CHAPTER 46
LAMAR FIKE: At the end of January ’74, when Elvis opened in Vegas, it was only a two-week engagement. Colonel’s contract with the Hilton expired in ’73, and when they renegotiated, a bunch of the other hotels—the Aladdin, the MGM Grand, where Kirk Kerkorian had gone—came calling. Henri Lewin, who was a Hilton vice president, finally got Colonel to commit to staying for two more years. And Lewin gave Elvis the option of playing only two weeks at a stretch, twice a year.
Boy, Elvis snapped at that. At $150,000 a week. And $150,000 was still more than anybody else was getting out there. Plus, by the time Elvis got his suite and anything else he wanted free, it added up to about a $25,000 perk. He was doing all right.
He brought Linda Thompson out there for that gig, but he also had two or three girls stashed in different rooms at the same time. Then Linda wanted to go off to do a little modeling. And Elvis said, “Sure, go on! Have a good time!” Because then he could bring in these other women. Elvis squired Sheila Ryan around for a while. She’d just been on the cover of Playboy. He saw Sheila off and on for eighteen months or so. And Linda knew it.
MARTY LACKER: Linda was the best woman he had ever been with. He called her “Mommy,” and she called him “Little Baby Buntin’.” She cared about him. She wouldn’t fall asleep at night until after Elvis did. If something happened while he was sleeping, she’d be up in a minute. She even cleaned Elvis up when he got nasty. He would get so bad at times that Linda had to take him to the bathroom. But the way Elvis saw it, there was no more challenge with her.
BILLY SMITH: Like we said, from the time Elvis Presley became famous, he never stopped seeing other women. And they were always young. He was almost forty now, and he needed to prove to everybody around him that he was still capable of getting a young woman. And it was easy until the seventies. But from about ’74 on, he started getting heavy, and he didn’t feel good.
He also didn’t think he could have a life with somebody and still be Elvis Presley.
MARTY LACKER: In ’74, while he was living with Linda, Elvis dated Ann Pennington. Her sister, Janice Pennington, is one of the models on The Price Is Right.
Elvis used to fly Ann into different places on tour. I remember picking her up at the airport in Monroe, Louisiana, one time. Someone else took Sheila Ryan to the airport while I was picking up Ann. He had women in revolving doors. They could run into each other at the airport and not know it.
After Ann stopped dating Elvis, she posed for a centerfold for Playboy, just like Sheila Ryan. Then she went on to marry Shaun Cassidy.
LAMAR FIKE: During that Vegas engagement, Elvis was pretty trigger-happy. One night while Linda was there, Elvis had his .22-caliber Savage revolver out and decided to pick off a statue of an owl up in the suite. He had a bunch of pills in him, and his aim was off. Linda was sitting in the bathroom, and out of nowhere, a bullet ripped through the wall and grazed the toilet paper roll right next to her knee. Then it zinged on and shattered the mirror on the back of the door.
BILLY SMITH: I think that bathroom incident scared the fool out of Linda. But nobody said a whole lot to him about it. They just kind of fluffed it off, and said, “Man, you got to be a little more careful with that thing.” The way he was with guns, it would have been damn easy for him to have made a mistake and shot somebody. But he’d always grumble, “Oh, goddamn, I know how to handle a gun.”
LAMAR FIKE: The Savage revolver had a long barrel on it. Serious gun. He hauled it out after Red one time. I don’t know which was tougher—Red or that gun—but we nearly had us a showdown.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis pulled a gun on Red two or three times. Red told him one time if he ever pulled it on him again, he’d better use it.
MARTY LACKER: One afternoon in ’74, when Elvis was eating breakfast, he turned on the TV and there was Robert Goulet. He’d never forgotten that letter Goulet had written him in Germany about Anita Wood. So Elvis just put down his knife and fork, pulled out his .22, and blew the television to kingdom come. Then he calmly picked up his utensils and said, “That’ll be enough of that shit.”
Another time, at Graceland, he was sitting in bed watching TV—that big RCA series 2000 console. He was eating a cheeseburger and drinking milk. And this hemorrhoid cream commercial came on. Elvis had a really weak stomach about things like that, so he threw the rest of his cheeseburger and milk at the screen, and yelled, “Rub that on your ass, you son of a bitch!” And then he reached over on his nightstand and picked up his turquoise-handled Colt .45 automatic and blasted the whole screen out.
BILLY SMITH: Lisa was there at the time, and Elvis didn’t want her to see the blown-up television, so he threw his robe over it. And then he called [his uncle] Earl Pritchett [the head groundskeeper] and told him his TV didn’t work anymore and asked him to get rid of it. Earl come in the bedroom and, without looking at it, said, “I know what’s wrong with that TV, Elvis. I had the same trouble with mine. It’s a high-voltage tube.” Elvis said, “Does yours have a hole in it?”
Earl carted it out and later asked if he could have it. Jimmy Velvet, the Elvis collector, sold it at auction in ’94. It brung all kinds of money.
