The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  By the next month, a thinner Elvis was ready to return to Vegas. There, in his dressing room on February 18, he met with Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters, who hoped to interest him in a movie role, a remake of A Star Is Born. Jerry Schilling, who was present at the meeting, recalls that Elvis “went for it, definitely.” And Gordon Stoker remembers Presley talking about how excited he was at the prospect.

  The Colonel, however, had several concerns, starting with billing and money. Streisand’s production company, First Artists, offered $500,000, plus 10 percent of profits, but no participation in music or recording rights. Parker responded that Elvis needed $1 million in salary, plus $100,000 in expenses and half of the profits, with a separate deal to be struck for a soundtrack. First Artists balked at the arrangement, and the deal fell apart when Streisand declined to make what Parker considered a suitable counteroffer.

  “Mr. Presley has indicated that he would like to make this movie,” the Colonel wrote to Roger Davis, a William Morris lawyer, “[but] I advised him not to allow this to become a part of making a cheap deal.” Parker would forever be criticized for allowing money to take precedence over revitalizing his client in a challenging film role, something Presley desperately wanted. But he would later shift the blame to Elvis. “There was never no plan for him to do A Star Is Born. He told me to make the contract stiff enough where they would turn it down, ’cause he did not want to do it.”

  Jerry Schilling says that Elvis was disillusioned, “but he knew if negotiations broke down, there was a good reason. He never complained about it that I heard.” Lamar Fike believes “deep down, Elvis knew he couldn’t play the part [but] laid a lot of the blame on the Colonel.”

  Yet others saw a deeper malaise, as if Presley, now forty years old and terrified of aging, realized the film had been his last chance to prove himself as an actor. “People aren’t going to remember me, because I’ve never done anything lasting,” he said to Kathy Westmoreland in a particularly poignant moment. “I’ve never made a classic film to show what I can do.” His one regret, he told Larry Geller, was that he had never won an Oscar.

  To quell his disappointment over A Star Is Born, Elvis buoyed himself with new offers to perform in England and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi dates especially thrilled him, says Lamar Fike, as Adnan and Essam Khashoggi offered $5 million for Elvis to play at the pyramids at Giza. But the Colonel turned it down, only to have the arms billionaires double their offer. “Elvis came out to the bus, and he said, ‘It’s this now,’ and he held up ten fingers.” When the deal fell through, Billy Smith remembers, “you could almost see the blood drain out of [his] face.”

  Presley tried to remain hopeful as other offers—including $1 million a night for Germany and Japan—poured in. Still the Colonel refused, even as he bragged about the money to Mel Ilberman and others at RCA, who thought it odd that he didn’t take Elvis abroad, considering the vast number of records the singer sold there. Sometimes Parker hinted it would happen, and other times he turned churlish. “I was with the Colonel one time when some people from South America came up and offered him two and a half million dollars for one show,” recalls Gaylen Adams, the RCA rep. “And he was just so nonchalant. He said, ‘Well, whenever I need two and a half million dollars, I’ll call you.’ ”

  Yet not only would Elvis soon borrow $350,000 from a Memphis bank, but the Colonel was so desperate for money that he insisted that concert promoters invest advance ticket funds in certificates of deposit under his name. Such profitable foreign dates could have easily solved the pair’s financial problems, and Parker could have gotten around the passport dilemma by having Weintraub and Hulett take Elvis abroad. But the Colonel, fearing loss of control, was too paranoid for that. Lately, he’d heard rumblings that Elvis asked Tom Hulett to manage him if Presley and Parker reached another impasse.

  For now, the performer was trying to make amends. In July, hearing that Elton John had given his manager a $40,000 Rolls-Royce, he bought the Colonel an airplane, a $1.2-million G-1 turboprop—a kind of companion to his own recent acquisition, a Convair 880 jet to be named the Lisa Marie, which he settled on after first attempting to buy exiled financier Robert Vesco’s impounded Boeing 707.

  Parker understood such impetuous and spontaneous shopping, and refused Presley’s gift of the twelve-seat plane, saying he couldn’t afford the taxes. That left Elvis angry, embarrassed, and more determined than ever to dismiss the Colonel for Hulett.

