Enter The Dragon
April, 2002 Mojo, UK’s Music Magazine

In the early ‘70s, Elvis took on the beast of Las Vegas with a mean-assed backing group and a neat line in ludicrous stage-wear. But amid an orgy of guns, pills and extra-marital affairs lurked the tedium of a crushing routine and a profound inner loneliness. By Bill DeMain

AUGUST 10, 1970, LAS VEGAS. IN THE GRAND BALLROOM of the 30-story International Hotel, the lights are going down. Out of the darkness comes a torrent of drums, a guitar riff as old as the crossroads, a piano, eight back-ground singers clapping in tent revival rhythm. Then Elvis appears from the wings, staking out the stage like an animal. He throws his shoulders around and flashes a photon bean of charisma; the world’s most coveted head of male hair flops across his forehead. The crowd roars.

Upping the sartorial ante from the previous year’s black karate outfit, designer Bill Belew had decked out the star in a white bell-bottom jump-shit, its magnificent collar big enough to warrant its own hangar. The low-plunging V-neck reveals a smooth, tanned chest. His heavy gold belt and studs catch the lights; the suit’s long tassels swing. On any other person, this outfit would be ridiculous. But not on Elvis Presley. He looks like an intergalactic emissary, sent to this small town in the desert to save the world from war, disease and tie-dye shirts. As he starts to sing, the roar crescendos. “That’s all right mama, that’s all right with you.” But it’s more than all right. The 35-year-old singer from East Tupelo is enjoying the ultimate rock ‘n’ roll comeback.

The previous year, as Apollo XI astronaut Neil Armstrong was making giant leaps for mankind across the moon's surface, Elvis had taken his own successful steps on the stage of the International. His first concert in 10 years had been a thundering success. In conjunction with his Singer Presents Elvis TV special, his Number I single Suspicious Minds and From Elvis In Memphis, his most fully realised album yet, Presley had re-established himself, after a decade of schlocky movies, as The King. But unlike Armstrong, who had planted his flag, grabbed a few moonrocks and come home, Elvis remained on Planet Vegas for too long.

Early '70s Vegas was a heady mix of seediness and glamour, big bucks, booze and busty showgirls. Time meant nothing and it was easy to lose yourself in the neon promises that flashed scarlet and gold up and down Las Vegas Boulevard. On 'The Strip', the hotel-casino showrooms boasted Jerry Lewis, Don Ho & The Hawaiians, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jimmy Durante or Johnny Pulec, & The Harmonicats, while Ike And Tina Turner and Redd Foxx were entertaining hicks and high rollers in the International's second and third auditoria. Celebrity couples were off in the wedding chapels getting hitched – Ann-Margret and Roger Smith, Xavier Cugat and Charo. Business titans like Howard Hughes and Kirk Kerkorian were playing a billion-dollar real estate game like it was Monopoly. And Mob boss Tony 'The Ant' Spilotro, known for his persuasive way with an ice pick, was running everything from numbers to drugs to prostitution rings. From his 30th floor penthouse in the $80million CinemaScope-shaped International, Elvis gazed down, master of all he surveyed.

In his 1969 engagement, he had turned the city upside down, shattering all records, with a total attendance of 101,500 and gross receipts of $ 1,522,635. He even left Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack in the dust. While this may not have meant much in terms of rock'n'roll credibility, the numbers were too good to ignore for Colonel Tom Parker, who aimed to make his boy a glitter gulch perennial. On July 31, 1969, he signed a contract with International president Alex Shoofey. Written on a coffee-stained table-cloth in the hotel coffee shop, it spelled out Elvis's future, guaranteeing the star $ 1 million a year for just eight weeks' work annually, lasting through 1974. Which doesn't sound so bad; "Las Vegas," as band member Glen D. Hardin points out, "is great if you drink and gamble and chase women 24 hours a day," and if Elvis did not drink, there is no evidence of his distaste towards at least one of the other two mentioned. But "after about three or four days of that", adds Hardin, "it gets very tiring to be there. With what we were doing, year in, year out, I think Elvis got bored to death."

