Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  The Colonel was indeed a superb tour manager and soon developed a process whereby he would arrive in the venue the day before Elvis, to make certain that Elvis’s coming was hyped to the maximum, all seats sold, and conditions optimal down to the finest detail. He would fly out to the next venue as Elvis and the company of some thirty-five musicians, singers, helpers, and bodyguards flew in. Later, the number in the troupe swelled to more than fifty.

  It was as if Tom Parker were back in the carnival where he had begun in show business, striking the tent after midnight in one town, only to raise it in another town the next day with great hoopla, as if nothing so great as this had ever happened before anywhere on the face of the earth. At first, they leased planes for their tours. But in 1975, Elvis had a retired Delta Airlines Convair jet revamped for his own use. He began crisscrossing the country at will, sometimes on tour with the most favored members of his troupe and often on a mere whim and with whomever he chose. He named the plane the Lisa Marie after his seven-year-old daughter.

  Keeping the Lisa Marie in the air was an expensive proposition. On one occasion, they touched down to refuel in El Paso, Texas, where gas was relatively cheap. Joe Esposito had forgotten to bring Elvis’s credit card and had to borrow Lamar Fike’s. The charge for gas to fill the tanks was $5,000—pocket change for Elvis, a small fortune for Lamar. The crew cost money too. The Lisa Marie’s perfectly-named pilot, Milo High, or a substitute, was always on call, along with a roster of copilots and engineers.

  Parker loved his work in Las Vegas and on the road. By this time he needed all the money he could get. In Las Vegas, he became addicted to gambling. He was often at the tables wagering staggering sums on a roll of the dice or a spin of the roulette wheel. Knowledgeable persons thought that he was losing money at the rate of about a million dollars a year, and many thought that the International Hotel in Las Vegas—which was acquired by Conrad Hilton in 1971 and renamed the Hilton International Hotel—held his markers for large sums and dangled those over his head to keep Elvis performing at a killing pace and to squeeze more profit for themselves out of Elvis’s labor. Whatever the case, Elvis continued to perform at the Hilton after the five-year contract had expired.

  Creating the Image

  During the first few years of Elvis’s career, Sam Phillips and the girls in Elvis’s audience did not fully know what they did, while Elvis himself sometimes asked, with genuine wonder, “What did I do?” But clearly, they all moved within the context of Southern white culture in the mid-twentieth century. One great irony of the Comeback Special was that its stage forms were created by people who felt that they knew very well what they were doing, and they did not move within the context of Southern white culture. To the contrary, the creators of the special were distinctly non-Southern. Steve Binder, Billy Goldenberg, and Bill Belew, in their roots and values, sprang from virtually the opposite end of the cultural spectrum. Elvis’s people had been in America and in the South for centuries, living and working on the land as farmers. The Binders, Goldenbergs, and Belews were new, national, and urban.

  Elvis became urban, but never urbane. He eschewed New York, and he never “went Hollywood.” In Los Angeles, he was practically never in the nightclubs, never at the Oscars, never in the homes of the famous for dinners or social events. Rather, he walled himself up in one of his mansions with the guys. His regular guests, even if famous, were female, young, and not there for dinner. Anyone who wanted to socialize with Elvis had to come to his house. Like other Americans, he partied in Las Vegas and retreated to Palm Springs, but home was home.

  Steve, Billy, and Bill each saw a different Elvis, and each projected his own image of Elvis onto Elvis. Those images were often incongruous and even contradictory. Steve saw him as an ideal American, a warm and generous person, modest, miraculously pure, not prejudiced against blacks, Jews, or Catholics, a poor boy who had made good by a gift for music, but whose success had not made him pretentious or arrogant. Billy saw him as a super-sexual creature, a good person who was nevertheless at bottom animalistic, wild, dark, rapacious, and even sadistic. Bill saw him as imperious, commanding, dominating— almost with whip in hand. Just as Elvis read each audience and gave them what they wanted, he read Steve, Billy, and Bill and gave each what he wanted. Insecurity seeks adoration. Such was the nature of Elvis’s genius. In the Comeback Special, Steve and his associates built the mold and Elvis poured himself into the spaces created for him to make a work of art that was, after all, embodied in him and essentially his own. Elvis played brilliantly to their perceptions of him.

