Call off the hunt! Elvis is really dead and the "king of rock 'n' roll" committed suicide with a huge drug overdose, Presley's controversial biographer said Friday.
"It's the dream gone to nightmare. It's perfect. It's the archetypal rags to riches to rot story," writer Albert Goldman said as advance copies of his Life magazine cover story were released to the media. "This is what happens."The story is getting a big ride in the June issue. "Thirteen years after the death of ELVIS PRESLEY new evidence points to an inescapable conclusion - SUICIDE" reads the copy alongside a photo of the King.
A private autopsy conducted following Presley's death in August 1977 put the cause of death as a heart attack. Through years of rumors about his death - including some saying Elvis staged his own funeral - the Presley estate has stuck with that finding.
A Friday morning phone call to Graceland, Presley's Memphis mansion, for comment on Goldman's claim from the Presley estate was not immediately returned.
Goldman stunned and infuriated millions of Presley fans around the world with his 1981 biography, "Elvis," which portrayed the King as an obese, impotent drug addict incapable of taking care of himself. Later, an unflattering Goldman book on the late John Lennon had the same effect on his fans.
Goldman had written in "Elvis" that the singer died of an accidental overdose.
But his conversations with David Stanley, Elvis' stepbrother and a fixture at Graceland, convinced Goldman that Presley had taken himself out. Stanley, one of the first people to see Elvis dead, says he knew all along it was suicide but had trouble accepting it.
"Several things convinced me. . . . He was too intelligent to overdose. He knew the PDR - Physicians' Desk Reference - inside and out," Stanley said Friday at a news conference at the Time & Life Building. The PDR is a standard reference book on the effects of various medicines.
The day he died, Elvis had consumed three packets of assorted drugs at once along with some codeine; the doses were usually spread out over eight hours, Stanley said.
Goldman points to Elvis' physical deterioration, his drug addiction and his depression over a tell-all book written by ex-bodyguards Red and Sonny West with Steve Dunleavy as three factors in the alleged suicide. Presley had also attempted suicide once before - on the eve of his marriage to Priscilla Beaulieu, Goldman said.
Stanley, himself a recovering drug addict, said that two days before Elvis' death, Presley indicated that he was not much longer for this world.
"He stood up in his bed, and started hugging me and crying. Then he told me, `David, I'm never going to see you again. The next time we meet will be in a different place,' " Stanley recalled.
Goldman said Stanley's story prompted more research, and he quickly became convinced Elvis had killed himself: "I began to see, uh-oh, boy, you've got the last 18 months wrong. Because this guy was three-quarters dead before he blew out the flame."