Elvis: The Final Years

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Looking at the list of mistakes above I recall a comment in Hopkin’s book. He writes of Elvis in 1975, "He took the easy way… he put his career on "automatic pilot" and stopped growing. He weakened his standards. He wasted his talent". At the age of 16, David began working and touring with Elvis as a personal aide and bodyguard. From 1972 to 1977, he did hundreds of shows with his world-famous stepbrother and was part of some of the most historical concert events of the 20th century.

To begin with I kept ignoring the mistakes so that I could keep on enjoying the book but even without any other reference books - and away from any Internet connection - these major factual errors kept leaping to my attention. In fact they started to make me quite angry, leading me to believe that Jerry Hopkins has become a very lazy author like all too many Elvis writers.

It was followed in 1980 by a sequel ( Elvis The Final Years), completing the remaining years of Elvis’ extraordinary but flawed life.

Presley’s cause of death was attributed to a cardiac arrest, with drugs believed to have played a major role in the physical stress that his body had endured at the time of his passing. It is only my annoyance that a quality writer of his ilk has been so lazy when it comes to this definitive upgrade of his own work. Not true. It was only the third Ed Sullivan Show in January 1957 that was filmed from "The waist up". Elvis was shown doing some fine pelvic action on the earlier Sullivan shows. Replacing Linda was actress Ginger Alden (above), a woman 20 years Elvis' junior. In December 1976, after a brief courtship, the singer gave her an engagement ring made from the diamond in his own TCB ring — an action that many thought was more for show than actual sentiment. In turn, many in Elvis' entourage believed Ginger to be nothing more than a gold-digger. Lamar Fike, a member of Elvis' "Memphis Mafia" entourage, famously said Ginger "didn't give a rat's ass about him." Quoted on the book’s front cover Rolling Stone editor Jan Wenner notes, "This thoroughly revised and updated version of his two classic books deserves a shelf of it’s own."The "shower girl" was most likely actress Mariana Hill. Raquel Welch appears in the opening scene at Mother's Tea House, her first lines in the cinema are "How come they call this a tea house, dear?" Today, David E. Stanley is a highly sought after Charismatic Speaker, Author, Filmmaker, and Founder & CEO of Impello Entertainment. His personal life story of triumph over adversity and stepping into Gods greatness continues to impact millions around the world.