Unknown Stories Behind The Legend

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

Elvis was talking to several girls at a party one day when he noticed a girl sitting all alone, crying.
He excused himself from his adoring harem and went over to the sad guest.
He sat next to the girl, put his arms around her, and let her cry on his shoulder.
He asked her to explain why she was crying before she flooded the entire room.
In between sobs, the girl explained that she was unhappy about turning 27 the following day.
Amused by her reason for crying, Elvis laughed.
He hugged her closer and said, "Honey, don't worry about it.
You'll grow out of it".
He exploded in a fit of laughter, and then the girl began to laugh as well.
She kissed Elvis and thanked him for making her feel better.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

Elvis was reunited with his co-star Yvonne Craig the day before they began filming Kissin' Cousins in October 1963.
He invited her out to dinner, and she gladly accepted.
Afterwards, they decided to go to Elvis' house to watch some television.
Elvis fell asleep while watching an old movie and Yvonne decided to leave.
Not wanting to disturb her sleeping date, she covered Elvis with a blanket, turned off the tv and the light, and went out the door.
Just before locking the door Yvonne remembered that Elvis hated the dark.
She went back inside.
After turning on a light, Yvonne went to the front door and walked out, closing the door behind her.
As she turned to walk away, she saw five police cars in front of the house.
Policemen, guns in hand, were aiming their weapons at her.
Yvonne had activated a silent alarm.
The sergeant in charge questioned her about who she was and what she was doing there.
The policemen then rang the doorbell and woke Elvis up.
He verified Yvonne's story and they let her go.
Elvis laughed at her for getting into such a situation and called her a silly bird.
The following morning on the set, Elvis popped into her dressing room and asked her if she'd set off any more alarms.
Yvonne told him to shut up and get out; she was embarrassed enough and did not want to keep being reminded of the incident.
Although she was a little piqued at Elvis when the scene was finished they walked hand in hand back to his dressing room.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

As Told By..... SAM THOMPSON

One time my sister Linda, my wife Louise, and I had been down with Elvis to see the old Circle G Ranch in Mississippi and were on our way back to Memphis in Elvis' Stutz Bearcat.
We passed a little black boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, by the side of Highway 51.
It was summer; it was hot - dust in the air.
The kid was caked in dust, sitting at a little watermelon stand.
We had the entourage, about four or five vehicles, and Elvis was in the lead.
{As we go by} Elvis pulls over.
Of course, everybody pulls over after him.
Everybody jumps out - Red and everybody.
They're looking around.
This is in the middle of nowhere.
This little kid - I'll never forget his face.
I know he knew who Elvis was, but he wasn't gonna let Elvis know that he knew.
He was a businessman, this kid.
He sat there and waited for Elvis to walk up.
Elvis had to initiate the conversation, "How much are the watermelons ?"
A price was established.
The kid was real tough and he wouldn't come off the price.
So finally Elvis just turned around and said, "We'll take the whole stand.
Pay him".
That's the only time the kid's visage cracked.
Elvis took one watermelon, the choice one, and put it in the back of the car.
Off we drove and left the entourage down there to settle up.
Elvis bought the whole watermelon stand, bought all those watermeons, and took them back to Memphis.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

As Told By..... CHERYLE JOHNSON

Elvis again had to cancel shows, this time {May 4-16, 1973} at the Sahara Tahoe {Statelie, Nevada}.
He canceled out four days early because, it was reported, he was ill.



JAMES BURTON (musician)

We cut "Are You Sincere" at the Palm Springs house.
We had a remote truck brought up from Los Angeles.
Elvis cut the record right in the living room with his pajamas and robe on the whole time.
We did a couple more songs, but that's the only one that was a hit.



ALEX LOGAN

The Palm Springs house was different back then.
The rooms were papered red and black, and the carpet was mostly red.
I remember that Elvis had a big round bed and a red bedspread.
I came into the room one day, and he was in bed by himself.
I kidded him about how he knew what side of the bed to get up on.
Elvis had buttons that controlled all the lights, all the sound, and the security system.
He finally had to have bars put on the windows because people would climb the fence and get in there.
We were building him a master bedroom that overlooked the valley, but after he and Priscilla split up, he never completed it.
He never even put carpet in it; it just sat there.
We put a playroom in for Lisa Marie.
It took us about a year and a half to finish it.
They had her fourth birhday party there.



