The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  By the end of the film, after relying on fakery and illusion to climb to Chicago’s supper-club-and-society level, Carlisle learns the horrific answer first hand. The inevitable fall of “Stanton the Great” results from his unyielding need to manipulate and mislead, and from his inability to separate himself from the marks he deceives.

  “The fascination Colonel had with that picture was unbelievable,” remembers Raphael. “He sat there so engrossed that he never moved, though God knows how many times he’d seen it. He talked about it all the time, for years.”

  Parker identified with the dark morality tale not just for the haunting, vulgar realism of the sideshow milieu, with its depictions of mitt camps and Tarot card readings, but because the character was very nearly him.

  As drawn in William Lindsay Gresham’s potent novel, Stanton Carlisle began life with a too-strict father, a deep love for animals, and the knowledge that he’s a bit too fond of his mother. As he slips into a life of deception and fraud, he causes the accidental death of a friend and, later, in a miracle worker “spook” scam gone wrong, brings on the stroke of a client he’s bilked out of a fortune. Lost and desperate, with the police on his trail, Carlisle sinks into the violent underworld of the fugitive, riding the rails and living with hobos. But in his eventual return to the carnival, he sentences himself to a living damnation he could not have imagined, as the most debased of the sideshow freaks.

  “I never thought Colonel would wind up as the geek,” says Raphael. “But in becoming the most horrendous of compulsive gamblers in his later years, that’s exactly what he did. He turned into the very thing he despised. All those years, nobody could touch him, and so he destroyed himself.”

  In the movie’s frightening finale, Carlisle, wild-eyed, screaming, and deep in the grips of psychosis (“The geek’s gone nuts!” yells an onlooker), finds himself chased by a mob with a straightjacket. McGraw, the carny boss who’d hired him only that morning, stops with a roustabout to watch. For the first time, the boss recognizes his new geek as the famed “mentalist” of old.

  “Well, he certainly fooled me,” mutters McGraw. “Stanton. Stanton the Great.”

  “How can a guy get so low?” asks the roustabout, echoing what the young Carlisle said long ago.

  McGraw, who’s seen it all, shakes his head. “He just reached too high.”

  19

  “WE THINK HE OD’D”: THE DEATH OF ELVIS

  ON the sweltering evening of August 15, 1977, Elvis Presley slipped out of his blue silk lounging pajamas and, with the help of his cousin Billy Smith, climbed into a black sweat suit emblazoned with a Drug Enforcement Agency patch, a white silk shirt, and a pair of black patent boots, which he wore unzipped due to the puffy buildup of fluid in his ankles.

  At 10:30, after a night of motorcycle riding with girlfriend Ginger Alden, the singer stuffed two .45-caliber automatic pistols in the waistband of his sweatpants. Then he donned his blue-tinted, chrome sunglasses to slide behind the wheel of his Stutz automobile. With Alden, Smith, and Smith’s wife, Jo, in tow, Elvis steered his way to the office of his dentist, Dr. Lester Hofman, in East Memphis. A crown on Presley’s back tooth needed fixing, and he wanted to tend to it before he left the following evening for Portland, Maine, the first date of a twelve-day tour.

  When the couples returned to Graceland around midnight, Elvis and Ginger went upstairs, and the Smiths retired to their trailer. Sometime around 2:00 A.M., Elvis spoke with Larry Geller. Geller recalls his friend was “in a very good mood, looking forward to the tour, and making plans for the future.” Around 4:00 A.M., Elvis still felt energetic enough for a game of racquetball, and phoned Billy and Jo to join him and Ginger. As the foursome went out the back door and down the concrete walkway to Elvis’s racquetball building, a light rain began to fall.

  “Ain’t no problem,” Elvis said, and put out his hands as if to stop it. Miraculously, Smith remembers, the rain let up. “See, I told you,” Elvis said. “If you’ve got a little faith, you can stop the rain.”

  Despite his sudden burst of energy, Elvis was exhausted from several days of a Jell-O diet, the latest in a series of desperate attempts to trim him down enough to fit into his stage costumes. He tired quickly on the court, and the couples resorted more to cutting up than concentrating on their game. After ten minutes, they took a break, then returned to the court. But they quit a second time when Elvis misjudged a serve and hit himself hard in the shin with his racquet.

