LATE in March 1972, the Colonel told the Las Vegas Hilton that Elvis would soon begin making his second MGM documentary concert film (Elvis On Tour) and would therefore be unavailable for the rest of the year. In truth, the movie would be completed in less than two months, and Parker’s announcement was little more than a ploy to revise Presley’s Vegas contract.
To up the ante, he hinted—by denying rumors to the effect—that in a year or so he might move Elvis to Kirk Kerkorian’s MGM Grand Hotel, then under construction. The Hilton caved: in April, the hotel agreed to pay Elvis $130,000 a week for the next two engagements and $150,000 a week for the following three. Parker, as a consultant to the hotel chain, would also be paid $50,000 a year for the next three years.
For Elvis’s summer tour, commencing in June, the Colonel engaged the Clanton Ross Advertising Agency of Tampa. The Ross was Bob Ross, - Marie’s forty-seven-year old son, who suffered from the early stages of multiple sclerosis. A year before, Ross and his wife had divorced, and Bob was now dating Sandra Polk, a spirited Tampa native seventeen years his junior who often flew to Las Vegas with her cousin to attend - Elvis’s shows. Though Parker’s relationship with Ross had always been tentative, the Colonel helped him receive top medical care through friends in Houston. He also continued to throw him business. Bob’s agency designed some of Elvis’s album covers, posters, and billboards, and before long, Parker would give him lucrative advertising accounts for other big stars whose managers the Colonel befriended.
The advertising for the summer ’72 tour held particular sway, as Elvis would play three shows at Madison Square Garden beginning June 9. Parker had deliberately kept his client out of Manhattan, other than for television appearances in the ’50s, fearing he might not fill a large arena in such a cosmopolitan area. Now, however, much had changed. Ticket sales for the New York engagement were so brisk that Parker added a fourth appearance, making Elvis the first performer to sell out four consecutive shows at the Garden, with grosses at $730,000.
Elvis had always been anxious about New York, remembering the stinging remarks of a cynical media that had dismissed him so cruelly at the start of his career. But the counterculture rebel of the ’50s was now an establishment darling of the ’70s, just as Parker had planned. At a press conference between rehearsals, a confident, relaxed Elvis, dressed in a flashy, high-collar blue jacket, bounded out to a bank of microphones and, with quick, good-natured humor, deflected questions as easily as swatting softballs over a fence. When a woman asked about his image as a shy, humble country boy, Elvis smiled. “Ah, I don’t know what makes ’em say that,” he said with a slight stutter, and then stood and pulled back his jacket to reveal the gaudy gold belt given to him by the International. Elvis won a laugh for his trouble, and Parker, standing by in a - rube’s straw hat, scanned the reporters’ faces and knew the coverage would be good.
Less than a week before the first show, RCA thought to tape the concerts for a live album and scrambled to get the contracts signed and the recording equipment in place. The label kept the plan secret, as not to spook either Elvis or the band, especially as Presley’s song selection was so spontaneous that no one ever knew what order he’d choose.
Yet the shows came off without a hitch for everyone except the comic, Jackie Kahane, who was booed off the stage opening night. Elvis heard about it and went to console him in his dressing room. “He said, ‘Mr. Kahane, they’re animals out there.’ ” Kahane recalls. “ ‘Don’t let them bother you. You go out there tomorrow and you kick ass.’ ”
When Elvis finally came out to the billowing strains of Also Sprach Zarathustra, remembers Joe Guercio, the crowd went into a roar, and “so many flashbulbs went off that the Garden was almost lit for a second.”
The New York Times described it as a legendary performance, with a headline that likened Presley to “A Prince from Another Planet.” Chris Chase, the paper’s reviewer, saw Elvis as “a special champion [like] a Joe Louis . . . Joe DiMaggio, someone in whose hands the way a thing is done becomes more important than the thing itself. . . . He stood there at the end, his arms stretched out, the great gold cloak giving him wings . . . the only one in his class.”
Yet as Presley’s career moved to a new tier of fame and accomplishment, his personal life crumbled around him. On July 26, 1972, Elvis and Priscilla legally separated. Presley’s lawyer, Ed Hookstratten, drew up the papers, secured a lawyer for Priscilla, and worked out the amicable terms of the divorce settlement. Priscilla would receive a lump sum of $100,000, plus $1,000 per month for her own expenses and $500 per month child support.
Elvis had already begun seeing the next woman in his life, Linda Thompson, a Memphis beauty queen who babied him and, for the time being, put up with his pharmaceutical habits. Still, Elvis seemed haunted. When he returned to Vegas in August, he received another, though less serious, death threat. One night during the engagement, Wolfman Jack, the popular television and radio personality, came backstage to say hello. - “What’s it like to be Elvis Presley?” the visitor wanted to know. “I’ll tell you what, Jack,” Elvis answered, “it’s very, very uncomfortable.”
Despite Elvis’s interest in Linda, the impending divorce seemed to weaken his resolve and usher in his third and final stage of drug use, starting with an increase in sedatives, or downers. Some days the performer was clear, lucid, and seemingly unaffected. But other times, he was so obviously under the influence that Jackie Kahane remembers a child coming up to him after a show and asking, “Was Elvis drunk?”
His usual protocol, says Lamar Fike, was to take a Valium, a Placidyl, a Valmid, some Butabarbital, and codeine—all at the same time. Before long, he would add Percodan and liquid Demerol to his potent cocktail.
On September 4, 1972, Parker and RCA president Laginestra held a press conference in Las Vegas to announce the upcoming satellite broadcast, “Aloha from Hawaii,” set for January 1973. The show, staged in Honolulu, would reach 1.4 billion viewers, though not all of them “live,” as the ballyhoo maintained, since both Europe and America would receive it on a delayed basis. RCA Record Tours would produce the show—displacing Management III for a year—and the label would also release a double LP of the concert, the first time “in the history of the record business,” the company gloated, that an album would be issued simultaneously around the world.
“It’s very hard to comprehend,” Elvis said over and over, crumpled in a chair at the briefing. But for some, what was harder to understand was why Presley perspired so heavily, with his speech slurred, his eyes dazed and dulled.
As the date of the concert neared, Presley worked hard to get himself in shape, dieting down to a sleek 175 pounds and staying off his drug protocol for two weeks. His entourage hoped that Elvis had turned a corner, that the incentive to clean up might last. But just before he went on stage, he asked for a shot of vitamin B12 mixed with amphetamines.
“The next morning,” says Marty Lacker, “we were supposed to go to the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial. We banged on his door, and nobody answered. Finally, Linda came, and she just made a face and shook her head. Elvis was sitting on the balcony, on the top floor of the hotel, stoned out of his gourd. He was sweating profusely, with a towel around his neck, and he could hardly talk. He’d gone right back into it.”
“Aloha from Hawaii” was Elvis’s last glorious moment, his final appearance as an undeniable superstar. The resulting album would stay on the Billboard charts for thirty-five weeks and climb to number one—his first chart-topping LP in nine years.
But there would be no more.
Parker seemed to sense it. At 3:00 A.M., following the broadcast, the Colonel sat down to write Elvis a congratulatory letter. Filled with sentiment, Parker told his client that they had no need for hugging, since they could tell “from seeing each other on stage and from the floor by the stage” how they felt.
“I always know that when I do my part,” he continued, “you always do yours in your own way and in your feeling in how to do it best. That is why you and I are never at each other when we are doing our work in our own best way possible. . . . You above all make all of it work by being the leader and the talent. Without your dedication to your following, it couldn’t have been done.”
Such emotional display was rare for Parker, but lately he had been under unusual strain. It was around this time that the Colonel, now so large he wore size 3X clothing, suffered yet another heart attack—his fourth. Surely he could not go on much longer. And worse, Marie, whose health had been steadily declining since the mid-’60s, was becoming more and more addled. She complained of worse headaches, and her speech was affected. “She started getting senile, like she was ninety years old instead of sixty-five,” recalled her brother, Bitsy Mott. The Colonel phoned her twice a day, and sometimes she didn’t recognize his voice or know who he was when he identified himself. Often, she hung up on him.
Parker, who still went home to her in Palm Springs every weekend, suspected her headaches generated from the metal ball and socket she received in hip surgery. Her doctor, however, believed she suffered from degenerative brain disease, or age-related dementia, though her symptoms weren’t always consistent with the condition. Whatever the source, Mott remembered, “It just got worse and worse, till finally she was immobile all over.”
The Colonel mourned the days when he bought her favorite shoes in every color—an attempt to make up for their impoverished years. But “as the disease progressed,” says Sandra Polk Ross, who became her daughter-in-law in 1973, “Colonel started to distance himself from her, keep her home. He would still take her to Vegas, but he would always have someone go with them and be with her.”
