The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  Larry Geller, whom Parker allowed back into the group in 1972, believing he had hypnotic powers, says that for a short time, Elvis did use liquid cocaine, which he obtained from his California dentist, Dr. Max Shapiro, and administered on Q-Tips stuck up in his nostrils. Soon Presley would begin using Dilaudid, or synthetic heroin. Because only “junkies” shot up, Presley had members of his entourage inject it into his hip. Dilaudid, often prescribed for terminal cancer patients, would become his favorite narcotic.

  As Presley’s drug use escalated, his relationship with Parker continued to unravel. In the summer of ’73, they fought over a variety of issues, from Elvis’s insistence on recording again in Memphis—this time, at the legendary Stax studios, where his initial sessions collapsed when Elvis was too slurry of speech—to Presley adding a gospel group, Voice, in Las Vegas. Not only did Parker believe Elvis paid them too much—$100,000 a year—but suspected one of its members helped keep him in drugs.

  By now, almost everyone could see that something was wrong with Elvis. The Hollywood Reporter was dismayed at the star’s August engagement, calling his opening-night show “one of the most ill-prepared, unsteady, and most disheartening performances of his Las Vegas career. . . . It is a tragedy . . . and absolutely depressing to see Elvis in such diminishing stature.” The Colonel, who had broken his ankle before going to Vegas, hobbled around on a dark brown bamboo cane, trying to exercise damage control.

  Ironically, during that same engagement, Presley accidentally fractured the ankle of one of his female guests while demonstrating a karate hold in his suite. It was this mishap that first brought Elvis into contact with Elias Ghanem, the Hilton’s house doctor, who was called to administer aid. The thirty-four-year-old Lebanese immigrant had been born in Israel as one of two sons of a wealthy oil company executive, and after interning at UCLA medical school, came to Vegas as an emergency room physician in 1971. Currently, he was opening the first of a string of twenty-four-hour medical centers on Joe W. Brown Drive near the Las Vegas Hilton. During his off hours, the doctor could be found at the racetrack or hobnobbing with celebrities.

  Soon Ghanem would become Presley’s favorite Las Vegas physician, the entertainer giving him a Stutz Bearcat and Mercedes. But according to Kathy Westmoreland, “Elvis was worse” after Ghanem came around. Not only was Ghanem lax with a prescription pad, but, says Westmoreland, “he was flaky. He thought he was Elvis in a way. He came into Elvis’s dressing room wearing one of his jumpsuits a couple of times. Had his hair darkened and everything.”

  Elvis was not amused, yet he would come to rely on Ghanem for treatment of a variety of ailments. The doctor recognized that Elvis’s health was in freefall, that his weight was in the unhealthy range, his liver fatty, and his colon unnaturally sluggish. More and more, Presley seemed to put himself in life-threatening situations.

  On October 11, 1973, two days after his divorce was final, Elvis, now addicted to Demerol, had trouble breathing while flying home to Memphis from Los Angeles. Dr. Nichopoulos put him in Baptist Memorial Hospital for tests. Colonel Parker, who did not visit his client during any of his hospital stays, informed the press that the singer suffered from pneumonia, but in truth, the stay amounted to a detox, as the Demerol incident was one of three overdoses that year alone. At Dr. Nick’s suggestion, Elvis’s next Vegas engagement, in January 1974, would be cut from four weeks to two. Meanwhile, the doctor suggested that Elvis take up racquetball for exercise.

  When Presley began rehearsals at RCA Studios in Los Angeles earlier that month, he auditioned a new bass player, Duke Bardwell. The Louisiana native, a lifelong Elvis fan, was “nervous as a chicken in a yard full of roosters.” As the first one there, he picked up a few tidbits—Elvis had gained some weight since the last tour and had been put on a diet of 500 calories a day, plus injections of “something that sounded like rabbit urine.”

  When the double doors swung open, Bardwell caught one glimpse of Elvis and thought he was “watching a Fellini movie. It was all there . . . the funky glasses, the cape, the little black cheroot, the high collar . . . and a big, nickel-plated pistol, which he pulled out of his belt and handed to one of the boys.

