THE ELVIS Only I Knew

THE KING'S ARMY BUDDY RECALLS BIG LAUGHS AND SWEET STORIES FROM THEIR TIME TOGETHER

- Fortune Benatar

Army veteran Johnny Lang has fond memories of dancing with a pretty girl at a house party in Germany on New Year’s Eve 1959. “She was a little doll,” he tells Closer. “I was having a great time until one of the bodyguards came up to me and said, ‘Johnny, you’re going to have to quit dancing with Priscilla. Elvis doesn’t like it.’”

The unlikely but genuine friendship between Elvis Presley, then the biggest star in the world, and Johnny, a regular guy from Macomb County, Mich., is the subject of a new memoir, My Army Days With Elvis: Friendship, Football & Follies. “I really got to know, not the movie star, but Elvis himself,” says Johnny, who befriended the Tennessee-reared singer during his two-year service.