Within three years, Marie would be so confused she’d think her son was her first husband and, on a trip to Florida to visit Bob and Sandra, would repeatedly rattle the couple’s doorknob, trying to crawl into bed with them. The Colonel’s monthly nursing bill climbed to $6,000.
Marie, Elvis, himself. It was taking a toll. But Parker couldn’t dwell on the negative. The best thing to do was to concentrate on business, think about the new music publishing companies, Aaron Music and Mister Songman Music, he planned to form with Freddy Bienstock, who had earlier been fired by the Aberbachs. Parker had been angered by Bienstock’s dismissal, and in August 1972 met with the Aberbach brothers to liquidate the Elvis and Gladys Music firms.
“The Colonel always felt the Aberbachs were part of him,” Bienstock explains. “But he had a number of resentments against them, and they stopped all social contact with him after I left the company.” In teaming with Bienstock, Parker would show the brothers who really knew the Elvis catalogue.
By now, the Colonel had a new secretary, Loanne Miller, a spinster from Ohio who had previously worked for Nick Naff. When she first interviewed with the advertising director, “she presented me with a little slip of paper listing her personal philosophy of what a secretary should be. Virtually, it said the boss is everything, and you serve him—whether it means washing his feet, or rubbing his back. She reveled in it.”
However, Naff wasn’t comfortable with such subservience (“I like to get my own coffee”), and while Loanne was splendid in her job, her servility clashed with Naff’s hands-on attitude. One day Alex Shoofey called and asked if it would disrupt Naff’s office too much if Loanne went to work for the Colonel. “Secretly, I said, ‘Great,’ ” Naff remembers, “but I took the generous posture and said I’d make the sacrifice. He loved that kind of devotion, and [working for him] made her a significant person, so she was ideal for him.” Indeed, she had no objections to helping plan Bob and Sandra Ross’s wedding and making the arrangements.
Given to airy, New Age beliefs and holistic health practices, Loanne bounced between childlike wonder and tough-cookie tenacity. She thought the Colonel hung the moon, and she defended his every action. “Most people have no idea how much of a genius he was because they weren’t with him enough to understand,” she maintains.
When she first went to work for the Colonel, he called her one day and said he needed her to fly to Los Angeles to take notes for an important meeting at MGM Studios. Upon her arrival, Parker cautioned her to “really pay attention . . . There are a lot of very important people in this meeting. Please come sit next to me.” He then led the nervous secretary back to the conference room, where she found a long table with twelve chairs—each occupied by a huge stuffed teddy bear with a pad and pencil in front of him.
Though Parker got her on the RCA payroll as an executive secretary to George Parkhill, and she had reason to travel with the Colonel, some at the hotel took it for granted that she was his girlfriend. Others discount it, but Bitsy Mott told his family he had caught them in “compromising circumstances” more than once.
Certainly Parker looked after her. Artie Newman, a casino shift boss who also worked the showroom and became one of the Colonel’s chief contacts, always let him know when the women’s clothing reps came to town, offering apparel in exchange for gambling losses. Soon Newman knew to bring dresses in two sizes—7 for the now-petite Marie, and 12 for the larger-boned Loanne. Since the secretary was lanky, quick with a smile, and every inch the Colonel’s puppet, Elvis’s entourage wickedly dubbed her Howdy Doody.
When Presley went back into the Hilton showroom for his eighth engagement at the end of January 1973, the singer was tired and lackluster. A week later, he would begin canceling shows, citing a lingering case of the flu. It was a difficult month, made even worse when four South American men jumped on stage near the end of Elvis’s performance on February 18. The entourage quickly took control, with Elvis knocking one of the men back into the crowd. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen,” Elvis told the audience afterward. “I’m sorry I didn’t break his goddamned neck is what I’m sorry about.”
The presumed assailants turned out to be no more than exuberant fans, but Presley, paranoid and delusional, convinced himself that Mike Stone, Priscilla’s boyfriend, had sent them to kill him. In the early hours of the morning, high on pills and raging out of control (“Another man has taken my wife! Mike Stone has to die!”), Elvis ordered Red West to hire a hit man to have the karate champion murdered. A week later, he softened.
Priscilla was also on Elvis’s mind for another reason. She’d agreed to far too little money in the divorce settlement, she told him, and planned to see a new lawyer about renegotiating the terms.
If it came to that, Parker had a good idea where Elvis could get the money.
Since the fall, RCA’s Mel Ilberman had been trying to persuade the Colonel to agree to a deal. Stymied by Parker’s long insistence that - Presley’s records must not be included in the RCA Record Club or repackaged at mid-price, which meant a lower royalty rate, Ilberman wondered if the manager and his client would be interested in selling - Presley’s master recordings, or back catalogue, for $3 million.
The Colonel was resolute: absolutely not. To do so would mean the label would never again have to pay royalties on records released before 1973, and Elvis would have no control over how those songs would be used. Vernon, however, saw it as an immediate fix to many of the Presleys’ financial straits. Parker argued that the material could be worth more in the future, that they shouldn’t sell, but added he would go back and see if he could get the record company to up its bid.
Ilberman was now on the spot. “I figured it would take a big check,” Ilberman recalls, “but a lot of the people in the company weren’t very happy with that, because Elvis’s sales had deteriorated dramatically.” The Colonel struck what the company saw as a hard bargain, and in the end, Ilberman went out on a limb, paying Elvis $5.4 million for all rights to every song he had ever recorded as of March 1, 1973.
With that, Parker turned to Elvis and demanded a new management agreement. All income from Elvis’s recordings would be divided 50–50 from the first dollar, meaning Presley and Parker were now locked into a pure and equal partnership. Money from the tours remained at the two-thirds/one-third split.
But Parker also negotiated a new seven-year contract with RCA. Presley would record two albums and four singles a year for a guaranteed annual payment of at least $500,000. Since the ’60s, Parker had an understanding with the label that no pop artist would get a higher royalty than Elvis, but Parker’s critics would later call the arrangement too low, considering the success of the “Aloha” special, even as Elvis had been somewhat devalued as a rock act by becoming a Vegas lounge singer. Under the 1973 agreement, they said, Elvis received only half the rate of such major artists as the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and even Elton John.
The $500,000 sum was subject to Parker and Presley’s new 50–50 agreement, of course, and the Colonel would receive extra monies for his side deals of promoting the records and tours, as well as developing merchandising and promotional concepts. At Parker’s insistence, Ilberman had to “scream at the lawyers to keep the buyout contract down to three or four pages.” As for the Colonel’s side deals, says Ilberman, “he always had side deals with everybody. That was the nature of the animal. It was almost a game.”
In the end, RCA paid the pair $10.5 million. Of that, $6 million would go to the Colonel, and $4.5 to Elvis. After taxes, Elvis would retain roughly $2 million for his best work—arguably the most valuable recordings in popular music. And now his wife was asking for a large chunk of it.
When the divorce decree was finalized in October 1973, Priscilla would receive a cash payment of $725,000, plus $4,200 a month spousal support for a year (after which the payment would balloon to $6,000 a month for ten years), and $4,000 a month child support. She would also get 5 percent of Elvis’s new publishing companies and half the sale of their California house.
The strain of Elvis’s emotional and physical fatigue showed in his performance at the Sahara in Tahoe in May 1973. Thirty pounds overweight and lethargic, the singer canceled a number of his shows and went to a local hospital for chest X rays. But according to Marty Lacker, who was present, “He wasn’t sick. He was just tired of all that shit. We flew home, and he was fine.” The Colonel, who was paid $100,000 for his help with the engagement, returned his fee.
Once Elvis returned to Memphis, an angry Parker contacted Vernon about the open dialogue between Elvis’s friends and family concerning his abuse of prescription medications. The fact that Elvis was in grave danger was apparent even to Presley’s young daughter, Lisa Marie, who frequently saw him guzzling pills.
“One night when I was about five or six, we were watching TV,” she remembers. “I looked up at him and said, ‘Daddy, Daddy, I don’t want you to die.’ And he just looked down at me and said, ‘Okay, I won’t. Don’t worry about it.’ I said that to him several times when we were alone together . . . I guess I was picking something up.”
According to Dr. Nichopoulos, Elvis was a “hard addict” who already suffered from bladder and bowel trouble, conditions that would soon leave him both incontinent and impotent. Parker didn’t like Dr. Nick and suspected he was one of Elvis’s main sources for drugs. But where else was he getting them? Through lawyer Ed Hookstratten, the Colonel and Vernon hired John O’Grady to investigate.
Over a period of months, the detective uncovered three physicians and one dentist who kept Elvis supplied with a steady flow of pharmaceuticals. All were summarily threatened, and deliveries occasionally intercepted. But nothing seemed to work. Elvis had no desire to stop using, and there were too many people willing to enable him.
