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15 “Goodbye, Good People” Dewey loved to joke about his problems in front of friends and strangers alike, but his flippant attitude often masked turmoil. Hopelessly confused by a bewildering reality and baffled by his continued tumble from stardom, he was already floundering badly when his last real hope for turning the cornertowardstability finally collapsed. In 1963, aftera great deal of soul-searching, his wife decided to leave him for good. Dot had been struggling for a number of years with the knowledge of how bad Dewey’s problem was. In 1959 she accidentally discovered his abuse of pain pills. After her own surgery, she had been given a prescription for pain. Her suspicions were originally aroused when, after taking only a few pills from her bottle, she noticed that the level had dropped dramatically. She realized that Dewey was the culprit when she hung up his coat one day and found a pill bottle in his pocket, her name on the label. He had called her doctor and filled the prescription without her knowledge. After that, she remembers, he deteriorated rapidly. Nonetheless , despite his increasingly erratic behavior, Dot somehow managed to stay with Dewey through some of his most difficult years. As his substance abuse increased, however, so did his anger and violence. When that happened she realized she had to get out. “I had three boys,” she says, “and when Dewey would get bad off, I couldn’t tell what he’d do.” The first time she sensed he might physically harm the boys she knew she had to leave.1 Until that point, most of his loved ones looked on Dewey as a relatively good family man and a loving father. He even relished the family role, always insisting that his children call him daddy. Randy, for example, remembers being spanked more than once as a small child for calling 15.207-221_Cant.indd฀฀฀207 2/8/05฀฀฀1:57:39฀PM DEWEY฀AND฀ELVIS 208 his father Daddy-O-Dewey. He also recalls being taken to the radio station frequently as a small boy and even being dragged along to some of Dewey’s sock hops in schools. His father did so, Randy thinks, because he “had to be away so much and didn’t get to spend as much time with us kids as he wanted to.”2 Unfortunately, all that changed as Dewey’s mood worsened. The flash point occurred when he exploded in one of his all too frequent outbursts and threw something at their youngest son, cutting his leg badly. There had also been another occasion when he became uncontrollably angry and slapped one of the boys on the forehead. Dot let her husband discipline their children with spankings, but she would not tolerate him using other kinds of physical force or violence. When he cut their son’s leg she became enraged and began to wield a butcher’s knife. When she did, Dewey’s mother (with whom the family was living), calmly told Dot to put down the knife. Odessa Phillips then walked over to Dewey and, as Dot said, “slapped the fire out of him.” At that point he apparently realized what he had done. He sat down, cried, and then apologized. No matter, however. Dot had decided that was it. She made up her mind at that moment to leave him, knowing full well that she would have to take care of the youngsters herself, which she did.3 Without question Dot’s departure proved to be the decisive blow for an already badly strung-out Dewey. The day she left, Barbara Pittman talked to him. He was, she says, totally destroyed in mind and spirit. “He kept saying over and over, ‘I’ve lost everything . . . I’ve lost everything.” Pittman tried to comfort him by telling him it was not necessarily the end of the world, but he refused to hear her. “No Barb,” he said, “I know I am a dead man now.”4 Marjorie sensed the same reaction from her brother. “After Dot left him, he just didn’t care anymore,” she recalls sadly. “I think that he just gave up at the end.” She remembers that Dot, at Dewey’s funeral, felt guilty about separating from him. She said, “If I hadn’t left him, he’d still be alive.” Marjorie replied that she could not have prevented his death and that it was crazy to blame herself. Nonetheless, she thinks Dot...

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