Elvis Presley was scheduled to board his private plane, the Lisa Marie, on the evening of August 16, 1977, for a flight from Memphis to Portland, Maine, where a new concert tour was set to begin. The Convair 880 was fueled, the gold-plated seat belts were polished, and the crew had filed the flight plan. The call for departure never came. Instead, at 2:33 p.
m. that afternoon, an ambulance raced down Elvis Presley Boulevard toward Baptist Memorial Hospital. Ron Strauss, the co-pilot who had flown Presley across America for two years, would never pilot the famous passenger again. For decades, the men who flew Elvis kept quiet about what they had witnessed during his final months.
The Lisa Marie was far more than transportation. Presley purchased the aircraft from Delta Airlines in April 1975 for $250,000 and spent another $800,000 transforming it into a flying palace. It featured suede chairs in the living room, a conference room with a mahogany table, and a private bedroom in the rear. Seat belts were plated in 24-karat gold, and the bathroom sinks were flecked with gold dust.
The crew operated on call 24 hours a day. Captain Elwood David flew left seat, with Strauss beside him as co-pilot. Jim Manny served as flight engineer. Strauss later recalled that Presley rarely traveled in daylight because fame had made him a prisoner.
The calls often came at 1 a. m. or 2 a. m.
, and the crew would scramble to the airport and take him wherever he wanted to go. There was a famous middle-of-the-night trip to Denver when Presley craved a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from a particular restaurant. There was another trip to Vail when he decided to buy Cadillacs for friends, purchasing four cars and a pickup truck because one of his buddies preferred trucks. He was generous, impulsive, and untethered from ordinary life.
Strauss also noticed something concerning. Presley would come up to the cockpit on almost every trip, friendly and curious about the instruments. But as the months passed, the man climbing those cockpit stairs looked less like the Elvis the world remembered. By 1976, the decline was unmistakable.
Presley stayed awake for days, wired on prescription medications administered freely by his personal physician, Dr. George Nichopoulos. Then he would crash, sleeping for 18 to 20 hours straight, missing appointments and rehearsals. His weight fluctuated wildly.
On some flights, Strauss noticed that Presley could barely make it up the stairs, his legs shaking, his face slick with sweat. Between mid-March 1976 and the end of June 1977, a period of 16 months, Presley spent 141 days on tour. The pilots saw him being helped onto the plane after shows, too exhausted to walk on his own. They saw him surrounded by prescription bottles.
They saw the fear in the eyes of the people around him, the unspoken knowledge that something terrible was coming. About six months before his death, something happened in Louisville, Kentucky, that should have changed everything. Larry Geller, Presley’s longtime friend and spiritual adviser, was with him on tour. Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s manager, arrived unannounced and went into the bedroom.
When the door opened briefly, Geller glimpsed Presley semi-conscious, with Dr. Nick dunking his head into a bucket of ice water to revive him. Geller thought the colonel had finally seen the reality and that someone would cancel the tour. About 90 seconds later, Parker walked out.
He stopped in front of Geller and said, “The only thing that’s important is that man is on that stage tonight. Nothing else matters. ” That night, Elvis performed. Concert reviews from that period are painful to read in retrospect.
In Miami in February, a reviewer described an aging star going through the motions. In Charlotte, a reporter noted Presley’s total disregard for his swollen face and puffy eyes. In Philadelphia in May, a critic wrote that he performed as if just roused from a drunken slumber, adding that dolphins performed more affectingly. Still, the tours continued.
On May 29, 1977, Presley walked off the stage in the middle of a concert in Baltimore. He stopped performing, mumbled something about nature calling and a twisted ankle, and disappeared backstage for half an hour. When he returned, he told the audience there was nothing wrong with his health. The people filing out knew better.
His final tour began on June 17, 1977, in Springfield, Missouri: 10 cities, 10 shows, 10 days. The Lisa Marie carried him from city to city. CBS television cameras filmed footage for a special that would air after his death. The footage shows Presley visibly unwell, bloated and sweating, struggling to remember lyrics.