WHEN IT CAME TO FINDING THE PERFECT band to back him in Vegas, Elvis must have spoken to just about every musician he knew. In the end he handed the recruitment job over to guitarist James Burton. Burton had first caught Elvis's eye as a member of Ricky Nelson's band on the weekly TV show Ozzie & Harriet. As the chicken-pickin' Telecaster-man rose to the top of the LA session scene, Elvis kept tabs on him. In June '69, as he was preparing for his first show, Elvis called to ask the guitarist to put together a backing band that could handle "any type of music". The core line-up he chose to join him was pianist/arranger Hardin, bassist Jerry Scheff, drummer Ronnie Tutt, plus two sets of backing singers.

Rehearsals for the engagement the Colonel dubbed "The Elvis Summer Festival" began on July 14, 1970 at MGM Recording Stage, 1A in Culver City, California. They were filmed for use in Dennis Sanders' documentary That's The Way It Is. Surrounded by his band, Elvis sat with a black Gretsch hollow body and a notebook full of song titles and lyrics. He rolled through Baby, Let's Play House, Little Sister, Get Back, Words, Twenty Days, Don't, Bridge Over Troubled Water. He conducted, chopping the air with karate punches. He clowned around, one minute imitating Bob Dylan's nasal whine, the next spicing up the lyrics to Love Me: "If you ever go/Darling, I'll be oh so horny."

"We rehearsed probably 200 songs [although] it was more like we were just having fun, like jamming almost," recalls Scheff. A San Francisco hippy with jazz and classical training, Scheff along with session drummer Jim Gordon, had formed a killer rhythm section on hundreds of West Coast pop sessions, from Neil Diamond to Tiny Tim to Linda Ronstadt. "The '50s songs, Elvis turned those into medleys, and we'd race through them. He basically put them in because he had to, but he squashed them down to the least time possible. He wanted to be taken more seriously by critics. I think that was his vision - to ease out of the rock'n'roll business and become known more for his voice and what he considered more adult-type stuff "

Hardin was a Lubbock, Texas native who cut his teeth with Buddy Holly's Crickets and, after a stint in the Navy, joined the house band for mid-‘60s TV music programme Shindig! "Elvis was very well convinced that he was probably the best rock singer in the world," he laughs, "but he came to a point where he wanted to be Perry Como! He wanted to be a bit of a crooner. I'm sure he knew he could do that, especially with a big orchestra." It was Hardin's arrangements that gave much of Presley's '70s live work its pomp and circumstance. "I could make the arrangements pretty busy because he was such a powerful singer. He'd tell me the song, then say he wanted it the next day. He'd give me the title, and I'd have to go find the lyrics. When I got it all together, I'd usually stop by his dressing room before we went on, and I'd play it for him. OK, here’s the intro, here's the verse, then the chorus, and he'd say, 'I got it.' It was loose." Presley didn't work like other musicians Hardin had known; they’d get together to work and run through all kinds of different songs, maybe all night. Elvis wanted freedom to move and not be strapped into a routine set.

For rookie drummer Ronnie Tutt - another Texan, who had played with Western Swing bands and symphonies before joining Elvis's band the previous summer - working with Elvis "was like working for a stripper in the old days of vaudeville. The drummers and musicians had to watch every move the stripper made to accent it with their instruments. With the setlist, we were always trying to get him to do more rock'n'roll, but over the years he became more interested in doing more big sounding ballads. He liked the rush of emotion."

Says band leader Burton: "In the rehearsals, and on-stage Elvis keyed off the guitar. We had great eye contact. He loved guitar. If I'd play a lick or something, he would just turn around and say, 'Yeah, baby!"