LAMAR FIKE: The paranoia really got bad in the mid-seventies. We’d be asleep, and Elvis would get up and raise hell with everybody, wanting to kill somebody.
One night he got on a table and started shooting because he couldn’t find Dr. Ghanem to get his drugs. Elias was on Adnan Khashoggi’s yacht somewhere in the Caribbean. And Elvis went into this maniacal raving, and he pulled his gun out and started firing at everything he saw. Boy, we were diving under the chairs during that one. Bad, bad.
He started that self-mutilation stuff again, too. He had a hole in his hand that he would pick at. It started off as some small injury, and by the time he finished, you could have parked a truck in it. Really, you could see the bones. Had Elias not gotten to it when he did, Elvis could have lost his hand.
You know why he did it? Same reason he dug a hole in his foot that time. To get more medicine.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis hurt himself on purpose like that another time, too. He beat his hand into the wall. Then he said some fan scratched it with her fingernail, and it got infected while he was shaking hands onstage.
LAMAR FIKE: It got to where he had to cut that shit out because his recuperative powers were gone. He didn’t heal like he should have. That was another indication of how sick he was getting.
If it hadn’t been for Elvis’s group, he would have died three years earlier, at the very least. Because being with him was like living in a firehouse. You never knew when the alarm was going to go off. But we literally kept that man alive.
I guess there were a good five or six times that he got so fucked up that he almost died. Dr. Nick would shoot him full of Ritalin and bring him around. That happened three or four times. He’d be damn near comatose, and we’d get Dr. Nick in, and he’d bring him back.
The first time happened in Vegas, probably ’74. Dr. Nick had to give him a shot of Ritalin straight in his heart. We thought we’d lost him. He was going down for the count, man. And Elvis popped out of it just like that. Talk about the gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands, we did it.
Another time, at a Howard Johnson Motel somewhere on the road, he had the opposite problem. He was so wired that Nick had to go in through his neck and shoot him to knock him out.
MARTY LACKER: Aside from just overdoses, you had to watch him when he ate because he’d get a load of stuff in him, and then he’d choke on his food. Drugs numb the nerves in the throat that control the swallowing reflex, and then food goes down the wrong way. Elvis had to be rescued all the time.
LAMAR FIKE: One time, in Vegas, Elvis was eating a peach and swallowed the pit, and it stuck down his fucking throat. Linda called Joe, and he went rushing in there, and Elvis had already started turning blue. Joe had to stick his finger down Elvis’s throat and pop that pit out. Later, Elvis swore up and down it never happened. The last five years were so difficult, it was unbelievable. God, it was horrendous.
MARTY LACKER: You might think that every time something like this happened, Elvis would repent or at least say something. But no. Nothing. Deep down inside, he knew what he was doing was wrong, and dangerous, but he got to the point where he didn’t think anything would happen.
LAMAR FIKE: There would be moments of contrition. But they wouldn’t last long. People say, “Oh, he was so unassuming.” He was not unassuming. He knew exactly who he was. He was the King.
MARTY LACKER: You can’t possibly control drug use like that unless you really set your mind to it. And Elvis was an escape artist.
Elvis wanted to be happy. He just didn’t know how to do it. He felt it was too late for him to find happiness. He could have found it with Linda. But instead of concentrating on that, he looked back at Priscilla and thought, “Maybe I’m not cut out to be married.” He dealt with it the only way he knew how—by getting wasted.
LAMAR FIKE: If we’re dealing with psyches, I think Elvis did not want to be what he was, but he didn’t want to give it up. We were talking one time, and I said, “Let’s go to Hawaii—get your act together.” He said, “I just can’t do it.” I said, “Well, I guess not.”
His tours were getting so bad that I would just fly a day ahead with Colonel and work advance. That way, I wouldn’t have to see the shows. He was losing his beauty—just all gut and chin. And he was forgetting lyrics, and preaching onstage, for God’s sake, and going into these interminable monologues. He was so drugged up, it was really embarrassing.
The worst performance I witnessed was in Houston, Texas. That morning, he was so loaded that we had to throw him in a cold shower to try to bring him around. He had damned near overdosed. When the cold water hit him, he didn’t even know it. He was that screwed up.
When he went out onstage that night, he did twenty-two minutes and forgot all the songs. Then he walked offstage and got in the bus. He wouldn’t have even done the twenty-two minutes if we hadn’t thrown him in the shower. He didn’t remember doing the show. He didn’t even remember where he was. He came by me and said, “Where the fuck were we?” I said, “Well, I can promise you it wasn’t Secaucus, New Jersey.” He said, “Don’t get funny.” I said, “We were in Houston,” which was one of his big towns. I said, “You’ve got to watch what you’re doing because you don’t know what’s going on out there.”
It didn’t register. He didn’t pay any attention to it. They were booing and everything. I think they even asked us not to come back. That was in ’74. But he didn’t care. He would cancel a show at the drop of a hat. If he was straight, that would never happen in a thousand years.
