SIXTEEN days after the comeback special aired in December 1968, the Colonel finalized the deal to take Elvis into the soon-to-be-built International Hotel, a $60-million resort palace that owner Kerkor “Kirk” Kerkorian promised would be an oasis of tastefulness on the Vegas desert of glitz and greed.
Kerkorian’s ties to the town went back to the postwar years, when he began operating a flying service to scurry gamblers from California to Nevada. Eventually, with a personal fortune of $100 million from the sale of his Trans International Airlines, Kerkorian began buying casinos, acquiring the Flamingo to use as a training ground for the staff that would run his dream hotel, the International.
To book the acts for the International’s 2,000-seat showroom—the largest in town—executive vice president Alex Shoofey tapped Bill Miller, the most respected entertainment director since Jack Entratter.
At the Flamingo, where Shoofey and Miller worked hand-in-glove, Miller brought in everyone from Sandler and Young to Tom Jones. Now for a high-profile act to open the International, he presented five names for Shoofey and the department heads to vote on, including Jones, Frank Sinatra, and Barbra Streisand, who had just won an Academy Award for Funny Girl.
But Miller had wanted Presley since Parker brought him into the Frontier in ’56 (“I made up my mind when I saw him at the time, I’m going to get Elvis”) and, through Abe Lastfogel, learned that he might be able to make a deal.
Miller called Parker at his office at MGM and set up a meeting. The Colonel wouldn’t hear of his client going into a new room—too many potential problems with sound and lighting and other bugs to work out. So Miller signed Streisand, and then went back to Parker to see about booking Elvis to follow. “He said, ‘That’s great,’ ” as the veteran entertainment director remembers, and the wheels were in motion.
Next the Colonel met with Shoofey. During his years at the Sahara and the Flamingo, Shoofey, who brought his team along every time he assumed the head of a new hotel, had earned the nickname “the Cleaver.” Knowing full well that he was in line to become president and director of the International, he watched his every step. And every penny. Of course, the hotel wanted Elvis, he told the Colonel, but Presley was unproven as a stage act after so many years in Hollywood, and especially in Vegas, where he hadn’t appeared in twelve years.
“Elvis was a question mark, to tell you the truth,” remembers Nick Naff, the hotel’s former advertising director, who had also come over from the Flamingo. But the Colonel, set on outmaneuvering Shoofey for the best deal, convinced him that the town had never seen the kind of business his client would draw.
“You’re going to find out what an opening is like when Elvis comes in,” Parker boasted, closing his pitch. “They’ll come from all over the world.” Shoofey raised a thick eyebrow, pondered the notion, and then nodded.
And so they began to hammer out the details, with the rumor floating through town that Milton Prell, Shoofey’s old boss at the Sahara, had really been the one to broker the deal for the Colonel. “Prell got money from the mob for putting the deal together,” says one longtime Vegas insider.
In July 1969, Elvis would begin a four-week engagement at the International showroom, performing two shows a night, seven nights a week. No other entertainer had ever committed to such a punishing routine; most usually enjoyed Monday or Tuesday night off. As compensation for such an all-out run, Parker demanded $100,000 a week, out of which Elvis and the Colonel would pay the musicians and backup vocalists. “Mark my words,” Parker said. “Elvis will be the first star in Las Vegas to make money for the showroom, apart from whatever his fans drop out in the casino. You’ll never have an empty seat,” he added. “I can promise you that.”
Shoofey, a long-faced Canadian with a degree in business administration from St. John’s University, mulled it over and ran the numbers. The International would want an option for a second appearance. But Parker had his needs, too, including complimentary suites at the hotel for both Elvis and him and the right to film a concert documentary. Shoofey agreed. Then the two shook hands, and Parker lined up the publicity pictures, in which Elvis posed signing his “contract” at the International’s construction site, with Shoofey and Miller flanking him in hard hats. It was only for show—Elvis would sign the official contract in April. But the photograph was historic. Never again would the Colonel give the hotel such access to his star.
The picture would become a prized possession for Bruce Banke, Nick Naff’s assistant and the executive assigned to look after the Colonel. (“Actually, I think I was about the third one, and I was the one that stuck.”) Banke would deliver Elvis’s weekly paychecks, order the big floral arrangements Parker placed in the hotel foyer each holiday, and be at the Colonel’s constant beck and call. In return, Parker treated him with unusual affection. “We were very close. I loved that man. He was like a father to me.”
In securing Elvis’s comeback in Las Vegas, the greatest carnival midway of all, Parker hoped to achieve two goals: to feed the ferocious beast that had become his gambling habit, and to reinvent and validate Presley to a new generation, building on the entertainer’s renewed popularity from the television special. The money from Vegas couldn’t touch what Elvis would make on the road, but first Parker needed to generate sizzle about Presley’s return to live performance.
Elvis himself was more concerned with following through on his promise to Steve Binder—to restore his credibility as an artist. To that end, he took the advice of Memphis Mafia member Marty Lacker to make his next album not in Nashville, with its factorylike approach to recording, but in Memphis, at Chips Moman’s American Studios. Elvis - hadn’t recorded in his hometown since the Sun years, and Moman was renowned for his soulful cache of studio musicians and his hit-making synthesis of pop and rhythm and blues. The combination, Lacker thought, just might help provide the magic to keep Elvis focused and inspired in the studio. Presley agreed and, during the first two months of 1969, recorded some of his most enduring music, including “Suspicious Minds,” “Kentucky Rain,” and “In the Ghetto.”
However, from the beginning, the project was fraught with tension, as both the label and Hill and Range grumbled at the arrangement. RCA policy dictated that all of its artists record in the company’s own studios, using only RCA staff producers. Parker backed Elvis’s request to record in Memphis, but sent Tom Diskin to the session, where RCA producer Felton Jarvis and label veep Harry Jenkins huddled together. Freddy Bienstock and Lamar Fike, the gatekeepers for Hill and Range, were equally watchful, knowing that Chips was also a songwriter and music publisher and that Lacker, who moonlighted as a song plugger and often worked with Moman, had been encouraging Presley to reach beyond the tired Hill and Range repertoire to keep pace with the innovative rockers of the ’60s.
Moman, who had produced more than one hundred hit singles, knew that his reputation was on the line with the Presley session. And while “Kentucky Rain,” a Hill and Range song by up and coming writer Eddie Rabbitt, seemed a good choice, Moman found the majority of the songs that Bienstock and Fike presented sorely lacking. “There were a lot of bad songs in there,” he recalls, “and I told them that if I had to cut all of those Hill and Range songs, I didn’t want to do it.”
Only days before the first session, songwriter Mac Davis had brought Moman a song that mirrored the social consciousness of the times. Moman knew that Elvis had never recorded anything as controversial as “In the Ghetto,” but the song built on the humanitarian spirit of “If I Can Dream,” and the producer thought it a perfect statement for a man whose music was rooted in black culture.
“He liked the song,” Moman remembers. “But after we cut it, there was a big discussion about whether it would be right for his image. Of course, back at that time, the racial thing was still hot and heavy.”