INSIDE THE INTERNATIONAL’S baroque, 2,000-seater ballroom, with its red velvet booths, midnight blue wallpaper and crystal chandeliers, only a tiny percentage of the people dining were paying much interest to their Roast Prime Rib au Jus. The emotional charge running between the audience and the stage was palpable. Love Me Tender had become a nightly kissfest, with Elvis dipping below stage level to plant his lips on the hungry female mouths below, to giggles and orgasmic squeals. On several occasions, to the horror of his security, he ventured out into the crowd. Tutt laughs: "He knew that that would stir something up, Boy! The place was chaos. He was like a mischievous kid."

Then, four days into the engagement, on August 14, the mischievous kid got slapped with a paternity suit. A 21-year-old waitress from LA, Patricia Ann Parker, claimed that Elvis had made her pregnant during his Vegas engagement in January of that year. While attorney Ed Hookstratten attempted to untangle the mess with the help of private eye John O'Grady, Elvis used the stage to plead his innocence. That night Paul Anka was in the audience with his pregnant wife. Elvis joked, " She didn't put nothing in the paper about me last week, did she?" A few nights later, when his wife Priscilla was present, he made another attempt at humour: "She knows I didn't knock that chick up last week either - 'cos I use birth control."

But even more serious was the death threat. On August 26, an anonymous phone call to International security detailed plans to kidnap Elvis. Two days later, Elvis's assistant Joe Esposito got a call at home, demanding $50,000 in small bills to reveal the name of the man who planned to kill Elvis on-stage. The FBI were called in. Private security was beefed up. Memphis Mafia man and former football player Jerry Schilling recalls: "He had me sitting in the orchestra with a gun. Sonny West was on the other side of the orchestra with a gun. Red West was in back with the FBI guys. It was very tense." Even Elvis was packing, with pistols tucked into his boots. Halfway through the show a man in the balcony yelled out "Elvis! " Everyone's trigger finger jumped. But the guy only wanted to request his favourite song. The would-be kidnapper/assassin was never heard from again.

After the late show every night, Elvis had established a tradition of holding court in his penthouse suite. While band members and insiders clinked glasses with the likes of Cary Grant, Sammy Davis Jr, Trini Lopez and Mama Cass, Elvis would sometimes go off into a private room with one or two friends to discuss his latest obsession, be it numerology or the teachings of Yogananda. Sometimes he'd play the guests his favourite record, featuring melodramatic song recitations by French actor Charles Boyer. Other times he'd give an impromptu karate demonstration, or engage some of the guys in a gospel sing-along that might go until dawn.

Joe Moscheo, who as leader of gospel group The Imperials had been singing with Elvis on and off since 1966, recalls the time when his wife called to say that their apartment had been broken into. As he left the party, Elvis stopped him to ask what was going on. "I said, Elvis, really, it's not a problem. I'll take care of it. 'No, no, we're going with you.' He gets this whole entourage, three limos full of people, and they follow me back. My wife's in her nightgown and she's surprised to see 20 people with Elvis. The kids were looking out at the door at him. So Elvis goes in and sits on the bed with them and says, 'I know you’re probably worried that they stole your bicycle or your stereo. Let me tell you, if we catch them, and they took any of your stuff, I'm going to replace it. So you make a list.' In about an hour, Elvis got bored. It wasn't what he thought it was going to be. So he rounds up everybody and goes back to the hotel. He was always looking for something unusual to happen that would change the tone of the evening."

But mostly he stayed put in his penthouse kingdom, letting people come to him. "He didn't get out much," recalls one regular visitor, Tom Jones. "Frank Sinatra was more accessible, more of a nightclub guy, but you would never see Elvis."

On September 9, 1970, two days after closing out the Vegas engagement, Elvis embarked on a pilot tour, as a warm-up for his first extensive stretch of roadwork in 13 years. Using what he called "The TCB Band" and pick-up orchestra players, he hit six cities, including Detroit, Mobile and Miami, grossing $174,212.53 after expenses.