  Limping into the lounge, Presley fixed himself a glass of ice water and then moved to the piano and began singing softly, ending with “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

  Afterward, upstairs in the house, Smith washed and dried his cousin’s hair. Presley again obsessed about the bodyguard book, Elvis: What Happened?, which had hit the stands two weeks before. Yelling wildly, out of his head, Elvis fumed he’d bring Red, Sonny, and Dave Hebler to Graceland, where he’d kill them himself and dispose of their bodies. Then his mood dimmed, and he rehearsed a speech he planned to give from the stage if his fans, shocked to learn their idol spent $1 million a year on drugs and doctors, turned on him in concert. “They’ve never beat me before,” he said, “and they won’t beat me now.” Billy knew what he meant: “Even if I have to get up there and admit to everything.”

  Numb, frightened, and weary from dread, he cried pitifully, shaking. Billy petted him, cooed baby talk to him. “It’s okay,” Billy soothed. “It’s going to be all right.” As Smith went out the door, Elvis, the cousin who was more like a big brother, turned to him. “Billy . . . son . . . this is going to be my best tour ever.” At 7:45 A.M., the singer took his second “attack packet” of four or five sleeping pills within two hours. The third would come shortly afterward. He’d had no food since the day before.

  Sometime around 8:00 A.M., Elvis climbed into bed with Ginger. As she recalled, she awakened in the tomblike room—always kept at a chilly sixty degrees—to find her aging boyfriend too keyed up to sleep, preoccupied with the tour. “Precious,” he said, “I’m going to go in the bathroom and read for a while.” Ginger stirred. “Okay, but don’t fall asleep.”

  “Don’t worry,” he called back. “I won’t.”

  Behind the bathroom door, Elvis picked up A Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus, a book about the Shroud of Turin, and waited for his pharmaceutical escort to slumber.

  As Elvis’s day was ending in Memphis, the Colonel’s was already in full swing in Portland, the big man holed up in the Dunfey Sheraton and riding herd on Tom Hulett, Lamar Fike, George Parkhill, and Tom Diskin to oversee every detail of Elvis’s two-day engagement there. Fike had flown in from Los Angeles on the red-eye and immediately went to work setting up the security and arranging the hotel rooms for the band and crew. Then he grabbed a quick bite to eat and went to bed.

  Just before noon, Billy Smith walked over to Graceland and spoke with entourage member Al Strada, who was packing Elvis’s wardrobe cases. Smith inquired as to whether anyone had seen the boss. Al said no, that Elvis wasn’t to be awakened until 4:00 P.M. Billy wondered aloud if one of the Stanley brothers had checked on Elvis and started up the stairs to do so himself. No, if they ain’t heard from him, God, let him rest, he thought. He needs it.

  At 2:20, Ginger turned over in Elvis’s huge bed and found it empty. Had he never come back to sleep? She noticed his reading light was still on and thought it odd. Ginger knocked on the bathroom door. “Elvis, honey?” No response. She turned the knob and went inside. Elvis was slumped on the floor, angled slightly to the left. He was on his knees, his hands beneath his face, in a near praying position, his silk pajama bottoms bunched at his feet. Inexplicably, he had fallen off the toilet and somehow twisted himself into the grotesque form. But why hadn’t he answered? Ginger called again. “Elvis?” He lay so still, so unnaturally still.

  Now Ginger bent down to touch him. He was cold, his swollen face buried in the red shag carpet, blood dotting the nostrils of his flattened nose, his tongue, nearly severed
in two, protruding from clenched teeth. His skin was mottled purple-black. She forced open an eye. A cloudy blue pupil stared back at her lifelessly.

  Elvis Presley was dead at the age of forty-two.

  Not wanting to believe the worst, a frightened Ginger pressed the intercom, which rang in the kitchen. Mary Jenkins, the cook and maid, took the call. Breathless, Ginger asked, “Who’s on duty?”

  “Al is here,” Mary answered, and passed the phone to Strada. “Al, come upstairs!” Ginger said. “I need you! Elvis has fainted!” Strada rushed upstairs, took one look, and with fear in his voice, called downstairs for Joe Esposito. Joe bounded up the stairs and turned the body, stiff with rigor mortis, on its side.

  Already Esposito knew the awful truth, but still he called for an ambulance. Then, after some delay, he got Dr. Nick on the phone with the news that Elvis had suffered a heart attack. With the ambulance screaming through Whitehaven, Joe called down to Vernon’s office. Suddenly, the upstairs was filled with people: Charlie Hodge crying and begging Elvis not to die; Vernon, recuperating from his own heart attack six months earlier, collapsing on the floor; nine-year-old Lisa Marie, visiting from California, peering wide-eyed into the scene.