Freddy Bienstock had another consideration, since the Aberbachs - didn’t control the publishing, and inquired whether Mac Davis would be willing to give up part of “In the Ghetto” for Elvis to record the song. Such a practice rankled the producer (“I just thought that was wrong”), and while Davis conceded, Moman was not about to relinquish even a fraction of two songs in his own publishing company, “Mama Liked the Roses” and the spectacular “Suspicious Minds,” which Elvis had already laid down on tape. A confrontation quickly ensued.
“I wasn’t angry about it,” remembers Freddy Bienstock. “Those sessions were very good. I would become aware of what songs Elvis wanted to do, and if the publishing rights were available, I would pick them up. ‘Suspicious Minds’ was more difficult [to obtain] than ‘In the Ghetto,’ because ‘Suspicious Minds’ had been recorded before. [But] Chips and I became friends.”
Moman remembers it differently. “Their deal was that they weren’t going to record any song that they didn’t have the publishing on. I was ready to erase the tapes and just let it go. I ended the session and sent the musicians home and asked all of the Elvis people to leave my studio.”
As tempers flared, Tom Diskin walked over to the phone and dialed his boss. If Moman wouldn’t cooperate, Parker told his lieutenant, they’d either go around him or dismiss him altogether. But RCA’s Harry Jenkins recognized that “Suspicious Minds” could be a career record for Elvis and took it upon himself to mediate the situation at the next day’s session.
“In all the years that I have been involved with Elvis,” Jenkins told the group, “I’ve never opened my mouth about songs or anything else. But that boy [Moman] is right, and we are going to finish this session however he wants to do it.”
That August, “Suspicious Minds” became Elvis’s first number-one single in seven years, and the last he would ever have. The American Studios sessions would spawn two albums, the first, From Elvis in Memphis, garnering a lead review in Rolling Stone magazine. But Parker saw only that Chips Moman had challenged his way of doing business, even as Felton Jarvis altered the producer’s recording of “Suspicious Minds” by adding “live” horns and a false fadeout at the end. Like Steve Binder, Moman would be banished forever. When Elvis requested that Parker hire Moman’s studio band to back him during his upcoming appearance in Vegas, Diskin replied that the group was unavailable.
In July, Elvis flew to Los Angeles to begin working up his show with a small group of handpicked musicians. Later, he would add the International’s thirty-eight-piece orchestra, led by Bobby Morris, and two vocal groups—the Sweet Inspirations, a black female vocal quartet that had backed Aretha Franklin and recorded with Moman, and the Imperials, the male gospel quartet Presley had long admired. As he’d done before the TV special, Elvis slacked off the pharmaceuticals and toned his body, hoping to be in peak physical condition for his grueling performance schedule.
Parker, meanwhile, became a constant presence at the hotel. In between readying the advertising blitz for Elvis’s engagement, he could usually be found in the hotel’s casino, or playing the ponies in the race book.
In fact, Parker operated as if he owned the place. Slipping into the mode of advance man, he commanded complete control of the promotion, with the hotel footing the bill.
“The campaign that he produced was unbelievable,” remembers Shoofey. “He had every billboard in the entire city, not only in Vegas, but leading all the way to California.”
And while Parker left the print ads to the hotel, he fiercely oversaw every detail of the radio spots, many of which lasted only twenty seconds. “I did the commercials personally under the Colonel’s supervision, but [it was really] more the supervision under the Colonel’s dictation,” says Naff. “He insisted only the word Elvis be used in the entire commercial, except to tag it at the end where and when he was appearing. So [it was just] ‘Elvis! Elvis! Elvis!’ What he tried to do was virtually blanket [Las Vegas] with the fact that Elvis was in town.”
Naff was often embarrassed by the Colonel’s personal style and found his advertising “schlocky as all hell.” Once when Parker requested a particular ad spot that Naff considered beneath the hotel’s dignity, he took it upon himself to write a more upscale commercial and planned to sneak on the air. “I would listen to the commercials in my office, and lo and behold, the Colonel was passing by my doorway and heard it. He walked in and made me change the whole thing. He wanted everything to be the - Colonel’s way.”
But no one could dispute that Parker’s way worked. “We got calls from all over the world,” says Shoofey, whose office was decorated with a gift from Parker, an artificial plant deemed the “snowtree,” with cotton balls glued on its branches. “We couldn’t accept all the reservations.”
“The closing night of Barbra,” remembers Bill Miller, “we had a big party. At five or six in the morning, my wife and I went to bed. We went downstairs and the lobby was jam-packed. They were standing three blocks away to get in to see Elvis that night. And that’s the way it stayed.”
As soon as Streisand ended her engagement, Parker began working into the thin hours of the night to transform the elegant International, with its imported marble walls, into something out of Barnum and Bailey. Though Shoofey held his tongue, Naff was horrified to discover a laddered crew plastering Elvis posters “just all over the goddamned place. Unbelievable.”
The Imperials’ Joe Moscheo was equally stunned. “There were banners and flags and stand-ups of Elvis in the lobby, and everybody who worked for the hotel was wearing straw hats with an Elvis plaque on the front.” Even the casino dealers were ordered to don the promotional chapeaus, as well as red, white, and blue armbands festooned with the word Elvis. “They looked like riverboat gamblers,” says Moscheo. “Honestly, it was a very strange atmosphere.”
Parker considered it one of his most impressive promotional campaigns. But to temper the vulgarity, he promised the money from the souvenirs he sold from a booth in front of the hotel would go to a charity of Naff’s choice.
“I don’t have to tell you how much went to charity and how much went to the Colonel,” says Naff. “It was a profit-making business.” What particularly galled the advertising director was the $125 sale of an Elvis portrait in a carved wood frame that bore the label RENALDO OF ITALY. In truth, says Naff, “those frames were made by an employee of ours in the carpenter shop in the basement of the hotel. He was the famous Renaldo of Italy.”
Still, Naff found Parker to be “a very likable guy, not the kind who irritated people in his demands.” One morning, at the height of the Elvis engagement, Naff was delighted to receive a crate of “fresh, gorgeous red strawberries” as a gift. “At the end of the day, I was taking them to my car, and I chanced to pass by the Colonel. He said, ‘Hey, Nick, what have you got there?’ I said, ‘I’ve got these beautiful strawberries!’ And he said, ‘Send them up to my room.’ Now, he did it in a very smiling way, so I - didn’t resent it. But I had to stop and think, What’s more important, my association with the Colonel, or the strawberries? So I lost them. Oh, he loved strawberries.”
While Parker reveled in the merriment of Elvis’s opening, the star himself wrestled with a serious case of stage fright and depended on Charlie Hodge to help him with pacing and song selection. Soon Elvis would tell Ray Connolly of The London Evening Standard, “I’ve wanted to perform on the stage again for the last nine years, and it’s been building inside of me . . . until the strain became intolerable.” But once he moved rehearsals to Las Vegas, Presley began to have his doubts. Catching the end of Barbra Streisand’s engagement, he whispered to Hodge that the International looked like a “helluva big stage to fill.”