Some of them were part of Presley’s own entourage. Another was a friend of the group whose husband was a doctor. “There was more dope in that outfit—you have no idea,” remembered Jackie Kahane.
But the FBI thought it knew of a more potent supplier. In a January 31, 1974, informant report about Mafia and drugs in entertainment, an agent noted, “Organized crime reaps profits from the entertainers by receiving kickbacks for obtaining their bookings in popular nightspots and in some cases, furnishing the performers with narcotics. Person contacted stated this is true currently in the case of Elvis Presley. . . . Person contacted stated that Presley is currently psychologically addicted to and a heavy user of cocaine. Because of this, he has turned down an engagement in England, which would have netted him several million dollars.”
Larry Geller, whom Parker allowed back into the group in 1972, believing he had hypnotic powers, says that for a short time, Elvis did use liquid cocaine, which he obtained from his California dentist, Dr. Max Shapiro, and administered on Q-Tips stuck up in his nostrils. Soon Presley would begin using Dilaudid, or synthetic heroin. Because only “junkies” shot up, Presley had members of his entourage inject it into his hip. Dilaudid, often prescribed for terminal cancer patients, would become his favorite narcotic.
As Presley’s drug use escalated, his relationship with Parker continued to unravel. In the summer of ’73, they fought over a variety of issues, from Elvis’s insistence on recording again in Memphis—this time, at the legendary Stax studios, where his initial sessions collapsed when Elvis was too slurry of speech—to Presley adding a gospel group, Voice, in Las Vegas. Not only did Parker believe Elvis paid them too much—$100,000 a year—but suspected one of its members helped keep him in drugs.
By now, almost everyone could see that something was wrong with Elvis. The Hollywood Reporter was dismayed at the star’s August engagement, calling his opening-night show “one of the most ill-prepared, unsteady, and most disheartening performances of his Las Vegas career. . . . It is a tragedy . . . and absolutely depressing to see Elvis in such diminishing stature.” The Colonel, who had broken his ankle before going to Vegas, hobbled around on a dark brown bamboo cane, trying to exercise damage control.
Ironically, during that same engagement, Presley accidentally fractured the ankle of one of his female guests while demonstrating a karate hold in his suite. It was this mishap that first brought Elvis into contact with Elias Ghanem, the Hilton’s house doctor, who was called to administer aid. The thirty-four-year-old Lebanese immigrant had been born in Israel as one of two sons of a wealthy oil company executive, and after interning at UCLA medical school, came to Vegas as an emergency room physician in 1971. Currently, he was opening the first of a string of twenty-four-hour medical centers on Joe W. Brown Drive near the Las Vegas Hilton. During his off hours, the doctor could be found at the racetrack or hobnobbing with celebrities.
Soon Ghanem would become Presley’s favorite Las Vegas physician, the entertainer giving him a Stutz Bearcat and Mercedes. But according to Kathy Westmoreland, “Elvis was worse” after Ghanem came around. Not only was Ghanem lax with a prescription pad, but, says Westmoreland, “he was flaky. He thought he was Elvis in a way. He came into Elvis’s dressing room wearing one of his jumpsuits a couple of times. Had his hair darkened and everything.”
Elvis was not amused, yet he would come to rely on Ghanem for treatment of a variety of ailments. The doctor recognized that Elvis’s health was in freefall, that his weight was in the unhealthy range, his liver fatty, and his colon unnaturally sluggish. More and more, Presley seemed to put himself in life-threatening situations.
On October 11, 1973, two days after his divorce was final, Elvis, now addicted to Demerol, had trouble breathing while flying home to Memphis from Los Angeles. Dr. Nichopoulos put him in Baptist Memorial Hospital for tests. Colonel Parker, who did not visit his client during any of his hospital stays, informed the press that the singer suffered from pneumonia, but in truth, the stay amounted to a detox, as the Demerol incident was one of three overdoses that year alone. At Dr. Nick’s suggestion, Elvis’s next Vegas engagement, in January 1974, would be cut from four weeks to two. Meanwhile, the doctor suggested that Elvis take up racquetball for exercise.
When Presley began rehearsals at RCA Studios in Los Angeles earlier that month, he auditioned a new bass player, Duke Bardwell. The Louisiana native, a lifelong Elvis fan, was “nervous as a chicken in a yard full of roosters.” As the first one there, he picked up a few tidbits—Elvis had gained some weight since the last tour and had been put on a diet of 500 calories a day, plus injections of “something that sounded like rabbit urine.”
When the double doors swung open, Bardwell caught one glimpse of Elvis and thought he was “watching a Fellini movie. It was all there . . . the funky glasses, the cape, the little black cheroot, the high collar . . . and a big, nickel-plated pistol, which he pulled out of his belt and handed to one of the boys.
“We rocked along for an hour or so, and when they decided to take a break, I found myself standing next to Elvis. I said, ‘I know you have a lot of martial arts training, so I was wondering why you carry a gun.’ He put that top lip up a little and said, ‘That’s to handle anything from six feet out. Six feet in, I got it covered.’ I was left pondering that while he walked away, and then he spun around and threw a punch that stopped with one of his big rings actually touching my nose. I never saw it coming, but it left me with a red face, a racing heart, and the realization that he could have missed by a half inch and driven my nose bone through my brain.”
Elvis’s behavior grew even more reckless once he got to Vegas. Shooting out a chandelier. Firing randomly when he couldn’t find Dr. Ghanem. Narrowly missing Linda Thompson, indisposed in the bathroom, while aiming at a porcelain owl. Some nights, when the pills dulled the nerves in his esophagus, members of the entourage pulled food from his throat to keep him from choking. More than once, his heart stopped beating, and a frenzied Dr. Nick injected the organ with Ritalin to get it pumping again.
Such rescues became increasingly commonplace. In May 1974, Elvis took a young fan named Paige to Palm Springs after his closing night in Tahoe. Partying on liquid Hycodan, Elvis accidentally overdosed them both, their body temperatures falling dangerously low in Presley’s frigid bedroom. The girl, who had frequently attended his Tahoe shows with her mother, suffered permanent effects.
“He said to me one time, ‘If I wasn’t a celebrity, I’d be put away, because I’m crazy,’ ” Jackie Kahane recalled. “I saw him wiped out—wiped out—crawling on the bloody floor! I couldn’t bear to watch him. One time my wife said to him, ‘Elvis, you were great tonight.’ And he said, ‘You saw the best imitation of Elvis Presley that he’s ever done.’ ”
As his client continued deteriorating, the Colonel largely looked away. At least two members of Elvis’s band maintain that Parker didn’t know the extent of the addiction, or how sick Presley was, even as the singer deliberately cut a festering hole in his hand to get stronger drugs. Others say, in retrospect, that the Colonel still didn’t know precisely what to do and hoped Elvis’s doctors would find a way to help him manage his habit. The Colonel himself later said that he could complain only when Elvis did a bad show, but as “every performer has good days and bad days,” and Presley balanced the off-nights with outstanding performances, he mostly stayed silent.
“I suppose I really began to get concerned at the beginning of 1974,” Parker would later tell Larry Hutchinson, chief investigator to the district attorney general for Memphis. “I got worried. He’d gained too much weight and he looked terrible. Now I spoke out . . . told him he did not look well. He said, ‘No disrespect, Colonel, but I know what I’m doing. Stay out of my personal life.’ ”
While most people around Presley were puzzled as to why the Colonel—who had ruled almost every aspect of Elvis’s life—stood by as Elvis destroyed himself, Duke Bardwell put it down to Parker’s “lack of humanity . . . because Colonel was the only one that could help.”
“There’s no question in my mind that the Colonel knew Elvis was dying,” says Byron Raphael, who had been invited back for one of Elvis’s Vegas openings. “And not only did he do nothing to stop it, but in a way, through omission, he was a coconspirator. There was really no strong relationship between the Colonel and Elvis anymore. He had lost his control, and that had to be a terrible thing for him. The real deadliness of Colonel Parker was that he believed the living Elvis had become an impediment to his management style and ambition. He didn’t really want him to die, but he knew that was the only way out, and considering the condition Elvis was in, the best thing that could have happened. Because Elvis was easier to control dead than alive. And more valuable, too, from merchandising alone. So he just stepped out of the way and let fate take its course. That way, he and Vernon could continue making the kinds of deals that the Colonel always dreamed of making.”
In planning for the inevitable, the Colonel approached Vernon in 1974 about setting up a company to oversee the merchandising of Elvis’s nonperformance products, as well as Presley’s new music publishing companies. Parker called it Boxcar Enterprises, taking the name from the gambling term for double sixes in the game of craps, and had a logo designed with a pair of dice adorning a railroad car.