His estate has refused to officially release the special for decades. Still, his voice remained. When he sang “Unchained Melody” in Rapid City on June 21, sitting at a piano in his white jumpsuit, the notes were as pure as anything he had ever recorded. The body was failing.
The voice remained. The crew flew Presley to his final concert on June 26, 1977, at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis. Seventeen thousand people packed the arena. Before the show, Presley reportedly told someone close that his body really hurt but that he was going out there anyway.
The show must go on, he believed. He was thinking about the people who depended on him. The Indianapolis Star reported that Presley led the crowd into “Banana Land” and that he still had the magic that had made him Elvis Presley. When the final notes of “Can’t Help Falling in Love” faded, Elvis Presley walked off a concert stage for the last time in his life.
The Lisa Marie carried him back to Memphis that night. For the next seven weeks, he stayed close to Graceland, resting and preparing for the next tour scheduled to begin on August 17 in Portland, Maine. The itinerary was brutal: 12 cities in 11 days, ending with two homecoming shows in Memphis. Tickets had been sold.
Venues had been booked. The machinery of his career ground forward. On the evening of August 15, Elvis was at Graceland. He played racquetball with his cousin Billy Smith until 4 a.
m. He sat at the piano and sang gospel songs for a small group. The last song he played, according to those present, was “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. ” Around 5 a.
m. , he went upstairs to his master suite and into the bathroom to read. He was 42 years old. He had less than 14 hours left to live.
The call came to the flight crew in the early afternoon of August 16. Elvis Presley was dead. Ginger Alden found him face down on the bathroom floor around 2 p. m.
Joe Esposito, his road manager, rushed upstairs and immediately knew it was too late. An ambulance was summoned, but attempts at resuscitation failed. Elvis Aaron Presley was pronounced dead at 3:30 p. m.
Central time. The tour was cancelled. The Lisa Marie sat silent on the tarmac at Memphis International Airport. The gold-plated seat belts would never hold him again.
But the plane had one more flight to make. The crew was dispatched to California to bring back the family. Priscilla Presley and 9-year-old Lisa Marie were in Los Angeles when they got the news. Ron Strauss flew them all back to Memphis for the funeral, a flight he would later describe as the hardest of his career.
They landed on August 17. By then, crowds had begun to gather outside the gates of Graceland. Estimates ranged from 50,000 to 80,000 people. The world had never seen anything like it.
In the years after Elvis’s death, the flight crew rarely spoke publicly. But Ron Strauss eventually opened up. He talked about Elvis coming up to the cockpit to say hello and the charisma that radiated from him even in his final days. He kept the TCB chain Elvis gave him.
“Taking care of business” was Elvis’s motto, and he gave those chains to the people he liked—TCB to the men, TLC to the women. Vernon Presley sold the Lisa Marie in 1978, needing money to keep Graceland running. The plane changed hands a few times, sitting in hangars and gathering dust. When Graceland opened to the public in 1982, Elvis Presley Enterprises began working to bring it home.
After two years of negotiations, in 1984, the Convair 880 touched down in Memphis for the final time and was towed across Elvis Presley Boulevard to its current resting place on the Graceland grounds. Visitors can still walk through the Lisa Marie, sit in the suede chairs, and see the bedroom where Elvis slept between shows. The plane will never fly again. Its engines are silent.
The official cause of death was cardiac arrhythmia. But everyone who knew him understood the truth was more complicated than any death certificate could capture. Elvis Presley had been dying for years in front of everyone, and nobody had been able to save him. The last flight of the Lisa Marie with Elvis aboard happened on June 26, 1977, returning from Indianapolis after his final concert.
The last flight it ever made in service to the Presley family was on August 17, carrying Priscilla and Lisa Marie to say goodbye. Between those two flights, rock and roll lost its king. The men who flew Elvis through the final chapter of his life were left with memories that stayed with them forever.