The Colonel got to work on booking more dates for November. Elvis was emerging from his Vegas cocoon into a world where US soldiers were on trial for the My Lai massacre, Arab terrorists were holding the passengers of five hijacked planes in the desert and Hendrix and Janis Joplin had died from overdoses within a month of each other.

With his cover of Dusty Springfield's You Don't Have To Say You Love Me at Number 11 on the US singles chart, Elvis' eight-city tour got underway on November 10 at the Oakland Coliseum, California. According to Tutt, "Elvis definitely preferred the concert setting. He hated those early dinner shows at Vegas, people up there cutting up their steaks with the noise of the knives on the plates. And there was a big difference in the reaction. Thousands of people had paid money to sit with undivided attention and watch every move he made."

Four days later, in between two sold-out shows at the Forum in Los Angeles, someone in the crowd handed Elvis what might have been a love letter - in fact, he was having papers served on him for the ongoing paternity suit. During the second show, a defensive Elvis reminded fans that he had 56 gold singles, 14 gold albums and had outsold The Beatles, the Stones and Tom Jones - "all of them together".

Not all the musicians preferred the road. "We never did sound-checks," Scheff says. "We'd get there 15 minutes before he was supposed to go on and all walk on-stage together. Elvis was playing for a bigger audience, and the bigger the audience, the more impersonal things get. In Las Vegas, you looked people in the eyes when you played."

Elvis's relationship with Vegas appeared to lean more towards love than hate. According to Tom Jones, even before he played there Elvis would "go there a lot. No, he wasn't a gambler - Parker was the gambler - but he got married there and he sang there in the '50s and he loved it, even though he flopped, because rock'n'roll was new then and Vegas had the age limit thing, so kids couldn't go. It was still being worked by a lot of Italian-American crooners - Sinatra, Al Martino, Dean Martin. And it hurt Elvis that he wasn't successful there and that Sammy Davis and Liberace were. He told me this."

In her autobiography Elvis And Me, Priscilla Presley would call her husband's decision to start touring "the beginning of the end of our relationship". He'd declared, "No wives allowed." And he had new hobbies: collecting guns and police badges.

In the early days, " says Jerry Schilling, "he was criticised by politicians, clergymen and the government, so for a policeman to say, 'Hey, we want you to be part of our organisation' was an honour for him. Also, it was a sense of security. Remember the death threat." On December 21, 1970, Elvis went after the collector's holy grail: a badge from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The photograph of Elvis in the White House shaking hands with Richard Nixon is one of the '70s weirdest, most indelible images. And, in many rock'n'rollers eyes' unforgivable as, in Schilling's words, "the ultimate rebel became the ultimate conservative". He even pointed a finger at The Beatles, who he said had been "promoting an anti-American spirit".

"They were trying to deport Lennon from New York at that time," Schilling says. "Elvis liked The Beatles. He wouldn't have recorded their songs or done them in concert otherwise. It's embarrassing, but I knew what Elvis was doing. It didn't have to do with his feelings about any of The Beatles. He wanted the badge and he knew Nixon would eat this up."

Tom Jones recalls a talk with Elvis about the Fabs. "Elvis said, 'What happened to The Beatles? Is that right, they're splitting up?' and I said, Yeah, they haven't worked together for a while, but now they've made it official. 'You know what I'd really like to do?' he said. 'I'd like it if the two of us and The Beatles would do a show together, but we'd have them as our backing group. "' The fantasy world of Vegas has a way of messing with one's notion d reality.

After a quiet Christmas with Priscilla and Lisa Marie and a private screening of That's The Way It Is at the Memphian Theatre the day after, he served as best man at Sonny West's wedding on December 28. On December 30, he flew back to DC to tour the FBI building. He'd hoped to meet J. Edgar Hoover - the head of the FBI and up there with Nixon in the rock credibility department but the appointment fell through.

