Did the King really commit suicide?
In a new documentary, Priscilla Presley claims her ex-husband committed suicide. Alice Vincent asks what happened to the King
Few deaths in pop history have exerted such a grim fascination as that of Elvis Presley. By the time he died, more than four decades ago in his bathroom at Graceland, he had become a drug-addicted recluse. He was plagued by debts, crippling self doubt and a spiralling addiction to cheeseburgers and prescription drugs, including barbiturates and amphetamines.
When he wasn’t maintaining a frantic tour schedule, he was holed up at home, where family members have since spoken of having to remove food from his mouth when he fell asleep at the dinner table. Images from his final performances, just weeks before his death, show him sweaty and obese. There has been rampant speculation about the cause of Elvis’s death in the intervening years, thanks in part to the fact the autopsy report was never made public, although the official line was heart failure. To this day, conspiracy theorists insist he isn’t dead at all. And now Priscilla Presley, Elvis’s former child bride who inherited Graceland, even though their marriage broke up in 1973, has dragged the whole sorry story back into the headlines by suggesting his death may have been intentional.
Elvis Presley: The Searcher is a new documentary from US network HBO that features the memories of Bruce Springsteen, the late Tom Petty and Presley. In it, Presley says that Elvis “knew what he was doing” on the night he was found dead aged just 42. “We’re exposing what went on behind the scenes,” she’s said of the film, declaring those who love Elvis “need to see what happened”.
Ginger Alden, who was Elvis’s 21-year-old fiancée when he died and who found Elvis’s body on the bathroom floor, immediately disputed Presley’s claims this week on Facebook. “There is no truth to the stories,” she wrote. “I encourage all fans to please know and understand that Elvis Presley would never and did not commit suicide. He was in a good mood, we had just set a wedding date literally hours earlier. He was ready to go back on stage, something he loved with all of his being.”
Presley’s suggestion that Elvis may have killed himself comes months after revelations that the King had been suffering from depression and had even written suicide notes in the months before his death. Certainly those letters suggest a man in despair. One, written to tour manager Joe Esposito, read: “I need a long rest. I’m sick and tired of my life.” Another, to Billy Miller, part of Elvis’s “Memphis Mafia” friends, included the words: “If it wasn’t for my prayers, I think my life would end. My willpower is almost gone.” Elvis’s stepbrother, Rick Stanley, said he believed the letters to be credible: “To me, it’s clear that suicide was on his mind.” This is not the first time rumours have surfaced that Elvis was suicidal.
In 1996, during an interview for a new book about Elvis, David Stanley, brother of Rick, who was reportedly one of the first on the scene after Elvis died, declared: “I’m the only guy who’s got the guts to say Elvis killed himself.” He argued that the King was terrified over the fact that a forthcoming tell-all biography, Elvis: What Happened? by three former bodyguards was about to expose his prodigious drug use. (The book came out four days before he died and would prove to be the first in a long line of “tell-all” moneymakers written by people who knew Elvis.)
“Elvis had good reason to be depressed,” believes Ray Connolly, the author of Being Elvis – A Lonely Life. “Drugs had wrecked his body, his career had not gone the way he had intended, and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, had been ripping him off for years to pay his gambling debts.”
The caricature of a bloated, addled Elvis that lingers today was formed in the wake of his divorce from Presley. Drugs had been a part of their marriage: Presley recalled whole weeks spent with him in the cold, dark “cocoon” of his bedroom where he would endure pill-induced sleeps. In her absence and under gruelling touring commitments, his dependency worsened. In 1977 alone his doctor had prescribed 10,000 doses of sedatives, amphetamines and narcotics.
Furthermore, his musical appeal had dwindled: no longer the snake-hipped rock ’n’ roll pioneer, Presley had slid into the realms of easy listening. His fans, as critic Marjorie Garber noted, “were now middle-aged matrons and blue-haired grandmothers”. And he was forced to go out and play for them: “Parker almost criminally sent him out on tour when he should have been sending him off to hospital for a very long detoxification,” Connolly says.
Elvis was due to start another tour on the night he died. But this, Alden, Connolly and Elvis’s daughter Lisa Marie Presley all maintain, actually brought him hope: “He was talking about how good it was going to be,”
‘Drugs had wrecked his body, his career had not gone how he intended and his manager ripped him off’
Connolly says. Members of Elvis’s band maintained that an international tour could have pulled the singer out of his slump: “Elvis wanted badly to go to Europe and Japan,” his guitarist, James Burton, said in 2016. But Parker, an illegal migrant from Holland, refused to let Elvis tour outside of America.
Even the facts surrounding Elvis’s death are murky: although coroners found 14 different drugs in significant quantities in his system, their reports have been examined several times to establish just why he died. The fact that the King’s bedroom and bathroom were wiped clean by his aunt and staff before the police arrived didn’t help.
But, Connolly says, “that doesn’t mean he committed suicide. He had liver damage, a massively enlarged heart, corroded veins, an ulcerated larynx and a blocked intestine. He didn’t realise how ill he was. I don’t believe Elvis committed suicide but his behaviour was almost certainly responsible for his early death.”
Of course, we’ll never know if Elvis’s death was intentional or a tragedy waiting to happen. But what’s undeniably true is that of all the many pop stars who have died too young, Elvis is one we just can’t leave in peace.
Elvis Presley: The Searcher will be shown on HBO from this Sat. UK transmission not yet confirmed