Authors: Suzanne Finstad
Most of the entourage, after Elvis’s death, seemed to bear a grudge against Ginger and would later dismiss as fanciful her claim that Elvis planned to marry her. George Klein felt she was “misunderstood” by the guys, because, in Jo Alden’s words, she “didn’t pal around” with them, as had Linda, who was their undisputed favorite. Rick Stanley attributed this resentment to Elvis envy, a common affliction within the entourage, the same syndrome Priscilla had both suffered from and been guilty of. “These guys were so competitive and jealous,” said Rick. “Anybody gets anything, any bit of attention—even a woman—they get weird.” “Elvis was a perceptive person,” declared Ginger’s mother. “He could see right through someone, and he wouldn’t have had [Ginger] around him up until his death if she were the kind of person they try to make her out to be.” Elvis’s signals concerning Ginger, were, in truth, conflicted, as were his
emotions in general. Rick Stanley was around on January 6, when Elvis awakened his jeweler, Harry Levitch, in the middle of the night to order a custom-made 11-carat diamond engagement ring—the same size as the stone in his signature TCB (“Taking Care of Business”) ring—to be created by the following morning so he could surprise Ginger. He ultimately removed the diamond from his own ring for Ginger’s engagement band to meet the deadline. Ricky was present when Elvis called together the guys at Graceland on January 26 to announce that Ginger had accepted his marriage proposal. “He cared about Ginger, he really did,” Ricky recalled. “He told me he was gonna marry her. Showed me the ring, the whole thing.”
Conversely, Elvis told Myrna Smith, who had no reason to resent Ginger, “that he
wasn’t
[going to marry Ginger]. Even though he told
her
different things. I don’t know why he did that. Because he told people one thing and obviously got her a ring.” Elvis, recalled Myrna, “came into our dressing room and took me in the back and told me that he wasn’t going to. I won’t tell you how he told me, but I knew that he wasn’t going to marry her.” The concern, for Elvis, was Ginger’s fidelity. Myrna Smith and Joe’s girlfriend, Shirley, both confirmed that Ginger had another boyfriend and “she wouldn’t break up with him,” said Shirley. Elvis enlisted the aid of Nancy Rooks, his Graceland maid, to spy on Ginger, calling her house to see if she was home when she was supposed to be. “Then we caught her!” whooped Nancy. “Elvis gave her a ring, okay? A $60,000 fur coat—I saw it all. Then he said, ‘I spent all that goddamn money on her and I’m not gonna marry her!’ ”
Kathy Westmoreland, who was still keeping company with Elvis, occasionally sleeping beside him, believed that Elvis had changed, that he was maturing, that he genuinely wanted to be in a monogamous relationship with Ginger, but it was too late. “He was really in love with her. I felt that she was beautiful and sweet, but just too young to really understand him and cope with his needs at that particular point. And there were a lot of problems in his life too. He was a dying man. She was just so young to go through all that.” Elvis, whose dreams had been broken—his hopes for a serious film career and a perfect union with his true soul mate—saw Ginger as his potential salvation, a means of resurrecting the shattered fantasy of finding his twin soul; and she, too, fit the visual pattern of his attempts to re-create the lost love of his youth, Debra Paget.
Larry Geller, who knew the inner depths of Elvis Presley’s soul as well as anyone, understood this. Elvis had even asked Larry, who was a licensed minister, to perform his marriage ceremony to Ginger, though Larry did not think, ultimately, that Elvis would go through with it. “It was so new. He was infatuated with her. He went gaga, he went nuts for her. Overboard. He was getting ready to die. Something in him knew it.… He wanted a son.… He was waking up to the fact that he was becoming a redundancy. He was highly desirous to be known as an actor. He said, ‘It’s my only regret!’ ” Marrying Ginger, to Elvis, was the magic pill—like waving a wand and erasing the regrets of his past. He had long since given up sex—for a year and a half, according to Larry—although Kathy Westmoreland claimed she had intercourse with Elvis shortly before his death. “I know for a fact he didn’t,” refuted Larry. “For absolute fact. I was with Elvis every night when he went to bed. He told me everything. Everything. He couldn’t even get a hard-on the last year of his life. He never even consummated his relationship with Ginger. He couldn’t. And he didn’t want to in a certain way, also.”
