Authors: Alanna Nash
Just why and how Parker settled on Weintraub and Hulett isn’t clear, especially as he had rejected two other concert promoters, Steve Wolf and Jim Rissmiller of Concert Associates, who
also attempted to woo the Colonel through a two-year letter-writing campaign, and finally wangled a meeting. The two found Parker charming, but a tough negotiator.
“He wanted us to pay the costs of producing the show,” Wolf remembered, “and then he gave us a cushion and a percentage over a certain
amount. He threw
it out so fast we had to keep asking him over and over, and he kept saying, ‘I told you boys, now for the last time this is the deal.’ He really hits you. He doesn’t sit back and
let it sink in. You’re sorry you asked a question.”
After much back and forth, Parker finally told them Elvis had no plans to tour, as it might hurt business at the hotel. But if he did, he’d need to honor some obligations that went back to
the late ’50s. Then, in a matter of months, he signed the deal with Weintraub.
“Jerry was very well connected, and a lot went through him,” says Joe Delaney. He was a formidable guy—still is.”
But Parker made him sweat for his power. The following month, when Weintraub went back to the Colonel to set up another eight-day tour, this time for Concerts West, Parker demanded a $1-million
deposit against 65 percent of the gate. Within twenty-four hours. It was a test of both the company’s bank account and Weintraub’s resolve. “Jerry had to go out and bust his
butt,” says Joe Shane. The money was late in arriving, though not really through Weintraub’s fault, and overall the Colonel’s student did not disappoint him.
As reward, Parker gave Weintraub and Hulett a piece of the concessions, though the Colonel later felt a need to wire Weintraub regarding ticket accessibility. In guarding against such stunts as
a box office manager pulling free tickets for the city council, he was also looking out for the fans “who made Elvis what he is today.” As he told Weintraub in a telegram, “We
want our fans to be taken care of. When they wait in line for hours and hours they are privileged customers. They come first.”
The Presley road show was now a major business, with huge grosses and attendance records, Elvis taking in more than $300,000 and beating the Rolling Stones’ numbers in two shows at the
Inglewood Forum in Los Angeles that November. Most of the members of Elvis’s entourage traveled with him, Joe Esposito being in top command under Parker, Charlie Hodge acting as stage manager
and general assistant, Lamar Fike handling the lighting, and Richard Davis taking care of Elvis’s wardrobe. Elvis also added a Memphis physician, Dr. George Nichopoulos, who had personally
tended to nearly all of Elvis’s medical and pharmaceutical needs since treating him for a cold in 1966.
At the age of sixty-one, Parker still personally advanced the tour, making a promotional trip two months (later cut down to a matter of weeks) ahead of the show. Sonny West, keeping his eyes and
ears open for Elvis as Joe Esposito did for the Colonel, traveled with Parker as security chief.
Together, they obtained the hotel rooms—Elvis and the Colonel each
occupied a whole floor at a different location from the show group—and figured out which entrance Presley could use to get to his room without going through the lobby. They also worked with
the local law enforcement, the Colonel picking either a captain or a detective to line up as many as sixty uniformed men to police Elvis’s hotel and travel route. The entourage was afforded
the same protection as a presidential motorcade.
“He would have it all mapped out, get as many as four limos for decoys, and time how long it would take to get to the airport, the hotel, and the venue,” remembers former RCA rep
Gaylen Adams. “He planned such details, it would scare you.” By the time Parker’s friend Al Dvorin announced, “Elvis has left the building,” to calm a frenzied show
crowd, Presley was, indeed, already on his way.
Once the tour started, Parker returned to each town the day before the date. He checked on the souvenir sales first—arena rock of the ’70s ushered in the modern era of
merchandising—then tended to the box office and promotion. A sellout was a must, and if ticket sales lagged, Parker counted on a pocketful of tricks to turn the tide. Regularly, he forced RCA
to buy a block of tickets as giveaways, but most of the time he relied on carny cunning.
One time in Salt Lake City, Parker remembered in the ’80s, “the rest of the auditorium was sold out, and we couldn’t sell the last two thousand seats for anything. Then on the
Sunday before the show, Elder Stevens [head of the Mormon church] died. The show was set for Wednesday. I called the radio stations and canceled all the ads. We weren’t selling tickets
anyway, and I figured we’d save $1,900.