CHARLIE HODGE

Elvis liked to lay out by the pool, but he didn't want to get his body tanned, just his face, so he wore his robe.
He'd have {an electric} fan on him to keep cool.
He would eat a pan-fried hamburger steak and mashed potatoes from the kitchen, but he liked to grill steaks out by the pool and do a hot dog for Lisa Marie.

[cibetty]

Thanks very much for sharing these stories!! I've already read them on another site, and I love them. They're sometimes sad, sometimes funny, but I think they are all true.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

In the film Girl Happy, Elvis played Rusty Wells, leader of his own band.
His band members were Andy, Wilbur, and Doc, played by Gary Crosby, Joby Baker, and Jimmy Hawkins.
Rusty Wells and his Combo played at either the 77 Club or the Sandbar Club in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
In the scene where the band plays "Startin' Tonight", Elvis accidently hit Jimmy Hawkins in the mouth with his guitar.
One of Jimmy's teeth was knocked loose and he was immediately sent to the dentist.
Elvis felt terrible for the accident and apologized to Hawkins several times.
From then on, the director made sure that the band members were spread out enough to keep everyone safe.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

As Told By..... SHAUN NIELSEN

The first time I took the whole group (the group that was to become "Voice") to see Elvis, he flew us to Las Vegas.
Tom Jones was having trouble with his backup singers, and we were gonna be like a "gift" from Elvis to Tom.
We were put up in a nice hotel at Elvis' expense, and then he brought us up to his room to sing for Tom that night.
This had to cost him a lot of money.
We got up to sing, and I remember that right in front of us were Tom Jones, Bobbie Gentry, and Elvis Presley!
I was intimidated, to say the least.
Anyway, Tom told Elvis that he had just signed a contract with The Blossoms, and if he got rid of them he'd probably be sued, so he didn't feel like he could use us.
Afterwards, Elvis called us back up to his suite, and we sat there on the floor in the bedroom for a long time, just chatting.
He said, "Well, I know you're probably disappointed, so I've drawn up this little contract."
It was on a sheet of toilet tissue!
The opening line said, "For the sum of one hundred thousand dollars..."we would travel and sing and work with him and write songs for his music publishing companies.
He said, "Would you boys be interested in that?"
As soon as we revived ourselves, we said, "Sure! We'd love to do that".
That was in 1973.
That same hundred thousand dollars would be equal to two hundred fifty to three hundred thousand dollars today.
After he signed the "contract" with us, Elvis went to the phone and called hs dad.
He said, "Daddy, I just want you to know I've finally got my own group".
Those were his words.
We were basically just to travel and sing with him when he felt like it.
Sometimes he'd send a plane for us in Nashville, just to take us to Memphis to go to the movies!
Then sometimes after the movies we'd go back to Graceland and sing all night.
That basically was our job.
We also opened his show at the Las Vegas Hilton for two or three years.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

Elvis nearly suffered fatal injuries on the set of Loving You in January of 1957.
He had just finished shooting a scene and had stepped back up onto the set when some instinct told him to move.
Three seconds later the entire light structure crashed to the ground.
Elvis would have been crushed had he not moved.
The studio wanted no more accidents with their young, multi-million dollar actor.
A stage-hand was ordered to stand within earshot of Elvis to ensure that nothing happened to him.
The director and producer had the crew check and stabilize all of their equipment.
An entire day was lost in taking these precautions, but it was better to lose a day than to lose the King of Rock 'n' Roll.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

In March 1967, Elvis was working on the movie "Clambake". While he was having his make-up done by make-up man Dan Greenway, one of the crew members tossed a lit firecracker into the trailer.
An all-out firecracker war was soon under way.
Elvis lit a firecracker to toss under a crew members chair.
He misjudged, however, and the cracker landed on top.
As the crew member sat down, the firecracker blew a hole in his pants.
Elvis laughed so hard that he did not hear one of his bodyguards behind him until a larger cracker popped right under his own rear end.
He quickly ran to his dressing room and retrieved his own stash of fireworks.
The firecracker fights continued for several days.
The set looked and sounded like a war movie.
Even director Arthur Nadel got involved in the action; he eventually appeared on the set sporting a German war helmet for protection.
Rear ends were singed and fingers were burned, but by the time some action was finally caught on film, everyone was in a great mood and it showed.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