ON JANUARY 8, 1971 ELVIS CELEBRATED HIS 36th birthday with a double shot of good news: he'd been selected by the junior Chamber of Commerce as one of the nation's Ten Outstanding Men of the Year in 1970, and he'd won a court order against Patricia Ann Parker to submit to a blood test and a lie detector test before pursuing her paternity suit. He was back at The International on January 26 to open his fourth season, the week that Charles Manson was convicted for the grisly murders of Sharon Tate and Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

After the brief thrill of opening night, Elvis's main concern became finding ways to stay interested in what was now a predictable routine. Schilling: "It's not going to be a challenge after a hundred gigs. Elvis loved the audience so much that he rarely did a bad show, but the great shows started becoming merely good shows." The setlist leaned even further towards ballads, with How Great Thou Art and The Impossible Dream Elvis's new favourites. He closed every show with the showstopper from Man Of La Mancha, with its yearning lyric about fulfilling potential.

Reckons Tutt, "He was like a caged animal [in Vegas]. We were there two shows a night, three on the weekends, five to eight weeks at a time. He was such a free spirit, it was hard to contain him. It was a big hotel, but it was like a gilded cage." And the sliding door games of romance he was playing with three different women - Joyce Bova, Barbara Leigh and his new soprano singer, Kathy Westmoreland - were splintering his concentration.

There were also more pre-show visits from Elvis growing stable of personal physicians. Joe Moscheo recalls, "I can honestly say that I never saw any trace of cocaine or any kind of hard stuff. Dr Nichopoulos would come and they'd say, 'Oh, Elvis is getting his Vitamin B 12 shot.' It gave him a little boost. It wasn't every night."

Tom Jones: "I never saw him do anything. He would never do anything in front of me - I mean, I wouldn't have cared, but he felt that he was letting himself down."

Moscheo: "There were a lot of pills. We thought they were just prescription things. He had trouble going to sleep, trouble going to the bathroom - these little troubles. He was human. He wasn't a machine."

Elvis tried to keep the mood up on-stage by joking around. One night, he wore a gorilla mask (luring You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'. Another he brought on a battery-operated laugh box, holding the cackling thing up to his mike and saying, "I'd like you to meet Colonel Parker." His monologues - with their odd Henry Youngman-meets-Salvador Dali tone - became as long as the songs. On January 27, he greeted the audience by saying: "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the International. My name is Frankie Avalon. I'd like to tell you, those that got kissed, that I have the flu. And I'll be around in the back later."

And: "After G. 1. Blues and Blue Hawaii, I wrote an 8mm picture called Up Your Nose, but it's not out yet. It's about a homesick little squirrel, in the winter, trying to find his nuts."

Tutt says, "I think he used humour just to keep himself halfway sane." James Burton adds: "He would sing Happy Birthday to me a lot. Even if it wasn't my birthday." After the run ended on February 23, Elvis and Priscilla stayed on to catch Ann-Margret's opening at the International, then returned to Graceland. In Elvis And Me, Priscilla says, "Thriving on the excitement, glamour and hysteria, he found it difficult to go home and resume his role as father and husband. And for me the impossibility of replacing the crowd's adoration became a real-life nightmare."

Elvis was edgy and temperamental, a condition made worse by the high doses of Dexedrine he was taking to control his weight. Priscilla: "In reality Elvis was lost. He did not know what to do with himself after Vegas."

While Elvis tooled around his hometown, the Colonel and RCA were planning recording sessions and record releases. For 1971 alone, they wanted a religious album, a Christmas album, a pop album and several singles - more than 40 songs in all. On March 15, Elvis entered RCA’s Studio B in Nashville with a stuffy nose and a pain behind his eyes. Ignoring the wishes of his label and manager, he cut four soft, poetic folk songs - The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, Amazing Grace, Early Morning Rain and For Lovin' Me - the latter two by Canadian Gordon Lightfoot. At 1.30am, the session was cut short, Elvis complaining about the increasing ache he felt in his eyes. Dr Nick flew in from Memphis and Elvis was admitted to Baptist Hospital. He got a 100-milligram shot of Demerol and a shot of cortisone directly into the eyeball to relieve the pressure. The diagnosis was iritis and secondary glaucoma. The condition, Dr Nick believed, was made worse by the dye from Elvis's hair and eyebrows mixing with sweat and dripping into his eyes.

