Red West
Long-serving member of Elvis Presley’s entourage who wrote a shocking exposé about his boss
ROBERT “RED” WEST, who has died aged 81, was an actor, stuntman, songwriter and long-time stalwart of Elvis Presley’s Memphis Mafia who shocked fans by publishing a behindthe-scenes exposé in the final weeks of the singer’s life.
West and Presley were pupils together at Humes High School in Memphis in the early 1950s, and West laid the foundations of a lifelong friendship with Elvis by rescuing him from an attack by a gang of football players threatening to cut off his pomaded hair.
Interviewed by Peter Guralnick for his biography of Presley, West recalled: “I really felt sorry for him. He seemed very lonely and had no real friends. He just didn’t seem to be able to fit in.”
However, by the summer of 1976, when West and his cousin Sonny were employed by the Presley touring operation as bodyguards, Red’s friendship with Elvis had deteriorated to the point where Vernon Presley, Elvis’s father, summarily sacked Red, Sonny and a fellow bodyguard, the karate expert Dave Gebler. The reason, purportedly, was to save money, though there had also been complaints about rough treatment of aggressive fans at concerts by the bodyguards.
It was at this point that the Wests and Gebler decided to collaborate with a tabloid reporter called Steve Dunleavy on a muckraking biography that would for the first time lift the lid on Elvis’s murky private world. Elvis: What Happened?, published two weeks before Elvis’s death in August 1977, revealed the disturbing extent of the singer’s drug addiction, sexual quirks, morbid paranoia and obsession with firearms.
Among its claims were that Elvis had inveigled a young female fan into taking so many sedatives that she fell into a coma and nearly died; had taken friends on a 3am tour of a local mortuary to discuss embalming techniques; and had discussed the assassination of his wife’s lover, the martial arts instructor Mike Stone.
Aided by the uncanny timing of its publication, Elvis: What Happened? sold at least three million copies. But West always insisted that his motive in writing it was simply to startle Elvis into addressing his drug dependency. In a tabloid article at the time he was quoted pleading: “You can’t be with a man since childhood and not feel something for him … I just wish he would get well.”
Robert Gene West, known as “Red”, was born in Bolivar, Tennessee, on March 8 1936 and brought up in Memphis, the son of Newton and Lois West. West, 6 ft 2 in tall and gingerhaired, was a football star at Humes High School – he was a freshman when Elvis was in junior year – and then at Jones County Junior College. He also competed in the Golden Gloves amateur boxing championships.
In 1954 he was flabbergasted to hear the Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips playing his school-friend’s song That’s All Right, Mama, on the radio. “I was happy for him,” he recalled. “But it was kind of unbelievable.”
As Elvis was learning to cope with being a local celebrity, he found Red a solid and reassuring figure to have around, and invited him to accompany him to shows.
Apart from a two-year stint from 1956 in the US Marine Corps, West would be an employee of Elvis’s, and close ally and morale-booster, for much of the next 20 years. In early 1958 Elvis’s devoted mother Gladys telephoned him to say: “Bob, look after my boy.” He spent time with Elvis in Germany, and was with him at his house in Bel Air when the Beatles visited in 1965.
Between 1955 and 1956 West drove the bus for the touring stage show, and then he went to Hollywood – “a crew-cut hick sonofabitch in a Marine uniform on a Paramount movie set” – for the film productions.
He appeared in numerous walk-on parts in Presley films, among them as a Red Indian in Flaming Star (1960), a party guest in Blue Hawaii (1961) and an ice cream vendor in Clambake (1967). If the roles were unsatisfying, there was much practical joking and high jinks on the set to make up for it. He also diversified into stuntman work, learning the ropes on the long-running Western television series The Rebel (1959-61).
Meanwhile, he had been taught guitar by Elvis’s backing player Scotty Moore, and he had some of his greatest success as a songwriter. Initially there were two writing collaborations with Elvis, on That’s Someone You Never Forget, recorded in 1961, and You’ll be Gone (1962). In 1972 Presley recorded Separate Ways, a melancholy song co-written by West; the lyrics about a romantic break-up seemed painfully relevant to the singer’s own marital troubles.
If You Talk in Your Sleep, recorded in 1973, was a similarly gloomy number with a theme of infidelity. Elvis loved gospel-tinged songs, and West had writing credits on If Every Day Was Like Christmas (1966) and in the early 1970s on Holly Leaves and Christmas Trees and Seeing is Believing. Pat Boone and Ricky Nelson also recorded his compositions.
After Elvis’s death West consolidated his acting career with a regular role in the military television series Baa Baa Black Sheep as well as guest-starring in prime-time shows such as The Six Million Dollar Man, Magnum, PI, The A-team, Knight Rider and The Fall Guy. He appeared in several films, notably the thriller Road House (1989) with Patrick Swayze, and in the acclaimed independent film Goodbye Solo in 2008.
Reflecting on his friendship with Elvis in an interview with an Australian fan website in 2008, West said: “You know, what he had, the adoration and the money … that’s what life is about, I imagine everybody here would like to reach that plateau, to have what he had, and to say ‘No I wouldn’t trade places with him’ – that’s a hard statement to make.
“He had it all except he didn’t have the privacy he should’ve had, that’s the main thing that happened to Elvis. He was a prisoner of his own career.”
In 1961 Red West married Pat Boyd, a talent agent who was working at the time as a secretary to Elvis Presley; they spent their honeymoon in Florida on the set of Elvis’s film Follow That Dream. She survives him with their two sons.
Red West, born March 8 1936, died July 18 2017