After the creative exhilaration of the Memphis Sessions, Elvis found it suffocating to return to Hollywood for his last dramatic picture, Change of Habit, in which he played a ghetto physician who unwittingly falls in love with a Catholic nun (Mary Tyler Moore) sent out into the lay community.
When the movie wrapped on May 2, Elvis and Priscilla flew to Hawaii on vacation. On their return, Elvis threw himself into fretting over his engagement at the new International Hotel, later the Las Vegas Hilton, for four weeks beginning the end of July.
Believing he still had something to prove to the Beatles, and most certainly to Tom Jones, a Vegas staple who knew how to make the over-forty matrons react the way Elvis had once affected young girls, Elvis paid close attention to certain of Jones’s stage moves when he saw him perform during his Hawaiian stay—an Irony, since Jones had learned how to move onstage from watching Elvis. In preparation for the opening, Elvis again slacked off on his pill use and toned his body with regular karate workouts.
The challenge deeply frightened and aroused him at the same time. Elvis was now thirty-four years old. He had legitimate concerns about his voice as he had asked little of it since his touring days, and to attempt a long engagement under such pressure could certainly prove problematic. He also worried about his ability to pull crowds to the massive hotel, which, with 1,500 rooms, was two and a half times the size of Caesars Palace.
To Elvis’s genuine surprise, he sold out every show, drawing exuberant fans to Vegas from literally all over the world—a feat which amazed Elvis’s longtime friend, Sammy Davis, Jr., who knew Vegas as well as any performer alive. Even hardened pit workers admitted they’d never seen such excitement generated over an engagement—it practically crackled the air. During his first four-week engagement, Elvis would set a Vegas record, with 101,509 paid customers and a gross take of $1.5 million.
After the success of opening night, Colonel negotiated a five-year contract at the International, with Elvis playing two thirty-day engagements a year, one in January and another in August. His fee: $1 million, the highest fee ever paid in Vegas. Immediately, Colonel began arranging tour dates to take advantage of Elvis’s commercial rebirth.
For Elvis, the victory must have tasted particularly sweet. The last time he’d played the town was in 1956, when his lame jokes and amateurish between-song prattle sank his engagement with Freddy Martin and Shecky Greene at the New Frontier.
In contrast, Variety now reported that “the Elvis Presley who was a freakish kid curiosity when he was third feature on a New Frontier showbill is no more. He has become ‘ELVIS,’ not only in huge electric letters on the International’s marquee, but also in more publicized and verbalized affirmations of his superstar status.”
LAMAR FIKE: In those months before he opened in Vegas, Elvis was as nervous as Hitler at a packed Bar Mitzvah. The slightest little thing just frayed his nerves. And for a while, Elvis had been tired of putting up with Alan’s doping and having to deal with Alan’s wife.
MARTY LACKER: The straw that broke the camel’s back was that ski trip to Aspen. That was right after the Memphis Sessions in February. They all went out to L.A. first, and Elvis took everybody down to Kerr’s Sporting Goods on Wilshire Boulevard, and they picked out ski equipment and clothes for themselves and their wives. And Alan questioned the fact that he had to pay for it.
LAMAR FIKE: I was there when the whole deal popped loose. We were at the outfitters. Elvis said, “Everybody pick out what you want.” But then all of a sudden, he decided he was spending too much money. I don’t know what triggered it. Maybe Priscilla. And he said, “Okay, you all pay for yourself.”
Well, Alan got pissed off. By the time he picked out what he and Jo needed, he had about $500 or $600 worth of stuff. It was equipment they’d never use again, and probably couldn’t afford, because Alan was keeping two apartments on $200 a week.
I wasn’t two feet away from Elvis. And Alan blew up sideways. He said, “Well, he can stick this stuff up his ass.” And Elvis heard him. And he turned around to Esposito and he said, “I set up a party for everybody, and the cocksucker is too cheap to buy his own damn equipment? Fuck him! I don’t want to talk to him. Just keep him out of my sight.” And then he said, “Better yet, get rid of the son of a bitch. I don’t want to see him.”
BILLY SMITH: At the time, Elvis had foot the bill for a lot of things, and he was beginning to feel like some of the guys were taking advantage of him. But Elvis would get mad at you and then blow up for something else. Another instance was with Jerry when they went to Colorado. Elvis’s commode stopped up, so he was going to take Jerry’s condo. Well, Jerry got aggravated about it and blew up at Elvis. And Elvis blew back. Got right up in his face. And so it wasn’t too long-after that when Jerry left. He decided he wanted to be a film editor. Went to work for Paramount.
