The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

To bolster its claim, the estate cited six interrelated documents dated March 1, 1973, which paid Parker $6.2 million over a seven-year period, while Presley received $4.6 million. The agreements, all related to the RCA buyout, collectively provided the Colonel with 57 percent of all income, plus another 10 percent of RCA’s net profits from tours. (“I did not receive more than Elvis did from the music or the motion pictures, only for the extra deals I made,” Parker later insisted.) The lawsuit, which sought to negate Parker’s claim of a joint venture, also criticized the manager for failing to instigate tax and estate planning, and for refusing to set up foreign concert tours, presumably because Parker never obtained an American passport nor attempted to become a U.S. citizen.

  But with the estate groaning under the weight of mounting legal fees, Tual and the executors reached an out-of-court settlement with Parker and RCA in November 1982, though full resolution wouldn’t be reached until the following June. Tual, who was well aware of Parker’s heart condition, had considered the Colonel’s ill health in making the decision. “We figured the Colonel might die before we finished litigation, and we would have to deal with his estate,” he says. But “if Elvis had lived and we tried a case against the Colonel, Elvis would have won.”

  And yet in a nearly mythological display of fortitude to withstand any tide or torrent, Parker not only prevailed with another slick deal, but again succeeded in finding someone else to pick up his tab.

  The settlement eliminated the Colonel’s future share of income and prohibited him from commercially exploiting the Presley name for five years. But in exchange for turning over master copies of Elvis’s audio recordings and 350 concert, movie, and TV clips to the estate, RCA would give Parker $2 million, doled out in payments of $40,000 a month—$60,000 each June—until May 1987. In addition, the Colonel collected $225,000 from the estate for his shares in Boxcar Enterprises, and agreed to provide it with a sampling of his vast Elvis memorabilia, including costumes, personal items, and stage paraphernalia. Now he felt vindicated. As he told his brother-in-law, “Bitsy, if I was doing something wrong, why are they trying to buy me out? Does that make sense?”

  By the time the final documents were signed in 1983, the estate had undergone profound changes. Priscilla Presley and the board of directors were about to turn Elvis’s memory into a profitable business through the licensing of souvenirs, just as Parker had envisioned with Boxcar. They would also make Graceland a top tourist spot. Of the nation’s famous private residences, only the White House would receive more visitors each year.

  Though the settlement demanded Parker sever ties with Priscilla and Lisa Marie, the Colonel had no such intent. Since the lawsuit began, he finagled a way to resume a relationship with both of them, sending Elvis’s daughter a toy, found in storage, that she had treasured as a child.

  “A couple of weeks after we opened Graceland [in June 1982], someone walked into my office and said that a man is on the phone who says - he’s Colonel Parker,” remembers Jack Soden, CEO of Elvis Presley Enterprises. “I got on . . . and he said, ‘You’ve got a big challenge ahead. Call me anytime. This battle isn’t between you and me. You don’t have anything to do with it.’ ”

  As Graceland developed into a $15-million-a-year business—sales of all things Elvis would top $37 million a year by 2002—the Colonel formulated his own strategy for cashing in on the legend. In the late ’80s, he began telling Elvis fans that he was opening his own museum, the Wonderful World of Show Business Exhibit, in his Madison home. Friends say he never really planned such a thing and simply hyped it as a bluff to sell Graceland the remainder of his memorabilia.

  Still, he put up a convincing ruse, obtaining an occupancy permit, paving his front yard for a parking lot, and installing chain-link fencing and security lights. He also insisted that he had a Japanese bidder who offered top dollar. Though the negotiations would drag on for years, the estate would eventually cough up his $2-million asking price, the Graceland movers arriving in the dead of night to load an estimated thirty-five tons of material—business records, photographs, newsreels, telegrams, letters, artwork, acetate recordings, and Elvis’s famous gold lamé suit—into seven semi-trucks for their secret move to Memphis.

