The King Is Dead! Hang The Doctor! (Part Three)
The King Is Dead! Hang The Doctor!
By Stanley Booth
(Part Three)
According to the police report, Elvis Presley was found at about 2:30 P.M. on August 16, 1977, face down on the red shag carpet of his bathroom floor, "slumped over in front of the commode....his arms and legs were stiff, and there was a discoloration in his face." The bathroom adjoined Presley's bedroom in the white-columned mansion at Graceland, the thirteen-acre estate in Whitehaven, Tennessee, where he had spent most of his life since the early days of the career that had taken him out of poverty and made him the highest paid entertainer and possibly the most famous human being of his time.
Memphis Fire Department ambulance and Dr. Nick were called. Dr. Nick arrived and boarded the ambulance as it was leaving Graceland to take Presley to Baptist Memorial Hospital, ten minutes away in Memphis. On the way there and in the emergency room, cardio-pulmonary resuscitation attempts were made without effect. At 3:30 P.M., Dr. Nick pronounced Elvis dead.
In the state of Tennessee, when someone is found dead, the local medical examiner must investigate. Dr. Jerry Francisco, the Shelby County (Memphis) Medical Examiner, was informed of Presley's death by Dr. Eric Muirhead, chief pathologist at Baptist Hospital. Dr. Nick had returned to Graceland and received consent for an autopsy from Elvis's father, Vernon Presley. The fact of Elvis's death had been made public, and a crowd had gathered at Baptist Hospital, creating a traffic jam outside the emergency room. Francisco agreed that the autopsy should be performed at the Baptist Hospital morgue rather than across the street at the Medical Examiner's morgue.
The preliminary, or gross, autopsy was completed before eight o'clock that night. In a press conference afterwards, Dr. Francisco made the "provisional diagnosis" that Presley had died of cardiac arrhythmia: his heart had lost its regular beat and then stopped. To determine the precise cause of the attack, Francisco said, "may take several days, it may take several weeks. It may never be discovered." Francisco also said that the preliminary autopsy had revealed no evidence of drug abuse. The Medical Examiner's office reported to the Homicide Division of the Memphis Police Department that Presley had died a natural death.
A few days before —— incredible timing —— a book had appeared, titled Elvis: What Happened? Written by three former bodyguards of Presley and a writer for the tabloid press, the book told of Presley's desire to have his wife's lover killed, described his "fascination with human corpses," and called him "a walking drugstore." The book also told of Presley's attending the 1964 funeral of Dewey Phillips, who died in 1968. Still, Presley's sudden death, coming at the same time as the allegations of his drug abuse, caused many to speculate, in spite of the Medical Examiner's statements, that he had died from a drug overdose.
On October 21, 1977, Dr. Francisco, after having reviewed Presley's complete autopsy report and other data including reports from four toxicology laboratories, issued his final opinion. Francisco said that Presley died of hypertensive heart disease resulting in cardiac arrhythmia, and that the death had not been caused by drugs. The next day, the Memphis Commercial Appeal carried a story listing ten drugs said to have been found in autopsy samples of Presley's blood at Bio-Science Laboratories in Van Nuys, California. The story was titled, "Near Toxic Level of Drugs Reported in Presley's Blood."
For over twenty years, Elvis Presley had been famous, but he had not been well known. The details of his private life, of passionate interest to many, were known to very few. These few —— the "Memphis Mafia," employees who were Presley's friends or relatives —— had surrounded him during his life, guarding his privacy with almost total silence. Elvis: What Happened?, the three fired bodyguards' lament, had broken the stillness, but with Presley's death and the revelation that he had left almost his entire estate to his daughter, there were among the Mafia few indeed who did not take part in a Babel of Elvis memories. Almost everyone had a story to tell or at least a book to sell.