In the days before his July 31 debut, Elvis suffered debilitating panic attacks, one of which lasted until he took the stage at 10:15, following opening sets from the Sweet Inspirations and comedian Sammy Shore. Now thirty-four, Elvis worried if his voice would hold up during such a long engagement. Never had he delivered a full-hour set, and especially not twice a night, though this evening he would be called on to give just one all-important performance.
If he flopped, word would travel fast—not only had fans come in from as far away as Europe and Asia, but the Colonel and Kerkorian had filled the invitation-only audience with such celebrities as Cary Grant, Carol Channing, Wayne Newton, Paul Anka, Fats Domino, and Elvis’s old flame Ann-Margret. In addition, a large contingent of press was in attendance, many of whom Parker had flown in on Kerkorian’s private jet.
But when he finally took the stage, Presley hid his nervousness in the bravado of the rock-and-roll beat. Dressed in a Bill Belew karate-inspired Cossack costume with macramé belt, he gave the crowd everything he had, falling to his knees, sliding across the stage, even turning a cartwheel in a display of boundless energy. The celebrity audience shouted its approval and stayed on its feet for most of the repertoire, which ranged from early chestnuts like “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Love Me Tender” to his latest material from the Memphis sessions. Afterward, even hardened pit bosses commented they’d never seen such excitement.
When the Colonel visited Elvis backstage afterward, he had tears in his eyes. In the rarest of sights, Parker clasped his arms around his client and then left to join Alex Shoofey in the coffee shop.
One person who couldn’t get back to congratulate the star was Steve Binder. Parker had excluded him from the guest list, and after the show, the director went to the stage door guard. “I said, ‘Would you please tell Elvis that Steve Binder’s here?’ And he got on the phone and [then] said, ‘Sorry.’ ” It would be more than thirty years before Binder would learn that Elvis had been asking for him.
The Colonel had made a point to invite Bob Finkel, the producer of the ’68 special, who, on the day of the show, was flabbergasted to see Parker wearing a straw hat and peddling Elvis’s albums from under his arm in the casino. As the Colonel’s pal, Finkel rated a special treat—a private visit with Elvis upstairs in his suite after the performance. Joe Esposito briefed Presley as to their arrival, and then escorted Finkel and his wife, Jane, to the private elevator that would deliver them to Elvis’s quarters. The singer, however, had retreated into a world of his own.
“We went up there and the elevator door opened,” Finkel remembers, “and the suite was pitch-black, except for the light from the television set. There was a Western on, and Elvis was sitting there all alone. After everything we’d gone through together, all he said was, ‘Hi, Bob.’ And then he fired at the television set with a pistol. It scared the shit out of me, and Jane and I got back in the elevator and went down.”
By this time, sitting in the hotel coffee shop, Parker and Shoofey, now the International’s president, had roughed out the terms for a new contract on a pink tablecloth stained brown with coffee. Foreseeing that Elvis’s would be a record-breaking Vegas engagement (grossing $1,522,635, with an attendance of 101,500), the hotel, Shoofey said, would boost Elvis’s salary to $125,000 a week and extend its option for two engagements a year for the next five years. Parker asked him to throw in a little present—a trip to Hawaii for Elvis and eight companions. Shoofey smiled, and the two shook hands.
The Colonel had again hit his magic figure of $1 million. But Shoofey was astonished that Parker hadn’t asked for a sliding scale, considering how much business Elvis brought to the hotel and its beckoning casinos. In fact, the Colonel had negotiated like a novice.
“He says, ‘Now tell me again. You’ll give me the same money for the five years?’ ” remembers Shoofey. “And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ I mean, this was unheard of that anybody would sign for five years for the same amount of money, no increase. So he took the tablecloth, he wrote the contract on the tablecloth, and he signed it. He was very receptive, very cooperative, and very easy to deal with.”
The Colonel soon began bragging that he had gotten the most money for a performer in the history of Las Vegas. But Shoofey and his staff did some gloating of their own. “I heard [they] told someone they had just gotten the biggest name in show business for the least amount of money,” says Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires. “The Colonel could have named any price.”
Or certainly more than he demanded, given the showroom’s 2,200-seat capacity, even as the top chairs were filled for action in the casino. Parker asked for no bonuses for exceeding certain records, and as the hotel later confirmed, when Elvis played the hotel, all the International’s revenue doubled, from the slot machines to the restaurants.
“Just look at the figures,” says Marty Lacker. “They had a $15 minimum, and at even two thousand people, that’s $30,000 a show. At two shows a night, for twenty-eight consecutive nights, it works out to $1,680,000. But it was really more because fifty percent of the shows were dinner shows, and actually 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. 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.”
Just as Parker promised. So why didn’t the Colonel ask for more? Theories abound: that Parker wanted to ensure that Elvis stayed at the hotel out of loyalty to a well-connected and powerful man; that continually sold-out shows in the largest Vegas showroom would translate to filled auditoriums when they went out on the road; and, most important, that Parker was delirious at being a high roller in the gambling capital of the world, where the hotel showered him with unimaginable perks, from stocking his Palm Springs home with gourmet food—he once demanded prime rib and Dover sole be sent on Frank Sinatra’s plane when the hotel forgot to pack it on his own—to forgiving at least a portion of his mounting casino losses.
Joe Delaney, the venerable Las Vegas Sun columnist, doesn’t believe Parker sold Elvis too cheaply, but likens the Colonel’s behavior to that of a double agent. “Was he trying to protect his fifty-two-weeks-a-year relationship with the hotel, or his eight-week-a-year relationship with the artist? If he’s going to bleed the hotel for every dollar for Elvis, he’s not going to get special treatment, although the way he gambled, I’d give it to him anyway. He had two things going. He had Elvis and he had the gambling.”
And increasingly, the two entwined in his mind. Elvis would become, in fact, the Colonel’s chit. “He had an open tab [and] nobody ever talked about money,” says entrepreneur Joe Shane, who would come to know the Colonel well in the following years. “He had the boy do a lot of free shows just to cover his debt.”
Just how reckless was Parker’s gambling? “[The] Colonel was one of the best customers we had,” Alex Shoofey later reported. “He was good for a million dollars a year.”
But others say $1 million is too conservative a figure, that Parker routinely lost between $50,000 and $100,000 a night during Elvis’s engagements. Therefore, every penny that Kerkorian and Shoofey paid for Elvis’s appearances, they won back on the tables, though most of the time, the Colonel’s was marker play. He spread his layouts to make sure he always had money coming back, and each time he won, the casino reduced his bill. Since no money changed hands, Parker developed a lackadaisical attitude about it. Money ceased to be real.
“I never saw anybody who could gamble like that man could gamble,” says Lamar Fike. “He used to scare me to death. I was up one night about $75,000 or $100,000. He came and took [my bet] off [one number] and put it on another, and I lost it. I said, ‘I ought to kill you for that.’ He said, ‘Well, you could have won, too.’ I saw him lose half a million dollars at a craps table one night between shows. God knows how much money that man lost over a period of years. I’d say an easy forty million.”
It was during the first weeks of the engagement that the press began to reference Parker’s frequent appearances in the casino, particularly at the roulette table, where the hotel treated him like royalty, security guards roping off a table for his private play, which often went on for twelve or fourteen hours at a time.