“What we did,” he went on, “was instead of taking the ads, we made an announcement that we were dropping the ads until after Elder - Stevens’s funeral on Tuesday. Of
course, the radio stations gave us all of the announcements free. Then on Wednesday, the ads started again and we sold out all two thousand seats in two hours. It had to be the Mormons who bought
the tickets.”
Another time, much later, in Pittsburgh, they played a 20,000-seat arena and found themselves stuck with 1,100 tickets, all of them “way up in the attic, behind a post. We were selling
maybe twelve or fifteen a day. So we pulled all our ads and put in new ones. We said, ‘We still have a few seats left. They aren’t very good, but it’s all we got.’ When that
hit the air, we sold out right away. People liked the honesty.”
For a man who still rose at 5:00
A.M.
, it was a grueling schedule, one
that didn’t end until well after sundown. If Elvis was flying in that
night after his show, as he always did on the later tours, since he had trouble winding down and falling asleep, Parker would wait for word that he had landed.
The next day, the show plane arrived. “He made life rough for us on the road,” says Kathy Westmoreland, Elvis’s high harmony singer, “because we were going to bed at four
in the morning and getting up at seven-thirty to fly to the next city.” Yet the musicians looked out their windows to see the Colonel leaning on his cane on the tarmac, knowing he would
always be there to greet them, no matter the weather. Tom Diskin, standing at his side, handed each musician a key as he came off the ramp and boarded the bus to the hotel. Then as the group waved
good-bye, Parker took off in his plane for the next town.
Though he met Elvis and the entourage every evening prior to the first show in Vegas, pulling Elvis into another room to talk business if need be, and sometimes staying for the first show, only
rarely did the Colonel wait to see Elvis perform on the road. Even if Parker spent the night, he never met with Presley before the concert.
Nonetheless, the man who loved playing Santa Claus at Frank - Sinatra’s Christmas parties found time to entertain the children whose parents traveled with the show. As “Uncle
Colonel,” he delighted the kids with stories of “the googala,” a giant centipede who resided in the - Colonel’s imagination, and whose likeness he sketched for the children
to take home and tape up on their walls.
It was just as well that Presley and Parker seldom met up on the tours, since Elvis was often furious about his accommodations. In Mobile, Alabama, they’d been booked into the Admiral
Semmes Hotel, which may have been luxurious the last time Presley stayed there, in 1955, but was a dump by 1970, a total fleabag, without air-conditioning. The Colonel knew Elvis preferred any
modern motel, even a Holiday Inn, to an older place. Hadn’t Parker checked it out when he advanced the tour? Presley raved. And why were they playing Mobile, anyway?
Even Concerts West was confused about that one, and as the tours continued, Weintraub and Hulett, who brought the Colonel a list of cities and dates for him to approve, were equally puzzled
about a number of towns Parker picked, such as Monroe, Louisiana, and Greensboro, North Carolina, that seemed off the beaten path for a megawatt rock star. Nobody else went there, which, the
Colonel said, was precisely the point. Fans in grassroots areas wanted to see Elvis, too, and he was guaranteed
a sellout. If Elvis had to perform in basketball gymnasiums,
or on three-foot stages—which he sometimes did—it helped pay the expenses between larger dates. Weintraub and Hulett weren’t the only promoters out there, and he’d set about
proving it to them.
What Parker failed to mention was that he yearned to return to the towns he’d first visited with the carnivals and tent shows, where he still had people in his pocket—from the mayor
to the cops—and knew how to control just about anything. He loved going back to the old hotels, too, even if some of the rooms on the floors they stayed on were boarded up. Sometimes he did
it to repay a favor. Besides, these old places were dirt cheap. Who could argue with that?
While Elvis had initially been happy to return to live performance, his pill-fueled behavior had become more erratic in recent months. He obsessed about collecting police badges—bugging
John O’Grady for how he could get one that would let him carry a gun across state lines—and schemed to get all the guys deputized to pack a weapon in Memphis, Las Vegas, and Palm
Springs. Loaded on pharmaceuticals, he shot a .22 automatic at a car one night in Beverly Hills after the driver made a rude gesture, and even terrorized his friends if they mouthed off at him,
sticking a loaded .44 Magnum in Lamar Fike’s nose one day and threatening to blow his brains out. In December 1970, as best man at Sonny West’s wedding, he would stand at the altar
wearing five loaded firearms—two gold-plated guns in shoulder holsters, a pair of pearl-handled pistols in his pants, and a derringer in his boot.
