ON the sweltering evening of August 15, 1977, Elvis Presley slipped out of his blue silk lounging pajamas and, with the help of his cousin Billy Smith, climbed into a black sweat suit emblazoned with a Drug Enforcement Agency patch, a white silk shirt, and a pair of black patent boots, which he wore unzipped due to the puffy buildup of fluid in his ankles.
At 10:30, after a night of motorcycle riding with girlfriend Ginger Alden, the singer stuffed two .45-caliber automatic pistols in the waistband of his sweatpants. Then he donned his blue-tinted, chrome sunglasses to slide behind the wheel of his Stutz automobile. With Alden, Smith, and Smith’s wife, Jo, in tow, Elvis steered his way to the office of his dentist, Dr. Lester Hofman, in East Memphis. A crown on Presley’s back tooth needed fixing, and he wanted to tend to it before he left the following evening for Portland, Maine, the first date of a twelve-day tour.
When the couples returned to Graceland around midnight, Elvis and Ginger went upstairs, and the Smiths retired to their trailer. Sometime around 2:00 A.M., Elvis spoke with Larry Geller. Geller recalls his friend was “in a very good mood, looking forward to the tour, and making plans for the future.” Around 4:00 A.M., Elvis still felt energetic enough for a game of racquetball, and phoned Billy and Jo to join him and Ginger. As the foursome went out the back door and down the concrete walkway to Elvis’s racquetball building, a light rain began to fall.
“Ain’t no problem,” Elvis said, and put out his hands as if to stop it. Miraculously, Smith remembers, the rain let up. “See, I told you,” Elvis said. “If you’ve got a little faith, you can stop the rain.”
Despite his sudden burst of energy, Elvis was exhausted from several days of a Jell-O diet, the latest in a series of desperate attempts to trim him down enough to fit into his stage costumes. He tired quickly on the court, and the couples resorted more to cutting up than concentrating on their game. After ten minutes, they took a break, then returned to the court. But they quit a second time when Elvis misjudged a serve and hit himself hard in the shin with his racquet.
Limping into the lounge, Presley fixed himself a glass of ice water and then moved to the piano and began singing softly, ending with “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”
Afterward, upstairs in the house, Smith washed and dried his cousin’s hair. Presley again obsessed about the bodyguard book, Elvis: What Happened?, which had hit the stands two weeks before. Yelling wildly, out of his head, Elvis fumed he’d bring Red, Sonny, and Dave Hebler to Graceland, where he’d kill them himself and dispose of their bodies. Then his mood dimmed, and he rehearsed a speech he planned to give from the stage if his fans, shocked to learn their idol spent $1 million a year on drugs and doctors, turned on him in concert. “They’ve never beat me before,” he said, “and they won’t beat me now.” Billy knew what he meant: “Even if I have to get up there and admit to everything.”
Numb, frightened, and weary from dread, he cried pitifully, shaking. Billy petted him, cooed baby talk to him. “It’s okay,” Billy soothed. “It’s going to be all right.” As Smith went out the door, Elvis, the cousin who was more like a big brother, turned to him. “Billy . . . son . . . this is going to be my best tour ever.” At 7:45 A.M., the singer took his second “attack packet” of four or five sleeping pills within two hours. The third would come shortly afterward. He’d had no food since the day before.
Sometime around 8:00 A.M., Elvis climbed into bed with Ginger. As she recalled, she awakened in the tomblike room—always kept at a chilly sixty degrees—to find her aging boyfriend too keyed up to sleep, preoccupied with the tour. “Precious,” he said, “I’m going to go in the bathroom and read for a while.” Ginger stirred. “Okay, but don’t fall asleep.”
“Don’t worry,” he called back. “I won’t.”
Behind the bathroom door, Elvis picked up A Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus, a book about the Shroud of Turin, and waited for his pharmaceutical escort to slumber.