Only games of chance, or betting against the house, aroused him. Games of skill, like poker, at which he might have made a living, left him cold. He especially loved the big six wheel, the Wheel of Fortune, so reminiscent of the carnivals, and bet numbers that related to his personal life, such as his birthday, or that of Marie, who brought her friend Maybelle Carter to Vegas for lower-stakes gambling. Always chasing the magic, he tried his best to hypnotize the wheel to deliver the payoff he wanted.
Often, he would wager $1,000 on every number, rationalizing it as betting large sums of money, but losing in small amounts. “If I don’t cover a number, and you hit it,” he’d bark at the dealer, “you’re gonna pay me.” A throng usually gathered, but as long as no one approached him directly or tried to muscle in on his table, he instructed that they be left alone—he loved the rush of winning with all eyes upon him. The hotel correctly saw him as a high-rolling shill.
While Parker only rarely tolerated a female onlooker who got too close—he regarded women as bad luck and would light up a cigar to smoke them out or call casino manager Jimmy Newman to remove them—he often requested a woman roulette dealer. “He felt he could intimidate a woman dealer,” says Frank Gorrell, a former casino floor man. But with either sex, “he would walk around the table and say to the dealer, ‘When I tell you, that’s when you spin the ball.’ He was also a big craps player, and he was going to run the table, not you. He was very sharp—he knew the payoffs better than we did. He’d say, ‘Don’t you cheat me, I know what I’m getting paid.’ And he did.” Affirms Gabe Tucker, “He’d stack ’em up all over, and run the men in the club plum crazy. I don’t see how they ever kept up with him.”
But while Parker loved to win big, tip generously, and watch how the bosses would react, he demonstrated one habit the dealers found peculiar. He was often good-natured when he lost, but when he won at a rough, fast-action game like craps, he liked the box men to curse him, tell him to go fuck himself. “He’d throw you in a couple of hundred if you treated him like shit,” says Gorrell. “He loved that atmosphere when he was winning.”
Whether the cursing of the croupiers served to reinforce Parker’s glee at ripping them off and choreographing their anger into public display—thus garnering Parker greater approval by all gathered at the table—the barking of the gaming dogs echoed the denigration and humiliation he heaped on Elvis’s entourage by “hypnotizing” them to “oink” or otherwise behave foolishly in front of authority figures. He treated them all as idiotic, sub-evolved lackeys, exposed under the Colonel’s power and control. He also seemed to find solace in reprimand, as if being told he was worthless and undeserving somehow assuaged his guilt.
According to Julian Aberbach, Parker had $7 million in his Madison, Tennessee, bank account in 1969, and had always gambled responsibly. But as he spent more time in Vegas, “everything went haywire” and the Colonel could not control his compulsion, even as he recognized it for what it was. “He told me, ‘Don’t gamble. There is no way in the world that you can ever win,’ ” Aberbach remembers. “He lost all his money. It is a tragic story—self-destruction on an unbelievable level, and equal to Elvis’s self-destruction. No question about it.”
With Elvis’s spectacular debut at the International, the Colonel began to receive a myriad of offers and immediately settled on two for 1970, after Presley’s four-week return to Vegas in late January. Scrapping a pay-per-view concert film scheduled for March, Parker struck a deal with Kirk Kerkorian, who now headed MGM Studios, to film a concert documentary for theatrical release, called Elvis: That’s the Way It Is. Filming would begin in July, after a June recording session for RCA in Nashville. But first, as a prelude to a national tour, the Colonel would take Elvis into the Houston Astrodome for six shows in three days in February.
Tom Diskin approached Joe Moscheo, the spokesman of the Imperials, about the group’s accompanying Presley in Texas. By now, Moscheo, who had signed the Imperials’ Vegas contract for $5,000 a week—or $1,000 per member—had discovered why the Jordanaires, who’d originally been offered the spot, turned down the deal. While the hotel rooms were covered, the group received no per diem, and Moscheo was chagrined to learn that other of the musicians received $2,000 or $3,000 apiece. Moscheo told Diskin they’d go to Houston, but that they needed to renegotiate their fee. Diskin said he’d have to talk to the Colonel, but all of Moscheo’s efforts to do so went in vain.
“He just wouldn’t see me,” Moscheo recalls. “I knew he always gambled after the second show, so about two or three o’clock in the morning, I went looking for him and found him sitting at a table playing roulette with this big crowd around him. He had a stubby little cigar in his mouth, and piles of [chips] everywhere, and a couple guys in his entourage standing behind him.
“My guys were going, ‘Just talk to him now . . . go in and tell him what we want,’ so I wiggled my way in to Tom Diskin, who was standing right behind the Colonel. The Colonel still wouldn’t talk to me directly, so I had to go through Tom.
“I’d say, ‘We’d really like for you to pay to get our cleaning done.’ And Diskin would go, ‘Colonel, Joe said that the Imperials would like you to pay for their cleaning.’ Then the Colonel would say, ‘Tell them to go to hell. We’re not paying.’ And Diskin would turn around and tell me, ‘The Colonel said to go to hell.’ It was a three-way conversation among people standing right next to each other.”
In the end, the Imperials got a raise, but the Colonel deftly sidetracked other requests. In October 1969, when Elvis took his Hawaii vacation, largely financed by the International, the Colonel got word from Joe Esposito that his client planned to return to Los Angeles, and with expedited passports for his party, which included Vernon and Dee, the Schillings, and the Espositos, fly on to Europe.
There, Presley hoped to visit some of the cities he’d longed to see since his army days (“Man, I’ll put on a disguise . . . I’ve got to get out of this country just to see the world,” he told Larry Geller), and maybe scout locales for a foreign tour. But Parker strongly argued that Elvis’s European fans would be insulted if he traveled the Continent before performing there and suggested that the entourage fly to the Bahamas instead. The Colonel had contacts there, he said. Besides, they’d enjoy the gambling. Elvis complied, though once there driving rain and hurricane winds forced him to stay indoors most of the trip, and the couples returned home a week earlier than expected.
Priscilla, who objected to Elvis’s long absences and frequent womanizing, hoped a European holiday would smooth out the rougher bumps in the marriage, something Elvis would soon allude to in the press. But neither could have anticipated the Colonel’s virulent reaction, or how he interpreted a benign vacation plan as an impulsive and assertive act.
Soon after the couple returned to Memphis, Elvis was visited by two formidable businessmen in suits and ties. The men, who identified themselves as employees of RCA, spoke politely but firmly. “They advised him of the dangers of his desire to travel to Europe because of his status and universal recognition,” says Larry Geller, who learned the story from Elvis when he came back into the entourage in 1972. “They told him he would be going eventually, but such things had to be planned out, that they took time and management. Underneath the veneer of cordiality, Elvis felt they were saying, ‘Hey, man, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ It made a deep impression upon him—he took it as a threat.”