Boxcar would become the sole entity through which Presley’s commercial rights were marketed. But the stock split was distinctly loaded toward the Colonel and his friends, who made up the board of directors and first officers of the corporation. Of the 500 shares issued, Parker owned 200, or 40 percent of the company, with Elvis, Tom Diskin, Freddy Bienstock, and George Parkhill (who was leaving RCA to work for the Colonel) each receiving 75 shares, or 15 percent control.
The salaries were also similarly skewed. At the outset, the Colonel paid himself $27,650 a year, while Elvis received $2,750. Tom Diskin and George Parkhill earned $4,750 each for 1974, though by 1976 the salaries would fluctuate wildly, with Parker earning $36,000, Diskin $46,448, and Elvis $10,500. Just why the star received so little of the company built around his legend was never explained.
Parker intended Boxcar to be a record company as well. George Parkhill, who “actually almost lived with the Colonel,” remembered Bruce Banke, was to be in charge of its every-day operation and product distributed through RCA. Yet Boxcar’s one and only long-playing album was Having Fun with Elvis On Stage, an embarrassing spoken-word recording made up solely of Elvis’s between-songs prattle, replete with burps, belches, and bad jokes.
But the label also pressed one single, “Growing Up in a Country Way,” by what the Colonel called a “green-grass group,” Bodie Mountain Express with Kirk Seeley. While the band hailed from California and regularly played Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland, the incongruous jacket photo showed four mountaineer ish young men in overalls and straw hats holding acoustic instruments. They stood behind the heavier Seeley, who wore a white suit and shoes, and strove mightily to look like Elvis: the Grand Ole Opry meets Vegas.
Parker signed them, says Kathy Westmoreland, because “he knew he had to have other irons in the fire—everyone pretty much knew that Elvis wasn’t going to make it very long.” Westmoreland, a former beauty contestant, had been picked by the Colonel to be Boxcar Records’ premier artist, and he even offered her a management contract. Like others of the Colonel’s schemes, however, it didn’t fly. Westmoreland balked when she realized that he had no idea how to develop her as a singer. “He knew talent when he saw it, but musically, he didn’t know what was professional and what was not.”
By now, the disease of gambling had become Parker’s total rationalization in business, his addiction marshalling his every move. At the Hilton—only one establishment around town that held his markers—his debts reached $6 million. He gambled by phone from Palm Springs on the weekends, and in Vegas, if he didn’t feel like going down to the casino, he asked for a roulette wheel to be sent to his rooms.
“He played stupid—they took the limit off when he came to the tables,” remembered Bitsy Mott, who watched him play the two, three, seventh, and eleventh spot in craps, which promised big odds but rarely delivered. “He didn’t do it with ignorance, but evidently he didn’t mind losing so much money.” The problem, Mott said, was that Parker had planned on leaving Marie well cared for at his death, with the remainder of his estate going to charity. “Now it looks like charity is the casinos.”
During Elvis’s August 1974 Vegas engagement, his performances had been riddled with long, rambling, and often painfully embarrassing monologues on a variety of personal subjects, including the rumor that the singer was on drugs. If he ever learned who started such a foul story, he said in a slurry rage that shocked all who heard it, “I’ll pull your goddamned tongue out by the roots!”
One night, he had attempted to introduce the Colonel, who was not in the showroom. The evening before, comedian Bill Cosby had filled in for Presley, who canceled a show from alleged exhaustion. Now, when Parker was nowhere to be found, Presley again went off. “And my manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Where is he? Is the Colonel around anywhere? No, he’s out playing roulette. Don’t kid me. I know what he’s doin’. Him and Cosby are out there talkin’ mash and drinkin’ trash, whatever.”
The resentment that had built between them in the last several years came to a head the following month. Elvis was blistered about everything, from his indentured slavery to the Colonel’s refusal to accept a $1-million offer for a string of Australian dates the previous spring. Now an incident at the hotel would lead to their biggest fight ever.
In late August, Elvis learned that the wife of Mario, the Hilton maître d’, was dying of cancer. Presley was fond of Mario, who had served him dinner in his suite every day. At his most delusional, the singer believed he had the power to heal the sick and, with entourage in tow, drove to Mario’s home to treat the woman with the laying on of hands. The hotel didn’t tolerate fraternization between staff and stars, however, and believing that Mario had crossed the line, terminated his employment.
Elvis was livid when he learned of Mario’s firing in early September and stormed in to confront the Colonel. The hotel had no right to do such a thing, Elvis charged indignantly. But Parker, who disapproved of Mario’s habit of accepting $200 tips from fans for front-row tables, told him it was hotel policy and none of Presley’s business. That night from the stage, Elvis delivered a furious attack on Barron Hilton: “I think you people ought to know that the big shots at the Hilton are an unfeeling, uncaring group . . . Barron Hilton’s . . . not worth a damn.”
The Colonel was purple with rage when he appeared in Presley’s dressing room after the show. How dare Elvis embarrass the people who had treated them so well! The two got into a shouting match in front of Elvis’s guys, and later continued the tirade upstairs in Presley’s thirtieth-floor suite. There, Elvis did what he’d been threatening to do for years: he fired the Colonel.
But Parker was not to be outdone. Elvis couldn’t fire him, he bellowed, because he quit. “I’ll call a press conference in the morning and say I’m leaving!” Presley yelled back that he’d call one that night. And so it went, until Parker, so infuriated that his jowls shook as he pounded the floor with his cane, groused that he wanted only to be paid all the singer owed him, and retired to his offices to draw up the bill. Vernon held his head when he saw it: $2 million, by most estimates, though Billy Smith remembers it at five times that amount.
“How could that be?” Elvis asked his daddy. “Well, he’s got it listed here,” Vernon moaned. “And he says once we pay him, he’ll give up the contract.” The Presleys retaliated with their own handwritten letter, informing the Colonel of all their grievances and terminating their relationship.
For a week and a half, Elvis and Parker traded insults and accusations through an intermediary, usually Lamar Fike.
The resolution came when Vernon informed his son that they couldn’t afford to buy out the contract. In fact, before long, they’d have to mortgage Graceland to meet the payroll. “I guess I’m gonna have to go make up with the old bastard,” Elvis told Joe Esposito.
They met at the Colonel’s Palm Springs house, where Parker, realizing what bad financial straits the singer was in, offered to reduce his percentage until Elvis could get on his feet. The singer tore up his list of grievances, forever missing his chance to break free of the servant-master hold. Still, it was a turning point. “It never got better,” says Billy Smith. “It got worse.”
At the end of September, Elvis started a new tour but seemed in no shape to be on the road. New keyboard man Tony Brown, who’d first joined the show as part of the gospel quartet Voice, saw Presley fall to his knees as he got out of a limousine in Maryland. In Detroit, he cut a show short at thirty minutes. Reviewers expressed puzzlement and dismay over his condition, and both Parker and the doctors agreed that the star needed to take five months off. The Colonel wrote to the Hilton that Elvis would not be able to fulfill his commitment in January.
Elias Ghanem, concerned about Elvis’s intestinal problems, ordered a series of colon tests. The results themselves were not alarming, but increasingly, Presley’s bowels were becoming so irregular that he would travel with a trunk of Fleet enemas and sleep with a towel fashioned around him like a diaper.
“He would be so damn drugged he couldn’t make it to the bathroom,” recalls Lamar Fike. “Or he’d get in there and be so groggy he’d fall down on the floor. That’s where they’d find him. I used to tell the Colonel, ‘You’re killing this guy! This guy is sick!’ And he’d say, ‘Just as long as he can keep doing the dates, we don’t have to worry. He’ll get himself back together again.’ ”
But Elvis was only drifting farther from reality. Fearful of odor, yet adverse to frequent bathing, he ingested Nullo deodorant tablets three times a day, believing “they’d kill any type of body odor, from bad breath to butt,” says Billy Smith, who with his wife, Jo, moved into a trailer on the Graceland grounds at Elvis’s insistence. “We used to con him into the bathtub when he was filthy,” adds Fike, “but you didn’t physically make him do anything when he wasn’t loaded. He’d fight you like a hawk.”
Together, Smith, Dr. Nichopoulos, and the physician’s office nurse, Tish Henley, would attempt to wean Elvis off prescription drugs, particularly after Presley was again admitted to Baptist Memorial Hospital in January 1975 for breathing difficulties. Vernon, who’d recently split from his wife, Dee, lay in the next room with a heart attack. Elvis was more concerned about his father than about his own health and, before his stay was over, charmed some of the nurses into bringing him whatever drugs he desired.
By the next month, a thinner Elvis was ready to return to Vegas. There, in his dressing room on February 18, he met with Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters, who hoped to interest him in a movie role, a remake of A Star Is Born. Jerry Schilling, who was present at the meeting, recalls that Elvis “went for it, definitely.” And Gordon Stoker remembers Presley talking about how excited he was at the prospect.