  “We rocked along for an hour or so, and when they decided to take a break, I found myself standing next to Elvis. I said, ‘I know you have a lot of martial arts training, so I was wondering why you carry a gun.’ He put that top lip up a little and said, ‘That’s to handle anything from six feet out. Six feet in, I got it covered.’ I was left pondering that while he walked away, and then he spun around and threw a punch that stopped with one of his big rings actually touching my nose. I never saw it coming, but it left me with a red face, a racing heart, and the realization that he could have missed by a half inch and driven my nose bone through my brain.”

  Elvis’s behavior grew even more reckless once he got to Vegas. Shooting out a chandelier. Firing randomly when he couldn’t find Dr. Ghanem. Narrowly missing Linda Thompson, indisposed in the bathroom, while aiming at a porcelain owl. Some nights, when the pills dulled the nerves in his esophagus, members of the entourage pulled food from his throat to keep him from choking. More than once, his heart stopped beating, and a frenzied Dr. Nick injected the organ with Ritalin to get it pumping again.

  Such rescues became increasingly commonplace. In May 1974, Elvis took a young fan named Paige to Palm Springs after his closing night in Tahoe. Partying on liquid Hycodan, Elvis accidentally overdosed them both, their body temperatures falling dangerously low in Presley’s frigid bedroom. The girl, who had frequently attended his Tahoe shows with her mother, suffered permanent effects.

  “He said to me one time, ‘If I wasn’t a celebrity, I’d be put away, because I’m crazy,’ ” Jackie Kahane recalled. “I saw him wiped out—wiped out—crawling on the bloody floor! I couldn’t bear to watch him. One time my wife said to him, ‘Elvis, you were great tonight.’ And he said, ‘You saw the best imitation of Elvis Presley that he’s ever done.’ ”

  As his client continued deteriorating, the Colonel largely looked away. At least two members of Elvis’s band maintain that Parker didn’t know the extent of the addiction, or how sick Presley was, even as the singer deliberately cut a festering hole in his hand to get stronger drugs. Others say, in retrospect, that the Colonel still didn’t know precisely what to do and hoped Elvis’s doctors would find a way to help him manage his habit. The Colonel himself later said that he could complain only when Elvis did a bad show, but as “every performer has good days and bad days,” and Presley balanced the off-nights with outstanding performances, he mostly stayed silent.

  “I suppose I really began to get concerned at the beginning of 1974,” Parker would later tell Larry Hutchinson, chief investigator to the district attorney general for Memphis. “I got worried. He’d gained too much weight and he looked terrible. Now I spoke out . . . told him he did not look well. He said, ‘No disrespect, Colonel, but I know what I’m doing. Stay out of my personal life.’ ”

  While most people around Presley were puzzled as to why the Colonel—who had ruled almost every aspect of Elvis’s life—stood by as Elvis destroyed himself, Duke Bardwell put it down to Parker’s “lack of humanity . . . because Colonel was the only one that could help.”

  “There’s no question in my mind that the Colonel knew Elvis was dying,” says Byron Raphael, who had been invited back for one of Elvis’s Vegas openings. “And not only did he do nothing to stop it, but in a way, through omission, he was a coconspirator. There was really no strong relationship between the Colonel and Elvis anymore. He had lost his control, and that had to be a terrible thing for him. The real deadliness of Colonel Parker was that he believed the living Elvis had become an impediment to his management style and ambition. He didn’t really want him to die, but he knew that was the only way out, and considering the condition Elvis was in, the best thing that could have happened. Because Elvis was easier to control dead than alive. And more valuable, too, from merchandising alone. So he just st
epped out of the way and let fate take its course. That way, he and Vernon could continue making the kinds of deals that the Colonel always dreamed of making.”

  In planning for the inevitable, the Colonel approached Vernon in 1974 about setting up a company to oversee the merchandising of Elvis’s nonperformance products, as well as Presley’s new music publishing companies. Parker called it Boxcar Enterprises, taking the name from the gambling term for double sixes in the game of craps, and had a logo designed with a pair of dice adorning a railroad car.

  Boxcar would become the sole entity through which Presley’s commercial rights were marketed. But the stock split was distinctly loaded toward the Colonel and his friends, who made up the board of directors and first officers of the corporation. Of the 500 shares issued, Parker owned 200, or 40 percent of the company, with Elvis, Tom Diskin, Freddy Bienstock, and George Parkhill (who was leaving RCA to work for the Colonel) each receiving 75 shares, or 15 percent control.