Believing that “Parker obviously manipulated the visit,” as Geller puts it, the episode must have reminded Elvis of the Colonel’s story of Sam Cooke’s fate at the hands of RCA’s disgruntled image makers and Mafia hit men. “It was common knowledge that Parker was deeply into the ‘people’ in Vegas because of his enormous gambling losses,” Geller reports. “Elvis became more aware of this as time went by and knew that he was Colonel Parker’s bait and ransom, that Parker owned him, and whatever losses Parker incurred, Elvis would ultimately pay off by performing.”
When Presley opened his second Vegas engagement in January 1970, he appeared so trim and vibrant, with his cheekbones showing when he smiled, that Lamar Fike found him “damn near gorgeous.” But Fike, who had just rejoined the entourage after his stint with Hill and Range, was chagrined to learn that Elvis was now in the second phase of his drug use, with pills in him roughly 60 percent of the time. Fike knew it was only a matter of time before his body would show the effects, particularly as Presley was becoming bolder about what he would take. “Elvis loved downers, and he loved getting totally fucked up,” says Fike. “Downers will put weight on you pretty quick.” They also added to Elvis’s paranoia.
During Presley’s next Vegas engagement that summer, an incident occurred that heightened Elvis’s fears about his safety, which had grown with Charles Manson’s horrific murders of actress Sharon Tate and hairdresser Jay Sebring, in whose Los Angeles shop Larry Geller once worked.
On Wednesday, August 26, the International’s security department was notified that Elvis would be kidnapped that evening. The hotel added extra security, and nothing happened, but then the Colonel received a similar call the following day. What shook everyone up was the next message, which came to Joe Esposito in Los Angeles early Friday morning. This time the caller, who dialed Esposito’s unpublished home phone number, said that an individual planned to shoot Elvis on stage during his Saturday-night show, and demanded $50,000 in small bills to reveal the name of the assailant. Later, Elvis received a hotel menu with his picture on the front, defaced with a picture of a gun pointed at his head. Written backward were the words “Guess who, and where?”
The Colonel phoned Elvis’s Beverly Hills lawyer, Ed Hookstratten, who notified the FBI. Then the attorney hired John O’Grady, a private detective and former L.A. police sergeant to come to Las Vegas to coordinate a ring of defense. Elvis, scared and shaken, called Jerry Schilling, then working as a film cutter at Paramount, and asked him to fly to Vegas to join the other bodyguards and security men who would surround the stage. Downstairs in his dressing room before the show, he told Schilling, “I don’t want any son of a bitch running around saying, ‘I killed Elvis Presley.’ If some guy shoots me, I want you to rip his goddamn eyes out!” Then he tucked a derringer in his boot and went upstairs.
With an ambulance and a Vegas doctor, Thomas “Flash” Newman, standing by, a nervous Presley began his show. The only tense moment came several songs into the performance, when a man yelled out, “Elvis!” The singer dropped to one knee and reached for the pistol. Then the voice continued: “Would you sing ‘Don’t Be Cruel’?”
Presley was never sure who was behind the hoax, but his mind raced at the possibilities. Maybe it was Parker, playing another trick to keep him in line. Or perhaps the Colonel was really the target. Maybe Parker owed a little bit too much at the tables and needed some incentive to pay up quick. Elvis knew the rumors that Parker borrowed heavily from the mob (“I’d say that Colonel Parker did a lot of stuff with people in this town that nobody is ever going to find out about,” echoes Frank Gorrell), and the latest gossip was even more frightening. Talk had it that Parker sold a percentage of Elvis’s earnings to the Mafia as payment for his debts.
Whatever the truth, Elvis began to fixate on firearms, cops, and badass effrontery. The following year, inspired by the film Shaft, in which a black private eye tangles with a powerful racketeer, he started dressing in black hipster clothing from the wildest racks on Beale Street. In the next months, he would also obtain a badge to allow him to carry a pistol in Memphis, buy an arsenal of weapons—from small handguns to an M16 automatic assault rifle—and customize many of the handles with his TCB (“Taking Care of Business”) insignia. Eventually, his fascination would border on the ludicrous. Making friends with policemen throughout the country, he occasionally donned a captain’s uniform (a gift from the Denver Police Department) and installed a revolving blue light on the roof of his car, so that he might pull over speeders and offer assistance at accident scenes.
As Elvis slipped deeper into a world of drugs and delusion, he distanced himself from the Colonel. Where earlier in the year Presley had introduced Parker to his Vegas audience, saying he was “not only my manager, but I love him very much,” they now spoke mostly through an intermediary, usually Esposito. Presley tried to avoid the Colonel at every turn.
That became easier to arrange in September, when Elvis flew to Phoenix to kick off a six-city tour, his first extended string of road shows since 1957. Tickets for nearly all the dates sold out within hours, especially since Parker kept the price to $10, less than half of what other major performers commanded. On board to promote four of the concerts was a new company called Management III.
The principal partners in the venture were Jerry Weintraub, a thirty-three-year-old former MCA talent agent who was managing the budding singer-songwriter John Denver, and Tom Hulett, whose company, Concerts West, had set the standard for contemporary rock tours with Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. Management III paid the Colonel $240,000 for the four dates, but Parker insisted on handling all advertising and promotion. The two men had no trouble with that—they’d been writing Parker for nearly two years, wanting to put Elvis into all the big, new arenas that were opening up throughout the country. They met with the Colonel for dinners with their wives and even endured Parker’s famous steam room meltdowns (“I make ’em stay until they see things my way”) at the Spa in Palm Springs.
“One of the things Jerry said,” remembered Denver, who followed his first big hit, 1971’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” with a string of chart-toppers, “was that if he did his job, and I did my job, I would always be able to work in whatever arena I chose, be it television, films, recordings, or concerts. He’s a very, very brilliant promoter. He went to the big arenas and said, ‘You want Elvis Presley to come play this place? Then I want Concerts West to be involved in every concert that comes into this building.’ And as a result of his influence in the concert market, Jerry had an enormous amount of clout with RCA, and also with radio stations.”
Just why and how Parker settled on Weintraub and Hulett isn’t clear, especially as he had rejected two other concert promoters, Steve Wolf and Jim Rissmiller of Concert Associates, who also attempted to woo the Colonel through a two-year letter-writing campaign, and finally wangled a meeting. The two found Parker charming, but a tough negotiator.
“He wanted us to pay the costs of producing the show,” Wolf remembered, “and then he gave us a cushion and a percentage over a certain amount. He threw it out so fast we had to keep asking him over and over, and he kept saying, ‘I told you boys, now for the last time this is the deal.’ He really hits you. He doesn’t sit back and let it sink in. You’re sorry you asked a question.”
After much back and forth, Parker finally told them Elvis had no plans to tour, as it might hurt business at the hotel. But if he did, he’d need to honor some obligations that went back to the late ’50s. Then, in a matter of months, he signed the deal with Weintraub.
“Jerry was very well connected, and a lot went through him,” says Joe Delaney. He was a formidable guy—still is.”
But Parker made him sweat for his power. The following month, when Weintraub went back to the Colonel to set up another eight-day tour, this time for Concerts West, Parker demanded a $1-million deposit against 65 percent of the gate. Within twenty-four hours. It was a test of both the company’s bank account and Weintraub’s resolve. “Jerry had to go out and bust his butt,” says Joe Shane. The money was late in arriving, though not really through Weintraub’s fault, and overall the Colonel’s student did not disappoint him.