As Elvis’s day was ending in Memphis, the Colonel’s was already in full swing in Portland, the big man holed up in the Dunfey Sheraton and riding herd on Tom Hulett, Lamar Fike, George Parkhill, and Tom Diskin to oversee every detail of Elvis’s two-day engagement there. Fike had flown in from Los Angeles on the red-eye and immediately went to work setting up the security and arranging the hotel rooms for the band and crew. Then he grabbed a quick bite to eat and went to bed.
Just before noon, Billy Smith walked over to Graceland and spoke with entourage member Al Strada, who was packing Elvis’s wardrobe cases. Smith inquired as to whether anyone had seen the boss. Al said no, that Elvis wasn’t to be awakened until 4:00 P.M. Billy wondered aloud if one of the Stanley brothers had checked on Elvis and started up the stairs to do so himself. No, if they ain’t heard from him, God, let him rest, he thought. He needs it.
At 2:20, Ginger turned over in Elvis’s huge bed and found it empty. Had he never come back to sleep? She noticed his reading light was still on and thought it odd. Ginger knocked on the bathroom door. “Elvis, honey?” No response. She turned the knob and went inside. Elvis was slumped on the floor, angled slightly to the left. He was on his knees, his hands beneath his face, in a near praying position, his silk pajama bottoms bunched at his feet. Inexplicably, he had fallen off the toilet and somehow twisted himself into the grotesque form. But why hadn’t he answered? Ginger called again. “Elvis?” He lay so still, so unnaturally still.
Now Ginger bent down to touch him. He was cold, his swollen face buried in the red shag carpet, blood dotting the nostrils of his flattened nose, his tongue, nearly severed in two, protruding from clenched teeth. His skin was mottled purple-black. She forced open an eye. A cloudy blue pupil stared back at her lifelessly.
Elvis Presley was dead at the age of forty-two.
Not wanting to believe the worst, a frightened Ginger pressed the intercom, which rang in the kitchen. Mary Jenkins, the cook and maid, took the call. Breathless, Ginger asked, “Who’s on duty?”
“Al is here,” Mary answered, and passed the phone to Strada. “Al, come upstairs!” Ginger said. “I need you! Elvis has fainted!” Strada rushed upstairs, took one look, and with fear in his voice, called downstairs for Joe Esposito. Joe bounded up the stairs and turned the body, stiff with rigor mortis, on its side.
Already Esposito knew the awful truth, but still he called for an ambulance. Then, after some delay, he got Dr. Nick on the phone with the news that Elvis had suffered a heart attack. With the ambulance screaming through Whitehaven, Joe called down to Vernon’s office. Suddenly, the upstairs was filled with people: Charlie Hodge crying and begging Elvis not to die; Vernon, recuperating from his own heart attack six months earlier, collapsing on the floor; nine-year-old Lisa Marie, visiting from California, peering wide-eyed into the scene.
“What happened to him?” asked Ulysses Jones, one of the emergency medical techs. Al blurted out the truth. “We think he OD’d.”
The paramedics were puzzled. Why was everyone so emphatic that they bring back a man who was so obviously dead, and who had been dead for hours? Who was he, anyway? Jones was shocked to learn the answer. The body was so discolored, he later said, he thought he’d been working on a black man.
At Baptist Memorial Hospital, the emergency team did its best. But no measure, whether frantic or heroic, could save Graceland’s master. Finally, Dr. Nick, his face orchid white, entered the private waiting room, where Esposito sat with Hodge, Strada, Smith, and David Stanley. “He’s gone,” said the doctor who had prescribed 19,000 pills for Elvis in less than three years. “He’s no longer here.”
The men cried shamelessly and held on to each other for support. Dr. Nick asked Maurice Elliott, the hospital spokesman, not to make the announcement until he’d given Vernon the terrible truth. Worrying that the old man’s heart might not be able to take such a shock, Dr. Nick immediately left for Graceland to perform the crushing duty.