  With the lawsuit resolved, the Colonel’s old friends rallied around him to help boost his reputation. In 1984, Janelle McComb, a Tupelo, Mississippi, friend of the estate who had spearheaded the building of the nondenominational chapel on the land behind the house where Presley was born, staged a private banquet for him in conjunction with a fund-raiser for the Elvis Presley Foundation. Rick Nelson—whom Parker casually counseled through his manager, Greg McDonald, a Palm Springs–based promoter and another of his “adopted” sons—performed a benefit concert. And the Colonel “signed” photographs of himself with a rubber stamp held in his left hand, leading the attendant members of Presley’s British fan club to wonder if the seventy-five-year-old had suffered a stroke.

  At the same time the Colonel worked to redeem himself with the estate and Elvis’s fan base, he tried hard to mend his image in the industry. Since Elvis’s death, he had continued as a “consultant” for Barron Hilton, though he had worked without a contract since 1978. As he explained it, “I didn’t hear from them when the time was up, so I wrote them a nice thank-you letter and said, ‘If you ever need me,’ [and] I got a letter back [that] said, ‘Perish the thought of you ever leaving my team.’ ”

  Many thought it was an arrangement by which Parker worked off a fraction of his gambling debts, as that same year, 1984, People magazine would report that the Colonel’s $30-million tab had been paid in full. The Colonel insisted his employment was anything but a way to write off his losses. “I’ve had offers far more financially better since those new [hotels] went up, but . . . [Barron] knows that I do a job.”

  Despite his lofty title, Parker’s tasks harkened to those he performed as an advance man for the carnivals. While someone else booked the acts into the showroom, the Colonel handled promotions—arranging billboard rentals, finishing posters, and buying radio spots. He successfully teamed country singer George Strait with Jerry Weintraub to make the movie Pure Country after Strait broke Presley’s attendance record at the hotel. But Vegas old-timers saw him as little more than a public relations figure, a walking Elvis souvenir, the live companion to the Presley statue in the foyer. “Any time the Colonel came into view, it was the old Elvis picture from way back, even if he was just there in the casino,” says Variety’s Bill Willard.

  Yet despite the enduring stardust of the Colonel’s name, by 1984 Barron Hilton had had enough of Parker’s escalating gambling tab. The rumor circulated that the hotel casino, like other places around town, had cut off Parker’s credit at the tables and relegated him to the $25 slot machines. It was a humiliating comedown.

  While the Colonel was welcome to a small office in the hotel, the suite of rooms on the fourth floor was also no longer at his disposal, so Parker leased apartment 23G in Regency Towers, a high-rise located on the golf course in the Las Vegas Country Club Estates on Bel Air Drive behind the Hilton. Marie, a bedridden invalid from 1975 on, remained at the couple’s home in Palm Springs. In 1982, mute but still alert, she was operated on, and found to have a massive, benign brain tumor, undetected for perhaps twenty years. She would die in November 1986 of “chronic brain syndrome.”

  “Marie’s a vegetable,” Parker would say point blank when anyone asked about her. “You wouldn’t want to see her now.”

  And so Loanne moved to the high-rise with him and made it look like a home, replete with the Colonel’s vast elephant collection, which he proudly showed to visitors. Residents regarded the duo as wonderful neighbors.

  On the surface, nothing had changed between Parker and the Hilton. In 1987, on the tenth anniversary of Presley’s death, the old entrepreneur brought Wayne Newton into the showroom for a tribute to Elvis, and the hotel opened Presley’s thirtieth-floor suite to the public. There, the Colonel set up a mini-museum of his life toge
ther with Elvis, plastering the walls with memorabilia and photos, and taking fans on guided tours of Presley’s bedroom. Though Parker was adamant that nothing be sold (“To me, that’s not a real tribute when you sell a lot of merchandise”), fans were given a free poster of the Colonel on the way out. The gesture did little to assuage the majority of Elvis’s faithful supporters, who still saw him as a black-hearted villain who traded the singer’s soul for the demon dollar.

  To publicize the event, Parker appeared on Ted Koppel’s Nightline. (“He wanted me to come to New York—I said, ‘No, you bring a satellite to me.’ ”) From the start, the Colonel was combative, correcting the host and lambasting critics who charged that he stunted Elvis as an actor with a steady diet of beach ’n’ bikini movies. “If they know so much, they ought to go into the management business,” he huffed. “[Elvis] knew that he could do whatever he wanted.”