You know, people say to me, “What was the problem? Colonel? Priscilla?” Elvis was the problem—his own worst enemy.
I think Elvis wanted to be like Frank Sinatra. One night, I said to him, “You know, Elvis, no matter how pissed off you get at Frank Sinatra, you know what he is?” He said, “What?” I said, “He’s his own man. He took the risk, and he went out there and did it. He’s been through the bramble bushes, and he’s been scarred up. Do you know the difference between Frank and you?” He said, “You give me a smart answer, and you’re a dead man.” I said, “I’ll give you a true one. He did it. But you wouldn’t.”
BILLY SMITH: Those last years, Lamar was the advance man for a reason. A lot of times, especially in the later years, Elvis would get tired of people being around him. He told Jo and me that. And I’ve said this to Marty—there were times when Elvis didn’t want Marty around him. He said he depressed him. Marty was Elvis’s dark cloud. Elvis didn’t like what Lamar and Marty had to say.
MARTY LACKER: In April of ’74, everybody got real excited again because Elvis got a $1 million offer to tour Australia. But, of course, nothing happened. According to the Commercial Appeal, Parker pulled out standard line number 101: “That’s plenty for me, but what about the boy?”
BILLY SMITH: That May, they went back into Tahoe. Elvis was supposed to do two shows a day for eleven days. But he canceled two shows—said he had the darn flu.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis had Lisa with him out there. She’d just turned six. The guys went into Tahoe a few days early to rehearse, and the Jackson family was finishing their run there. Jerry took Lisa down after the show one night. That’s where she first met Michael Jackson, her husband-to-be. Schilling actually did it, but you might say that Elvis introduced them.
BILLY SMITH: That was the same time in Tahoe that Red, and Sonny, and David Stanley, and Dick Grob roughed up a real estate developer outside the suite there on the fourteenth floor. He claimed he’d given one of the guys $60 to get into a party there after the show one night, and when he come up, they wouldn’t let him in. So he found the breaker switches and turned the lights off on ’em.
Everybody come running out of the suite, and the guy said they beat the livin’ daylights out of him. I don’t know what really happened. But the guy filed a $6.3 million lawsuit. It took a while, but I think Elvis settled.
LAMAR FIKE: When we went back to Vegas in August, Elvis got the word that Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters wanted to come meet him. So they came down after a show.
They wanted to talk to him about taking the male lead in her remake of A Star Is Born. Peters was going to coproduce. And they went back into Elvis’s private room and talked to him about it. He told me about it afterwards, and he was real excited. He really wanted to do it. But Colonel said no.
Actually, I think it was a mutual decision. Elvis would not have subjugated himself to Jon’s and Barbra’s decisions. And both Elvis and Barbra would have wanted to see how late the other one would get to the set.
It would have been a great role for him. Very, very different from what he had been playing. But in a way, he would have been playing Elvis. And he realized he would have dropped into [playing] a pathetic character. He let everybody think he wanted to, but deep down he just didn’t want to push that button.
In the end, I don’t know what Colonel really said to him. You hear that it’s because Colonel wanted $1 million and Barbra balked. But I don’t think Colonel had to do much nudging. Colonel says Elvis told him to make the contract stiff enough where they would turn it down ’cause he didn’t want to do it.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis wouldn’t have done it without the Colonel, no sir. And he wanted to do that picture so bad. But it’s true Elvis had to be the most important person.
He’d been offered other real good roles that either him or Colonel turned down. Like the Jon Voight role [Joe Buck] in Midnight Cowboy. And before that, the Paul Newman part [Chance Wayne] in Sweet Bird of Youth. But if he’d ever put his foot down, he could have been some hellacious actor. Heck, he was a good actor. He acted every day.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis told me, and Red, and everybody else, that he wanted to do A Star Is Born. And the guys who were there told me that he was really enthused after Streisand and Peters left because he thought he was finally going to get an opportunity to act in a quality production.
Colonel gave the excuse that Streisand wanted top billing, and that’s why Elvis wouldn’t do it. But I think Parker wouldn’t do it for several reasons, including he didn’t want Elvis to be exposed to the “business” of show business with someone like Streisand.
And there’s another reason he might not have done it. Elvis might have been intimidated by Streisand. They were two very strong people.
BILLY SMITH: Colonel should have presented Elvis with an ultimatum of “Get yourself straightened out because I’ve got a couple of challenges for you and you can’t meet them in the shape you’re in.” He should have said, “Let’s find you a decent movie and do a worldwide tour. But you’ve got to get in shape first.” But there was no way in hell Elvis was going to do anything on his own, because the Colonel had so much control that he would have thrown a block in front of everybody.
LAMAR FIKE: During this engagement in Vegas in August, Elvis had a big showdown with Colonel. Not over the Streisand thing. Over stuff a lot bigger than that. It started with an incident with the maître d’. But it went back a lot farther.
