Authors: Alanna Nash
After the Norfolk incident, the Colonel got Vernon on the telephone, according to Mike Crowley, who had just gone to work for Concerts West. “I was there,” says Crowley, the
company’s liaison to the Colonel. “He said, ‘You’re going to have to take him off the road for at least six months to clean himself up. He can’t do this to the fans or
himself.’ ” Vernon replied that Elvis had to work, Crowley says, and if Parker didn’t want to take him out on the road, they’d find someone else who would.
“I hate that old man,” Elvis told Billy Smith shortly afterward. His cousin asked him why. Elvis mumbled something about Parker being senile and rude, and Smith pumped him for more.
“He said, ‘The Colonel is too concerned with my drug use. I’m tired of the old son of a bitch threatening me, saying he’s not going to book me anymore. Goddamn it,
I’ve done performances that I didn’t want to. They booked me in places that I didn’t want to be. We need to stick to our old agreement, where Colonel takes care of the business
part, and I take care of the performing. It’ll work a hell of a lot better.’ ”
Despite such friction, the Colonel still pondered ways to boost his client to new heights. For New Year’s Eve 1975, Parker let Jerry Weintraub take Elvis into the huge Pontiac, Michigan,
Silverdome as a substitute for the Rolling Stones, who canceled due to illness. But Elvis made a poor showing, hampered by drugs, mediocre pickup musicians, and weather so frigid that one of the
players plugged in an electric blanket. Presley was so late getting to the stage that intermission, following several
opening acts, including Parker’s
“green-grass” group, lasted more than an hour.
“He’s really screwed up,” conductor Joe Guercio told Jackie Kahane, who emceed the show. Kahane saw for himself, as the star said he was “scared shitless” as he
passed him on the stairs.
Within minutes, Elvis split his pants and left the stage to change, and when he returned, he was so discombobulated that he kept on singing once the orchestra stopped for the countdown to
midnight and the playing of “Auld Lang Syne.” Then when the band went into “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Elvis launched into a hymn, and segued into “I Can’t Help
Falling in Love with You,” the last song of the show. “He didn’t do twenty minutes,” Kahane recalled. “I figured they’d kill him.” But the Silverdome
booked him back before he even left town, says the comic. “That was the magic of Elvis.”
The Colonel would tout the appearance as another Elvis “first.” With 62,500 fans in attendance, the show grossed more than $800,000—the biggest sum ever generated by a single
artist in a one-night performance. After expenses, Presley and Parker divided $300,000 by their two-thirds/one-third agreement for the night’s work.
However, twenty-three days later, the Colonel presented Elvis with a document that called for Parker to receive a larger share of such profits, or a 50–50 split on all live
appearances.
“It is hereby understood by both parties,” the contract read, “that these [tours] are a joint venture and that Elvis Presley is responsible for the presentation of his stage
performance and Colonel Tom Parker and his representatives [for the] advertising and promotion of the show. . . . This authorization and agreement will run for seven years from [January 22,
1976.]” Elvis signed without hesitation, though he was so strapped for cash that Parker took his old one-third commission for a time, Presley agreeing to pay him back when finances
weren’t so tight.
Now Parker turned his attentions to fulfilling Elvis’s recording obligations, the source of much rancor between the label and the star. Neither the Colonel nor Felton Jarvis had been able
to get Elvis into the studio for nearly a year. Finally, in early 1976, the record company saw it had no choice but to take the studio to him.
On February 2, engineers from RCA Nashville pulled up at Graceland in the big red recording van, which amounted to a mobile studio. Elvis’s guys helped move the hideous Polynesian future
out of the den, and the crew rolled the baby grand piano in from the music room. Then they did
their best to blunt the acoustics, draping the walls with heavy blankets,
nailing plywood sheets together to set up partitions, and bringing in extra carpeting to try to isolate each musician’s sound—a necessity, since Elvis held fast to the old way of
recording, where everyone played at once.
