Elvis: The Final Years - Jerry Hopkins

 ELVIS: THE FINAL YEARS - JERRY HOPKINS

Hey, buddy, the Elvis I knew was no junky. No, he was way beyond that. Being addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates was as nothing compared to his addiction to spending and giving money away. Wandering into Hollywood and Beverley Hills on an evening to spend $38,000 on guns and $80,000 on cars for Christmas gifts, handing over $500 bills to total strangers and wishing them merry Christmas, renting movie theatres and amusement parks at night after they were closed to the public, shooting at countless television sets with his derringer without a second thought, ordering his chauffeur to drive through the gates to his Graceland estate when they weren't opened promptly enough for him, giving away millions of dollars in cars, rings, houses and airplanes - all was as nothing to him.

"Lookit, goddammit," he would say "It's my fuckin' money and I can do whatever in goddamn hell I want with it."

I know the considered opinion is that Elvis was at his height during the 1950s and essentially before he went into the Army but I would argue that it was in the 1970s that he was at his greatest. This was the period when Elvis truly was the Emperor King, the time during which he bought and gave away more cars, took more drugs, hired more bodyguards, sang more songs, entertained more girls, and collected more awards than anyone.

"Before Elvis there wasn't anyone," Lennon once said, affirming Elvis's place at the top of the rock'n'roll hierarchy and acknowledging that without Elvis there would have been no Beatles. Ever the gentleman, Elvis accepted such patronage gracefully even when he sometimes didn't see eye to eye with those it was coming from.

Elvis met the Beatles, of course, or rather the Beatles met him though he always made public his disapproval of their drug taking and quietly disapproved of their long hair and their social stance. Elvis may well have been the figurehead of teenage rebellion in his early days but later on in his career it was no longer the image he wanted to be associated with. He had no desire to offend anyone nor to be associated with anyone who might cause offence to anyone. The image he wished to portray of himself was that of being a good, Christian boy with no specific social or political stance and of course that's what he was even when counting Richard Nixon as a friend and being a fervent supporter of the police. Hence his distancing himself from the Beatles even though they actually had much in common. Drugs, for example. The difference being that Elvis didn't consider the barbiturates, amphetamines and diet pills he took to actually be drugs even though his use of them was kept secret. He regarded them as medicine.  

Elvis: The Final Years by Jerry Hopkins is an exceptional book telling the story of Elvis Presley's lurid, decadent and exceptional life from between 1970 and 1977. It gets right into the nooks and crannies of his life at Graceland, backstage at his concerts, the divorce from Priscilla, the aftershow motel rooms, his antics, his habits and his obsessions. At the same time it knows where to show discretion and where to draw a veil over things which means it's not going for sensationalism alone. Whilst not shying away from the pill popping, the inadequacies, the madness and the sadness it displays decorum when cruelty towards its subject could easily have been pursued. It shows respect.

Hopkins charts the slow and steady decline along with the near tragic loneliness of what was one of the most famous people in the world. Elvis was taking morphine for pain, Quaaludes to sleep and amphetamines to diet. He was bingeing on junk food and by 1975 was spending and giving away more than he was earning, not helped by all his hangers-on and payrolled entourage who may well have loved him but who also knew that he was their cash cow whom they would milk until the cows came home.

Without any question, Elvis was a genuinely lovely man whose generosity knew no bounds. As his hired hands would all attest, he wore his heart on his sleeve and openly bore his scars, those being the death of his twin brother at birth, the death of his mother, the divorce with Priscilla and then finally just weeks before his death the publication of a book by some of his ex-bodyguards exposing his private life and the problems he wrestled with, particularly in regard to his use of chemicals. Elvis's biggest problems, however, were not his inner demons but the outer ones magnified ten-fold by the machinations of the music business. 

Come the end, it was these outer demons that did for him. The exploiters, the freeloaders, the manipulators, the bloodsuckers, the usurers, the gravy train riders, the hangers-on, the ambulance chasers, and the starfuckers. 

Come the end, in July of 1977 at the age of just 42 years old, riding a cocktail of pills and a bellyful of hamburgers Elvis passed out in the palatial bathroom of Gracelands, never to re-awaken.

For the very last and final time, Elvis had left the building.

John Serpico