Their Last Suppers: Legends of History and Their Final Meals (17 page)

• Remove outer leaves of cabbage, cut into four, then remove the core and shred finely.
  
• Put in colander and place over boiling water. Steam for 3 to 4 minutes and remove cabbage from steam.
  
• Place butter and champagne in large pan and heat gently. When butter and champagne are blended, whisk lightly, add cabbage, and season to taste. Serve immediately.
  

ELVIS AARON PRESLEY

On January 8, 1935, after 10 hours of labor, an exhausted Gladys Presley finally gave birth to the son she had always prayed for. As her husband, Vernon, rushed to her side, he saw the sadness on the doctor’s face. The baby was stillborn. But his uncle put his hand on her stomach and said, “But Vernon, I think there’s another baby in there.” The doctor rushed back to her side. “He’s right! There’s a twin.”

And so 30 minutes later, at 4:35 a.m., Elvis Aaron Presley was brought into the world. As his brother, Jesse Garon, was buried the next day in an unmarked grave in a cardboard box, the extraordinary life of the man who would always be called The King began in a dismal two-room shack in Tupelo, Mississippi.

From the beginning of his life Elvis was surrounded by music. His mother picked cotton during the day in the heat of the Mississippi sun, pulling her 1-year-old son behind her on a bundle of rags. Blacks and whites worked side by side in the cotton fields of
the 1930s, and their singing and humming helped ease the burden of the long monotonous hours. In church every Sunday the choirs sang part gospel, part blues, and the young Elvis stood eagerly mouthing the music along with them.

When Elvis was 4, his father made him a guitar from an old cigar box, a broom handle, and some fishing line, and Elvis stood for hours belting out any tunes he could remember.

As his father drifted in and out of jail, Elvis grew even closer to his mother, who encouraged his musical leanings by taking him to different churches to hear other choirs. By the time he was 8 years old he was wandering through the town by himself, looking for anyone to sing a tune with. By 9 he had a repertoire of hillbilly songs and was hanging outside the local radio station (WELO) singing along to the sounds of his hero, Tupelo’s “King of Country,” Mississippi Slim.

As with many children in a broken marriage, the relationship with his mother shaped his life in many ways. As a child Elvis loved potato salad with his all-time favorite, deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches as a main course. He hated fish and most vegetables, and his adoring mother made no attempt to change his eating habits. Double batter-fried chicken when available, meatloaf, and hamburgers were all Elvis ever knew, and although he was a lanky, lean teenager, the seeds of his eventual ill health were being sown.

At the age of 17, Elvis was nearly 6 feet tall, with sandy blond hair and heavy acne. He started dyeing his hair black at the age of 19, a look he kept forever, and as he started to make records and his fame grew, plastic surgery corrected the acne and all his teeth were capped.

Considered too risqué for mainstream America, with his gyrations and excessive body movements (they would film him only from the waist up on TV), his concerts sold out nonetheless. Hollywood signed him to do a stream of B movies, all based around Elvis getting the girl and singing his current hits. As he came under the control of manager Colonel Parker, his mother began to see her baby slipping away from her and so followed his father down the path of alcoholism, taking amphetamines and any other available pills to ease the pain of her life.

She and Elvis always used baby-talk to each other on their frequent phone calls when he was on the road, but unbeknown to him she was slipping fast. Finally admitted to Memphis Hospital on August 9, 1958 with severe cirrhosis of the liver, she died on August 14 at the age of only 46.

Elvis mourned his mother for days, blaming himself for leaving her and angry about the poverty she’d had to endure and about how, just when he could give her anything she wanted, she’d been taken away from him. This loss apparently created a scar that never healed.

He was unable to sleep, and the doctors gave him tranquilizer shots and the first of many sleeping pills to help get him through the traumatic days ahead. Those days became years.

Sobbing on her casket at the funeral, Elvis cried, “Goodbye darling, goodbye darling … lived my whole life for you, we’ll keep the house, everything you loved, we won’t change a thing.”

Sick the next day, with a temperature of 102°F, Elvis received friends in his bedroom at Graceland, a habit that continued for the rest of his life, as he retreated into a world where he lived at night and slept all day.

With the passing of his mother, Elvis threw himself even further into his career. Gold record followed gold record, and the money and the women rolled in. He became more and more dependent on medication for his sleep and found no shortage of doctors and hangers-on to get him the pills he needed daily. Just as destructive as the drugs, his love affair with junk food continued unabated. His appetite was becoming legendary. At one sitting he ate eight deluxe cheeseburgers, two bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches, and three chocolate shakes.

Over the years the excessive food and drugs caused major changes in his physical appearance. The Elvis who weighed only 170 pounds at age 20 was 75 pounds heavier 10 years later and still growing.

In 1974 a special medical team was installed in Graceland to help wean him off fat-laden pork chops, chicken-fried steaks, and the plates of cakes and cookies he could down effortlessly, all prepared for him by his loyal cooks.