  But at a Vegas press conference, he mostly waxed nostalgic. “I’ll never manage anyone again. After Elvis, where do you go?” It wasn’t true that the two never shared a meal, he said (“We may have had dinner three times a year”), and while Elvis had been the highest-paid performer in Vegas, “I feel ashamed to tell you what Elvis made for his shows back then.”

  Still, he denied that he booked Presley for overlong engagements (“Elvis worked two-hour shows for two hundred nights a year. If you add that up, he worked about four months a year”), and insisted his client had only one goal that he never accomplished, and that was to “stay alive.” The Colonel feigned deafness when questions turned to drug use. “We’re here to honor his memory. I think I didn’t hear you very well.”

  Parker steadfastly maintained that his only concern was to keep Elvis’s name before the fans. But others say the estrangement from the estate weighed heavily on his mind. When Alex Shoofey’s ex-wife visited him in the Elvis suite, he confided his dismay. “He thought he had been given the shaft, that the family had done him wrong, and Priscilla should have lived up to the deal,” says Joan Shoofey Richardson. “It was the only time I ever saw him angry.”

  And so it was an emotional Parker who accepted Jack Soden’s invitation to come to Graceland for two days in June of ’87, both to talk about selling the remainder of his memorabilia (the estate would finally announce the acquisition in 1990) and to be welcomed back for special projects. Shortly after, a reporter asked if the visit held special memories. “None of ’em are memories for me,” the Colonel said. “You relive it every day.”

  Seven months later, Parker was back in Memphis for the observance of what would have been Presley’s fifty-third birthday. Fierce snowstorms crippled the country, and although canceled flights turned his trip into a grueling two-day ordeal, Parker appeared humbled and on his best behavior at a gathering of media and fan club members. “Why did you come this year, Colonel?” someone shouted. “Well, it’s been too long,” Parker answered, casting an eager glance at Soden. “But things are working out.” Soden nodded his head. “Yes, they are, Colonel. Yes, they are.”

  Wearing a round fur hat and a heavy camel’s hair coat, Parker resembled a friendly Khrushchev as he settled into a jovial mood. A woman from Arkansas cornered him, he joked, and told him of an Elvis séance. “I said, ‘I’ll give you my new phone number. Tell Elvis to call me.’ ”

  “Colonel,” a woman chirped, “why did you decide to be Elvis’s manager?”

  “I didn’t decide. I received a telegram from his father and mother asking if I could get Elvis a record contract. It just happened, that’s all.”

  “Do you think if Elvis were living today,” called another voice, “he’d still be playing the same style of music?”

  “Well,” Parker shot back, “let’s ask him that when I talk to that lady in Arkansas!”

  And then it was over. “Okay,” he shouted off mike. “If you want a picture with the Colonel, no charge.” A woman stepped up. “Just don’t kiss me,” he said. “I got the measles.”

  But when Parker appeared that evening at a Graceland-sponsored banquet, the fans greeted him with no more than polite applause, saving their enthusiasm for Steve Binder, the man who rejuvenated Presley’s career and spirit with the 1968 television special.

  The Colonel poked fun at himself as he took the podium, and then made his peace with the producer he’d fought with years before. (“I don’t think there was any producer [who] could ever . . . get the talent out of Elvis like Steve.”) But when he quipped that his plaque should be larger than Binder’s (“Colonel, we’ll send it out and get you a bigger one,” he was assured), an undertow of disgust roiled through the crowd. “I think,” says Soden, “that Colonel Parker hoped history would treat him kinder.”

  Certainly Priscilla Presley extended herself to him in ways that made many wonder if their legal settlement had amounted to an armed truce. Both Priscilla and Lisa Marie made a video to be played at the banquet, in which they said a “special hello to an old friend of ours” and lauded the manager-singer duo, one Priscilla guessed would never be duplicated “in the history of show business.”

  Suddenly, the estate began spinning a revisionist take on the Presley-Parker past and planning an Elvis and the Colonel Museum. The two men “shared an abiding friendship that is often overlooked and misunderstood by the press and the general public,” as Soden later put it.

  That stance put Soden and company in an awkward position when author Chet Flippo came down hard on the Colonel in the introduction to an estate-sanctioned book, Graceland: The Living Legacy of Elvis Presley. No one at Elvis Presley Enterprises read Flippo’s manuscript before it went to press, and Priscilla unsuccessfully put pressure on the publisher to pull the volume from distribution.