Vernon, suspecting that his son would not be coming home, had already prepared Lisa Marie. When the final news came, Elvis’s daughter dialed her father’s old girlfriend. “It’s Lisa,” she said into the phone. Linda Thompson cooed. “I know who it is, you goobernickel.” Then came the words that Thompson had dreaded so long: “Linda,” said the small voice, “Daddy’s dead.”
As Dr. Nick left the hospital, Joe asked Maurice Elliott for a private line. The public relations man led him into a conference room off the ER. There, Esposito called the Colonel in Maine. George Parkhill answered, and gave the phone to his boss.
“I have something terrible to tell you,” Joe began, his voice wavering. “Elvis is dead.”
Thirty seconds, maybe more, passed before Parker spoke.
“Okay, Joe,” he said, his voice flat, devoid of emotion. “We’ll be there as soon as we can. You just do what you have to do. Tell Vernon we’ll be there. We have a lot of work.” Esposito sensed that beneath the calm, the Colonel was shaken. “Like me,” Joe later wrote, “he would do whatever had to be done: cancel the tour and let everyone know it was all over.”
Lamar Fike was still sleeping when Tom Hulett banged on his door. “Lamar!” he called. “The Colonel wants to see you right now.” Fike was groggy and spent. “Fuck him,” he yelled back. “I’m tired. I’m sleepy.” Hulett persisted. “Lamar, answer the door!”
Fike slipped the chain off. Hulett had his head down. “I said, ‘What’s the matter with you, Tom?’ ” he remembers. “Hulett said, ‘You need to come down to the room and talk to the Colonel right now.’ ”
The hotel was built in the round. “I remember walking around the circle to Colonel’s room. I went in, and he was sitting on the side of the bed, hanging up the phone from Joe. Everybody was looking down at the floor.
“I said, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ I had my arm on the television set. Colonel got up and walked over to me, and stood maybe ten inches away from my face. He said, ‘Lamar, you need to go to Memphis and meet with Mr. Vernon. Elvis is dead.’ ”
Fike was shattered but hardly surprised. Only the coldness of Parker’s attitude shocked the aide.
“I said, ‘That’s it?’ Colonel said, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ I said, ‘Well, it took you awhile, but you finally ran him into the ground, didn’t you?’ ” Parker challenged him: “What did you say?” And Fike was resolute. “I said, ‘You heard what I said. He couldn’t run anymore, could he?’ ” Lamar looked around the room, searching the faces of the others, his anger building. “ ‘I kept telling you guys, man. None of you listened to me.’ ”
That night, the advance team would go downstairs to dinner as planned, though no one felt like eating. “I don’t want anyone making any scenes,” Parker ordered. “We’re going to show respect, and we’re going to put on the best face possible.”
In Las Vegas, Parker’s Hilton contact, Bruce Banke, was in his office when he got a call from Robert Macy, a friend at the Associated Press. Macy told him he’d just gotten a bulletin that Banke needed to hear. The PR man recognized the background sounds—four bells on the Teletype machine, to signal a major news story—and said, “Bob, I hope to hell World War III has just broken out.” Macy told him no, it was worse.
Banke found Barron Hilton meeting with the hotel’s senior officers. “I must have been just pale as a sheet, because I walked in and the entire meeting stopped and everybody turned around and stared at me.” Hilton said, “What is it, Bruce?” Banke had just stopped speaking when the phone rang. It was the Colonel calling from Portland.
The show plane, which had departed from Los Angeles, having stopped in Las Vegas to pick up Joe Guercio, was en route to the East Coast. Suddenly, the pilot announced that the plane would land in Pueblo, Colorado. Jackie Kahane remembers how puzzled everyone was.
Marty Harrell, the trombone player and Guercio’s assistant, got off in Pueblo and went inside the terminal, where he found a note to call the Colonel. Parker minced no words and gave him his orders to make the announcement and fly back to Vegas. Drawn, Harrell put down the receiver and reboarded the aircraft. “Would everybody get off the plane?” he asked. Only the Sweet Inspirations’ Myrna Smith refused. “Please,” Harrell begged. “I have something to say, and I can only say it once.”