Elvis had been on this kick that he could heal the sick and dying. Right around Christmas ’66, Alan’s father was in the hospital, dying of cancer. Elvis had never met him, and he felt bad for Alan, so he wanted to do something. So he gave Mr. Fortas a gold pocket watch that the Aberbachs had given him. In retrospect, it wasn’t the best gift because Mr. Fortas didn’t have much time, you know? The man was, like, right at the point of death.
Elvis went to the hospital to give him the watch himself. A bunch of us were there—Alan, Marty, and I don’t know who else. Mr. Fortas was drugged into unconsciousness. And Elvis got right down in his ear, and he whispered, “You can overcome this.”
When we got out of there, I said, “Elvis! What were you doing?” And he said, “Right before people die, they can remember everything that’s been said.”
Well, from there, Elvis decided he could move bushes, and twigs and shit, just by moving his hands over them. And he thought he could heal with the laying on of hands.
BILLY SMITH: In Self-Realization, they teach you that some people have the gift of healing. And of course, a lot of people say it’s fraud, but who’s to say whether it’s real or not? All I know is, sometimes we had these readings and studies on people, like Rasputin, who were supposedly capable of doing these things. And Elvis got to believing, “Hey, maybe it’s possible.” So he got to experimenting.
LAMAR FIKE: In ’73, Sonny and Judy’s little boy, Brian, got a real high fever. He was, like, a year old, and they were worried.
Well, Elvis decided he’d do the laying-on-of-hands trip and rip that fever right out of the kid. He went over to Sonny’s house with this big green scarf because he said green was a healing color. And he put on this damn turban, if you can believe it, with some kind of fake jewel on it. Looked like Ali Baba.
Elvis laid Brian down on the cloth, and then he went into the fucking lotus position and meditated. And he said all this mumbo jumbo and told Brian to concentrate on letting his fever pass into Elvis’s hands. The kid’s a year old, right? Elvis started working on him, and Brian got fixated on that fake stone and reached up to snatch it off the turban. Elvis snapped, “Don’t do that, Brian!” The kid was ruining the show! It was hilarious.
Well, Elvis put his hands on both sides of Brian’s head, and his solar plexus, and mumbled all this crap about the fever traveling through his arms and out. Then he said, “I think the fever’s starting to break.” Sonny put his hand on Brian’s forehead, and he was as hot as ever. But Sonny said, “Yeah, I think you’re right.”
The next day, Brian was a lot better. His fever was down, but hell, they’d been giving him all kinds of medicine. Sonny called Elvis and gave him the news. And Elvis said, “Good, that pleases me. Call me if there’s any change.”
MARTY LACKER: Geller’s influence lingered on.
In August, in Vegas, Elvis was talking to Mario, who used to bring and serve Elvis’s dinner in the suite. Elvis asked how his family was, and Mario told him that his wife was dying of cancer. And because Elvis thought he could heal the world, he said, “Look, don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”
He asked Mario where he lived. And a whole bunch of us got in two or three cars and went out to Mario’s house. We all went in, and Elvis started talking in this real hushed tone. He asked Mario, “Where is your wife?” Mario said, “She’s in the bedroom.”
Elvis said, “I’d like to go in there and make her feel better.” He was going to put his hands on her [to heal her] and all this other stuff. He looked around the room, and he said to two or three people, “Come on, go with me.” He glanced over at me, but he didn’t bother to ask me because I had just given him a look like “I ain’t going in there,” and he knew I thought it was all hokum.
Well, somehow the hotel got wind of Elvis going out to Mario’s house. And they made it seem like Mario was taking advantage of his position. So one night, somebody else brought the food up. And since Elvis insisted on having Mario all the time, he said, “Where’s Mario?” And the other waiter said, “Mario doesn’t work here anymore.” Elvis asked why, and the guy told him he’d been fired. And Elvis blew up.
That night, he went onstage and lambasted Barron Hilton. He said, “I think you people ought to know that the big shots at the Hilton are an unfeeling, uncaring group. They’re rotten. A man’s wife was dying of cancer, and just because I went out there to try to help her, they fired him. Barron Hilton’s behind this. He’s not worth a damn.” He just berated him. The pills were screwing him up so much that he didn’t care what he did.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis went to the Colonel about it before he went onstage. And the Colonel tore into him. He said, “You don’t need to interfere with the hotel’s business!” And that’s what tilted Elvis. He said, “Fuck the hotel’s business!” He said, “Mario’s a friend of mine, and Barron shouldn’t have fired him.” And Colonel said, “This is hotel policy. You’re involving yourself in something that isn’t any of your business, and you’re setting yourself up for trouble.”
MARTY LACKER: I think Elvis was making a statement, which was, “I don’t want to play here anymore.” He told me, “I’ll see that the old son of a bitch doesn’t book me in Vegas again!”
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel came charging out and walked up to me and said, “This is going to cause us a lot of problems.” I said, “Well, Colonel, you go on in and tell Elvis what he did wrong because ain’t nobody here going to tell him.”
Elvis left the stage and went downstairs to the dressing room. And Parker went down there just screaming and yelling. You could hear them through the doors in the back. Colonel said, “What the hell are you doing? Who gives you the right to say those things about Barron Hilton?”
