Dish (21 page)

“The doleful fact is that the celebrity industry has reached
the point at which the demand is outstripping the supply,” according to another article. “There is hardly a major newspaper in the nation that hasn’t launched its own gossip or names-in-the-news column.”

“To everything there is a season, and if this seems to be the season for anything at all, then that thing is gossip,”
Esquire
noted. “You can bet that Time Inc. isn’t publishing
People
as a public service.” The magazine went on to report the gossip on gossip columnists. (Louella Parsons used to wet herself in restaurants, Rona Barrett’s real name is Rona Burstein.) “So what is it with you? Why, all of a sudden, are you so interested in this stuff?”
Esquire
asked. “Are you ashamed of yourself? Should you be? … Does anybody care? DOES ANYBODY CARE!”

Readers not only cared, they cared a great deal. They cared more than they did about Watergate or Vietnam or race riots, and any publisher who ignored what people really cared about—and tried to tell them what they should care about—was headed toward extinction.
Life
magazine had found that out, but if
Esquire
or anyone else needed further proof, it came one hot August day in 1977. It was the ultimate tabloid event.

Shortly after midnight, on August 16, 1977, Elvis Presley drove his Stutz-Bearcat through the music-sheet-inspired iron gates in front of 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard. Fans were waiting at the gates as usual, and one of them snapped the singer’s picture with a $20.95 instamatic camera. When Elvis got home, he sang “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and “Unchained Melody,” ate some cookies and a bowl of ice cream, and then played racquetball until 6
A.M
. He changed into gold-colored pajama bottoms, and, clutching some reading material—friends maintain it was a book on the Shroud of Turin, others say it was actually pornography—Elvis went to a second floor bathroom. There, the forty-two-year-old, two-hundred-sixty-pound performer took a handful of pills. Moments later, he collapsed.

Elvis’s fiancée, Ginger Alden, was asleep in the next room and heard nothing, but at 2:15 that afternoon, she said, she went into the bathroom and discovered Elvis’s body sprawled on the red shag carpet. She called for help. Al Strada, a bodyguard, was next on the scene, then came Elvis’s road manager, Joe Esposito. Soon, the bathroom was filled with members of the “Memphis
Mafia,” some of them sobbing hysterically, others desperately trying to revive him.

“Don’t die!” Presley’s guitarist cried as he knelt over the singer’s body. “Please don’t leave us!” Elvis’s elderly father Vernon was having heart troubles and collapsed on the floor beside his son. Nine-year-old Lisa Marie stood at the doorway. “What’s wrong with my daddy?” she asked, but no one answered.

At 2:33
P.M
. the dispatcher for the Memphis Fire Department notified paramedics. “Unit Six, respond to 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard. Party having difficulty breathing. Go to the front gate and go to the front of the mansion.” Paramedic Ulysses S. Jones Jr. tried to resuscitate Presley while Charlie Crosby drove the ambulance the seven miles to the Baptist Memorial Hospital; there a “white male, approximately forty, under CPR, no response” was admitted to the emergency room at 2:56
P.M
. On the admittance form, he was listed as Mr. John Doe and across the top were the words: NO PUBLICITY.

At 3:30
P.M
. Elvis’s personal physician, Dr. George Nichopoulos, came out of the emergency room with a grim expression on his face. “He’s gone,” Dr. Nichopoulos told the sobbing entourage. “He’s no longer here.”

August 16 was a sweltering hot, otherwise slow news day when
National Enquirer
Executive Editor Iain Calder called his closest aides into an office and closed the door. It was about 3
P.M
. “Elvis Presley is dead,” Calder said. The news hadn’t been announced—even the family hadn’t been given the official word—but the
Enquirer
had a source inside Graceland. A reporter was on his way to the mansion before the ambulance got there. The announcement would be delayed for at least half an hour so that Elvis’s father Vernon could be notified.

This was no time for mourning. This wasn’t just a big story, it was the biggest. Elvis Presley’s death—more than any other story in the
National Enquirer’s
history—was monumental to tabloid readers. To the masses who read the
National Enquirer,
it was what John Kennedy’s assassination was to the
New York Times’s
readers.

The staff of the
Enquirer
began to mobilize. Calder had already
chartered a Cessna Citation jet to take a team of four reporters and a photographer to Memphis. Sixteen more would be flown in from around the country to join them. Operation Elvis would have an unlimited budget and a simple mission: get the story, get it first, and get it exclusively. Calder needed a commander to oversee the effort. He turned to Tom Kuncl, an aggressive 6-foot 2-inch, 215-pound former war correspondent with a caustic sense of humor and a booming voice. “Tom, what have you got going right now that’s important?” Calder asked. The editor had just killed a story that Kuncl had worked on for months, and the reporter was in a sulk. “Nothing,” Kuncl mumbled. “You,” Calder ordered Kuncl, “go to Memphis.”

By 6
P.M.
the
Enquirer
crew was in flight on its chartered Cessna and headed to Graceland.