Smith obliged, and Harrell, standing on the runway, cleared his throat. “I hate to tell you guys this, but Elvis is dead.”
Several of the men began softly crying. Myrna Smith took off running around the airfield in a wild frenzy of grief, only to be caught and sedated with Valium. Kahane tried to call his wife. Both his phone lines were busy, so he dialed the operator to break through for an emergency. “The operator was crying,” he remembers. “She said, ‘Do you know that Elvis Presley died?’ The people in the show were the last to know.”
While the most devoted of Presley’s fans began a pilgrimage to Memphis, the Colonel booked a flight to New York. “I can’t waste time mourning,” he explained later. “There’s plenty of people ready to come in and cut the ground from under our feet.”
After canceling the tour, Parker flew to New York to meet with RCA, for whom his client had sold more tapes and records than any other performer in recording history. The old carny rightly expected that every store in the country would sell out of Presley product within twenty-four hours. Now he put the squeeze on RCA to keep a rich river of Elvis records churning.
Next he met with Harry “the Bear” Geisler, a forty-eight-year-old former steelworker and third-grade dropout who had just made a fortune overnight with Farrah Fawcett posters and T-shirts, putting up $300,000 for the rights in early 1977 and paying out some $400,000 in royalties to Fawcett’s agent that summer. His company, Factors Etc., Inc., had also acquired the merchandising licenses for tie-ins for the movies Star Wars and Rocky. The Bear was a hustler to be reckoned with.
In preparing a likeness of an artist and selling it, from Eddy Arnold on, Parker may have innovated concert merchandising, but mass merchandising was beyond him, which is why he’d brought Hank Saperstein into the split in 1956. Now he needed Geisler to do the same.
But the Colonel also wanted to include his young friend Joe Shane, the Kentucky merchandiser he’d taken under his wing and given the exclusive worldwide rights for the name of Elvis Presley. “He knew exactly what was going to transpire,” Shane recalls, “and he was wise enough to know that he couldn’t stop it. I got him on the phone as soon as I heard Elvis was gone, and he said, ‘Joe, this thing is gonna get out of control. You better get protected.’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”
Shane played tough with all the fly-by-night companies that called, but he knew scaring off Geisler was out of the question.
“The Bear said, ‘We’re not asking you, we’re telling you that starting tonight, we’re gonna put out a line of Elvis Presley posters and iron-on transfers,’ ” Shane remembers. “We got into a little shouting match, and I said, ‘I hope you sell a billion, because I’ve got the rights.’ ” And he said, ‘I will sell a billion, and you won’t get anything.’ He was really gruff.”
On August 17, as tens of thousands of fans from around the world lined up in front of Graceland and down Elvis Presley Boulevard, snaking up the driveway for a last look at the famous face laid out in the huge copper casket in Graceland’s foyer, Shane and the Colonel talked again. They agreed to meet at the William Morris office in Los Angeles in the days following Elvis’s funeral to finalize the contract with Geissler. Shane would assign his rights to Factors for a one percent royalty. “I couldn’t police the industry, and he could, and that was his big selling point.” But as part of the deal, the twenty-seven-year-old Shane would take over the merchandising of Factors’ rock-and-roll contracts for Grease, Saturday Night Fever, and the Bee Gees. “The Bear said, ‘Son, you are going to be one of the richest men in the country.’ ”
Their contract included a provision that Factors, Etc., Inc., would sue the bootleggers who horned in on the territory, thus giving both Shane and Presley a percentage of the illicit sales without Parker having to dirty his own hands.
“The Colonel really looked after me. He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t give up your rights to the boy.’ Of course, once I had assigned my rights to Factors for a royalty, I wasn’t really in control anymore. But the Colonel felt as long as I had an association with him, I was okay. He paged me at an airport between flights and said, ‘Are the people treating you right? Let me know if they are or not.’ Because anybody who wanted to sublicense had to have the Presley estate’s approval, and it wasn’t Vernon or Lisa Marie or anybody else. It was the Colonel. He was calling all of the shots.”
