Dish (23 page)

“The main attitude at the time was one of awe,” said a reporter who covered Elvis’s death for the
Pensacola News Journal.
“Nobody wanted to delve into the seedier side. Now, I keep wondering why we didn’t ask more questions.”

The Memphis Mafia was doing its best to hold off the press. No reporters were allowed into Graceland to view Elvis. Much to the dismay of Elvis’s inner circle, however, one reporter did get in. Her name was Caroline Kennedy. The daughter of the late President had been working as an intern at the New York
Daily News.
Columnist Pete Hamill, who was dating Jackie Onassis, got Caroline a summer job at the newspaper. When the news of Elvis’s death broke, Hamill was staying at Hyannis Port with the Kennedys. He immediately left for Memphis, taking the cub reporter with him.

When Caroline went to Graceland, people didn’t know that she was there as a journalist. Other reporters who noted her presence in Memphis assumed she was there as a celebrity visiting Elvis’s family, like actor George Hamilton, soul singer James Brown, and actress Ann-Margret. Elvis’s family and friends were honored that John Kennedy’s daughter was there to pay her respects. “Well, we were all impressed,” said Elvis’s friend, Memphis disc jockey George Klein. “We’d always been such Kennedy supporters, you know.” Elvis’s father, Vernon Presley, was especially touched by the gesture. “The bell rang, and I opened the door and said, ‘Caroline, come on in,’ ” Klein said. “That was a mistake. A big mistake.” Until he saw what Caroline wrote, Klein had no idea that she was there as a reporter. “That was a cheap shot way to get a story,” Klein said.

The
Daily News
decided not to run Caroline’s article. Some say she missed her deadline, others say the writing was simply terrible.
Rolling Stone
publisher Jann Wenner snatched up the rejected story. Jann was friendly with Jackie and had escorted Caroline to the theater. He also knew the impact of a Kennedy byline. He gave the manuscript to an editor who, staffers say, had to almost entirely rewrite the piece. “Graceland: A Family Mourns” didn’t contain any scoops or stunning insights; rather, it was a somewhat flat, cold-eyed description of Elvis in his coffin, surrounded by his mourning family and cronies. “The director of police, who looked like the advance man from
Nashville,
invited me into the house where a scarlet carpeted hall led into a large room filled with gold and white folding chairs,” Kennedy wrote. Priscilla Beaulieu Presley offered Kennedy a Coke or Seven-Up and introduced her to Elvis’s father, Vernon, some of his aunts and uncles, and his eighty-two-year-old grandmother. “At the far end of the room was the gleaming copper coffin that contained the body of Elvis Presley,” the article continued. “His face seemed swollen and his sideburns reached his chin … Potted plastic palms surrounded the coffin and on the wall was a painting of a skyline on black velveteen…. ‘He doesn’t look anything like himself,’ the woman beside me said softly.”

The article struck some as an astonishing breach of taste—coming, as it did, from someone whose mother not long ago had waged a bitter war with William Manchester over his account of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in his book,
The Death of a President.
Caroline—who would later write a book on peoples’ rights to privacy—made no apologies for the article. But when Vernon Presley read Caroline’s revelations, he was devastated. “She not only insulted the memory of Elvis,” Vernon said, “she insulted her own family name.”

Even without any Kennedys on staff, the
National Enquirer
was coming up with a fair number of Elvis exclusives. But no matter what they got, Pope seemed underwhelmed. “He kept screaming at us and giving us incredible grief,” recalled Kuncl. “He said that we didn’t have any blockbusters.” Members of Operation Elvis feared for their jobs. Then one reporter, the son of
a funeral director in Brooklyn, had an idea. At his father’s mortuary, he said, it was the custom to photograph the departed at rest in their coffins. The pictures made unique souvenirs of the funeral. Why not do the same for Elvis?

The
Enquirer
staff bought every camera they could find for miles around. They handed out the cameras—along with cash and promises of a lot more—to anyone who could snap a decent photo of Elvis in his coffin. “We thought it was a long shot,” said P. J. Corkery, then a features editor for the tabloid, “but we overlooked the fact that relatives and retainers and others would prove to be extraordinarily greedy. That night, people kept sneaking into the viewing room, snapping photographs and holding others with the same idea at gunpoint. Next morning, our cheeseburger-littered nerve center was also littered with photos of Elvis lying in state.”

The picture of Elvis in his white suit and copper coffin was plastered across the front page of the September 1, 1977, issue of the
National Enquirer
with the headline “ELVIS AT PEACE.” It became the best-seller in the history of the tabloid: 6,668,563 issues were sold—more than a million over the previous record holder, “How Freddie Prinze Rehearsed His Own Suicide.”

According to
National Enquirer
lore, the infamous picture was taken by a cousin of Elvis who used a $300 Minox supplied to him by the
Enquirer.
He was paid anywhere from $35,000 to $75,000. The Presley family hired a private detective to track down the traitor; he allegedly has been ostracized.

In another peculiar postmortem to the episode, after the picture ran, a group of
Enquirer
reporters stole it. The photograph was worth a lot of money to Elvis collectors, and the office burglars were tracked down, charged with corporate theft, and led away from the
Enquirer
offices in handcuffs.

