Muhammad Ali: A Tribute to the Greatest (11 page)

Five months after Elvis’s comeback special, the International Hotel (soon to be acquired by Hilton) announced that it had signed him to perform fifty-seven shows over a four-week period in Las Vegas for the then-astronomical sum of $500,000.

Thirteen years earlier, in April 1956, a young Elvis Presley had unsuccessfully played the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas. The audience had been unimpressed. A reviewer for the
Las Vegas Sun
wrote at the time, “For the teen-agers, the long tall Memphis lad is a whiz. For the average Vegas spender or showgoer, a bore. His musical sound with a combo of three is uncouth, matching to a great extent the lyric content of his nonsensical songs.”

Times change.

Elvis opened at The International on July 31, 1969. The next day, the hotel extended his contract to provide for eight weeks of performances annually (in February and August) over a five-year period. His salary would be one million dollars a year.

Elvis and Ali met twice in Las Vegas. The first time, Muhammad saw him onstage and they chatted briefly afterward. “All my life, I admired Elvis,” Ali said years later. “It was a thrill to meet him.”

Their second meeting, in February 1973, was more consequential.

Ali was less threatening to the establishment by then. He’d been stripped of his championship and denied a license to box after refusing induction into the United States Army. After three years in exile, he was allowed by court order to fight again, but had lost to Joe Frazier in “The Fight of the Century.” His rematches with Frazier and triumphant battle against George Foreman in Zaire to reclaim the heavyweight crown were yet to come. Ali’s adversaries had exploited his vulnerabilities and seemed to have beaten him down.

From time to time, Elvis’s life had intersected with the sweet science. He tried out for his high school boxing team, but quit the first day after suffering a bloody nose. Later, in the 1962 movie
Kid Galahad
, he’d played a professional fighter.

On February 14, 1973, Ali fought Joe Bugner at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Prior to the bout, he and Elvis met in a hotel suite and Elvis presented him with a faux-jewel-studded robe emblazoned with the words “The People’s Choice.” Ali wore the robe that night and beat Bugner.

The Las Vegas years are an important part of Elvis’s legacy. The city’s dream machine revived him and gave him new life as a superstar. Soon, he was performing around the country again.

“The most important thing is the inspiration I get from a live audience,” Elvis said in Houston before a 1970 engagement at The Astrodome. “I was missing that.”

Time and again, he elaborated on that theme: “A live concert to me is exciting because of all the electricity that’s generated in the crowd and onstage. It’s my favorite part of the business . . . I missed the closeness of a live audience. So as soon as I got out of the movie contract, I decided to play live concerts again . . . It’s a good feeling. There’s a new audience each time. What’s interesting about music and all the people here [his back-up musicians] is, they find new sounds and they do things differently themselves; so it’s like a new experience every day.”

Elvis was appearing onstage more often now than ever before. In 1973, there were 168 concert performances; the most notable of them at the Honolulu International Center in Hawaii.

Aloha Hawaii
was taped in January and aired in the United States on April 4, 1973, capturing 57% of the viewing audience. More significantly, it was transmitted by satellite to thirty-six countries around the world.

Meanwhile, Ali was experiencing a rebirth of his own. In 1974, he dethroned George Foreman to regain the heavyweight championship of the world. Then he abandoned the separatist teachings of the Nation of Islam and, while still a devout Muslim, embraced the philosopy that hearts and souls know no color.

Ali’s kingdom was now the world. And Elvis had become a symbol larger than himself; the quintessential larger-than-life celebrity rock star. He was an Elvis; the only one of its kind.

Only a select few people have ever experienced what Elvis and Ali came to experience in the mid-1970s. They were icons of the highest order, universal royalty, instantly recognizable around the globe.

Ali loved being king. But Elvis couldn’t ride the wave and seemed burdened by the crown.

There are people the spotlight never turns away from. Wherever they go, they can never be anonymous. These people either give in to their fame and embrace it (in the manner of Ali); manage their fame by setting strict boundaries; or it devours them.