The books included My Life with Elvis, by a secretary; A Presley Speaks, by an uncle; The Life of Elvis, by a cousin; I Called Him Babe, by a nurse; Elvis, We Love You Tender, by Presley's stepmother and -brothers; Inside Elvis, by a karate instructor, and Elvis: Portrait of a Friend, by one of Elvis's numerous best friends. The movies would come later.
The books told and retold the story of Elvis Aron Presley, the Depression-born son of Mississippi sharecropper Vernon, who, with his eighth-grade education, misspelled the Biblical name Aaron on his son's birth certificate. Elvis's stillborn twin brother, Jesse Garon, was much discussed, and many attributed to his death the unusual affection between Elvis and his mother, the former Gladys Smith, whose actual middle name was Love. "She worshipped that child," a friend said, "from the day he was borned to the day she died."
The little shotgun house, built by his father and grandfather, where Elvis was born; the single room where Elvis and his family first lived in Memphis; the housing project where they lived during Elvis's years as an outsider at Humes High School; all have become standard parts of the legend. So have the Crown Electric Company, where Elvis worked for forty dollars a week after his graduation from school, and the Memphis Recording Service, where Elvis paid four dollars to record on an acetate disc two songs, "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin" as a present for his mother. Sam Phillips, the owner of the recording studio and Sun Records, heard Elvis, gave him the chance to make a record for release, and the rest is history, the kind of history that sells.
The first Elvis Presley record was released in 1954; his first movies were released in 1957; the next year, as the career for which she alone had prepared her son was just getting started, Gladys Presley died. Though Elvis made three films a year for ten years after her death, he did not appear in public concert again for over twelve years. He kept for the rest of his life a pink Cadillac that he bought for his mother and kept for many years the tree from their last Christmas together.
There are some interesting photographs of Elvis and Gladys —— one of Elvis kissing Gladys while holding a pair of jockey shorts to her bosom, another showing Elvis holding Gladys's head, a handful of her hair, looking into her eyes, curling her lip in a smile, but not a smile, an earnest look....
What must Elvis have seen, looking into Gladys's eyes? God visited Gladys Presley with the mysteries of birth and death, and the life of Elvis was the result, the realization of her awe-filled vision. It was her image of him, idealized beyond reason, that the public —— his public —— accepted.
He is dressed like a prince, the diamonds glitter, the cape waves; he is tall and athletic, and in the cunning play of lights (all that pale blue and crimson) he seems as unreal as the ghost of a Greek god, the original perfect male. Who cares if he's made up? if the lights are deceiving? if the tune of "Thus Spake Zarathustra" makes you fall for the trick? The fact remains that he is, that he floats through countless dreams, and that whatever he was, or wherever he is going, he is now, at this moment, the living symbol of freedom and light.
——W.A. Harbinson, The Illustrated Elvis
Elvis was buried at Graceland beside his mother. "What has died," one editorial writer suggested, "is the adolescence of an entire generation. It is the memory of several million people's first intimation of freedom that was in the white hearse."
The anniversary of his death promises to become a holiday like Christmas or the Fourth of July, when each year more Elvis products are served up. One year after Presley's death, a Canadian writer, in a piece called "The Last Days of Elvis," listed eleven drugs found in Presley's body by the University of Utah Center for Human Toxicology and quoted a pharmaceutical guide regarding contraindications and the dangers of drug interactions. The story contained allegations of a conspiracy of silence including the Memphis police, the Commercial Appeal, and Presley's doctors, none of whom were named.
About a year later, Elvis: Portrait of a Friend was published. It was produced by an ex-employee of Presley named Marty Lacker and his wife Patsy with the help of an editor of veterinary publications. The book contained chapter titles like "The Doctor as Pusher" and "Prescription for Death" and left no doubt that the death-dealing doctor was Dr. Nick.
