The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  “I understand you’re trying to sell some merchandise of my boy,” Parker rasped into the phone.

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  “Do you pay me any money for that?”

  “No, sir, I do not.”

  “Well,” the manager said evenly, “I think you’d better start.”

  If the young merchandiser wanted to continue selling Elvis shirts, he needed to give the Colonel 25 percent of retail. Shane gulped—the usual fee was 10 percent of wholesale—and agreed. “Then you’d better get out here,” Parker beckoned from California. “Let’s put this deal together.”

  “The Colonel prefers to give his contracts to people who’re hungry, people on the way up fast but still not at the top, people stretched a little thin and willing to take a smaller piece of the pie,” as one of the Colonel’s former associates explains.

  Shane fit the bill. “We had a nice camaraderie because he saw some carny in me,” he says. And Parker, who never attempted mass merchandising through magazines, was fascinated that Shane had been able to sell 1,500 shirts a day from an ad. But his big concern was why he didn’t sell more. A few days after they struck their deal, Parker took him to the William Morris Agency and signed the papers to make Shane the only other licensed Elvis merchandiser in the world.

  As Parker forged a new alliance in California, an old one was breaking up in Memphis. On the morning of July 13, 1976, Vernon placed three phone calls—the first to Red West, the second to Sonny West, and the third to Dave Hebler, one of Elvis’s newer bodyguards, who’d been hired mainly for his karate expertise. All three were being terminated with one week’s pay. Vernon explained that it had been a difficult year and he needed to trim the payroll, but the real reasons ran more to the pending lawsuit and the Wests’ tendency to cause friction among the group. Red, who had been Elvis’s friend and protector since high school, was particularly stunned not to have received the news from Elvis himself. Presley, too, was upset but, not knowing what to do or say, remained silent.

  Ten days later, as Elvis began his fifth tour of the year, his stage moves were little more than perfunctory, his voice worn and tired. The Colonel, distraught at reports of a string of bad shows, confronted Elvis in Hartford and again bellowed that if Elvis didn’t shape up fast, he was in danger of losing not only his fans, but his Vegas contract and recording deal. Presley, shaken by the encounter, sought out Tom Hulett for solace. “You are the biggest entertainer there is, and everybody loves you,” Hulett said reassuringly. But Hulett, too, knew that Elvis couldn’t go on much longer.

  In Houston, on August 28, Elvis gave such a dismaying show that critic Bob Claypool described it as a “depressingly incoherent, amateurish mess served up by a bloated, stumbling and mumbling figure who didn’t act like ‘the King’ of anything, least of all rock ’n’ roll.” For more than twenty years, Claypool wrote, Elvis had been breaking hearts. “Saturday afternoon in the Summit—in a completely new and unexpected way—he broke mine.”

  “It was really bad,” says Lamar Fike, who’d replaced Sonny West as security chief. “We almost lost him in Houston. But nobody would say it, even though it was just tearing us up, ripping us to shreds. I felt like some sort of voice in the wilderness. I said, ‘God almighty, guys, look what’s happening here! He’s going on us!’ ”

  Larry Geller was equally disturbed but, like Fike, found most of the people around Elvis in denial. “It took him more and more time to get ready for the show. I would go to people’s rooms and literally cry. I’d say, ‘Look at him. He’s sick and something’s got to be done.’ And they’d say, ‘No, man, in twenty years Elvis is going to look better than he does today. He’s going to pull out of it.’ ”

  But Dr. Nichopoulos knew better and, with the help of Billy Smith, stepped up the efforts to quell Elvis’s craving, diluting his shots, draining his capsules, and substituting placebos for the harder pills, delivered as “attack packets” at appointed hours by Elvis’s stepbrothers. Like any drug addict, Presley caught on quick, demanding more and stronger stuff. If Nichopoulos refused, he’d fly to Vegas or L.A. to find another source.

  Despite Elvis’s physical condition and faltering shows, the public had no knowledge of the extent of Presley’s drug habit, believing he was simply ill. All that was about to change.

  In September, rumors swirled that Red, Sonny, and Dave Hebler were writing a book about their life with Elvis, intending to reveal his terrible deterioration as a kind of wake-up call. Jackie Kahane had encouraged members of the group to go to the newspapers months before. “What would the point be?” Joe Guercio asked him. “To save his life! He’s on dope, he’s on everything!” Kahane said. “Forget it,” Guercio told him. “You’d look like an ass.”