LAMAR FIKE: If you set Elvis up, he’d come at you. So you never set him up. The thing with Alan was, he couldn’t take it. In May of ’69, a couple months after Elvis let him go, Alan tried to commit suicide again. He always denied it, but it’s the truth. We were in Hawaii on vacation. We got this call from his wife at three o’clock in the morning. He loaded up on Tuinals or Placidyls, one, because he was losing her and he was losing his grip. And he was facing a fact that all of us had to face after Elvis died—he wasn’t Elvis. When he went back into the mundane, day-to-day life, Alan never again had the fun that he had with us.
MARTY LACKER: After Alan got fired, he stayed in California for a while and worked as an extra in pictures. But that was a dead end, and he eventually came back to Memphis. He filed for divorce almost the day he got home. Then he went to work as the manager and bartender at this club, TJ’s, which was owned by a friend of ours, Herbie O’Mell. Ronnie Milsap led the house band there. Later, Alan got into the bond business.
He married a second time, around ’70, to this woman named Marian Stokes. The only good thing that came out of that marriage was Miles, Alan’s son. He became Alan’s whole life.
LAMAR FIKE: I wasn’t around Alan a lot in the latter years. But I had the feeling he continued to do drugs. He kept using Dr. Nick.
MARTY LACKER: The fact that Elvis didn’t call Alan after the firing really hurt him. He said, “You know, as much as I loved Elvis, I’ll never forget that.” Yet he never said a bad word about him, not even after Elvis died.
LAMAR FIKE: Sometime in ’69, Dick Grab came into the entourage as a security man. He’d been a fighter pilot in the air force and then he became a sergeant in the Palm Springs Police Department. He rubbed a lot of people the wrong way because he’s a tough, know-it-all kind of guy. Elvis was getting more and more into all that police stuff, so I think Dick was just a connection.
When Elvis went to Vegas, he mostly wanted the old gang around him because he was scared. So he brought me out to run lights for him. Putting that show together was orchestrated chaos.
MARTY LACKER: When Elvis did the Memphis Sessions, he asked Chips and the American group to be his band in Vegas. I thought, “There ain’t no way that Chips is going to do it because he’d have to close the studio, and he’s not going to do that.” And I knew those guys hadn’t played onstage in a while. But I’ll be damned if Chips didn’t say, “Yeah, man, we’d love to.”
In the end, they didn’t do it. My guess is that Colonel decided he didn’t want Elvis to be exposed to Chips anymore. So they started making up lies about Chips. They fed Elvis some crap about Chips trying to steal “In the Ghetto.” But that was part of Parker’s game. He’d cut his nose off to spite his face.
Elvis ended up with a good band, though. He had James Burton and John Wilkinson on guitar, Larry Muhoberac—he was later replaced by Glen D Hardin—on piano, Jerry Scheff on bass, and Ronnie Tutt on drums. And then Charlie Hodge stood up there and played guitar and sang harmony vocals. But he was mainly there to hand Elvis his water and, later, his scarves. His microphone wasn’t usually connected, except for a couple of songs where he actually sang harmony, and his guitar wasn’t hooked up to an amplifier. I thought he was terrible. But he thought he was big-time because he was up there on the stage with Elvis.
LAMAR FIKE: Christ, Elvis interviewed musicians for weeks. He must have gone through two hundred players before he found the ones he wanted. Then they rehearsed at RCA Sound Studios for ten days. Learned two hundred songs or so. And then spent another week putting it together in Vegas.
MARTY LACKER: For his backup singers, Elvis wanted the Jordanaires, but they had other commitments in Nashville, so he chose the Imperials, the gospel group with Jake Hess, who had always been one of his idols. But he also wanted that soul sound. So he hired the Sweet Inspirations, which was a black, female group. They’d sung behind Aretha Franklin.
I was the one who suggested them. I knew they’d cut a hit [“Sweet Inspiration”] with Chips, and I’d heard a lot about them from Dionne Warwick, who’d recorded at Chips’s studio. So I told him about them at the movies one night, and he said, “Remind me when I get home, and I’ll write that down.”