In midtown Manhattan, up on the twenty-ninth floor of Time-Life’s sleek skyscraper on Avenue of the Americas, Dick Stolley was in the final stages of closing that week’s issue of
People
magazine when he heard that Elvis Presley had died. Stolley sighed. He was not an Elvis fan, but he knew he should somehow acknowledge the death of the once-revolutionary singer. Stolley didn’t even consider putting the story on the cover of
People;
Time Inc. had a policy of not picturing the deceased on its magazine covers. To do so would have been considered unseemly, exploitative. “You didn’t spend a lot of time covering dead people back then,” Stolley later said, “unless they were world figures, presidents and the rest, and even then probably not on the cover.” When John F. Kennedy was assassinated,
Time
didn’t put him on the cover, and he was a beloved president. Elvis was a flabby, over-the-hill crooner who gave concerts in Vegas. Besides, the cover of that week’s
People
was already finished: it featured Marty Feldman and Dick Stolley’s good friend Ann-Margret on the release of their movie,
The Last Remake of Beau Geste.
Stolley decided to put the news of Elvis’s death in “Star Tracks”—a two-page section of photographs with paragraph-long captions that ran toward the back of the magazine. He had a picture editor round up shots of Elvis and chose a recent one of the singer in concert, looking jowly and ludicrous, his paunchy belly pushing up against
his rhinestone-studded belt.
People
gave Elvis’s death a 169-word write-up. The “late Elvis Presley” shared the page with a couple of other people in the news, including Dorothy Hamill, who made it into the “Star Tracks” section because a toy company was marketing a Dorothy Hamill doll. “It was the biggest mistake of my career,” Stolley later admitted. “I probably should have been fired for not putting Elvis on the cover.”

A few blocks away, at 745 Fifth Avenue, the young hipsters who worked for
Rolling Stone
were also about to put their latest issue to bed. It was a special New York edition, celebrating the magazine’s move from San Francisco to Manhattan. Editors and production people were congratulating one another on a job well done when word spread through the moving-crate-littered offices that Elvis Presley had died. Music editor Peter Herbst went to Jann Wenner’s office to share the news with his boss. “His face sort of scrunched up and he started crying,” said Herbst. “These tears were rolling down his face, and he was trying to say something, but I couldn’t understand.” Then finally, the grief-stricken editor gathered his composure enough to speak. “It’s …” Wenner sobbed. “It’s a cover.” The music editor protested. The New York issue had been put together in the midst of the transcontinental move and involved tremendous effort from everyone. The staff was particularly proud of the results. An Andy Warhol portrait of Bella Abzug was on the cover and everything inside was very New York and very hip. Wasn’t Elvis sort of … hokey? “It’s a cover!” Wenner practically screamed. “It’s a cover!”

But Wenner didn’t want just a new cover—he wanted an Elvis Presley issue. The magazine was ripped up and redone in four days.
Rolling Stone’s
deadline was pushed back and writers were dispatched to Graceland, and to Elvis’s birthplace, Tupelo, Mississippi. His movies were reevaluated; his records re-reviewed. Jann told staffers that he wanted them to evoke the slim, hip swinging rock-n-roll rebel of the fifties—not the bloated recluse that Elvis had become. Some of the young editors and photo researchers rolled their eyes; as usual, Wenner was acting less like a dispassionate, unbiased journalist and more like a fan. That, however, was the secret of his success.

It was a late-breaking story for the networks to cover. The story wasn’t formally announced until 4
P.M
. The networks usually started feeding footage to local stations at 5
P.M
. for the 6
P.M.
news. At NBC, there was no question what the lead story would be. Anchor David Brinkley was a North Carolina native. “The truth is that I never liked Elvis Presley’s music,” Brinkley later said. “But I knew millions of others did.” Brinkley opened the news with the death of Elvis, and spent nearly three minutes eulogizing him—an extraordinary time in network news. At Brinkley’s urging, NBC immediately began putting together a late-night special tribute to Elvis, which they broadcast that evening.

ABC also led with the Elvis story—devoting two minutes to the segment. Upon hearing the announcement of the NBC special, ABC scrambled to put together its own special, which was hosted by a long-haired reporter and Elvis fan who had recently joined the network to give the news a little pizzazz: Geraldo Rivera.

News executives at CBS, however, didn’t think Elvis’s death was a significant story. The Tiffany network led instead with the news that former President Gerald Ford had endorsed the Panama Canal treaties. The minute-long report on Elvis’s death was buried six minutes inside the broadcast. “We thought the [Panama] story was terribly important,” said Burton Benjamin Jr., the program’s executive producer. Several staffers, including anchor Roger Mudd who was filling in for the vacationing Walter Cronkite, protested the decision—people
care
about Elvis, they said. The staffers were overruled—rather vehemently. The Panama story was
significant;
the Elvis story merely
interesting. CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite,
which regularly led in the ratings, was badly beaten by both NBC and ABC.