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14 The Final Descent: “If Dewey Couldn’t be Number One, He Didn’t Wanna Be” Although the Phillips family still speaks of Dewey in positive, if not glowing, terms, none have any problem with openly discussing his terrible decline toward the end—when, as Dot Phillips sometimes puts it, “He was just a mess.” She, for example, is quick to emphasize that Dewey’s drug habit started as a desperate effort to relieve his suffering. Most people, she says, do not realize the severity of the damage done to his left leg; after the second accident he came very close to death. “He’d lost a lot of blood,” she recalls. “The whole six hours they were operating on him, we didn’t think he’d make it.” Sam Phillips says that anybody else would have been dead in such an accident. “He was re-broken all to pieces.”1 Unfortunately, the second accident was just the beginning of neverending misery with his leg. Before it was all over Dewey had a total of fourteen operations, most of which involved surgery on his shin and scraping the bone. Each time, the leg became a bit shorter. Army doctors at the Kennedy Veterans Hospital advised that the leg should be amputated. When he chose not to, he committed himself to a lifetime of pain.2 After leaving the hospital following the first accident, a specially built shoe allowed Dewey to walk at first without a noticeable limp. Later, however, when some of the pins were removed, he developed a distinct andirregulargaitthatneverlefthimeventhoughheworetheshoe.Once he started to appear on television, the discernible hobble soon became as familiar a characteristic to fans as his spitfire sentences had been on the radio. Dewey always seemed to move a little faster than would be 14.193-206_Cant.indd฀฀฀193 2/8/05฀฀฀1:57:21฀PM DEWEY฀AND฀ELVIS 194 expected, apparently trying to compensate for the bad leg that inevitably dragged behind, giving him an idiosyncratic lope. The medical term for his problem is “osteomyelitis,” an acute bone infection that develops from badly shattered bones. “Dewey’s wound would heal from the outside in, but it wouldn’t heal from the inside out,” Dot laments. “It might heal for a while, but then it would get worse.” The sore was deep in his leg, causing the wound to fester, so it was purposely left open to permit drainage from time to time and thus never allowed to completely heal. Bill Kirby tried to get him to “stop picking at it,” which did no good. For well over a decade Dewey walked around with an open leg wound.3 Randy Phillips tries to remain composed as he poignantly recalls the grief his father suffered. On some days the leg would hurt more than others. “A lot of times, after getting into it with Grandpa [Dot’s father] over the pills, Dewey would go outside on the front porch and sit down and rub his leg,” Randy remembers. His father would pull up his pants, pull back the brace (“like a polio brace”), show him the hole in his leg, and “say ‘This is why I have to take those pills.’” Initially, he had pins in the leg as well, which Randy says Dewey felt constantly. As he grew older he would sit with his father and try to talk to him—“You know, try to soothe him a little.”4 The only real soothing Dewey ever had from pain, however, came with pills. Perhaps it might have been predicted (given Dewey’s normally erratic behavior), but his reliance on them for relief was almost immediately out of control. Sam Phillips says that before Dewey came to rely on drugs he never complained about pain because he thought doing so was “sissy.” Later, however, after he became strung out, “He’d go out to Kennedy and tell them how bad he was hurtin’. And no doubt he was,” Sam adds. After all that complaining, “He usually didn’t have much trouble getting almost anything he wanted.”5 Dewey’s drug addiction at the end invites an almost melodramatic comparison with Elvis Presley’s substance abuse problem. The similarities are striking. Both men were celebrities who abused drugs, had easy access to them, and had virtually no one around to say no. Both were superstars whose shortcomings were, at best, often tolerated. At worst, and on many occasions, both were coddled and pampered like spoiled children...

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