The phone rang at four in the morning at her aunt’s house in Memphis. Her aunt answered in her politest Southern voice, said “Why, yes, she is — just a moment please,” and then turned around wide-eyed: “Oh my God. It’s Elvis Presley on the phone.” The young woman who took that call was Linda Thompson, and she had met him only hours earlier. What Elvis said was simple and direct: he just wanted her to know how happy he was to have met her — and “don’t disappear on me.” Then he asked her to come to Graceland the next day and meet his father.
She was 22 years old and had just been crowned Miss Tennessee USA. Elvis was 37, and had recently separated from Priscilla. Linda has always been careful to say what he was like that night: very proper, very much the gentleman. She went the next day — but she took her friend Jeannie along as a chaperone, because, as she put it, she was still very much an innocent and rather naive.
She stayed for four and a half years.
Life at Graceland ran on Elvis’s clock, which meant nights instead of days, and Linda was in the middle of all of it. But the reason her story matters isn’t the fame or the shopping trips. It’s what she did when things went wrong. In November 1973, Elvis was admitted to Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis and stayed for eighteen days. Linda didn’t visit. She moved in. The hospital bent its own rules and put a cot in his room so she could sleep beside him. Her rule was absolute: “Whenever he went to the hospital, I went to the hospital. So it was ‘we’ went to the hospital.”
Linda Thompson Shares Her Life with Elvis: Their First Meeting and Living Together
There’s one morning she has described that stays with you. Around seven o’clock, lying in bed beside him, she sensed something wrong with his breathing. She shook him and asked if he was all right. His answer was “I can’t get my breath!” It was pneumonia. She called for the nurse, oxygen was brought over, and he was rushed to the hospital. She stayed with him for two and a half weeks.
Linda has been remarkably clear-eyed about what that relationship actually asked of her. Her assessment of him is one of the most quoted things anyone who loved him ever said: “Elvis needed more love and care than anybody I’ve ever met. Probably more than anybody in this world ever has.” She traced it back to where he came from — a man who was somehow both the most famous person alive and a poor boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, who never quite stopped needing a mother figure nearby.
She left in 1976, worn out. They stayed in touch, and she has noted the timing quietly ever since: he died only eight months after she went. What happened to her afterward is its own remarkable story. She married Olympic champion Bruce Jenner in 1981, and later composer David Foster — with whom she began writing song lyrics. In 1992 she co-wrote “I Have Nothing” for Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard. It earned her Grammy and Academy Award nominations. The 22-year-old beauty queen who answered a 4 a.m. phone call ended up writing one of the biggest ballads of the nineties.