There are some things that will give away a person's age almost immediately: their favorite slang term, how many pairs of Chuck Taylors they've owned in their lifetime, what movie they think of first when they hear the words "Star Wars," and how they know Charo. Some know her as the "cuchi-cuchi" girl from Johnny Carson and the like. Others know her from "Fantasy Island" and "The Love Boat." And others know her from her iconic appearances on "Dancing with the Stars," "Jane the Virgin," and in "Sharknado 5: Global Swarming." 

Others know her as an award-winning guitarist, and saying she's an incredible musician is putting it lightly. She's been honored as one of the best flamenco guitarists in the world and lauded for her contributions to Latin music. Listening to her play for just a few minutes explains why she moves the way she does: Clearly, she's the very personification of music, rhythm, and dance. 

And here's the thing about Charo: Every part of her life is extraordinary, from her incredibly unconventional upbringing and her childhood struggles to her work as an activist. Even that led her to adopt a very non-traditional pet and get into all sorts of trouble for it... as only Charo can.

Charo was born in an area of southeastern Spain called Murcia, although the year of her birth has been a point of contention, with the date being anywhere between 1941 to 1949. Thanks to a judge, she had it officially declared as 1951. As for her name? That's complicated: "Charo" is short for Rosario, which is just a part of her actual name. That's Maria Rosario Pilar Lorenza Emilia Eugenia Martinez Molina Baeza De La Osa Rasten, and don't worry, that's not going to be on the test later. Her distinctive accent is absolutely real, and she's used it to her benefit — she once told The New York Times, "I get away with murder in my comedy, because I know they're not going to understand me anyway."

The fact that Charo has made a life in America performing and playing guitar is a testament to her determination. To hear her tell her story, she was little more than a toddler when she knew that she wanted to spend her life on the stage — and slightly older, perhaps, when she knew she wanted to cross the ocean for a life in the U.S.

It was a dream she shared with her sister, too. She recalled them playing a game when they were very, very young, pretending to leave their homeland for the States by leaping over a chamber pot sitting on the floor between the beds in their shared room. For her, it was an escape: Her childhood was during an era of Spain's history when they were subjected to the authoritarian rule of a government run by the dictator Francisco Franco.

Everyone has those moments in childhood that shape them as adults, and for Charo, those moments happened during the summers. That's when she would stay with her grandmother, and also staying with her grandmother — camping on her land, to be precise — were Romani families. Charo explained to W that it was this early introduction to their music that captured her heart: "I was watching them play, and it was magic," she said.

Music was in her blood, she told She Shreds. "Although they're all farmers, from both sides, my father and mother, music has been the medicine in my family for centuries. Music is like oxygen." She continued, calling those summers some of the best days of her life and crediting them with teaching her how to live in the moment and appreciate everything around her: "They don't care if the next day they're going to have food, they just welcome the night and the sunset. They play guitar, make a fire, and dance."

She had been so earnestly, honestly fascinated by the guitar that one of her grandmother's Romani guests — a man known as "el faraon," or "pharaoh" — gave her his own instrument before they moved on in their travels. He also showed her how to stretch her fingers to give her the flexibility needed to play.

Charo's happy childhood was short-lived, as her previously well-to-do family was shattered when she was just 7 years old and her father — a lawyer, accountant, and professor — attracted the attention of Spain's fascist government. He was forced to flee the country, presumably sometime in the late 1950s, but that didn't entirely protect the wife and daughters he left behind: The government seized their ancestral farmland. Charo explained to The New York Times, "We were cute little rich girls, full of love, but the good life finished."

She wouldn't see her father for the next decade, and she's been candid about the long-lasting impact that it had on her: "It is a trauma that you never forget. You never know when it will hit you."

Charo turned to the music she'd learned in happier days, saying that her childhood difficulties shaped her approach to success. (She invested heavily in property, for example, because she and her sister promised each other they would never be homeless again.) Her road to stardom really started when she was 9 and auditioned for a spot in guitarist Andrés Segovia's music school. Young and the only girl in class, she says the challenges of her young life gave her strength to face challenges as an adult, even if some of those early experiences still haunt her: "When I have to do a big opening or something important, the night before, I dream that I can see the oranges [on her grandparents' farm], but I cannot grab them," she said. 

It was Andrés Segovia who lauded Charo for her natural talents and style when she was 9 years old, and just a few years later, she caught the eye of another musician: Xavier Cugat (pictured), the bandleader who had also mentored a young Desi Arnaz. Today, the events that unfolded around their relationship are more than a little uncomfortable.

The upheaval of her family life may have required Charo to grow up very quickly, but it's still pretty shocking to think that she was in her teens when — with the help of some conveniently placed padding — she says she was able to convince Cugat that she was actually 25. He found out the truth pretty quickly, but still convinced her mother to let her and her sister travel to America with him. She explained to W, "He said, 'I would like to take your daughter to the United States to give it a try. For three months. She's going to make you some money, and she will be protected with a chaperone.'"