The Colonel, however, had several concerns, starting with billing and money. Streisand’s production company, First Artists, offered $500,000, plus 10 percent of profits, but no participation in music or recording rights. Parker responded that Elvis needed $1 million in salary, plus $100,000 in expenses and half of the profits, with a separate deal to be struck for a soundtrack. First Artists balked at the arrangement, and the deal fell apart when Streisand declined to make what Parker considered a suitable counteroffer.
“Mr. Presley has indicated that he would like to make this movie,” the Colonel wrote to Roger Davis, a William Morris lawyer, “[but] I advised him not to allow this to become a part of making a cheap deal.” Parker would forever be criticized for allowing money to take precedence over revitalizing his client in a challenging film role, something Presley desperately wanted. But he would later shift the blame to Elvis. “There was never no plan for him to do A Star Is Born. He told me to make the contract stiff enough where they would turn it down, ’cause he did not want to do it.”
Jerry Schilling says that Elvis was disillusioned, “but he knew if negotiations broke down, there was a good reason. He never complained about it that I heard.” Lamar Fike believes “deep down, Elvis knew he couldn’t play the part [but] laid a lot of the blame on the Colonel.”
Yet others saw a deeper malaise, as if Presley, now forty years old and terrified of aging, realized the film had been his last chance to prove himself as an actor. “People aren’t going to remember me, because I’ve never done anything lasting,” he said to Kathy Westmoreland in a particularly poignant moment. “I’ve never made a classic film to show what I can do.” His one regret, he told Larry Geller, was that he had never won an Oscar.
To quell his disappointment over A Star Is Born, Elvis buoyed himself with new offers to perform in England and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi dates especially thrilled him, says Lamar Fike, as Adnan and Essam Khashoggi offered $5 million for Elvis to play at the pyramids at Giza. But the Colonel turned it down, only to have the arms billionaires double their offer. “Elvis came out to the bus, and he said, ‘It’s this now,’ and he held up ten fingers.” When the deal fell through, Billy Smith remembers, “you could almost see the blood drain out of [his] face.”
Presley tried to remain hopeful as other offers—including $1 million a night for Germany and Japan—poured in. Still the Colonel refused, even as he bragged about the money to Mel Ilberman and others at RCA, who thought it odd that he didn’t take Elvis abroad, considering the vast number of records the singer sold there. Sometimes Parker hinted it would happen, and other times he turned churlish. “I was with the Colonel one time when some people from South America came up and offered him two and a half million dollars for one show,” recalls Gaylen Adams, the RCA rep. “And he was just so nonchalant. He said, ‘Well, whenever I need two and a half million dollars, I’ll call you.’ ”
Yet not only would Elvis soon borrow $350,000 from a Memphis bank, but the Colonel was so desperate for money that he insisted that concert promoters invest advance ticket funds in certificates of deposit under his name. Such profitable foreign dates could have easily solved the pair’s financial problems, and Parker could have gotten around the passport dilemma by having Weintraub and Hulett take Elvis abroad. But the Colonel, fearing loss of control, was too paranoid for that. Lately, he’d heard rumblings that Elvis asked Tom Hulett to manage him if Presley and Parker reached another impasse.
For now, the performer was trying to make amends. In July, hearing that Elton John had given his manager a $40,000 Rolls-Royce, he bought the Colonel an airplane, a $1.2-million G-1 turboprop—a kind of companion to his own recent acquisition, a Convair 880 jet to be named the Lisa Marie, which he settled on after first attempting to buy exiled financier Robert Vesco’s impounded Boeing 707.
Parker understood such impetuous and spontaneous shopping, and refused Presley’s gift of the twelve-seat plane, saying he couldn’t afford the taxes. That left Elvis angry, embarrassed, and more determined than ever to dismiss the Colonel for Hulett.
The talks with Hulett got far enough along, according to David Briggs, Presley’s piano player at the time, that “we all thought it was going to happen.” In fact, the men had already discussed going to Erope.
Loanne Miller cites two more reasons why Parker balked at going to Europe—his own bad health and the difficulties of doing business with foreign promoters. “Colonel was adamant that the fans not be taken advantage of with extremely high priced tickets, and everyone who wanted [to bring] Elvis overseas wanted to charge the equivalent of $100. Colonel knew that most of the fans didn’t begin to have that kind of money.”
Whatever the reasons, the fact remains, says Duke Bardwell, that Elvis never realized his dream. “To deny him that was the last nail in the coffin. He didn’t have anything to look forward to, and so he just went deeper and deeper into the things that let him hide.”
Yet more and more there was no hiding much of anything. On July 20, Elvis embarrassed his backup singers, Kathy Westmoreland and the Sweet Inspirations, with racial and sexual insults on stage in Norfolk, Virginia. Two days later, in North Carolina, he angrily waved a Baretta pistol at Dr. Nichopoulos when the physician tried to control his medications, the gun discharging, and a bullet ricocheting off a chair and striking Dr. Nick in the chest, wounding him only slightly. By the time Elvis arrived in Vegas in August, he was so loopy that he sat down for most of one performance, and finally lay flat on the stage, prompting yet another hospital stay.
After the Norfolk incident, the Colonel got Vernon on the telephone, according to Mike Crowley, who had just gone to work for Concerts West. “I was there,” says Crowley, the company’s liaison to the Colonel. “He said, ‘You’re going to have to take him off the road for at least six months to clean himself up. He can’t do this to the fans or himself.’ ” Vernon replied that Elvis had to work, Crowley says, and if Parker didn’t want to take him out on the road, they’d find someone else who would.
“I hate that old man,” Elvis told Billy Smith shortly afterward. His cousin asked him why. Elvis mumbled something about Parker being senile and rude, and Smith pumped him for more. “He said, ‘The Colonel is too concerned with my drug use. I’m tired of the old son of a bitch threatening me, saying he’s not going to book me anymore. Goddamn it, I’ve done performances that I didn’t want to. They booked me in places that I didn’t want to be. We need to stick to our old agreement, where Colonel takes care of the business part, and I take care of the performing. It’ll work a hell of a lot better.’ ”
Despite such friction, the Colonel still pondered ways to boost his client to new heights. For New Year’s Eve 1975, Parker let Jerry Weintraub take Elvis into the huge Pontiac, Michigan, Silverdome as a substitute for the Rolling Stones, who canceled due to illness. But Elvis made a poor showing, hampered by drugs, mediocre pickup musicians, and weather so frigid that one of the players plugged in an electric blanket. Presley was so late getting to the stage that intermission, following several opening acts, including Parker’s “green-grass” group, lasted more than an hour.
“He’s really screwed up,” conductor Joe Guercio told Jackie Kahane, who emceed the show. Kahane saw for himself, as the star said he was “scared shitless” as he passed him on the stairs.
Within minutes, Elvis split his pants and left the stage to change, and when he returned, he was so discombobulated that he kept on singing once the orchestra stopped for the countdown to midnight and the playing of “Auld Lang Syne.” Then when the band went into “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Elvis launched into a hymn, and segued into “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You,” the last song of the show. “He didn’t do twenty minutes,” Kahane recalled. “I figured they’d kill him.” But the Silverdome booked him back before he even left town, says the comic. “That was the magic of Elvis.”
The Colonel would tout the appearance as another Elvis “first.” With 62,500 fans in attendance, the show grossed more than $800,000—the biggest sum ever generated by a single artist in a one-night performance. After expenses, Presley and Parker divided $300,000 by their two-thirds/one-third agreement for the night’s work.
However, twenty-three days later, the Colonel presented Elvis with a document that called for Parker to receive a larger share of such profits, or a 50–50 split on all live appearances.
“It is hereby understood by both parties,” the contract read, “that these [tours] are a joint venture and that Elvis Presley is responsible for the presentation of his stage performance and Colonel Tom Parker and his representatives [for the] advertising and promotion of the show. . . . This authorization and agreement will run for seven years from [January 22, 1976.]” Elvis signed without hesitation, though he was so strapped for cash that Parker took his old one-third commission for a time, Presley agreeing to pay him back when finances weren’t so tight.
Now Parker turned his attentions to fulfilling Elvis’s recording obligations, the source of much rancor between the label and the star. Neither the Colonel nor Felton Jarvis had been able to get Elvis into the studio for nearly a year. Finally, in early 1976, the record company saw it had no choice but to take the studio to him.
On February 2, engineers from RCA Nashville pulled up at Graceland in the big red recording van, which amounted to a mobile studio. Elvis’s guys helped move the hideous Polynesian future out of the den, and the crew rolled the baby grand piano in from the music room. Then they did their best to blunt the acoustics, draping the walls with heavy blankets, nailing plywood sheets together to set up partitions, and bringing in extra carpeting to try to isolate each musician’s sound—a necessity, since Elvis held fast to the old way of recording, where everyone played at once.