Elvis said, “Look, if you don’t like it, that’s tough shit.” And Parker said, “Well, I don’t like it, and I don’t know if I’ll take this anymore.” And Elvis said, “Well, goddamnit, if you don’t like it, just get the fuck out! We’re through. Finished.”
MARTY LACKER: Parker said, “Okay, I’ll call a press conference in the morning, and I’ll announce that I am no longer your manager because of the weird, stupid things you do.”
And Elvis snapped back, “Well, then, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll call a damn press conference tonight and tell them I fired your ass.” Parker said, “You do what you want. I’ll get my bill together and present it to your father in the next couple of days. And when you pay it, I’m finished.”
Now, there shouldn’t have been a bill because of the way that money was split up. And all that night, Elvis just screamed and hollered, “That old rotten son of a bitch! Fuck him! I don’t need him anymore.”
One of the other guys told me that when Colonel left, Esposito spoke up and said, “Good. Now we can handle this ourselves. We can run things because the tours are laid out anyway.” But Joe was way over his head. He was road manager on the tours, and Joe was good at what he did, but he was no manager. And no disrespect to Joe, but Elvis was down on his case bad, too. He wanted to weed him out.
LAMAR FIKE: I told Elvis, “Joe wants to manage you.” I said, “You can write it down. Joe and maybe Jerry Schilling.” And I think they’d scouted around for somebody like Jerry Weintraub to help them, although I don’t think Weintraub ever approached Elvis about it. Weintraub handled Sinatra and John Denver. But I told Elvis, “Something’s going on. I don’t know what it is, but you’d better watch your ass.”
That whole thing with Colonel lasted for days. It started with a big buildup, and it all came to a big, screaming explosion.
The day Elvis really blew up, he was in his bedroom in the suite. He told me to get Colonel up there, and I went downstairs and got him. We went in the bedroom, and I walked over and sat by the Exercycle. Esposito was there. And Elvis just ripped into Colonel all over again. He said, “You’re through. You’re fired.” The Colonel said, “You can’t fire me.” Elvis said, “I just did.” The Colonel said, “You’re going to have to pay me off.”
That was the first time I’d seen Colonel get really ballistic. He said, “I’m going to call a conference, and I’m going to lay it all out.” And Elvis said, “You get your ass out of here!” And the Colonel stormed out of the room.
About ten minutes later, I went downstairs. And Colonel said, “Tell Elvis such and such.” So I did. And then Elvis said, “Go back and tell the Colonel . . . ” They had me in the middle, and I was like a Ping-Pong ball, bouncing around.
BILLY SMITH: From there on, Elvis despised Colonel. Didn’t even like to be around him.
MARTY LACKER: Two or three days later, Vernon went out there and said, “Son, I think we have to make up with the Colonel.”
Elvis said, “What are you talking about?” Vernon said, “He just presented us with his bill for $2 million. He says we owe it to him.” Which was bullshit. And Elvis said, “What do you mean, $2 million?” Vernon said, “Well, he’s got it listed here. And he says once we pay him, he’ll give up the contract.”
Elvis and his father talked for a while, and Elvis came out and said to Joe, “I guess we’re going to have to go down there and make up with the old bastard.”
BILLY SMITH: That was Elvis’s big chance to get away from Colonel. And he missed it.
MARTY LACKER: Vernon had no idea that somebody else could put up the $2 million, and they could have told the Colonel to go to hell. There were so many managers in the entertainment business who would have given their right arm to have Elvis. Record companies, too.
There’s a book called The Death of Elvis [by Charles C. Thompson II and James P. Cole] that concentrates on the last year. But it also has a brief interview with Colonel Parker by Larry Hutchinson, chief criminal investigator for the attorney general of Tennessee. Parker told Hutchinson that in ’74, when Elvis was playing Vegas, Elvis came out to Palm Springs and went over to Parker’s house.
Parker told Hutchinson, “He didn’t look well. I said, ‘Do you want to take a rest? There’s something wrong. I don’t know what it is, but you don’t look well.’ That’s when Elvis told me, ‘I do drugs. I don’t tell you what to do with your life. I don’t interfere with it. I don’t want you to get involved in my personal life. I know what I’m doing, Colonel, no disrespect, but I know what I’m doing, and I’m fine.’ ”
Colonel said that later he got concerned about Elvis’s weight gain, and he said to Elvis, “You’ve gained so much weight.” And Elvis supposedly repeated, “I know what I’m doing, Colonel. Please don’t interfere.”
So Hutchinson said to Colonel, “You never did interfere into his personal life?” And Colonel said, “I never had from the start.”
Now, I don’t know if that conversation between Elvis and Parker ever really happened. But if it did, it’s unconscionable. I know that Parker said to Elvis once, “If you don’t straighten out, no one’s going to want to book you.” But Parker wasn’t concerned about Elvis’s welfare—he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to make money off him anymore.
