Elvis’ bodyguard recalls his days as protector of a legend

Lisa Ferguson

Friday, Aug. 15, 1997 | 8:55 a.m.

To protect and serve.

That may have been what Elvis Presley originally hired Dick Grob to do when he enlisted his services as a bodyguard and chief of his security team three decades ago.

But from that business deal a friendship formed.

Grob, a 58-year-old Las Vegas resident, was a Palm Springs, Calif. police officer when he met Presley on May 1, 1967.

He'd been assigned to keep fans away while Presley and his new bride, Priscilla, honeymooned at their home in the upscale desert community.

"I was sitting out in front of the house in a police car that didn't have air conditioning," Grob recalls. "This guy walks out of the house with a glass of lemonade, climbs into the car and said, 'Here, it looks like you need this.' "

Presley introduced himself and the two spent an hour chewing the fat and listening to the police radio in the patrol car. "He said, 'Come on in anytime you want more to drink.' "

The pair remained friends and visited whenever Presley was in town vacationing.

"Had he not been an entertainer, I think he would have been in some sort of law enforcement," Grob said.

"I think he was amazed at the brotherhood that exists among law enforcement people around the world. It transcends races, cultures, everything, much like his music did."

After much persuading, Grob left the department and joined Presley on tour. ("He made me an offer I couldn't refuse," he jokes.)

Grob devised a security plan for him much like the one he'd utilized while previously guarding President Nixon and England's Prince Phillip in Palm Springs.

"Most of it was not to protect him so much as it was to protect the people from themselves," he explains. "They'd rush toward him and somebody would fall and get trampled.

"It provided him an opportunity to get close to his fans (because) he enjoyed sitting and talking to people."

In '73, Grob, his then-wife and their young son (whom Grob claims cut his teeth on one of Presley's diamond rings) moved to Memphis, Tenn., and resided in a home not far from Graceland, the singer's famed estate.

The mansion served as the gathering place for the "Memphis Mafia," a tight-knit cluster of Presley pals and employees to which Grob belonged. (Need proof? Check out the gold "TCB" charm -- Elvis' insignia, meaning "Taking Care of Business" -- that dangles from his neck.)

"It was just like a regular house, really," Grob says. "We'd sit around and drink coffee, talk, play racquetball." Then there were the golf cart races and fireworks wars in the backyard.

Around the holidays, Presley would fire-up his fleet of snowmobiles and the gang would race around the property.

Christmas shopping was also an event, Grob says. "We'd arrange to have the mall stay open after closing so he could walk around and do his own shopping. He'd buy for everybody."

On occasion, Presley would rent the local movie theater and have first-run movies flown in from Los Angeles for their viewing pleasure.

"We watched 'MacArthur' three or four times," Grob recalls. "Anything (starring) Peter Sellers we watched repeatedly. The disavantage was you might be engrossed in a movie and if Elvis didn't like it, he stopped it and put another movie on.

"It was just a bunch of guys having fun."

And a loyal bunch they were. "It was a brotherhood," Grob says. "If somebody was sick, it bothered you. If somebody was having problems with their family life, it bothered you."

Grob is still in contact with several members of the group, including Presley's right hand-man, Joe Esposito, and musician Charlie Hodge. All attended the "Memphis Mafia Reunion" there this week during events commemorating the 20th anniversary of Presley's death.

But even in the wake of Presley's death, Grob's loyalty lives on. He's quick to clear up misconceptions surrounding the star's excessive drug use during the '70s.

"The substance abuse problems are not what people try to make it out to be," he contends.

One account, he says, claimed Presley had some 90,000 medications prescribed to him over a nine-month period. "If you do the mathematics, it is physically impossible for him to take all of those.

"What people don't understand," he says, "is that those prescriptions were filled before we went on tour by the medical person who traveled with us. When you have 159 people (on tour) some of them are gonna get sick ... (and) you can't afford to have them sick.

"When we got back home those medicines were given to free clinics" and charities, Grob says. "I'm not saying that (Presley) did not take certain medications, but not to the extreme everybody wants to believe."

And, despite rumors of his failing health, Grob says he and others who spent the morning of Aug. 16, 1977 with Presley had no indication that it would be his last.

The group had played racquetball until 5:30 a.m. "He was as happy as he could be," he says. "He was upbeat, laughing, joking, having a good time."

Grob was at home packing for Presley's tour (which was scheduled to begin the next day) when he got a call informing him of Elvis' death.

The scene at Graceland "was almost impossible to describe," he says. "It was very somber, very hectic, very chaotic."

Meanwhile, Presley's then 9-year-old daughter, Lisa Marie, got lost in the shuffle.

"She was outside playing and obviously she saw all of the attention going on and she was very confused," Grob says.

"I took Lisa out and we sat on the golf cart and I tried to talk to her about it. My concern was to get her away from the walls" and out of the sight of cameramen who had surrounded the estate.

Following his death, Grob says Presley's father, Vernon, asked him to further investigate the events surrounding that fateful day. His findings became the basis for his book, "The Elvis Conspiracy" (Fox Reflections Publishing, 1996).

"The question," Grob explains, "is not is he alive today, but could he be alive today if people had done certain things? The real question was might he have been saved if aide or assistance had been called earlier?"

Grob stayed on at Graceland until 1980, when he went to work for a Fortune 500 company engineering and installing safety systems. He moved back to Las Vegas last year and co-owns a both a mortgage and a drug testing business.

Several of the gifts Presley bestowed upon him over the years are on display in his home, including a pair of pistols, an autographed copy of an unreleased record single and an 18-karat-gold, diamond-and-black-sapphire- encrusted, music note-shaped pinkie ring.

"It was the only job that wasn't a job," Grob says reflecting upon his tenure with Presley. "It was an opportunity that a lot of people would have died to have and I appreciated it."

He still gets back to Memphis about twice a year, usually while en route to the handful of charity events he appears at annually.

But he rarely visits Graceland.

"It's not the same," he says. "I prefer to remember it the way it was."