The Final Years

That wasn't entirely untrue, either. Elvis had been taking so many uppers he hadn't slept much. He ate poorly, exercised not at all, and the live performances, however listless, took what little he had.

Dr. Nick watched Elvis closely. For a long, long time -- more than two years --Elvis had been using drugs daily rather than periodically. His use of them was now, in fact, rampant -- a runaway pattern that could lead to a fatal overdose.

Elvis had nearly overdosed on several occasions. Linda Thompson recalls times she found him unconscious or unable to get his breath. Red and Sonny West tell of a time when a girl Elvis took to Palm Springs was hospitalized after they'd spent an evening swilling Hycadan, a codeine cough syrup.

Elvis was an experimenter. Just as he wanted the newest automotive extravagance, he wanted the latest drug. The best and newest on the marketplace. Valium. Ethinamate. Dilaudid. Demerol. Percodan. Placidyl. Dexedrine. Biphetamine. Amytal. Quaalude. Carbrital. Cocaine hydrochloride. Ritalin.

He had once turned to Red West's wife and said, "Pat, I've tried them all, honey, and believe me. Dilaudid is the best." Dilaudid is a painkiller usually given to terminal cancer patients.

Elvis regarded his many prescriptions as medicine. He had real problems -- pain, insomnia, a tendency toward obesity -- and he was taking real medicine to take care of those problems. And that was it.

Except that wasn't it. Not all of it. He also knew that those drugs made him feel good. Dilaudid was best. That one brought on the cushiony surfboard ride, that friendly blotto that wiped out all the psychic injuries and brought on a dreamy somnolence.

It was from a very peculiar position that Dr. Nick watched Elvis dry out in the hospital, because he knew that the pills Elvis was so strung out on had come from him. As early as January. Dr. Nick had become Elvis' primary supplier. It wasn't greed or ego that put this small, white-haired physician in that place. Up until January, Elvis had solicited his prescriptions from dozens of doctors, stretching from Beverly Hilts and Palm Springs to Elvis' Graceland neighborhood. Dr. Nick, who had been one of them, figured that if he could become his patient's only source, he could gain control and, with time, wean Elvis off drugs completely.

But the quantity and variety Dr. Nick prescribed challenged all credibility. Two years after Elvis' death a computer check of prescriptions issued in the Memphis area showed that in the final seven months of Elvis' life, George Nichopoulos prescribed 5300 uppers, downers and painkillers for Elvis. That's an average of about twenty-five pills or injectable vials a day.

Elvis checked himself out of the hospital after five days and went home, where he resumed his routine of being given a packet of eight or nine pills to go to sleep and another packet upon waking up.

August 1977

If Elvis reflected on his recent years, he had much to be proud of. In 1968, after years spent hidden away in Hollywood making lightweight musicals, he had climbed into a black leather suit and, in a single television special, launched a comeback that realty never stopped peaking. His return to public performing in 1969 in Las Vegas and the following year on the road were significant musical events. In 1971, he won the prestigious Bing Crosby Award. In 1972, tie filled Madison Square Garden for four shows in a row, breaking all attendance and box-office records. In 1973, he gave his Aloha from Hawaii satellite show, which reached a billion people; he won a Golden Globe award for the documentary Elvis On Tour; and he won his first Grammy (after nearly fifty albums and ninety singles) for his gospel LP, He Touched Me.

The awards and events came less frequently after that, but they came nonetheless. And still the records sold and sold. Every year, it was his name that appeared in The Guinness Book of World Records for selling more records than any other artist in the history of recorded music.

If Elvis was in a reflective mood, he might also have looked back on more than a thousand personal appearances in eight years. Where hadn't he been in America during that time? Surely he must have visited everyone's hometown. Perhaps that was what had made Elvis such a superstar.

The final week in Elvis' life was memorable only because it was the final week. Elvis saw friends occasionally or talked on the telephone when they called. He played racquetball in the court behind his house. He watched gospel shows on television. He talked about the tour that was to begin on June 17th in Maine. Ginger Alden [his last girlfriend] said they continued to make wedding plans, claiming that he was going to make an announcement at a concert in Memphis at the end of the tour. He read his Bible and his numbers book. He ate his cheeseburgers and took his pills.