Elvis didn’t care what anybody said. Parker waited too long, and said too little.
By the way, it’s interesting to note that 1974 was also the year that Colonel set up Boxcar Enterprises to oversee the merchandising of Elvis products. Souvenirs, for example. And there was a short-lived Boxcar Records. They put out an all-talk album, Having Fun with Elvis on Stage. Basically, it was just comments Elvis made in concert. Parker used to sell it at the souvenir stands in Vegas and on the road.
Appropriately enough, “boxcar” is a gambling term. It means double sixes on the dice. Colonel set up Boxcar for two reasons. Most of Elvis’s income was from live performances. And Colonel saw that Elvis couldn’t go on all that much longer. His health was deteriorating so fast. And Colonel also wanted to give his faithful pals another break. Because here’s how the stock of Boxcar broke down: Parker, 40 percent. Tom Diskin, 15 percent. George Parkhill, 15 percent. Freddy Bienstock, 15 percent. And Elvis Presley, 15 percent. So Parker and his cronies got 85 percent of the stock.
Now, Elvis got a salary, too. In ’74, it was $2,750. But the others also got a salary. In ’74, Colonel got $27,650—almost $25,000 more than Elvis! And by ’76, Colonel would get $36,000, Elvis would get $10,500, and Diskin, who was president, would get $46,448.
LAMAR FIKE: Boxcar was set up for merchandising and merchandising only. And consequently, the merchandising at times made more than Elvis did.
Colonel earned 50 percent, and Elvis earned 50 percent. Well, maybe Colonel had 56 percent. Colonel could have charged a 6 percent administration fee over and above it, for running it.
But compare that with merchandising today. The artist gets X amount of dollars up front. The merchandiser puts up all the money, and it’s a 70/30 deal.
BILLY SMITH: The thing is, Colonel put all these other people in the Boxcar deal. And when he done that, Elvis come out on the short end of the stick.
MARTY LACKER: On September 2, Elvis closed his second two-week engagement at the Hilton. Sheila Ryan was his date that night. She shared Elvis’s booth with Priscilla and Lisa Marie. And Elvis was still going with Linda.
Sonny says Elvis introduced Sheila to his audience as his “new girlfriend” and asked her to show off a diamond ring he gave her. Then he introduced Priscilla and said, “We get along fine. There’s no trouble.” But then he turned around to the band and said, “But Mike Stone ain’t got no balls. Mike is a stud, my ass.”
And the audience heard it. I’m sure both Sheila and Priscilla were embarrassed as hell. I’ll say one thing for Sheila—she didn’t pump him for cars and gifts like so many of the other girls.
BILLY SMITH: In late ’74, I saw Elvis for the first time in a couple of years. And I was shocked to see the condition he was in. He was overweight, naturally—up one time to, well, about 250 pounds. And he was just drugged out. I wondered how he was going to keep going because now that he’d cut his Vegas dates in half, he was trying to increase his tours. He needed the money, and he wanted the world to know he was still great.
He had this one more tour to do in late ’74, which was his fourth tour that year. After that, he took five months off. And he pretty well begged me to come back to work for him. When I made that decision to stay home and go to work in the late sixties, that changed a whole lot between us. And he knew it.
In fact, he made a promise to my wife that if I’d just come back, he wouldn’t take me on the road. He wanted us to move back to Graceland and have a trailer out back. He swore to Jo that wherever I went, she would be able to go. Because he saw that to get one of us, he had to take two. And he swore on the Bible that he wasn’t going to try to separate us.
When I did come back, the group of guys was pretty different. It had all these new people now, like Al Strada, and Dick Grob, and David and Ricky Stanley, and Dave Hebler, and Sam Thompson, Linda’s brother. Sam didn’t come to work for Elvis until ’76, but he was around a lot before that.
LAMAR FIKE: Dave Hebler didn’t really play that big a part. He was hired in ’74 as a bodyguard. Dave would do karate exhibitions with him.
And Dick Grob was a bodyguard in the strictest sense of the word. Jerry Schilling sometimes worked security, too, though he was too afraid of hurting his looks. Jerry was kind of a peacock. The only thing he didn’t do is fly on top of a roof.
MARTY LACKER: Sam Thompson was all right. He had been a Shelby County sheriff’s deputy for about four years before he came to work for Elvis. And he made $350 a week, which was a lot more than some of the other guys got.
LAMAR FIKE: I’d say Sam was a Tonto Straight Arrow. Not a terrific personality. Sort of a dour person, just an average, big, tall guy.
BILLY SMITH: Sam met Elvis through Linda. He was going to law school when we first met him. He’s a real nice person. Very intelligent and, like Linda, down-to-earth. He really looked up to Elvis.
We had a pretty good group, but there was changes that had to be made. Everybody was fighting to get somebody else’s position. Back-stabbing, in a sense.
When I went back to work for Elvis, we sat down and had a long talk. Me, him, and my wife. ’Cause, see, I give up a damn good job at the railroad. I said, “I’m not being nasty, but you have no kind of retirement fund. All you can offer is Social Security. And I really hate to give up my benefits.”