LAMAR FIKE: We went in there in ’69 not knowing a damn thing. He didn’t even have an act, much less a Vegas act. We literally designed that show from scratch—made it up as we went along. Hugo Granada, one of the greatest light men in Las Vegas, had taught me a lot about lights when I was with Brenda Lee. We had a light man we worked with, but the light show that Elvis used ’til the day he died was the one I designed and developed.
It was pretty impromptu, even during the performances. I’d do something wrong with the lights, and Elvis would holler up at me in the balcony, and I’d holler back, “Hey, it’s hard to follow you sometimes.” The audience thought it was funny.
We had it planned that when he’d do “Tiger Man,” I’d throw a strobe and he would move sideways. But one night, for some reason, he complained about it. So I put a lobster scope on a light. A lobster scope is a round apparatus with a hole in it. You spin it up to speed. And the light hits that one spot, and it causes a strobe effect.
Well, he didn’t know what it was, and it liked to blind him. He stopped everything, and said, “What in God’s name . . . ?” I said, “It’s a lobster scope.” He said, “What does that thing do?” I said, “What it just did.” And he said, “Well, I can’t see!” I said, “Well, I won’t use it again.” He said, “No, use it.” And he cranked back into “Tiger Man” and did it.
MARTY LACKER: The deal that Colonel struck with the hotel was that Elvis would play two shows a day, seven days a week, for a month, starting with the first engagement. And for that he got $100,000 a week, or $400,000 for the month.
Now, $400,000 for a month’s work was very, very good money. But you’ve got to understand something about Vegas. Before Elvis started performing there, every entertainer had one night a week off—Monday or Tuesday. And Elvis said, “I’m going to work seven nights a week.” He was so up and excited the first time. He said, “Man, I love this. I’d go stark raving mad if I had to sit around one night, just twiddling my thumbs.” So that was a first for Vegas. And the hotels started saying to other entertainers, “If Elvis can work seven nights a week, so can you.”
Elvis was also the first artist to have just his first name up on a marquee. The International ran this gargantuan “ELVIS” up there, with the names of the comedian Sammy Shore, and the Imperials, and the Sweet Inspirations in much smaller letters. After that, all the other hotels just followed suit.
The International had just been built. Actually, parts of it weren’t quite finished. And they had this 1,500-seat showroom that they could really pack two thousand people into. Alex Shoofey, the general manager, asked Colonel if Elvis wanted to open it. And Colonel said, “Not on your life,” because it was risky. The room was a tough place to play because it’s sort of like an auditorium—real spread out and not very intimate. So they put Barbra Streisand in it, and then Elvis followed after her run.
We did an interview with Sammy Davis, Jr., for that documentary we made after Elvis died. He said, “Man, I’ve been performing in Vegas almost since Vegas was opened. And I have never, ever seen somebody fill a two-thousand-seat room.” But Elvis’s whole engagement was sold out ahead of time.
LAMAR FIKE: Nobody goes to Vegas and plays four weeks anymore—they do five days, tops. Do you realize what kind of hell four weeks is? That’s a marathon—nearly sixty performances. And Elvis had such a high-energy show that when he would do an honest hour and fifteen minutes twice a night, he was so tired he was cross-eyed. That’s why he took all that stuff [drugs] to keep him going.
MARTY LACKER: You know one reason Colonel booked Elvis to a schedule like that? The Colonel got really into debt out there, gambling. And when he struck his deal with the International, he probably had his gambling debts cut back.
Elvis might have made unprecedented money in Vegas, but he was worth a lot more than he got. Because when the hotel realized that Elvis was going to sell out every show, they immediately signed him to a five-year deal of two monthlong engagements a year. But with an increase in fee of only $25,000 a week—$125,000, for a total of $1 million for the two months. That’s the key, see. Colonel allowed it.
Just look at the figures: They had a $15 minimum, at two thousand people, for $30,000 a show. At two shows a night, for twenty-eight consecutive nights, that’s $1,680,000. But it was really more because 50 percent of the shows were dinner shows, and sometimes they got even more people in that room. So the hotel was taking in more than $2 million a month on Elvis—twice a year for five years. Now, Vegas knows that most shows lose money, but they book entertainment to get people into the casinos. Elvis was the first act in Vegas history to make a hotel a profit on the show. Plus, he was bringing the type of people to Vegas who didn’t normally come there, like families. They were coming from all over the world.
It’s pretty clear what was going on: Colonel was supporting his gambling habit. Shoofey used to work for Milton Prell, by the way—Colonel’s old buddy at the Sahara. I think that’s what Colonel held out for in the deal at the International—that the hotel would give him perks and forgive at least a portion of his casino debts if he and Elvis signed the deal.
