Thousands of devoted fans around the country will gather this week to mark the twentieth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, but it is unlikely that any of them will feel that perhaps they might just have been able to save the king of rock and roll. That distinction—sort of—belongs to former President Jimmy Carter.
“When I was first elected President, I got a call from Elvis Presley,” Carter told me recently. “He was totally stoned and didn’t know what he was saying. His sentences were almost incoherent.” It was the summer of 1977, and Elvis, in a rage fuelled by barbiturates, had telephoned the White House from Graceland (among the two most visited residences in America) seeking a Presidential pardon for a sheriff he knew was in some legal trouble. “I talked to him for a long time, and I finally extracted that from him,” Carter recalled. In a scene weirdly reminiscent of the “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which the thirty-ninth President (played by Dan Aykroyd) used the White House hot line to talk a teen-ager down from a bad acid trip, Carter said he patiently tried to ease Presley out of his paranoid delusions, calming his fears that he was being “shadowed” by sinister forces and that his friend was being framed….
Carter recalled, “I asked him what the sheriff’s sentence was, and he said that he hadn’t been tried in court yet. Well, I said, ‘Elvis, I can’t consider a pardon until after a trial and sentencing and everything.’ I don’t think he understood that.”… Though Presley’s desperate calls to the White House continued unabated, Carter never spoke to him again.
—Douglas Brinkley, Dept. of Missed Opportunities, Talk of the Town, August 18, 1997
