Authors: Alanna Nash
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.
There, Presley hoped to visit some of the cities he’d longed to see since his army days (“Man, I’ll put on a disguise . . . I’ve got to get out of this country just to
see the world,” he told Larry Geller), and maybe scout locales for a foreign tour. But Parker strongly argued that Elvis’s European fans would be insulted if he traveled the Continent
before performing there and suggested that the entourage fly to the Bahamas instead. The Colonel had contacts there, he said. Besides, they’d enjoy the gambling. Elvis complied, though once
there driving rain and hurricane winds forced him to stay indoors most of the trip, and the couples returned home a week earlier than expected.
Priscilla, who objected to Elvis’s long absences and frequent womanizing, hoped a European holiday would smooth out the rougher bumps in the marriage, something Elvis would soon allude to
in the press. But neither could have anticipated the Colonel’s virulent reaction, or how he interpreted a benign vacation plan as an impulsive and assertive act.
Soon after the couple returned to Memphis, Elvis was visited by two formidable businessmen in suits and ties. The men, who identified themselves as employees of RCA, spoke politely but firmly.
“They advised him of the dangers of his desire to travel to Europe because of his status and universal recognition,” says Larry Geller, who learned the story from Elvis when he came
back into the entourage in 1972. “They told him he
would be going eventually, but such things had to be planned out, that they took time and management. Underneath the
veneer of cordiality, Elvis felt they were saying, ‘Hey, man, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ It made a deep impression upon him—he took it as a threat.”
Believing that “Parker obviously manipulated the visit,” as Geller puts it, the episode must have reminded Elvis of the Colonel’s story of Sam Cooke’s fate at the hands
of RCA’s disgruntled image makers and Mafia hit men. “It was common knowledge that Parker was deeply into the ‘people’ in Vegas because of his enormous gambling
losses,” Geller reports. “Elvis became more aware of this as time went by and knew that he was Colonel Parker’s bait and ransom, that Parker owned him, and whatever losses Parker
incurred, Elvis would ultimately pay off by performing.”
When Presley opened his second Vegas engagement in January 1970, he appeared so trim and vibrant, with his cheekbones showing when he smiled, that Lamar Fike found him “damn near
gorgeous.” But Fike, who had just rejoined the entourage after his stint with Hill and Range, was chagrined to learn that Elvis was now in the second phase of his drug use, with pills in him
roughly 60 percent of the time. Fike knew it was only a matter of time before his body would show the effects, particularly as Presley was becoming bolder about what he would take. “Elvis
loved downers, and he loved getting totally fucked up,” says Fike. “Downers will put weight on you pretty quick.” They also added to Elvis’s paranoia.
During Presley’s next Vegas engagement that summer, an incident occurred that heightened Elvis’s fears about his safety, which had grown with Charles Manson’s horrific murders
of actress Sharon Tate and hairdresser Jay Sebring, in whose Los Angeles shop Larry Geller once worked.
On Wednesday, August 26, the International’s security department was notified that Elvis would be kidnapped that evening. The hotel added extra security, and nothing happened, but then the
Colonel received a similar call the following day. What shook everyone up was the next message, which came to Joe Esposito in Los Angeles early Friday morning. This time the caller, who dialed
Esposito’s unpublished home phone number, said that an individual planned to shoot Elvis on stage during his Saturday-night show, and demanded $50,000 in small bills to reveal the name of the
assailant. Later, Elvis received a hotel menu with his picture on the front, defaced with a picture of a gun pointed at his head. Written backward were the words “Guess who, and
where?”
The Colonel phoned Elvis’s Beverly Hills lawyer, Ed Hookstratten,
who notified the FBI. Then the attorney hired John O’Grady, a private detective and former
L.A. police sergeant to come to Las Vegas to coordinate a ring of defense. Elvis, scared and shaken, called Jerry Schilling, then working as a film cutter at Paramount, and asked him to fly to
Vegas to join the other bodyguards and security men who would surround the stage. Downstairs in his dressing room before the show, he told Schilling, “I don’t want any son of a bitch
running around saying, ‘I killed Elvis Presley.’ If some guy shoots me, I want you to rip his goddamn eyes out!” Then he tucked a derringer in his boot and went upstairs.
With an ambulance and a Vegas doctor, Thomas “Flash” Newman, standing by, a nervous Presley began his show. The only tense moment came several songs into the performance, when a man
yelled out, “Elvis!” The singer dropped to one knee and reached for the pistol. Then the voice continued: “Would you sing ‘Don’t Be Cruel’?”
Presley was never sure who was behind the hoax, but his mind raced at the possibilities. Maybe it was Parker, playing another trick to keep him in line. Or perhaps the Colonel was really the
target. Maybe Parker owed a little bit too much at the tables and needed some incentive to pay up quick. Elvis knew the rumors that Parker borrowed heavily from the mob (“I’d say that
Colonel Parker did a lot of stuff with people in this town that nobody is ever going to find out about,” echoes Frank Gorrell), and the latest gossip was even more frightening. Talk had it
that Parker sold a percentage of Elvis’s earnings to the Mafia as payment for his debts.
Whatever the truth, Elvis began to fixate on firearms, cops, and badass effrontery. The following year, inspired by the film
Shaft,
in which a black private eye tangles with a powerful
racketeer, he started dressing in black hipster clothing from the wildest racks on Beale Street. In the next months, he would also obtain a badge to allow him to carry a pistol in Memphis, buy an
arsenal of weapons—from small handguns to an M16 automatic assault rifle—and customize many of the handles with his TCB (“Taking Care of Business”) insignia. Eventually, his
fascination would border on the ludicrous. Making friends with policemen throughout the country, he occasionally donned a captain’s uniform (a gift from the Denver Police Department) and
installed a revolving blue light on the roof of his car, so that he might pull over speeders and offer assistance at accident scenes.
As Elvis slipped deeper into a world of drugs and delusion, he distanced himself from the Colonel. Where earlier in the year Presley had
introduced Parker to his Vegas
audience, saying he was “not only my manager, but I love him very much,” they now spoke mostly through an intermediary, usually Esposito. Presley tried to avoid the Colonel at every
turn.
That became easier to arrange in September, when Elvis flew to Phoenix to kick off a six-city tour, his first extended string of road shows since 1957. Tickets for nearly all the dates sold out
within hours, especially since Parker kept the price to $10, less than half of what other major performers commanded. On board to promote four of the concerts was a new company called Management
III.
The principal partners in the venture were Jerry Weintraub, a thirty-three-year-old former MCA talent agent who was managing the budding singer-songwriter John Denver, and Tom Hulett, whose
company, Concerts West, had set the standard for contemporary rock tours with Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. Management III paid the Colonel $240,000 for the four dates, but Parker insisted on
handling all advertising and promotion. The two men had no trouble with that—they’d been writing Parker for nearly two years, wanting to put Elvis into all the big, new arenas that were
opening up throughout the country. They met with the Colonel for dinners with their wives and even endured Parker’s famous steam room meltdowns (“I make ’em stay until they see
things my way”) at the Spa in Palm Springs.
“One of the things Jerry said,” remembered Denver, who followed his first big hit, 1971’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” with a string of chart-toppers, “was
that if he did his job, and I did my job, I would always be able to work in whatever arena I chose, be it television, films, recordings, or concerts. He’s a very, very brilliant promoter. He
went to the big arenas and said, ‘You want Elvis Presley to come play this place? Then I want Concerts West to be involved in every concert that comes into this building.’ And as a
result of his influence in the concert market, Jerry had an enormous amount of clout with RCA, and also with radio stations.”