The last days of Elvis: how loneliness and drugs changed the face of the King of Rock

When Elvis Presley (Tupelo, Mississippi, 1935-Memphis, Tennessee, 1977) performed for the first time in Las Vegas, on April 23, 1956, he had just turned 21 years old.

This was a full-blown Elvis, brimming with enthusiasm and energy.

He had just climbed to number one on the charts with

, his recent tour of the Midwest had been a success, and he was backed by a trio of formidable musicians: Scotty Moore on guitar, Bill Brack on bass and DJ. Fountain to the battery.

However, his performance that April afternoon at the New Frontier hotel-casino stung the bone.

The audience of seasoned middle-aged poker players reacted with icy indifference.

There was hardly any applause.

According to the chronicle of a local newspaper, "Elvis offered a shot of cheap whiskey to an audience of gourmets accustomed to French champagne."

This was Sinatra's audience.

Elvis, the idol of southern teenage girls, struck them as boorish, histrionic, and vulgar.

"He had bushy sideburns and shaggy hair, like a marmot's nest," explained years later Freddie Bell, a variety artist residing at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.

"He dressed like a pretentious lout and squirmed onstage as if he had stuck his fingers in a socket."

Ancient and puritanical America abhorred that boy and the attempt at youthful insurrection that he represented.

Not a sad picture worth

newspaper

that Elvis, in addition to being an upstart who was a long way from becoming someone in the music business, had a “boring and mediocre” staging.

Even a sharp-eyed photographer, Jerry Abbott, present that night, concluded that the Memphis singer was lacking in substance: “I stood at the foot of the stage and took a few pictures, maybe a dozen, but his show seemed null to me from the visual point of view.

I decided to save the rest of the reel for Shecky Greene, the next comedienne who was the highlight of the evening."

Who remembers Shecky Greene now?

Elvis Presley, Joe Esposito and Vernon Presley in 1974. Ron Galella (Ron Galella Collection via Getty)

Elvis stayed in Las Vegas until early May.

He fulfilled his two-week residency at the New Frontier like a professional and even a firm detractor like Jerry Abbott considers that “his last concerts of his were much better than his first”.

The city excited him.

The nightlife, the music, the

the excursions into the Nevada desert, the showgirls who managed to sneak into his suite.

It was love at first sight.

She let herself be seduced by the point of extravagance and leaden madness of that enormous amusement park in which everything seemed possible.

Before he left, he promised to return a few months later: he was determined to put a pike in Sinatra territory.

Residence on Earth

Now touches a time ellipsis of 13 years and two months.

In that time, Elvis has climbed to the top, he has put on the world for a hat, he has cut his hair, he has gone to do his military service in Germany and, finally, always instigated by his manager, Tom Parker, a shady huckster with ideas of a firefighter, has stopped acting live and has focused on a film career as lucrative as it is calamitous.

On July 31, 1969, the king of

returns to the starting point, Las Vegas, to sing at the newly opened International Hotel.

A year earlier, the success of his TV performance dubbed the

has convinced even the stubborn and reluctant Parker that returning to concerts can be a terrific business.

Elvis Presley, in a performance in 1974.Michael Ochs Archives

The problem is that Elvis has lost the nomadic instinct.

He doesn't feel like embarking on a grueling tour, Boston today, New York tomorrow, like those young raptors of popular music that are the Rolling Stones.

He is 34 years old, has bourgeois habits and a full belly.

He prefers to settle in a city where he feels comfortable and where the public travels to see him.

Like a king who receives his subjects behind the palisade of his castle.

What better place than Las Vegas to do something like this?

Richard Zoglin, author of

, explains that the singer was the one who brought the concept of the resident musician to rock as an alternative to touring.

In a certain sense, it was about sublimating the Sinatra formula, that of the intimate encounter of a great artist with his audience in an exclusive environment, taking it to a much more massive level.

Sinatra was performing for audiences of a privileged few hundred, as if he had crashed a wedding reception and started singing.

Elvis gathered night after night an army of fans attracted by an insurmountable claim: the King had jumped back into the ring after eight years of absence, he was in top form and Las Vegas was the only place on the planet where it was possible to see him act. .

As Zoglin explains in his book: “The Sinatra thing was a show.

The Elvis thing, an experience”.

Days of wine and roses

On this occasion, Tom Parker played his cards with a master hand.

Four months before the Las Vegas debut, he gave an interview to tell the world that the London Palladium had offered him $28,000 for a week of performances: "I've told them that's fine with me, but tell me how much they're going to pay Elvis."

London ruled out, the main hotels in the City of Sin began to bid for the return of the prodigal son.

The International took the cat to the water by offering him just what he wanted, a summer bowling marathon: 57 in four weeks.

They were a success.

Elvis, in effect, kept his voice and stage presence intact.

