Final Year and Death

This is Elvis, Benjamin Button style.    We start at the sad end and with each word you read you journey back in time til you finally reach the beginning and complete lifes circle.     Elvis is forever 42 and dead unless you read him back to life, lets get started. 

Journalist Tony Scherman writes that by early 1977, "Elvis Presley had become a grotesque caricature of his sleek, energetic former self.    Hugely overweight, his mind dulled by the pharmacopoeia he daily ingested, he was barely able to pull himself through his abbreviated concerts.    " In Alexandria, Louisiana, the singer was on stage for less than an hour and "was impossible to understand". In Baton Rouge, Presley failed to appear: he was unable to get out of his hotel bed, and the rest of the tour was cancelled.    In Knoxville, Tennessee, on May 20, "there was no longer any pretence of keeping up appearances.    The idea was simply to get Elvis out on stage and keep him upright".    Despite the accelerating deterioration of his health, he stuck to most of touring commitments.    Shows in Omaha, Nebraska, and Rapid City, South Dakota, were recorded for an album and CBS television special, Elvis In Concert.

In Rapid City, "he was so nervous on stage that he could hardly talk", according to Presley historian Samuel Roy.    "He was undoubtedly painfully aware of how he looked, and he knew that in his condition, he could not perform any significant movement."    The story was much the same in Omaha.    According to Guralnick, fans "were becoming increasingly voluble about their disappointment, but it all seemed to go right past Elvis, whose world was now confined almost entirely to his room and his spiritualism books."    A cousin, Billy Smith, recalled how Presley would sit in his room and chat, recounting things like his favorite Monty Python sketches and his own past japes, but "mostly there was a grim obsessiveness... a paranoia about people, germs... future events", that reminded Smith of Howard Hughes.    Presley's final performance was in Indianapolis at the Market Square Arena, on June 26, 1977.     He was now living with a new girlfriend, Ginger Alden, who later reported that she and Presley became engaged. His stepbrother David Stanley confirms that Presley proposed and gave her a ring, but says he believes he wanted to secure her companionship and had no intention of marrying again.

Presley's final resting place is at Graceland.   The book Elvis: What Happened?, written by Steve Dunleavy and the three bodyguards fired the previous year, was published on August 1.    It was the first exposé to detail Presley's years of drug misuse.    According to David Stanley, he "was devastated by the book.    Here were his close friends who had written serious stuff that would affect his life. He felt betrayed. [But] what they wrote was true.   " By this point, he suffered from multiple ailments—glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage, and an enlarged colon, each aggravated, and possibly caused, by drug abuse.    After re-examining Presley's X-rays in the 1990s, Nichopoulos concluded that he was probably also suffering from degenerative arthritis, fueling his addiction to painkillers.

Presley was scheduled to fly out of Memphis on the evening of August 16, 1977, to begin another tour.    That afternoon, Alden discovered him unresponsive on his bathroom floor.    Attempts to revive him failed, and death was officially pronounced at 3:30 pm at Baptist Memorial Hospital.

President Jimmy Carter issued a statement that credited Presley with "permanently chang[ing] the face of American popular culture" (see "Legacy").    Hundreds of thousands of fans, the press, and celebrities lined the streets of Memphis, many hoping to see the open casket in Graceland.     One of Presley's cousins, Billy Mann, accepted $18,000 to secretly photograph the corpse; the picture appeared on the cover of the National Enquirer's biggest-selling issue ever.    Alden struck a $105,000 deal with the Enquirer for her story, but settled for less when she broke her exclusivity agreement. Presley left her nothing in his will.

Presley's funeral was held at Graceland, on Thursday, August 18. Among the mourners were Ann-Margret, who had remained close to him since they co-starred in Viva Las Vegas 13 years before, and his ex-wife, Priscilla.    Outside the gates, a car plowed into a group of fans, killing two women and critically injuring a third.    Presley was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis, next to his mother. An attempt was made to steal his body eleven days later.    After zoning issues were addressed, the remains of both Elvis Presley and his mother were reburied in Graceland's Meditation Garden on October 2.