IT WAS just a casual game of touch football, in a north Memphis park, one hot July Sunday in 1954.
Jerry Schilling, at 12 years old, was starting to earn himself a reputation on the school team, so was invited to join in by some older, tougher kids. On the pitch he was introduced to the quarterback, and suddenly, as he recalls, "felt a jolt". The
19-year-old truck driver asking him if he knew how to catch a football was someone he'd heard a couple of nights previously on a local radio station, delivering an electrifying cover version of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's song That's All Right Mama, and his name was Elvis Presley.
That scratch football game was the start of Schilling's 23 years as friend, assistant, minder and confidant to the singer who shook popular music by the scruff of its neck. It was a relationship which, in many ways, defined his life and is described in his newly-published memoir, Me and a Guy Named Elvis. Written with the entertainment journalist Chuck Crisafulli, the book is an intensely personal and affectionate portrayal of life as a friend of Presley's and as a member of his entourage. It lapses at times into hagiography, but also depicts Presley's faults and frustrations, his dark humours and tantrums, as well as his extravagant generosity.
Thirty years after he was a pallbearer at Presley's funeral, riding in that long cortege of white Cadillacs, Schilling sits in his home in the Hollywood Hills - the house which Presley paid for, outright - and recalls the singer's impact on his life.
Schilling was a working-class Memphis kid, whose mother died when he was barely more than a year old and who was brought up largely by grandparents, aunts and uncles. When he got the phone call on 16 August 1977, telling him Presley had died, he found himself flashing back to that insecure 12-year-old. "Having come from a background that knew some really hard times, I somehow thought that nothing could ever happen to me while Elvis was alive. And I felt that someone had just taken all that away from me."
Captivated by this charismatic new acquaintance, who later became prone to turning up at Sunday football games with dark-eyed Hollywood starlet Natalie Wood on the back of his motorcycle, the teenage Schilling took to frequenting Presley's concerts and hang-outs, and ultimately found himself admitted into the inner sanctum of Graceland, which a rapidly rising Presley bought in 1957. He was swept up in the singer's extravagant leisure life, such as the after-hours sprees when he'd commandeer an entire cinema or fairground for the exclusive use of his magic circle.
To help understand the controversy ignited by Elvis' early, raw music at a time when even popular radio stations were effectively segregated in their playlists and audiences, Schilling's book recounts a childhood incident when, at a friend's house, he played one of his 78s by the Dominoes, a black outfit. His friend's normally amiable mother underwent a kind of Jekyll and Hyde transformation, ripped the disc from the turntable and smashed it. "You're not going to play that nigger music in my house," she raged. Small wonder that by some, Presley was branded a "traitor to his race".
In 1964, Schilling, contemplating a career as a history teacher, football coach and "generally upstanding citizen", was chatting to Presley on the front porch of Graceland when the star - who had been using an oxygen mask, showing early signs of the ill health which would ruin him - invited him to work for him, there and then. Within hours he was on board the tour coach, a full-time member of the "Memphis Mafia", as the singer's entourage was known.
Moving into Graceland (where, despite the lavish lifestyle, his bedroom had a leaky roof which required him to put a plank over the resulting puddle), Schilling became a close associate and friend of Presley and his family. It was Schilling who was detailed by Presley to drive the couple to hospital for Lisa Marie's birth. He was also often asked to accompany the singer on visits to his mother's grave, while other duties entailed everything from bodyguard to photo double. Presley he describes as a man who, regardless of his early image as a tearaway, read widely and was interested in "spiritual" subjects, absorbing the likes of Khalil Gibran and Autobiography of a Yogi.
Life at Graceland was easygoing, although everyone was expected to drop everything to attend to the man at the hub of it all, who could be prone to sudden mood changes. "There might be a dark day when Elvis was in a bad mood and everybody walked on eggshells, but that wasn't the norm," he says. And one way to really arouse the wrath of the man who revolutionised rock and roll was to play one of his own recordings at his parties - "Get that crap off," was his reaction on one occasion when someone had the temerity to put All Shook Up on the jukebox.
The wealthy singer could be wildly generous to those around him, presenting each member of the Memphis Mafia with a Triumph Bonneville motorbike (Elvis was a Harley Davidson man himself), or dispensing Cadillacs as thank-you presents. As the pair become closer, he paid for Schilling's house above Sunset Strip.
The King's increasingly desperate need to spend could alarm those around him, not least his wily manager and Svengali, the legendary "Colonel" Tom Parker. Having once blown a million dollars renovating a ranch, he decided that everyone needed a brand-new Ranchero pick-up. Schilling refused it, so a puzzled Presley simply presented it to a visiting electrician instead.
Then there were the "prescription" drugs. As early as 1964, Presley and company were regularly taking Dexedrine, or "speed", to keep them awake at night while driving between venues, then resorting to sleeping tablets to rest up the next day. The Dexedrine, adds Schilling, "was also a diet thing, if he was getting back to making another movie and had put on some pounds". However, he thinks it wasn't these pills that affected Presley so badly as the painkillers, upon which he became dependent, for chronic complaints such as a twisted colon.