And he said, “God, if you’ll just come back to me, I’ll make sure that you get more than what you’re making down there. And you know the benefits with me are more than they ever could be at the railroad.” And he presented a beautiful package.
We also talked about some of the problems around him. I told him I wouldn’t come back if things were still the same. And by that, I meant the class separation, the gap between a lot of the guys.
I said, “Elvis, you allow certain things to go on around you that force some people away. Especially your older group.” Because he asked me. He said, “Why do you think so many of ’em left me? Why did you leave?” And I broke down and told him. I said, “Well, it was true about my daddy and my kids gettin’ ready to go to school. But I also resented the way I was treated. I was family, but I was more an employee. And to me, you were my family, number one, not number two. I thought I ought to have some privileges.”
And from there on, I stayed with him. I was trying to help him. And, of course, I liked being around him. He was not drugged-out all the time, but his moods would swing like a pendulum. And his life was exciting. ’Course at times it was total hell. And he would get irrational. But at first, when I went back with him, I think he tried not to let that show too much. Maybe because he didn’t want to scare me into thinking I’d made a mistake, I don’t know.
In September, when he come home from Vegas, and before he started his tour, Elvis went down to Schilling Lincoln-Mercury on Union Avenue and bought their whole stock of ’74 Continental Mark IVs. He give one to Linda, and one to Red, and Marty, and Richard Davis, who didn’t even work for him anymore, and one to me. He’d gained a whole lot of weight just in the three weeks since he’d been back—really just ballooned—and I’m sure that made him unhappy. And when he got unhappy, he liked to go buy cars.
Well, I didn’t want another car. He’d just bought me a car a short time before. So I said I wasn’t going to take this one. And he said he was going to shoot me in the leg if I didn’t accept it. We were down at the Lincoln dealer’s.
And I said, “Well, then you might as well pull the trigger because I don’t want the son of a bitch!” And he pulled a gun out, his World War I Commemorative Colt .45 with the turquoise handle, which was one of his favorites. The grip has “E” on one side and “P” on the other. But I knew he wasn’t going to do anything. So anyway, a salesman, Percy Kidd, come over, and Elvis said he wanted the car we were looking at. But Percy was going to charge Elvis full price. And that pissed me off no end. I said, “You’re not going to knock anything off?” He said, “No, you’re buying a Lincoln Continental.”
I said, “I don’t give a damn if it’s a Rolls-Royce. You’ve got a hell of a range here that you can knock off.” And he said no again, and I said, “Well, we don’t want it then.”
Well, Elvis bought the car anyway. He bought all those cars that afternoon. And by the time we got home, it was late—about ten P.M. The car lot was already closed. But I was still ranting and raving. I just couldn’t see it. Because after we left Schilling [Motors], we went down to Madison Cadillac and Elvis bought five Cadillacs. And they’d give him $1,200 off.
So the more I thought about the guy at Schilling, the madder I got. Elvis said, “What in the hell is bothering you?” I said, “Look, I don’t care who you are. It makes no difference.” I said, “If I went in there and bought that car, I could have gotten a discount. There’s no reason why you can’t.”
So Elvis called his daddy and told him the whole story, and he said, “How come I can’t get a discount?” Well, his daddy called Percy Kidd. And Percy told Vernon, “He’s already bought the cars, now, Mr. Presley. It’s not like Elvis can’t afford it. After all, you’re buying a Lincoln.”
Vernon said, “Well, let me put it this way, Mr. Kidd. Either discount it or we’ll have the cars back up there.” Percy kind of hemmed and hawed, and Vernon said, “It won’t look good if I call the paper tomorrow and tell them that Elvis Presley was probably the only person in Memphis who never got a discount from Schilling Motors.”
And Percy still didn’t offer to make it right. So Vernon held his own, and we took them damn cars back at three o’clock in the morning, and parked them, and left them. Halfway up there, we even got a police escort. Boy, I was still fuming. I didn’t get over it that whole night.
Well, everybody had pretty much fallen in love with the car Elvis had bought them. So Elvis told us, “I want the same color, the same make car, with the same stuff [options] on it for each person. And I want them here by tomorrow afternoon.”
I called all over the place, but I couldn’t get them. Finally, we called Foxgate Lincoln, which is also in Memphis. And I never will forget it. The boy’s name was Dewayne Curtis. He had just been made sales manager. He didn’t have the cars, either. And he called Mississippi, and he called Arkansas. He said, “Man, I can’t do it. But what if I give Elvis the discount, and I get the same cars from Schilling [Motors]? Just don’t tell him.”
So we got the same damn cars we already had and got a $1,400 discount. Now, ain’t that something? The funny thing is, Schilling also owned Foxgate. Elvis didn’t know that, either.
MARTY LACKER: At the end of September, Sonny, who’d been working advance with Colonel, saw Elvis in College Park, Maryland, for the first time in about a month. Sonny was so shaken by how he looked that he cried. He said that he and Red and Dave Hebler went in their motel room and said a prayer.