That was in 1964, and it's been suggested that the newly divorced, 65-year-old Cugat gave the teenage guitarist a chance partially because of her talent, and partially to spite his now-ex (fourth) wife. Things got serious pretty quickly, and they had a Las Vegas wedding two years later. She would later say the marriage was purely a business move that allowed her to stay in the U.S.

Charo's first chance to make a splash came very quickly, when she was booked on Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show." There was, however, a catch: "I didn't understand what he was asking me," she said later. She took a wild guess, though, that it was something sexually suggestive and replied with the words that would turn into her catchphrase: "Cuchi-cuchi!"

No one really needed to know what it meant; it sounded just dirty enough to be funny, and just family-friendly enough to make it onto television. Charo says it has nothing to do with being dirty at all — it had to do with being a lonely child who befriended a very cranky dog. When she was very young, she became best friends with one of her grandmother's dogs. She'd taken him in after he'd suffered a massive spinal injury, and even after nursing him back to health, he continued to walk with a distinctive, hip-swaying gait. 

That's what she was mimicking when she jumped from her chair with a wink and a "Cuchi-cuchi!" The dog's name was Cuchillo — which means "knife" — but the young Charo couldn't pronounce it, and he became "Cuchi." "Every time I walked like Cuchillo, the people laughed," she told Vice. "Anything that I did wrong, I can fix it by saying 'Cuchi' and moving like the dog. It was my security blanket."

Television in the 1960s was quite a bit different than it is today, and Ed Sullivan was so concerned with keeping his namesake show clean and wholesome that when the Rolling Stones appeared in 1964, he famously declared they would never be allowed to perform again. (Spoiler alert: They were.) He regularly asked artists to change lyrics, and they tended to respond in one of a few ways: They made the requested changes, with some meme-worthy eye rolls (the Rolling Stones), they sang whatever lyrics they wanted (The Doors), or they refused to perform (Bob Dylan).

As harmlessly wholesome as she seems, Charo was one of the performers asked to change her lyrics — even though they were in Spanish. When she auditioned and performed "La Cucaracha," she told W that Sullivan demanded that a translator tell him what the lyrics to the song meant. When he realized she was singing about a cockroach that couldn't walk because of "marijuana que fumar," he declared that there definitely weren't going to be references to marijuana on his show. She changed it to "cigarillos que fumar," prompting Xavier Cugat to call Charo's mother: "[He] said, 'She's taking over America, but she's crazy. I cannot control her. She was talking about marijuana to Mister Sullivan.'"

Calling someone a sister can mean so much more than biology, but sometimes — for those very lucky people — biological sisters grow up to have the kind of honest friendship that others might just dream about. That's the case with Charo and her sister, Carmen Lesher. They went from sharing a room and dreaming of a life in the U.S. to traveling there together, to making it work together.

It's Lesher who designs all of Charo's one-of-a-kind outfits, including the tuxedos she wears when she picks up her guitar, shrugs off the innuendo and the "cuchi-cuchi," and starts to play as only she can. Carmen is also her stylist, and watches her to make sure she's not showing the cameras anything she doesn't want to show them — although Lesher has said that Charo doesn't always listen.

When Charo spoke with Vice, though, it was clear that the love and respect they have for each other runs very deep. Charo explained, "If my sister was less talented, I would not have this luxury. ... We are a team. We are survivors, because we are so well trained. Carmen will always be able to get a job in design. I will always be able to get a job playing guitar. If there are no jobs playing guitar, I can work as a performer. If there are no jobs for performers, then I'm sure we can wash windows."

Can Charo get more wholesome? Yes: She loves animals. When she gave The Oprah Winfrey Network an inside look at her Beverly Hills house, she was proud to share the fact that it had been decorated like a traditional Spanish home. She was also thrilled to show off some of the animals that lived there with her, but she was less-than-thrilled about the fact that when it came to her largest pet, her only option was a photo. Why? Her neighbors had such a problem with her pet that she'd been forced to relocate it.

The pet in question was a full-grown bull named Manolo, a creature that Charo had befriended as a calf. They'd met while filming an anti-bullfighting spot for PETA, and that's when she decided to keep him. Perhaps unsurprisingly, city officials got involved when the neighbors started complaining about the smell, and told Charo that Manolo had to go find a new place to live.

Charo did relocate him, but apparently, he returned to Beverly Hills for the occasional visit. That compromise didn't make her any less upset, though, and she told OWN that the only neighbor who was good about it was Jennifer Lopez. "God bless her, she took it," she said. "But the other neighbors did not like it, that we have a bull. So, they called the police and said, 'We smell bull*** from Charo's backyard!'"

Watch a beloved comedian enough, and it's almost inevitable that jokes will begin to repeat themselves. Even something that's gut-bustingly funny the first few times around will have a tendency to get old, and when Vice talked to Charo in 2016, she said as much — especially when it's the sort of spur-of-the-moment comedy that she favors. Drop some innuendo, throw in a curse word, and it's funny because it's unexpected. When it's played over and over? Not so much.