LAMAR FIKE: Now, is that exactly how it went down? Who knows for sure except the Colonel, and Shoofey, and Kirk Kerkorian, the owner of the hotel? You never could pierce that veil. I think that they had the Colonel in an uncomfortable position, and they said, “Okay, you can get out of it if you do this.” That’s what we’ve heard.
MARTY LACKER: They supposedly wrote that contract on a tablecloth in the restaurant at the hotel. Colonel says it’s true. But you can bet your house that it was written on paper later.
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel had living quarters at the hotel. Now, why would the International let Colonel Parker have a suite of rooms? Because Colonel lost a fortune at the International on blackjack, craps, and roulette. Alex Shoofey confirmed that. He said, “The Colonel was one of the best customers we had. He was good for a million dollars a year.”
Back in ’75, ’76, somebody told me that Colonel was one of the top five rollers in Las Vegas. But you almost never knew what his money was worth because he played with colored chips, and you couldn’t tell what the denomination of the chips were. Only the hotel knew.
When Barron Hilton bought the hotel from Kerkorian in ’71, he bought Colonel’s markers, too. That’s how the whole thing stayed in a lock.
A few years after he opened, Elvis and I were sitting in the living room one day, and Elvis said, “Look, damnit, I’ll play this town ’til I die. That old son of a bitch owes so much money that they own him, and they’re trying to own me.” I said, “Are you kidding me?” He said, “Lamar, I’m talking all the way back to 1957 at the Sahara Hotel with his buddy Milton Prell. Colonel was gambling when he had Eddy Arnold, and it carried into me. The markers were moved from there, to there, to here.” So Colonel had Elvis where he wanted him, and Elvis knew it.
BILLY SMITH: Colonel would gamble on anything. It’s like one time with a picture, Colonel and Hal Wallis got into a little tiff about the girls who were up in Elvis’s suite until three A.M. Wallis complained that they looked tired, and that they yawned all the time. Colonel picked up a pair of dice and said, “I’ll tell you what, Wallis. I’ll shoot you double or nothing for the movie. If I win, you pay double. If you win, we’ll do it free. One roll of the dice.” Wallis stared a hole through him, and then he said, “You’re crazy, Parker.”
LAMAR FIKE: A high roller is treated royally in Vegas. That’s why Colonel would leave with all those sandwiches and other food, and that’s why he had a whole wing of the hotel for his use. If you own a hotel and casino, you make the high roller happy. And if your high roller happens to own an artist, especially your biggest-selling star, you’ve got a guy that’s stronger than Tarzan’s armpits.
But Colonel stayed in debt, and the debt got bigger. The tragedy for Elvis was that Colonel apparently never had to pay it back in real money.
I was up, like $40,000 or $50,000 one night, and Colonel came up and took my $50,000 and bet it on the line, and I lost it in one pop. I said, “You can’t do that to me!” But he did.
MARTY LACKER: Colonel is the only guy I’ve ever seen in Vegas that they’d let use two balls on the roulette wheel. I was standing right next to him when he did it. They didn’t care what Colonel did in the casino. They just wanted his marker.
LAMAR FIKE: The same night he lost my $50,000, I saw him lose a quarter of a million dollars in one roll of the dice. I know because this time he was betting stacks of $100 chips. And he played what they call “Around the Horn,” the center of the table. Those were all the long-shot bets. And your money’s not worth anything on those long-shot bets. He would always bet against the guy passing, and the guy started passing and beat his brains out. On roulette, Colonel would play every number on the table. And I promise you there weren’t any dollar chips.
MARTY LACKER: When Milton Prell owned the Aladdin Hotel, and before Elvis got married there, we went to Vegas to mess around one time. Colonel wouldn’t let anybody on a table he played on, if he could help it.
This was one of the few times I got involved in one of his little games. We were standing at the table, and he was smoking a cigar. This old drunken woman came by and said, “Well, what have we got here?” She staggered around, and she bumped into Parker. And that pissed him off.
After that, she inched her way into the table and said, “I think I’m going to play some roulette,” just slurring her words, you know. And the guy working the table looked at the Colonel like “Hey, I can’t turn anybody away. This is a casino.” So the Colonel looked around, and he pulled a bunch of cigars out of his pocket. And he said, “Pass these out to all the guys.” There were about five or six of us around the table. And he said, “All right, boys, let’s smoke her out of here.” He was standing next to her, and he puffed on his cigar, and he blew a big mouthful of smoke right in her face. And so did everybody else, repeatedly. We made this woman so sick she passed out. That was Parker’s way of getting rid of her.
