The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  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.”