Without question, Shane says, “He was like, ‘The boy’s dead, and how much money can I make?’ ” But in doing what he did, when he did it, Parker “legitimized the value of merchandising after an artist is no longer living. The industry owes him a debt of gratitude for doing that, because the numbers became overwhelming.”
But the Colonel didn’t strictly have the right to negotiate such deals until after he arrived in Memphis for Presley’s service, along with celebrities Ann-Margret and husband Roger Smith, James Brown, and Caroline Kennedy, who covered the event for the New York Daily News. With the tabloids’ helicopters circling overhead, and the droning screech of cicadas hanging heavy in the Memphis humidity, Parker cornered Vernon in the Graceland foyer. He explained that pirates and scam artists would come out of the woodwork to cash in on Elvis’s memory now, and that Vernon, the executor of Elvis’s estate, was in no physical or emotional shape to deal with them, especially as he had other worries on his mind.
The estate would eventually be valued at $7.6 million, but that was before taxes, and lately Elvis had been in the habit of mortgaging Graceland to make his payroll. Shouldn’t they just continue business as usual? The Colonel could advance the estate $1 million to pay off debts and make it look as if Elvis had some cash in his depleted checking account. Besides, “Elvis didn’t die. The body did,” Parker said—and would repeat for days on end whenever reporters got close. “It don’t mean a damned thing. It’s just like when he was away in the army. . . . This changes nothing.”
The Colonel would go on managing Presley’s memory, and on August 23, Vernon signed the official letter, drafted, one suspects, by Parker himself. “I am deeply grateful that you have offered to carry on in the same old way, assisting me in any way possible with the many problems facing us,” Vernon allegedly wrote. “I hereby would appreciate if you will carry on according to the same terms and conditions as stated in the contractual agreement you had with Elvis dated January 22, 1976, and I hereby authorize you to speak and sign for me in all these matters pertaining to this agreement.”
While the Colonel had business on his mind the day of the funeral, several of the mourners gathered in Graceland’s music, dining, and living rooms for the 2:00 P.M. service on August 18 found his behavior more peculiar than ever, beginning with his dress: a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap, from which protruded unruly tufts of gray-brown hair.
“If Elvis looks down and he sees the Colonel all dressed up, he’s gonna say, ‘What the hell is that?’ ” Parker explained later. “This is the way I always dress. Informal. No point putting on airs now.” When he saw Tom Hulett dressed appropriately in a tie and black suit, the Colonel told him to go change into his usual jeans and loafers.
But what galled everyone was that Parker refused to be a pallbearer, and, as Jackie Kahane remembers, “every time he would go past the coffin, he would avert his eyes.” Larry Geller also found it strange. He remembers the Colonel being stoic.
“He didn’t talk to many people, and he was way in the back. He certainly wasn’t sitting in the front room, and he could have been right down there with Grandma [Minnie Mae Presley] and Vernon if he’d wanted.” Afterward, Geller expected Parker to have a private moment at the casket before the lid came down for the last time and a white hearse trailed by seventeen white limousines carried the body to Forest Hill Cemetery. “But it never happened. He wouldn’t walk up. He didn’t even look. You could almost see him struggling not to look.”
Kathy Westmoreland was upset with the Colonel for the way he was dressed, but rationalized his actions. “I could see there was pain in his eyes, and he didn’t want to show it.”
Years later, Parker boasted that he never once wept at the funeral. “No, sir. If anybody had seen my eyes mist up for a second they must have had their hands in my pockets.”
And if Parker wondered just what killed his client, he spoke of it to no one in Presley’s camp. Jackie Kahane thought he had a fairly good idea. “Elvis committed suicide for want of another term. It saddened me to see such a big talent kill himself.” On the plane, the comedian wrote a eulogy, which he read at the service between performances by gospel groups and remarks by evangelist Rex Humbard.