LAMAR FIKE: The night before Elvis opened, we went down and saw Barbra Streisand. Elvis listened for a while, and he didn’t really get her. Especially when she went into her Jewish shtick. A little ways into it, he turned to me and he said, “She sucks.”
He’d been drinking Bloody Marys, and when we went backstage, instead of telling Barbra how great she was, Elvis said, “Man, what did you ever see in Elliott Gould? I can’t stand the guy.” And Streisand gathered herself up into this indignant huff and said, “What do you mean? He’s the father of my son!” Hardly an auspicious meeting.
MARTY LACKER: As soon as Streisand was out of there, Parker went to work turning the International into the House of Presley. And he continued to handle Elvis like he was some carnival freak. The day Elvis opened, Colonel walked around in a white coat that said “Elvis—International—In Person” and put posters and banners all over the place. And then he sold straw hats, and canes, and teddy bears.
Well, he made money, I’m sure, from the Elvis fanatics. But I can tell you right now, Elvis would have had two thousand people in that showroom, anyway.
LAMAR FIKE: Christ, everybody turned out that night: Ann-Margret, Dick Clark, Angle Dickinson and Burt Bacharach, George Hamilton, Carol Charming, Wayne Newton, Fats Domino, Pat Boone, Shirley Bassey, Paul Anka, Petula Clark. On and on. I think they got 2,500 people in that room. The fire marshal would have shit a brick.
MARTY LACKER: The opening in Vegas in ’69 was fantastic. George Klein and I went out for it. I called Esposito and told him we were coming, and he said, “Elvis would like you to do him a favor.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “He’d like you to come the second night, not the first night.” I said, “Really, why?” He said, “Well, I’ll tell you the truth. He knows there’ll be all kinds of people there the first night. But he’s real nervous that everybody’ll leave, and there won’t be anybody out in the audience for the second night, or the third or the fourth. So he’d really like you and George to be there the second night, so he’ll know he has someone to give him a good reception.”
We drove out and arrived the afternoon of the second day. Elvis was on the twenty-ninth floor, the high rollers’ floor—later, they built the thirtieth-floor penthouse suite for him. Anyway, I called up there, and Joe answered, and I said, “We’re coming up. What’s your suite number?” And Joe said, “No, he doesn’t want you up here.” I said, “What do you mean? I drove eleven hundred damn miles to get here!” Joe said, “He doesn’t want to see you until after the show. He wants you to tell him what you think.” I thought Joe was joking, but he wasn’t. So we just waited.
That was the first time in many, many years that I had seen him perform live, and the performance was absolutely electrifying. He opened with “Blue Suede Shoes,” and you could tell he was nervous. Then he went into a lot of the old stuff, “I Got a Woman,” “That’s All Right (Mama),” “Love Me Tender,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” and a couple others. And then he said, “This is the first time I’ve worked in front of people in nine [sic] years, and it may be my last, I don’t know.”
But he didn’t have to worry. They liked the old stuff, and they liked the newer stuff—“Memories,” “In the Ghetto,” “Suspicious Minds,” “Tiger Man,” and, interestingly enough, a couple of Beatles tunes, “Hey, Jude,” and “Yesterday.” The last song was “What’d I Say,” the Ray Charles hit, and then he got this just thunderous standing ovation. He left the stage, and when he came back out, he did “Can’t Help Falling in Love” for an encore.
Afterwards, people were filing out, and Joe or somebody came up to get us. We went downstairs to the dressing room, and Elvis was waiting outside the door. He still had his stage costume on—a dark blue karate-style outfit, tapered and belled. He looked at my face to see my reaction, and all I could say was, “My boy, my boy.”
It was funny because he just opened his arms, and we hugged. We didn’t say any more until we got in the dressing room because we were very emotional. I finally said, “Elvis, that was unbelievable.” And he said, “Man, that’s the greatest feeling I’ve had in years. It’s fantastic.”
There were only one or two occasions when I saw the Colonel and Elvis hug, and that was one of them. Colonel actually looked like he had tears in his eyes because everything went so well. Now, those tears might have been motivated by dollar signs because he realized they were back in business again. But they were tears nonetheless.