  “As I recall,” says Flippo, “Parker read the book, blew up, and called Priscilla, who . . . demanded to have [it] killed.” The work was immediately removed from the Graceland gift shops, and the estate soon set up the Colonel Parker Tribute Committee to issue a thirty-two-page magazine, Elvis & Colonel Tom Parker: The Partnership Behind the Legend.

  Like the estate, Barron Hilton was publicly loyal to the end. In June 1989, the hotel staged a gala dinner for the Colonel’s eightieth birthday, with former Tennessee lieutenant governor Frank Gorrell, who had long handled Parker’s charitable contributions, as master of ceremonies. Celebrities winged in on the Hilton’s tab, RCA executives hovered and fawned, and scores of others, including President George Bush, Bob Hope, and Bill Cosby sent cheery telegrams of congratulations. “They window-dressed it pretty nicely,” says Joe Delaney, the Las Vegas Sun columnist. “The Colonel held court.”

  Two months earlier, the Colonel and Loanne (“a single man and a single woman,” as the deed read) jointly bought a town house in the Spanish Oaks area, an old, upgraded neighborhood. While $300,000 homes were not uncommon in the gated community, the residence was modest by comparison. They lived simply, shopping at Von’s grocery at Decatur and Sahara, where Parker often waited outside on a bench and talked to passersby while Loanne did the marketing. She bought his clothes off the rack at JC Penney.

  By all accounts, Loanne was good for him. She hung on his every word, laughed at his stories, and bragged on him to others, seeking not so much respect for herself, but for him. More important, she served as an indispensable nurse, doling out his daily medications, watching his cholesterol and his diet to stave off the gout that swelled his extremities, and driving him to Elias Ghanem’s medical clinic for the slightest ailment, even as Parker’s loyalty to the doctor who gave his client so many drugs seemed to some perverse.

  They made an odd couple—she tall and angular, towering over him; he, squat and shorter than anyone remembered, balancing his bulky body on a bamboo cane and leaning heavily on her arm in his increasingly unsteady walk. She was also his most vigilant watchdog. When Merilyn Potters, a reporter for the Sun, visited the house for an upbeat story to mark Parker’s birthday, she found the couple guarded, insisting on conducting the interview in the front courtyard instead of in their
home. “He wouldn’t answer certain questions regarding Elvis,” Potters remembers. “And often, when he began to ramble, [Loanne] put the lid on.” Her usual technique: Glancing over and raising an index finger to halt him if she thought he revealed too much.

  “I think the Colonel was sharp enough to realize that he needed a guardian,” offers Joe Delaney. “Loanne was a completely faithful servant.”

  And so, at the urging of Mae Axton, Parker married Loanne at the home of lawyer John O’Reilly on October 26, 1990. The Colonel was then eighty-one; Loanne, who took on the unofficial title of Mrs. Colonel, fifty-five.

  A month after the ceremony, Parker signed a will that established a trust for talented youngsters, left monetary gifts to friends, and provided for his new wife. What few people knew was that in relative terms, the Colonel was no longer a wealthy man.

  While he remained a loyal contributor to the Sun camp fund for needy children, donating $14,000 in the last six years of his life (“buying his soul out of hell,” charged one wag), he largely lived off U.S. Treasury bonds, which he’d let mature and roll over. Occasionally, he put in appearances at fund-raisers around town (including one for presidential candidate Bill Clinton, whose mother, Virginia Kelley, became a gambling buddy), but the invitations were gratis, and Loanne kept her eye on every penny. Though he still sent cash to treasured acolytes at Christmas, twice in coming years Parker would add codicils to his will to reduce or rescind his financial gifts.

  “Loanne hoarded money to keep him from pissing it away at the tables,” as Jackie Kahane recalled. While the Colonel gambled, she sat quietly, reading a book.

  Privately Loanne told people Parker was often cold to her, but in public their interaction was playful and childlike. “He said, ‘Without her, I - wouldn’t be living,’ ” remembers a friend. “And when she’d try to give him his pills, they would just fuss, but that was part of the game. They were like two little kittens. She added those extra years to his life.”