Since Moore and Fontana were earning their day's wages as session musicians in Nashville and couldn't afford to spend the entire month of August in Las Vegas, the singer recruited a new band, with guitarist James Burton and a couple of gospel groups. , The Imperials and Sweet Inspirations.

In addition, he had expanded his repertoire with recent songs that had never been performed live before, such as

or

.

Fans of Elvis Presley at his funeral on Aug. 18, 1977 in Memphis. Gilbert UZAN (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Thus was born a pop culture myth that

, Baz Luhrman's film starring Austin Butler, which opens on June 24, does not quite do justice.

Fat Elvis.

The decadent Elvis.

The Elvis entrenched in Las Vegas, plunged into a narcotic stupor while the world turns and he remains oblivious to everything that happens.

Of all conceivable Elvises, this is perhaps the most romantic.

Above all, for those of us who have become accustomed to finding an aura in decrepitude.

Andrés López Martínez, author of

published in Spain by Cátedra, believes that this late Elvis is very defensible in terms of music: “The fascination that he aroused is due, in my opinion, to three reasons: the first, his spectacular comeback in 1968, with the NBC television special.

Then, to the very efficient band that accompanied him, the TCB Band, with which he performed from 1969 until his death, and finally, to how much Elvis gave himself live ”.

López Martínez considers that the twilight winds were slow in coming.

Elvis gave the occasional "poor" concert, but it was already in his last months in Las Vegas, when the physical exhaustion began to take its toll.

Between 1969 and well into the 1970s, perhaps as late as 1975, he put on a magnificent show night after night.

At the height of the legend of him.

minions, suckers and false friends

The biographer considers that “Elvis was very big in the fifties and seventies″.

In the sixties, on the other hand, he entered a deep recess that eroded his prestige due to "his absurd decision to dedicate himself to the cinema, for the search for easy money and ill-advised by Parker."

For López, Elvis could very well have survived himself and aged gracefully if he had gotten rid of "his colleagues from the Memphis Mafia and his representative."

Elvis Presley in a studio photo in 1963.Getty

They were all "parasites on his success and did not prevent his sad end for fear of losing his favors."

They fueled their self-indulgence with adulation and drugs: "He directly supported the Memphis mobsters, and Colonel Parker ruthlessly treated Elvis like a vulgar goose that lays the golden eggs, never caring about his artistic and musical scope."

In recent months, "nobody was able to tell him to his face that his health was being ruined and that his life was in danger."

Unfortunately, the King brought his dazzling career to a close "by giving a final series of concerts far below his means and making the decline apparent."

The last years of the myth were a downward spiral.

Elvis embarked on the occasional tour to further capitalize on the impact of his return to live performances, but his natural setting was Las Vegas.

There he spent a great deal of time giving non-stop concerts, cultivating his reputation as a ladies' man and mingling with dubious companies while his wife, Priscilla, waited for him at the Graceland family mansion in Memphis.

In February 1972, Priscilla went public with her relationship with Mike Stone, her husband's karate teacher.

They immediately separated and divorced in August.

Elvis already resided for much of the year in his legendary penthouse on the 30th floor of the International Hotel (today the Hilton).

Members of the so-called Memphis Mafia passed through that room, most of whom were distant cousins, childhood friends, old colleagues from his time in the Army.

More than gangsters, they were opportunists and bloodsuckers, the kind of dubious characters that usually make up the entourage of supervening kings.

There, "surrounded by occasional lovers, nannies, drug dealers, bodyguards, pimps and false friends", according to the account of journalist Patrick Humphreys, the King began to fatten and languish.

The actress, singer and model Linda Thompson, one of his last girlfriends, lived with the bully, intoxicated, deranged and obese Elvis of that final stretch of his life.

Presley almost killed her "by accident" one day while doing target practice in his suite, and a split bullet crossed two walls and three rooms to embed itself inches from Thompson, who was showering in the bathroom.

Elvis, by now, couldn't even practice the karate chops he'd been so excited about in previous years, so he was just gobbling up junk food and playing with his guns.

A sordid and epic death

On August 16, 1977, Ginger Alden, the last of his partners, found Elvis unconscious in the second-floor bathroom at Graceland.

He was taken to the city's Baptist Memorial Hospital, where he passed away just after 3 p.m.

The cause of death was an arrhythmia caused by the consumption of opiates (codeine, Demerol, Percodan...).

The autopsy revealed that he also suffered from chronic and severe constipation, glaucoma and diabetes.

He was 42 years old.

It had been consumed and spoiled at a premature age.

Zoglin considers that he was killed by "fame, a very powerful and very harmful toxin that, reached a certain level, destroys some and destabilizes almost everyone."

Fat

left this world on tiptoe, having smudged the last pages of the book of his legend.

At least he was able to get to know and thoroughly enjoy Las Vegas.

The city that, as Dean Martin said, is the closest thing to heaven that earth can offer.

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