George Constantine Nichopoulos was born in 1927 in Ridgway, Pennsylvania. His parents, Constantine George (Gus) and Persephone Nichopoulos, both came from villages in Greece. At sixteen or seventeen, Gus came to New York City and worked as a bus boy. In 1925, on a six-month return visit to Greece, he met and became engaged to Persephone Bobotsiares. In January, 1927, after working with a cousin in a restaurant in Ridgway and saving his money, Gus married Persephone in Greece and brought her to Pennsylvania, where, in October, their son was born.
In 1928, with the help of Persephone's brother in Greenville, South Carolina, Gus started running a restaurant in Anniston, Alabama. When he retired, more than forty years later, Anniston celebrated Gus Nichopoulos Day. There were not many Greeks in Anniston, a handsome town of about 45,000 people, on rolling hills in eastern Alabama, and the Nichopoulos family was in many ways exemplary. Since Anniston has no Greek Orthodox church, the Nichopouloses regularly attended a local Episcopal church. Gus, who died in June, 1979, had been a Shriner, a 32nd Degree Mason, an Elk, a Rotarian, a State Farm Valued Customer, a greatly beloved citizen. Persephone still lives in the white frame house where she and Gus reared their son, who came to be called Nick, and his sister Vangie, six years younger.
Nick walked a few blocks to the Woodstock Grammar School and then to Anniston High School. His parents allowed him to play football only if he studied music, and there are photographs of him standing on the front lawn at home, wearing short pants, holding his violin under his chin. He is a dark, serious, little boy. From the time Nick was quite small, he worked in his parents' restaurant. He was a first-string fullback and halfback on the Anniston Bulldogs football team. He became an Eagle Scout. He couldn't decide whether he wanted to be a priest, own a restaurant, or be a doctor.
In 1946, Nick graduated from high school and joined the Army, which put him to work for eighteen months in a hospital in Munich. When he got out of the Army, he entered the pre-medical course of study at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, graduating in 1951. That fall, he entered medical school at Vanderbilt University but left after one year to study for a Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. While going to school in Memphis, Nick met Edna Sanidas, a pretty blond girl whose father also owned a restaurant. Nick and Edna were married in 1954. The next year, their son Dean was born. In 1956, Nick went back to Vanderbilt Medical School, and in 1959 he graduated with an M.D. degree.
In 1963, after serving his internship at St. Thomas' Hospital in Nashville, Dr. Nick brought his family (now there were also two daughters, Chrissie and Elaine) to Memphis and started working in a partnership called the Medical Group. He had worked there four years when he met Elvis Presley.
After he pronounced Presley dead, Dr. Nick stepped out of the emergency room into the room where Presley employees Billy Smith, Joe Esposito, Charlie Hodge, David Stanley, and Al Strada were waiting. Billy, Presley's first cousin, had been as close as any friend Presley ever had. "Dr. Nick started to speak to me and he couldn't talk," Billy told me at the Medical Examiners' hearing. "That's how much Elvis's death hurt him. Dr. Nick loved Elvis. He did everything he could to help Elvis. How can anyone think Dr. Nick would hurt Elvis?"
Ten days after Presley died, the Commercial Appeal published an exclusive interview with Dr. Nick. In it Dr. Nick said, "I spent many hours a day thinking about different things to do to help him ... It's going to take some time to lose some of those thoughts and I think everybody's lost ... We keep thinking that he's here someplace. It's hard to accept."
A year later, Dr. Nick talked briefly about Presley on a local television show, but otherwise he said no more. While friends and relatives of Presley, no longer on his payroll, signed contracts for books and movies, Dr. Nick, almost alone, kept silent. There had been around Elvis Presley a hierarchy of silence, and Dr. Nick was very near its top.
Meanwhile the Elvis memories, finding an audience, began to resemble the music business, sometimes described as a self-devouring organism that vomits itself back up. In New York City, Charles Thompson, a Memphis-born television producer, was reading about Presley. 20/20, the ABC television news program for which Thompson works, was new and had to have some hot stories if it were to compete with its opposite number, CBS television's popular 60 Minutes.