As things started to fall apart, one memorable fit of paranoia erupted over Mike Stone, a karate instructor boyfriend of the by-then departed Priscilla. Presley actually demanded that a contract be taken out on Stone's life, but the moment of truth came when he was informed that $10,000 (£4,900) would see the job done. "Elvis immediately went pale," recalls Schilling. "His words had taken us right up to the edge of a terrifying cliff. He wasn't going to take us over it.
"'That's a little heavy,' he said. 'Let's just leave it alone for a while.'"
But perhaps the most bizarre example of Presley's sometimes spectacularly unpredictable behaviour was in December 1970, when, on the spur of the moment, he flew to Washington where, accompanied by a somewhat agitated Schilling and a trusted chauffeur, Sonny West, he handed a letter to the security guards at the White House, to be passed to the President, Richard Nixon. In it, he asked to be granted credentials as a "federal agent-at-large" in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The episode became increasingly surreal within the hour, as they indeed found themselves in the Oval Office, schmoozing with Tricky Dicky. The resulting photograph remains the most requested of all the documents in the possession of the US National Archive.
But Presley's star, his health and his state of mind were all in the descendant. Ultimately, however, Schilling doesn't believe that it was drugs that helped kill Presley at the age of 42, so much as his acute sense of creative disappointment and frustration. The price of being one of the highest-paid performers in Hollywood was the second and third-rate film scripts and other material with which he was landed. "I believe the drugs were just the Band-Aid," says his old friend. "You can't take a genius like he was and just give them the same old stuff."
Schilling walked away from the Memphis Mafia more than once, latterly to pursue a career managing Billy Joel and the Beach Boys, but maintained contact with Presley. It wasn't until he saw a posthumous screening of a CBS TV special filmed shortly before the singer's death that he realised how much he had become a bloated caricature of himself. "I never, in all the years I knew him, saw him look anything close to that," he tells me.
"I was furious with the Colonel and said, 'How could you have let him even walk on stage, let alone in front of a camera, like that?'" Not that he paints an entirely bad picture of the oft-maligned Parker: "He looks like the bad guy, he's got the image of the carnie and all that, and I had creative differences with him.
"But there were some great qualities about him. I just think he was more of a promoter than a creative guy. He would have been happy if Elvis had just done Bing Crosby-type Christmas shows."
So the young iconoclast whose gyrations shocked one generation and electrified another, was eventually crushed by the triumph of the anodyne.
Schilling, now 65, is currently much in demand for Elvis TV specials and, later this month, will host an "Elvis cruise" in the Bahamas. Cashing in on the anniversary? He is, after all, creative director of Elvis Presley Enterprises. However, he insists that he's turned down other lucrative Elvis-related offers: "For years after Elvis passed away, I didn't talk about him and I got on with my career. When I decided to write the book, four years ago, I had no idea when I would finish it."
Presley, he concludes, "was not about being normal. He was either hot or cold, no in between". Yet, he adds, "when people say to me, if I had just one wish, what would it be, I always say I'd just like to stay up all night, just shooting pool with Elvis".
• Me and a Guy Named Elvis is published by Penguin/Michael Joseph
Elvis Myths and Legends
ELVIS WAS AN ALIEN SOME fans attribute Elvis's uniqueness to the theory that he was not of this Earth - Elvis, surprisingly, was one of them. He believed that he may have arrived here from a blue star planet in the Orion constellation, mainly because of his father, Vernon, who said that on the night Elvis was born a dazzling blue light appeared in the sky above the Presleys' home. Some fans claim that Elvis had contact with "cosmic beings of light" as a child, and even believe that he didn't die in 1977, he just went back to his own planet. EP phone home?
ELVIS WAS GAY A RECENT biography, Elvis: The Hollywood Years, by celebrity writer David Bret, suggests that, despite his legions of girlfriends, Elvis was homosexual. Bret claims that his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, used his knowledge of the King's affair with actor Nick Adams to blackmail Elvis and keep him under his control. Several relatives and biographers of Presley have also made this claim, though most who knew him dismiss it, especially the women.
WAS IT REALLY ELVIS IN THAT COFFIN?IN 1977, National Enquirer magazine smuggled a mini-camera into the public viewing of his corpse at Graceland. The resulting published picture caused shock-waves among fans, because the figure in the coffin looked nothing like him. Rumour had it that a wax figure of Elvis was purchased by a Presley family member days after his death, and that this dummy had been used to cover up the fact that Elvis was still alive.
However, when the autopsy had been carried out, Elvis's internal organs, including his brain, were removed and not replaced, so it's unsurprising his form did not resemble its original state when stitched up again. His famous sideburns had to be glued back on to his face before the body was returned to his family for the funeral and viewing.
The coffin in which Elvis was buried weighed an astonishing 900 pounds, leading the wax-dummy conspiracy theorists to speculate that there was also an air-conditioning unit inside it to keep the effigy from melting.
In fact it was so abnormally heavy not because of that, nor as a result of the rock'n'roll star's obesity or heavy gold jewellery, but because - like his mother Gladys's before him - Elvis's coffin was lined with copper.