Ali embraced his fame, gave himself completely to the public, and mingled joyously with them. People who met Ali one-on-one loved him more afterward. If Ali was feeling low, he could walk down the street and cause a traffic jam by hugging people and signing autographs to lift his spirits.

For Elvis, that was the stuff of nightmares. Fame was a trap that he couldn’t escape. He was oppressed by it. He cut himself off from the public and lived largely in seclusion.

“I felt sorry for Elvis,” Ali said a decade after Presley’s death. “He didn’t enjoy life the way he should. He stayed indoors all the time. I told him he should go out and see people. He said he couldn’t because, everywhere he went, they mobbed him. He didn’t understand. No one wanted to hurt him. All they wanted was to be friendly and tell him how much they loved him.”

In many ways, fame is a stronger test of character than adversity. People act obsequiously and pay homage to the famous. Ali had the fact that he was black and people were throwing punches at him to remind him of life’s harsh realities. Also, Ali had something much larger than himself—his religion—to flow into.

Elvis had music, which was his means of expression. But it wasn’t enough. His fantasies had come to fruition when he was twenty-one years old. After that, what was left? In his orbit, everything was about him. He was surrounded by a tight coterie of enablers who indulged his every whim, never held him to the standards of accountability that apply to most men and women, and lived off him. But he had a fragile psyche and never found a calm center. He grew older but not wiser. He lost his way.

Ali was more comfortable with who he was than Elvis was. He was at peace with himself. And he was stronger at his core.

Where Elvis’s “real-life” interaction with women is concerned, one can speculate that the happiest relationship he enjoyed was with Ann-Margret (his co-star in the 1963 film
Viva Las Vegas
).

He married once.

Elvis and Priscilla Beaulieu met in 1959. Her father was a United States Air Force officer serving in Germany. Elvis was twenty-four years old; she was fourteen. They were married eight years later. On February 1, 1968, nine months to the day after their wedding, their only child (Lisa Marie) was born.

Elvis pushed Priscilla away sexually after the birth of their daughter. That and his profligate womanizing led to an affair on her part. Soon after Christmas 1971, she told him that she wanted a divorce. Their marriage was formally dissolved on October 9, 1973.

One can speculate based on anecdotal evidence that Elvis was an unsophisticated lover. He was more comfortable cuddling and kissing than he was making love. After Priscilla left him, the women who stayed in his life for any length of time moved quickly from sexual object to caretaker.

As the 1970s progressed, things got worse. Elvis had looked like he was having so much fun when he was young, particularly onstage. Then the fun came to an end and it seemed as though life was an ordeal.

After the
Aloha Hawaii
special, his weight burgeoned out of control. Worse, he became increasingly dependent on prescription drugs.

Elvis had begun self-medicating heavily long before his marriage ended. The drug use increased after he and Priscilla separated. He took pills and overate because he was depressed. He took pills and overate because he was bored. He took pills and overate because he was nervous, He took pills to help him sleep at night, to start his day (which often began in mid-afternoon), to raise his energy level to perform, and to calm down afterward.

In October 1973, Elvis was hospitalized in a semi-comatose condition after receiving excessive injections of Demerol. He was nursed back to health, then relapsed. In 1974, he added cocaine to his drug habits.

It had always been hard to imagine Elvis Presley doing anything normally. During the last few years of his life, his mood swings became more and more pronounced and he was increasingly out of control.

He was reclusive but, at the same time, afraid to be left completely alone.

He acted petulantly toward those around him; then sought to regain their affection by lavishing gifts upon them. On a single day (July 27, 1975), he bought and gave away thirteen Cadillacs.

The drugs interfered with his sex life.

He shot at television sets and fired his gun into ceilings and walls.

There were times when he fell asleep with his mouth full of food.

He was still surrounded by enablers, who gave him whatever was necessary to maintain their favored position. But like Humpty Dumpty, Elvis had suffered a great fall. There was no way that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could put him back together again.

He had lost his dignity and self-respect. He was dangerously depressed. Each day when he woke up and looked in the mirror, he was reminded of what he’d become. His famous hair had begun to thin. He underwent cosmetic surgery around his eyes in an effort to conceal the ravages of drug abuse. There was an emptiness inside that he couldn’t fill. He needed an emotional center to stabilize his life, and it wasn’t there.

