Elvis and Lennon

Elvis

and

Lennon

The Untold Story

of their Deadly Feud

Chris Hutchins

and Peter Thompson

This ePub edition published by Christopher Hutchins Ltd

Also published under the title "Elvis meets the Beatles"

Copyright © Chris Hutchins and Peter Thompson 1994

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

The right of Chris Hutchins and Peter Thompson to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-9570207-3-3

ebook by Ebooks by Design

www.ebooksbydesign.co

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

Chris Hutchins

I FIRST MET the Beatles in Hamburg as a reporter in November 1962. After Beatlemania broke out in Britain, I shared their adven­tures in the United States in 1964 and 1965.

I had also been a dedicated Elvis fan since boyhood, and had interviewed his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, on the telephone several times. I met him in Los Angeles in the summer of 1964, and the following year I met Elvis at the studios of Paramount Pictures in Hollywood. My purpose all along had been to arrange a meeting between Elvis and the Beatles. I did this by introducing Colonel Parker to Brian Epstein and pointing out the advantages to both camps. However, a reluctant Elvis kept ducking the issue because the Beatles were now so clearly on top. But in September 1964, I did manage to arrange a telephone conversation between him and Paul McCartney. When Elvis finally agreed to meet the Beatles the following summer, I was the only journalist present at that historic meeting at Elvis's Bel Air home on the night of 27 August 1965.

This story, like all my others at the time, appeared in the New Musical Express. As I was travelling and living with the Beatles on their tours, all of my reports were aimed at maintaining the group's image in the eyes of their fans. It was only after I had left the NME and worked for ten years as a press agent for Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Gilbert O'Sullivan and such bands as the Bee Gees, the Moody Blues, Eric Clapton's Cream, Procol Harum and Status Quo that I could begin to write the real stories I had uncov­ered in the world of show business.

I had many meetings with Elvis in Las Vegas in the Seventies, and came to know his wife Priscilla, who was by then separated from him and living in Los Angeles.

On the night of 16 August 1977, I heard from Memphis that Elvis was dead. I contacted Peter Thompson, who was editing the Daily Mirror that night, and the story caught the Mirror's first edition. Thompson cleared the entire front page, and ran my inside account of Elvis's life, 'The King Is Dead', across the cen­tre pages of the next edition. In 1993 and 1994, Thompson and I went to the United States to uncover the real stories behind the events I had witnessed thirty years earlier, which is why this book is written as a first-person account.

Our thanks go to the many people who helped us, particularly Colonel Parker, who guided us as we retraced Elvis's steps from his birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Memphis, New York, Hollywood and Las Vegas, where the story begins . . . in the Imperial Suite of the Hilton Hotel in February 1973. It was quite a night.

One

VENDETTA IN

VEGAS

A SAVAGE electrical storm was raging across the Nevada desert when the hired limousine took us from Caesars Palace to the Hilton Hotel where Elvis was appearing. Lightning raked the sky and the neon signs along the Strip blinked moodily in the rain. The night was set for melodrama of a particular showbiz kind.

When the car pulled up, Joe Esposito was waiting to greet Tom Jones and conduct our small group to the Imperial Suite on the 30th floor. Elvis hadn't been expecting us to arrive in Las Vegas, but had been glad to get our phone call. Diamond Joe told us: 'The Boss would really appreciate the company of an old buddy tonight . . . But take it easy,' the head of the Memphis Mafia continued as the lift went up. 'He's got troubles.'

Elvis had been unwinding after his second show when someone had unwisely mentioned John Lennon. It was a bad move. Lennon's name was banned in the King's presence unless it was accompanied by words such as 'Commie' or 'junkie'.

'Lennon?' Elvis had snapped angrily, instantly flaring up. 'You oughta spell that L-e-n-i-n.'

Only those privy to his deepest thoughts knew at that time just how much Elvis hated the former Beatle or to what lengths he had gone to destroy him. If things had been bad for Elvis in 1963 when the Beatles first made their run at his title, they were infinitely worse now, even though the group had broken up. Paul, George and Ringo might not pose a threat any more, but John Lennon mattered more than ever.

To Elvis, he had become a symbol of anti-American activism, a mocking, unwashed, long-haired hero of a drug culture that was threatening the established order of things. In Elvis's eyes, he was a son of Satan, an anti-Christ who believed he was bigger than Jesus.

His judgment distorted by his own drug dependence, Elvis had waged an unrelenting campaign against John ever since they had first fallen out at their one and only meeting back in the Sixties. I remembered that occasion extremely well. I had been responsible for setting it up and had had a ringside seat at the events that took place. Priscilla had been there, too.

