The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  O’Grady, who had headed up the narcotics unit for the L.A. Police Department, was hip to Elvis’s habits—he’d done a polygraph test on Presley for an annoying paternity suit—and noticed his pulse and breathing rates were below normal. And Elvis had way too many questions about how to become an agent-at-large for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, especially after O’Grady set up a meeting for him with Paul Frees, a voiceover announcer who’d earned just such a badge for undercover work. The unctuous O’Grady liked rubbing shoulders with the famous and told Elvis he might be able to help: he’d get him an introduction to John Finlator, the deputy director of the Narcotics Bureau.

  Parker, meanwhile, had grown tired of having to speak to Elvis through his father or Esposito, and early in December, on the same day he completed a deal with RCA to extend his annual $100,000 consulting fee for five years, he wrote to Elvis, expressing his frustration at not being able to get his client on the phone. Using sarcasm to mildly mask his fury, the Colonel cited Elvis’s obvious avoidance of him, and reminded him of how hard he had been working in his behalf. “Remember,” he concluded, “your slogan TCB . . . only works if you use it.”

  Vernon Presley was not pleased to see his son at odds with the Colonel and told him so in a blowup in mid-December. The time had come to replace the old bastard, Elvis argued, but Vernon told him he’d never find anybody better. Then Vernon started in on Elvis’s lavish spending sprees and produced the bills: $20,000 and $30,000 gun-buying trips, $85,000 worth of Mercedes-Benzes for his friends. Such extravagance had to stop. Priscilla agreed, especially as the couple had just put down a deposit on a new home in Beverly Hills, despite the shakiness of the marriage.

  By now, Elvis was so volatile that, as his cousin Billy Smith remembers, “you especially had to be careful of what you said [to him]. He was like a caged animal. He was coming out any way he could. You didn’t embarrass him, and you didn’t scare him, and you certainly didn’t ever humiliate him.”

  Feeling restricted and hampered by the Colonel, and then by his wife and father, Elvis was about to defy all of them in a demonstration of independence more surprising than they could have imagined. On December 19, 1970, without their knowledge, he slipped out of Graceland, went to the airport alone, and began a journey to Washington to see John Finlator, O’Grady’s contact at the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Elvis wanted his badge.

  Finlator turned him down, but Elvis, by now accompanied by Jerry Schilling and Sonny West, had a backup plan. On the plane, stoned, shaky, and woozy-eyed, he had written a letter to President Richard M. Nixon, declaring himself a concerned American. The country was in bad shape, with the hippies, the drug culture, the Black Panthers, and the Students for a Democratic Society, he wrote. He knew so because he had done “an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques.” But if Nixon would make him a federal agent, he could be of service to this great nation, since none of those threats to the American way of life considered him an enemy.

  “I would love to meet you just to say hello if you’re not too busy,” he said in closing, and then dropped the letter off at the White House gates on the way to his hotel. The result: Presley, dressed like Dracula in outlandish garb—a velvet cape topping a black suede suit, a massive gold belt given to him by the International, glittering chains circling his neck, tinted sunglasses, and a cane—got his meeting with Nixon at the White House. And he got the cherished badge, which became, Schilling says, “his most prized physical possession.” At last, Elvis was a narc.

  The Colonel, who learned about the visit to Washington after the fact, was gravely worried. The president, for God’s sake! Elvis was slipping completely out of his control. He would have to find a way to keep Elvis in check and step up his surveillance of his actions.

  In March 1971, when Elvis blew up while attempting to record in Nashville—kicking a gun through a guitar and storming out of the session—Parker managed to keep most of it out of the press. The following day, the singer, whose eyesight had been troubling him, was hospitalized for glaucoma. Now Parker saw his act becoming more fractious with each passing month, and realized he had to create new ways to maximize Presley’s earning power. Otherwise, the Colonel would find himself in the same sad straits as his friend Oscar Davis—sick, dependent on Parker’s handout of $100 a month, and soon to be dead, never again managing a major star nearly twenty years after Hank Williams’s self-destructive ways caught up with him on the way to a show date.

  Though Parker was constantly renegotiating Elvis’s contract with RCA—the latest deal was for the budget Camden label, yet even then he finagled improved royalties—his first foray into new money came in July 1971, when he took Presley into Del Webb’s Sahara Tahoe in Stateline, Nevada.

  The engagement, where orchestra leader Joe Guercio debuted Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra as the singer’s introduction on stage, was a raging success. Parker had figured out a way to put eight people at a table that normally seated four, which allowed Elvis to break the showroom’s attendance record. One month before, the Hilton hotel chain had taken over the International in a 50 percent partnership with Kerkorian and Shoofey, renaming it the Las Vegas Hilton. The Colonel would soon use Elvis’s Tahoe numbers, plus the fact that he had negotiated a fee of $300,000 for two weeks, to cut a new deal with Henri Lewin, the Las Vegas Hilton’s new executive vice president of hotel and casino operations, and Barron Hilton himself.