Jarvis had hoped to glean twenty new masters from the sessions, and budgeted more than $74,000 for six nights of recording. But Elvis, popping pills, wearing his cop’s uniform, and ranting about his plot to rub out all the drug dealers in Memphis, gave everyone fits, stretching Felton’s budget by another $30,000. One night, he stopped everything to fly off to Denver for a peanut butter sandwich.
“Felton would come back and say, ‘It just wasn’t good,’ ” remembers RCA’s Joe Galante. “The company was at the point where it wasn’t a matter of control or direction anymore, but just containment.”
On the fourth day, as if to police the goings-on, the Colonel himself made an uncustomary appearance, historic both for his showing up at a recording session, and even more for visiting Graceland. David Briggs, who played electric keyboard, flinched as Parker walked in during the playback of a pornographic version of “Hurt,” which Elvis had recorded as a joke for the players. “The Colonel almost shit when he heard it. He said, ‘Get rid of that tape!’ ” though by then too many people already had copies to keep it out of circulation. On the last day, Elvis refused to come downstairs, and the session was canceled.
Eventually, Presley would lay down enough tracks for the Moody Blue album, though it would require additional recording in October to get just enough songs to pad out an LP. Even then, the sessions dragged on as Elvis played pool and ate chicken.
“We’d come to the house and wait all day long, sitting in the living room,” remembers Tony Brown, who played piano on the fall sessions. “One night he was singing a track, and he excused himself. We were all there, J.D. [Sumner] and the Stamps, the Sweet Inspirations. Maybe two hours later, he comes downstairs with a hat and a trench coat on and a shotgun, pretending to blow everything up with it. For the next four hours, he explained that gun to us and told us how many guns he owned. And then the session was over.” Another time, he abruptly ended rehearsals when a truck arrived with a delivery of motorcycles.
To some, Elvis appeared to simply want company. One particularly difficult night, unable to shake the loneliness, he disappeared, and Felton went looking for him, eventually finding him outside in the dark. “Why are you sitting out here, Elvis?” The singer let out a weary sigh. “I’m just so tired of playing Elvis Presley.”
Things were no better when Elvis went back on tour in the spring. “There was a lot of dissension [in the band] there at the end,” says Tony Brown, “and I think it was frustration over Elvis not being at the top of his game. Some nights it just sounded awful, and we were all looking like fools. We were always thinking, Is he going to be on or off tonight? Ninety percent of the time, he was pretty much off.” Backup singer Sherrill Nielsen was instructed to double Presley on the high notes in case he couldn’t sustain them.
By now, Elvis’s drug regimen for the road was so specific that Dr. Nichopoulos prescribed it in six stages. Stage one, administered at 3:00 P.M., when Presley arose, consisted of a “voice shot” that Dr. Ghanem concocted, three appetite suppressants, medication for dizziness, a laxative, vitamins and herbs, and testosterone. Stage two, delivered an hour before he went on stage, was made up of another voice shot, a decongestant with codeine, an amphetamine, a pill for vertigo, and Dilaudid. Stage three, timed just before his performance, included more Dilaudid, Dexedrine, and caffeine. And stage four, designed to bring him down after the show, included a pill to lower his blood pressure, some diluted Demerol, a sedative, and an antihistamine.
At bedtime, Elvis received stage five, a Placidyl, a Quaalude, three additional sedatives, an amphetamine, a blood-pressure pill, and a laxative. If Elvis couldn’t sleep, he advanced to stage six, made up of Amytal, a hypnotic sleeping pill, and more Quaaludes.
These extreme ups and downs were taking their toll. When private investigator John O’Grady caught Presley’s show in Tahoe that April, “he had locomotive attacks where he couldn’t walk . . . I really thought he was going to die.” O’Grady reported what he’d seen to attorney Ed Hookstratten in L.A. In June, “Hookstratten, Priscilla, and I did everything to get him in the hospital for three or four months,” O’Grady recalled, referring to the drug-treatment program at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego. They also considered taking him to a private hospital on Maui and one in the mid-South.
By now, Elvis suffered a host of physical problems, from blood clots, to hypoglycemia, to an enlarged heart. His liver was three times its normal size, his colon twisted. In three years, his weight, on a diet of junk food and downers, had zoomed from 175 to 245, something he tried to camouflage with darker jumpsuits and an elastic corset that held in his girth. Secretly, Presley told Kathy Westmoreland he had bone cancer, asking her to keep it quiet: “I don’t want anybody to know how sick I am . . . I don’t want people coming to see a dying man.” But Elton John, visiting him backstage in Maryland in June, saw it anyway. “He had dozens of people around him, supposedly looking after him,” the Englishman later said, “but he already seemed like a corpse.”
In July, Dr. Ghanem moved Elvis into a wing of his house for one of several “sleep diets,” a kind of rapid detox in which the patient ingests only liquid nourishment and sedatives, slumbering through withdrawal. Elvis’s feces had lately been as white as chalk, a certain sign of liver trouble, probably from ingesting massive amounts of pills. While a host of physicians contributed to Elvis’s problem, Tennessee records would later show that Dr. Nichopoulos alone had supplied a staggering 1,296 amphetamines, 1,891 sedatives, and 910 narcotics for the year 1975. That number would escalate dramatically for each of the next two years.
When Elvis returned to Memphis, he was withdrawn, sullen, depressed. Nothing became of the plan to hospitalize Presley because no one enforced it. Certainly not his manager, who couldn’t forget his own institutionalization forty-three years before, nor the spineless Vernon, and least of all the Memphis Mafia, which was powerless to do much of anything.
The entourage was largely made up of younger men now—Dean Nichopoulos, son of Dr. Nick, and Elvis’s stepbrothers David, Billy, and Rick Stanley, the latter of whom had been arrested in August 1975 at Methodist Hospital in Memphis, trying to use a forged prescription for Demerol. Too often, they looked at the job as a paycheck and reflected glory. Joe Esposito lived in California. Jerry Schilling, also on the West Coast, had little contact with Elvis anymore. And Presley was somewhat estranged from Red and Sonny West for, among other reasons, their rough handling of fans, one of whom was bringing a lawsuit against the star.
Parker himself felt shut out of Elvis’s life, and complained about it in a letter to him on June 16, more than a week after the singer ended an eleven-day tour.
“As I told Vernon today, I have not heard from anyone since I got back, neither from Sonny or from any other member of your staff. I just wanted you to know in the event you feel that they are in contact with me, but they are not.”
Still, on the whole, whether out of depression or compulsion, the Colonel seemed less concerned with managerial vision than continuing to play the numbers.
“I was gambling at the Las Vegas Hilton,” remembers Mike Growney, general manager of the Gold Coast Casino, “and there was one man sitting there, and I noticed that a security guard would keep coming over and bringing a stack of $100 chips. He would put the whole pile down and bet the number, and then they would spin the wheel. Then the security guard would bring over another stack of chips. And it’s $10,000 at a time. I said to the floor man, ‘What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘That’s Colonel Parker . . . He’s lost a million dollars.’ ”
Despite such willful extravagance, the Colonel kept an eye peeled for anyone who tried to fleece him out of a dollar. Which was how he met Joe Shane, then a twenty-six-year-old merchandiser from Paducah, Kentucky, who’d sold thousands of Elvis Presley “Aloha from Hawaii” T-shirts by running ads in TV Guide and The National Enquirer. Shane was just about to close a deal with JC Penney’s 1,900 stores when he ran into a snag: he didn’t own the licensing rights.
“I understand you’re trying to sell some merchandise of my boy,” Parker rasped into the phone.
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“Do you pay me any money for that?”
“No, sir, I do not.”
“Well,” the manager said evenly, “I think you’d better start.”
If the young merchandiser wanted to continue selling Elvis shirts, he needed to give the Colonel 25 percent of retail. Shane gulped—the usual fee was 10 percent of wholesale—and agreed. “Then you’d better get out here,” Parker beckoned from California. “Let’s put this deal together.”
“The Colonel prefers to give his contracts to people who’re hungry, people on the way up fast but still not at the top, people stretched a little thin and willing to take a smaller piece of the pie,” as one of the Colonel’s former associates explains.
Shane fit the bill. “We had a nice camaraderie because he saw some carny in me,” he says. And Parker, who never attempted mass merchandising through magazines, was fascinated that Shane had been able to sell 1,500 shirts a day from an ad. But his big concern was why he didn’t sell more. A few days after they struck their deal, Parker took him to the William Morris Agency and signed the papers to make Shane the only other licensed Elvis merchandiser in the world.