  The salaries were also similarly skewed. At the outset, the Colonel paid himself $27,650 a year, while Elvis received $2,750. Tom Diskin and George Parkhill earned $4,750 each for 1974, though by 1976 the salaries would fluctuate wildly, with Parker earning $36,000, Diskin $46,448, and Elvis $10,500. Just why the star received so little of the company built around his legend was never explained.

  Parker intended Boxcar to be a record company as well. George Parkhill, who “actually almost lived with the Colonel,” remembered Bruce Banke, was to be in charge of its every-day operation and product distributed through RCA. Yet Boxcar’s one and only long-playing album was Having Fun with Elvis On Stage, an embarrassing spoken-word recording made up solely of Elvis’s between-songs prattle, replete with burps, belches, and bad jokes.

  But the label also pressed one single, “Growing Up in a Country Way,” by what the Colonel called a “green-grass group,” Bodie Mountain Express with Kirk Seeley. While the band hailed from California and regularly played Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland, the incongruous jacket photo showed four mountaineer ish young men in overalls and straw hats holding acoustic instruments. They stood behind the heavier Seeley, who wore a white suit and shoes, and strove mightily to look like Elvis: the Grand Ole Opry meets Vegas.

  Parker signed them, says Kathy Westmoreland, because “he knew he had to have other irons in the fire—everyone pretty much knew that Elvis wasn’t going to make it very long.” Westmoreland, a former beauty contestant, had been picked by the Colonel to be Boxcar Records’ premier artist, and he even offered her a management contract. Like others of the Colonel’s schemes, however, it didn’t fly. Westmoreland balked when she realized that he had no idea how to develop her as a singer. “He knew talent when he saw it, but musically, he didn’t know what was professional and what was not.”

  By now, the disease of gambling had become Parker’s total rationalization in business, his addiction marshalling his every move. At the Hilton—only one establishment around town that held his markers—his debts reached $6 million. He gambled by phone from Palm Springs on the weekends, and in Vegas, if he didn’t feel like going down to the casino, he asked for a roulette wheel to be sent to his rooms.

  “He played stupid—they took the limit off when he came to the tables,” remembered Bitsy Mott, who watched him play the two, three, seventh, and eleventh spot in craps, which promised big odds but rarely delivered. “He didn’t do it with ignorance, but evidently he didn’t mind losing so much money.” The problem, Mott said, was that Parker had planned on leaving Marie well cared for at his death, with the remainder of his estate going to charity. “Now it looks like charity is the casinos.”

  During Elvis’s August 1974 Vegas engagement, his performances had been riddled with long, rambling, and often painfully embarrassing monologues on a variety of personal subjects, including the rumor that the singer was on drugs. If he ever learned who started such a foul story, he said in a slurry rage that shocked all who heard it, “I’ll pull your goddamned tongue out by the roots!”

  One night, he had attempted to introduce the Colonel, who was not in the showroom. The evening before, comedian Bill Cosby had filled in for Presley, who canceled a show from alleged exhaustion. Now, when Parker was nowhere to be found, Presley again went off. “And my manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Where is he? Is the Colonel around anywhere? No, he’s out playing roulette. Don’t kid me. I know what he’s doin’. Him and Cosby are out there talkin’ mash and drinkin’ trash, whatever.”

  The resentment that had built between them in the last several years came to a head the following month. Elvis was blistered about everything, from his indentured slavery to the Colonel’s refusal to accept a $1-million offer for a string of Australian dates the previous spring. Now an incident at the hotel would lead to their biggest fight ever.

  In late August, Elvis learned that the wife of Mario, the Hilton maître d’, was dying of cancer. Presley was fond of Mario, who had served him dinner in his suite every day. At his most delusional, the singer believed he had the power to heal the sick and, with entourage in tow, drove to Mario’s home to treat the woman with the laying on of hands. The hotel didn’t tolerate fraternization between staff and stars, however, and believing that Mario had crossed the line, terminated his employment.

