Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  At first, Elvis had doubts about recording “In the Ghetto” because the race element might antagonize some of his fans. The Colonel had always told him to stay away from socially sensitive issues and politics. Elvis had never given the public the slightest hint of where he stood on the civil rights movement or the war in Vietnam, and there is no readily available evidence that he ever voted. But Elvis liked the ghetto song for its feeling and, as usual, melted himself into the appropriate emotion.

  His pursuit of the racial theme continued in an innocuous vein in the film Change of Habit, in which he played an idealistic young doctor, John Carpenter, who ministered to black youth in the ghetto with the aid of nuns who had temporarily dropped their habits for secular clothing. The movie was upgraded substantially for thespian quality and convincing moral tone by his costar, Mary Tyler Moore, who played Sister Michelle Gallagher, sworn to perpetual purity and virginity no matter how sexy Dr. Carpenter seemed to be as he swiveled his hips around the neighborhood.

  Elvis’s record from the Singer special, “If I Can Dream,” came out in October 1968, rose to No. 12 on the charts, and eventually sold eight hundred thousand copies, a height Elvis had not achieved since 1965. That score was dwarfed by what came out of his recordings in Memphis in the American Sound Studio. The January–February sessions produced three records and two albums that sold more than a million copies each. “In the Ghetto” reached No. 3 on the best-seller charts, and “Suspicious Minds” became No. 1, his first since 1962. Elvis was into his music again. He was getting better material to work with, and it showed in a broad popular reception of his records and increased sales.

  Las Vegas

  Elvis was on a roll, and so too was Colonel Parker. He booked Elvis into the brand-new two-thousand-seat Showroom Internationale of the International Hotel in Las Vegas for four weeks beginning Thursday, July 31, 1969. Opening night was attended by a huge and enthusiastic crowd of invited celebrities and critics. The Colonel immediately renegotiated an increase in Elvis’s salary from $100,000 to $125,000 a week. Further, he signed Elvis up for two shows a night for four weeks each January and August for the next five years for $1 million a year plus benefits—such as luxury suites for himself and Elvis in the hotel. Elvis’s suite was, at first, on the top floor, the twenty-ninth. Later, the hotel built a penthouse suite on the thirtieth level that he used. During his first run in Las Vegas and ever after, including his last engagement in December 1976, Elvis filled every seat in the Showroom every night.

  Steve and his people had built the Comeback Special, but Elvis himself put together his first Las Vegas show, filling the forms onstage that were developed in the special. He carefully considered virtually every singer and musician he knew, and he consulted personally with many of them before making his choices. He selected each artist, he chose the songs and arrangements, and in exhaustive rehearsals he tuned them all together up to perfection.

  As in the Comeback Special, the very singers and musicians that Elvis chose to bring to his stage celebrated simultaneously American diversity and American harmony. He had heard but never seen the Sweet Inspirations, a black female group that had sung backup for some of the leading black female singers in the nation, most notably Aretha Franklin. He loved their sound, and he was not at all disappointed by their looks when he saw them. Later, for a brief time, Elvis also added high soprano Millie Kirkham to the troupe. When Millie dropped out to pursue her career in Nashville where she could be with her husband and two children, Elvis replaced her with thirty-five-year-old Kathy Westmoreland. Kathy was a highly trained and sophisticated white musician whose talents were in great demand in recording studios and on television in Los Angeles and elsewhere. She was a perfect complement to the Sweets.

  Elvis also brought Southern gospel to Las Vegas. Before he came to Sam Phillips, his great musical ambition was to sing with a gospel quartet. Now, he brought a gospel quartet to “Sin City” to sing with him. He chose the Imperials, a group out of Atlanta he had worked with before. Later he would bring J. D. Sumner, who could sing in a phenomenally low key as a result of a childhood illness, and his Stamps Quartet onto the stage. Elvis relished high voices, such as Kathy’s, and low voices, such as J. D.’s.