The “Elvis at Peace” issue spawned an
Enquirer
tradition, indelicately referred to as the “celebrity in a box” picture.
Enquirer
reporters became notorious for trying to photograph stars in their coffins.
Enquirer
reporters used a ham operator to break into the walkie-talkie conversations of the security guards standing watch at Liberace’s funeral. A paparazzi working for the
Enquirer
parachuted onto Rock Hudson’s hearse. When Bing Crosby died,
the tabloid’s religion reporter disguised himself as a priest to get pictures of the singer. On the way out of the church, the reporter, still dressed in cleric’s robes, was stopped by ABC’s Geraldo Rivera, who asked him for an interview. The “priest” obliged and then chastised Rivera for invading the privacy of the mourning family. Not every “celebrity in a box” ended up on the cover of the
National Enquirer,
however. When Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994, the
Enquirer
editors had what one described as a “raging newsroom debate” about whether they should run a photo of the grunge star in his coffin. They ultimately decided not to, said one, because they thought it was “in bad taste”— although another source says the real reason was that they knew their readers weren’t Kurt Cobain fans.

The editors at the
National Enquirer
realized that their readers loved Elvis, dead or alive. The tabloid came up with plenty of excuses to put Elvis on its cover even after his death, reporting JFK-like conspiracies about the singer’s death: That Elvis was rubbed out by the Mafia to keep a lid on a $2 billion bond scam he knew about; that Elvis’s death was staged by the FBI so that the singer could become an undercover agent for the government; and, most popularly, that Elvis had faked his own death to escape the prying media.

Dick Stolley also learned a lesson from Elvis’s death. Because he—and the high-minded Time Inc. corporation—didn’t want to exploit the dead,
People
missed the biggest story of the decade. The magazine wouldn’t make that mistake again. On the first anniversary of the singer’s death—and on at least four occasions after that—
People
concocted a cover story about Elvis. Dead celebrities would become one of
People’s
sure-fire formulas for a best-selling issue: When John Lennon was shot in 1980,
People
put him on the cover without hesitation. That issue sold 2,664,000 on the newsstands—about a million more than usual, making the John Lennon memorial issue
People’s
best-seller to date. Thus, an amendment was added to Stolley’s “Pretty is better than ugly” formula of cover stories that sell. The new axiom: “Nothing is better than a dead celebrity.”

Many in the mainstream press were appalled by the coverage
of Elvis’s death. “Elvis was not an icon,” wrote syndicated Chicago
Sun-Times
columnist Mike Royko, “he was a con.” Royko was outraged that so many people seemed more distraught by Elvis’s death than they were when Kennedy was shot. “I think what Presley’s success really proves, is that the majority of Americans—while fine, decent people—have lousy taste in music.”

While editors and producers around the country may have agreed with Royko’s sneering assessment of Elvis’s music, the verdict on Elvis as a news subject was undeniable: he sold like crazy. That was a significant discovery in 1977, when newspapers were struggling to stay alive and network news producers were first grappling with the choice between profitability and respect. CBS News President Salant maintained that editors should base their news decisions on “what is important, rather than what is merely interesting,” but if they did, the viewers simply changed the channel. Elvis Presley’s death was a turning point in news coverage; it, more than any other single news event in recent history, proved to newspaper editors and television producers around the country that if you don’t cater to your audience, you lose it.

Two years after Elvis’s death, the episode was still fresh in the minds of producers at ABC who were looking for a way to rescue their nascent news magazine,
20/20.
The program was still in the trial stages, it was broadcast irregularly, and like
60 Minutes
in its early years, it was having trouble finding an audience.

Geraldo Rivera had been tapped as one of the show’s regular correspondents, and the biggest ratings grabber he had done for
20/20
was a segment on the bizarre life and death of Howard Hughes. “If it worked with Howard Hughes, it would work again,” Geraldo recalled. “I remember brainstorming it with [producer] Charlie Thompson, casting about for another larger-than-life celebrity who had lived and died under mysterious or at least unexplained circumstances.” The first person who came to mind was John F. Kennedy, but Geraldo had recently done a segment on Kennedy for another show,
Good Night America.
Rivera was a fan of actor James Dean, but he worried that Dean didn’t have the mass appeal he was looking for. Then he remembered Elvis, and what a ratings blockbuster his death had been. Now all he
needed was controversy. Geraldo had publicly and repeatedly disputed reports that Elvis had died of drugs, but now he was prepared to reverse his opinion. His producer Thompson had worked for the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
and was able to get into the “shit files” of the newspaper—where one of the paper’s reporters had dug up some unreleased results of the autopsy. The
Appeal
hadn’t published the information, which it allegedly considered too controversial at the time. By using the
Appeal’s
banned autopsy finding and Thompson’s contacts in Memphis, Geraldo came up with some explosive footage about the facts behind Elvis’s death. He and Thompson showed the executive producer for
20/20
what they had, and he decided to make it
20/20’s
season opener and to dedicate the entire program to it. The show, “The Elvis Cover-up,” was slotted for Thursday, September 13, 1979. If the ratings were low, it would probably signal the end for
20/20.

“The official investigation of the death of Elvis Presley, at least insofar as we have been able to determine, must rank among the worst, most unprofessional investigations of this type ever made,” Geraldo said. “Reporting this story has been a melancholy experience for me, because I wanted it not to be true…. But it was true. By the end of his life, Elvis had become a medical addict.”

Geraldo’s anguish was alleviated somewhat by the ratings for the “The Elvis Cover-up.” Forty-three percent of all people watching television that evening tuned in to watch the Elvis conspiracy. It ranked a stunning fourth that week, beating all other news show; only entertainment shows—
Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat,
and
Three’s Company
—did better. Most important, it beat the highly rated, highly respected
60 Minutes.
“It established me as top gun among
20/20
correspondents,” said Rivera, “and it established my team as the ass-kicking class of the industry.’’ Geraldo’s exposé would remain the most-watched segment in
20/20
history until Barbara Walters’s interview with Monica Lewinsky some twenty years later. Because of Elvis,
20/20
was awarded a regular time slot. Network news would never be the same.