Doctor Feelgood

In 1977 alone, George Nichopoulos wrote Elvis prescriptions for 10,000 doses of uppers, downers and assorted narcotics. He tells Adam Higginbotham he did it because he 'cared'
The old man stands outside his house in the gathering dusk. A hot summer wind blows the smell of cut grass across the street. Opposite, a woman rides a mower up and down her vast front lawn.
'One of my patients, who was dying from Aids,' he says, 'his parents bought him this house next door so he could be close to me - 10, 20 years ago.
'Those people,' he points across the road to an impressive colonial-style property, 'used to be my patients. They built this house.'
Behind him, ochre paint blisters and peels from the walls of his home: the house that Elvis helped him buy; the one they designed together. He wants to sell it now. It's too big: he and his wife don't need seven bathrooms. He hasn't used the racquetball court in a year. The shag-pile carpet has seen better days.
We stare in silence at the woman on her mower.
Who treats all these people now?
He glances sideways at me over his glasses with a wry twinkle. 'Mostly,' says Dr Nick, 'they go to veterinarians.'
It's just gone seven years now, since they finally took his licence away from him. But everyone still calls George Nichopoulos 'Dr Nick'. People have been calling him that since he qualified at Vanderbilt Medical School in 1959. And nobody seems ready to stop - even now, since that last run-in with the Tennessee Medical Board, that he's not a real doctor any more. 'Defrocked,' he says. 'My wife still calls me George.' Twinkle. 'When she talks to me.'
Dr Nick doesn't really care for interviews any more. What with one thing and another, he doesn't feel he's been very well served by the media. On the phone he sounds hesitant, nervous, as if afraid of saying anything at all. But he agrees to meet, to discuss the possibility of talking further. I ask how I will recognise him. 'Oh,' he says, 'I'm just a short, grey-haired, fat man.'
In fact, his hair is white, as it has been since he was in his thirties: it's a Dr Nick trademark. He comes to meet me in the lobby of my hotel. It takes a long time to persuade him to be interviewed. He doesn't want his friends and family hurt any more than they already have been. 'I'd like to set the record straight,' he says, 'But I don't know...' He speaks slowly, in a gentle southern accent, and leaves long pauses, wetting his lips, chewing over his thoughts before delivering them. There are a lot of things he says he just can't remember.
Doctor George C Nichopoulos was, for a while, one of the most infamous physicians in the world.
For 10 years Dr Nick was Elvis Presley's personal doctor. It was Dr Nick who helped prescribe the constellation of uppers, downers, laxatives, narcotics, hormones and shots that kept Elvis going through the last decade of his life.
But it wasn't until 1977, when details of the King's titanic appetite for prescription drugs began leaking out, that anyone outside Memphis knew his name. Then, in the wake of Elvis's death, ques tions began to be asked of him. The cause of death was officially recorded as 'fatal heart arrhythmia'- a heart attack. But blood tests conducted at the BioScience laboratory in Van Nuys, California showed traces of 14 different drugs in Elvis's body at the time of his death. It didn't take the media long to decide that the Memphis medical examiner's officially recorded conclusions were part of a cover-up. Elvis did not die of natural causes, they argued. He died of an overdose of drugs. Drugs that Dr Nick gave him. Fans around the world were convinced that they had found the Man Who Killed Elvis.
In 1967, when Dr Nick first started treating Elvis Presley, he was a well-respected member of a Memphis group practice. He and six other doctors specialising in internal medicine had a good referral practice, seeing patients from all over the area. This year, 25 years after the sudden and unexpected death of his most famous patient, Dr Nick still works in Memphis - in the disability benefits department of the city's biggest employer, Federal Express. He examines the medical insurance claims of FedEx employees injured while working for the company. That way, he's still able to use his medical knowledge. But it's just paperwork.
'There's no hands-on medicine. I don't see any of these people. I read their records.'
But Dr Nick has to keep working. He has legal bills to pay. In and out of courts and medical tribunals for many of those 25 years, he's borrowed heavily, spent his pension fund and, in the end, lost his job anyway. He doesn't know how much longer he's going to have to work to pay off his debts.
'I've started to write a book several times, and I just can't get motivated,' he says. 'I just wanted to put all this behind me and go on with my life.'
It may be a little late for that now. Dr Nick will be 75 in October.