  Elvis was livid when he learned of Mario’s firing in early September and stormed in to confront the Colonel. The hotel had no right to do such a thing, Elvis charged indignantly. But Parker, who disapproved of Mario’s habit of accepting $200 tips from fans for front-row tables, told him it was hotel policy and none of Presley’s business. That night from the stage, Elvis delivered a furious attack on Barron Hilton: “I think you people ought to know that the big shots at the Hilton are an unfeeling, uncaring group . . . Barron Hilton’s . . . not worth a damn.”

  The Colonel was purple with rage when he appeared in Presley’s dressing room after the show. How dare Elvis embarrass the people who had treated them so well! The two got into a shouting match in front of Elvis’s guys, and later continued the tirade upstairs in Presley’s thirtieth-floor suite. There, Elvis did what he’d been threatening to do for years: he fired the Colonel.

  But Parker was not to be outdone. Elvis couldn’t fire him, he bellowed, because he quit. “I’ll call a press conference in the morning and say I’m leaving!” Presley yelled back that he’d call one that night. And so it went, until Parker, so infuriated that his jowls shook as he pounded the floor with his cane, groused that he wanted only to be paid all the singer owed him, and retired to his offices to draw up the bill. Vernon held his head when he saw it: $2 million, by most estimates, though Billy Smith remembers it at five times that amount.

  “How could that be?” Elvis asked his daddy. “Well, he’s got it listed here,” Vernon moaned. “And he says once we pay him, he’ll give up the contract.” The Presleys retaliated with their own handwritten letter, informing the Colonel of all their grievances and terminating their relationship.

  For a week and a half, Elvis and Parker traded insults and accusations through an intermediary, usually Lamar Fike.

  The resolution came when Vernon informed his son that they couldn’t afford to buy out the contract. In fact, before long, they’d have to mortgage Graceland to meet the payroll. “I guess I’m gonna have to go make up with the old bastard,” Elvis told Joe Esposito.

  They met at the Colonel’s Palm Springs house, where Parker, realizing what bad financial straits the singer was in, offered to reduce his percentage until Elvis could get on his feet. The singer tore up his list of grievances, forever missing his chance to break free of the servant-master hold. Still, it was a turning point. “It never got better,” says Billy Smith. “It got worse.”

  At the end of September, Elvis started a new tour but seemed in no shape to be on the road. New keyboard man Tony Brown, who’d first joined the show as part of the gospel quartet Voice, saw Presley fall to his knees as he got out of a limousine in Maryland. In Detroit, he cut a show short at thirty min
utes. Reviewers expressed puzzlement and dismay over his condition, and both Parker and the doctors agreed that the star needed to take five months off. The Colonel wrote to the Hilton that Elvis would not be able to fulfill his commitment in January.

  Elias Ghanem, concerned about Elvis’s intestinal problems, ordered a series of colon tests. The results themselves were not alarming, but increasingly, Presley’s bowels were becoming so irregular that he would travel with a trunk of Fleet enemas and sleep with a towel fashioned around him like a diaper.

  “He would be so damn drugged he couldn’t make it to the bathroom,” recalls Lamar Fike. “Or he’d get in there and be so groggy he’d fall down on the floor. That’s where they’d find him. I used to tell the Colonel, ‘You’re killing this guy! This guy is sick!’ And he’d say, ‘Just as long as he can keep doing the dates, we don’t have to worry. He’ll get himself back together again.’ ”

  But Elvis was only drifting farther from reality. Fearful of odor, yet adverse to frequent bathing, he ingested Nullo deodorant tablets three times a day, believing “they’d kill any type of body odor, from bad breath to butt,” says Billy Smith, who with his wife, Jo, moved into a trailer on the Graceland grounds at Elvis’s insistence. “We used to con him into the bathtub when he was filthy,” adds Fike, “but you didn’t physically make him do anything when he wasn’t loaded. He’d fight you like a hawk.”

  Together, Smith, Dr. Nichopoulos, and the physician’s office nurse, Tish Henley, would attempt to wean Elvis off prescription drugs, particularly after Presley was again admitted to Baptist Memorial Hospital in January 1975 for breathing difficulties. Vernon, who’d recently split from his wife, Dee, lay in the next room with a heart attack. Elvis was more concerned about his father than about his own health and, before his stay was over, charmed some of the nurses into bringing him whatever drugs he desired.