As Parker forged a new alliance in California, an old one was breaking up in Memphis. On the morning of July 13, 1976, Vernon placed three phone calls—the first to Red West, the second to Sonny West, and the third to Dave Hebler, one of Elvis’s newer bodyguards, who’d been hired mainly for his karate expertise. All three were being terminated with one week’s pay. Vernon explained that it had been a difficult year and he needed to trim the payroll, but the real reasons ran more to the pending lawsuit and the Wests’ tendency to cause friction among the group. Red, who had been Elvis’s friend and protector since high school, was particularly stunned not to have received the news from Elvis himself. Presley, too, was upset but, not knowing what to do or say, remained silent.
Ten days later, as Elvis began his fifth tour of the year, his stage moves were little more than perfunctory, his voice worn and tired. The Colonel, distraught at reports of a string of bad shows, confronted Elvis in Hartford and again bellowed that if Elvis didn’t shape up fast, he was in danger of losing not only his fans, but his Vegas contract and recording deal. Presley, shaken by the encounter, sought out Tom Hulett for solace. “You are the biggest entertainer there is, and everybody loves you,” Hulett said reassuringly. But Hulett, too, knew that Elvis couldn’t go on much longer.
In Houston, on August 28, Elvis gave such a dismaying show that critic Bob Claypool described it as a “depressingly incoherent, amateurish mess served up by a bloated, stumbling and mumbling figure who didn’t act like ‘the King’ of anything, least of all rock ’n’ roll.” For more than twenty years, Claypool wrote, Elvis had been breaking hearts. “Saturday afternoon in the Summit—in a completely new and unexpected way—he broke mine.”
“It was really bad,” says Lamar Fike, who’d replaced Sonny West as security chief. “We almost lost him in Houston. But nobody would say it, even though it was just tearing us up, ripping us to shreds. I felt like some sort of voice in the wilderness. I said, ‘God almighty, guys, look what’s happening here! He’s going on us!’ ”
Larry Geller was equally disturbed but, like Fike, found most of the people around Elvis in denial. “It took him more and more time to get ready for the show. I would go to people’s rooms and literally cry. I’d say, ‘Look at him. He’s sick and something’s got to be done.’ And they’d say, ‘No, man, in twenty years Elvis is going to look better than he does today. He’s going to pull out of it.’ ”
But Dr. Nichopoulos knew better and, with the help of Billy Smith, stepped up the efforts to quell Elvis’s craving, diluting his shots, draining his capsules, and substituting placebos for the harder pills, delivered as “attack packets” at appointed hours by Elvis’s stepbrothers. Like any drug addict, Presley caught on quick, demanding more and stronger stuff. If Nichopoulos refused, he’d fly to Vegas or L.A. to find another source.
Despite Elvis’s physical condition and faltering shows, the public had no knowledge of the extent of Presley’s drug habit, believing he was simply ill. All that was about to change.
In September, rumors swirled that Red, Sonny, and Dave Hebler were writing a book about their life with Elvis, intending to reveal his terrible deterioration as a kind of wake-up call. Jackie Kahane had encouraged members of the group to go to the newspapers months before. “What would the point be?” Joe Guercio asked him. “To save his life! He’s on dope, he’s on everything!” Kahane said. “Forget it,” Guercio told him. “You’d look like an ass.”
“When Elvis found out about the book,” Larry Geller remembers, “he was so hurt. We were in Mobile, Alabama. I can still see him, sitting in bed, with tears running down his cheeks. He said, ‘How could these guys do this to me? They could have anything they want.’ He wasn’t so worried about how it would impact him, but rather his family. He kept saying, ‘How is it going to affect my father and my little girl? When she grows up, what is she going to think about her daddy?’ ”
Through Vernon, Elvis asked Parker to have the book stopped. The manager hired John O’Grady, who learned that the tell-all was being cowritten by Steve Dunleavy of the tabloid Star, and offered the Wests and Hebler $50,000 to cancel the project. But the bodyguards refused. Nothing more was ever done.
Geller believes the Colonel didn’t find a way to stop the book because he wanted it to be published. Fike says that Parker tried to halt it, but by the time he learned of its existence, the authors had already signed their contracts. Elvis, however, believed the matter had been taken care of, though his obsession with the book caused him to overindulge his love of fattening foods, his weight ballooning even higher.
When he returned to Las Vegas that December, Elvis was so large that Bruce Banke couldn’t believe his appearance (“I said, ‘He’s putting us on. That’s got to be padding in there.” His belt buckle was down below his belly”). He injured his ankle on stage, railed about his frustrations, cursed the “tinny” microphone, and one night, told a perplexed audience, “I hate Las Vegas.” Bill Burk of the Memphis Press-Scimitar wrote what everyone was thinking but few would say: “One walks away wondering how much longer it can be before the end comes.”
By the last months of ’76, Linda Thompson, tired of watching Elvis self-destruct and “feeling that I wasn’t worth anything without him,” had all but phased herself out of his life. In November, he met twenty-year-old Ginger Alden, another dark-haired Memphis beauty queen who currently held the title of Miss Mid-South Fair. Ginger reminded Elvis of a young Priscilla, but several factors hampered the courtship, including - Elvis’s physical condition, the twenty-two-year difference in their ages, and Ginger’s feisty independence.
Unlike other of Elvis’s girlfriends, Ginger refused to build her life around Presley’s, preferring to be with her friends much of the time instead of spending the night at Graceland or going on tours. In January 1977, when she was to accompany Elvis to Nashville for a recording session, she changed her mind at the last minute and refused to go. Elvis, moody and angry, checked in to a Nashville hotel, but never made an appearance at the studio, complaining of a sore throat.
He returned to Memphis the next day, prompting the Colonel to once more lay down the law: “Get off your tail [and] fulfill your commitment, or there will be no more tours.”
The canceled recording session made its way into the Nashville Banner, where a columnist reported Presley’s aides “contend the singer’s new girlfriend . . . [is] absolutely running him ragged.” Later that month, Elvis presented Ginger with an 11.5-karat diamond engagement ring. Then in March, he took her family on vacation in Hawaii, bringing along several of the guys.
Larry Geller was among them. When the men were alone, Geller spoke to Elvis about his health, advising him on his diet and suggesting foods and vitamins to strengthen his immune system. Elvis needed rest, he told him, and the singer vowed to take off six months to a year and come back to the islands to relax and restore his well-being. He also pledged to make other changes.
“He was adamant about firing the Colonel,” says Geller. “I’d never heard him so resolute, and I’m convinced he was going to get rid of him.” In several conversations, Presley brought up the ’74 incident, saying he was sorry he hadn’t gone through with it then. “He even had the time picked out when he was going to make his move, and he was certain he wanted Tom Hulett to manage his career. He said, ‘Larry, I promise you, this is exactly what I’m going to do.’ ” He would see to it after the last tour wound down in August.
Several days later, Elvis cut his vacation short after suffering an eye infection, and when he went back on the road at the end of the month, he did not appear well. Billy Smith could barely get him on the plane. In Alexandria, Louisiana, on March 30, he stumbled through “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and finally improvised his own prophetic lyric: “Wise men know/ When it’s time to go . . .”
The next day, in Baton Rouge, Elvis woke up feeling ill, and summoned Dr. Nick, Joe Esposito, and Larry Geller to his suite. “I told Daddy and Nick I’m sick, man, I can’t go on tonight,” he moaned. “I’m canceling the rest of the tour.” But Geller had obtained galley sheets of the West and Hebler book through a fan, and knew that the tabloids would see a cancellation as verification of the story. The awful details were already beginning to appear in the British press.
Presley’s entourage had kept the news from the star, but now Geller thought he should hear it. Elvis exploded in anger (“Get me the Colonel!”) and was so traumatized that Dr. Nick felt the need to sedate him. When he awakened, he insisted on flying back to Memphis and going into the hospital, as much for insurance reasons as health.
The Colonel would add the canceled dates on to a later tour, but the crowd in Baton Rouge would never forget the bizarre way Parker handled the last-minute cancellation. “He had us go on stage and take our places as if Elvis was coming out,” remembers Kathy Westmoreland. “Then he faked a blackout, and whisked us out of the building into police cars. Tom Hulett said they were trying to get everybody out without getting hurt. In fact, there was a riot afterwards.”
Three weeks later, with Ginger in tow, Elvis was back on the road for his third tour of the year. One review described the performer as “seeming not to care.” A Detroit columnist wrote, “He stunk the joint out.”
Although a few industry insiders knew the relationship between Parker and Presley had broken down, perhaps irretrievably, a story in the Nashville Banner in late April came as a surprise to most. The Colonel had put Elvis’s management contract up for sale, and a group of West Coast businessmen had expressed interest, the paper reported, quoting sources in Nashville, Memphis, and Los Angeles.
