It Almost Happened

Source: Crazy Days and Nights

Shortly before the death of this permanent A++ lister, he had been in discussions for two things.

One, was to buy his own pharmacy so he wouldn’t have any issues getting all the drugs he wanted.

The other thing that was on his mind was an exhibition.

The A++ lister was going to compete in a karate vs wrestling contest against one of the greatest wrestlers alive. There was a lot of excitement, but the drugs were too dominant a force and the A++ lister only lived a few weeks after the deal was made.

Elvis Presley

Jerry Lawler  – The King

The following excerpt is taken from It’s Good to Be the King…Sometimes by Jerry “The King” Lawler with Doug Asheville (Pocket Books, USA, 2002, ISBN: 0743457676)

One day we were talking and Mickey told me his brother was the president of the Elvis Presley International Fan Club. I said, “yeah, Mickey, I’m an astronaut too.” But he said, “No, really. All the fan clubs are under him and he hangs out at Graceland all the time. He knows everybody, talks to Elvis all the time.” I told him what I wanted to do.

I got him all geeked up. I said that Elvis was into karate. What if we had this bif karate versus wrestling match at the [Mid-South] Coliseum? Mickey said, “I guarantee Elvis would love that. I’ll get my brother to talk to him.” I thought he was just a goof, his brother’s no more president of the fan club than I am. I said go ahead.

Next day, Mickey dais he’d talked to his brother and his brother was going to talk to Elvis’ uncle, Vester Presley, who was the main guard at Graceland. At this point, when he was still alive, Elvis was not that big a deal. (Terrible as it sounds, dying was the best career move he ever made.) He was looked on as a recluse in Memphis.

But still, this was Elvis. Mickey told me that Elvis’ dad, Vernon, was going to call me. Now Mickey is the guy who let me set his hand on fire just to see if it would hurt, so I’m really waiting on the call. I was living in Hendersonville, near Nashville, at the time. I get home one night and Kay said that somebody had called the house looking for me and his name was Vernon Presley. I said, “Really?” She said he sounded like an old man with a real southern voice and I said well, he would be an old man with a real southern voice. She said he’d call back tomorrow.

I was going to Evansville, Indiana, the next day. I had to leave around three o’c;ock. I got back and Kay said he’s called again. He said he’d call the next morning at ten o’clock. I’m sitting there by the phone. Sure enough, Vernon Presley called. “Jerry…”

I was in double shock. For one, here was Vernon Presley on the phone. And that also meant Mickey’s brother Eddie was really the president of the Elvis Presley fan club. Vernon had talked with Elvis about the idea. He said Elvis would like to do it. But he said Elvis was not really in very good shape. He’s started to work out because he’s got a tour coming up. When he comes off the tour, Vernon ssaid he’d call me back and we’d figure out the details. He said it would be a lot of fun. I said cool. I bet it was three weeks later that Elvis died.

Elvis was really big into karate; he worked out with this karate champion called Bill Wallace who taught martial arts at Memphis State and he co-owned the Memphis Karate Institute. He was a wrestling fan too. A guy called Mr. Coffee who worked at the Ellis Auditorium for forty years used to let Elvis in to watch the wrestling from the stage. Vester Presley came every Monday night to the Coliseum for a long time and he used to bring Lisa Marie to the matches when she was four or five years old.

it would have been great to have set up a program with Elvis. But by the time we were talking about it, it was too late. By 1977, Elvis was doing so many drugs. I guess he told Dr. Nichopoulos, give me this stuff, or I’ll buy a drugstore. Dr. Nick would give him placebos and stuff but he also prescribed thousands of narcotic and amphetamine pills for him in 1977 alone. His license got suspended for a while.

There were all these stories about Elvis just before he died. At night he had to wear diapers. He had a long flashlight and before he got on one of his planes to go anywhere, he’d get on the plane with the flashlight and look around. People who knew him said Elvis was as nice a guy as you’d want to meet but he was still real country, as country as you could be. And he had the most magnificent complexion. Smooth as anything. – Source

How ABC Unearthed the Elvis Story

TV news stalked the grim reaper for the story about Elvis’ death.