  “When Elvis found out about the book,” Larry Geller remembers, “he was so hurt. We were in Mobile, Alabama. I can still see him, sitting in bed, with tears running down his cheeks. He said, ‘How could these guys do this to me? They could have anything they want.’ He wasn’t so worried about how it would impact him, but rather his family. He kept saying, ‘How is it going to affect my father and my little girl? When she grows up, what is she going to think about her daddy?’ ”

  Through Vernon, Elvis asked Parker to have the book stopped. The manager hired John O’Grady, who learned that the tell-all was being cowritten by Steve Dunleavy of the tabloid Star, and offered the Wests and Hebler $50,000 to cancel the project. But the bodyguards refused. Nothing more was ever done.

  Geller believes the Colonel didn’t find a way to stop the book because he wanted it to be published. Fike says that Parker tried to halt it, but by the time he learned of its existence, the authors had already signed their contracts. Elvis, however, believed the matter had been taken care of, though his obsession with the book caused him to overindulge his love of fattening foods, his weight ballooning even higher.

  When he returned to Las Vegas that December, Elvis was so large that Bruce Banke couldn’t believe his appearance (“I said, ‘He’s putting us on. That’s got to be padding in there.” His belt buckle was down below his belly”). He injured his ankle on stage, railed about his frustrations, cursed the “tinny” microphone, and one night, told a perplexed audience, “I hate Las Vegas.” Bill Burk of the Memphis Press-Scimitar wrote what everyone was thinking but few would say: “One walks away wondering how much longer it can be before the end comes.”

  By the last months of ’76, Linda Thompson, tired of watching Elvis self-destruct and “feeling that I wasn’t worth anything without him,” had all but phased herself out of his life. In November, he met twenty-year-old Ginger Alden, another dark-haired Memphis beauty queen who currently held the title of Miss Mid-South Fair. Ginger reminded Elvis of a young Priscilla, but several factors hampered the courtship, including - Elvis’s physical condition, the twenty-two-year difference in their ages, and Ginger’s feisty independence.

  Unlike other of Elvis’s girlfriends, Ginger refused to build her life around Presley’s, preferring to be with her friends much of the time instead of spending the night at Graceland or going on tours. In January 1977, when she was to accompany Elvis to Nashville for a recording session, she changed her mind at the last minute and refused to go. Elvis, moody and angry, checked in to a Nashville hotel, but never made an appearance at the studio, complaining of a sore throat.

  He returned to Memphis the next day, prompting the Colonel to once more lay down the law: “Get off your tail [and] fulfill your commitment, or there will be no more tours.”

  The canceled recording session made its way into the Nashville Banner, where a columnist reported Presley’s aides “contend the singer’s new girlfriend . . . [is] absolutely running him ragged.” Later that month, Elvis presented Ginger with an 11.5-karat diamond engagement ring. Then in March, he took her family on vacation in Hawaii, bringing along several of the guys.

  Larry Geller was among them. When the men were alone, Geller spoke to Elvis about his health, advising him on his diet and sug
gesting foods and vitamins to strengthen his immune system. Elvis needed rest, he told him, and the singer vowed to take off six months to a year and come back to the islands to relax and restore his well-being. He also pledged to make other changes.

  “He was adamant about firing the Colonel,” says Geller. “I’d never heard him so resolute, and I’m convinced he was going to get rid of him.” In several conversations, Presley brought up the ’74 incident, saying he was sorry he hadn’t gone through with it then. “He even had the time picked out when he was going to make his move, and he was certain he wanted Tom Hulett to manage his career. He said, ‘Larry, I promise you, this is exactly what I’m going to do.’ ” He would see to it after the last tour wound down in August.

  Several days later, Elvis cut his vacation short after suffering an eye infection, and when he went back on the road at the end of the month, he did not appear well. Billy Smith could barely get him on the plane. In Alexandria, Louisiana, on March 30, he stumbled through “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” and finally improvised his own prophetic lyric: “Wise men know/ When it’s time to go . . .”