  Thus, Elvis onstage came to be backed by nine singers: five men and four women, six whites and three blacks. They could sing gospel, blues, and opera, but onstage with Elvis they sang everything. Elvis picked his band of five men from among the best studio musicians in America—piano, drums, and guitars. Always with him was Charlie Hodge, playing rhythm guitar, handing Elvis glasses of water and scarves, holding his hand mike for him, and doing whatever he needed in a manner that showed his boundless affection and admiration. Elvis was also backed by the newly formed twenty-six-member International Hotel orchestra. As Vegas musicians, they were accustomed to playing behind whichever performer happened to be in front of them. Elvis soon tuned them up to his liking, demanding that they be ready to swing into any one of the couple of hundred tunes he had mastered in his career.

  Elvis attempted to persuade Billy Goldenberg to come to Las Vegas to conduct the International Hotel orchestra for his shows. Billy, however, wanted to continue with his career in Los Angeles and New York, and eventually returned to Broadway.

  Bill Belew stuck with Elvis. He continued to design and construct striking costumes, skintight suits that struggled with an intriguing lack of success to contain Elvis’s imagined sexuality, karate outfits, the high-collared, wide cape that became a favorite, and, in his later years, loose clothes to hide his obesity. An invoice dated January 19, 1970, for some of Elvis’s costumes for the second Las Vegas run shows Bill’s exquisite aesthetic still at work. It lists four “Silk Crepe Shirts” at $100 each, “28 China Silk Scarfs” at $10 each (to be made moist with Elvis’s ever-flowing bodily fluids and thrown to women reaching up from the audience), 2 white jumpsuits, 2 black jumpsuits, 1 white mohair suit, and 1 white jumpsuit with a Cossack top. The total cost came to $3,030. In the final dress rehearsal for the opening show, Elvis wore one of Bill’s “Cossack suits,” complemented with a “dangling macramé belt.” Bill, who always came to Elvis’s Vegas openings, attended a later opening with a woman who leaned over and said to him what he already knew. “You can feel the sensuality and the sex oozing from that man,” she said.

  In spite of Tom Parker’s reputation for driving hard bargains, the International Hotel was not taken advantage of by the Colonel. Anyone could have done the math, and the hotel did. A $15 minimum charge for each patron in full houses would bring in more than $1.5 million over four weeks. In fact, the first engagement itself grossed over $1.6 million for the hotel.

  At first, Elvis’s show was the only major show in Las Vegas that made a profit, and it set a new standard of success in that business. Previously, hotels booked shows only to attract people who would gamble, and they accepted related losses because of the tremendous profits they reaped for the casinos. Elvis’s sold-out performances proved that a hotel’s showroom itself could be another money maker. Also, Elvis doing two shows a night seven days a week broke precedent, since performers ordinarily demanded one or two nights off a week during a long engagement. Not Elvis. He wanted total exposure. He could not see himself sitting around twiddling his thumbs one whole night when he could be basking in the adulation of his fans.

  Touring

  Even while Elvis was performing in Las Vegas in August 1969, Tom Parker signed him up for six performances over three days in February 1970, in the 50,000-seat Astrodome in Houston during the Annual Texas Livestock Show. His first performance in the first afternoon show did not go well. The sound system was bad, and Elvis was sandwiched in between the chuck wagon race and the calf-roping event. Only some 16,000 people attended, 4,000 of whom were handicapped children specially invited. After the performance, Elvis confessed to one of his entourage that he feared his career was over. Depressed, he went to bed. In the evening, the sound was improved, the performance drew more than 36,000 peo
ple, and they liked him. Elvis was elated. On Saturday evening, attendance soared to 43,614, the largest ever for a show in such a venue. In three days, more than 200,000 people saw Elvis perform live in Houston.

