Elvis Presley Lived His Life in Total Isolation as He Became ‘Intensely Lonely at Heart’

On January 28, 1956, Elvis Presley made his national TV debut. Ed Sullivan often gets credit for making him a star. But Presley’s first appearance was on the CBS series Stage Show, hosted by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. And it changed his life and American music forever.

Presley’s energy and unbridled sexuality delighted America’s youth and horrified parents. Fans went wild for the King of Rock and Roll. Hysterical mobs chased him wherever he went. As the years went by Presley increasingly avoided going out in public despite the warning he’d gotten from Stage Show‘s producer Jackie Gleason.

Jackie Gleason warned Elvis Presley to ‘go public’ before he became a superstar

Country Rebel said that after seeing Presley’s act, Stage Show host Tommy declared, “You see that guy Elvis Presley — he’s going to be one of the biggest names in show business in a short time.” But actor Jackie Gleason seemed less impressed. He said, “We’ll survive Elvis. He can’t last, I tell you flatly, he can’t last.”

But the actor and comedian who famously played Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners offered Presley some advice. In an interview from Elvis Australia, TV and radio host Larry King told Presley’s former girlfriend, Linda Thompson, what Gleason told Presley: “Gleason told him, ‘You are going to be a major star. Don’t hide. Go out to restaurants. Walk the streets. Go public, because if you hide, you’re gonna be the loneliest guy.'” 

“Wow,” Thompson replied. “I never knew that.” The former beauty queen, actress, and Oscar-nominated lyricist, lived with Presley for four and a half years. Thompson met him at a private movie screening in Memphis, Tennessee in 1972. She told King about meeting Presley, “He had on this black cape with a high collar and a red satin lining and I said ‘dressed a little like Dracula aren’t we?'” 

Ironically, Thompson said she decided not to marry him because she didn’t want to live like a vampire. “We were awake all night, sleeping all day. I didn’t want to bring more children into the world who would have to compromise their hours and the way they lived.” 

Presley’s mobs of fans drove him to total isolation

Teens who longed for singers who were more exciting and rebellious than Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra embraced Presley with a vengeance — sometimes literally.  By the time Presley met Thompson, the attention he enjoyed on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 had become a burden. Presley tried to avoid his fans by only going out at night.

Chicago Tribune reports that later on, during his residency in Las Vegas, Presley would not go out in public. Thompson and Presley didn’t leave their hotel room except to attend his shows. Armed guards stood outside the door to keep strangers away. Presley reportedly told a bellman at the hotel, “I’d give a million dollars if I could be a bellman for just one week … just so I could go downstairs and walk through the lobby.”

Thompson confirmed that they never went out. “The Beatles, everybody came to him. You know, everyone came to him. Barbara Streisand came to him, everybody who wanted to have an audience with him came to him,” she said.

Elvis Presley said he was ‘intensely lonely at heart’

During her years with Presley, Thompson watched his health decline as his isolation increased. He struggled with his weight, and the criticism he received because of it. “He was a very sensitive, acutely sensitive person to other people’s perceptions of him. And, you know, he just — it did hurt his feelings a lot,” Thompson remembered. “And he always used to say, ‘I’m intensely lonely at heart,'”

Presley tried to lose weight with “extreme” diets. People reports that a doctor even kept him sedated almost constantly for two weeks to keep him from eating, probably not the best treatment for a man already addicted to a variety of prescription drugs.

According to the Toronto Sun, his former wife Priscilla Presley said his drug abuse began while he was in the military. “They gave [drugs] to the soldiers over there to keep them awake. He had maneuvers that he had to do late at night, so the pills were given to the guys and that’s how he started,” she said.

In 1976 Thompson ended the relationship. “Well, after four-and-a-half years of the yo-yo back and forth of other women, up all night, sleeping all day, the drug abuse… I just realized that I probably was never gonna be able to help him the way I wanted to help him.” 

Eight months later, after years of excess, the fatal flaw he’d once admitted to Thompson finally caught up with him. “He said, ‘I’ll probably only admit this once, but I’ve got a self-destructive streak,'” Thompson revealed. “And it was evident in a lot of things but particularly in the way that, you know, he abused his body with prescription medication.”

On August 16, 1977, Presley’s new love, Ginger Alden, found him dead in the bathroom of his Graceland home at the age of 42. “I was in denial,” Alden said on the Today Show. “It was something that none of us expected. I, it’s, it’s still hard to this day.”