The following month, on April 15, Elvis returned to Nashville and an RCA studio which had been made unseasonably festive with a tree and wrapped packages. A note from the Colonel wished Elvis luck with "a special Christmas album... with the special sacred songs done by Elvis as only he can do it." Over a week, Elvis half-heartedly blew through 32 songs, including Winter Wonderland and Merry Christmas Baby and gospel tunes like Lead Me, Guide Me and I've Got Confidence. Songs went to tape with a haste that left the engineers scrambling to get the instruments miked up properly. "He normally wouldn't record a song more than two or three times," James Burton says. "If it didn't fall in place - boom - real fast, he would just get disgusted with it and move on to something else."

With the exception of an 11-minute fiery jam on Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's All Right and a great take on the ballad I'm Leavin' (his best hope for a single, it only, reached Number 36 that summer), Elvis just wasn't into it. He seemed more concerned with cracking jokes with his Memphis Mafia buddies and showing off his guns and badges. As Glen Spreen, arranger on the session, has said, "There was no planning. Lamar [Fike, Memphis Mafia man] would just bring him a song, and we'd pick up and throw it in the 'Let's do' or the 'Let's don't' corner. It was not enjoyable. It was just, 'Let's get it over with.”

Of Elvis's erratic behaviour in the studio, Hardin says: "First of all, RCA was putting out way too many records. They should've been a lot more selective. But on the other hand, you have to remember - they nearly had to follow him around with a microphone to get a record out of him. When they could get him in the studio, they were willing to take anything they could. Sometimes he was in the mood to record, and sometimes he was not. If he wasn't in the mood, there just wasn't much you could do."

On June 14, Frank Sinatra announced his retirement from show business. One month later, on July 20, the man Ol' Blue Eyes had once called "vulgar" opened a two-week engagement at the Sahara in Lake Tahoe, as a warm-up for Las Vegas. He broke all attendance records in the resort city, reaping a $142,062.50 reward. There were two significant changes to the show: he added silk-lined capes to his wardrobe, and a new musical opening that would become synonymous with Elvis for the rest of his career - Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra, aka the theme from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Hardin: "Joe Guercio [orchestra conductor] took his wife to see 2001. The lights went down, the theme came up, and she turned to Joe and said, 'Wow; do you get the feeling that Elvis is about to come on?' And he said, 'What a great idea!' We were playing it the very next day." After such a huge classical build-up, opening number C.C. Rider sounded puny by comparison.

Back in at the International in Vegas on August 9, now newly renamed the Las Vegas Hilton, the show opened to a sour review in the Hollywood Reporter, which rated it as "sloppy, hurriedly rehearsed, mundanely lit, poorly amplified, occasionally monotonous, often silly and haphazardly coordinated...”

"You never knew which way he was going to go onstage," says Burton. "He'd say, 'James, give me an E.' Then he'd go into whatever song he had in his mind. " Adds Hardin, "Your concentration was sky high. He'd play, 'Stump The Band.' He'd try to find little ways to pull something on us. I think he knew that he could just do whatever he wanted to do and we'd be there." The fans loved him and the show. On closing night, September 6, he promised there wouldn't be "any raise in price when you come back. I'm here to entertain you," he declared, "and that's all I care about."