We now found Elvis in the suite's vast sunken livingroom with Charlie Hodge, Jerry Schilling and some of the other Guys. An assortment of party guests, hand-picked because they were either decorative or useful in some other way, were trying unsuccessfully to enliven proceedings. Rain pelted down on the penthouse roof, but the wraparound view of the encircling mountains was excluded by heavy drapes. Elvis was frightened of storms and the music was turned up loud to drown out the pyrotechnics.

We were received warmly enough, although a curtain of Welsh gloom descended on Tom the moment he gauged Elvis's mood. Tom sat down and ran his fingers through his big Afro mop of woolly black hair. He hated to see his friend in emotional pain. The reason was known to anyone with the ability to read or switch on a TV set.

The King's life had been torn apart when Priscilla, his wife of five years, had informed him of her decision to leave the marriage and live with her lover Mike Stone. There was to be no trial separation, no second chance. She had finally come to the conclusion that Elvis's addiction to drugs, prescribed and otherwise, had not only made him unwell but also extremely dangerous.

Priscilla had flown to Las Vegas in February 1972 to give Elvis the bad news. His reaction confirmed her worst fears. After an almost sexless marriage, he had forced her down on his bed and made angry love to her. Priscilla had fled back to Los Angeles, packed her bags and moved out of their Beverly Hills home, taking their daughter Lisa Marie with her. For the past twelve months, Elvis had been alternately suicidal and homicidal.

'Are you still trying to get her back?' asked Tom, settling into a glass of Dom Perignon. 'Do you still talk to her?'

'Every night, Tom. I call her every night. She just keeps on saying it's all over. The divorce is going ahead. This has been one helluva time.'

Elvis's calls to Priscilla had been anything but conciliatory. One night he had threatened to come for Mike Stone with an M-16 rifle, put him up against a wall and execute him. In deep distress, Elvis had stormed around the penthouse with the rifle, ignoring the pleas of his new girlfriend Linda Thompson. He had had to be sedated before someone got seriously hurt.

The way Elvis told it, however, he was the wronged party. Although his own extramarital romps with young girls were an open secret in showbiz circles, the thing that stuck in his craw was that Priscilla had dared to be unfaithful to him. Elvis felt shamed and betrayed. Even worse, she had chosen as her lover Mike Stone, the karate instructor Elvis and I had in common - and he possessed the physique of an Hawaiian Hercules. Her infidelity with this of all men threatened not only Elvis's public image but also his manhood.

Tom identified strongly with Elvis's sense of outrage, although no woman, neither his long-suffering wife Linda nor any of his numerous lovers, had ever left him. He had stayed with Linda and kissed all the others goodbye.

The irony was that, until Priscilla's defection, things had been going promisingly from Elvis's point of view. In January 1972, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director for whom Elvis worked as an undercover agent spying on 'subversive' entertainers, had succeeded in having a deportation order served on John Lennon and his second wife, Yoko Ono. Hoover, like Elvis, reasoned that the best way to deal with John's radical cheek was to deny him direct access to its protagonists in America.

'Kick him out and keep him out' was how Elvis put it to the Guys.

But John and Yoko had appealed against the order and, supported by artists, writers, actors and film-makers as well as high-powered attorneys, they were pressing to be granted permanent residence status.

'I think this has something to do with Yoko and me being so outspoken over the Vietnam war,' said John with typical understatement. 'We love it here. Like Mr Nixon in his broadcast on Vietnam, all we are saying is give peace a chance.' And in one bizarre manoeuvre, the Ono Lennons claimed diplomatic immunity on the grounds that they were ambassadors of the 'Cosmic Kingdom of Nutopia'.

Just as the battle had reached the courts, Hoover, the man whom Elvis misguidedly called 'the greatest living American', had died of a massive heart attack. With the chief motivator of the Lennon witch-hunt permanently off the scene, the FBI had started to lose interest. Moreover, the expense of spying on the Lennons, tapping their phones and keeping track of their eccentric movements twenty-four hours a day was simply too high to justify. Elvis had lost his greatest ally, ironically a man who had detested Elvis as much as he had despised John.

If he couldn't have his Cilia back, Elvis wanted two things more than anything else in life: he wanted Mike Stone out of the way, and he wanted John Lennon barred from the United States or, failing that, he wanted John dead. As the rain drummed down on the Imperial Suite beneath the giant red HILTON insignia on the roof, both objectives seemed to be slipping beyond his reach.

