Authors: Alanna Nash
Parker signed them, says Kathy Westmoreland, because “he knew he had to have other irons in the fire—everyone pretty much knew that Elvis wasn’t going to make it very
long.” Westmoreland, a former beauty contestant, had been picked by the Colonel to be Boxcar Records’ premier artist, and he even offered her a management contract. Like others of the
Colonel’s schemes, however, it didn’t fly. Westmoreland balked when she realized that he had no idea how to develop her as a singer. “He knew talent when he saw it, but musically,
he didn’t know what was professional and what was not.”
By now, the disease of gambling had become Parker’s total rationalization in business, his addiction marshalling his every move. At the
Hilton—only one establishment around town that held his markers—his debts reached $6 million. He gambled by phone from Palm Springs on the weekends, and in Vegas, if he didn’t
feel like going down to the casino, he asked for a roulette wheel to be sent to his rooms.
“He played stupid—they took the limit off when he came to the tables,” remembered Bitsy Mott, who watched him play the two, three, seventh, and eleventh spot in craps, which
promised big odds but rarely delivered. “He didn’t do it with ignorance, but evidently he didn’t mind losing so much money.” The problem, Mott said, was that Parker had
planned on leaving Marie well cared for at his death, with the remainder of his estate going to charity. “Now it looks like charity is the casinos.”
During Elvis’s August 1974 Vegas engagement, his performances had been riddled with long, rambling, and often painfully embarrassing monologues on a variety of personal
subjects, including the rumor that the singer was on drugs. If he ever learned who started such a foul story, he said in a slurry rage that shocked all who heard it, “I’ll pull your
goddamned tongue out by the
roots!
”
One night, he had attempted to introduce the Colonel, who was not in the showroom. The evening before, comedian Bill Cosby had filled in for Presley, who canceled a show from alleged exhaustion.
Now, when Parker was nowhere to be found, Presley again went off. “And my manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Where is he? Is the Colonel around anywhere? No, he’s out playing roulette.
Don’t kid me. I know what he’s doin’. Him and Cosby are out there talkin’ mash and drinkin’ trash, whatever.”
The resentment that had built between them in the last several years came to a head the following month. Elvis was blistered about everything, from his indentured slavery to the Colonel’s
refusal to accept a $1-million offer for a string of Australian dates the previous spring. Now an incident at the hotel would lead to their biggest fight ever.
In late August, Elvis learned that the wife of Mario, the Hilton maître d’, was dying of cancer. Presley was fond of Mario, who had served him dinner in his suite every day. At his
most delusional, the singer believed he had the power to heal the sick and, with entourage in tow, drove to
Mario’s home to treat the woman with the laying on of hands.
The hotel didn’t tolerate fraternization between staff and stars, however, and believing that Mario had crossed the line, terminated his employment.
Elvis was livid when he learned of Mario’s firing in early September and stormed in to confront the Colonel. The hotel had no right to do such a thing, Elvis charged indignantly. But
Parker, who disapproved of Mario’s habit of accepting $200 tips from fans for front-row tables, told him it was hotel policy and none of Presley’s business. That night from the stage,
Elvis delivered a furious attack on Barron Hilton: “I think you people ought to know that the big shots at the Hilton are an unfeeling, uncaring group . . . Barron Hilton’s . . . not
worth a damn.”
The Colonel was purple with rage when he appeared in Presley’s dressing room after the show. How dare Elvis embarrass the people who had treated them so well! The two got into a shouting
match in front of Elvis’s guys, and later continued the tirade upstairs in Presley’s thirtieth-floor suite. There, Elvis did what he’d been threatening to do for years: he fired
the Colonel.
But Parker was not to be outdone. Elvis couldn’t fire him, he bellowed, because he quit. “I’ll call a press conference in the morning and say I’m leaving!” Presley
yelled back that he’d call one that night. And so it went, until Parker, so infuriated that his jowls shook as he pounded the floor with his cane, groused that he wanted only to be paid all
the singer owed him, and retired to his offices to draw up the bill. Vernon held his head when he saw it: $2 million, by most estimates, though Billy Smith remembers it at five times that
amount.
“How could that be?” Elvis asked his daddy. “Well, he’s got it listed here,” Vernon moaned. “And he says once we pay him, he’ll give up the
contract.” The Presleys retaliated with their own handwritten letter, informing the Colonel of all their grievances and terminating their relationship.
For a week and a half, Elvis and Parker traded insults and accusations through an intermediary, usually Lamar Fike.
The resolution came when Vernon informed his son that they couldn’t afford to buy out the contract. In fact, before long, they’d have to mortgage Graceland to meet the payroll.
“I guess I’m gonna have to go make up with the old bastard,” Elvis told Joe Esposito.
They met at the Colonel’s Palm Springs house, where Parker, realizing what bad financial straits the singer was in, offered to reduce his percentage until Elvis could get on his feet. The
singer tore up his list of grievances,
forever missing his chance to break free of the servant-master hold. Still, it was a turning point. “It never got better,”
says Billy Smith. “It got worse.”
At the end of September, Elvis started a new tour but seemed in no shape to be on the road. New keyboard man Tony Brown, who’d first joined the show as part of the gospel quartet Voice,
saw Presley fall to his knees as he got out of a limousine in Maryland. In Detroit, he cut a show short at thirty minutes. Reviewers expressed puzzlement and dismay over his condition, and both
Parker and the doctors agreed that the star needed to take five months off. The Colonel wrote to the Hilton that Elvis would not be able to fulfill his commitment in January.
Elias Ghanem, concerned about Elvis’s intestinal problems, ordered a series of colon tests. The results themselves were not alarming, but increasingly, Presley’s bowels were becoming
so irregular that he would travel with a trunk of Fleet enemas and sleep with a towel fashioned around him like a diaper.
“He would be so damn drugged he couldn’t make it to the bathroom,” recalls Lamar Fike. “Or he’d get in there and be so groggy he’d fall down on the floor.
That’s where they’d find him. I used to tell the Colonel, ‘You’re killing this guy! This guy is sick!’ And he’d say, ‘Just as long as he can keep doing the
dates, we don’t have to worry. He’ll get himself back together again.’ ”
But Elvis was only drifting farther from reality. Fearful of odor, yet adverse to frequent bathing, he ingested Nullo deodorant tablets three times a day, believing “they’d kill any
type of body odor, from bad breath to butt,” says Billy Smith, who with his wife, Jo, moved into a trailer on the Graceland grounds at Elvis’s insistence. “We used to con him into
the bathtub when he was filthy,” adds Fike, “but you didn’t physically make him do anything when he wasn’t loaded. He’d fight you like a hawk.”
Together, Smith, Dr. Nichopoulos, and the physician’s office nurse, Tish Henley, would attempt to wean Elvis off prescription drugs, particularly after Presley was again admitted to
Baptist Memorial Hospital in January 1975 for breathing difficulties. Vernon, who’d recently split from his wife, Dee, lay in the next room with a heart attack. Elvis was more concerned about
his father than about his own health and, before his stay was over, charmed some of the nurses into bringing him whatever drugs he desired.
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.