He Was Going to Change His Lıfe
40th Anniversary of His Death FRIENDS AND LOVERS RECALL THE KING’S DRAMATIC DECISION BEFORE HIS DEATH
When Elvis Presley died 40 years ago at the age of 42, he had a lot to live for. “He wanted to do a film called Mission,” his girlfriend at the time, Ginger Alden, tells Closer about an uplifting, semiautobiographical drama. “We had plans to redecorate his home. And a few hours before he passed away we had set a wedding date.” And while their relationship could be tumultuous because of his drug dependency, “I loved him with all my heart. I was determined to try to help him,” Ginger, 60, says. Sadly, though, she’d be the one to find Elvis lying on the bathroom floor where he’d succumbed to a heart attack on Aug. 16, 1977.
Many people wanted to rescue Elvis from his spiral into addiction, but their efforts didn’t succeed. The women who loved him, from ex-wife Priscilla Presley to former girlfriend Linda Thompson and fiancée Ginger, doted on him and tried to save him. “Linda would stay awake all night to make sure his breathing wouldn’t stop,” Alanna Nash, author of Baby, Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him, tells Closer. But Elvis was stubborn, not used to being questioned about his behavior, and he didn’t know how to ask for help. By the day he died, he felt trapped by his upcoming tour, financial responsibilities and addictions. Elvis had hit rock bottom and “he wanted to change it all,” his longtime friend and hairdresser Larry Geller tells Closer. In fact, Elvis made the decision to dramatically change his life. “He said, ‘We’ll do it in September,’” Larry recalls. “Tragically, he died in August. He knew he had so much more to give.”
That Elvis wanted to keep giving to his friends and fans became part
of his problem. His dependency on sleeping pills went back to the early 1960s when he gave his all to a relentless schedule of moviemaking and recording. Priscilla, now 72, says she recognized his habit when she first arrived at Graceland as a teenager, but he “wasn’t someone who you could just say, ‘You need to take care of yourself….’ He felt he was OK. ”
After 1969’s film Change of Habit, he began performing regularly in Las Vegas and his punishing schedule continued. “He was the first performer to be playing seven days a week, two shows a night,” says Nash, who also wrote The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley, about Elvis’ hard-driving manager. “No one can take that.”
As a result, he depended more on the drugs and his moods became erratic, but he wouldn’t ask for help because he felt it “wasn’t manly,” Nash says. “There was real pressure to tour all the time,” she adds. He was scheduled to go out again on a tour that would last only a few weeks just days after he died. Priscilla says of their last conversation, “I was asking if he was OK and if he was excited about going on tour, and he was.”
But others insist he was tired and unenthused. “If Elvis died of anything, he died of terminal apathy,” said his late friend Lamar Fike in Elvis: Truth, Myth & Beyond by L.E. McCullough and Harold F. Eggers Jr. Elvis really wanted to tour Europe, Lamar said, but Col. Parker, who was notoriously controlling, refused. “Elvis had to mortgage Graceland to make the payroll,” Nash says. “He just spent too much money and gave too much away.”
“Had we done a [European] tour, I think he’d still be alive. It would have helped him.”
— Lamar Fike, Elvis’ friend
LONESOME TONIGHT
The bubble Elvis had built around his life became his cage, and many around the King were at a loss about what to do for him. “There were no Betty Ford clinics back then,” said Lamar, who urged him to take a year off.
Even Elvis’ young daughter, Lisa Marie, only 9 when he died, noticed her dad’s health issues. “His temper was getting worse, he was gaining weight, he was not happy,” Lisa, now 49, says. At one point Lisa pleaded, “Don’t die, Daddy!” and he respond- ed, “I won’t.” Still, Elvis kept working.
Elvis’ nurse, Letetia Henley Kirk, 75, author of Taking Care of Elvis, tried to help. “He and I were very close,” she says. “He was miserable because he’d gained so much weight, and he was dreading going on the tour. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to perform like he wanted to.” But while Letetia “continuously” tried to control his weight — “we tried exercising, racquetball, walking” — and she fed him a low-carb, low-calorie diet, it didn’t take. “He did OK for a few days, and then he would just blow it away,” she tells Closer.
Linda Thompson also did her best to turn around the life of the “very, very lonely” superstar, as Letetia describes him. “He was happy when he was with Linda.” Elvis met the 22-year-old beauty queen in 1972 and they stayed together until just eight months before his death. “Elvis fooled himself into thinking he didn’t have a drug problem because everything he took was by prescription,” says Linda, 67.
But he was hospitalized several times. “It was always under the guise of something else being wrong with him,” says Nash, but “they were detoxes.” And while several doctors tried to get him off the more addictive drugs, “He was so charming,” Nash says, “he would get nurses to bring him what he wanted.”
Linda made heroic efforts to save him. “She had to pull food out of his throat when he would get so doped up that he couldn’t swallow,” Nash says. Linda admits she saved his life “many times.” She says she was emotionally torn by her decision to leave him, thinking, “No one is going to be stupid enough to take care of him as selflessly as I did.”
Even his former love, Viva Las Vegas co-star Ann-Margret, sensed Elvis’ struggles. They didn’t see each other often, but he always sent her a guitar-shaped flower arrangement when she performed in Las Vegas. “During my last stint at the Tropicana,” she recalls, “Joe [Esposito, Elvis’ friend] came to the show, and I questioned him about Elvis’ health.” Ann-Margret, 76, says Joe assured her Elvis was fine: “If he would’ve come forward about the difficulties Elvis was having, I would’ve been there in a second to intervene.”
IF I CAN DREAM
Elvis knew he was in trouble. “He began to search for deeper meaning in life and why he was here,” says Nash. His friend and hairdresser Larry would talk with Elvis about spiritual matters. “Elvis wanted to be a gospel singer and find God,” says Larry’s daughter Timon Cana, who’s also a hairstylist. As Larry, 78, tells Closer, “He woke up to the fact that he’d become so unhealthy. He said, ‘Larry, I know my life is on the line, I know I have to make dramatic changes because I have so many plans. But I can’t do it unless I get healthy, and I need to get off these pills.’ ”
Larry insists Elvis was determined to clean up and take time off after the next tour. The idea was to go on the road for a few weeks and then, in September, “He was going to quit singing for a year, stop everything and we were going to go to Hawaii,” Larry says. “We had the house picked out, and he was going to swim every day and play football.”
Sadly, Elvis died before he could implement his drastic plan. “My mind goes to his last words [to me],” recalls Ginger: “‘I’m going to the bathroom to read.’ ” Hours later, she found his body. “No one could have saved him on that particular morning,” she says.
The loved ones he left behind have long grappled with what might have been if he’d succeeded in making the changes he planned. “It’s a lesson for all of us,” Larry tells Closer. “Don’t wait! God, the universe, doesn’t care if you’re Elvis. We have to make changes when we know we have to make them.” Says Ginger, “Time just wasn’t on our side.”
Reporting by Amanda ChampagneMeadows & Hilary Sheinbaum