  The next day, in Baton Rouge, Elvis woke up feeling ill, and summoned Dr. Nick, Joe Esposito, and Larry Geller to his suite. “I told Daddy and Nick I’m sick, man, I can’t go on tonight,” he moaned. “I’m canceling the rest of the tour.” But Geller had obtained galley sheets of the West and Hebler book through a fan, and knew that the tabloids would see a cancellation as verification of the story. The awful details were already beginning to appear in the British press.

  Presley’s entourage had kept the news from the star, but now Geller thought he should hear it. Elvis exploded in anger (“Get me the Colonel!”) and was so traumatized that Dr. Nick felt the need to sedate him. When he awakened, he insisted on flying back to Memphis and going into the hospital, as much for insurance reasons as health.

  The Colonel would add the canceled dates on to a later tour, but the crowd in Baton Rouge would never forget the bizarre way Parker handled the last-minute cancellation. “He had us go on stage and take our places as if Elvis was coming out,” remembers Kathy Westmoreland. “Then he faked a blackout, and whisked us out of the building into police cars. Tom Hulett said they were trying to get everybody out without getting hurt. In fact, there was a riot afterwards.”

  Three weeks later, with Ginger in tow, Elvis was back on the road for his third tour of the year. One review described the performer as “seeming not to care.” A Detroit columnist wrote, “He stunk the joint out.”

  Although a few industry insiders knew the relationship between Parker and Presley had broken down, perhaps irretrievably, a story in the Nashville Banner in late April came as a surprise to most. The Colonel had put Elvis’s management contract up for sale, and a group of West Coast businessmen had expressed interest, the paper reported, quoting sources in Nashville, Memphis, and Los Angeles.

  The reasons were said to be the Colonel’s failing health and financial problems, particularly his high-rolling habits. Parker and Presley had reportedly “not spoken in two years,” wrote columnist Bill Hance.

  By the next day, Parker, in St. Paul to advance the singer’s concert, was on the phone to dispute the story, telling Nashville’s morning paper, the Tennessean, he had “absolutely no plans to sell Elvis Presley. . . . I’m here working with Elvis, I’m in good health, and I don’t have any debts—at least none that I can’t pay.” Joe Esposito, who parroted the Colonel’s words, also dismissed the report that the two men didn’t talk. “They’re on the road together all the time, and the Colonel just spoke to Elvis yesterday.”

  What prompted the story isn’t known, but clearly Parker was exploring new directions, including one he had shied away from for so long. Around this same time, he contacted Peter Grant, the corpulent manager of the British rock group Led Zeppelin, whose U.S. dates were handled through Concerts West. Could Grant promote a European tour for Elvis, since Parker was too busy stateside to accompany his star? They made plans to talk about it after Presley’s last shows of the summer.

  But in truth, Elvis was not up to performing. By May, on his fourth tour of 1977, he wore the same white, Aztec-calendared jumpsuit thirteen days in a row. It was the only one that fit him.

  In Knoxville, a doctor who saw Elvis backstage reported that “he was pale, swollen—he had no stamina.” Then in Landover, Maryland, he left the stage, tossing two microphones to the floor, to answer “nature’s call.” A week later, in Baltimore, he again walked off for thirty minutes. “At the finale,” Variety wrote, “there was no ovation, and patrons exited shaking their heads and speculating on what was wrong with him.”

  Presley himself knew the signs. Not long before, he’d invited the songwriter Ben Weisman to come up to the suite in Vegas. Elvis, his face puffy, sat down at the piano. “Ben,” he said, “there’s a song I love, called ‘Softly As I Leave You.’ But it’s not about a man leaving a lady. It’s about a man - who’s going to die.”

  Before the taping of a CBS-TV concert special in Rapid City, South Dakota, Elvis showed Kathy Westmoreland a blue jumpsuit he planned to wear that evening. “I’m going to look fat in that faggy little suit,” he told her, “but I’ll look good in my coffin.” Westmoreland found herself unable to say a word, “because I knew that it was inevitable and could come at any moment. He wanted me to wear white, not black, at the funeral.”