  By then, the Colonel had put together Elvis’s first road tour since 1957. Both Elvis and the Colonel realized soon after its opening that the Vegas show could go, ready-made, on the road and reap a handsome profit. On September 7, 1970, Elvis rolled out of a four-week run in Las Vegas, and two days later he began a six-day tour in Phoenix, proceeding on to St. Louis, Detroit, Miami, and Tampa, before ending in Mobile. The tour was a tremendous success. It generated wildly enthusiastic audiences for Elvis, boosted his self-confidence, and yielded quick cash. Sold-out performances in each city brought Elvis $175,000 for the six days. Six days on the road brought Elvis even more cash than a week in Vegas.

  After the Astrodome and the six-day tour that began in Phoenix, the troupe hit the road every year, hip-hopping over all of America, from the Von Braun Civic Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to the Pershing Memorial Auditorium in Lincoln, Nebraska, from the Sports Arena in San Diego to the Civic Center in Baltimore. In 1972 and 1973, he did six tours over a total of sixty-eight days. In 1974, he did four tours lasting fifty-five days. In that year, he did 152 shows, counting his tours, two runs in Las Vegas, and one run in Lake Tahoe. In 1975, he did three tours lasting forty-one days. And then in 1976, he did nine tours over a total of 87 days, more than twice the number of days he had spent on the road the year before. In the first half of 1977, Elvis did five tours lasting fifty-six days. If he had lived just one more day, he would have died on tour.

  The form of an Elvis show remained the same in Vegas, Tahoe, or on the road. But the specific content, the living art that Elvis and his troupe poured into the form, was constantly changing. The wimpy “If I Can Dream” was dropped, and, to end the show, “An American Trilogy” was added. The Trilogy began with a rather mournful rendition of “Dixie”—as if the South were dying a sad but necessary and lovely death. It then passed into a hardly less mournful black song, “All My Trials”—as if to acknowledge that African Americans had once had a hard time. But the mood of the Trilogy suddenly switched to end with a rousing rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in which God will save America to enjoy a surely glorious but unspecified future. His truth goes marching inexorably on with band blaring, chorus in full voice, drums rolling, and Elvis standing spread-eagle, cape held wide, singing with all his might. As the show closed, there was no room in the air for anything else—to breathe the air in that space was to breathe in Elvis’s air and absorb his performance.

  Elvis’s show was changed to end with a blast; it was also changed to begin with a blast. In 1971, Joe Guercio became the conductor of the International Hotel orchestra. Joe was a veteran Las Vegas music man and not worshipful of the stars behind whom he led his band. Virtually from their first rehearsal, however, he developed a great respect for Elvis’s talent as an entertainer. Following a suggestion from his wife, Corky, and with approval from Elvis, Guercio developed the idea of opening the show with Richard Strauss’s powerful composition Thus Spake Zarathustra. He arranged the piece brilliantly for maximum dramatic effect. First, his band filled the theater to bursting with sound. As his timpanist came down with the last eight notes, Elvis’s drummer began a roll that would bring Elvis striding onto the stage, fantastically costumed, striking a series of dramatic poses, while the audience applauded wildly. Guercio caught Elvis’s ambition perfectly in a single sentence: “He wanted to be a god.”

  Guercio thus described succinctly a real change in Elvis after the Comeback Special and a change in the tone of his show. Elvis had come to see that his role in life, on stage and off, was to save mankind. He had been chosen from among many. His repertoire came to include various songs working on the vision theme—“If I Can Dream,” for example. He began to give melodramatic readings of “How Great Thou Art.” His costumes increasingly came to suggest some sort of divinity. When he ended his show with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the spotlight shining fully upon him, he would hold his flowing golden cloak out to extremes like angel’s wings and lift his rapt face heavenward, eyes closed as if transported.

  Finances

  With hotel engagements, tours, and increased record sales, Elvis’s income swelled dramatically during the next four years. In 1969, he netted only $1.325 million after income taxes. In 1970, he netted $2.4 million after taxes. In 1971, his net income approached $3 million, and in 1972 it swelled to nearly $4 million. The vast increase in Elvis’s income then and later came mostly from live performances, especially from touring.