Thompson had worked as a field producer at CBS, leaving when ABC beckoned partly because he and CBS had not seen eye to eye on a story about Billy Carter's supposed violations of federal energy regulations. Thompson had wanted to do the story, but the powers at CBS had thought there was no story, or none worth putting on television. It wasn't Thompson's first such disagreement with an employer. In 1970, when Thompson was working for a television station in Jacksonville, Florida, he did a story on pollution that accused the station itself of polluting and got himself fired.
Thompson had graduated from high school in Memphis, studied journalism at Memphis State University, worked at the Commercial Appeal. In the middle nineteen-sixties, Thompson did two tours with the Navy in Vietnam, serving as liaison with the Marines, calling in air strikes. He saw a good bit of action, and when he came back home had troubling nightmares of mangled bodies, burning children, and seemed to see the dark side of issues.
When Thompson learned, the day it happened, that Presley had died, he expected, so he said later, that "by night they would say it was drugs." He was surprised when they didn't, but when he read the Elvis books, among them Marty Lacker's accusation of Dr. Nick, his expectations were at last fulfilled. Thompson's reportorial sixth sense told him, This is Good, this is a Story. King Dies of Drugs from Court Physician is Good. The King is Dead! Hang the Doctor! Still, Thompson admits that he came to Memphis for a "top-to-bottom investigation on Elvis" with nothing more than a hunch. "I didn't have anything," he has said.
In looking through the Presley file at the Commercial Appeal, Thompson came upon the Bio-Science toxicology report which had been quoted in the "Near Toxic" story. Thompson says he showed the report to a doctor at Baptist Hospital, who said, according to Thompson, "Jesus Christ, it's obvious. The son of a bitch died of drugs."
At least one doctor at Baptist Hospital says that Thompson showed him the report. He told Thompson that in his opinion, Presley's drug problems had been primarily with laxatives and steroids. The doctor advised Thompson, should he have questions about Presley and drugs, to call Dr. Nick. In July of 1979, by his own count, Thompson tried three times to question Dr. Nick, who did not return his calls. Armed with that fact and the toxicology report, Thompson told the doctor who'd suggested he talk with Dr. Nick: "I think I've got a homicide."
Thompson brought James Cole, his brother-in-law, who like Thompson had worked for the Commercial Appeal, in to help research the story. Cole learned that a routine audit of prescription records in Memphis was going to be conducted by the Tennessee Healing Arts Board and telephoned the Board's office in Nashville, the state capital, "to find out what was going on." He talked with Jack Fosbinder, the Board's chief investigator, who told him that an audit of the first six months of 1979 was in progress. Cole told Fosbinder, so he has said, "We suspect Elvis may have died a drug death. Maybe you should look back into 1977."
In August of 1979, after Charles Thompson's three failed attempts, Thompson's New York colleague, ABC television news performer Geraldo Rivera, came to Memphis to talk to Dr. Nick and failed six times. The 20/20 team had no such trouble talking with the state Health Related Boards' investigators. On September 6, Thompson, Rivera and Cole came to Dr. Nick's office after a meeting with the investigators, who had told them that Dr. Nick was about to have formal charges brought against him. On this, his seventh try, Rivera succeeded.
In the interview, Rivera asked Dr. Nick various questions about Presley, leading up to the big charge: "The records indicate that, especially in the last year of his life, you prescribed certain medications to Elvis Presley in quite extraordinarily large amounts. Why?"
"I can't comment on that," Dr. Nick said, "and I don't believe that it's true."
"The records we have, Doctor —— and I'll say this as gently as I possibly can —— indicate that from January 20, 1977 to August 16, 1977, the day he died, you prescribed to Elvis Presley, and the prescriptions were all signed by you —— over five thousand schedule two narcotics and/or amphetamines. That comes out to something like twenty-five per day."
"I don't believe that."
"Well, is it something that you'd like to refresh your memory on, or is it something you deny?"
"I deny it."
...CONTINUE TO PART FOUR...
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