“When I joined the TCB group seven years ago,” Kahane began, “I was given simple instructions by Colonel Parker. He said, ‘Jack, keep it clean.’ As an entertainer, Elvis was the embodiment of clean, wholesome entertainment.”
But as a private citizen, he was something else, a prescription drug addict, not much different from a gutter junkie, except in his drugs of choice. Yet what had killed Elvis Presley? Dr. Elias Ghanem told friends he was certain Elvis had fallen off the toilet and suffocated in the shag carpet, and pointed to his lolling tongue as proof. Others speculated that Elvis had mistaken the codeine tablets given to him by his dentist for Demerol and had ingested all ten, suffering an allergic reaction.
But a grief-stricken Vernon believed his son had been murdered, either by a member of the entourage or, he suspected, by Parker himself, especially in light of Elvis’s growing interest in finding another manager and the Colonel’s monumental gaming debts, his association with nefarious circles, and his inability to sell Elvis’s contract in California. For that reason, Vernon authorized both a private investigation and an autopsy.
On October 18, Dr. Eric Muirhead, chief of pathology at Baptist Memorial Hospital, took a team to Graceland to explain the autopsy report to Elvis’s father.
According to The Death of Elvis: What Really Happened, by Charles C. Thompson II and James P. Cole, the toxicology report showed that Elvis died of a drug overdose, or polypharmacy, the lethal interaction of a number of drugs taken concurrently. Vernon was told that at the meeting, the authors contend.
The following day, October 19, the Memphis Commercial Appeal ran a story by an enterprising staff journalist named Beth Tamke, who reported that Vernon had been told that tests ordered by Baptist Memorial Hospital showed at least ten different drugs in the singer’s system. - Tamke’s story went on to speculate that the interaction of the drugs might have affected Elvis’s heart and caused his death.
But to reporters who contacted him later, Vernon insisted it was too early to say whether drugs played a role in his son’s demise, and added a baffling statement: “I can’t straighten it out by telling another lie.”
On October 21, Dr. Jerry Francisco, Shelby County medical examiner, appeared at a news conference and passed out a press release that said Elvis Presley died of “hypertensive heart disease, with coronary artery disease as a contributing factor.” According to Francisco, who had signed the death certificate the day before, Elvis died of cardiac arrhythmia, although he conceded that no fewer than eight drugs had been present in Presley’s body. “Prescription drugs found in his blood were not a contributing factor,” Francisco said. “Had these drugs not been there, he still would have died.”
Earlier that month, CBS-TV aired “Elvis in Concert,” which had been taped in Omaha, Nebraska, on June 19, and in Rapid City, South Dakota, on June 21. The special, which many fans and entourage members say never should have been broadcast, revealed a legend colliding with myth, too fat to move and too often short of breath. Big and bloated, Elvis stumbled through his lyrics, slurred his speech, and sweated like a man on fire. In the end, he was all chins, gut, and gospel singer hair, a shocking caricature of a once brilliant talent.
Three years after Elvis’s death, Parker told Larry Hutchinson, chief investigator to the district attorney general for Memphis, that he first noticed Elvis’s drugs in the late ’60s, “not that it specially concerned me,” as Elvis always showed up to do his work in the movies. But other than their confrontation in 1974, when Presley told his manager to stay out of his personal life, “I couldn’t get involved,” the Colonel said.
After that, Parker insisted, he was oblivious of any real problem. “I was aware he was treated by physicians in Las Vegas and Palm Springs, but I had no personal experience of his visits. Sonny West told me one time that he was getting prescriptions in other people’s names, but I - didn’t know about that.”
Yet while he knew that Dr. Nick was often in the dressing room before a performance, Parker testified, “I never saw Elvis being given drugs, though I know that Dr. Nick has said he prepared medications for Elvis before he went on stage and when he came off.” Likewise, “I never heard of him being admitted to the hospital for an overdose of drugs. I was concerned sometimes, but I couldn’t talk to him about it . . . It’s a sad situation. I had no control over him. That was Elvis’s choice.”