  The talks with Hulett got far enough along, according to David Briggs, Presley’s piano player at the time, that “we all thought it was going to happen.” In fact, the men had already discussed going to Erope.

  Loanne Miller cites two more reasons why Parker balked at going to Europe—his own bad health and the difficulties of doing business with foreign promoters. “Colonel was adamant that the fans not be taken advantage of with extremely high priced tickets, and everyone who wanted [to bring] Elvis overseas wanted to charge the equivalent of $100. Colonel knew that most of the fans didn’t begin to have that kind of money.”

  Whatever the reasons, the fact remains, says Duke Bardwell, that Elvis never realized his dream. “To deny him that was the last nail in the coffin. He didn’t have anything to look forward to, and so he just went deeper and deeper into the things that let him hide.”

  Yet more and more there was no hiding much of anything. On July 20, Elvis embarrassed his backup singers, Kathy Westmoreland and the Sweet Inspirations, with racial and sexual insults on stage in Norfolk, Virginia. Two days later, in North Carolina, he angrily waved a Baretta pistol at Dr. Nichopoulos when the physician tried to control his medications, the gun discharging, and a bullet ricocheting off a chair and striking Dr. Nick in the chest, wounding him only slightly. By the time Elvis arrived in Vegas in August, he was so loopy that he sat down for most of one performance, and finally lay flat on the stage, prompting yet another hospital stay.

  After the Norfolk incident, the Colonel got Vernon on the telephone, according to Mike Crowley, who had just gone to work for Concerts West. “I was there,” says Crowley, the company’s liaison to the Colonel. “He said, ‘You’re going to have to take him off the road for at least six months to clean himself up. He can’t do this to the fans or himself.’ ” Vernon replied that Elvis had to work, Crowley says, and if Parker didn’t want to take him out on the road, they’d find someone else who would.

  “I hate that old man,” Elvis told Billy Smith shortly afterward. His cousin asked him why. Elvis mumbled something about Parker being senile and rude, and Smith pumped him for more. “He said, ‘The Colonel is too concerned with my drug use. I’m tired of the old son of a bitch threatening me, saying he’s not going to book me anymore. Goddamn it, I’ve done performances that I didn’t want to. They booked me in places that I didn’t want to be. We need to stick to our old agreement, where Colonel takes care of the business part, and I take care of the performing. It’ll work a hell of a lot better.’ ”

  Despite such friction, the Colonel still pondered ways to boost his client to new heights. For New Year’s Eve 1975, Parker let Jerry Weintraub take Elvis into the huge Pontiac, Michigan, Silverdome as a substitute for the Rolling Stones, who canceled due to illness. But Elvis made a poor showing, hampered by drugs, mediocre pickup musicians, and weather so frigid that one of the players plugged in an electric blanket. Presley was so late getting to the stage that intermission, following several opening acts, including Parker’s “green-grass” group, lasted more than an hour.

  “He’s really screwed up,” conductor Joe Guercio told Jackie Kahane, who emceed the show. Kahane saw for himself, as the star said he was “scared shitless” as he passed him on the stairs.

  Within minutes, Elvis split his pants and left the stage to change, and when he returned, he was so discombobulated that he kept on singing once the orchestra stopped for the countdown to midnight and the playing of “Auld Lang Syne.” Then when the band went into “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Elvis launched into a
hymn, and segued into “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You,” the last song of the show. “He didn’t do twenty minutes,” Kahane recalled. “I figured they’d kill him.” But the Silverdome booked him back before he even left town, says the comic. “That was the magic of Elvis.”

  The Colonel would tout the appearance as another Elvis “first.” With 62,500 fans in attendance, the show grossed more than $800,000—the biggest sum ever generated by a single artist in a one-night performance. After expenses, Presley and Parker divided $300,000 by their two-thirds/one-third agreement for the night’s work.

  However, twenty-three days later, the Colonel presented Elvis with a document that called for Parker to receive a larger share of such profits, or a 50–50 split on all live appearances.

  “It is hereby understood by both parties,” the contract read, “that these [tours] are a joint venture and that Elvis Presley is responsible for the presentation of his stage performance and Colonel Tom Parker and his representatives [for the] advertising and promotion of the show. . . . This authorization and agreement will run for seven years from [January 22, 1976.]” Elvis signed without hesitation, though he was so strapped for cash that Parker took his old one-third commission for a time, Presley agreeing to pay him back when finances weren’t so tight.

