Agent Elvis

By the end, with the King weighing in at a princely 255 pounds, the only jumpsuit he could maneuver into was the one he called the Aztec, with its great golden starburst aglow in a field of glaringly white polyester. Northerners viewed Elvis’s jumpsuits as his personal contribution to the universe of onstage fashion. But southerners knew them as the traditional attire of country music stars. As such, the suits were designators of region and class — sartorial equivalents of Elvis’s pompadour. In a nation where the emblem of legitimacy is a pin-striped suit, an Aztec jumpsuit was destined to be the stigma of the outsider.

And this perturbed a poor-born southern man whose insecurities were unassuagable and who knew what all individuals of renown come to know: that fame and treasure pale beside the ultimate luxury of being taken seriously.

It had been easy for Elvis to become an icon. For that he simply had to move his pelvis and sing. “They all think I’m a sex maniac,” he ventured early on. “They’re just frustrated old types anyway. I’m just natural.”

Though he would be the apocalyptic forebear of the enveloping chaos of the ’60s, he was also a naif who could stare at the original Elvis pens and dolls, which would become part of a multimillion dollar industry, and ask their manufacturer, “Can they really sell this stuff, Mr. Saperstein?” A country boy who would age but never mature, he would adore, to the end, his mama, his country, Clint Eastwood, and his gilded, pearl-handled Beretta automatic, while loathing communism and communists in general, and Jane Fonda, activist H. Rap Brown, and hippies in particular.

The final seven years of his life were the familiar drug addict’s tale, a saga of mindlessness that nonetheless had its own logic: He increased his prescribed medications, which increased his paranoia, which increased his obsession with personal safety until he was tucking a derringer into the waistband of whichever of his 20 pairs of custom-made silk pajamas he happened to be wearing. Elvis was not a subtle man, so it is not surprising that he equated being in control with amassing authority. As a consequence, he resuscitated, at age 35, his childhood longing to be a highway patrolman.

In late 1970, he asked his local sheriff to appoint him to the nonsalaried position of special deputy to the sheriff of Shelby County, Tennessee. Too popular for any elected official to turn him down, he was appointed to the post. Then he asked to be reappointed chief special deputy. Next, he called upon the sheriff to deputize all 12 men in his entourage — known as the Memphis Mafia — as well as his father and Dr. George Nichopoulos, the tireless prescriber of Elvis’s multitudinous medications.

That December, Elvis’s men posed with their badges, the King seated in their midst, his still-slender waist encumbered by the gold belt buckle they had given him, which featured a diamond-encrusted replica of his deputy sheriff’s star. Wearing tinted shades and an expression of both wonder and satisfaction, he must have believed, on that day, six and a half years before he died, that fame is a conjurer that can generate any pleasure.


Soon, he had inveigled special deputy badges from the Palm Springs Police Department, the Beverly Hills police, and 30 other official agencies, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, pinning them all to the lining of a leather briefcase he carted wherever he went. His next official acquisition was the blue identification lamp that Tennessee policemen use when working out of unmarked cars. Affixing it to his midnight blue Mercedes-Benz, he cruised Memphis highways in the small hours, pulling over drivers to whom he sternly delivered the usual chastening litany. “Sir,” he would demand, “do you realize how fast you were travelin’?”

Swamped in the addict’s denial, he ingested Demerol, Nembutal, and his favorite drug, Dilaudid, in quantities that would be fatal for an average person, while maintaining that the word drugs applied strictly to heroin. Rock groups, he insisted, were part of a communist conspiracy to destroy America by plundering its youth’s morals and encouraging them to get stoned. “Man,” he would say, “I wish I could be an undercover narcotics detective.”

One night, he met a man who carried a laminated card declaring him to be an agent at large of the Department of Justice. Elvis gazed at the card, with its seals from the Justice Department and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. “There isn’t much I’ve got,” he sighed, “that I wouldn’t give up for one of those.”

Elvis was not accustomed to being thwarted, and so he turned up in Washington one early winter morning shortly after he had been deputized. He was conveyed by limousine to the White House, where he handed a guard the letter he had just written to President Nixon, in which he warned of the danger the nation faced from entertainers like the Beatles, and volunteered to combat this menace by placing his own services on the side of righteousness. The letter had disingenuousness worthy of any politician. “He really liked the Beatles,” recalls his lifelong friend and confidant, Jerry Schilling, who accompanied him to Washington, “and he knew they admired him. But he also knew how to get to Nixon.”

Elvis’s offer, however unlikely, was also exceedingly well timed, for Nixon was poised to launch a campaign declaring drugs to be America’s most pressing problem. Within 20 minutes, Elvis was told the president would see him.

ne hour later, the King strutted into the Oval Office, eyes hooded beneath his amber-tinted sunglasses. He was decked out for the occasion, brandishing a cane and wearing a cape. “You dress pretty wild, don’t you?” Nixon asked.

“Mr. President,” Elvis answered, “you got your show to run and I got mine.”

Elvis then embarked on a patriotic diatribe, the sort he inserted into his concerts, indebted to the windy rhetoric of Fourth of July convocations. Declaring himself to be living proof that America is the land of opportunity, he went on to assure the president that he was the man to serve as ambassador of sobriety for the nation’s young and that to be ultimately effective in this crucial endeavor, he needed the badge of a proper narcotics agent.

When Elvis finished, the president flicked on an intercom. A badge and a complete set of credentials, he ordered, were to be prepared at once for Mr. Presley. In return, before taking his leave, a gratified Elvis gave the president his Colt .45.

Previously, Elvis had tried to give a Colt .357 magnum to Vice President Spiro Agnew, who would soon be driven from office in the wake of accusations that he had taken bribes in the White House. But Agnew refused the present on the grounds that he could not accept a gift from a private citizen.

A coda to Elvis’s rendezvous with Nixon was that both men eventually would be required to face the fact that power cannot save a man. “I’m just so tired of being Elvis Presley,” Elvis had taken to saying by the time he was rendered to that single jumpsuit. And on August 16, 1977, he overdosed sometime in the early afternoon, which, according to the curious way he had come to live, was the middle of the night.