The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  Naff was often embarrassed by the Colonel’s personal style and found his advertising “schlocky as all hell.” Once when Parker requested a particular ad spot that Naff considered beneath the hotel’s dignity, he took it upon himself to write a more upscale commercial and planned to sneak on the air. “I would listen to the commercials in my office, and lo and behold, the Colonel was passing by my doorway and heard it. He walked in and made me change the whole thing. He wanted everything to be the - Colonel’s way.”

  But no one could dispute that Parker’s way worked. “We got calls from all over the world,” says Shoofey, whose office was decorated with a gift from Parker, an artificial plant deemed the “snowtree,” with cotton balls glued on its branches. “We couldn’t accept all the reservations.”

  “The closing night of Barbra,” remembers Bill Miller, “we had a big party. At five or six in the morning, my wife and I went to bed. We went downstairs and the lobby was jam-packed. They were standing three blocks away to get in to see Elvis that night. And that’s the way it stayed.”

  As soon as Streisand ended her engagement, Parker began working into the thin hours of the night to transform the elegant International, with its imported marble walls, into something out of Barnum and Bailey. Though Shoofey held his tongue, Naff was horrified to discover a laddered crew plastering Elvis posters “just all over the goddamned place. Unbelievable.”

  The Imperials’ Joe Moscheo was equally stunned. “There were banners and flags and stand-ups of Elvis in the lobby, and everybody who worked for the hotel was wearing straw hats with an Elvis plaque on the front.” Even the casino dealers were ordered to don the promotional chapeaus, as well as red, white, and blue armbands festooned with the word Elvis. “They looked like riverboat gamblers,” says Moscheo. “Honestly, it was a very strange atmosphere.”

  Parker considered it one of his most impressive promotional campaigns. But to temper the vulgarity, he promised the money from the souvenirs he sold from a booth in front of the hotel would go to a charity of Naff’s choice.

  “I don’t have to tell you how much went to charity and how much went to the Colonel,” says Naff. “It was a profit-making business.” What particularly galled the advertising director was the $125 sale of an Elvis portrait in a carved wood frame that bore the label RENALDO OF ITALY. In truth, says Naff, “those frames were made by an employee of ours in the carpenter shop in the basement of the hotel. He was the famous Renaldo of Italy.”

  Still, Naff found Parker to be “a very likable guy, not the kind who irritated people in his demands.” One morning, at the height of the Elvis engagement, Naff was delighted to receive a crate of “fresh, gorgeous red strawberries” as a gift. “At the end of the day, I was taking them to my car, and I chanced to pass by the Colonel. He said, ‘Hey, Nick, what have you got there?’ I said, ‘I’ve got these beautiful strawberries!’ And he said, ‘Send them up to my room.’ Now, he did it in a very smiling way, so I - didn’t resent it. But I had to stop and think, What’s more important, my association with the Colonel, or the strawberries? So I lost them. Oh, he loved strawberries.”

  While Parker reveled in the merriment of Elvis’s opening, the star himself wrestled with a serious case of stage fright and depended on Charlie Hodge to help him with pacing and song selection. Soon Elvis would tell Ray Connolly of The London Evening Standard, “I’ve wanted to perform on the stage again for the last nine years, and it’s been building inside of me . . . until the strain became intolerable.” But once he moved rehearsals to Las Vegas, Presley began to have his doubts. Catching the end of Barbra Streisand’s engagement, he whispered to Hodge that the International looked like a “helluva big stage to fill.”

  In the days before his July 31 debut, Elvis suffered debilitating panic attacks, one of which lasted until he took the stage at 10:15, following opening sets from the Sweet Inspirations and comedian Sammy Shore. Now thirty-four, Elvis worried if his voice would hold up during such a long engagement. Never had he delivered a full-hour set, and especially not twice a night, though this evening he would be called on to give just one all-important performance.

  If he flopped, word would travel fast—not only had fans come in from as far away as Europe and Asia, but the Colonel and Kerkorian had filled the invitation-only audience with such celebrities as Cary Grant, Carol Channing, Wayne Newton, Paul Anka, Fats Domino, and Elvis’s old flame Ann-Margret. In addition, a large contingent of press was in attendance, many of whom Parker had flown in on Kerkorian’s private jet.