It looks like something straight out of Watergate. It is Friday, January 18, 1980, and the Memphis City Council Chamber has been transformed. Rows of television cameras and banks of lighting equipment line the front of the room. Some of the cameramen are wearing open shirts and gold chains around their necks, while most of their solemn subjects are in stiff three-piece suits. The atmosphere is tense, the crowd dead silent.

Sitting in the center of this spectacle is Dr. George C. Nichopoulos, the affable doctor with the hesitant drawl and electric white hair. He is facing what must be the most crucial hearing of his life, one that will rule on his very competence as a physician. It hasn’t been a good week. “Dr. Nick” (as friends and patients call him) has admitted to the State Board of Medical Examiners that his most famous patient, Elvis Presley, was a medical drug addict, to whom he prescribed literally thousands of uppers, downers, and in-betweeners over the past several years – 12,000 doses in the last twenty months of Elvis’ life, alone.

During the week of the hearing, Nichopoulos has painted a far different picture of the King of rock and roll than the image his fans have clung to since Elvis died. He depicts Presley as a ranting drug addict who had been detoxified at least three times, the first as early as 1973. Elvis’ insatiable and uncontrollable demand for drugs – almost all prescribed substances – was more than Dr. Nick could handle. He has testified that he tried substituting placebos and vitamins for the drugs, but Elvis had studied the medical literature and couldn’t be fooled. Nichopouolos has insisted that he valiantly tried to stem Presley’s voracious appetite for drugs; he has also admitted that he failed.

As Friday’s hearing recesses for lunch, one of the spectators in the third row is clearly pleased about what has transpired during the week. For Charles Thompson, it has, in many ways, been a week of vindication. Thompson is a former Memphian now working as a producer for the ABC News program 20/20. He was largely responsible for initiating an investigation in July of 1979 into the questions surrounding the death of Elvis Presley two years earlier. It now appears likely that had the investigation by ABC never taken place, the story of Elvis drug habits would have remained largely a subject of speculation, rather than public record.

Thompson has felt for months that the story goes even further. It is his contention, and that of ABC News, that at the very least, Elvis Presley’s drug abuse contributed to his death, and the drugs in his body may well have killed him directly. This assertion bluntly challenges the official conclusion, reached by Shelby County Medical Examiner Dr. Jerry T. Francisco, that Elvis died from heart disease.

During the Nichopoulos hearing, much of what ABC reported in its first 20/20 program on the Presley case has been confirmed. Now, on the final day of the hearings, it begins to look as though Thompson is going to achieve his long-sought goal: the release of the late singer’s autopsy report. He is confident that Dr. E. Eric Muirhead, chief of pathology at Baptist Memorial Hospital and head of the team that performed Presley’s autopsy, will take the stand. Thompson is ecstatic. “It’s already starting to come out,” Thompson says of the closely-guarded, secret report. “They’ve already said more this week than I ever knew. They have [Elvis] being admitted for detoxification in 1973. I never knew it went back that far. THey’ve also admitted publicly that he was a medical drug addict. They haven’t said anything that disagrees with out first report last September. By this afternoon, when Dr. Muirhead testifies, the autopsy will have to come out.”

Sources Thompson considers very reliable have told him that the Baptist autopsy team concluded that Elvis’ death resulted from polypharmacy, the interaction of several drugs with resultant toxic effects. Jerry Francisco has steadfastly maintained that drugs played “no role whatsoever in Elvis’ death.” But because of a loophole in Tennessee law, Francisco has never been forced to make that autopsy a matter of public record. In a separate lawsuit, ABC has been trying to force the issue, but, as Charlie Thompson observes before the afternoon session begins, “If this thing goes like I think it will, that lawsuit will be moot. The autopsy is going to come out this afternoon, barring any difficulties. I think it will speak for itself.” – Read more here