  Elvis did not, however, become rich. His performances grossed on average about $5 million a year during the last several years of his life, but at his death his total assets probably amounted to substantially less than $3 million. Like his parents, Elvis apparently never thought about saving any money for a rainy day. He never bought stocks, corporate bonds, or rental property for investment and income. The final inventory of his possessions filed in the court records of Shelby County show that he did buy a $10,000 US government bond. He probably forgot he had it. He practically never invested in anything he could not eat, wear, ride, or live in. Such scattered investments as he did make—for example, buying and selling airplanes—lost money.

  A large part of Elvis’s income went toward keeping more than twenty people on his regular payroll, including a staff at Graceland, his “guys,” and his father, Vernon, whom he eventually paid $75,000 a year. Marty Lacker estimated that Elvis’s payroll ran to about $100,000 a month. Also, he was famous for his gifts to friends and strangers—new cars being a favored item. In all, he gave away about 275 “luxury cars” worth well over $3 million, almost all of these in the last ten years of his life. The gifts often came in batches. In one spree, he gave away ten cars worth about $10,000 each in a few days. Another came when he was stocking his Circle G Ranch south of Graceland, buying trucks, mobile homes, horses, boots, and cowboy outfits for everyone. In one day, he bought twenty-two trucks. Vernon could hardly stand it. That night he came out of his office at the Circle G carrying a tape from an adding machine in his hand.

  “Marty, look at this!” he exclaimed, shaking the tape. “He’s spent $98,000 on trucks and given them away.”

  Marty had no sympathy for Vernon in his distress. “What do you want me to do?” he said. “He’s your son.”

  Elvis spared no expense in maintaining and running Graceland. It housed or supported more than a dozen of his relatives at various times, and it operated as a sort of all-expenses-paid club for the guys with its television room, pool room, and swimming pool. The guys’ girls were also welcomed. Priscilla said that it was like a “breeding ground.” The kitchen was fully stocked with food and drinks, open twenty-four hours a day, and staffed with a cook ready to serve up whatever the guys ordered. All of the cooks and maids were black women—the only African Americans in Elvis’s employ. Marty thought that running Graceland cost about $40,000 a month.

  Unlike many other high-income Americans, Elvis never took advantage of available tax shelters. Medical doctors, for instance, in the 1960s and 1970s, reaped unprecedented profits due to a relative shortage of physicians to meet the swelling “baby boomer” population, noncompetitive pricing, and the cash cows generated by Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance companies. Seeking to escape from federal income taxes that might take away a third or more of their income, doctors bought farms, which provided tax shelters legitimated by Congress to meet an American desire to protect those who tilled the earth. Often physicians—as farmers—turned their farms into ranches to raise cattle or horses, which required relatively little labor, equipment, and expense. If they moved, their well-kept farms could be turned into ready cash. When they retired, they could live comfortably on their country estates, where some had already become “gentleman riders,” elegantly dressed in riding outfits, handsomely mounted, riding to the sound of horn
and hound, chasing the tiny but wily fox.

  Elvis did keep horses and sometimes rode, but he rejected the elite’s fiscal model. He spent all that he made as fast as he made it—like almost all of the people who worked for him, like almost all of his relatives, like he himself would have done had he become an electrician rather than a star entertainer, like the great majority of the fans who came to see him in Las Vegas or Tahoe, Buffalo, Little Rock, or Wichita. Elvis shared totally the material world view of his people, that is, enjoy to the fullest the fruits of one’s labor now before the boss or the bank or the government snatches it away from you.

  Tours and Showrooms

  With his initial and highly successful tour in September 1970, the pattern for Elvis’s performance venues for the rest of his life was set. Appearances in the Showroom in Las Vegas (and, beginning in July 1971, at the Sahara Tahoe Hotel in northern Nevada near Reno), punctuated a continuous stream of tours, each lasting from about ten to twenty days. At first, the Colonel got RCA and a professional management company to underwrite the tours and share in any profits. But soon he decided to manage the tours himself and take as his commission one-third of the profits, an arrangement that Elvis easily accepted as fair.