At this point, Elvis turned his attention to me. 'Chris,' he said, 'it was you who brought the Beatles to my house, wasn't it? What an asshole John Lennon turned out to be.'

'I had a run-in with him myself,' Tom cut in before I could reply. 'He made some smart-ass remark on a TV show we were doing back in England. I wanted to take him outside and see what sort of a hiding his intellect could stand.'

Tom's grudge brought a smile to Elvis's face, and he called Linda, an athletic Miss Tennessee beauty queen, to join the inner circle. To provide an antidote to Priscilla, his talent-spotter George Klein had introduced them at a private showing at the Memphian Theatre. Now a fully fledged member of the King's flying circus, Linda was aware that Elvis was now high and unpredictable.

'I would see him take as many as twenty or thirty pills during the course of an evening,' she related some time later. 'His behaviour was constantly erratic. His temperament was volatile and variable. He had a bad temper, and sometimes it would be the interaction of the drugs.

'It was basically the Marilyn Monroe/Judy Garland syndrome. He would take sleeping pills to knock himself out and then wake up groggy and take Dexedrine. The erratic behaviour - the bad temper, the shooting-out television sets, that kind of thing - resulted.'

But tonight the TV sets remained intact. There was no gun play, no karate exhibitions with the Guys, no singing competition with Tom Jones, certainly no drug-fuelled orgy. Elvis was in a space that Joe Esposito easily recognized and chose to play down.

'There was erratic behaviour, but it was the life we were leading,' he later explained. 'He had a lot of emotional problems. He'd get angry like anyone else. If he got mad, he might walk off stage. Sure, he did that. But it was down to the work, the emotional stress.' This refusal to see the real problem simply enabled Elvis to get away with even greater excesses.

Joe had met Elvis in the Army in 1959, and as overseer of the entire Presley operation, he had plenty of problems of his own. One of them was Elvis's valet, James Caughley.

'Joe was worried that stories about Elvis's erratic behaviour would get out,' said Caughley, known as Hamburger James or Fetchum Bill because of his menial duties. 'Shooting-out televisions when he didn't like what was on was just the half of it. I have watched Elvis, sitting at the breakfast table at the Hilton with a $22,000 gold engraved pistol in his hand, shooting at the chandelier. Now the Hilton didn't normally complain, but they made him stop that because it was causing a leak.

'One time after he and Linda had been rowing, he got up and started firing the pistol in the bedroom of the Hilton suite, firing at an ornament, a pot owl. Linda was in the bathroom and I was cleaning up the room when that god-damn gun went off. Linda screamed and I called out to her. Her bathroom backed on to the television area where the owl was positioned, and one of the bullets that had missed the owl went straight through the cheap wall and into Linda's bathroom, just missing her.

'Elvis did crazy things, but you can't blame it all on the drugs. He had a very emotional temper and could be riled sick. Nobody would stand up and tell him No. He was like a little kid sometimes.'

One man who did stand up to Elvis was Henri J. Lewin, vice president of Hilton Hotels, in charge of its hotel/casino operations in Vegas. Lewin was a German Jew who had escaped from the Gestapo. Pop stars, even an armed one, held little terror for him. After he told Elvis to stop ventilating the ceiling, he gave him a few well-chosen words of advice.

'What the hell are you doing to yourself?' asked Lewin.

'You've got millions and all you want to do is lie on a couch, eat hamburgers and sleep. It isn't healthy. Get up and live a normal life.'

'You're a tough man, Mr Lewin,' Elvis replied defensively. 'You're much tougher than my father.'

'Yeah,' snapped Lewin, 'I tell you the truth.'

Henri Lewin told me that, after Priscilla left him, Elvis only lived and breathed for performances such as the one we had missed that night.

'When the band started playing the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey, my heart stopped beating and I entered a new dimension of excitement,' he recounted. 'Elvis jumped on stage and propelled himself like a spider to the front of his thirty-piece band. At the top of his voice, he sang, I can't stop loving you over the music. Then, to the surprise of 1800 people, he put down the microphone and sang the rest of the song. He had dropped the microphone, but you could still hear every word. Every chandelier in that big room was shaking.

'As I watched him closely, I had the feeling that he was actually under some kind of hypnotic trance during the whole performance, and his father Vernon Presley and the bodyguards were, in turn, under his spell. You could have poked a needle into any one of them and I doubt that they would have felt it.

'Elvis was walking on clouds on stage, but he died as soon as he came off. He was like a zombie.'