  But when he finally took the stage, Presley hid his nervousness in the bravado of the rock-and-roll beat. Dressed in a Bill Belew karate-inspired Cossack costume with macramé belt, he gave the crowd everything he had, falling to his knees, sliding across the stage, even turning a cartwheel in a display of boundless energy. The celebrity audience shouted its approval and stayed on its feet for most of the repertoire, which ranged from early chestnuts like “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Love Me Tender” to his latest material from the Memphis sessions. Afterward, even hardened pit bosses commented they’d never seen such excitement.

  When the Colonel visited Elvis backstage afterward, he had tears in his eyes. In the rarest of sights, Parker clasped his arms around his client and then left to join Alex Shoofey in the coffee shop.

  One person who couldn’t get back to congratulate the star was Steve Binder. Parker had excluded him from the guest list, and after the show, the director went to the stage door guard. “I said, ‘Would you please tell Elvis that Steve Binder’s here?’ And he got on the phone and [then] said, ‘Sorry.’ ” It would be more than thirty years before Binder would learn that Elvis had been asking for him.

  The Colonel had made a point to invite Bob Finkel, the producer of the ’68 special, who, on the day of the show, was flabbergasted to see Parker wearing a straw hat and peddling Elvis’s albums from under his arm in the casino. As the Colonel’s pal, Finkel rated a special treat—a private visit with Elvis upstairs in his suite after the performance. Joe Esposito briefed Presley as to their arrival, and then escorted Finkel and his wife, Jane, to the private elevator that would deliver them to Elvis’s quarters. The singer, however, had retreated into a world of his own.

  “We went up there and the elevator door opened,” Finkel remembers, “and the suite was pitch-black, except for the light from the television set. There was a Western on, and Elvis was sitting there all alone. After everything we’d gone through together, all he said was, ‘Hi, Bob.’ And then he fired at the television set with a pistol. It scared the shit out of me, and Jane and I got back in the elevator and went down.”

  By this time, sitting in the hotel coffee shop, Parker and Shoofey, now the International’s president, had roughed out the terms for a new contract on a pink tablecloth stained brown with coffee. Foreseeing that Elvis’s would be a record-breaking Vegas engagement (grossing $1,522,635, with an attendance of 101,500), the hotel, Shoofey said, would boost Elvis’s salary to $125,000 a week and extend its option for two engagements a year for the next five years. Parker asked him to throw in a little present—a trip to Hawaii for Elvis and eight companions. Shoofey smiled, and the two shook hands.

  The Colonel had again hit his magic figure of $1 million. But Shoofey was astonished that Parker hadn’t asked for a sliding scale, considering how much business Elvis brought to the hotel and its beckoning casinos. In fact, the Colonel had negotiated like a novice.

  “He says, ‘Now tell me again. You’ll give me the same money for the five years?’ ” remembers Shoofey. “And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ I mean, this was unheard of that anybody would sign for five years for the same amount of money, no increase. So he took the tablecloth, he wrote the contract on the tablecloth, and he signed it. He was very receptive, very cooperative, and very easy to deal with.”

  The Colonel soon began bragging that he had gotten the most money for a performer in the history of Las Vegas. But Shoofey and his staff did some gloating of their own. “I he
ard [they] told someone they had just gotten the biggest name in show business for the least amount of money,” says Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires. “The Colonel could have named any price.”

  Or certainly more than he demanded, given the showroom’s 2,200-seat capacity, even as the top chairs were filled for action in the casino. Parker asked for no bonuses for exceeding certain records, and as the hotel later confirmed, when Elvis played the hotel, all the International’s revenue doubled, from the slot machines to the restaurants.

  “Just look at the figures,” says Marty Lacker. “They had a $15 minimum, and at even two thousand people, that’s $30,000 a show. At two shows a night, for twenty-eight consecutive nights, it works out to $1,680,000. But it was really more because fifty percent of the shows were dinner shows, and actually they got even more people in that room. So the hotel was taking in more than $2 million a month on Elvis, twice a year. Now, Vegas knows that most shows lose money, but they book entertainment to get people into the casinos. Elvis was the first act in Vegas history to make a hotel a profit on the show.”

