Elvis’s Secret Diary: Divorced, Alone, and Watched by a Billion Eyes D

There’s a page in this diary worn soft at the corner like it’s been touched too many times in the dark. It’s dated January 14th, 1973. The night 1 billion people, they say, watched a single man sing live by satellite. And he still wrote down that he had never in his life felt so alone. I almost didn’t want to read this one out loud, but I think somebody should finally hear it in his own words exactly the way he set it down that night.

So, I’ll stop talking now and let him tell it. January 14th, 1973, Honolulu, Hawaii. I woke up before the sun in a hotel room 14 floors above the Pacific. And for a minute I didn’t know why my chest felt so tight. Then I remembered tonight. Tonight I was going to walk out onto a stage at the Honolulu International Center and somewhere past the curtain, past the cameras, past a satellite dish pointed straight up at the sky.

More people were going to watch me at one time than had ever watched one man do anything anywhere in the history of this world. They kept saying that number to me like it was supposed to make me feel 10 ft tall, a billion. I heard it and I felt smaller than I had in years. I lay there a long while listening to an ocean I couldn’t even see, just hearing it through the glass.

And I thought about how strange a thing it was that the loneliest I’d felt in my whole life was the very week I was about to belong to more people than I ever had before. Priscilla wasn’t down the hall anymore. Hadn’t been in a long time now. Lisa Marie wasn’t back in Memphis waiting on me to come home and swing her up onto my shoulders and call her my little buttercup.

It was just me in that room, the ache in my knees from two months of rehearsal, a room service tray gone cold that I hadn’t touched, and a whole world getting ready to look at me. Priscilla and I signed the papers a few months back. It isn’t final yet in the eyes of the law, but it’s final in every way that counts in a man’s chest.

I still think about the day she drove off Graceland’s grounds with her suitcases in the back seat. How quiet that big house got after. How I’d walk from room to room that used to be full of noise and hear nothing coming back at me but my own footsteps. I don’t blame her. Not really. I gave the stage what a husband’s supposed to give a wife, and I knew it even while I was doing it.

And I went on and did it anyway, year after year, town after town. So here I was about to hand the whole world the biggest night of my career, and there wasn’t a soul in that hotel room to zip up my jumpsuit and tell me I looked fine, nerves and all. Just Charlie Hodgej down the hall and Colonel outworking the telephones, same as always, making this thing bigger and bigger until it swallowed the whole sky.

Lying there in the dark, I told myself I was going to prove something tonight. Not to Priscilla, not even to the fans exactly, to myself. That 38 years old wasn’t finished. that a divorced man with a tired body and a heart still bruised from home could walk under those lights one more time and be Elvis Presley the way I was before any of it got so complicated.

I needed that stage tonight the way another man needs a drink or needs a prayer said over him. Marty Pacetta, the man directing the whole broadcast, had sat across from me back in November and told me straight to my face that if I walked out looking soft and puffy, a billion people were going to see it in sharp focus and never forget it.

Nobody talked to me like that anymore. Not since my daddy. I respected him for it more than he ever knew. So for two months I did something I’d never had the discipline for before. Cut back hard. Ran in place backstage till my lungs burned. Dropped near 25 lb so that eagle on my jumpsuit would catch the light the way it was built to.

That jumpsuit. white collar standing up high and across the back and the cape an American eagle worked in rhinestones with its wings spread wide like it was fixing to fly right off my shoulders. I stood in front of the dressing room mirror that afternoon and barely knew the man looking back at me. Not sick, not soft, just still solid.

Like maybe, just maybe, I really could carry the weight of this whole night on my back. For two weeks before that, I’d rehearsed until my throat felt raw and my legs shook just standing still. James Burton working that guitar of his like it was talking back to me note fornotee. the sweet inspirations behind me holding notes I couldn’t always reach on my own anymore propping me up with their voices without ever once making it look like propping JD Sumner down low with the stamps that bass of his rattling clear through the floorboards Joe Gersio running the orchestra through the same 20some songs again and again until even Colonel finally said that’s enough now boys let the man rest his voice. Some nights I’d catch myself sitting on the edge of a folding chair between numbers, shirt soaked through, wondering if I still had it in me at 38, wondering

if a man could really build the biggest night of his whole life out of exhaustion and a broken heart and still make it look easy for a camera. Outside, the crew had been building for a week straight. satellite dishes big as houses, cable running everywhere backstage like veins under skin. They told me this signal was going to bounce clear off space and land live in Japan, in Korea, in Australia, in a hundred places I’d never once set foot in and likely never would.

Funny thing, folks back home in America wouldn’t even see it that night. NBC was holding the broadcast back for springtime. Here I was singing live to the other side of the earth before my own country got a look. By 7 that evening, the arena was already roaring. And I hadn’t even stepped out yet.

9,000 seats, every single one filled. Folks in lays and bright aloha shirts fanning themselves in that warm island air. and every dollar from every ticket going to start a cancer fund named after Kooi Lee, a songwriter who wrote some of the prettiest island songs I ever sang and died of it far too young before he ever got to see how far his music traveled.