Knowing that — and being determined to avoid the pitfalls of being bland or repetitive — means that Charo puts a shocking amount of work into her stage shows, which are part comedy, part dance, and part music. It's the comedy part that makes for some rigorous prep: For every show, she writes new material a day in advance. She says she's inspired by current events and notes that it's important to her that her comedy is never cruel... at least, not to others. "My greatest fun is attacking me," she said. "I don't like to write jokes where you are actually offending people."

For those who just know Charo as the "cuchi-cuchi" girl, shame! In an interview with She Shreds, Charo spoke about how she became known as little more than a catchphrase, a jiggle, and a charming but clueless figure: "When I came to America, it was very make it or break it," she said. "Overnight, America found 'cuchi-cuchi,' and that is the character that became so powerful. For me, cuchi-cuchi means money. Not only that, it saved me. And then we had a problem. Cuchi-cuchi took over the real me: my preparation, my knowledge, my guitar, my education. I became an idiot."

Charo was a musician first, and after years of dedicating her life to her passion and her craft, she was devastated when she found that record companies were interested in putting out her music — and all that anyone wanted was the airheaded woman in the tight clothing. She told W, "I said, 'But when I close my eyes or I look into the mirror, I see my mother working, my grandmom digging in the soil, my aunt doing embroidery.' ... I don't want to lose respect for myself."

So, she put out records, and her "Guitar Passion" peaked at No. 21 on Billboard's charts in 1994. She told Vice that the second half of her stage shows — where she dons a tuxedo designed by her sister, and picks up her guitar to perform — is truly her.

When Vice talked to Charo in 2016, she was still head-over-heels in love with her husband, Kjell Rasten. They married in 1978, and she said, "I have no scandals. [Rasten] is my affair. ... We are still having fun and planning to be together for hopefully a long, long time on this planet." Then, in February 2019, Charo confirmed that he had died by suicide. In her official statement, she revealed that he had been struggling with depression, was in failing health, and had been diagnosed with the rare skin condition bullous pemphigoid. That, says the Cleveland Clinic, is an autoimmune disease that causes the development of itchy blisters on folds of the skin (like the armpit) and mucous membranes (like the mouth), which can break open to form ulcers.

It was Charo who found him; she told The New York Times that she had been looking for him, singing, "Good morning, good morning!" when she made the awful discovery. After his death, she said, "I was empty." Despairing, she locked herself in her bedroom and stayed there for a month.

She also took the announcement of his death as a chance to ask: "Please, if anyone you know and love is suffering from depression or illness, hold them close, tell them you love them with all your heart and that the world is better because they are in it."

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org

Seven months after her husband died by suicide, Charo spoke with She Shreds for a candid interview about what had kept her going. For starters, there was nature and quiet solitude. A period of soul-searching and introspection brought her to the realization that although she continued to heal from a devastating tragedy, she still had a purpose: "I want to talk to children, because what happened to me, I hope will never happen to anyone. ... And I'm using the tragedy in my life to save lives."

She spoke, too, about the obligation that came with being able to make a living as a performer, and that was to make people happy. She's seen just how powerful laughter can be, especially when it's shared. While she's not thrilled to be forever identified with "cuchi-cuchi," she knows that it makes people laugh, and she knows that's important.

When asked what she hoped her legacy would be, her answer was revealing. She said that she hoped to be remembered as a comedian who made people laugh, a musician who moved people with her music, and a person who had nothing but respect for others and a desire to make them happy. "Because when the curtain opens, I am so happy, but when the curtain closes, I am not happy," she said. "I'm not happy because I don't have a beautiful man, laughing and hugging me. I don't have that anymore. And that is the truth."

When someone reaches a certain level of fame, it's tempting to think that everything about them is a matter of public record, particularly if they lived and made headlines in the modern era. Take Elvis Presley, for example. The King — a moniker Presley didn't enjoy — dominated American culture in the mid-20th century through his music. After Presley tragically died on August 16, 1977, and even beforehand, darker details about his private life trickled into the public consciousness. So you'd think everybody would know everything about Presley by now: he loved his mama (maybe a little too much), he loved weird food, he died on the toilet, and, as an aside, sang some of the greatest songs of all time.

Not every detail about Elvis Presley is a casual fact of pop culture the way his pompadour haircut and Graceland mansion are. In fact, Presley was actually a natural-born blonde who dyed his locks for that slick, "Greased Lightning" look, which would likely distress those Elvis fans who idolized that famous hair of his. But there are even more facts about Presley that often go ignored, and many of them cast him in a less-than-flattering light. Animal lovers might be disappointed to discover the King owned his own chimpanzee. His "womanizer" image went a little too far and began to impact his personal relationships. And then there are the tragic details of his health and drug misuse. From weird obsessions to eyebrow-raising relationships with the women in his life, here's the dark side of Elvis Presley.

