Authors: Alanna Nash
Lamar Fike was still sleeping when Tom Hulett banged on his door. “Lamar!” he called. “The Colonel wants to see you right now.” Fike was groggy and
spent. “Fuck him,” he yelled back. “I’m tired. I’m sleepy.” Hulett persisted. “Lamar, answer the door!”
Fike slipped the chain off. Hulett had his head down. “I said, ‘What’s the matter with you, Tom?’ ” he remembers. “Hulett said, ‘You need to come down
to the room and talk to the Colonel right now.’ ”
The hotel was built in the round. “I remember walking around the circle to Colonel’s room. I went in, and he was sitting on the side of the bed, hanging up the phone from Joe.
Everybody was looking down at the floor.
“I said, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ I had my arm on the television set. Colonel got up and walked over to me, and stood maybe ten inches away from my face. He said,
‘Lamar, you need to go to Memphis and meet with Mr. Vernon. Elvis is dead.’ ”
Fike was shattered but hardly surprised. Only the coldness of Parker’s attitude shocked the aide.
“I said, ‘That’s it?’ Colonel said, ‘Yeah, that’s it.’ I said, ‘Well, it took you awhile, but you finally ran him into the ground, didn’t
you?’ ” Parker challenged him: “What did you say?” And Fike was resolute. “I said, ‘You heard what I said. He couldn’t run anymore, could he?’
” Lamar looked around the room, searching the faces of the others, his anger building. “ ‘I kept telling you guys, man. None of you listened to me.’ ”
That night, the advance team would go downstairs to dinner as planned, though no one felt like eating. “I don’t want anyone making any scenes,” Parker ordered.
“We’re going to show respect, and we’re going to put on the best face possible.”
In Las Vegas, Parker’s Hilton contact, Bruce Banke, was in his office when he got a call from Robert Macy, a friend at the Associated Press. Macy told him he’d just gotten a bulletin
that Banke needed to hear. The PR man recognized the background sounds—four bells on the Teletype machine, to signal a major news story—and said, “Bob, I hope to hell World War
III has just broken out.” Macy told him no, it was worse.
Banke found Barron Hilton meeting with the hotel’s senior officers. “I must have been just pale as a sheet, because I walked in and the entire meeting stopped and everybody turned
around and stared at me.” Hilton said, “What is it, Bruce?” Banke had just stopped speaking when the phone rang. It was the Colonel calling from Portland.
The show plane, which had departed from Los Angeles, having
stopped in Las Vegas to pick up Joe Guercio, was en route to the East Coast. Suddenly, the pilot announced that
the plane would land in Pueblo, Colorado. Jackie Kahane remembers how puzzled everyone was.
Marty Harrell, the trombone player and Guercio’s assistant, got off in Pueblo and went inside the terminal, where he found a note to call the Colonel. Parker minced no words and gave him
his orders to make the announcement and fly back to Vegas. Drawn, Harrell put down the receiver and reboarded the aircraft. “Would everybody get off the plane?” he asked. Only the Sweet
Inspirations’ Myrna Smith refused. “Please,” Harrell begged. “I have something to say, and I can only say it once.”
Smith obliged, and Harrell, standing on the runway, cleared his throat. “I hate to tell you guys this, but Elvis is dead.”
Several of the men began softly crying. Myrna Smith took off running around the airfield in a wild frenzy of grief, only to be caught and sedated with Valium. Kahane tried to call his wife. Both
his phone lines were busy, so he dialed the operator to break through for an emergency. “The operator was crying,” he remembers. “She said, ‘Do you know that Elvis Presley
died?’ The people in the show were the last to know.”
While the most devoted of Presley’s fans began a pilgrimage to Memphis, the Colonel booked a flight to New York. “I can’t waste time mourning,” he explained later.
“There’s plenty of people ready to come in and cut the ground from under our feet.”
After canceling the tour, Parker flew to New York to meet with RCA, for whom his client had sold more tapes and records than any other performer in recording history. The old carny rightly
expected that every store in the country would sell out of Presley product within twenty-four hours. Now he put the squeeze on RCA to keep a rich river of Elvis records churning.