To begin with, Dr Nick treated Elvis for insomnia. But by 1967, this was no simple task. Elvis had a history of disrupted sleep, sleepwalking and nightmares going back to childhood. It intensified after the death of his mother, and his drafting into the army in 1957. And in his early twenties, Elvis had also developed an evangelical enthusiasm for amphetamines. Legally available in the US as appetite suppressants - they weren't outlawed until 1965 - they kept him going and they kept his weight down. They also, of course, kept him awake. He had become what Dr Nick calls a 'night person'.
By the time he became Dr Nick's patient, Elvis was a dedicated student of the Physician's Desk Reference , the doctor's encyclopedia of contemporary pharmacology. He was taking an exotic cocktail of uppers and downers: Tiunal, Desbutal, Escatrol. The powerful tranquilliser Placidyl would become a particular favourite. And he was going to increasing lengths to get hold of them - sending 'the guys' off to Vegas on prescription shopping trips.
At first, Dr Nick treated Elvis only on the odd occasions when he came back to Memphis from his house in LA. 'He was still in the movies. I didn't really become his primary doctor until he moved back here. Around '70.'
But in 1969, Elvis began the first of his month-long residencies, giving explosive live performances at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. Dr Nick went with him. For Elvis, Vegas - and the national touring that followed - would become a treadmill as financially profitable as it was physically costly. It would carry him on to the end of his life. For Dr Nick, it would lay the groundwork for the end of his career.
Throughout his time with Elvis, Dr Nick continued to work at the Memphis group practice. When Elvis summoned him to Graceland in the middle of the night, often simply because he was lonely and wanted someone to talk to, Dr Nick still went to his surgery in the morning. When Elvis opened in Vegas, Dr Nick flew out for the first couple of days, and then returned to Memphis.
This arrangement did not work well. Elvis's reliance upon a regime of drugs to get him going when he awoke and bring him down at bedtime was intensified by the concert schedule. Now, he needed amphetamines before a show, and then tranquillisers afterwards: and there were two shows every night. When he was around, Dr Nick tried to manage Elvis's intake. But when Dr Nick wasn't around, there was a roll-call of other doctors only too happy to fulfil the King's requirements. Doctors like Elias Ghanem and Thomas 'Flash' Newman - named for his ability to materialise at a moment's notice bearing anything you might desire. And after Priscilla left him in 1971, Elvis's behaviour became increasingly erratic. He spent more and more time in a chemical fog, taking whatever he could get his hands on.
In 1973, he overdosed twice on barbiturates: in February, when he spent three days in a coma in his suite at the Hilton, and later, on tour in St Louis. He began cancelling shows more and more frequently. At the end of the year he was admitted, semi-comatose, to the Baptist Hospital in Memphis. This time, he had been secretly seeing a doctor in LA. He had become poisoned by cortisone injections and was addicted to the high-test opiate painkiller Demerol. Dr Nick put him on meth-adone. Then he began trying to stop the flow of contraband pills from other doctors.
'Elvis's problem,' Dr Nick has said, 'was that he didn't see the wrong in it. He felt that by getting it from a doctor, he wasn't the common everyday junkie getting something off the street. He was a person who thought that as far as medications and drugs went, there was something for everything.'
While he was in hospital, Dr Nick and Elvis's road manager, Joe Esposito, raided Elvis's bedroom at Graceland: they found three giant pharmacy-sized jars, each containing 1,000 high-dose Seconal, Dexedrine and Placidyl. There were even vials of pills hidden in the seams of the curtains.
Afterwards, whenever Elvis went to see a dentist or another doctor for any reason, Dr Nick went with him, 'because he would always talk these guys into anything- crazy things'.
When Dr Nick refused to give him what he wanted, he'd just find another doctor. 'He'd get mad at me, and he'd get on his plane and fly to Vegas or Palm Springs or California and stay for a few days and get what he wanted. And I'd have to take it away from him when he got back home.'
This petulant hunger for drugs was such that, when Dr Nick thought Elvis was claiming symptoms he didn't have, he began to administer placebos.
'On the road,' he says, 'he was so afraid that he wouldn't get enough sleep to do a good show the next night that he would end up asking you for an extra pill or two. So those extra pill or twos would be placebos.'