  On Tour: The Third Elvis

  The first great Elvis image—the “Bad Elvis”—was launched by the young women at the Shell in Overton Park in July 1954. The second Elvis image—the “Good Elvis”—was the creature of the Cold War. It was clearly visible on the flight deck of the USS Hancock in San Diego Bay in April 1956, then sanctified by Ed Sullivan on his show in January 1957.

  The third and final Elvis image, much more complex than the first two, brought back the bad Elvis in another mutation. Now Elvis was “bad” in the sense that bad meant “good,” even “the best.” Now clearly an adult, he is free and independent. Liberate yourself and have fun, he urges white Americans tired of black civil rights activists, Communist confrontations, and a demoralizing war in Vietnam. He is self-confident, neither giving nor accepting abuse, indicting his enemies, joyous, loving life, hedonistic but harmless. The image was hatched with the Comeback Special and achieved full flight during his first engagement at the International Hotel in Las Vegas in August 1969. It continued through his tours and hotel showroom appearances until his death in 1977. It was the image that his audiences needed and wanted; it was the spirit that they would travel from afar to be near and share.

  Las Vegas, America’s premier “Sin City,” was the perfect place to launch and sustain the “bad” Elvis. From July 1969, through December 1976, he played fifteen engagements in the Showroom of the International Hotel. In Las Vegas, drinking was encouraged, prostitution was openly practiced, gambling was virtually mandatory, and no-fault sex pulsated through the air. All sorts of things forbidden in conventional American life were smiled upon there. Physically, the city was literally an oasis in a desert; morally, it was an enclave of sin in a puritanical nation. For those who came to play, it was Mardi Gras without masks. Lent could come later, when they got back home with family, friends, and neighbors, work, and church.

  Elvis loved Las Vegas. He often stayed there in the Imperial Suite in the International Hotel even when not playing in the Showroom. He loved the audiences he attracted night after night, first to a dinner show in the evening and then a later show that often went on past midnight. He threw his sweat-drenched scarves into the audience just as the first bad Elvis had thrown his spit-wet chewing gum to the girls. Women loved it. They threw bras, slips, panties, and keys—marked with their room numbers—back at him, women both young and middle-aged. It was the bubble again, but riper and richer with age.

  In Las Vegas, Elvis the rebel burst forth. Rising resentment erupted upon what had seemed to be a smooth, even-tempered surface. No one was ever going to mess with him again. In rambling monologues, he depicted how other boys in his high school had not liked him and wanted to beat him up. He was like a “squirrel” they had spotted in a tree, he said, and the cry went up to “get him.” The seething anger that he had long felt over his treatment by Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen on national television and movie moguls in Hollywood poured out onstage like so much bile—Elvis’s revenge.

  Elvis was now ready to do violence to his persecutors, past, present, and future, as he demonstrated onstage by aggressive karate chops and kicks. He was himself prepared for combat, physical and otherwise. Also he had his own gang, strong unsmiling men ready to inflict whatever pain upon others he desired. Now, he would “get them.”

  His arsenal included his live audiences, always in close support. They never lost their love and affection for him. They raise
d him up. They did, in truth, think of him as “the King.”

  PART IV

  The Fall

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE BODYGUARD BOOK

  Physical Assaults and Legal Suits

  On September 7, 1973, Red West and two of the guys attacked and beat up a man named K. Peter Pajarinen outside of Elvis’s suite at the Hilton Hotel. Pajarinen said that he had been invited as a “guest” to Elvis’s quarters and insisted on his admission to what he surely thought would be a party with a lot of attractive girls. Two years later, he brought suit against Elvis. In May 1974, Red and the boys did it again. This time it was during an engagement at the Sahara Tahoe Hotel.

  It was a bad time for Elvis. The San Francisco Examiner described an opening show as “listless, uninspired, and downright tired.” Afterward, he missed two shows because, he complained, he had the “flu.” Lamar Fike called such events “Vegas throat,” meaning that Elvis just did not want to go on and offered illness as his excuse.

