Maurice Elliott, the reporter who announced Elvis’ death to the world from Baptist Memorial Hospital has died.
He was hospitalized four times, from 1973 prior to his death. He was also at the hospital when his father suffered a heart attack and when his daughter, Lisa Marie, was born.
Seated in his office at Methodist Health Systems (just down the street from Baptist Memorial), where he is now executive vice president, Elliott recalled that on the day Elvis and Priscilla left the hospital, carrying newborn Lisa Marie, “There was a face pressed against every single patient window of the 20-story hospital building.” Mused Elliott, “I always found that pretty amazing.”
It wasn’t easy work having Elvis as a visitor: “A little Elvis went a long way.” His stays came complete with entourage, girlfriends and orders to tin-foil the windows so that he could sleep during the daytime hours. For security reasons, Elvis was always ensconced on the end of the 18th floor.
Such visits meant fielding phone calls from fans, processing increased mail (“He always got lots of teddy bears”) and, of course, responding to the press.
The excitement of those visits, said Elliott, never prepared him for the events of Aug. 16, 1977.
They began with a phone call from a nursing supervisor in the emergency room. Recalled Elliott: “She called and said, ‘We’ve just gotten Elvis Presley in respiratory distress, and it doesn’t look good.’
“Well, that floored me. I’d gotten accustomed to Elvis Presley coming into the hospital and, well, checking out again. I was dumbfounded.”
Elliott bolted to the emergency room (“I didn’t wait for an elevator--I took the stairs”). “There were a lot of people there, working on Elvis Presley. . . . From a layman’s point of view, the first thing I remembered thinking was, ‘This fella’s dead.’”
It was Dr. George Nichopoulos who broke the news to Elvis’ friends. “People were crying,” said Elliott, “and then Joe Esposito made the point that everyone should pull themselves together, so that when they left the hospital no one could see them like this.”
Then came a request from Nichopoulos: He wanted to drive to Graceland to break the news to Vernon Presley. “He didn’t want him to have to hear it announced over the TV or radio,” explained Elliott. This meant the hospital had to postpone announcement of the death for at least 30 minutes.
But word had already gotten out: “They were on to us,” said Elliott, “because Elvis had come into the hospital in a fire department ambulance.” For the next 30 minutes, the hospital fielded “a deluge” of calls from reporters.
“We were in a tough situation, because we knew Elvis Presley was dead, but we also had an obligation to his family. So we kept telling reporters that he was in respiratory distress, and we were working with him.”
After the hospital finally received its call from Graceland, where Vernon Presley had been told about his son, it was decided that Joe Esposito would officially announce the death to those members of the press (“maybe 30 or so”) who had already gathered at the hospital.
But when Elliott and Esposito walked into the hospital’s administrative library, set aside for the press, Esposito, said Elliott, “choked up and said, ‘I can’t do it. You do it.’ ”
So Elliott made the announcement: “And, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure what all I said at the time.” What followed was “sort of a mad-dash-to-the-phone type of thing.” The mood was to continue for days.
(Source: Anthony Stuchbury / L.A. Times)