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33 Things You Should Know About Elvis Presley
33 Things You Should Know About Elvis Presley
33 Things You Should Know About Elvis Presley
14. For a time, he believed he could control the sprinkler system at the country club golf course behind his Los
Angeles home …
… using only mind power.
16. Elvis could pick hits. But he never wrote his own songs.
"There are exceptions, when he changed arrangements so drastically that he got a writer's credit," Ernst Jorgensen
says. "That's what happened on 'Don't Be Cruel' and 'All Shook Up.' But Elvis never saw himself as a writer."
17. He once slept with the entire chorus line of a French nightclub show.
On leave in Paris in 1959, Presley and several of his army friends took the dancers from the Lido nightclub back to
their hotel suite. The next afternoon, the Lido's manager called the hotel. He needed the girls back, he insisted, so he
could reopen for business that night.
20. He didn't think the Las Vegas comeback was going to work.
Sam Phillips went to Presley's opening night in Vegas in July 1968. "He combed his damn hair about 50 times before
he went out, and that was a pretty good indication that he was real nervous," Phillips recalls. "He hadn't been on the
stage for about nine years. But before he got through his opening medley, there was a standing ovation. And then
everything was over, baby!"
21. He once played the International in Las Vegas with a pistol in each boot.
In 1970, he received a death threat before a show. "If some son of a bitch tries to kill me," he said to bodyguards Red
and Sonny West, "I want you guys to get him. I want you to rip his goddamned eyes out. I don't want him sitting
around afterward like Charlie Manson with a grin on his face saying, 'I killed Elvis Presley.'"
22. Nobody planning to go to bed early ever invited the King to come by.
"When he came to the house," Phillips says, "he didn't want to impose, but he'd stay all night."
29. Nobody exactly knows who first said "Elvis has left the building."
"It would have been a stagehand in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1956," Jorgensen says. "It was basically to stop people
from tearing down the building trying to get in the stage doors. Al Dvorin, who was Elvis's announcer on tours in the
late '50s and the '70s, picked up the phrase. I think he even claims he invented it."
31. Elvis had at least 11 different drugs in his system when died on August 16, 1977.
Among them were Butabarbital, codeine, Demerol, Placidyl, morphine, Pentobarbital, Quaaludes and Valium.