Yet through it all, Elvis kept performing. He needed the adulation that he received from his adoring fans. He wanted to give of himself and make them happy. And he still loved music. It was the only anchor that he had in his life. Without music, he was nothing.

For the most part, the reviewers were kind. But a few of them incorporated hard truths in their critiques.

After Elvis returned to the International Hilton in August 1973, the
Hollywood Reporter
declared, “It’s Elvis at his most indifferent, uninterested, and unappealing. He’s not just a little out of shape, not just a little chubbier than usual. The Living Legend is fat and ludicrously aping his former self. His voice was thin, uncertain, and strained. His personality was lost in one of the most ill-prepared, unsteady, most disheartening performances of his Las Vegas career. It is a tragedy and absolutely depressing to see Elvis in such diminishing stature.”

That was followed by a two-week engagement in Lake Tahoe. A review in
Variety
noted that Elvis was “thirty pounds overweight” (a kind estimate) and observed, “He’s puffy, white-faced, and blinking against the light. The voice sounds weak; delivery is flabby. Attempts to perpetuate his mystique of sex and power end in weak self-parody.”

The last four days of the Lake Tahoe engagement were cancelled.

Elvis onstage in the 1950s had been uninhibited. Elvis onstage in the 1970s was increasingly out of control. There were times when he seemed like an Elvis impersonator; lumbering around, engaging in rambling monologues that were all but impossible to understand. Sometimes he forgot the words to songs he’d sung a thousand times. There were moments when he seemed perilously close to having a psychiatric breakdown in front of his audience. Or maybe he was having one.

Yet he remained a viable ticket-seller, performing before overflow crowds in huge arenas until the end. He was obese and drugged out. He was a heart attack waiting to happen. But he was still Elvis Presley, and still capable of isolated moments of extraordinary performance art.

Elvis had a beautiful voice and had learned to use it well. In some respects, his celebrity status overshadowed his talent. Throughout his career, he captured the emotional import of his songs. He understood intuitively what worked musically and what didn’t. He was passionate about his music and sang from the heart.

When he was young, his music was characterized by sexual energy and excitement. As he aged, it was more about showing off the range of his voice and how long he could hold a note. But his singing also became more powerful. He could sell a ballad. He began to tell stories—often about sadness and regret—and give deeper meaning to the lyrics. He could sing anything.

But by June 1977, when his final tour began, Elvis could barely perform. There was nothing left in him anymore. He died at Graceland on August 16, 1977. Fourteen drugs were found in his system; ten of them in significant quantities. The assumption is that “polypharmacy” was the primary cause of death.

He was an old forty-two when he died.

As Elvis was sliding toward the precipice, Ali was also in decline. Like Elvis, he was in a profession where it’s hard to age gracefully. But if Ali had a bad night, he paid for it with a beating.

The damage to Elvis’s health had been self-administered. The damage to Ali was inflicted by others. The punishment he took began to mount. Against Joe Frazier in Manila in 1975; at Madison Square Garden against Earnie Shavers seven weeks after Elvis died; in Las Vegas in 1980 at the hands of Larry Holmes.

Elvis had paid an emotional price for his greatness. For Ali, the cost was physical. The ravages of Parkinsonism turned his face into a mask and restricted his movements as surely as Elvis had been diminished.

Time goes by. Thirty-four years have passed since Elvis died. He’s still a cultural force. His music remains popular. Thousands of entertainers around the globe dress up as Elvis impersonators and groom themselves in a certain way in an effort to imitate his performances. No other star, past or present, has that sort of following.

The entertainment conglomerate CKX now controls Elvis’s name, likeness, and image for commercial purposes. It also manages Graceland. Six hundred thousand fans make the pilgrimage to the mansion on Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis each year.

CKX has also acquired a controlling interest in Ali’s name, likeness, and image for commercial purposes. But to date, Elvis has been a more profitable marketing venture.