A Little Thing Called Life-By: Linda Thompson

The King Is Gone

"Linda! It's Lisa!" a breathlessly excited nine-year old Lisa Marie Presley urgently gasped into the phone.
An immediate smile crossed my face upon hearing the voice of the little girl I had grown up to love deeply over the past several years. It was not uncommon for Lisa to telephone me in a playful mood just to say, "Hi," and that she missed me, as she was doing now from Graceland in Memphis. Her father, Elvis, and I had broken up eight months before this August 16 phone call, after having lived together for almost five years. She reached me in my apartment in Los Angeles, where her father had stayed with me on several occasions.
"Hey--you little goobernickle!" I jokingly answered. Goobernickle was a term of endearment Elvis and I had come up with for his little offspring. "I know who this is! You don't have to tell me!"
"Linda! My daddy's dead! My daddy's dead!"
"No! No!" I automatically responded, instantly frozen by a dread of acknowledging the truth. "He can't be. He's not, honey."
"Yes he is! He is! They told me. He smothered in the carpet!"
Numbly, I threw the phone across the room. I stood there, catatonic, gazing at the receiver. He smothered in the carpet, repeatedly raced through my stinging mind. Those gravity-filled words sank my heart with the reality that Elvis Presley was in all probability dead. On too many occasions to count, during my years of loving and caring for him, I had found and attended to him in deathly, comprimising circumstances like the one Lisa had just described.
I stared at the phone for as long as it took me to gather my senses enough to realize that this incredibly bright and sensitive nine year old child had had the presence of mind to pick up the phone to share this devastating occurrence with me. She needs me, I thought, as I reached for the cold, hard, plastic transmitter that held my connection to the biggest part of Elvis' heart, his little girl.
"Oh Lisa, are you sure, sweetheart?" I asked. "Are you sure he didn't just go to the hospital like when I was with him before? Remember, he was just sick, but he got better?"
"No, he's gone. That's what they said! Nobody knows yet! I called you first! Nobody knows but us! He's dead!"
Hearing the pain and disbelief in her too-young-to-lose-her-daddy voice, I knew I needed to say something to comfort Lisa.
"Oh, Yisa Maria," I said, using another pet name Elvis and I had for her. "Your daddy loves you so much. Please always remember that. And, sweetheart, love never dies. You'll always have that. You'll always be his little Goobernickle, the one he's loved most. What he's most proud of. It'll be okay, honey. You'll always feel his love with you."
I babbled on and on, hoping something I said might resonate with comfort and assurance. I could just picture the diminutive, blond haired, now fatherless Lisa Marie, her tiny hand clutching the phone, standing alone on unsteady little legs.
"Who's with you, baby?" I asked.
Before I had more time to dwell on the lonely, imagined scenario playing out in my mind, I heard a familiar, calm, and deep voiced, Southern drawl take over the phone.
"Linda, you need to come home right away," said my brother, Sam, who had been working for Elvis as a bodyguard for the past few years. Even though Elvis and I weren't together, he had kept Sam as a trusted employee.
"Oh my god, Sam," I said. "Is he really gone? Is Elvis really dead? Could Lisa be mistaken?"
"You need to come home to Memphis as soon as you can get here," Sam answered, seemingly unable to articulate the doom-filled words that would in fact confirm my desperate query.
"Sam, is he dead? Please tell me the truth!" I pleaded.
A pause, a sigh, then a resigned and defeated, "Elvis is gone. You need to come home."
The words escaping from Sam's tight throat broke the last piece of my heart, still clinging to the hope that Elvis might be alive.
"Sam, stay with Lisa," I said. "Take care of her. Let me speak to her again, please."
I rambled to the little girl, who was no doubt reeling, reassuring her as best as I could, and telling her I would be there soon to "mug her noggin."
"C'mere, you, get over here and let me mug your noggin!" Elvis would growl through grinding teeth when he was overwhelmed with his need to show affection for Lisa Marie or me. He would grab the backs of our necks, look deeply into our eyes with those otherworldly eyes of his, then press his forehead, hard, onto ours. He would then close his eyes tightly, grit his teeth together, and forehead to forehead, press and roll slightly to "mug noggins." It was apparently something his beloved mama did with him when he was just a "little shaver."
Elvis couldn't resist baby talk. He spoke it fluently, recieved it hungrily. I understood both the intensity and the silliness of the gibberish, since my own family communicated with each other in the same loving fashion. It was always the tone in which Elvis and I spoke to each other. If Elvis addressed me as Linda, I knew our conversation would be serious. He always called me by pet names, such as Ariadne, in homage to Ariadne Pennington, a little three year old character in one of his movies, or more commonly, Mommy. Looking back now, these both seem a little odd to me, but at the time, they felt natural.
I hung up the phone. Silence. Time to grieve. No one to comfort, no one to comfort me. I was hesitant to call anyone, because Lisa had told me that nobody knew. I certainly didn't want to alert the media. I sat there in my quiet apartment, in my grief and disbelief, and began to cry.
If there had ever been any notion of reconciliation, any chance that Elvis and I might have gotten back together, it was now dashed; between Elvis and me, there were no maybes. The finality of this knowledge sank into my heart and deepened my grief. I would never again hear that voice I'd loved so much, except for on the radio. I would never again feel his touch. I would never again have the chance to say anything I had left unsaid.
