The Colonel (56 page)

The Colonel banged the door behind him. For a moment, Geller’s
heart sank. Then he felt relieved. Finally, the Colonel had seen Elvis at his worst. Surely now he
would talk to him, pull him off the road, take steps to get him help. Yet ninety seconds later, the manager thundered out. Larry rose. “You listen to me!” Parker shouted, stabbing the
air with his cane. “The only thing that’s important is that he’s on that stage tonight! Nothing else matters!”

And then the Colonel was gone.

“I thought, Oh my God!,” Geller remembers. “What about Elvis? Doesn’t Colonel understand that this man is in dire straits? I was horrified. I can only surmise he acted
out of stupidity and denial. But still, how could he be so callous?”

The answer to that question was one that almost no one knew, with origins deep in Parker’s carny past. As a young man on the circuit, one of his jobs had been to befriend the geek, the
pathetic dipsomaniac who sat in a pit and bit the heads off live chickens in exchange for a daily bottle. Periodically, the poor soul would run off and hide in the fields, unable to face another
bloody performance. Parker would find him, shuddering and desperate, then wave the bottle as bait and reward, and bring him back to do the show.

“Parker and Presley represent the convergence of two characters from carnival culture: the poor country boy who grabs the brass ring and the mysterious stranger who fleeces the
innocent,” Richard Harrington wrote in
The Washington Post.

But Parker’s gambling had morphed him into a combination of the two, and then some. As Elvis prepared for his next tour in August 1977, the Colonel’s gambling debts at the Las Vegas
Hilton reached a staggering $30 million.

It is in that sad fact that the lines begin to blur between the geek, his keeper, and the chicken, dancing or otherwise.

In the late 1950s, Parker invited Byron Raphael to Grauman’s Chinese Theater for a showing of his favorite movie. Produced in 1947 as gritty and disturbing film noir,
Nightmare
Alley
perfectly captured the sordid netherworld of the small-time carnival. In the picture’s evocative opening, Tyrone Power, as the ambitious young sideshow hustler Stanton Carlisle,
encounters his first gloaming geek. At the sound of frenzied squawking, the crowd gasps, and a shaken Carlisle asks the show owner: “How does a guy get so low? Is he born a geek?”

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.”

O
N
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.”