  On this occasion Red and three other bodyguards beat up Edward L. Ashley, a real estate developer from Grass Valley, California. Ashley, up in Tahoe for a good time, thought that he had an invitation to an Elvis party. Indeed, he said that he had passed $60 to one of Elvis’s retainers to obtain the invitation. He was denied entrance and in retaliation attempted to shut off the power in Elvis’s suite. Two of the guys held Ashley down while two others beat him severely.

  In October, Ashley brought suit against Elvis for more than $6 million. He claimed that Elvis watched the beating. Insiders knew that the guys always did what Elvis wanted them to do, whether he watched or not. Ashley said that he had suffered “severe lacerations of his lips, loosened teeth, possible fractured jaw, injury to the left ear, brain concussion,” and more.

  In Elvis’s last years, the guys, like Elvis, began to really fear for their lives. “There were so many death threats,” Billy Smith later said. Elvis’s bodyguards became increasingly frustrated, uncertain, and quick to respond violently. On one occasion, Red rousted and roughly handled a guest in the Hilton Showroom because he was acting in a suspicious manner. The man turned out to be an FBI agent secretly planted to help protect Elvis. One of the guys indulged himself in extracurricular violence by getting into a barroom brawl with one of the “Tailhookers,” US Navy carrier pilots who convened in Las Vegas every year. They tended to get very drunk, hire prostitutes, chase girls in ways unbecoming to officers and gentlemen, and behave generally very much like sailors on shore leave after months at sea with no alcohol and no women around.

  On several occasions, in the alleged defense of Elvis, the guys caused bruises and drew blood. Only rarely did they crack bones or smash teeth, but the macho style seemed to feed upon itself and grow, the guards relishing their work too much. In their zeal to protect Elvis, they became a threat to the physical safety of others, his image, and his pocketbook.

  Inevitably, all this mayhem generated lawsuits, and they were not frivolous. In 1976, six such suits against Elvis were pending. This was something new in Elvis’s life. The courts might find that the assault by Elvis’s guys against Ashley was not just an isolated incident but one event in a pattern of unwarranted and vicious assaults. The “Memphis Mafia,” the appellation of which Elvis and the guys had been so proud, had become a liability. They were indeed, it seemed, a gang of sadistic bullies and thugs who thought themselves above the law. If the police and the criminal courts did not bring them to justice, the civil courts would.

  Clearly, it was going to cost Elvis a lot of money just to hire lawyers to cope with the suits already filed, never mind the settlements that would probably ensue. Further, if Elvis lost even one case, it would establish a likelihood of guilt and put all the rest in jeopardy. And who knew how many other people who had been manhandled by the guys were out there waiting for revenge and a chance to get significant money out of what they saw to be Elvis’s bottomless coffers? It was a crisis such as he had never faced before.

  The suits were not going to go away, and Elvis’s finances were already shaky. The Colonel was probably taking about half of the income produced by Elvis’s work and fame, even though his contracts with Elvis would not show that. As much as a third of what Elvis got went to the federal government in income taxes. Fortunately for his fiscal survival, Tennessee had no income tax, and he steadfastly maintained his residence in that state. Even after sharing income with the Colonel and paying his taxes, Elvis was still making millions, but he was spending it all, sometimes faster than he made it. In November 1975, facing a cash flow problem, he was forced to mortgage Graceland to borrow $350,000 from his bank in Memphis, the National Bank of Commerce. Elvis had earned more than $100 million in the previous twenty years, but he was living from hand to mouth.

  In January 1976, Elvis signed a new agreement with the Colonel splitting the proceeds from his performances on tour fifty-fifty instead of the two-thirds for Elvis and one-third for the Colonel previously agreed upon. Elvis readily agreed that the new arrangement was fairer than the old. In the tour business, Parker’s labors seemed just as important as Elvis’s in achieving high earnings. In March, however, Elvis was so short of cash that the Colonel gave him two-thirds of the proceeds from a tour with the understanding that Elvis would pay him back at the end of the year. But Parker continued the practice, even after the year ended. This meant that Elvis was running up a tremendous debt to the Colonel. If he fired the Colonel, he would be more than broke; if the Colonel sold his contract to another manager, Elvis would still owe someone a pile of money. The more he made, the more he owed. Someday would be pay-up day—1977, 1978, 1979, or later.