Elvis and Larry had many deep conversations those last days, occasionally drifting to the subject of Priscilla. He had changed his mind, he told Larry, in thinking they were soul mates. He still believed there was a “karmic link” between them, but it had taken on a different meaning in Elvis’s mind. “It took me a long time to realize she’s not my soul mate,” he told Larry during his last few months. “Priscilla came into my life for two major reasons: one, so we could have Lisa … and number two, so I could teach her. Priscilla came to learn a lot of lessons about life. I raised her, Larry.” Larry recalled Elvis saying, “I had to push her out of the nest so she could fly with her own wings, and I’m only sorry I didn’t push her out of the bird’s nest when I should have.” Elvis himself realized, at the end, the paternal—as opposed to carnal or erotic—connection he had with Priscilla.
Priscilla was herself confronting the psychological aspects of her intense relationship with Elvis that spring, in the person of Kirk Kerkorian. Kerkorian, the rich, much older, immensely powerful, secretive, and married owner of airlines, casinos, movie studios, and the International Hotel, where Elvis first performed in Vegas, had noticed Priscilla during Elvis’s premier engagement at his hotel, but had waited for their estrangement to make his move. He and Priscilla began a clandestine affair in
1977, spending time on Kerkorian’s yacht in Saint-Tropez, traveling to Europe on his private plane, until Priscilla began to panic. “It scared me, that relationship,” she admitted. “It could have been a nice relationship. It was just too soon. Elvis was still alive at the time. And it was too close to what I just got out of.”
Priscilla cooled the relationship with Kirk Kerkorian, which was conducted in such secrecy that Joe Esposito knew nothing about it at the time and would later express doubt that it ever happened; he was certain that Priscilla could not have been involved with Kerkorian without his knowing it. Maureen Donaldson, a photographer who was dating Cary Grant at the time, remembered flying to London with Cary, Kirk, and Priscilla on Kerkorian’s private plane that June. She and Priscilla, Maureen would say, stayed up all night, drinking Château Lafitte and “comparing notes” on life in the shadows of a superstar, as Kerkorian and Grant slept. Priscilla, who had never been to London before, took the opportunity to quiz Maureen thoroughly on where to shop. Maureen regarded Priscilla as “fragile” at the thought of becoming involved romantically with another high-powered man. Priscilla instead opted for a friendship with Kerkorian, which she took advantage of by questioning him about his business dealings, soaking up the information like a sponge. That summer she signed with the William Morris talent agency.
She was clearly anxious to be in another relationship, having been essentially solo for several months, as proven by her romance, that spring, with her hairdresser, Elie Ezerzer. Elie, a shaggy-haired blond French Moroccan from Israel who ran a trendy salon, was closer to the smooth Warren Beatty character in
Shampoo
than to the stereotypical male hairdresser. He had in fact patterned himself after Vidal Sassoon and was “very sophisticated and masculine,” according to the discerning Phylliss Mann. Joan Quinn, a Beverly Hills attorney’s wife who ran in those circles, considered Elie “very macho” and remembered him doing Elvis Presley impersonations at parties, down to the black leather costume, before he met Priscilla. It was Joan’s impression, however, that Elie “was just this absolute, total user of her. He wanted to be Elvis Presley, he wanted to sing. Everybody always said the only reason he was interested in her was that he always had this preoccupation with Elvis.” The connection was doubly ironic, for Elie fit the pattern of nearly every male Priscilla had pursued since she was eight—only now
she
had become
the object of identification for those who were interested in
Elvis.
Priscilla found Elie appealingly “flamboyant.”
What drew her to him, she said, was that he was French. “I was attracted to Elie because he was unique, too. I just found Elie fascinating. He was a very emotional person, very French. Captivating, different.” Priscilla had embarked upon her European period, and Elie was her bridge to the Old World, a live-in tutor in matters of taste and style, her latest self-improvement project. Phylliss Mann, who considered Priscilla and her mother completely bereft of breeding, credited Elie with instilling in Priscilla whatever sophistication she had acquired by the age of thirty-two, when they parted. As part of her French phase, Priscilla decided to transfer Lisa from the John Dye School the next fall to the Lycée Français, a prestigious academy in west L.A., where classes were taught in French. She asked Elvis if she and Elie could borrow his private plane to fly to Europe that summer, a request that annoyed him, according to Ginger.
One of Priscilla’s last visits with Elvis at Graceland occurred in April, when he was just home from his latest hospital stay, and she stopped by to fetch Lisa. Marion Cocke, Elvis’s favorite nurse from Baptist Memorial, was at the mansion and remembered Priscilla sweeping in, dressed like one of the characters from
Doctor Zhivago
, “looking like a star.” Marion could sense the connection between her and Elvis. “You could tell by the way that they treated and looked at each other, it was a life experience.”