  “What happened to him?” asked Ulysses Jones, one of the emergency medical techs. Al blurted out the truth. “We think he OD’d.”

  The paramedics were puzzled. Why was everyone so emphatic that they bring back a man who was so obviously dead, and who had been dead for hours? Who was he, anyway? Jones was shocked to learn the answer. The body was so discolored, he later said, he thought he’d been working on a black man.

  At Baptist Memorial Hospital, the emergency team did its best. But no measure, whether frantic or heroic, could save Graceland’s master. Finally, Dr. Nick, his face orchid white, entered the private waiting room, where Esposito sat with Hodge, Strada, Smith, and David Stanley. “He’s gone,” said the doctor who had prescribed 19,000 pills for Elvis in less than three years. “He’s no longer here.”

  The men cried shamelessly and held on to each other for support. Dr. Nick asked Maurice Elliott, the hospital spokesman, not to make the announcement until he’d given Vernon the terrible truth. Worrying that the old man’s heart might not be able to take such a shock, Dr. Nick immediately left for Graceland to perform the crushing duty.

  Vernon, suspecting that his son would not be coming home, had already prepared Lisa Marie. When the final news came, Elvis’s daughter dialed her father’s old girlfriend. “It’s Lisa,” she said into the phone. Linda Thompson cooed. “I know who it is, you goobernickel.” Then came the words that Thompson had dreaded so long: “Linda,” said the small voice, “Daddy’s dead.”

  As Dr. Nick left the hospital, Joe asked Maurice Elliott for a private line. The public relations man led him into a conference room off the ER. There, Esposito called the Colonel in Maine. George Parkhill answered, and gave the phone to his boss.

  “I have something terrible to tell you,” Joe began, his voice wavering. “Elvis is dead.”

  Thirty seconds, maybe more, passed before Parker spoke.

  “Okay, Joe,” he said, his voice flat, devoid of emotion. “We’ll be there as soon as we can. You just do what you have to do. Tell Vernon we’ll be there. We have a lot of work.” Esposito sensed that beneath the calm, the Colonel was shaken. “Like me,” Joe later wrote, “he would do whatever had to be done: cancel the tour and let everyone know it was all over.”

  Lamar Fike was still sleeping when Tom Hulett banged on his door. “Lamar!” he called. “The Colonel wants to see you right now.” Fike was groggy and spent. “Fuck him,” he yelled back. “I’m tired. I’m sleepy.” Hulett persisted. “Lamar, answer the door!”

  Fike slipped the chain off. Hulett had his head down. “I said, ‘What’s the matter with you, Tom?’ ” he remembers. “Hulett said, ‘You need to come down to the room and talk to the Colonel right now.’ ”

  The hotel was built in the round. “I remember walking around the circle to Colonel’s room. I went in, and he was sitting on the side of the bed, hanging up the phone from Joe. Everybody was looking down at the floor.

  “I said, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ I had my arm on the television set. Colonel got up and walked over to me, and stood maybe ten inches away from my face. He said, ‘Lamar, you need to go to Memphis and meet with Mr. Vernon. Elvis is dead.’ ”

  Fike was shattered but hardly surprised. Only the coldness of Parker’s attitude shocked the aide.

  “I said, ‘That’s it?’ Colonel said, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ I said, ‘Well, it took you awhile, but you finally ran him into the ground, didn’t you?’ ” Parker challenged him: “What did you say?” And Fike was resolute. “I said, ‘You heard what I said. He couldn’t run anymore, could he?’ ” Lamar looked around the room, searching the faces of the others, his anger building. “ ‘I kept telling you guys, man. None of you listened to me.’ ”

  That night, the advance team would go downstairs to dinner as planned, though no one felt like eating. “I don’t want anyone making any scenes,” Parker ordered. “We’re going to show respect, and we’re going to put on the best face possible.”

  In Las Vegas, Parker’s Hilton contact, Bruce Banke, was in his office when he got a call from Robert Macy, a friend at the Associated Press. Macy told him he’d just gotten a bulletin that Banke needed to hear. The PR man recognized the background sounds—four bells on the Teletype machine, to signal a major news story—and said, “Bob, I hope to hell World War III has just broken out.” Macy told him no, it was worse.