  Just as Parker promised. So why didn’t the Colonel ask for more? Theories abound: that Parker wanted to ensure that Elvis stayed at the hotel out of loyalty to a well-connected and powerful man; that continually sold-out shows in the largest Vegas showroom would translate to filled auditoriums when they went out on the road; and, most important, that Parker was delirious at being a high roller in the gambling capital of the world, where the hotel showered him with unimaginable perks, from stocking his Palm Springs home with gourmet food—he once demanded prime rib and Dover sole be sent on Frank Sinatra’s plane when the hotel forgot to pack it on his own—to forgiving at least a portion of his mounting casino losses.

  Joe Delaney, the venerable Las Vegas Sun columnist, doesn’t believe Parker sold Elvis too cheaply, but likens the Colonel’s behavior to that of a double agent. “Was he trying to protect his fifty-two-weeks-a-year relationship with the hotel, or his eight-week-a-year relationship with the artist? If he’s going to bleed the hotel for every dollar for Elvis, he’s not going to get special treatment, although the way he gambled, I’d give it to him anyway. He had two things going. He had Elvis and he had the gambling.”

  And increasingly, the two entwined in his mind. Elvis would become, in fact, the Colonel’s chit. “He had an open tab [and] nobody ever talked about money,” says entrepreneur Joe Shane, who would come to know the Colonel well in the following years. “He had the boy do a lot of free shows just to cover his debt.”

  Just how reckless was Parker’s gambling? “[The] Colonel was one of the best customers we had,” Alex Shoofey later reported. “He was good for a million dollars a year.”

  But others say $1 million is too conservative a figure, that Parker routinely lost between $50,000 and $100,000 a night during Elvis’s engagements. Therefore, every penny that Kerkorian and Shoofey paid for Elvis’s appearances, they won back on the tables, though most of the time, the Colonel’s was marker play. He spread his layouts to make sure he always had money coming back, and each time he won, the casino reduced his bill. Since no money changed hands, Parker developed a lackadaisical attitude about it. Money ceased to be real.

  “I never saw anybody who could gamble like that man could gamble,” says Lamar Fike. “He used to scare me to death. I was up one night about $75,000 or $100,000. He came and took [my bet] off [one number] and put it on another, and I lost it. I said, ‘I ought to kill you for that.’ He said, ‘Well, you could have won, too.’ I saw him lose half a million dollars at a craps table one night between shows. God knows how much money that man lost over a period of years. I’d say an easy forty million.”

  It was during the first weeks of the engagement that the press began to reference Parker’s frequent appearances in the casino, particularly at the roulette table, where the hotel treated him like royalty, security guards roping off a table for his private play, which often went on for twelve or fourteen hours at a time.

  Only games of chance, or betting against the house, aroused him. Games of skill, like poker, at which he might have made a living, left him cold. He especially loved the big six wheel, the Wheel of Fortune, so reminiscent of the carnivals, and bet numbers that related to his personal life, such as his birthday, or that of Marie, who brought her friend Maybelle Carter to Vegas for lower-stakes gambling. Always chasing the magic, he tried his best to hypnotize the wheel to deliver the payoff he wanted.

  Often, he would wager $1,000 on every number, rationalizing it as betting large sums of money, but losing in small amounts. “If I don’t cover a number, and you hit it,” he’d bark at the dealer, “you’re gonna pay me.” A throng usually gathered, but as long as no one approached him directly or tried to muscle in on his table, he instructed that they be left alone—he loved the rush of winning with all eyes upon him. The hotel correctly saw him as a high-rolling shill.

  While Parker only rarely tolerated a female onlooker who got too close—he regarded women as bad luck and would light up a cigar to smoke them out or call casino manager Jimmy Newman to remove them—he often requested a woman roulette dealer. “He felt he could intimidate a woman dealer,” says Frank Gorrell, a former casino floor man. But with either sex, “he would walk around the table and say to the dealer, ‘When I tell you, that’s when you spin the ball.’ He was also a big craps player, and he was going to run the table, not you. He was very sharp—he knew the payoffs better than we did. He’d say, ‘Don’t you cheat me, I know what I’m getting paid.’ And he did.” Affirms Gabe Tucker, “He’d stack ’em up all over, and run the men in the club plum crazy. I don’t see how they ever kept up with him.”

