn coffin past a massive bank of floral arrangements - hound dogs, clowns, and broken hearts, guitars and simple sprigs of red and yellow roses, all offered in humble tribute - up the steps of a stark grey mausoleum just a few hundred feet from Gladys Presley’s grave.

With the roses that had covered the coffin scattered on the mausoleum floor, the Reverend Bradley conducted a brief, five-minute ceremony in the mausoleum chapel, and then the family filed into the crypt one by one to touch or kiss the casket. Vernon remained alone with his son for a few moments after everyone else had left and had to be supported when he emerged from the building. Everyone returned to Graceland for a "Southern supper", and later that evening Vernon directed that all the flowers be given away to the fans, who were gathered by the thousands at the cemetery at 8:25am the following morning when the gates were opened. By noon more than 50,000 of them had showed up, and every last spray and blossom was gone.

Ginger Alden arranged to sell her story to the National Enquirer in the aftermath of Elvis’s death for a reputed $105,000, an amount substantially reduced when it was discovered that she had violated the exclusivity of her agreement with an interview that appeared in the Commercial Appeal. There was a bizarre and almost laughably inept attempt to steal Elvis’s body just 11 days after the interment, and two months later, on 27 October, Elvis and his mother were both reburied in the Meditation Garden at Graceland, after all zoning requirements had been met.

"I guess they will finally get to rest," Vernon remarked at a small graveside gathering.

1999 by Peter Guralnick, extracted from Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, published by Abacus, 10.99.

Peter Guralnick will talk about his work as a music writer with Roddy Doyle at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Saturday, 24 August.