Elvis had recovered his equilibrium after a massive injection of a tranquillizer in his dressing room, though the man talking to us now was anything but calm or composed. When chef George Ziros wheeled his late-night meal into the livingroom on a large hot cart, Elvis waved it away. He wanted nothing to eat. What he wanted were solutions and none was forthcoming.

At one point, he retired to his bedroom. He returned even more wired than before. 'You oughta cut back on alcohol,' Elvis told Tom, noticing that his glass had been replenished during his absence. 'It can kill you.'

'I love you, Elvis,' Tom replied reasonably, 'but if you don't stop sticking that stuff up your nose, you won't be around to love much longer.'

He was the only man who could talk to Elvis like that and get away with it.

'It's all right, man,' said Elvis wildly, giving that famous smile. 'I tried everything before John Lennon even knew what a stimulant was.'

The Presleys had first met Tom at the Ilikai Hotel in Hawaii. After his performance one night, Priscilla had astonished the Welsh heart-throb by asking for his autograph. Tom and Elvis had been, in Priscilla's words, 'like a couple of schoolboys together'. When Tom had called on Elvis at his hotel, Priscilla, smiling broadly, had greeted him at the door. 'Elvis has just gone out to buy guitars for the two of you to goof around with,' she said. The three of them had gone to the beach where Elvis, despite the sticky heat, had kept his shirt on. He had been over dieting and was too embarrassed to reveal his scrawny torso in front of the well-muscled, hairy-chested Welshman.

After travelling to Vegas to watch Tom at the Flamingo in 1968, Elvis told him excitedly: 'Man, that was terrific. After seeing you, I want to get back up on stage myself.' This was the origin of Elvis's legendary comeback at the International Hotel (later bought by the Hilton chain), and he owed it to Tom Jones' example.

Off stage, Tom and Elvis put their friendship first, even exchanging rings. Elvis gave Tom a magnificent black sapphire (it later disappeared, along with a young lady, from his hotel bathroom), while Tom reciprocated with a tiger's-eye ring that Elvis had admired. Another Presley gift was a small Bible, on the flyleaf of which he had written a message: the words certainly looked sincere, but no one was ever able to decipher Elvis's handwriting.

There was to be no Bible-reading tonight. Elvis was starting to nod, his speech to slur. Sonny West, his friend and bodyguard, remembers Elvis being 'totally out of it on the couch in the living-room of his suite. I made a comment to a couple of the other guys that I wished we could film him to show him what he looked like,' he said later. 'He was sitting up and his eyes were closed and it seemed like they were lead weights. It made me think of Demerol because, when I had a back operation, I had Demerol. I had the doctor take me off it because I would lay there with my eyes closed in a euphoric twilight zone, but I also hallucinated. Elvis looked like I had felt:

At 4.00 am, we decided it was time to return to Caesars Palace, leaving the King to brood among the Guys until he passed out.

I was left to reflect on the unpleasant fact that the most celebrated rendezvous in the history of rock music had given rise to a highly dangerous feud between Elvis Presley and John Lennon, once the King's greatest fan. I had been aware of the bad feeling between them at the time, but the intensity of Elvis's rage was frightening. He seemed capable of just about anything.

Only after FBI files, which had been kept secret for twenty years, were finally opened was I able to find proof of his duplicity. Until then, it had just seemed like so much wild talk, despite the fact that Elvis had told Tom he had visited President Nixon in the White House and been appointed a special drug enforcement agent. When Tom had expressed disbelief, Elvis produced a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and written credentials empowering him to identify himself as an agent of the Bureau. Elvis took it all very seriously. One of his greatest ambitions was to bust John Lennon, identified in another FBI memo as 'a heavy user of narcotics'. With Elvis's own drug use clearly out of control, Tom Jones told me: 'Elvis should have arrested himself.'

The FBI files reveal that, in a private conversation with Federal agents on New Year's Eve 1970, Elvis denounced the Beatles and directed J. Edgar Hoover's attention towards John Lennon in particular.

Presley indicated that he is of the opinion that the Beatles laid the groundwork for many of the problems we are having with young people by their filthy unkempt appearances and suggestive music while entertaining in this country during the early and middle 1960s.

Thus disclosed a confidential FBI memorandum obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act.

After Elvis's intervention, Hoover had ordered an immediate update of all files relating to John Lennon, and the surveillance operation against Lennon had moved into a higher gear.

So it was true. But why? In some ways, both men were unnervingly similar. Was it simply a case of like magnetic poles repelling one another? Or was John just a symptom of a deeper ailment inside Elvis?