  Now Parker turned his attentions to fulfilling Elvis’s recording obligations, the source of much rancor between the label and the star. Neither the Colonel nor Felton Jarvis had been able to get Elvis into the studio for nearly a year. Finally, in early 1976, the record company saw it had no choice but to take the studio to him.

  On February 2, engineers from RCA Nashville pulled up at Graceland in the big red recording van, which amounted to a mobile studio. Elvis’s guys helped move the hideous Polynesian future out of the den, and the crew rolled the baby grand piano in from the music room. Then they did their best to blunt the acoustics, draping the walls with heavy blankets, nailing plywood sheets together to set up partitions, and bringing in extra carpeting to try to isolate each musician’s sound—a necessity, since Elvis held fast to the old way of recording, where everyone played at once.

  Jarvis had hoped to glean twenty new masters from the sessions, and budgeted more than $74,000 for six nights of recording. But Elvis, popping pills, wearing his cop’s uniform, and ranting about his plot to rub out all the drug dealers in Memphis, gave everyone fits, stretching Felton’s budget by another $30,000. One night, he stopped everything to fly off to Denver for a peanut butter sandwich.

  “Felton would come back and say, ‘It just wasn’t good,’ ” remembers RCA’s Joe Galante. “The company was at the point where it wasn’t a matter of control or direction anymore, but just containment.”

  On the fourth day, as if to police the goings-on, the Colonel himself made an uncustomary appearance, historic both for his showing up at a recording session, and even more for visiting Graceland. David Briggs, who played electric keyboard, flinched as Parker walked in during the playback of a pornographic version of “Hurt,” which Elvis had recorded as a joke for the players. “The Colonel almost shit when he heard it. He said, ‘Get rid of that tape!’ ” though by then too many people already had copies to keep it out of circulation. On the last day, Elvis refused to come downstairs, and the session was canceled.

  Eventually, Presley would lay down enough tracks for the Moody Blue album, though it would require additional recording in October to get just enough songs to pad out an LP. Even then, the sessions dragged on as Elvis played pool and ate chicken.

  “We’d come to the house and wait all day long, sitting in the living room,” remembers Tony Brown, who played piano on the fall sessions. “One night he was singing a track, and he excused himself. We were all there, J.D. [Sumner] and the Stamps, the Sweet Inspirations. Maybe two hours later, he comes downstairs with a hat and a trench coat on and a shotgun, pretending to blow everything up with it. For the next four hours, he explained that gun to us and told us how many guns he owned. And then the session was over.” Another time, he abruptly ended rehearsals when a truck arrived with a delivery of motorcycles.

  To some, Elvis appeared to simply want company. One particularly difficult night, unable to shake the loneliness, he disappeared, and Felton went looking for him, eventually finding him outside in the dark. “Why are you sitting out here, Elvis?” The singer let out a weary sigh. “I’m just so tired of playing Elvis Presley.”

  Things were no better when Elvis went back on tour in the spring. “There was a lot of dissension [in the band] there at the end,” says Tony Brown, “and I think it was frustration over Elvis not being at the top of his game. Some nights it just sounded awful, and we were all looking like fools. We were always thinking, Is he going to be on or off tonight? Ninety percent of the time, he was pretty much off.” Backup singer Sherrill Nielsen was instructed to double Presley on the high notes in case he couldn’t sustain them.

  By now, Elvis’s drug regimen for the road was so specific that Dr. Nichopoulos prescribed it in six stages. Stage one, administered at 3:00 P.M., when Presley arose, consisted of a “voice shot” that Dr. Ghanem concocted, three appetite suppressants, medication for dizziness, a laxative, vitamins and herbs, and testosterone. Stage two, delivered an hour before he went on stage, was made up of another voice shot, a decongestant with codeine, an amphetamine, a pill for vertigo, and Dilaudid. Stage three, timed just before his performance, included more Dilaudid, Dexedrine, and caffeine. And stage four, designed to bring him down after the show, included a pill to lower his blood pressure, some diluted Demerol, a sedative, and an antihistamine.