Recommending a breakfast of two poached eggs, orange juice, and coffee to start the day right, the doctor was stunned to find
Elvis having his preferred breakfast of three double cheeseburgers, half a pound of fries, and a pound of bacon burnt to a crisp as a side dish.

Drastic dieting to prepare him for an upcoming movie or concert would help drop 20 pounds or more, but in a matter of weeks the weight would be replaced, usually with a little interest.

One particular night with pals, he had a craving for his favorite sandwich, “Fool’s Gold Special,” which was made of creamy peanut butter, grape jelly, and crisp lean bacon, piled inside a hollowed-out loaf sliced lengthwise and deep fried. A restaurant called the Colorado Gold Mine Company in the Rockies made it. Undeterred by the distance, he loaded his friends into his private plane and landed at Stapleton Airport after midnight, where the restaurant owner was waiting with twenty-two full sandwiches, a case of champagne, and a case of Perrier. Each sandwich contained more than 42,000 calories.

Elvis began to miss concert appearances, sometimes almost collapsing on stage, as his drug-filled body could not cope with the demands he placed on it. At the heart of everything was the terrible loneliness he’d felt since the death of his mother. Numerous women had passed through over the years, but with the exception of Priscilla Presley, whom he’d wooed when she was a 14-year-old girl in Germany and later married, none could fill the void he seemed to feel.

On May 28, 1977, while performing at the Philadelphia Spectrum, he couldn’t remember the lyrics of his songs and was staggering about the stage. The next night, in Baltimore, his voice was so weak the audience couldn’t hear him. He dropped the microphone, and eventually an assistant had to hold it for him.

It was his last set. He had taken more than 128 doses of drugs during the tour. His crew had discreetly started carrying oxygen tanks around in case they needed to revive him. On August 16 Elvis showed no signs of being ready to hit the road again. Normally he would go on a Jell-O diet to lose weight, or he would starve himself for days on end to fit into the only two jumpsuits he could wear. But as he climbed the stairs of Graceland with his girlfriend, Ginger Alden, on August 16, 1977, Elvis called down for some “ice cream and cookies, but not as much as usual,” because he’d just finished eating spaghetti and meatballs.

As always, he was plagued by insomnia that night and took two packets of his prescription drugs, not mentioning to Ginger that he had codeine and morphine hidden in his huge bathroom along with numerous other medications.

After tossing about for a while he apparently still couldn’t sleep, so he rolled away from the sleeping Ginger and went off to his bathroom. She woke just after 2 a.m., and seeing the bed empty and the light still on in his bathroom she went to look for him. There on the floor, on his knees, was the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, Elvis Presley, dead at the age of 42.

The autopsy stated that he died of hypertensive heart disease. He weighed nearly 350 pounds at death, and it took five large men to lift him down the stairs to the hospital.

On August 18, 1977, with more than 4,500 floral tributes and tens of thousands of screaming mourners lining the streets, Elvis Aaron Presley was finally returned to his mother’s side at Forest Hill Cemetery, Memphis, Tennessee.

A man who had everything—looks and talent, fame and money—could not cope with the loneliness within him. Each year more than 6 million fans pay homage to him at his Graceland home. The King lives on.

MENUS

Elvis Presley’s last meal was a simple snack of frosted cookies and ice cream, although a couple of hours earlier he ate spaghetti and meatballs, one of his all-time favorites.

Favorite Foods

Fried Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwich

Ham Pancakes

Hawaiian Hamburgers

Baked Apple and Sweet Potato Pudding

Ham Bone Dumplings

The golden rule at Graceland, Elvis’s home, was that breakfast, his favorite meal, was to be served all day, except mornings. Even the menu for his wedding to Priscilla on May 1, 1967, at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, reflected Elvis’s consuming love affair with food.

Wedding Menu

Ham and Eggs

Southern Fried Chicken

Oysters Rockefeller

Roast Suckling Pig

Poached and Candied Salmon

Lobster

Eggs Minnette

Wedding Cake

Champagne

• Try to time the spaghetti so it is cooked at the same time as the sauce.
  

  Meatballs
  :
  

  2 lb ground beef
  

  2 beaten eggs
  

  1 chopped onion
  

  4 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
  

  ¼ cup tomato ketchup
  

  1 tsp oregano
  

  salt and pepper to taste
  

   
  
• Lightly sauté onion in pan and then combine with all other ingredients and roll into golfball-size balls. Lightly brown meatballs in the frying pan and remove.
  
• Elvis liked a heavy tomato sauce with his meatballs, and if you use sauce from a jar, lightly heat sauce and put meatballs in to simmer for about 10 minutes; add six whole peeled tomatoes and about 1 cup of tomato juice.
  
• Put spaghetti in boiling water for allotted time, remove from heat, strain, and mix in large bowl with meatball sauce. Sprinkle with finely chopped oregano and Parmesan cheese and serve.
  

• Mix bananas and peanut butter together; make sandwiches and lightly fry in melted butter until golden brown on both sides.