It was not the only time that Tom had seen Elvis angry. Whenever John Lennon’s name came up, he would fly into a rage.
His dislike of the pacifist Beatle was born from the night I took the Fab Four to his house for their first — and last — meeting.
John had annoyed Presley by making his anti-war feelings known the moment he stepped into the massive lounge and spotted the table lamps — model wagons engraved with the message: ‘All the way with LBJ.’ Lennon hated President Lyndon B Johnson for raising the stakes in the Vietnam War.
Presley allied himself with the FBI director Edgar Hoover and encouraged him to have Lennon thrown out of the U.S.
‘He should’ve been kicked out long ago,’ Elvis told Tom that night. ‘I had a run-in with him myself,’ Tom said. He made some smart remark at a TV studios in England, where we were appearing on the show Thank Your Lucky Stars. I wanted to take him outside and see what sort of hiding his intellect would stand.’
For the first time that night, Elvis smiled. Tom was talking his kind of language.
UPDATE — If only Elvis had shot John Lennon with this gun.