I turned on the television, hoping the news would break and I'd be free to call someone. Finally, it did. It was confirmed: "Elvis Presley died today at his Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tennessee." The voice droned on, and then something inexplicable happened: The anchor moved on to other news. How could that be? I thought, my irrational mind full of grief. There is no other news. There is nothing else. Suddenly, I was confronted with a difficult truth to absorb--life does indeed go on, and we must roll along with it. But for those of us who are shocked into stricken grief, we must be gentle with ourselves, and others, and allow for that time of mourning. And looking around my apartment, I came to see just how difficult this would be for me.
The space of my apartment was still filled with Elvis' energy. I was sitting on my army green sofa he had given me from his Beverly Hills home, on which he and I had sat and lounged together. On my walls were the paintings he had also given me from his home. The bed I lay on was a bed he and I had shared together. When I retreated to the bathroom to look in the mirror at my tear swollen face, it was a mirror that he had looked into and saw his own reflection. When I sat down to have a cup of tea, I was seated at the glass topped table at which he'd also sat. Looking at the four white whicker fan-backed chairs, I recalled him sitting across from me, and still saw his face lingering there.
I stood and washed my cup in the sink, realizing that nowhere was safe in that little apartment because he had been in all of those rooms with me. From the living room, the sound of the news drifted in, as the channel I had turned on earlier was revisiting the story of his passing with expanded and repeated coverage, and I could hear him singing, "Are You Lonesome Tonight?" Hearing his words, and those words, of course, I just lost it. So many feelings, rushing me, stirring my memories. I could still feel him there with me, his presence and the history we'd shared together, and even to this day, I can recall vividly, viscerally, the essence of who and what Elvis Presley was in my life. He had breathed that same air I was breathing, and now, he would breathe no more. I started crying again, and this time I couldn't stop.
Elvis had now more than left the building. His soul had "slipped the surly bonds of earth and winged and soared where eagles dare not fly." Elvis loved the Blue Angels' creed, that lovely prose he quoted often. In so many ways, he was not of this earth. He felt a strong connection to the spirit world and to the ethereal, that he was merely "passing through" this world.
Maybe Elvis is home at last, I thought.
As word spread, some of my friends began calling to check on me. Between calls, I started the process of packing, with memories of Elvis still flooding my thoughts. How he used to come in through the back sliding glass door that led out to my little patio and the alley beyond, because he couldn't just walk in the front door. How he used to baby-talk my dog, a little Maltese he had given me.
Sometime shortly after I began to pack, all the power went off in my apartment. Not long after that, my next-door neighbor knocked on my door and stuck her head in.
"Can I get you anything?" She asked. "Can I do anything for you? We heard the news about Elvis, and we know he was a big part of your life. We used to see him slipping in the back door here."
"Thank you so much," I said. "But, no, I have everything I need. Oh, is your power off?"
"No, ours is fine," She said. "Let me know if you do need anything."
I smiled and nodded as she closed the door behind her. As the day darkened into night, I began to light candles to better navigate around my apartment. A few friends came by, including my workout buddy, Deborah.
"Oh, how sweet, you're lighting candles for Elvis," She said.
"Well, not really," I said. "I have to see to get ready to fly out of here, and there's no power in my apartment."
I was not unaware of the strangeness of the situation. It was down-right eerie. As the night wore on, and the power remained inexplicably out in my apartment only, I began to consider all the candles for Elvis after all. It was his first candlelight vigil, a tradition his fans have carried out every anniversary of his passing since that day.
And so, with candles lighting the way, I put one thing after another in the suitcase, until I was confronted with a question:
What would he want me to wear to his funeral?
Even though I went through the motions of going to my closet to survey the many dresses Elvis had gotten made for me in Las Vegas by the dressmaker-to-the-stars, Suzy Creamcheese, I knew immediately what he would want me to wear to his funeral. Still, I paused at a really pretty black backless dress I'd bought at Giorgio's on Rodeo Drive, when Elvis sent me on a shopping spree there toward the end of our relationship. I knew that wasn't what he'd want me to wear, and besides, it wouldn't be appropriate to wear a backless dress to a funeral in Memphis, a Southern Baptist capital. Knowing how Elvis had been deeply influenced by colors and numbers, and their spiritual significance, I chose the dress I'd always known I'd wear, a lavender silk dress, not the traditional black outfit. Elvis believed that all shades of purple emitted the highest spiritual vibrations and considered the color to be the most closely connected to the purity and power of God. That was enough of a fashion endorsement for me.
I didn't care if eyebrows would be raised because I wasn't wearing traditional black at a funeral in the conservative South. I only wanted to honor Elvis' sweet soul and his deepest beliefs. Coincidentally, I'd been wearing a skirted bodysuit with lavender flowers on it the night we met, and so it was the perfect symbol of our union. Quite honestly, I felt a little smug that I knew him so very well, and could nearly channel his thoughts and feelings. Wearing a lavender dress in a sea of dark mourners would be my way of communicating with Elvis' spirit.
It was between him and me, and I knew he would've heartily approved.