In September 1978, the Colonel staged a fan festival, Always Elvis, at the Las Vegas Hilton, where he, Vernon, and Priscilla would dedicate a life-size bronze statue of the singer in the lobby. The convention was booked into the hotel’s new Pavilion, where Elvis was to have performed that year. Always Elvis, which offered, for a price separate from the $15 general admission, a multimedia show that Jerry Weintraub later took on the road, was the first of many events that would prove the Colonel right: Elvis didn’t die after all.
“It was just like when Elvis would be there at the Hilton for the summer festival,” says Presley collector Robin Rosaaen. “Banners hung outside the Hilton and from the roof tops—carnival was the atmosphere, and money was the name of the game.”
The Colonel was in his glory, working the crowd as the Memphis Mafia mingled with the fans. When the statue was unveiled, fans packed the showroom, and a throng of entertainers, including Robert Goulet and Sammy Davis Jr., sat in the plush booths, as if waiting to see Elvis himself.
Indeed, his clothes were already there, on ghoulish display and draped on mannequins, inspiring a now-famous Saturday Night Live sketch in which Elvis’s coat toured the nation. Nothing was too outlandish. Charlie Hodge charged $5 to have his picture taken with fans, and the Colonel, sitting in a vendor’s booth with a cigar clinched between yellowed teeth, hawked and signed his own Elvis poem for a buck.
Robert Hilburn, rock critic for the Los Angeles Times, happened upon the Colonel that day and drew the old man out. “We made a hell of a team,” Parker said once the crowd cleared. “I thought we’d go on forever, but . . .” He stared out into the huge room, leaning on the pearl-handled cane that had become his favorite, and paused as if trying to think of something more to say. “Sure,” he finally added, answering a question that Hilburn never asked. “Sure, I loved him.”
“I sat with him there for a week, signing autographs,” says Jackie Kahane, who emceed the event. “And in the course of talking, he referred to Elvis as being like a son. But I don’t think Colonel was capable of demonstrating love. That was always the problem.”
A larger test of Parker’s fatherly affection came closer to home in the months just after Presley’s death. Suddenly and without warning, the Colonel inexplicably pulled all his advertising accounts from his stepson, Bob Ross and, according to Ross’s widow, Sandra, gave the business to Jerry Weintraub.
By that time, through the Colonel’s influence, the Rosses had handled accounts for Rick Nelson, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Frank Sinatra, and Olivia Newton-John. It all dried up, and the couple sustained huge financial losses just as Bob’s multiple sclerosis worsened. With the added stress of the economic strain, Ross suffered a fatal heart attack and died ten days after his fifty-third birthday, in July 1978.
“You could say the Colonel killed him,” Sandra offers. “But when Bobby was dying, Colonel called him three times in one day to see how he was. Bobby said in amazement, ‘Three times in one day. He really does care.’ And I think he did. He just didn’t understand the ramifications of what he did.”
Parker sent Tom Diskin to the funeral. Marie, now lost to the ravages of her disease, never knew her son was dead.
A matter of weeks after Bob Ross’s death, his widow opened the door to see a ghost. Billy Ross, Bobby’s fifty-one-year-old clubfooted brother, whom Marie had given to the Florida Children’s Home as an infant, stood in the transom. “I thought I would die. He looked so much like Bobby, and even sounded like him.” Sandra found his story heartbreaking, but the visit upset her terribly. “It was just too much, too soon. And I didn’t know what he wanted out of me.”
What he wanted was his heritage. Adopted by a Plant City dirt-farming family, Billy had endured a difficult life. They had worked him like a mule in the fields, and their natural children had never accepted him, even barring him from sitting with them at their mother’s funeral. For years, he had tried to discover his real identity. Once he had gotten his birth records unsealed, his search led him to Bitsy Mott, who referred him to Sandra and the Colonel. Billy was bitter that his real mother had lived a luxurious life as the wife of a famous entertainment manager, and resentful that his brother, Bob, had led such a grandiose existence, mixing and mingling with starlets in Hollywood and hanging out with Elvis Presley.