  Banke found Barron Hilton meeting with the hotel’s senior officers. “I must have been just pale as a sheet, because I walked in and the entire meeting stopped and everybody turned around and stared at me.” Hilton said, “What is it, Bruce?” Banke had just stopped speaking when the phone rang. It was the Colonel calling from Portland.

  The show plane, which had departed from Los Angeles, having stopped in Las Vegas to pick up Joe Guercio, was en route to the East Coast. Suddenly, the pilot announced that the plane would land in Pueblo, Colorado. Jackie Kahane remembers how puzzled everyone was.

  Marty Harrell, the trombone player and Guercio’s assistant, got off in Pueblo and went inside the terminal, where he found a note to call the Colonel. Parker minced no words and gave him his orders to make the announcement and fly back to Vegas. Drawn, Harrell put down the receiver and reboarded the aircraft. “Would everybody get off the plane?” he asked. Only the Sweet Inspirations’ Myrna Smith refused. “Please,” Harrell begged. “I have something to say, and I can only say it once.”

  Smith obliged, and Harrell, standing on the runway, cleared his throat. “I hate to tell you guys this, but Elvis is dead.”

  Several of the men began softly crying. Myrna Smith took off running around the airfield in a wild frenzy of grief, only to be caught and sedated with Valium. Kahane tried to call his wife. Both his phone lines were busy, so he dialed the operator to break through for an emergency. “The operator was crying,” he remembers. “She said, ‘Do you know that Elvis Presley died?’ The people in the show were the last to know.”

  While the most devoted of Presley’s fans began a pilgrimage to Memphis, the Colonel booked a flight to New York. “I can’t waste time mourning,” he explained later. “There’s plenty of people ready to come in and cut the ground from under our feet.”

  After canceling the tour, Parker flew to New York to meet with RCA, for whom his client had sold more tapes and records than any other performer in recording history. The old carny rightly expected that every store in the country would sell out of Presley product within twenty-four hours. Now he put the squeeze on RCA to keep a rich river of Elvis records churning.

  Next he met with Harry “the Bear” Geisler, a forty-eight-year-old former steelworker and third-grade dropout who had just made a fortune overnight with Farrah Fawcett posters and T-shirts, putting up $300,000 for the rights in early 1977 and paying out some $400,000
in royalties to Fawcett’s agent that summer. His company, Factors Etc., Inc., had also acquired the merchandising licenses for tie-ins for the movies Star Wars and Rocky. The Bear was a hustler to be reckoned with.

  In preparing a likeness of an artist and selling it, from Eddy Arnold on, Parker may have innovated concert merchandising, but mass merchandising was beyond him, which is why he’d brought Hank Saperstein into the split in 1956. Now he needed Geisler to do the same.

  But the Colonel also wanted to include his young friend Joe Shane, the Kentucky merchandiser he’d taken under his wing and given the exclusive worldwide rights for the name of Elvis Presley. “He knew exactly what was going to transpire,” Shane recalls, “and he was wise enough to know that he couldn’t stop it. I got him on the phone as soon as I heard Elvis was gone, and he said, ‘Joe, this thing is gonna get out of control. You better get protected.’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”

  Shane played tough with all the fly-by-night companies that called, but he knew scaring off Geisler was out of the question.

  “The Bear said, ‘We’re not asking you, we’re telling you that starting tonight, we’re gonna put out a line of Elvis Presley posters and iron-on transfers,’ ” Shane remembers. “We got into a little shouting match, and I said, ‘I hope you sell a billion, because I’ve got the rights.’ ” And he said, ‘I will sell a billion, and you won’t get anything.’ He was really gruff.”

  On August 17, as tens of thousands of fans from around the world lined up in front of Graceland and down Elvis Presley Boulevard, snaking up the driveway for a last look at the famous face laid out in the huge copper casket in Graceland’s foyer, Shane and the Colonel talked again. They agreed to meet at the William Morris office in Los Angeles in the days following Elvis’s funeral to finalize the contract with Geissler. Shane would assign his rights to Factors for a one percent royalty. “I couldn’t police the industry, and he could, and that was his big selling point.” But as part of the deal, the twenty-seven-year-old Shane would take over the merchandising of Factors’ rock-and-roll contracts for Grease, Saturday Night Fever, and the Bee Gees. “The Bear said, ‘Son, you are going to be one of the richest men in the country.’ ”