  Meanwhile, he and Colonel Parker were milking the tours for all they were worth. Elvis was touring at a killing pace to maintain the revenue stream upon which everyone depended. Parker began to book Elvis into smaller towns with smaller auditoriums to exploit that market. This meant that Elvis had to perform more often to maintain his income level, and his diminishing energies were further taxed. There was a real question as to how long Elvis’s increasingly sick and obese body and distressed psyche could continue at this pace.

  The Firings

  With the suits for assaults coming to a head, Elvis’s career was in jeopardy. His image and his livelihood were in danger. One way to defend himself was to distance himself from his most conspicuously violent bodyguards. He yielded to advice and in July 1976 instructed Vernon to fire Red, Sonny, and Dave Hebler, a karate enthusiast they had brought into the group in 1973.

  Vernon had long thought that the bodyguards were overpaid and underworked; nor was he fond of them personally. At last, he had a chance to manifest his dislike and keep money at the same time. Reputedly, Vernon later said that this was “one of the happiest moments in my life.” Vernon gave Red West, Elvis’s close friend for more than twenty years and head bodyguard, and Red’s cousin Sonny West, who had served Elvis for almost as long as Red, no warning at all and only a week’s severance pay.

  The bodyguards heard no rumor of their coming dismissal and were taken totally by surprise. That morning, Vernon reached Sonny by phone at his dentist’s office. Dave Hebler got the call while he was enjoying the swimming pool at his motel near the Memphis airport. Ironically, Red got his while he was at the office of a private detective talking about one of the several lawsuits pending against Elvis.

  Vernon asked Sonny to come out to Graceland to see him. He and Sonny had just had a bitter fight after Vernon refused to pay for air travel for Sonny’s wife and child to join him during Elvis’s recent engagement in Shreveport, Louisiana. Sonny said that he was a grown man and could probably handle anything Vernon had to say over the phone.

  “Well, things haven’t been going too well,” Vernon told him, warming up to his task, “and, well, we’re going to have to cut back on expenses and we’re going to have to let some people go.”

  “Oh, I see,” Sonny replied, “and I guess I’m one of the ones that is going to be let go.”

&nbs
p; “Yes, I’m afraid so,” Vernon said, then added with a shower of crocodile tears, “There will be others, too, unfortunately.”

  Sonny asked who else, but Vernon declined to say. Sonny returned to the motel where he and his family were staying. Morosely, he watched his wife and young son playing by the motel pool. He called Dave Hebler and found that Vernon had already summoned Dave to Graceland. Soon Red phoned Sonny.

  “I’ve been fired, man,” he said flatly.

  The guys complained bitterly to each other and their friends about the cold and abrupt nature of their dismissal. Vernon was never skilled in personal relations, but Elvis would have been better served had Vernon honestly told them that they were being dismissed to improve Elvis’s situation in the suits. Out of loyalty to Elvis, they should simply lie low for a time, and then they would be rehired.

  The bodyguards knew full well that the real problem was not paying their salaries. They knew, too, that Elvis himself, not Vernon, ultimately had the power to decide who would come and who would go, and that he always found the money to do whatever he wanted to do. Fairly recently, Elvis had actually hired three new guys to join his security force, David Stanley and Ricky Stanley, Dee Stanley’s sons, who claimed that they were Elvis’s “brothers,” and Dean Nichopoulos, Dr. Nick’s son. They also knew that Elvis had specifically chosen to make the three of them, and not others, the scapegoats. Vernon’s explanation was a bald-faced lie.

  Red West felt especially betrayed. In his view he had given twenty years of his life and very nearly total and exclusive devotion to Elvis Presley, the one man in the world he most loved. He resented deeply—and justly—that his dismissal did not come from Elvis himself and was based on the flimsy and transparent excuse of financial necessity. Elvis had not only suddenly taken away Red’s livelihood but had also insulted Red’s manhood.