  At bedtime, Elvis received stage five, a Placidyl, a Quaalude, three additional sedatives, an amphetamine, a blood-pressure pill, and a laxative. If Elvis couldn’t sleep, he advanced to stage six, made up of Amytal, a hypnotic sleeping pill, and more Quaaludes.

  These extreme ups and downs were taking their toll. When private investigator John O’Grady caught Presley’s show in Tahoe that April, “he had locomotive attacks where he couldn’t walk . . . I really thought he was going to die.” O’Grady reported what he’d seen to attorney Ed Hookstratten in L.A. In June, “Hookstratten, Priscilla, and I did everything to get him in the hospital for three or four months,” O’Grady recalled, referring to the drug-treatment program at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego. They also considered taking him to a private hospital on Maui and one in the mid-South.

  By now, Elvis suffered a host of physical problems, from blood clots, to hypoglycemia, to an enlarged heart. His liver was three times its normal size, his colon twisted. In three years, his weight, on a diet of junk food and downers, had zoomed from 175 to 245, something he tried to camouflage with darker jumpsuits and an elastic corset that held in his girth. Secretly, Presley told Kathy Westmoreland he had bone cancer, asking her to keep it quiet: “I don’t want anybody to know how sick I am . . . I don’t want people coming to see a dying man.” But Elton John, visiting him backstage in Maryland in June, saw it anyway. “He had dozens of people around him, supposedly looking after him,” the Englishman later said, “but he already seemed like a corpse.”

  In July, Dr. Ghanem moved Elvis into a wing of his house for one of several “sleep diets,” a kind of rapid detox in which the patient ingests only liquid nourishment and sedatives, slumbering through withdrawal. Elvis’s feces had lately been as white as chalk, a certain sign of liver trouble, probably from ingesting massive amounts of pills. While a host of physicians contributed to Elvis’s problem, Tennessee records would later show that Dr. Nichopoulos alone had supplied a staggering 1,296 amphetamines, 1,891 sedatives, and 910 narcotics for the year 1975. That number would escalate dramatically for each of the next two years.

  When Elvis returned to Memphis, he was withdrawn, sullen, depressed. Nothing became of the plan to hospitalize Presley because no one enforced it. Certainly not his manager, who couldn’t forget his own institutionalization forty-three years before, nor the spineless Vernon, and least of all the Memp
his Mafia, which was powerless to do much of anything.

  The entourage was largely made up of younger men now—Dean Nichopoulos, son of Dr. Nick, and Elvis’s stepbrothers David, Billy, and Rick Stanley, the latter of whom had been arrested in August 1975 at Methodist Hospital in Memphis, trying to use a forged prescription for Demerol. Too often, they looked at the job as a paycheck and reflected glory. Joe Esposito lived in California. Jerry Schilling, also on the West Coast, had little contact with Elvis anymore. And Presley was somewhat estranged from Red and Sonny West for, among other reasons, their rough handling of fans, one of whom was bringing a lawsuit against the star.

  Parker himself felt shut out of Elvis’s life, and complained about it in a letter to him on June 16, more than a week after the singer ended an eleven-day tour.

  “As I told Vernon today, I have not heard from anyone since I got back, neither from Sonny or from any other member of your staff. I just wanted you to know in the event you feel that they are in contact with me, but they are not.”

  Still, on the whole, whether out of depression or compulsion, the Colonel seemed less concerned with managerial vision than continuing to play the numbers.

  “I was gambling at the Las Vegas Hilton,” remembers Mike Growney, general manager of the Gold Coast Casino, “and there was one man sitting there, and I noticed that a security guard would keep coming over and bringing a stack of $100 chips. He would put the whole pile down and bet the number, and then they would spin the wheel. Then the security guard would bring over another stack of chips. And it’s $10,000 at a time. I said to the floor man, ‘What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘That’s Colonel Parker . . . He’s lost a million dollars.’ ”

  Despite such willful extravagance, the Colonel kept an eye peeled for anyone who tried to fleece him out of a dollar. Which was how he met Joe Shane, then a twenty-six-year-old merchandiser from Paducah, Kentucky, who’d sold thousands of Elvis Presley “Aloha from Hawaii” T-shirts by running ads in TV Guide and The National Enquirer. Shane was just about to close a deal with JC Penney’s 1,900 stores when he ran into a snag: he didn’t own the licensing rights.