I liked that part best of the whole night. It made the spectacle feel like it was standing for something bigger than just me under those lights, like maybe some good could come out of all this noise besides another headline with my name on it. Backstage 10 minutes before curtain, I stood in a dark hallway with my hand flat against the cinder block, just breathing.

My heart was going harder than before any show I could call to mind. And Lord knows I’ve walked out onto some big stages in my time. That number kept turning over in my head. A billion. I tried to shrink it down into something I could hold on to. Told myself it’s just people. Same as always. A man in Manila, a woman in Melbourne, a boy in Seoul.

All of them only wanting two hours where the world made a little more sense. I’d been giving people that since I was 19 years old in a little recording studio on Union Avenue with nothing to my name but a guitar and a prayer. Charlie patted my shoulder, said, “You got this, boss. Easy as anything.” Then I heard the orchestra tuning up.

That low hum before a storm breaks, and out past the black curtain, the fanfare started to rise. They cued also Sprock Zerahustra, that same thundering fanfare I’d walked out to a hundred nights running. Only this time, it felt like it was announcing something bigger than any one concert. The lights caught that eagle across my back, and the second I stepped through the curtain, the sound coming up out of that crowd nearly knocked me back on my heels.

Flashbulbs popping like sheet lightning, girls on their feet before I’d sung a single note. I took hold of the mic and let CC Rider carry me in. And something happened that always happens, no matter how hollow or tired I am walking out there, the moment my voice hits that first line, the ache goes quiet just for a while.

That stage has always been the one place on this earth that never once asked me a hard question. I moved through the songs I figured would travel best across an ocean and a satellite signal. Burning love, my hips still finding that old rhythm even in a body I’d worked so hard to lighten. Suspicious minds.

And I looked out past the lights, past the cameras with their little red recording eyes, and tried to picture that boy in soul, that woman in Melbourne, and sing it straight at them like I’d promised myself in the dark that morning, I would. Between numbers, I joked a little, wiped my face with a scarf, and flung it out into the crowd, watched hands fight over it like it was something holy.

For those minutes, I wasn’t a lonely, divorced man alone in a hotel room. I was just a voice going everywhere on earth at once. But it was the trilogy that undid me. That medley I’d built out of Dixie and the battle hymn and that old slave spiritual stitched together into one song about a country and a sorrow bigger than any single man’s troubles.

The lights dropped low and blew, and I stood there with my arms out wide like I was trying to hold the whole arena up by myself. And I sang the way I used to sing in the Assembly of God church back in Tupelo. A barefoot boy who didn’t have two nickels to rub together long before any of this. the money, the movies, the marriage, the divorce, the fame that turns into its own kind of cage around a man.

For those four minutes, I wasn’t thinking about Priscilla or Lisa Marie, or the empty rooms waiting for me back at Graceand, or that number, a billion, that had been sitting on my chest all day like a stone laid flat over my heart. I was just a voice reaching for something higher than I was, my cape catching the light like real wings.

And when I hit that last high note and held it, I heard 9,000 people come up out of their seats at once. And for one single moment, the loneliness just stopped. Went quiet the way a room goes quiet right after thunder. I opened my eyes and saw grown men crying down in the third row. I thought of my mama gone 15 years now.

And I thought, satin, I hope you’re watching this somehow, because I don’t know that I’ve ever sung anything closer to the truth of what’s sitting in me. That’s the strange gift of this life. The more it empties a man out, the more it seems to want from his voice. And somehow some nights you find you’ve still got it in you to give.

The show ended and the applause ran on so long they had to bring the house lights up just to get folks moving toward the doors. Colonel came backstage grinning like a man who just watched his horse win by 10 lengths. Already talking about how many countries had carried it live. Already talking numbers again.

I let him talk. I was too worn out to do anything but nod along. Later, alone in the dressing room, jumpsuit hanging on its rack, sweat gone cold on the back of my neck, I sat down in front of that mirror ringed with light bulbs, and looked at a man who’ just done the biggest thing of his whole career and felt underneath the ringing still in my ears almost nothing at all.

No wife down the hall, no little girl to call and tell about it. Not till it was daytime back in Memphis. Anyway, I picked up the telephone once and near dialed the number for Graceand before I remembered the hour back home, the middle of the night. Lisa Marie, long asleep in her crib with somebody else tucking her blanket in instead of me.

I set the receiver down soft so it wouldn’t even click like I might wake her clean across the ocean just by wanting so bad to hear her breathe. Just Charlie knocking soft on the door after that asking if I needed anything and me telling him no just water and quiet please just quiet. I keep thinking, sitting here writing this by lamplight, a billion people watched me tonight, and not one of them was in this room with me.

Funny thing about being loved by that many strangers all at once. It doesn’t fill the same hole that one person leaving behind empties out of a man. I proved what I set out to prove tonight. I know that much, sitting here with my hands still shaking a little. I’m just not sure yet what it cost me or if I’ll ever really know the full price of it.

I closed the diary right there, past midnight Hawaii time. That same ocean still going outside my window. Same as it had been before any of this ever happened. Same as it’ll be long after I’m gone.