Dr Nick and the guys would while away their spare hours on tour by making counterfeit pills for the King. 'We'd sit around,' he says, 'and, instead of playing cards, we'd make placebos. Ha!' Using syringes, they'd suck the liquid out of capsules and refill them with saline solution. When Elvis asked for a shot that he didn't need, Dr Nick would wait until his back was turned, squirt the liquid on the floor, and then 'inject' his patient with the emptied syringe. Tablets were trickier. Eventually, Dr Nick managed to persuade Knoll, the manufacturers of Dilaudid, Elvis's favourite painkiller, to press a special batch of a thousand pills without any active ingredients. It took a year of letter-writing and legal wrangling. But they looked just like the real thing. They cost him $5.98 apiece.
After a series of embarrassing on-stage disasters and show cancellations when other doctors tried their methods on Elvis, Dr Nick became the regular tour physician. Licensed only to prescribe drugs in Tennessee, he would stock up on 'supplies' before leaving the state. After the first couple of times out, he got to know what he would need in advance. He began each tour with three locked suitcases filled with prescription drugs.
'My job,' he says, 'was taking care of the whole entourage. There were about 150 people I took care of. You had a couple of bands. You had the songbirds. You had the people that set up the stage... And all these people were night people, too.'
Dr Nick made sure the drugs for Elvis were strictly controlled. On tour, Elvis would come to him at regular intervals: on waking; before the show; after the show; and at bedtime. Each time, he would be allowed specific uppers and downers in the lowest doses Dr Nick thought he could get away with. At home, without the excuse that he needed amphetamines to perform, Elvis was given just the manila envelopes of sleeping tablets - 'bedtime packet number one' and 'bedtime packet number two'- to be handed out separately during the night. During the 10 years he treated him, Dr Nick never knew Presley to sleep for longer than three hours at a stretch without waking up, looking for more pills.
Surrounded by watchful retainers; impossible to trust around a medicine cabinet; incapable of making decisions for himself: it's very easy to get the impression that Elvis was a stupid man.
'No, he was a very smart guy,' says Dr Nick. 'Not to have any college education... He was well read. Ha! He carried more books on the road than we carried drugs. I mean, he had three suitcases - three big steamer trunks, full of books. Religious books, metaphysical books, some medical stuff.'
Did he understand what he was doing to himself?
'No, I don't think he did.'
Do you think you were afraid of telling him what he needed to do?
'It's hard to convince somebody what's right and wrong or what they need to do. It's hard when you've got somebody that thinks they have all the answers and no matter what you throw at 'em, they've got answers for you.'
But why didn't he just trust you as a doctor?
'Well, I think he did. I think that's the reason I was around as long as I was.'
But he still ignored you when you said, 'Look, stop taking these pills.' Which presumably you did.
'Yeah. I mean, he was always childlike with these things. I don't think he ever realised how harmful these things could be to him. If he got a sore throat, and I gave him a penicillin tablet - I gave him 20 to take, saying, "You take four a day of these things until you use these up," - so he's going to take eight or 12 a day until he uses them up 'cos he thinks he'll get well faster that way.'
But that's the behaviour of a stupid man.
'I know. It was certainly a stupid decision on his part. But he wasn't a stupid man. He was really a smart guy. But he did a lot of stupid-assed things.'
Elvis Presley died on 16 August, 1977. At the time of his death, he was suffering from glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage and an enlarged colon. All of these ailments were aggravated, if not caused, by drug abuse. 'He didn't have any major heart problems,' says Dr Nick. 'Even with his obesity and everything - that's what really surprised me. I was dumbfounded that he died.'
Over the subsequent months, Dr Nick began receiving death threats. On 17 September, he went to the Saturday-night football game at the Liberty Bowl Stadium in Memphis with fellow doctor Tom Langford. Langford, sitting directly behind his friend, was hit in the shoulder by a bullet. No one in the stadium heard the shot. The police told him it was an accident: a stray bullet fired outside the stadium. But some officers were sent to his house anyway. They stayed there for three weeks. Today, Dr Nick is still convinced someone meant to kill him.
The recriminations and arguments over Elvis's death and autopsy that would rumble on for another 20 years began immediately. In the summer of 1979, a production team from sensational investigative TV show 20/20 moved down to Memphis. In September, the Tennessee Medical Board charged Dr Nick with gross malpractice over the illegal prescription of painkillers and other drugs to Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and 12 other patients. The following day, the district attorney's office announced they were looking into whether Dr Nick could be held criminally responsible for Elvis's death. They said that they ruled out murder charges because of the conflicting medical opinions about the cause of death.
That night, an hour-long 20/20 special, 'The Elvis Cover-Up', was broadcast, maintaining that Presley was killed by an overdose of prescription drugs.