As reward, Parker gave Weintraub and Hulett a piece of the concessions, though the Colonel later felt a need to wire Weintraub regarding ticket accessibility. In guarding against such stunts as a box office manager pulling free tickets for the city council, he was also looking out for the fans “who made Elvis what he is today.” As he told Weintraub in a telegram, “We want our fans to be taken care of. When they wait in line for hours and hours they are privileged customers. They come first.”
The Presley road show was now a major business, with huge grosses and attendance records, Elvis taking in more than $300,000 and beating the Rolling Stones’ numbers in two shows at the Inglewood Forum in Los Angeles that November. Most of the members of Elvis’s entourage traveled with him, Joe Esposito being in top command under Parker, Charlie Hodge acting as stage manager and general assistant, Lamar Fike handling the lighting, and Richard Davis taking care of Elvis’s wardrobe. Elvis also added a Memphis physician, Dr. George Nichopoulos, who had personally tended to nearly all of Elvis’s medical and pharmaceutical needs since treating him for a cold in 1966.
At the age of sixty-one, Parker still personally advanced the tour, making a promotional trip two months (later cut down to a matter of weeks) ahead of the show. Sonny West, keeping his eyes and ears open for Elvis as Joe Esposito did for the Colonel, traveled with Parker as security chief. Together, they obtained the hotel rooms—Elvis and the Colonel each occupied a whole floor at a different location from the show group—and figured out which entrance Presley could use to get to his room without going through the lobby. They also worked with the local law enforcement, the Colonel picking either a captain or a detective to line up as many as sixty uniformed men to police Elvis’s hotel and travel route. The entourage was afforded the same protection as a presidential motorcade.
“He would have it all mapped out, get as many as four limos for decoys, and time how long it would take to get to the airport, the hotel, and the venue,” remembers former RCA rep Gaylen Adams. “He planned such details, it would scare you.” By the time Parker’s friend Al Dvorin announced, “Elvis has left the building,” to calm a frenzied show crowd, Presley was, indeed, already on his way.
Once the tour started, Parker returned to each town the day before the date. He checked on the souvenir sales first—arena rock of the ’70s ushered in the modern era of merchandising—then tended to the box office and promotion. A sellout was a must, and if ticket sales lagged, Parker counted on a pocketful of tricks to turn the tide. Regularly, he forced RCA to buy a block of tickets as giveaways, but most of the time he relied on carny cunning.
One time in Salt Lake City, Parker remembered in the ’80s, “the rest of the auditorium was sold out, and we couldn’t sell the last two thousand seats for anything. Then on the Sunday before the show, Elder Stevens [head of the Mormon church] died. The show was set for Wednesday. I called the radio stations and canceled all the ads. We weren’t selling tickets anyway, and I figured we’d save $1,900.
“What we did,” he went on, “was instead of taking the ads, we made an announcement that we were dropping the ads until after Elder - Stevens’s funeral on Tuesday. Of course, the radio stations gave us all of the announcements free. Then on Wednesday, the ads started again and we sold out all two thousand seats in two hours. It had to be the Mormons who bought the tickets.”
Another time, much later, in Pittsburgh, they played a 20,000-seat arena and found themselves stuck with 1,100 tickets, all of them “way up in the attic, behind a post. We were selling maybe twelve or fifteen a day. So we pulled all our ads and put in new ones. We said, ‘We still have a few seats left. They aren’t very good, but it’s all we got.’ When that hit the air, we sold out right away. People liked the honesty.”
For a man who still rose at 5:00 A.M., it was a grueling schedule, one that didn’t end until well after sundown. If Elvis was flying in that night after his show, as he always did on the later tours, since he had trouble winding down and falling asleep, Parker would wait for word that he had landed.
The next day, the show plane arrived. “He made life rough for us on the road,” says Kathy Westmoreland, Elvis’s high harmony singer, “because we were going to bed at four in the morning and getting up at seven-thirty to fly to the next city.” Yet the musicians looked out their windows to see the Colonel leaning on his cane on the tarmac, knowing he would always be there to greet them, no matter the weather. Tom Diskin, standing at his side, handed each musician a key as he came off the ramp and boarded the bus to the hotel. Then as the group waved good-bye, Parker took off in his plane for the next town.
Though he met Elvis and the entourage every evening prior to the first show in Vegas, pulling Elvis into another room to talk business if need be, and sometimes staying for the first show, only rarely did the Colonel wait to see Elvis perform on the road. Even if Parker spent the night, he never met with Presley before the concert.
Nonetheless, the man who loved playing Santa Claus at Frank - Sinatra’s Christmas parties found time to entertain the children whose parents traveled with the show. As “Uncle Colonel,” he delighted the kids with stories of “the googala,” a giant centipede who resided in the - Colonel’s imagination, and whose likeness he sketched for the children to take home and tape up on their walls.
It was just as well that Presley and Parker seldom met up on the tours, since Elvis was often furious about his accommodations. In Mobile, Alabama, they’d been booked into the Admiral Semmes Hotel, which may have been luxurious the last time Presley stayed there, in 1955, but was a dump by 1970, a total fleabag, without air-conditioning. The Colonel knew Elvis preferred any modern motel, even a Holiday Inn, to an older place. Hadn’t Parker checked it out when he advanced the tour? Presley raved. And why were they playing Mobile, anyway?
Even Concerts West was confused about that one, and as the tours continued, Weintraub and Hulett, who brought the Colonel a list of cities and dates for him to approve, were equally puzzled about a number of towns Parker picked, such as Monroe, Louisiana, and Greensboro, North Carolina, that seemed off the beaten path for a megawatt rock star. Nobody else went there, which, the Colonel said, was precisely the point. Fans in grassroots areas wanted to see Elvis, too, and he was guaranteed a sellout. If Elvis had to perform in basketball gymnasiums, or on three-foot stages—which he sometimes did—it helped pay the expenses between larger dates. Weintraub and Hulett weren’t the only promoters out there, and he’d set about proving it to them.
What Parker failed to mention was that he yearned to return to the towns he’d first visited with the carnivals and tent shows, where he still had people in his pocket—from the mayor to the cops—and knew how to control just about anything. He loved going back to the old hotels, too, even if some of the rooms on the floors they stayed on were boarded up. Sometimes he did it to repay a favor. Besides, these old places were dirt cheap. Who could argue with that?
While Elvis had initially been happy to return to live performance, his pill-fueled behavior had become more erratic in recent months. He obsessed about collecting police badges—bugging John O’Grady for how he could get one that would let him carry a gun across state lines—and schemed to get all the guys deputized to pack a weapon in Memphis, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs. Loaded on pharmaceuticals, he shot a .22 automatic at a car one night in Beverly Hills after the driver made a rude gesture, and even terrorized his friends if they mouthed off at him, sticking a loaded .44 Magnum in Lamar Fike’s nose one day and threatening to blow his brains out. In December 1970, as best man at Sonny West’s wedding, he would stand at the altar wearing five loaded firearms—two gold-plated guns in shoulder holsters, a pair of pearl-handled pistols in his pants, and a derringer in his boot.