The following article includes allegations and descriptions of addiction.

The singer of a song is naturally the person most people will associate with the tune. Even when a performer is not known to write their own music or lyrics, it is their rendition that makes it to the airwaves to be consumed by the general public, rather than the sheet music with its noted authors. But that association between singer and song can sometimes crowd out all other contributions, and so it has largely been with the discography of Elvis Presley.

Presley was first and foremost a performer, and nobody sees him as a Dylan-esque songwriting genius. But you'd be shocked to know he literally wrote nothing. Despite being credited on some songs as a co-writer, Presley never contributed anything past the odd title here and there (for example, he apparently thought of the phrase "all shook up" after a bad dream, and then somebody else turned that into a song.) The "co-writer" credits were simply there for publicity, and the man himself admitted as much.

In a 1957 interview for Dig magazine (via Keith Flynn's Elvis Presley Pages), Presley confessed, "I never wrote a song in my life ... I've never even had an idea for a song." In that same interview, he also claimed that, despite walking around with a guitar and strumming it during a concert, he couldn't actually play. This was self-deprecation beyond the literal truth; Presley could play, and he used the guitar to work out arrangements. But he was never a master player, and as his career took off, he used the guitar more and more as a prop rather than an instrument.

The reason Elvis Presley has any songwriting credits at all is because of business-side strong-arming by his notorious manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Presley had a special arrangement with music publishers: when Presley wanted to record a song by an outsider, Parker would demand a third of songwriter royalties for his client. "He would get a piece of the action. Colonel Tom Parker made sure of that," songwriter David Hess told American Songwriter. "To have a potential No. 1 hit staring you in the face made the pain of getting screwed a little less painful." For example, Presley is a listed contributor to "Don't Be Cruel," of which he didn't write a word or a note.

One songwriter who resisted exploitation: Dolly Parton. In 1974, she released "I Will Always Love You," which eventually became a cash cow when Whitney Houston covered it for "The Bodyguard" in 1992. The soundtrack album sold 12 million copies (per Billboard), providing a nice payday for the country legend. Back in the '70s, Presley wanted to cover it, but with the condition that Parton sign over half the royalties. As published in the Belfast Telegraph (via Elvis.com), Parton turned down Presley and replied, "Well, now it's already been a hit. ... I wrote it and I've already published it. And this is the stuff I'm leaving for my family, when I'm dead and gone." No deal from Dolly meant no Presley version of "I Will Always Love You."

What we might call the popular caricature of Elvis Presley will have certain key pieces: the pompadour, the guitar, the gyrating hips, and the sequined jumpsuits. But for greater accuracy, the above image should also be packing: Presley loved guns, and he loved shooting things almost as much as Elmer Fudd did. He was a humongous gun collector and ended up with enough of them to fund his own militia. By the time he died in 1977, he owned more than 40 guns, including rifles and even a machine gun, just in case the guys from "Jailhouse Rock" broke out and went on a rampage or something. By the '70s, he had grown paranoid enough to bring guns with him on stage, though thankfully never the machine gun. Instead, he would stuff guns into his boots.

To Presley's credit, he had a concealed-carry permit, and he was hardly alone among Southerners of his generation in his love of firearms. However, he was dangerously careless with his guns. As recounted in his autobiography, "Over the Top and Back," singer Tom Jones once visited Presley's dressing room to find a loaded Colt .45 automatic pistol just lying there in the King's bathroom. He wrapped it in a towel and gingerly gave it to Presley, who nonchalantly responded with his classic catchphrase: "Thank you very much."

While touring, Presley ruined many a hotel room's lamp and TV set by blasting them. At home, he fired at makeshift targets, and in his darker moments, he threatened his own friends with his guns.

As just about everybody knows, with the exception of costume parties, it's illegal to impersonate a cop. It's also illegal to pull people over and pretend to give out tickets. But Elvis Presley did both, and quite regularly, too. He and his friends loved to play pranks and practical jokes on each other, as well as on the unaffiliated and unsuspecting. Presley also loved the police and law enforcement, and even wanted to be a policeman when he was a boy. But when all grown up, he was too busy being a rock star to become an actual cop, or simply unwilling to give up peanut butter and banana sandwiches to properly train.

So instead, according to Priscilla Presley's "Elvis, by the Presleys," Presley would slap a police siren on his car, don one of the many fake badges he had accumulated over the years (Priscilla claimed he had a million, which may have been an exaggeration), pull speeders over, and tell them something like, "Son, you were speeding. Just want to warn you to slow down." He even had a blue cop light to complete the picture. 

To these unsuspecting motorists, Presley would give a lecture. Then, he would give them a ticket that was actually an autograph, which didn't make pulling people over under the guise of "I am the law" any less wrong (nor did his love of the force keep Presley from getting speeding tickets of his own). If only he had spent less time cosplaying as Barney Fife and more time learning to play guitar and write music.