Some of the guys in the band said they hardly recognized Elvis. When he got out of the limousine at the show, he fell out on his knees. People flocked around to help, and Elvis just pushed them away. Then he went onstage and held on to the microphone stand like it was the only thing that was holding him up. He slurred his words, and he cut the show short, the way he did in Vegas. Joe Guercio, his old conductor in Vegas, was there. And he cried, too.
After that, Elvis straightened out for a few dates. Vernon took Linda to Abilene to see the show. He had Tony Brown playing piano for him in his band by that time. Tony replaced David Briggs, who’d joined Elvis’s band at $3,000 a week. Linda had begun to have some interest in David. I think “interest” was all it was at that time, though. David dropped out of the band to go to Nashville, where he could earn more money.
Vernon was so upset at how Elvis looked that he had Dr. Nick come out from Memphis. I heard Elvis got all right for a few shows, and then he went to Detroit and fell back into the pattern. Pretty soon, he went to Tahoe to make up for the cancellation the year before. After that, he took five months off.
LAMAR FIKE: Everything was starting to fall apart. Sometime in September, Vernon and Dee formally separated. I guess that had been coming for some time. Vernon had cheated on her for years and with pretty much anything. When Elvis played El Paso in ’72, Vernon took the Stanley brothers to a whorehouse, picked out the best hookers there, and paid for the whole party. And Dee started having more of a social life, although to what extent, I don’t really know. I do know she and Vernon threatened each other with divorce a few times. Billy Stanley says Vernon told her he’d smash every bone in her face if she didn’t keep her ass at home.
MARTY LACKER: What finally led to the split was the fact that Vernon had a girlfriend, Sandy Miller. He met her on the road, in Denver, I think, and took a shine to her. Pretty soon, she was writing him letters, and he moved her to Memphis and rented an apartment for her. But he had to find an excuse to have her around. He’d had a mild heart attack in ’73 or ’74, so they hired Sandy, who was a nurse, a thirty-three-year-old divorcée with a couple of kids. One day, Dee came home and Vernon and Sandy looked too cozy—they were decorating something together. And Dee snooped around and found out they were having an affair. I think she even confronted Sandy about it. Anyway, Dee moved out, and Sandy moved in, and Dee eventually filed for divorce.
BILLY SMITH: In the fall, like October or November, a rumor went around that Elvis had showered Priscilla with all these gifts and asked her to marry him again. Well, I don’t believe that for a second. But one night, he was talking about her with all the wives. He said, “When I was married, Priscilla wouldn’t let me give good presents. She only wanted me to give small things.”
And he said, “I hate her. I don’t know why I married that bitch.” He kept up the ranting and raving. And when he stopped for a minute, I said, “You still love her, don’t you?” And he paused, and bowed his head, and all of a sudden he was just like a wall crumbling. He said, “Yeah, I do.” And he looked over at me and said, “I never could fool you, could I?”
LAMAR FIKE: By the end of the year, the press was having a field day with Elvis’s weight and the unevenness of his shows and records. Everybody was pointing out that he’d be forty in January.
He was more depressed about everything, and he was pretty much broke. In ’77, that lawsuit with the guy in Tahoe required Elvis to produce a record of his earnings in ’74. His income for ’74 was $7,273,622. More than $6 million of it came from Vegas, Tahoe, and the road shows, and the rest of it was from records, publishing royalties, and motion picture rentals. But his accountants put his operating expenses at $4,295,372, and his personal expenses at more than $3 million. Goldman says Colonel took only 25 percent that year.
BILLY SMITH: In the early seventies, when Elvis played Denver, he dropped in on the cops out there. He took a liking to two of them—Captain Jerry Kennedy and Ron Pietrofeso, who was in charge of the Colorado Strike Force Against Crime.
He stayed in touch, and he went out to see them a couple of times. And after he got a badge out of them, he conned them right out of a captain’s uniform. He’d put it on and parade around, just to show he had it.
At some point—I don’t remember exactly when—one of the policemen on the Denver force got killed. And Elvis attended the funeral and actually wore the uniform. He loved playing cop.
LAMAR FIKE: Oh, Lord, that was it! Going to the funeral of a cop, dressed in a cop’s uniform. David Stanley went with him. The dead cop was a brother of one of Elvis’s friends there, I think. He said he wore the uniform out of respect.
When they got back from Denver, I went up to the house. And Elvis came down the steps in that thing—with the hat on, even—and I didn’t recognize him. I said, “Damn!” He thought that was neat.
The pathetic part about Elvis is that from a dramatic standpoint, his life was equal to Greek tragedy. There’s sadness in pathos and exhilaration in pathos. But his life was almost surrealistic. I used to look at him when he was acting strange, or when he was so out of it, and think, “You couldn’t dream up a situation like this if you tried.” And I’d remember Elvis when he was so straight and happy-go-lucky, sitting over on Audubon Drive, playing “Name That Tune” on the piano.