When he came off the road that November, Elvis began to fixate on the idea of becoming a federal agent. A federal agent’s badge would give him not only ultimate power, but also a feeling of invincibility. No one would dare mess with a federal agent, no matter what controlled substances he carried around with him in a little black bag.
O’Grady, who had headed up the narcotics unit for the L.A. Police Department, was hip to Elvis’s habits—he’d done a polygraph test on Presley for an annoying paternity suit—and noticed his pulse and breathing rates were below normal. And Elvis had way too many questions about how to become an agent-at-large for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, especially after O’Grady set up a meeting for him with Paul Frees, a voiceover announcer who’d earned just such a badge for undercover work. The unctuous O’Grady liked rubbing shoulders with the famous and told Elvis he might be able to help: he’d get him an introduction to John Finlator, the deputy director of the Narcotics Bureau.
Parker, meanwhile, had grown tired of having to speak to Elvis through his father or Esposito, and early in December, on the same day he completed a deal with RCA to extend his annual $100,000 consulting fee for five years, he wrote to Elvis, expressing his frustration at not being able to get his client on the phone. Using sarcasm to mildly mask his fury, the Colonel cited Elvis’s obvious avoidance of him, and reminded him of how hard he had been working in his behalf. “Remember,” he concluded, “your slogan TCB . . . only works if you use it.”
Vernon Presley was not pleased to see his son at odds with the Colonel and told him so in a blowup in mid-December. The time had come to replace the old bastard, Elvis argued, but Vernon told him he’d never find anybody better. Then Vernon started in on Elvis’s lavish spending sprees and produced the bills: $20,000 and $30,000 gun-buying trips, $85,000 worth of Mercedes-Benzes for his friends. Such extravagance had to stop. Priscilla agreed, especially as the couple had just put down a deposit on a new home in Beverly Hills, despite the shakiness of the marriage.
By now, Elvis was so volatile that, as his cousin Billy Smith remembers, “you especially had to be careful of what you said [to him]. He was like a caged animal. He was coming out any way he could. You didn’t embarrass him, and you didn’t scare him, and you certainly didn’t ever humiliate him.”
Feeling restricted and hampered by the Colonel, and then by his wife and father, Elvis was about to defy all of them in a demonstration of independence more surprising than they could have imagined. On December 19, 1970, without their knowledge, he slipped out of Graceland, went to the airport alone, and began a journey to Washington to see John Finlator, O’Grady’s contact at the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Elvis wanted his badge.
Finlator turned him down, but Elvis, by now accompanied by Jerry Schilling and Sonny West, had a backup plan. On the plane, stoned, shaky, and woozy-eyed, he had written a letter to President Richard M. Nixon, declaring himself a concerned American. The country was in bad shape, with the hippies, the drug culture, the Black Panthers, and the Students for a Democratic Society, he wrote. He knew so because he had done “an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques.” But if Nixon would make him a federal agent, he could be of service to this great nation, since none of those threats to the American way of life considered him an enemy.
“I would love to meet you just to say hello if you’re not too busy,” he said in closing, and then dropped the letter off at the White House gates on the way to his hotel. The result: Presley, dressed like Dracula in outlandish garb—a velvet cape topping a black suede suit, a massive gold belt given to him by the International, glittering chains circling his neck, tinted sunglasses, and a cane—got his meeting with Nixon at the White House. And he got the cherished badge, which became, Schilling says, “his most prized physical possession.” At last, Elvis was a narc.
The Colonel, who learned about the visit to Washington after the fact, was gravely worried. The president, for God’s sake! Elvis was slipping completely out of his control. He would have to find a way to keep Elvis in check and step up his surveillance of his actions.
In March 1971, when Elvis blew up while attempting to record in Nashville—kicking a gun through a guitar and storming out of the session—Parker managed to keep most of it out of the press. The following day, the singer, whose eyesight had been troubling him, was hospitalized for glaucoma. Now Parker saw his act becoming more fractious with each passing month, and realized he had to create new ways to maximize Presley’s earning power. Otherwise, the Colonel would find himself in the same sad straits as his friend Oscar Davis—sick, dependent on Parker’s handout of $100 a month, and soon to be dead, never again managing a major star nearly twenty years after Hank Williams’s self-destructive ways caught up with him on the way to a show date.
Though Parker was constantly renegotiating Elvis’s contract with RCA—the latest deal was for the budget Camden label, yet even then he finagled improved royalties—his first foray into new money came in July 1971, when he took Presley into Del Webb’s Sahara Tahoe in Stateline, Nevada.
The engagement, where orchestra leader Joe Guercio debuted Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra as the singer’s introduction on stage, was a raging success. Parker had figured out a way to put eight people at a table that normally seated four, which allowed Elvis to break the showroom’s attendance record. One month before, the Hilton hotel chain had taken over the International in a 50 percent partnership with Kerkorian and Shoofey, renaming it the Las Vegas Hilton. The Colonel would soon use Elvis’s Tahoe numbers, plus the fact that he had negotiated a fee of $300,000 for two weeks, to cut a new deal with Henri Lewin, the Las Vegas Hilton’s new executive vice president of hotel and casino operations, and Barron Hilton himself.
Lewin, a German Jew whose family fled the Nazis, already seemed to be in Parker’s corner, throwing him a surprise sixty-second birthday party that June. Their first meeting came five hours after Hilton took over the hotel, the Colonel flying in from Palm Springs. Lewin had been nervous: Parker had a clause in his contract that stipulated that if the hotel were sold, he and Elvis were free to go elsewhere.
“The Colonel said, ‘I did business with Kerkorian, I liked him, and I have no reason not to trust that you will be as good or better,’ ” Lewin remembered years later. And, as a measure of honor, the Colonel accepted the same contract. “Elvis was always paid more than we paid anybody else . . . and he was still the cheapest. We made more money paying him more than paying somebody else less. You shake hands with the Colonel, you can forget worry.”
But as Parker loved Las Vegas, and he and Elvis were becoming synonymous with the town, Presley was growing tired of the seven-days-a-week, two-shows-a-night grind, so demanding both physically and mentally. At first, remembers Jerry Schilling, “it was great. But going in about the third year, there was no challenge . . . it was the same songs, and the same audience, and we stayed up all night, and slept all day. We didn’t see sunlight for a couple months. What was once exciting and fun became dark and angry.”
“Elvis was mad,” says Lamar Fike. “He didn’t want to do it anymore. He said, ‘I want out of this place. I don’t want to come back.’ As a consequence, this seething cauldron of hate built up in Las Vegas.”
A month after Tahoe, in August 1971, Elvis opened his summer festival at the Las Vegas Hilton to poor reviews. The Hollywood Reporter found Elvis “drawn, tired, and noticeably heavier,” and the show “occasionally monotonous, often silly, and haphazardly coordinated.” Still the fans came, to the point that Parker added an additional show per day to accommodate the overflow crowds. But the strain was too much—on the sixth day, Elvis cut a show short, complained of the flu, and consulted an ear, nose, and throat specialist, Dr. Sidney Boyer, who, like Thomas “Flash” Newman, would remain in his stable of Vegas physicians.