In 1957, at his career peak, Elvis Presley briefly disappeared. The reason: He got drafted into the United States peacetime standing army, to his horror. Presley feared that a stint in the army would take him away from the music scene for too long and cost him his fame. But he shipped out in March 1958 with an armored division stationed in Germany, and not as a Special Services man entertaining the troops. He worked as a truck driver (Presley had been a truck driver before he became the rock King). When the base grew inundated with fan mail and aggressive local women trying to scale its walls, he got a transfer to a scout platoon.

Presley returned to the U.S. less than six months later, following the death of his beloved mother, Gladys Presley. Deeply upset by the loss, Presley reportedly worked through his grief via self-destructive behavior. When he returned to Germany after the funeral, he partied like there was no tomorrow, and during a trip to Munich, he got into a nasty bar fight. On a trip to Paris, he took some soldiers to a strip club and brought the strippers back to their hotel. It was also during this time when Presley reportedly started daily misusing amphetamines, the start of a pill addiction that would eventually hasten his demise.

Elvis Presley had plenty of patience for his fans, sometimes to his own — and others' — detriment. In 1956 (per Elvis Presley Photos), he was back in Memphis after a tour and stopped at a gas station to have his exhaust line checked. By the time his car was ready to go, a crowd of autograph seekers had gathered, and the King was happy to oblige them from out the window of his Continental Mark II. Unfortunately for everyone else who needed gas at that station, Presley's car was blocking the pump.

The owner of the station, Edd Hopper, asked Presley three times if he would move his car, unaware of his patron's name or fame. Each time, Presley said he would, only to carry on signing autographs. After the third time — well, recollections varied. Hopper said that Presley punched him in the face while someone else held his hands back; Presley claimed that Hopper punched him. Whoever started it, a handful of blows were exchanged before the police broke the fight up.

Presley, Hopper, and Hopper's employee were all taken in and appeared before a judge. The charges against Presley were dropped, to the delight of his many fans in the courtroom. But the judge did issue a reprimand: "In the future you should take into consideration that you have a large following and should cooperate fully with business people in order to avoid disruptions." Presley agreed and later said, "I'll regret this day as long as I live." As for Hopper and his worker, they were fined $25 and $15 respectively.

With how far pop culture has come in terms of depicting overt sexuality, it's almost impossible to imagine now what a stir Elvis Presley's gyrating dance moves made in the 1950s. He might have hated the nickname "Elvis the Pelvis," but Presley was well aware of his throngs of adoring female fans and had a high tolerance for such crowds. "Whether the girls were eight years old or 18 or 65 or 70, he just liked women," recalled one photographer (per Alanna Nasha's "Baby, Let's Play House").

But while Presley might have basked in female attention, it was at least partially because his manager wanted him to. Colonel Tom Parker was tireless in marketing Presley as the ultimate lady's man, and the idea that Presley might finally find "the one" was a nightmarish thought. Parker's control over Presley's love life was never more evident than in 1956, when Presley's girlfriend, June Juanico, told reporters she was his steady (via Elvis Australia). Immediately, Parker sought to squash the news, having Presley "confess" to a different reporter, "I got about 25 girls I date regular. She's just one of the girls."

It's safe to assume these publicity stunts didn't delight Elvis' love interests. But on the flip side, it may have given Juanico the freedom to also date who she wanted. And indeed, she found someone else, breaking up with the King in a train car not long after, letting him know she had promised to marry another. In the end, he was left alone on the train as it pulled away from the station.

After the King, there was the Fab Four. The Beatles took America — and the rock genre — by storm in the 1960s, throwing out sounds and ideas very different from the work of Elvis Presley. In a utopian world, the two acts would appreciate one another and get on well over the years, while engaged in friendly competition. And in the one documented meeting between Presley and his Scouser rivals in 1965, such a relationship seemed in the cards. The Beatles had grown up admiring Presley, after all. The five of them in the same room together weren't terribly chatty, but they did enjoy a jam fest, and Presley was complimentary to the Beatles in a press conference a few years later.

But by the time Presley sat down with President Richard Nixon in 1970, his tune on the boys from Liverpool had changed. At that meeting, the rocker unloaded, accusing the Beatles of representing all the worst aspects of the hippie movement. He told Nixon that the Beatles were a pack of opportunists who blew their way through America, made their fortune, and skedaddled back across the pond to rail against the country that had given them so much.

Even Nixon, the poster child for paranoid grievances, was taken aback by Presley's attack on his fellow rock n' rollers. He apparently moved the subject to more general griping about protesters. But Presley gave the same sort of speech to J. Edgar Hoover the next year, though this time he focused on the Beatles' appearance and the bad example it set.

Elvis Presley first took up with the only woman he'd ever marry when she was barely a teenager. Priscilla Beaulieu was raised by a father in the U.S. Air Force, and when she was in her early teens, he moved the whole family to a base in Wiesbaden, Germany. One day in 1959, when Beaulieu was 14 years old, she was hanging out at an American military club when a man named Currie Grant approached her and said he was close friends with 24-year-old Elvis Presley, who was at the time enlisted in the Army and stationed nearby.