Though the Colonel had arranged a 12-city jaunt for November, and saw a bounty of domestic touring ahead, Elvis had his sights set on more exotic destinations than Pittsburgh. He'd even bought his own jet - christened Lisa Marie, after his daughter - for the sole purpose of touring internationally. The Colonel would nix the idea time and again, citing obstacles such as tax problems, security issues and production details. The real obstacle was that Colonel Tom Parker, n6 Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, was an illegal alien. To fly across the ocean would be to risk not only being exposed but barred re-entry into the US. He hid the truth and argued his case in his brusque, Colonel-knows-best manner.

"One of the only times I saw Elvis and the Colonel raise their voices was in Las Vegas over this idea of the international tour," recalls Schilling. "The Colonel said, 'Well, if you want to go, you'll go without me.' Elvis said, 'Then that's what I'll do.' I was running papers from Colonel Parker's fourth floor suite in the International up to the 30th floor where Elvis was. The Colonel was sitting there in his robe at a typewriter late at night settling up with all that he thought Elvis owed him. And I was the messenger. It was almost like a cold war." One that the Colonel eventually won.

"It's a damn shame," says Hardin. "Things might've turned out differently for him if he'd been able to tour the world. I think he would've put himself in tip-top shape, and really enjoyed it. Just to be in a different place, and have some different food, and meet some different people. What's crazy was that all of us worked with other people, and we were traveling all over the world, and he didn't, he couldn't. That was all wrong."

1971 brought Elvis $114,000 from motion pictures, $1,200,000 from record sales, and $2,700,000 from personal appearances. (He paid $1,300,000 in income tax.) But for all this success, it was the bluest of Christmases at Graceland. Priscilla was leaving him. The marriage had been slowly unraveling since May 1, 1967, the day they exchanged vows. She had tolerated his flings and the constant boisterous presence of the Memphis Mafia, but for the young mother trapped in a mansion, the prolonged absences were too much. "For years, nothing had existed in my world but him, and now that he was gone for long stretches of time, the inevitable happened. I was creating a life of my own, discovering there was a whole world outside our marriage," she says. "I knew this was probably the most difficult thing I would ever have to do." She took three-year-old Lisa Marie back to Los Angeles on December 30. And Elvis announced to his closest friends, "Priscilla is leaving me. She hasn't told me why - just that she no longer loves me."

Jerry Schilling recalls: "I'd seen that look before in Elvis's eyes. It's a look that still sends a chill down my spine, when I think of it - the pain, anger, desperation and hurt. For the rest of that day, 'til about 4am, Elvis closed himself up in his bedroom. He wouldn't eat or take our calls. We got very worried. We thought he had knocked himself out with a whole lot of sleeping pills. From time to time, Joe and I would sneak up to his bedroom and listen at the door. Once I heard him cursing. Another time I heard him screaming. But mostly we heard him sobbing. The day she left was the beginning of the end for the Elvis I had known and loved."

THE FIVE-AND-A-HALF YEARS PRESLEY HAD LEFT to live would bring fewer and fewer triumphs. On December 12, 1976 he played Las Vegas for the last time. In a city that offers custom-made illusions, he had fallen for a big one: the promise that the comeback he made under its glittering lights would lead ever more gloriously onwards and upwards. Instead it turned into a treadmill more exhausting than the one in Hollywood, and it turned into the slippery slide down which he made his final, awful descent. Five days before that last Vegas date, Elvis wrote the following note in his suite at the Hilton:

I feel so alone sometimes
The night is quiet for me
I would love to be able to sleep
I'm glad everyone is gone now
I will probably not rest tonight
I have no need for all of this
Help me Lord.

Says Tom Jones, "He'd fired his bodyguards and they came to me and asked if l could talk to him, see what was wrong, and I tried but he wouldn't answer the phone. Somebody would answer and say, 'Yeah, I'll tell Elvis that you called and he'll get back to you,' but he never did. He didn't want to be reminded that he wasn't Elvis Presley any more."

"Elvis," says Jerry Schilling, "died of creative disappointment. The drugs were the Band-Aids. It was short-term thinking for a long-term artist. That's how we ultimately lost Elvis."