Now he demanded two things: a meeting with Marie and his share of the pie. Otherwise, he would write a book about his story; he had, in fact, begun a manuscript. He intended to petition the courts to restore his name to Ross.
Both Sandra and the Colonel explained that Marie was in no shape to see him, and that if by some miracle she did understand who he was, the shock might kill her. But Billy persisted, hoping he could somehow restore his mother’s mind and win her heart.
Parker, who remembered the importance of a mother’s love, wrestled with the problem for a time and finally acquiesced, flying Billy and his wife and children to Palm Springs to see Marie, who had no idea why this stranger had come to meet her. Billy’s book never appeared. Sandra Ross believes the Colonel simply bought him off to protect Marie’s reputation, the way he’d handled so many problems before.
However, the Colonel was to realize a new set of problems in the events that began on June 26, 1979, when Vernon died on Parker’s seventieth birthday. Elvis’s father had resisted naming Priscilla the new executor to his son’s estate, but she had cajoled him into it, citing the interest of Lisa Marie, Elvis’s sole beneficiary. To keep the money straight, Vernon named Joe Hanks, Elvis’s certified public accountant, and the National Bank of Commerce in Memphis, as co-executors.
Immediately after Vernon’s death, Parker approached Priscilla about carrying on his arrangement with the estate. By now, she and the co-executors had put together an impressive board of directors to maximize income from one of the most famous names on the planet.
In 1979, the estate’s income would be $1.2 million, much of it from the 160 licenses the Colonel had arranged. Parker would get half of the money. And sometimes more.
That year, Dennis Roberts, Elvis’s optician, got a call from the Colonel about designing a line of eyeglasses to be licensed through Boxcar. Roberts met Parker at his office at the RCA Building in Los Angeles and, in the course of conversation, made a casual inquiry.
“I said, ‘You know I made 488 pairs of eyeglasses for Elvis,’ ” as Roberts remembers. “He went, ‘Yeah.’ ” I said, ‘What happened to all of them?’ The Colonel said, ‘I don’t know. I was never social with the man.’ I said, ‘Colonel, Elvis spent over a quarter of a million dollars on glasses. The EPs and the TCBs that I designed are fourteen-karat gold. Some of them have diamonds and sapphires in them.’ He said, ‘You gotta be kidding.’ And he picked up the phone and buzzed some aide to call Graceland, and when he got ’em on the phone, he said, ‘I want you to round up all of Elvis’s glasses and overnight ’em to me immediately.’ And that was the last anybody ever saw of Elvis Presley’s eyeglasses, except the very few that have shown up at auction.”
Roberts wasn’t thrilled with the way his Boxcar deal turned out. “It cost me about $135,000 for licensing and inventory, but it never really jelled because the Colonel didn’t come through with his promise to promote them. He was more consumed with his Elvis musical whiskey decanters. He thought those were the rip-off of the century. He said, ‘We’re getting $200 for these things!’ ”
But if Roberts wasn’t pleased with Parker’s efforts, the co-executors were, even as Priscilla admits “it was a shock to all of us” that Elvis had left so little money. Three days after Vernon’s death, on June 29, 1979, they wrote the Colonel a letter directing him to carry on pursuant to his agreement with Vernon. All income for the estate would be forwarded to Parker, who would then deduct his 25 percent to 50 percent and forward the balance to the estate.
In May 1980, the co-executors filed a petition to approve Parker’s compensation agreement and ratify all payments of commission, even as the estate’s lawyers raised an eyebrow. “We weren’t aware of the extent of Parker’s commissions until Vernon died,” says D. Beecher Smith II, one of the Memphis attorneys who helped settle Presley’s estate. “Vernon had been relatively secretive about it. We filed a petition with the probate court to rule on the propriety of the commissions.”
That decision would alter the Colonel’s saga in ways no one could have imagined.