She'd soon accept Grant's invitation to meet Presley. The first time he came face to face with the girl that his friend had picked up for him, Presley guessed she was a junior or senior in high school, only for Beaulieu to correct him. "Why, you're just a baby," she recalled him quipping in an essay penned in People. Before long, he was promising to look after her like a sister. Soon after that, Beaulieu and Presley were a couple, much to her parents' consternation. The lovers insisted everything was proper and, wrote Beaulieu: "they wanted to believe me."

Presley eventually charmed Beaulieu's parents, and the relationship continued. After Presley's discharge and return to the U.S., he'd fly Beaulieu out on occasion, sneaking off to see her without arousing suspicions of his girlfriend, actor Anita Wood. After Wood found out and broke things off, Presley invited Beaulieu to move in with him. She was 15 at the time.

Why even be rich and famous at all if you don't blow your money on something preposterous once in a while? To that end, Elvis Presley blew money on the kinds of things one usually sees on celebrity TV shows such as MTV's "Cribs" — houses, cars, etc. But how many early 2000s rappers had a pet chimp?

Decades before Michael Jackson and Bubbles, there was Elvis' pet chimpanzee King and Scatter. Memphis TV host Bill Killebrew employed the chimpanzee, which he'd taught all kinds of tricks. Their favorite bit? Driving around Memphis, where Killebrew would lay low in the driver's seat and work the pedals while Scatter steered, shocking anyone who had never seen a chip drive a car before. And all for the entertainment of loyal viewers of WMC-TV.

Somehow, Killebrew got bored with Scatter after about a year, and approached Presley about taking the chimp off his hands. "I guess he figured Graceland was the kind of untamed place where a monkey would feel at home," longtime Presley associate Alan Fortas told Elvis Australia. But party central wasn't the most positive environment for a young chimp, which indulged in all of its worst impulses. Presley would reportedly laugh when Scatter would approach female guests and lift up their skirts, knock back a beer or some whiskey, or tear up the curtains and throw his poop around. A biter who attacked maids, wives, and Memphis Mafia men alike, Scatter eventually became too much to handle, and he spent his final years caged and without company.

Throughout his relationships, Elvis Presley tried to exert control and influence over women. They had to be virginal, devoted, tolerant of any extracurricular activities he got up to on the road, and prepared to subsume their own personalities. It was a pattern he set early; when he was 19 years old, Presley dated 15-year-old Dixie Locke, whose clothing choices he dictated. That behavior grew more pronounced when he entered into a relationship with Priscilla Beaulieu, later Priscilla Presley.

"He wanted to mold me to his opinions and preferences," Priscilla wrote in her People essay in 1985. She wasn't pleased with how quickly into the marriage she'd become pregnant. According to her memoir, Priscilla discussed getting a prescription for birth control pills with Elvis shortly before the nuptials. "He had been adamantly against it: 'They're not good for you. I really don't want you taking them. They're not perfected yet. There's all kinds of side effects.'"

Priscilla also wrote about how upon visiting Elvis in the U.S. early in their relationship in the 1960s, he took her on a four-hour shopping trip that she called "the Elvis Presley Fashion Course." He insisted that she wore only the colors that he liked to wear, solids only, and never dark green or brown because those reminded him of his military years. "I was Elvis's doll, his own living doll, to fashion as he pleased," Priscilla explained, adding that the musician would also order her to redo her makeup if she applied it too lightly.

Elvis and Priscilla Presley married in 1967, more than seven years after their relationship began in Germany in the late 1950s. The couple didn't physically consummate their relationship until their wedding night. In her 1985 memoir "Elvis and Me," Priscilla Presley recalled tearfully begging her boyfriend to meet her physical needs. He refused every time.

She and Presley kissed and snuggled, and the couple took explicit, sexually charged Polaroid pictures of each other. Throughout their dating years, Presley carried on flings and affairs, notably with Ann-Margret while filming "Viva Las Vegas." But Priscilla remained technically chaste — per Presley's wishes and in line with a deeply-held personal philosophy regarding whoever he chose to marry. "Something in his Southern upbringing had taught him that the 'right' girl was to be saved for marriage. I was that girl," Priscilla wrote in her People essay.

Nine months to the day after their 1967 wedding night, the Presley parents became the Presley family when their daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, was born. After the birth of their child, Elvis lost all sexual interest in his wife, claiming that he couldn't be with a woman after childbirth. "He had mentioned to me before we were married that he had never been able to make love to a woman who had a child," Priscilla wrote in her memoir.

Pressure from his management may have compelled Elvis Presley to spend time in female company and put out statements in support of a womanizing image, but it wasn't all for show. Presley had many girlfriends over his short life, the rich and famous among them. And even as he insisted on devotion and virginity from his steady girlfriends — and later from his wife — he made it clear that he wasn't playing by the same rulebook.