On June 16, 1966, Elvis started work on his new movie, "Double Trouble", with Annette Day.
Day was only 18 years old when she was hired; she was nervous about being in her first movie as well as meeting and playing with the famous Presley.
Always in a playful mood, Elvis decided to play a prank on Day.
He got a rubber vulture from the prop room and attached it to his arm.
He then went to Day and asked her if she'd like to see his new pet.
He shoved the vulture in her face, making her scream.
She nearly tumbled backwards trying to get away from the bird.
It took Day over ten minutes to compose herself, Elvis kept apologizing - in between fits of laughter.
When she finally forgave him, Elvis told her he'd never seen anyone's eyes bulge so much.
He soon had the young actress laughing as well.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

As Told By..... DR. GEORGE NICHOPOULOS

Unfortunately, Elvis felt that in order for something to be more effective, it had to be given by a shot.
That's the reason that we gave him decongestants by injection at times.
Elvis had a phobia about going onstage and his voice cracking, or not being able to project as well as he could.
Even though he may have felt all right before going onstage, he felt that somehow a shot would protect him from something bad happening.
I don't know if he'd been embarrassed at some time or another onstage, or what may have happened, but it was difficult trying to get away from giving him shots all the time.



BECKY HARTLEY

I do know Elvis would get "desert throat" out in Vegas.
Before he would sing he would have to have shots and things. Mr. Presley had me write a letter to one doctor because he was wondering why vitamin B-12 shots cost what they did, and exactly what all did they do?
The doctor wrote back and said he couldn't, naturally, divulge that information. Vernon was concerned about it.



DR. GEORGE NICHOPOULOS

Every time Elvis got a shot, {the bodyguards} would think that it was some sort of narcotic or something, and that wasn't true.
He was getting some allergy shots and B-12 shots (he was one of those people who thought that a B-12 shot helped him).
He would feel better after one; whether it actually helped him or not, I don't know.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

In the mid-1970's, Elvis heard from a friend about a boy who was almost blind.
The boy needed a very delicate operation to regain his sight and his family did not have enough money to pay for the surgery.
Elvis contacted the boy's hospital, set up a date for the operation, and hired the best eye surgeon in Memphis to perform the risky procedure.
Elvis did not want to call the boy's family himself; instead, he had the hospital inform the family that "someone" had arranged and paid for the operation.
The youngster and his family were ecstatic about the unexpected news.
The operation was a total success and the boy's sight was fully restored.
All of the hospital and doctor bill were paid in full before the boy ever came in for the surgery, and no word was ever spoken by the staff in regards to who the mysterious benefactor was.
The family never knew who funded the boy's miracle.
Elvis was extremely happy that his riches could help so many people.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

As Told By..... SHAUN NIELSEN

Elvis came to the National Quartet Convention in Nashville several different times.
They'd bring him around to the backstage door and he'd wait there until everybody was onstage, to make as little commotion as possible.
They would just kind of sneak him in.
We would always ask him if he wanted to be introduced, and sometimes he'd walk out and wave and go backstage.
It was always quite an event when he was there.



JAMES BLACKWOOD

Elvis would always attend the convention if he could.
I remember looking up one time and there he was backstage.
The auditorium was packed - like four or five thousand people there.
When Elvis came out onstage, it looked like a million light bulbs went off.
Elvis had a great feel for gospel music.
The Grammys that he won were all for his gospel albums, and they were best-sellers.
It's been said that Elvis copied his style originally from Jake Hess, who sang with the Imperials and the Statesmen Quartet.
Like myself, he'd been raised in the Pentecostal church.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

In October 1974, Elvis sponsored a girl named Wardee Anderson in the annual bike-a-thon benefiting the Diabetes Association of California.
Wardee had approached Elvis at his Bel Air home and asked him to sponsor her.
Elvis got a kick out of the idea of riding a bicycle for money and agreed to pay Wardee $5 for every mile she rode.
In those days, the average amount of money paid per mile was 25 or 50 cents.
For someone to pay $5 per mile was unheard of.
By the end of the charity event Wardee had ridden 28 miles.
Elvis promptly wrote out a check in the amount of $140 and proudly presented it to the girl.
Elvis' contribution and participation helped to bring in $7,000 more than the anticipated mark of $50,000.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

Although Elvis very rarely went to bars, one of the girls he dated requested that he take her to one.
Not wanting to disappoint her, Elvis took her where she wanted to go.
They sat at a table in the corner for some privacy.
Elvis ordered sodas for himself while his date drank martinis. Elvis overheard two men making remarks about him and his date and asked the men to apologize to her.
They laughed and said they would do no such thing.
Elvis asked the men to step outside, and when they refused to move, he grabbed one of them and knocked some sense into him.
He then grabbed the other man and did the same.
When he was through, Elvis forced them to apologize to his date. He then helped her with her coat and they left the bar.
They went back to his house for a little peace and quiet.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