  Lewin, a German Jew whose family fled the Nazis, already seemed to be in Parker’s corner, throwing him a surprise sixty-second birthday party that June. Their first meeting came five hours after Hilton took over the hotel, the Colonel flying in from Palm Springs. Lewin had been nervous: Parker had a clause in his contract that stipulated that if the hotel were sold, he and Elvis were free to go elsewhere.

  “The Colonel said, ‘I did business with Kerkorian, I liked him, and I have no reason not to trust that you will be as good or better,’ ” Lewin remembered years later. And, as a measure of honor, the Colonel accepted the same contract. “Elvis was always paid more than we paid anybody else . . . and he was still the cheapest. We made more money paying him more than paying somebody else less. You shake hands with the Colonel, you can forget worry.”

  But as Parker loved Las Vegas, and he and Elvis were becoming synonymous with the town, Presley was growing tired of the seven-days-a-week, two-shows-a-night grind, so demanding both physically and mentally. At first, remembers Jerry Schilling, “it was great. But going in about the third year, there was no challenge . . . it was the same songs, and the same audience, and we stayed up all night, and slept all day. We didn’t see sunlight for a couple months. What was once exciting and fun became dark and angry.”

  “Elvis was mad,” says Lamar Fike. “He didn’t want to do it anymore. He said, ‘I want out of this place. I don’t want to come back.’ As a consequence, this seething cauldron of hate built up in Las Vegas.”

  A month after Tahoe, in August 1971, Elvis opened his summer festival at the Las Vegas Hilton to poor reviews. The Hollywood Reporter found Elvis “drawn, tired, and noticeably heavier,” and the show “occasionally monotonous, often silly, and haphazardly coordinated.” Still the fans came, to the point that Parker added an additional show per day to accommodate the overflow crowds. But the strain was too much—on the sixth day, Elvis cut a show short, complained of the flu, and consulted an ear, nose, and throat specialist, Dr. Sidney Boyer, who, like Thomas “Flash” Newman, would remain in his stable of Vegas physicians.

  By the last night, he felt strong enough to close the show wearing a heavy rhinestone-and-jewel-encrusted cape, thrusting his arms in a dramatic stance that would become a hallmark of his performances. But the press preferred to report on Elvis’s illness and daily doctors’ visits.

  “He didn’t have breathing room,” says Alex Shoofey. “It was a continuous thing. I even said to the Colonel one time, ‘Give him a breather, Colonel, gosh! He needs a little
rest.’ He said, ‘Oh, he’s young, don’t worry. He loves every moment of it.’ I think he could have let up a little, given him a little more time off.”

  “Nobody goes to Vegas and plays four weeks anymore—they do five days, tops,” explains Lamar Fike. “And Elvis had such a high-energy show that when he would do an honest hour and fifteen minutes twice a night, he was so tired he was cross-eyed. That’s why he took that stuff, to keep him going. And because he was bored. Bored to tears.”

  According to Henri Lewin, Parker spoke to Vernon about his son’s condition. “I was there when Colonel Parker pleaded with Vernon Presley, and then they both pleaded with Elvis to understand the importance of taking care of his personal life.”

  But Parker continued to weigh his options. With his gambling debts mounting, and Presley becoming more unpredictable, the Colonel apparently, in the fall of 1971, considered selling Elvis’s contract to Gordon Mills, the flamboyant manager of Tom Jones. Items to that effect appeared in the American and British press, and an exchange of correspondence between Mills and the Colonel’s office concerning a denial of discussions suggests that such talks had, in fact, happened. Later, John Moran, Jones’s publicist, confirmed it to Marty Lacker.

  The newspapers were more concerned, however, about rumors that Elvis and Priscilla were estranged. As Presley began another tour that November—Elvis replacing the Imperials with J. D. Sumner and the Stamps Quartet, and Parker substituting comedian Jackie Kahane for the alcoholic Sammy Shore—the singer became less guarded about his dalliances with other women. Within months, his marriage would be in tatters.

  For quite a while, Presley had been getting reports that Priscilla was dating her karate instructor, Mike Stone. The maid at the Presleys’ new house in California told Red West that Stone spent too much time there, and three-year-old Lisa Marie blew the whistle on the pair when she mentioned they’d “wrestled” in a sleeping bag on a camping trip. Then Sonny West caught them in the shower together and told Elvis.

  The showdown came during Presley’s engagement at the Hilton in February 1972, when Priscilla owned up to the affair, railed against their surreal, life-in-a-bubble existence, and asked for a divorce. Elvis, humiliated and enraged, forced her to have sex in an episode that, according to Priscilla, bordered on rape. Later, he would ask her to reconsider breaking the marriage, but as Priscilla eventually made him understand, it had ended long ago, largely from his own indifference.