"He wasn't faithful," Priscilla Presley flatly told "Saturday Night" (via Today) about her husband. "Not that he had someone special, but when you're in the entertainment business there is always that." Priscilla was torn between willful ignorance of the affairs and jealousy over Presley's infidelity, all while his wants and needs superseded her own. "As much as he wanted to be married and have a family, I don't know if he was ever cut to be married," Pricilla said, "because I don't think he could ever be faithful to one woman."

Pricilla had her own affair towards the end of their marriage with karate teacher Mike Stone, which helped to end her marriage, though she and Presley remained close. Having a taste of his own medicine did nothing to curb Presley's dalliances; his long-term girlfriend Linda Thompson left him because of his many affairs, and because of his stubborn attitude about the differences between men and women when it came to sex. "A man can have an affair and it means nothing," he told her (per Express). "It's just me rubbing up against somebody ... women aren't built like that."

Priscilla Presley was the only woman that Elvis Presley ever married, but she said in her memoir that the King truly only had room in his heart for one woman — his mother, Gladys Presley. It's an assumption more than one observer has made as well. To the extent that he had meaningful relationships with other women, Presley may have seen something of his mom in his girlfriends and his wife. "He was attracted to women who reminded him of his mother, as Priscilla did with dark hair and beautiful eyes," a friend of Presley's told a biographer (via The Sunday Times).

That could stem from Gladys Presley's doting on her son when he was a boy. "[She] gave him so much love and attention when he was growing up that he came to put all mothers on a special pedestal," Presley's friend Sonny West wrote in "Elvis: Still Taking Care of Business" (via Express). Because of his strong regard for motherhood, West claimed, Presley couldn't bring himself to be with any mother sexually.

Gladys and Presley long referred to each other by fawning pet names. She called him "Baby," "Ageless," and "Naughty," while he called her "Baby" in return as well as "Satnin," the name of a brand of lard. "He talked baby talk to her," Presley's associate Lamar Fike said in "Elvis and the Memphis Mafia." That extreme level of closeness between mother and son helped encourage actor Natalie Wood to break off her romance with Presley — she witnessed the adult rock star sitting in his mother's lap.

Elvis Presley had a huge appetite — for women, sure, but also for food. In 1960, James Gregory wrote in "The Elvis Presley Story" (via The Independent) the details of the Southern boy's penchant for gigantic, heart-stopping Southern-style breakfasts. To quote: "Elvis loves enormous breakfasts complete with sausage, bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, home-baked rolls, and coffee." In 1981, Presley's uncle, Vester Presley, and a Graceland cook named Nancy Rooks published "The Presley Family Cookbook," which featured some of the King's purported favorite foods. Delicacies included were the southern fried squirrel, the leftover potato patty fry, and something called "Pepsi-Cola salad:" black cherry Jell-O mixed with chopped apples, cream cheese, pecans, canned pineapple, and white grapes and raisins, with a basting of Pepsi.

In the 1995 BBC special "The Burger and the King," longtime Graceland cook Mary Jenkins discussed Presley's relationship with food, particularly his fondness for butter-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches, as well as how she once snuck Presley a bag of forbidden hot dogs when he was hospitalized. "The only thing I get any enjoyment out of is eating," Jenkins said Presley once told her. 

But back to peanut butter sandwiches, which probably nobody loved more than Elvis Presley. In the '70s, he discovered a Denver restaurant, the Colorado Mining Company, and their ridiculously over-the-top sandwich: the Fool's Gold. It consisted of a loaf of bread slathered with a jar of jam, a jar of peanut butter, and a pound of bacon. Elvis fell in love with the sandwich so much that he would fly out to Denver just to pick up more.

As Elvis Presley did everything to the extreme — womanizing, pill-taking, gunning, eating — it should come as no surprise that his diets and weight-loss regimens pushed the boundaries of good sense. As much as the King binge-ate, he felt guilty and upset about packing on the pounds he so famously added to his sparkly jumpsuit-covered frame in the 1970s — though only towards the end of the decade, which was sadly near the end of his own life. And so, he engaged in some of the era's many ill-advised weight-loss schemes.

He pursued some sensible strategies as well; he had his karate and some favorite recreational sports. But according to the Independent, Presley once became convinced he could quickly shed some extra weight by eating jelly made out of black cherry soda (his favorite beverage) and bananas — and nothing else. He tried it for weeks, but it didn't bring long-term weight loss. He also tried something called the "sleeping beauty diet," in which people have a doctor place them in a medically induced coma: while they "sleep," the body wastes away, living off itself to stay alive.

This is, to put it mildly, not recommended by reputable doctors. They're still warning people about the "diet," which has lingered on to the present day. In Presley's case, he swore off the idea, though he never reached the danger zone. His sleeping beauty pursuit reportedly ended when he fell out of a hospital bed and roused himself from his coma.

