Drugs, Defecation & Death - from Lenny Bruce to Elvis Presley

Recreational drug use and bathrooms have been a bad combination since at least the 1960s. The comedian Lenny Bruce overdosed on the loo in 1966.

Lenny was lying face down on the floor, naked except for the jeans crowded down about his boots. A spike was sticking out of his right arm. A blue bathrobe sash was slung around his elbow. Obviously, he had toppled forward while seated on the toilet.

(Ladies and Gentlemen - Lenny Bruce!! - Albert Goldman 1976)

 

By contrast, Judy Garland, who followed Lenny Bruce over the rainbow in 1969, managed to remain seated.

Deans [Garland's fifth husband] scoured the house and discovered the bathroom door was locked. He banged on it but received no reply. He climbed in through the bathroom window and found a naked Judy dead, sitting on the lavatory. Rigor mortis had already set in. She was only 47. The official cause of death was given as 'Barbiturate Poisoning (quinalbarbitone), incautious self-overdosage, accidental.'

(Judy Garland - Paul Donelly 2007)

 

In 1970, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison both overdosed in the bathroom – rather than on the W.C. itself. But the most famous death in situ, and one that will forever colour our perception of him, is that of Elvis Presley on 16^th August 1977.

Shortly after Elvis became the most famous ever king to die on a lavatory, Dan Warlick, the Shelby County medical investigator, arrived to assess the scene.

 

Warlick found a stain on the bathroom carpeting, too, that seemed to indicate where Elvis had thrown up after being stricken, apparently while seated on the toilet. It looked to the medical investigator as if he had “stumbled or crawled several feet before he died…”

The liver showed considerable damage, and the large intestine was clogged with fecal matter, indicating a painful and longstanding bowel condition. The bowel condition alone would have strongly suggested to the doctors what by now they had every reason to suspect from Elvis’ hospital history, the observed liver damage, and abundant anecdotal evidence: that drug use was heavily implicated in this unanticipated death of a middle-aged man with no known history of heart disease who had been “mobile and functional within eight hours of his death.” It was certainly possible that he had been taken while “straining at stool.”

(Peter Guralnick – Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley 1999)