On March 26, 1976, Elvis and his electrician went to the lighting fixture store to purchase a new chandelier for Graceland.
While driving down the highway, they spotted an overturned truck.
Elvis stopped his car and ran over to see what was happening.
He asked the police officer at the scene if he could be of any help, and the man turned around and yelled, "Yeah!.
Move your **** car out of the way!".
Elvis pulled out his sheriff's badge and showed it to the cop, but the officer was not impressed.
He said, "That's nice.
Now move!".
Offended by the policeman's arrogance and bad attitude, Elvis stormed off and drove home.
The next day, the same policeman came to Graceland to attempt to apologize to Elvis.
After learning about the incident, the local sheriff had forced the cop to offer an apology.
When Elvis heard that the cop was at the gate, he refused to see him.
The policeman was shocked by Elvis' behavior.
When he got back to the station and told the sheriff what had happened, he was suspended without pay.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

As Told By..... DR. GEORGE NICHOPOULOS

Elvis would call other physicians and get extra drugs.
I had to get full cooperation from everyone around him on trying to limit those extras he was getting.
I had to make everybody realize that if we didn't control the situation it would not only effect Elvis but also their jobs.
If Elvis didn't work, they didn't work.
Some of them may have thought they were doing him a favor by not telling him what was going on, but they were only hurting him and themselves.
There was {somewhat of} a turnaround about that time; if the pilots flew out, they'd call me; if someone had to go to the airport for Elvis, they'd call me.
Sometimes they'd pick up a drug shipment and bring it by my office.
But if he really wanted something, it was easy for him to procure it.
He would hide drugs everywhere.
During Elvis' first major illness in '73, while he was in the hospital, Joe Esposito and myself went to his room to go through everything.
He had three bottles {of drugs} that had a thousand capsules each: one was Dexedrine, one was Seconal, and the other was some other sedative - a thousand capsules in each bottle!.
We threw 'em all out.
This was a sporadic thing.
There would be times when everything was fine and he would take nothing, times he was totally drug free.

SONNY WEST

Elvis was very strong in his convictions.
If he had made up his mind that he was going to get off the drugs and never take another one - if he'd really made up his mind to do it - he'd have done it and never take another one again.
I mean, he could have done that just like he done other things; he just had to make up his mind.

DR. Forest Tennant Jr. (drug abuse expert)

I think that Elvis Presley, himself, had a very poor understanding of what his drugs were doing, or why he was even taking the drugs.
When you get your drug problem all mixed up and you don't know why you're taking your drugs, and you don't admit to yourself internally why you're taking your drugs, that's when you get yourself into problems.
That's exactly what happened to Elvis.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

As Told By..... LINDA THOMPSON

Life with Elvis wasn't all Camelot.
There was a lot of heartache, and he exhibited a lot of self-destructive behavior, which was very difficult for me, you know - watching someone I loved so much destroy himself.



DR. GEORGE NICHOPOULOS

Elvis was always looking for shortcuts: "I oughta be able to lose weight faster!".
In November of '73, I believe, he found this physician out in California who said he was giving Elvis acupuncture, but he was injecting him with syringes.
He was using some local anesthetic, some Novocaine, some Demerol, and B-12, and of course Elvis felt great afterwards.
This is how that illness got started.
He'd had so much cortisone and Demerol in those shots he'd become addicted to Demerol and he was Cushingoid {his face and hands swollen, his body bloated} from too much cortisone.
He was so sedated when he came back to Memphis, he was carried off the plane.
I called an ambulance immediately.
There were a number of different side effects; his ulcer was bleeding due to the cortisone, and the pain medicine was covering all this up.
He was having a very difficult time breathing.
He was near death.
I hospitalized him and called in a couple of specialists to detoxify him.
That was the first time I'd had to have him detoxified, and I've always felt this {overdose} was an accidental thing.
While he was in the hospital we had to keep his chart locked up.
Everyone wanted to look at his records.
That particular admission, the lab technicians were selling his blood and urine.
It was crazy.
A lot of things we didn't put in the chart because it was difficult to keep quiet.
We didn't know how much Elvis was addicted, so we treated him like a Demerol addict.
We stopped the Demerol and gave decreasing doses of Methadone.
After he got well, Elvis was sorry; he tried to behave himself.
He promised not to do it again.