By the last night, he felt strong enough to close the show wearing a heavy rhinestone-and-jewel-encrusted cape, thrusting his arms in a dramatic stance that would become a hallmark of his performances. But the press preferred to report on Elvis’s illness and daily doctors’ visits.
“He didn’t have breathing room,” says Alex Shoofey. “It was a continuous thing. I even said to the Colonel one time, ‘Give him a breather, Colonel, gosh! He needs a little rest.’ He said, ‘Oh, he’s young, don’t worry. He loves every moment of it.’ I think he could have let up a little, given him a little more time off.”
“Nobody goes to Vegas and plays four weeks anymore—they do five days, tops,” explains Lamar Fike. “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 that stuff, to keep him going. And because he was bored. Bored to tears.”
According to Henri Lewin, Parker spoke to Vernon about his son’s condition. “I was there when Colonel Parker pleaded with Vernon Presley, and then they both pleaded with Elvis to understand the importance of taking care of his personal life.”
But Parker continued to weigh his options. With his gambling debts mounting, and Presley becoming more unpredictable, the Colonel apparently, in the fall of 1971, considered selling Elvis’s contract to Gordon Mills, the flamboyant manager of Tom Jones. Items to that effect appeared in the American and British press, and an exchange of correspondence between Mills and the Colonel’s office concerning a denial of discussions suggests that such talks had, in fact, happened. Later, John Moran, Jones’s publicist, confirmed it to Marty Lacker.
The newspapers were more concerned, however, about rumors that Elvis and Priscilla were estranged. As Presley began another tour that November—Elvis replacing the Imperials with J. D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet, and Parker substituting comedian Jackie Kahane for the alcoholic Sammy Shore—the singer became less guarded about his dalliances with other women. Within months, his marriage would be in tatters.
For quite a while, Presley had been getting reports that Priscilla was dating her karate instructor, Mike Stone. The maid at the Presleys’ new house in California told Red West that Stone spent too much time there, and three-year-old Lisa Marie blew the whistle on the pair when she mentioned they’d “wrestled” in a sleeping bag on a camping trip. Then Sonny West caught them in the shower together and told Elvis.
The showdown came during Presley’s engagement at the Hilton in February 1972, when Priscilla owned up to the affair, railed against their surreal, life-in-a-bubble existence, and asked for a divorce. Elvis, humiliated and enraged, forced her to have sex in an episode that, according to Priscilla, bordered on rape. Later, he would ask her to reconsider breaking the marriage, but as Priscilla eventually made him understand, it had ended long ago, largely from his own indifference.
Throughout such turmoil, the Colonel had more practical matters on his mind. As Elvis performed in the Hilton showroom, Parker sat in his fourth-floor suite of six rooms and offices and mused about something that the new RCA president Rocco Laginestra had casually mentioned—an innovative technology that allowed for live satellite broadcast around the world. Elvis had again been making noises about wanting to go to Europe to perform, citing the number of letters he got from foreign fans.
“I’m working on it,” Parker grumbled. But before long, when the Colonel was offered $500,000 for six concerts in London, he’d repeat that the venues weren’t large enough overseas—an unlikely explanation, considering Wembley and a myriad of soccer stadiums, though he insisted Elvis himself balked at playing outdoor arenas. Sometimes the Colonel would reiterate that security would be a problem, since European fans were wilder in their adoration, or say simply that the money wasn’t right. “[Elvis] wanted to take all of his troupe with him and his own orchestra,” Parker offered years later. “When we checked out the possibilities where he could play, he could sell out and [still] lose money.”
But, of course, they were never going to Europe, and not just because Parker had no passport. The Colonel was worried about Elvis’s stamina; Dr. Nichopoulos had to accompany him on all the tours now. And Parker wasn’t sure what kinds of drugs Elvis was taking, lately hearing rumors of cocaine use. If Elvis got sick, or customs found some illegal substance, the Colonel wouldn’t be able to keep it out of the papers. The risk was simply too great.
Yet if Parker understood it correctly, with the new satellite, Elvis could “tour” the globe in one concert, without ever leaving the States. Such a coup—the first entertainment special broadcast live around the world—would help keep the boy on top and in the news, and maybe lift him from his funk. The Colonel tore a piece of the old International stationery in half and started making a to-do list (“Clearances needed on songs”). In bold handwriting, with numbers still reminiscent of the European style, he jotted down the costs (backup musicians, rehearsal room) and posed some questions: “RCA makes contracts with talent or do we?”
Laginestra loved the idea of an Elvis satellite tour, especially as Parker had already planned to stage it from Hawaii, the site of so many successful Presley ventures. But Laginestra didn’t like dealing with the Colonel personally, and so he handed him off to others in the company, particularly Mel Ilberman, the head of U.S. Operations, who admired Parker (“He was a big friend of mine. . . . He was always honest with me”) and tried to keep him happy.
As part of that goodwill endeavor, the label agreed to set up a concert promotion company. That was something the Colonel had been after for years, and a coup RCA’s Joe Galante calls “a brilliant move, because he had now taken the company’s resources and focused them solely on his act.” Though the agreement included Management III, Parker, in effect, controlled everything, with the help of RCA’s George Parkhill and Pat Kelleher of the label’s promotion department. Their first tour under the new umbrella would begin in April.
The frugal Dutchman pinched every penny—paying a promoter in Tennessee only $1,000 to handle ticket sales—and would continue to do so throughout Elvis’s touring years. When keyboardist Tony Brown joined the band two years later, he was surprised to find that the musicians had to buy tickets for their guests, and that the Elvis show had no catering backstage of any kind, in comparison with lesser stars who provided full meals and liquor.
“We finally demanded that we get some soft drinks, and eventually, they started putting a trash can in our dressing room with Cokes and Pepsis and 7UPs, but that was it. Occasionally, the Colonel would get on the bus and walk down the aisle and give everybody a ten-dollar bill for dinner. Of course, once he left, there was all kinds of snickering and sarcastic remarks—‘Where you havin’ dinner?’—that kind of stuff.” Anyone who was late for the bus was fined a dollar a minute.
By now, the Colonel could clearly see that touring was a bigger source of revenue than even Elvis’s movies. On February 4, 1972, a week after he signed the joint venture with RCA, he presented a new contract to Elvis. Parker was changing his basic management fee, he explained. After expenses, which included agency commissions, the profits from the tours would now be split two thirds for Elvis and one third for Parker.
“There were a lot of things that maybe the Colonel didn’t collect on like he should have,” defends Lamar Fike. But only the Colonel really understood what constituted “expenses” and what was “net.”
“People talk about the fifty percent and other outrageous splits, but there were times when the Colonel took it all,” says Joe Shane. “He was hiding the fact that he was going through Elvis’s money. To see him negotiate deals for concerts was just unbelievable. A promoter would say, ‘I want to do ten dates in the Midwest,’ and the Colonel would say, ‘Okay, I’ll take a million dollars up front and half of it in cash before you sell the first ticket.’ And he’d get it. He always wanted the cash. The truth was, he needed it.”