  Westmoreland consoled herself with the news that after the fifth tour ended in June, Elvis would have the entire month of July to himself. Though the Colonel often gave the band very little notice, the next dates weren’t scheduled to start until August 17, and Lisa Marie was coming for a two-week visit. Ordinarily, Elvis liked to work, and other than the times he was ill, he never thought of Parker as pushing him to tour, even asking him to book more shows when the Colonel suggested he slow down. But now he knew he needed time off.

  “I’m so tired,” he told Westmoreland. “I don’t want to go out on this next tour, but I have to. The Colonel owes $8 million.”

  Elvis, too, was feeling the pinch. Recently, he had issued Priscilla a deed of trust to Graceland, guaranteeing her nearly half a million dollars still owed on the divorce settlement.

  Lamar Fike also looked forward to Elvis’s last show before the midsummer break, which fell in Indianapolis on June 26, the Colonel’s sixty-eighth birthday. Like Geller, Fike had encouraged the singer to go to Hawaii and change everything he hated about his life. Now Fike wondered if it might be too late. On stage, Elvis had summoned new strength, giving his best performance in months, and ending his eighty-minute show with impassioned renditions of “Hurt” and “Bridge over Troubled Water.” But moments before, he’d looked so fatigued, as if the life had already drained out of him.

  “He’ll never see the snow fly,” Fike told the entourage. “I promise you.”

  The Colonel had seen irrefutable evidence of Elvis’s dire condition himself as late as May 21, in Louisville. Larry Geller was in the anteroom of Elvis’s hotel suite, waiting for Dr. Nick to finish administering the drugs that would transform Presley from a sick, lethargic man to an energized performer. Suddenly, Geller heard a loud knock at the door. He answered it to find an angry Parker leaning on his cane. Geller was shocked—never had he known the Colonel to come to Elvis’s room on tour.

  “Where is he?” Parker demanded.

  Geller said he would let Elvis know he was there. “No, I’m going in,” the Colonel said curtly, brushing Geller as he passed.

  The Colonel opened the door to a devastating sight—Elvis, semiconscious and moaning, with Dr. Nick working frantically to revive him, kneeling at his bedside, dunking the singer’s head into a bucket of ice water.

  The Colonel banged the door behind him. For a moment, Geller’s heart sank. Then he felt relieved. Finally, the Colonel had seen Elvis at his worst. Surely now he would talk to him, pull him off the road, take steps to get him help. Yet ninety seconds later, the manager thundered out. Larry rose. “You liste
n to me!” Parker shouted, stabbing the air with his cane. “The only thing that’s important is that he’s on that stage tonight! Nothing else matters!”

  And then the Colonel was gone.

  “I thought, Oh my God!,” Geller remembers. “What about Elvis? Doesn’t Colonel understand that this man is in dire straits? I was horrified. I can only surmise he acted out of stupidity and denial. But still, how could he be so callous?”

  The answer to that question was one that almost no one knew, with origins deep in Parker’s carny past. As a young man on the circuit, one of his jobs had been to befriend the geek, the pathetic dipsomaniac who sat in a pit and bit the heads off live chickens in exchange for a daily bottle. Periodically, the poor soul would run off and hide in the fields, unable to face another bloody performance. Parker would find him, shuddering and desperate, then wave the bottle as bait and reward, and bring him back to do the show.

  “Parker and Presley represent the convergence of two characters from carnival culture: the poor country boy who grabs the brass ring and the mysterious stranger who fleeces the innocent,” Richard Harrington wrote in The Washington Post.

  But Parker’s gambling had morphed him into a combination of the two, and then some. As Elvis prepared for his next tour in August 1977, the Colonel’s gambling debts at the Las Vegas Hilton reached a staggering $30 million.

  It is in that sad fact that the lines begin to blur between the geek, his keeper, and the chicken, dancing or otherwise.

  In the late 1950s, Parker invited Byron Raphael to Grauman’s Chinese Theater for a showing of his favorite movie. Produced in 1947 as gritty and disturbing film noir, Nightmare Alley perfectly captured the sordid netherworld of the small-time carnival. In the picture’s evocative opening, Tyrone Power, as the ambitious young sideshow hustler Stanton Carlisle, encounters his first gloaming geek. At the sound of frenzied squawking, the crowd gasps, and a shaken Carlisle asks the show owner: “How does a guy get so low? Is he born a geek?”