  But while Parker loved to win big, tip generously, and watch how the bosses would react, he demonstrated one habit the dealers found peculiar. He was often good-natured when he lost, but when he won at a rough, fast-action game like craps, he liked the box men to curse him, tell him to go fuck himself. “He’d throw you in a couple of hundred if you treated him like shit,” says Gorrell. “He loved that atmosphere when he was winning.”

  Whether the cursing of the croupiers served to reinforce Parker’s glee at ripping them off and choreographing their anger into public display—thus garnering Parker greater approval by all gathered at the table—the barking of the gaming dogs echoed the denigration and humiliation he heaped on Elvis’s entourage by “hypnotizing” them to “oink” or otherwise behave foolishly in front of authority figures. He treated them all as idiotic, sub-evolved lackeys, exposed under the Colonel’s power and control. He also seemed to find solace in reprimand, as if being told he was worthless and undeserving somehow assuaged his guilt.

  According to Julian Aberbach, Parker had $7 million in his Madison, Tennessee, bank account in 1969, and had always gambled responsibly. But as he spent more time in Vegas, “everything went haywire” and the Colonel could not control his compulsion, even as he recognized it for what it was. “He told me, ‘Don’t gamble. There is no way in the world that you can ever win,’ ” Aberbach remembers. “He lost all his money. It is a tragic story—self-destruction on an unbelievable level, and equal to Elvis’s self-destruction. No question about it.”

  With Elvis’s spectacular debut at the International, the Colonel began to receive a myriad of offers and immediately settled on two for 1970, after Presley’s four-week return to Vegas in late January. Scrapping a pay-per-view concert film scheduled for March, Parker struck a deal with Kirk Kerkorian, who now headed MGM Studios, to film a concert documentary for theatrical release, called Elvis: That’s the Way It Is. Filming would begin in July, after a June recording session for RCA in Nashville. But first, as a prelude to a national tour, the Colonel would take Elvis into the Houston Astrodome for six shows in three days in February.

  Tom Diskin approached Joe Moscheo, the spokesman of the Imperials, about the group’s accompanying Presley in Texas. By now, Moscheo, who had signed the Imperials’ Vegas contract for $5,000 a week—or $1,000 per
member—had discovered why the Jordanaires, who’d originally been offered the spot, turned down the deal. While the hotel rooms were covered, the group received no per diem, and Moscheo was chagrined to learn that other of the musicians received $2,000 or $3,000 apiece. Moscheo told Diskin they’d go to Houston, but that they needed to renegotiate their fee. Diskin said he’d have to talk to the Colonel, but all of Moscheo’s efforts to do so went in vain.

  “He just wouldn’t see me,” Moscheo recalls. “I knew he always gambled after the second show, so about two or three o’clock in the morning, I went looking for him and found him sitting at a table playing roulette with this big crowd around him. He had a stubby little cigar in his mouth, and piles of [chips] everywhere, and a couple guys in his entourage standing behind him.

  “My guys were going, ‘Just talk to him now . . . go in and tell him what we want,’ so I wiggled my way in to Tom Diskin, who was standing right behind the Colonel. The Colonel still wouldn’t talk to me directly, so I had to go through Tom.

  “I’d say, ‘We’d really like for you to pay to get our cleaning done.’ And Diskin would go, ‘Colonel, Joe said that the Imperials would like you to pay for their cleaning.’ Then the Colonel would say, ‘Tell them to go to hell. We’re not paying.’ And Diskin would turn around and tell me, ‘The Colonel said to go to hell.’ It was a three-way conversation among people standing right next to each other.”

  In the end, the Imperials got a raise, but the Colonel deftly sidetracked other requests. In October 1969, when Elvis took his Hawaii vacation, largely financed by the International, the Colonel got word from Joe Esposito that his client planned to return to Los Angeles, and with expedited passports for his party, which included Vernon and Dee, the Schillings, and the Espositos, fly on to Europe.