At around three in the morning in the summer of 1975, a small Chow puppy named Getlo started behaving strangely at Graceland. Elvis Presley’s girlfriend Linda Thompson noticed something was badly wrong and called out a vet in the middle of the night. The vet examined the dog, then delivered the verdict nobody wanted: “I don’t think the dog will make it through the night.”
Getlo had a congenital kidney condition. He was less than a year old. What Elvis did in the next few hours has become one of the most-told stories among people who knew him.
He didn’t accept it. He got on the phone, leased a Learjet, and arranged a flight to Boston — where there was a specialist clinic that could provide the dog with kidney dialysis. On board went Getlo, Linda, her friend Jeannie LeMay, and the vet. This was 1975. Dialysis for a dog was not something ordinary people had ever heard of. Elvis is reported to have spent tens of thousands of dollars making it happen.
The journey wasn’t smooth. By the time they landed, Getlo was too sick to travel on to the veterinary hospital at West Boylston. So the whole party checked into a hotel in Boston and waited two days until the dog was strong enough to continue. Picture it: the most famous singer on earth paying for a suite so a puppy could rest before its hospital appointment.
Watch Linda tell the whole story here!
Linda Thompson (Elvis’ Girlfriend) Graceland Elvis Week 2025 Conversations about Elvis
Getlo stayed in intensive care in Boston for about three months. Elvis kept paying. When the dog was finally well enough, he was flown home to Memphis, where his treatment carried on. For a while it looked like it had all worked.
It hadn’t. Getlo died not long afterward, still under a year old. Elvis was on tour when the news came through. Linda described the moment they were told — they were flying home on his own plane when somebody broke it to him. Her account of what happened next is three words long: “Elvis just cried.”
If this seems out of character for a man known for gold suits and Cadillacs, it wasn’t. Elvis was surrounded by animals his whole life and had once wanted to turn Graceland into a zoo. Over the years he kept Great Danes named Brutus and Snoopy, a basset hound called Sherlock, a collie, a poodle, a Pomeranian named Edmund that he gave away to his aunt because the two of them bonded so instantly, and — for a spell — donkeys living in an empty swimming pool. He gave his mother a little dog called Sweet Pea in 1956, and gave Priscilla a poodle puppy named Honey for Christmas. He even had a mynah bird that learned to repeat all the excuses it heard around the house — “Elvis is asleep,” “Elvis isn’t here” — and would run through the whole list at once, which Elvis reportedly thought was the funniest thing in the world.