Elvis and Rick Stanley watched their last movie together that month, a television movie about the life of Howard Hughes, starring Tommy Lee Jones, dramatizing the billionaire’s fall from grace. As Jones, playing Hughes, descended further into paranoia and delusion, secreted inside darkened hotel suites, “I’d look over at Elvis,” recalled Ricky, “and he’d look over at me, like, ‘This is familiar …’ and he kind of laughed.” The movie, and Hughes’s tragic demise, “had an effect on him,” said Ricky. Elvis worried that his life might end as Hughes’s had. “It made him start thinking, examining. Sometimes when you’re used to a lifestyle like Elvis has, you’re confronted with truths. Sometimes it’s hard to act on them because there’s so much stuff you have to get rid of.”
David Stanley, Rick’s brother, would later tell the story about driving Elvis to Priscilla’s house on Summit that final summer, declaring that Elvis disappeared into a room with Priscilla and
emerged a short while later, saying, “Everything’s all right now,” as if he had made some final farewell. Mike Edwards, who would soon become Priscilla’s next boyfriend, recalled Priscilla telling him about the same visit. “She told me the last time she really saw Elvis he came by her house on Summit, and he was sort of asking her if they couldn’t maybe see each other again. And she had moved on. She had someone else up in her bedroom. I think it was Elie. And Elie didn’t come down, and she said, ‘No, Elvis, I can’t.’ And I think maybe Elvis was coming by to be romantic or something. It was early in the morning. He’d been recording all night long. She said his hair was all greasy and he had on this jumpsuit. And she looked at him, and I think at that point, that was when she decided it was definitely over.”
“This is the thing that upset me more than anything about Priscilla,” responded Shirley Dieu, Joe Esposito’s girlfriend, who was among the group with Elvis that night. “It may seem small, but to me it was heartfelt. That’s not how it happened at all. What happened was that Elvis had bought a Ferrari and he wanted to take it by to show Lisa. So we were in the car, and I can’t remember who was in what car, but I remember we pulled up to the Summit house and Lisa was in bed or something. And as I recall, Priscilla got out of her bed. We had just been to Vail and we had been snowmobiling, and Elvis had taken a liking to these overalls that zipped up the front to keep you warm. And it was cold and he was wearing a snowmobile suit. Not an Elvis onstage suit. He was talking and being very gentlemanly, and she kept turning her head, laughing at him and making fun of what he was wearing. I was tolerant of her, but I found it very offensive. He was seriously talking, and she was turning her head, laughing, mocking him. And it just irked me. That she was laughing behind his back. She would turn to the side where he couldn’t see her laugh and make fun of him. I felt so sorry and embarrassed for him.”
Elvis’s spirit continued to flag during the rest of that summer. He and Larry Geller stood outside on his balcony at the Hilton late one night, gazing at the lights of Vegas, and Elvis pondered aloud whether he would ever know if any woman really loved him for himself, that he might die without being in a true love relationship. Larry answered him by saying that he already had that with his fans. They loved him unconditionally. “And he
thought about it,” recalled Larry, “and then said, ‘Yeah, man, you’re right. That’s my destiny.’ ”
By August he was deeply despondent over the imminent publication of an exposé of his unusual lifestyle, written by three aides whom he had let go the previous year: Red and Sonny West, and Dave Hebler. Larry Geller likened the book to a crucifixion. Patti Parry said simply, “It broke his heart.”
Priscilla, meanwhile, was busy making plans to go on safari in New Guinea with Elie, and sent Lisa off to spend a few days with Elvis at Graceland while she went to La Costa to lose five pounds. Elvis spent his last few days with the daughter he loved, renting Libertyland Amusement Park in Memphis, trying to obtain a copy of
Star Wars
, which had not yet been released. He died the day Lisa was due to fly home, August 16, the date of his mother’s funeral twenty years earlier. He had ingested a pharmacy of prescription medications. The official cause of death was stated to be heart disease—later contested as a drug overdose—but in truth, Elvis perished of a broken heart. He was, as he had predicted, forty-two years old. Ginger Alden discovered Elvis’s sadly bloated body in the bathroom, on or near a chair, holding a still-opened book about Jesus, which Larry Geller had given to him just a few hours before.