Jarvis had hoped to glean twenty new masters from the sessions, and budgeted more than $74,000 for six nights of recording. But Elvis, popping pills, wearing his cop’s uniform, and ranting
about his plot to rub out all the drug dealers in Memphis, gave everyone fits, stretching Felton’s budget by another $30,000. One night, he stopped everything to fly off to Denver for a
peanut butter sandwich.
“Felton would come back and say, ‘It just wasn’t good,’ ” remembers RCA’s Joe Galante. “The company was at the point where it wasn’t a matter of
control or direction anymore, but just containment.”
On the fourth day, as if to police the goings-on, the Colonel himself made an uncustomary appearance, historic both for his showing up at a recording session, and even more for visiting
Graceland. David Briggs, who played electric keyboard, flinched as Parker walked in during the playback of a pornographic version of “Hurt,” which Elvis had recorded as a joke for the
players. “The Colonel almost shit when he heard it. He said, ‘Get rid of that tape!’ ” though by then too many people already had copies to keep it out of circulation. On
the last day, Elvis refused to come downstairs, and the session was canceled.
Eventually, Presley would lay down enough tracks for the
Moody Blue
album, though it would require additional recording in October to get just enough songs to pad out an LP. Even then,
the sessions dragged on as Elvis played pool and ate chicken.
“We’d come to the house and wait all day long, sitting in the living room,” remembers Tony Brown, who played piano on the fall sessions. “One night he was singing a
track, and he excused himself. We were all there, J.D. [Sumner] and the Stamps, the Sweet Inspirations. Maybe two hours later, he comes downstairs with a hat and a trench coat on and a shotgun,
pretending to blow everything up with it. For the next four hours, he explained that gun to us and told us how many guns he owned. And then the session was over.” Another time, he abruptly
ended rehearsals when a truck arrived with a delivery of motorcycles.
To some, Elvis appeared to simply want company. One particularly difficult night, unable to shake the loneliness, he disappeared, and Felton went looking for him, eventually finding him outside
in the dark. “Why
are you sitting out here, Elvis?” The singer let out a weary sigh. “I’m just so tired of playing Elvis Presley.”
Things were no better when Elvis went back on tour in the spring. “There was a lot of dissension [in the band] there at the end,” says Tony Brown, “and I think it was
frustration over Elvis not being at the top of his game. Some nights it just sounded awful, and we were all looking like fools. We were always thinking, Is he going to be on or off tonight? Ninety
percent of the time, he was pretty much off.” Backup singer Sherrill Nielsen was instructed to double Presley on the high notes in case he couldn’t sustain them.
By now, Elvis’s drug regimen for the road was so specific that Dr. Nichopoulos prescribed it in six stages. Stage one, administered at 3:00
P.M.
, when Presley
arose, consisted of a “voice shot” that Dr. Ghanem concocted, three appetite suppressants, medication for dizziness, a laxative, vitamins and herbs, and testosterone. Stage two,
delivered an hour before he went on stage, was made up of another voice shot, a decongestant with codeine, an amphetamine, a pill for vertigo, and Dilaudid. Stage three, timed just before his
performance, included more Dilaudid, Dexedrine, and caffeine. And stage four, designed to bring him down after the show, included a pill to lower his blood pressure, some diluted Demerol, a
sedative, and an antihistamine.
At bedtime, Elvis received stage five, a Placidyl, a Quaalude, three additional sedatives, an amphetamine, a blood-pressure pill, and a laxative. If Elvis couldn’t sleep, he advanced to
stage six, made up of Amytal, a hypnotic sleeping pill, and more Quaaludes.
These extreme ups and downs were taking their toll. When private investigator John O’Grady caught Presley’s show in Tahoe that April, “he had locomotive attacks where he
couldn’t walk . . . I really thought he was going to die.” O’Grady reported what he’d seen to attorney Ed Hookstratten in L.A. In June, “Hookstratten, Priscilla, and I
did everything to get him in the hospital for three or four months,” O’Grady recalled, referring to the drug-treatment program at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego. They also considered
taking him to a private hospital on Maui and one in the mid-South.
