Man known as doctor who killed Elvis
After Elvis Presley died in the bathroom of his Memphis home in 1977, an autopsy found a cocktail of 14 different drugs in his bloodstream. They had been prescribed by George Nichopoulos, Presley’s personal physician, known to the singer and his circle as ‘‘Dr Nick’’, but subsequently dubbed by fans as ‘‘the Man Who Killed Elvis’’.
The official cause of Presley’s death was cardiac arrhythmia, but in the eight months prior to Presley’s demise, Nichopoulos had written the singer prescriptions for more than 10,000 doses of sedatives, amphetamines and narcotics.
Presley was suffering from glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage and an enlarged colon – all ailments that were aggravated, if not caused, by his drug abuse. Rumours spread that it was the prescription drugs that had caused his heart to stop beating, an allegation that was vigorously contested by Nichopoulos, who accompanied Presley’s lifeless body on its final journey from the singer’s Graceland home to the hospital where he was declared dead.
For almost a decade before Presley’s death, ‘‘Dr Nick’’ had supplied amphetamines in the morning to wake him up, tranquillisers at night to wind him down, and various other substances in between to keep him going through the day. He did not appear to worry about his work. He was charged with malpractice by the medical authorities for overprescribing to a number of wealthy patients, including not only Presley but also the singer Jerry Lee Lewis. He was found guilty, but it was deemed that his conduct had not been ‘‘unethical’’ and so his licence was merely suspended for three months. A criminal trial also acquitted him of liability for Presley’s death.
That did not stop him, though, from receiving a number of threats. When a friend sitting with him at an American football game in Memphis was shot in the shoulder, the physician was convinced that the unidentified gunman had intended the bullet for him.
Nichopoulos complained that no one understood that Presley had been a ‘‘complicated’’ character. In an interview in 2009, he said: ‘‘At times I was his father, his best friend, his doctor. Whatever role I needed to play at the time, I did.’’
He resumed practising until his licence was revoked for good in 1995, after another overprescribing scandal – he admitted the charge, but claimed it was because he ‘‘cared too much’’. His response to the loss of his livelihood was to organise a touring exhibition of macabre memorabilia titled Memories of Elvis, the centrepiece of which was his black doctor’s bag and an empty phial of Dilaudid – Presley’s favourite painkiller for which Dr Nick had written a prescription on the day he died.
Presley was not the first or last super-rich celebrity to have a personal physician who was paid handsomely to blur the boundaries between genuine medical need and self-indulgent drug abuse. Such practitioners became known as ‘‘doctor feelgoods’’ and their role was celebrated in the Beatles’ song Dr Robert, about a New York practitioner notorious for prescribing amphetamines for his wealthy clients.
In an interview in 1967 – the year Dr Nick started prescribing amphetamines for Presley – Paul McCartney explained: ‘‘We’d hear people say ‘you can get everything off him, any pills you want’. It was a big racket and he kept New York high. That’s what Dr Robert is about, a pill doctor who sees you right.’’
Nichopoulos claimed that Presley never realised how harmful the drugs could be. ‘‘Elvis’s problem,’’ he said, ‘‘was that he didn’t see the wrong in it. He felt that by getting it from a doctor, he wasn’t the common everyday junkie getting something off the street.’’
More than 40 years later when Michael Jackson’s doctor Conrad Murray was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, the court was told during the trial that he had been warned by a member of the singer’s entourage: ‘‘Don’t be a Dr Nick’’. The incompetent quack Dr Nick Riviera in The Simpsons was also modelled on Nichopoulos.
George Constantine Nichopoulos was born in Ridgway, Pennsylvania, in 1927 to Greek immigrant parents and grew up in Anniston, Alabama, where his father opened a cafe. He served in the US Army medical corps in Germany after the war, and qualified as a doctor from Vanderbilt university in Nashville in 1959.
By the time Presley first consulted him in 1967, he was one of six partners in a Memphis general practice. The singer told him that he had a history of disrupted sleep, sleepwalking and nightmares, going back to childhood and that this had intensified after the death of his mother. He had become addicted to amphetamines and the drug only increased his inability to sleep.
Dr Nick wrote him a prescription, and then another. Elvis took to summoning him to Graceland in the middle of the night and, by 1970, Nichopoulos had become Presley’s almost full-time physician. When the singer was on tour, Dr Nick went with him – together with three locked suitcases filled with drugs. He claimed that he never knew Presley to sleep for longer than three hours at a stretch without waking and demanding more pills.
The extent to which he attempted to educate Presley about the dangers of his drug use remains an unanswered controversy, however the constant supply of pills and potions made Nichopoulos a vital member of the socalled ‘‘Memphis Mafia’’ of friends, employees, gofers and yes men who pandered to Presley’s every whim.
The rewards were substantial and included such generous fringe benefits as houses and cars. The entire Nichopoulos family became close to the singer: his wife Edna ‘‘mothered’’ Presley; his daughters Kissy and Elaine were regular guests at concerts and at Graceland (Elaine later worked in her father’s medical office); and his son, Dean, worked for the singer as a personal aide and taught him to play racquetball. ‘‘Elvis was family to all of us,’’ he said. Nichopoulos is survived by his wife and children, who all live in Tennessee.
His reputation never recovered from the taint of Presley’s death and he spent the rest of his life protesting his innocence. In a memoir, The King and Dr Nick: What Really Happened to Elvis and Me, he claimed that he had frequently given the singer a harmless placebo in an attempt to wean him off his addictions.
‘‘All of us close to him would have created different scenarios if we had known the end at the beginning,’’ he wrote.