The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  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. Bi
g 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.”