  Throughout such turmoil, the Colonel had more practical matters on his mind. As Elvis performed in the Hilton showroom, Parker sat in his fourth-floor suite of six rooms and offices and mused about something that the new RCA president Rocco Laginestra had casually mentioned—an innovative technology that allowed for live satellite broadcast around the world. Elvis had again been making noises about wanting to go to Europe to perform, citing the number of letters he got from foreign fans.

  “I’m working on it,” Parker grumbled. But before long, when the Colonel was offered $500,000 for six concerts in London, he’d repeat that the venues weren’t large enough overseas—an unlikely explanation, considering Wembley and a myriad of soccer stadiums, though he insisted Elvis himself balked at playing outdoor arenas. Sometimes the Colonel would reiterate that security would be a problem, since European fans were wilder in their adoration, or say simply that the money wasn’t right. “[Elvis] wanted to take all of his troupe with him and his own orchestra,” Parker offered years later. “When we checked out the possibilities where he could play, he could sell out and [still] lose money.”

  But, of course, they were never going to Europe, and not just because Parker had no passport. The Colonel was worried about Elvis’s stamina; Dr. Nichopoulos had to accompany him on all the tours now. And Parker wasn’t sure what kinds of drugs Elvis was taking, lately hearing rumors of cocaine use. If Elvis got sick, or customs found some illegal substance, the Colonel wouldn’t be able to keep it out of the papers. The risk was simply too great.

  Yet if Parker understood it correctly, with the new satellite, Elvis could “tour” the globe in one concert, without ever leaving the States. Such a coup—the first entertainment special broadcast live around the world—would help keep the boy on top and in the news, and maybe lift him from his funk. The Colonel tore a piece of the old International stationery in half and started making a to-do list (“Clearances needed on songs”). In bold handwriting, with numbers still reminiscent of the European style, he jotted down the costs (backup musicians, rehearsal room) and posed some questions: “RCA makes contracts with talent or do we?”

  Laginestra loved the idea of an Elvis satellite tour, especially as Parker had already planned to stage it from Hawaii, the site of so many successful Presley ventures. But Laginestra didn’t like dealing with the Colonel personally, and so he handed him off to others in the company, particularly Mel Ilberman, the head of U.S. Operations, who admired Parker (“He was a big friend of mine. . . . He was always honest with me”) and tried to keep him happy.

  As part of that goodwill endeavor, the label agreed to set up a concert promotion company. That was something the Colonel had been after for years, and a coup RCA’s Joe Galante calls “a brilliant move, because he had now taken the company’s resources and focused them solely on his act.” Though the agreement included Management III, Parker, in effect, controlled everything, with the help of RCA’s George Parkhill and Pat Kelleher of the label’s promotion department. Their first tour under the new umbrella would begin in April.

  The frugal Dutchman pinched every penny—paying a promoter in Tennessee only $1,000 to handle ticket sales—and would continue to do so throughout Elvis’s touring years. When keyboardist Tony Brown joined the band two years later, he was surprised to find that the musicians had to buy tickets for their guests, and that the Elvis show had no catering backstage of any kind, in comparison with lesser stars who provided full meals and liquor.

  “We finally demanded that we get some soft drinks, and eventually, they started putting a trash can in our dressing room with Cokes and Pepsis and 7UPs, but that was it. Occasionally, the Colonel would get on the bus and walk down the aisle and give everybody a ten-dollar bill for dinner. Of course, once he left, there was all kinds of snickering and sarcastic remarks—‘Where you havin’ dinner?’—that kind of stuff.” Anyone who was late for the bus was fined a dollar a minute.

  By now, the Colonel could clearly see that touring was a bigger source of revenue than even Elvis’s movies. On February 4, 1972, a week after he signed the joint venture with RCA, he presented a new contract to Elvis. Parker was changing his basic management fee, he explained. After expenses, which included agency commissions, the profits from the tours would now be split two thirds for Elvis and one third for Parker.

  “There were a lot of things that maybe the Colonel didn’t collect on like he should have,” defends Lamar Fike. But only the Colonel really understood what constituted “expenses” and what was “net.”

  “People talk about the fifty percent and other outrageous splits, but there were times when the Colonel took it all,” says Joe Shane. “He was hiding the fact that he was going through Elvis’s money. To see him negotiate deals for concerts was just unbelievable. A promoter would say, ‘I want to do ten dates in the Midwest,’ and the Colonel would say, ‘Okay, I’ll take a million dollars up front and half of it in cash before you sell the first ticket.’ And he’d get it. He always wanted the cash. The truth was, he needed it.”

  18

  GEEK FEVER

  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 Gra
nd 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.