Elvis Presley was famously photographed shaking hands with President Richard Nixon, and the special occasion was Presley's successful quest for a Federal Bureau of Narcotics badge. This badge just wasn't another for his collection, either. The King really was concerned about illicit drug use, and considered himself well-positioned to help lead young people away from them. He also worried that drug use was a fuel for "anti-American" sentiment in the 1960s.

But in Presley's mind, the dangerous drugs were the illegal kind: pot, coke, acid, and the like. He didn't see any harm in using drugs prescribed by a doctor, and he used a lot of those kinds of drugs. On his death in 1977, a toxicology report found 14 different drugs in his system, with ten present in significant quantities (per FHE Health), among which were morphine, several barbiturates, and Valium. Presley had been taking this dangerous cocktail for years and had already had several overdoses. Presley could get almost any drug he wanted thanks to his personal physician, Dr. George C Nichopoulos, who first began treating the King for insomnia in 1967.

Presley's issues with insomnia were real, and treatments like amphetamines were still legal at the time. But his overreliance on drugs, worsened by his divorce, was obvious by the end. And when "Dr. Nick" wouldn't provide, Presley's fame and fortune could convince plenty of other, less scrupulous doctors to help grow his supply.

Elvis Presley movies have their fans, and individual titles have admirers in the critical and filmmaking communities. But taken as a whole, his filmography is often regarded as a succession of formulaic and lackluster musicals, a waste of any potential acting talent Presley may have had. It wasn't the way that he wanted his time in Hollywood to be regarded. Presley entertained acting ambitions right from the start, and he hoped to follow in the footsteps of stars like James Dean. He lobbied for straight parts in dramas, not for fluffy musicals.

He got a handful of chances to stretch as an actor, both at the beginning and end of his career, and when he departed from type and really tried to play a part, he convinced many that he had acting chops to match his famous pipes. But his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and Hollywood executives weren't interested in Presley's burning ambitions to be the next James Dean. They were interested in easy profits and steady marketing of the King's set image, and the scripts and songs that came his way reflected their desires.

There's a long list of varied and challenging parts Presley desired, tested for, or was rumored to be after, only to be thwarted by bad luck or Parker. Working on the safe, formulaic pictures that he did took a heavy toll on Presley's emotional health, and it eroded his standing in pop culture until his 1968 comeback special.

Despite many a meme and cheap shot to the contrary, Elvis Presley did not "steal" rock and roll music from Black artists (nor was he the first white performer to popularize it among mainstream audiences). Throughout his life, he was very open about the debt he owed to singers like "Fats" Domino and to the gospel music he grew up with. But his appreciation for the gospel ran much deeper than music. Presley's stepbrother told the Observer (via The Guardian) that Presley was an incredibly devout Christian, praying over his concerts and acting as an unofficial Sunday School teacher to his stepbrothers when they were younger.

But Presley's beliefs were on the eclectic side. "All I want is to know the truth, to know and experience God," he told a friend (via USA Today). To that end, in addition to his Pentecostal faith, he dabbled in meditation and Taoism, wore the symbols of various religions, and read extensively on spiritualism. Per Peter Guralnick's "Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley," it distressed Presley greatly that, despite his sincere belief, he never had a direct spiritual or religious experience.

The older, lonelier, and more paranoid he got, the more Presley leaned into spirituality, searching for some meaning to life beyond his fame and fortune. "There has to be a purpose," he once lamented, "there's got to be a reason ... why I was chosen to be Elvis Presley." He was allegedly considering converting to Mormonism at the end of his life, which helped justify the church re-baptizing him after his death.

Everyone wants to shed this mortal coil in a sweet and dignified way. An ideal death may look something like this: after telling gathered loved ones how much they've contributed to a valuable life, the soon-to-be departed will deliver a profound speech about the nature of life. Elvis Presley could have had a few things to pass on; after all, he changed music forever. But fate didn't allow him a death worthy of his stature. In August 1977, the King of Rock 'n' Roll, at the very young age of 42, died alone in the middle of the afternoon at his Graceland estate ... in the bathroom. His heart stopped while he sat on the toilet, and he keeled over with his pants around his ankles. Not exactly a hero's death.

Did the King "push" too hard? Not necessarily. He did suffer from chronic constipation, a condition exacerbated by what he chose to put into his body. However, according to The New York Times, the local county medical examiner attributed Presley's death to an irregular heartbeat related to hypertension and high blood pressure. A toxicology report found a Valley of the Dolls-meets-Studio 54 variety and volume of drugs in Presley's system, including codeine, quaaludes, a couple of prescription sedatives, a barbiturate, morphine, and the painkiller Demerol. In 1980, Presley's "Doctor Feelgood" of choice, George "Dr. Nick" Nichopoulos, faced a 14-count indictment for overprescribing drugs to Presley and other celebrities. He was ultimately acquitted, but later lost his license to practice medicine in Tennessee.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).