The Medical Board Tribunal heard evidence of astounding volumes of prescriptions written by Dr Nick. Between 1975 and 1977, he had prescribed 19,000 doses of drugs. In the first eight months of 1977 alone, he had written 199 prescriptions totalling more than 10,000 doses of sedatives, amphetamines and narcotics: all in Elvis's name. On 20 January 1980, the board found him guilty of overprescription, but decided that he was not unethical. They gave him three months' suspension of his licence and three years' probation.
Four months later, he faced criminal prosecution on similar charges. On 16 May 1980, still in his white coat, Dr Nick surrendered himself to the Shelby County Sheriff, who formally arrested and charged him with 14 counts of abusing his licence to prescribe controlled drugs. Dr Nick faced from two to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $20,000 for each count. Friends formed a defence fund and raised $150,000 for him.
The trial began in October, and for a month it was a national sensation, The Criminal Justice Center in Memphis filled with reporters and TV crews, all eager to know whether Elvis died of an overdose of drugs that Dr Nick had prescribed. In November, the jury concluded that he had tried to act in the best interests of his patients. He was acquitted on all counts. 'I think he deserved this,' his attorney said. 'He's been harassed for years.'
Dr Nick went back to his practice, his patient list unaffected by the trial. 'My patients,' he grins thinly, 'the ones I didn't kill, were very faithful.'
In 1985, he started a solo practice. He called it We Care, Inc.
Then, in 1992, a tougher, more aggressive Tennessee Medical Board once again charged him with overprescription. Things had moved on. He no longer had the support of a powerful group of city doctors, whose testimony would be respected. Dr Nick argued that he was attempting to help patients who suffered from inoperable chronic pain. His supporters took out an ad in the Memphis Commercial Appeal , calling for 'friends of Dr Nick' to protest against the charges. The Health Department received an unprecedented number of phone calls decrying their 'harassment'. One caller in particular stuck in the department spokeswoman's mind: 'He never came right out and said it was Elvis,' she said. 'But he sounded like Elvis, and he just said, "You know who this is."'
The case dragged on for three years. But it was no good. In July 1995, he was stripped of his licence.
Over the next few years, he appealed repeatedly. He received counselling under the Tennessee Medical Foundation's Physician Health Program. 'One of his problems,' said the doctor who ran the programme, 'was that he couldn't say no.'
At one hearing, Dr Nick admitted to the board that he had overprescribed. 'I cared too much,' he told them. They still voted 10 to one against reinstating him. Once again, his patients organised fundraising events to contribute toward his legal fees. In December 1996, a benefit was organised for Dr Nick's campaign. It was to be headlined by his other infamous former patient, Jerry Lee Lewis. But, on the night, Jerry Lee never showed up.
In the years since he lost his licence, Dr Nick has
tried to keep himself occupied. Two years ago, he and his friend Bobby organised a touring memorabilia exhibition, 'Memories of Elvis'. It started at the Hollywood Casino over in Mississippi. The centrepiece was his old black bag, complete with an empty phial of Dilaudid with Elvis's name on it.
The tour got as far as two casinos in Nevada and then stopped. Dr Nick wasn't really surprised when the bag offended people. It was Bobby's idea. 'I just did it because the guy thought it would be a big drawing card, and a conversation piece, which it was. But I didn't really want it in.'
And, bizarrely, for a while, Dr Nick also worked as Jerry Lee Lewis's road manager. 'I did that right after I lost my licence,' he says. 'Tryin' to find something to do until I could get my licence back.'
Are you still working on that?
'Not really,' he says softly.
In 1994, the autopsy into the death of Elvis was re-opened. 'There is nothing,' said coroner Dr Joseph Davis, 'in any of the data that supports a death from drugs. In fact, everything points to a sudden, violent heart attack.' A few years ago, Dr Nick re-examined a selection of x-rays taken of Elvis at the Baptist Hospital during the 70s. Now, he thinks, Elvis must really have been feeling a lot of the pain they thought at the time was a junkie stunt: he may have been suffering from degenerative arthritis.
In the end, the Tennessee Medical Board stated that they rescinded Dr Nichopoulos's licence after finding him guilty of unethical conduct, gross malpractice, prescribing drugs without a legitimate purpose and prescribing them to addicted patients without trying to cure them.
When I ask Dr Nick why he thinks they took his licence away, he is quiet for a long time. 'I think,' he says eventually, 'it's because Elvis died.'