When he came off the road that November, Elvis began to fixate on the idea of becoming a federal agent. A federal agent’s badge would give him not only ultimate power, but also a feeling
of invincibility. No one would dare mess with a federal agent, no matter what controlled substances he carried around with him in a little black bag.
O’Grady, who had headed up the narcotics unit for the L.A. Police Department, was hip to Elvis’s habits—he’d done a polygraph test on Presley for an annoying paternity
suit—and noticed his pulse and breathing rates were below normal. And Elvis had way too many questions about how to become an agent-at-large for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs,
especially after O’Grady set up a meeting for him with Paul Frees, a voiceover announcer who’d earned just such a badge for undercover work. The unctuous O’Grady liked rubbing
shoulders with the famous and told Elvis he might be able to help: he’d get him an introduction to John Finlator, the deputy director of the Narcotics Bureau.
Parker, meanwhile, had grown tired of having to speak to Elvis through his father or Esposito, and early in December, on the same day he completed a deal with RCA to
extend his annual $100,000 consulting fee for five years, he wrote to Elvis, expressing his frustration at not being able to get his client on the phone. Using sarcasm to mildly mask his fury, the
Colonel cited Elvis’s obvious avoidance of him, and reminded him of how hard he had been working in his behalf. “Remember,” he concluded, “your slogan TCB . . . only works
if you use it.”
Vernon Presley was not pleased to see his son at odds with the Colonel and told him so in a blowup in mid-December. The time had come to replace the old bastard, Elvis argued, but Vernon told
him he’d never find anybody better. Then Vernon started in on Elvis’s lavish spending sprees and produced the bills: $20,000 and $30,000 gun-buying trips, $85,000 worth of
Mercedes-Benzes for his friends. Such extravagance had to stop. Priscilla agreed, especially as the couple had just put down a deposit on a new home in Beverly Hills, despite the shakiness of the
marriage.
By now, Elvis was so volatile that, as his cousin Billy Smith remembers, “you especially had to be careful of what you said [to him]. He was like a caged animal. He was coming out any way
he could. You didn’t embarrass him, and you didn’t scare him, and you certainly didn’t ever humiliate him.”
Feeling restricted and hampered by the Colonel, and then by his wife and father, Elvis was about to defy all of them in a demonstration of independence more surprising than they could have
imagined. On December 19, 1970, without their knowledge, he slipped out of Graceland, went to the airport alone, and began a journey to Washington to see John Finlator, O’Grady’s
contact at the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Elvis wanted his badge.
Finlator turned him down, but Elvis, by now accompanied by Jerry Schilling and Sonny West, had a backup plan. On the plane, stoned, shaky, and woozy-eyed, he had written a letter to President
Richard M. Nixon, declaring himself a concerned American. The country was in bad shape, with the hippies, the drug culture, the Black Panthers, and the Students for a Democratic Society, he wrote.
He knew so because he had done “an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques.” But if Nixon would make him a federal agent, he could be of service to this great
nation, since none of those threats to the American way of life considered him an enemy.
“I would love to meet you just to say hello if you’re not too busy,” he
said in closing, and then dropped the letter off at the White House gates on the
way to his hotel. The result: Presley, dressed like Dracula in outlandish garb—a velvet cape topping a black suede suit, a massive gold belt given to him by the International, glittering
chains circling his neck, tinted sunglasses, and a cane—got his meeting with Nixon at the White House. And he got the cherished badge, which became, Schilling says, “his most prized
physical possession.” At last, Elvis was a narc.
The Colonel, who learned about the visit to Washington after the fact, was gravely worried. The president, for God’s sake! Elvis was slipping completely out of his control. He would have
to find a way to keep Elvis in check and step up his surveillance of his actions.
In March 1971, when Elvis blew up while attempting to record in Nashville—kicking a gun through a guitar and storming out of the session—Parker managed to keep most of it out of the
press. The following day, the singer, whose eyesight had been troubling him, was hospitalized for glaucoma. Now Parker saw his act becoming more fractious with each passing month, and realized he
had to create new ways to maximize Presley’s earning power. Otherwise, the Colonel would find himself in the same sad straits as his friend Oscar Davis—sick, dependent on Parker’s
handout of $100 a month, and soon to be dead, never again managing a major star nearly twenty years after Hank Williams’s self-destructive ways caught up with him on the way to a show
date.