Both men had been raised as the only children of weak fathers who lived, and influential mothers who were taken from them. Vernon Presley had served time in prison for forging a cheque, while Freddie Lennon had spent three months behind bars for stealing a bottle of vodka. When John's mother, Julia Stanley, a slim, vivacious redhead, had wed ship's steward Freddie in 1938, she had mischievously put down her occupation on the marriage certificate as 'cinema usherette'; it was to be an illusory marriage. Two years later, at 6.30 on the evening of 9 October 1940, John Winston Lennon was born at the Maternity Hospital, Liverpool, during a heavy German air raid. Torn between an adorable but inadequate mother and an appealing but footloose father, John was damaged for life.

Julia was knocked down and killed by a car on 15 July 1958, just a month before Gladys Presley was to die of her alcoholism in a Memphis hospital. John was 17, Elvis 23. Julia's death almost destroyed the Beatle, who had just been getting to know his mother again after years of estrangement. 'I was in a sort of blind rage for two years,' he said. 'I was either drunk or fighting.' His mother's rejection of him had driven John since childhood: 'The only reason I went for that goal [to be a star] is that I wanted to say, Now, Mummy, will you love me? '

Elvis tried to throw himself into Gladys's grave, sobbing: 'Oh God, everything I have is gone. I lived my whole life for you.' Later, he said: 'She was very close, more than a mother. She was a friend who would let me talk to her any hour of the day or night if I had a problem.'

The singer Patti Page recalls that, whenever she met Elvis in Las Vegas or Hawaii, her very presence would remind him of Gladys. 'I was his mother's favourite singer and I know he took her death extremely badly because that was his love,' she told me. 'Elvis used to ask me to sing her favourite songs for him, one of which was Down the Trail of Broken Hearts. I always thought he had a sad quality about him. You always noticed some sadness in him.'

After that, there were the aunts - Delta Mae for Elvis and Mimi for John - who doted on the two young men but never made up for the loss. Both men were plagued by a morbid fascination with death, Elvis taking his obsession to the extreme of visiting a Memphis morgue to look at the bodies of the departed.

Both men had been outsiders, shunned at school, who had turned to music as an outlet for pent-up emotions. Hearing 'Heartbreak Hotel' had changed John's life. 'Nothing really affected me until I heard Elvis,' he said. 'If there hadn't been Elvis, there would not have been the Beatles.' Both saw themselves as products of society's basement. Even when he was worth millions, Elvis still liked to describe himself as 'a poor country boy from Tennessee', while John, with all his riches, identified himself as a working-class hero opposed to wealth and privilege.

Both men had married young sweethearts - John to Cynthia Powell, Elvis to Priscilla Beaulieu - fathered a single child and seen their marriages end messily and unhappily in the divorce courts. Both men used hard drugs and sex as an escape from the unbearable reality of being. Hookers were frequently called in to give them a quick fix of erotic fantasy. Their attitude to any woman who couldn't be categorized as either a virgin or a mother was equally sick. Both became physically violent to women who upset them. 'I was a hitter,' confessed John. 'I fought men and I hit women.' Most telling of all, John's nickname for Yoko was 'Mother', while Elvis called Linda Thompson 'Mummy'.

John was extrovert yet mystical, a searcher for truth in strange places; Elvis secretive yet spiritual, an embracer of gospels and mystic texts. John the born leader, forceful, dominant, a master of words, some of his songs full of the violent outpourings of a disturbed mind; Elvis the loner surrounded by yes-men, polite, generous, a master of lyrics, his songs making even heartbreak sound exciting. It was indicative of their personalities that John should become the Walrus of Lewis Carroll's creations, while Elvis forever remained the Hound Dog of lowly esteem.

The motivating force the two shared in common, the well-spring that fed poison into their systems, came from deep down in their psyches. It stemmed from a self-centred fear that was more powerful than family, money or fame. Envious of each other and jealous of their own stardom, they had turned their mutual hostility into a contest of wills, an Olympian battle of the egos.

In Elvis's psychotic mind, his resentment was magnified into a war between ideologies: capitalism versus Communism, the forces of good fighting a diabolical evil. To John, it became a crusade for peace and justice in a troubled and unjust world in which Elvis was just another shop-soiled loser.

Even while he was fighting for his green card during 1972, John had gone into the studio and recorded Some Time in New York City, which was devoted to the highly explosive political causes he supported. He was incapable of compromise, only getting out of the ring when his lawyers advised him to exercise a little more restraint. 'I thought it was my duty to save the