MARY ANN MOBLEY

In a way, Elvis was a victim of his fame.
I think that the doctors gave him whatever they thought he wanted.



DR. GEORGE NICHOPOULOS

I became very conscious that Elvis was using prescribed drugs more heavily after the acupuncture incident.
I felt if he could get sucked in on that so easily, he was a sitting target for anybody that wanted to play games with him.
He was naive in a lot of ways about doctors.
Right after he got well from the acupuncture and started working again, I'd find him going to different areas of the country wanting to get something for pain, something I didn't think he ought to have.
This was about the time he'd bought his airplanes, and it was convenient for him.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

As Told By..... DR. GEORGE NICHOPOULOS

During one hospitalization some doctor mailed Elvis some drugs "to get well".
We couldn't even identify the drugs because they were locally made.
He didn't get to use them; we threw them away.
Once a doctor came to visit him and gave him some medications without informing me.
I called the doctor up and asked him what was going on.
He said they were all placebos; not to worry, there was nothing in those pills.
The bottle was sealed like from the factory.
They were the real thing.



DR. FOREST TENNANT JR.

Every internal medicine specialist, every general practitioner in the United States has some patients like Elvis Presley in their practice. It's well-known to doctors; and doctors, frankly, are at their wits end in managing these cases.
Doctors like myself are trying to work out what should be done with them, but it's a very frustrating thing for physicians.
Elvis Presley's case is routine in some circles of medicine.
National surveys show that ninety percent of drugs prescribed by a doctor are taken as prescribed.
However, doctors know that we have those few patients - that five or ten percent of patients that get these substances - that simply will not take them as prescribed.
They have this compulsive drive to take more and more.
We seem to be powerless to take them off of the drugs or to keep them from going from one doctor to another or one emergency room to another.
They just keep taking the drugs on a compulsive basis, and they refuse to go into any kind of therapy from a psychological point of view, or they have failed these treatments.
There is quite a difference in having addiction that is well-controlled versus uncontrolled addiction.
What we're finding out in those people who are going to compulsively take a drug to the point of addiction is that it's far better to have controlled medical addiction than uncontrolled addiction.
In other words, it's the lesser of two evils.



SONNY WEST

There's times when Elvis woke up in the middle of the night and just took things.
That's why he had someone watching him, so that he wouldn't take things and forget and accidentally take them again.
There'd been a couple times when Elvis almost OD'd but was saved.



DR. GEORGE NICHOPOULOS

We had a confrontation and I told him that I couldn't trust him to continue taking his own medicines.
I wasn't accusing him of overdosing or deliberately taking too much, but people with him would sometimes see him reach over and take something, and he'd be half asleep.
He'd wake up and go to the bathroom and take a pill just to be sure he could go back to sleep...and he didn't need it.
This is where we had gotten into a lot of problems earlier on the tour.
I said, "Let me handle your medications.
You call me if you need me".
This put more demand on me as far as getting rest at night.
It would have been easier to give them all to him and say, "Here, you take 'em", you know.
We did real well with this for a while, then he got to the point here he'd say, "Hey, I'm an adult.
I'm a grown man.
Why can't I handle my own medicines?"
Everybody else does.
Why do you have to baby-sit with me ?"
I said "We tried it the other way and you saw what happened.
This is the only way I can be responsible for it".
This came up every now and then, but he seemed to adjust to it.

[Polk-Salad-Annie]

As Told By..... CHERYL JOHNSON

In August, Elvis was again appearing at the Hilton in Vegas, and he cancelled two more shows.
They said it was because he had the flu, but a lot of fans were beginning to seriously worry about him.



ED PARKER

Once, at the Hilton, Elvis asked the guys to be quiet at the table; they didn't.
He pulled his gun and shot it five or six times into the air.
He put some holes in the ceiling; he got their attention!.
It was his form of release.
Some people try to make it mean something else, but it really didn't.
Another time Elvis asked the guys to turn the tv off because Robert Goulet was on it.
They didn't do it, so he came over and shot the tv out.
Some people said he was vicious - a madman; he was not.
That was just his strange form of entertainment.



FRED FREDRICK

Elvis shot his Ferrari.
It did something - ran off the road or stalled or whatever, so he just shot it.
He said he "killed it".
Somebody went down to get the car and towed it back up to the house.
Elvis said, "Take that **** thing right back where I left it.
It died!".
It still won't run.
It's still shot.