The reasons were said to be the Colonel’s failing health and financial problems, particularly his high-rolling habits. Parker and Presley had reportedly “not spoken in two years,” wrote columnist Bill Hance.
By the next day, Parker, in St. Paul to advance the singer’s concert, was on the phone to dispute the story, telling Nashville’s morning paper, the Tennessean, he had “absolutely no plans to sell Elvis Presley. . . . I’m here working with Elvis, I’m in good health, and I don’t have any debts—at least none that I can’t pay.” Joe Esposito, who parroted the Colonel’s words, also dismissed the report that the two men didn’t talk. “They’re on the road together all the time, and the Colonel just spoke to Elvis yesterday.”
What prompted the story isn’t known, but clearly Parker was exploring new directions, including one he had shied away from for so long. Around this same time, he contacted Peter Grant, the corpulent manager of the British rock group Led Zeppelin, whose U.S. dates were handled through Concerts West. Could Grant promote a European tour for Elvis, since Parker was too busy stateside to accompany his star? They made plans to talk about it after Presley’s last shows of the summer.
But in truth, Elvis was not up to performing. By May, on his fourth tour of 1977, he wore the same white, Aztec-calendared jumpsuit thirteen days in a row. It was the only one that fit him.
In Knoxville, a doctor who saw Elvis backstage reported that “he was pale, swollen—he had no stamina.” Then in Landover, Maryland, he left the stage, tossing two microphones to the floor, to answer “nature’s call.” A week later, in Baltimore, he again walked off for thirty minutes. “At the finale,” Variety wrote, “there was no ovation, and patrons exited shaking their heads and speculating on what was wrong with him.”
Presley himself knew the signs. Not long before, he’d invited the songwriter Ben Weisman to come up to the suite in Vegas. Elvis, his face puffy, sat down at the piano. “Ben,” he said, “there’s a song I love, called ‘Softly As I Leave You.’ But it’s not about a man leaving a lady. It’s about a man - who’s going to die.”
Before the taping of a CBS-TV concert special in Rapid City, South Dakota, Elvis showed Kathy Westmoreland a blue jumpsuit he planned to wear that evening. “I’m going to look fat in that faggy little suit,” he told her, “but I’ll look good in my coffin.” Westmoreland found herself unable to say a word, “because I knew that it was inevitable and could come at any moment. He wanted me to wear white, not black, at the funeral.”
Westmoreland consoled herself with the news that after the fifth tour ended in June, Elvis would have the entire month of July to himself. Though the Colonel often gave the band very little notice, the next dates weren’t scheduled to start until August 17, and Lisa Marie was coming for a two-week visit. Ordinarily, Elvis liked to work, and other than the times he was ill, he never thought of Parker as pushing him to tour, even asking him to book more shows when the Colonel suggested he slow down. But now he knew he needed time off.
“I’m so tired,” he told Westmoreland. “I don’t want to go out on this next tour, but I have to. The Colonel owes $8 million.”
Elvis, too, was feeling the pinch. Recently, he had issued Priscilla a deed of trust to Graceland, guaranteeing her nearly half a million dollars still owed on the divorce settlement.
Lamar Fike also looked forward to Elvis’s last show before the midsummer break, which fell in Indianapolis on June 26, the Colonel’s sixty-eighth birthday. Like Geller, Fike had encouraged the singer to go to Hawaii and change everything he hated about his life. Now Fike wondered if it might be too late. On stage, Elvis had summoned new strength, giving his best performance in months, and ending his eighty-minute show with impassioned renditions of “Hurt” and “Bridge over Troubled Water.” But moments before, he’d looked so fatigued, as if the life had already drained out of him.
“He’ll never see the snow fly,” Fike told the entourage. “I promise you.”
The Colonel had seen irrefutable evidence of Elvis’s dire condition himself as late as May 21, in Louisville. Larry Geller was in the anteroom of Elvis’s hotel suite, waiting for Dr. Nick to finish administering the drugs that would transform Presley from a sick, lethargic man to an energized performer. Suddenly, Geller heard a loud knock at the door. He answered it to find an angry Parker leaning on his cane. Geller was shocked—never had he known the Colonel to come to Elvis’s room on tour.
“Where is he?” Parker demanded.
Geller said he would let Elvis know he was there. “No, I’m going in,” the Colonel said curtly, brushing Geller as he passed.
The Colonel opened the door to a devastating sight—Elvis, semiconscious and moaning, with Dr. Nick working frantically to revive him, kneeling at his bedside, dunking the singer’s head into a bucket of ice water.
The Colonel banged the door behind him. For a moment, Geller’s heart sank. Then he felt relieved. Finally, the Colonel had seen Elvis at his worst. Surely now he would talk to him, pull him off the road, take steps to get him help. Yet ninety seconds later, the manager thundered out. Larry rose. “You listen to me!” Parker shouted, stabbing the air with his cane. “The only thing that’s important is that he’s on that stage tonight! Nothing else matters!”
And then the Colonel was gone.
“I thought, Oh my God!,” Geller remembers. “What about Elvis? Doesn’t Colonel understand that this man is in dire straits? I was horrified. I can only surmise he acted out of stupidity and denial. But still, how could he be so callous?”
The answer to that question was one that almost no one knew, with origins deep in Parker’s carny past. As a young man on the circuit, one of his jobs had been to befriend the geek, the pathetic dipsomaniac who sat in a pit and bit the heads off live chickens in exchange for a daily bottle. Periodically, the poor soul would run off and hide in the fields, unable to face another bloody performance. Parker would find him, shuddering and desperate, then wave the bottle as bait and reward, and bring him back to do the show.
“Parker and Presley represent the convergence of two characters from carnival culture: the poor country boy who grabs the brass ring and the mysterious stranger who fleeces the innocent,” Richard Harrington wrote in The Washington Post.
But Parker’s gambling had morphed him into a combination of the two, and then some. As Elvis prepared for his next tour in August 1977, the Colonel’s gambling debts at the Las Vegas Hilton reached a staggering $30 million.
It is in that sad fact that the lines begin to blur between the geek, his keeper, and the chicken, dancing or otherwise.
In the late 1950s, Parker invited Byron Raphael to Grauman’s Chinese Theater for a showing of his favorite movie. Produced in 1947 as gritty and disturbing film noir, Nightmare Alley perfectly captured the sordid netherworld of the small-time carnival. In the picture’s evocative opening, Tyrone Power, as the ambitious young sideshow hustler Stanton Carlisle, encounters his first gloaming geek. At the sound of frenzied squawking, the crowd gasps, and a shaken Carlisle asks the show owner: “How does a guy get so low? Is he born a geek?”
By the end of the film, after relying on fakery and illusion to climb to Chicago’s supper-club-and-society level, Carlisle learns the horrific answer first hand. The inevitable fall of “Stanton the Great” results from his unyielding need to manipulate and mislead, and from his inability to separate himself from the marks he deceives.
“The fascination Colonel had with that picture was unbelievable,” remembers Raphael. “He sat there so engrossed that he never moved, though God knows how many times he’d seen it. He talked about it all the time, for years.”
Parker identified with the dark morality tale not just for the haunting, vulgar realism of the sideshow milieu, with its depictions of mitt camps and Tarot card readings, but because the character was very nearly him.
As drawn in William Lindsay Gresham’s potent novel, Stanton Carlisle began life with a too-strict father, a deep love for animals, and the knowledge that he’s a bit too fond of his mother. As he slips into a life of deception and fraud, he causes the accidental death of a friend and, later, in a miracle worker “spook” scam gone wrong, brings on the stroke of a client he’s bilked out of a fortune. Lost and desperate, with the police on his trail, Carlisle sinks into the violent underworld of the fugitive, riding the rails and living with hobos. But in his eventual return to the carnival, he sentences himself to a living damnation he could not have imagined, as the most debased of the sideshow freaks.
“I never thought Colonel would wind up as the geek,” says Raphael. “But in becoming the most horrendous of compulsive gamblers in his later years, that’s exactly what he did. He turned into the very thing he despised. All those years, nobody could touch him, and so he destroyed himself.”
In the movie’s frightening finale, Carlisle, wild-eyed, screaming, and deep in the grips of psychosis (“The geek’s gone nuts!” yells an onlooker), finds himself chased by a mob with a straightjacket. McGraw, the carny boss who’d hired him only that morning, stops with a roustabout to watch. For the first time, the boss recognizes his new geek as the famed “mentalist” of old.
“Well, he certainly fooled me,” mutters McGraw. “Stanton. Stanton the Great.”
“How can a guy get so low?” asks the roustabout, echoing what the young Carlisle said long ago.
McGraw, who’s seen it all, shakes his head. “He just reached too high.”