Elvis had a vision during a cross-country road trip in
1964. Driving to Hollywood from his Tennessee Graceland
mansion, Elvis looked into the clouds and saw the face of
Stalin.
By 1964, the pop icon had been guzzling amphetamines since his army tour in the
fifties. Surrounded by an entourage accompanying him to film Harem
Scarum, Elvis experienced a religious miracle which took a peculiar form,
according to the recent biography Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley.
Elvis suddenly gasped and cried, "Whoa!"
When I turned to him, he was slumped back in his seat, slack-jawed, staring at
the horizon. Following his gaze, I saw a cloud, a single white mass floating in
the sky. From the clouds emerged a clear, definite, recognizable image.
"Do
you see what I see?" Elvis asked in a whisper. I looked again. "That's Joseph
Stalin's face up there!"
Try as I might to see it any other way, there was
no denying it was Stalin's face in the cloud.
"Why Stalin? Why
Stalin?" Elvis asked, his voice breaking. "Of all people, what's he doing up
there?"
Elvis gets a strange look in his face, pulls his bus of hangers-on to the side
of the road, and shouts "Follow me!" as he runs into the desert. His spiritual
advisor Larry Geller finally caught up with him in the desert.
"It's God!" Elvis cried. "It's God!" Tears streamed down his
face as he hugged me tightly and said, "I thank you from the bottom of my
heart. You got me here. I'll never forget, never, man. It really happened. I
saw the face of Stalin and I thought to myself, Why Stalin? Is it a projection
of something that's inside of me? Is God trying to show me what he thinks of
me? And then it happened! The face of Stalin turned right into the face of
Jesus, and he smiled at me, and every fiber of my being felt it... Oh, God.
Oh, God," Elvis kept saying.
Then he paused and added a peculiar aside. "Can you imagine what the fans
would think if they saw me like this?"