By now, Elvis suffered a host of physical problems, from blood clots, to hypoglycemia, to an enlarged heart. His liver was three times its normal size, his colon twisted. In three years, his
weight, on a diet of junk food and downers, had zoomed from 175 to 245, something he tried to camouflage with darker jumpsuits and an elastic corset that held in his
girth.
Secretly, Presley told Kathy Westmoreland he had bone cancer, asking her to keep it quiet: “I don’t want anybody to know how sick I am . . . I don’t want people coming to see a
dying man.” But Elton John, visiting him backstage in Maryland in June, saw it anyway. “He had dozens of people around him, supposedly looking after him,” the Englishman later
said, “but he already seemed like a corpse.”
In July, Dr. Ghanem moved Elvis into a wing of his house for one of several “sleep diets,” a kind of rapid detox in which the patient ingests only liquid nourishment and sedatives,
slumbering through withdrawal. Elvis’s feces had lately been as white as chalk, a certain sign of liver trouble, probably from ingesting massive amounts of pills. While a host of physicians
contributed to Elvis’s problem, Tennessee records would later show that Dr. Nichopoulos alone had supplied a staggering 1,296 amphetamines, 1,891 sedatives, and 910 narcotics for the year
1975. That number would escalate dramatically for each of the next two years.
When Elvis returned to Memphis, he was withdrawn, sullen, depressed. Nothing became of the plan to hospitalize Presley because no one enforced it. Certainly not his manager, who couldn’t
forget his own institutionalization forty-three years before, nor the spineless Vernon, and least of all the Memphis Mafia, which was powerless to do much of anything.
The entourage was largely made up of younger men now—Dean Nichopoulos, son of Dr. Nick, and Elvis’s stepbrothers David, Billy, and Rick Stanley, the latter of whom had been arrested
in August 1975 at Methodist Hospital in Memphis, trying to use a forged prescription for Demerol. Too often, they looked at the job as a paycheck and reflected glory. Joe Esposito lived in
California. Jerry Schilling, also on the West Coast, had little contact with Elvis anymore. And Presley was somewhat estranged from Red and Sonny West for, among other reasons, their rough handling
of fans, one of whom was bringing a lawsuit against the star.
Parker himself felt shut out of Elvis’s life, and complained about it in a letter to him on June 16, more than a week after the singer ended an eleven-day tour.
“As I told Vernon today, I have not heard from anyone since I got back, neither from Sonny or from any other member of your staff. I just wanted you to know in the event you feel that they
are in contact with me, but they are not.”
Still, on the whole, whether out of depression or compulsion, the Colonel seemed less concerned with managerial vision than continuing to play the numbers.
“I was gambling at the Las Vegas Hilton,” remembers Mike Growney, general manager of the Gold Coast Casino, “and there was one man sitting there, and I noticed that a security
guard would keep coming over and bringing a stack of $100 chips. He would put the whole pile down and bet the number, and then they would spin the wheel. Then the security guard would bring over
another stack of chips. And it’s $10,000 at a time. I said to the floor man, ‘What’s going on?’ And he said, ‘That’s Colonel Parker . . . He’s lost a
million dollars.’ ”
Despite such willful extravagance, the Colonel kept an eye peeled for anyone who tried to fleece him out of a dollar. Which was how he met Joe Shane, then a twenty-six-year-old merchandiser from
Paducah, Kentucky, who’d sold thousands of Elvis Presley “Aloha from Hawaii” T-shirts by running ads in
TV Guide
and
The National Enquirer.
Shane was just about
to close a deal with JC Penney’s 1,900 stores when he ran into a snag: he didn’t own the licensing rights.
“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.