Next he met with Harry “the Bear” Geisler, a forty-eight-year-old former steelworker and third-grade dropout who had just made a fortune overnight with Farrah Fawcett posters and
T-shirts, putting up $300,000 for the rights in early 1977 and paying out some $400,000 in royalties to Fawcett’s agent that summer. His company, Factors Etc., Inc., had also acquired the
merchandising licenses for tie-ins for the movies
Star Wars
and
Rocky.
The Bear was a hustler to be reckoned with.
In preparing a likeness of an artist and selling it, from Eddy Arnold on, Parker may have innovated concert merchandising, but mass merchandising was beyond him, which is why he’d brought
Hank Saperstein into the split in 1956. Now he needed Geisler to do the same.
But the Colonel also wanted to include his young friend Joe Shane, the Kentucky merchandiser he’d taken under his wing and given the exclusive worldwide rights for
the name of Elvis Presley. “He knew exactly what was going to transpire,” Shane recalls, “and he was wise enough to know that he couldn’t stop it. I got him on the phone as
soon as I heard Elvis was gone, and he said, ‘Joe, this thing is gonna get out of control. You better get protected.’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ ”
Shane played tough with all the fly-by-night companies that called, but he knew scaring off Geisler was out of the question.
“The Bear said, ‘We’re not asking you, we’re
telling
you that starting tonight, we’re gonna put out a line of Elvis Presley posters and iron-on
transfers,’ ” Shane remembers. “We got into a little shouting match, and I said, ‘I hope you sell a billion, because I’ve got the rights.’ ” And he said,
‘I
will
sell a billion, and you won’t get anything.’ He was really gruff.”
On August 17, as tens of thousands of fans from around the world lined up in front of Graceland and down Elvis Presley Boulevard, snaking up the driveway for a last look at the famous face laid
out in the huge copper casket in Graceland’s foyer, Shane and the Colonel talked again. They agreed to meet at the William Morris office in Los Angeles in the days following Elvis’s
funeral to finalize the contract with Geissler. Shane would assign his rights to Factors for a one percent royalty. “I couldn’t police the industry, and he could, and that was his big
selling point.” But as part of the deal, the twenty-seven-year-old Shane would take over the merchandising of Factors’ rock-and-roll contracts for
Grease, Saturday Night Fever,
and the Bee Gees. “The Bear said, ‘Son, you are going to be one of the richest men in the country.’ ”
Their contract included a provision that Factors, Etc., Inc., would sue the bootleggers who horned in on the territory, thus giving both Shane and Presley a percentage of the illicit sales
without Parker having to dirty his own hands.
“The Colonel really looked after me. He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t give up your rights to the boy.’ Of course, once I had assigned my rights to Factors for a royalty,
I wasn’t really in control anymore. But the Colonel felt as long as I had an association with him, I was okay. He paged me at an airport between flights and said, ‘Are the people
treating you right? Let me know if they are or not.’ Because anybody who wanted to sublicense had to have the Presley estate’s approval, and it wasn’t Vernon or Lisa Marie or
anybody else. It was the Colonel. He was calling all of the shots.”
Without question, Shane says, “He was like, ‘The boy’s dead, and how much money can I make?’ ” But in doing what he did, when he did it,
Parker “legitimized the value of merchandising after an artist is no longer living. The industry owes him a debt of gratitude for doing that, because the numbers became
overwhelming.”
But the Colonel didn’t strictly have the right to negotiate such deals until after he arrived in Memphis for Presley’s service, along with celebrities Ann-Margret and husband Roger
Smith, James Brown, and Caroline Kennedy, who covered the event for the New York
Daily News.
With the tabloids’ helicopters circling overhead, and the droning screech of cicadas
hanging heavy in the Memphis humidity, Parker cornered Vernon in the Graceland foyer. He explained that pirates and scam artists would come out of the woodwork to cash in on Elvis’s memory
now, and that Vernon, the executor of Elvis’s estate, was in no physical or emotional shape to deal with them, especially as he had other worries on his mind.
The estate would eventually be valued at $7.6 million, but that was before taxes, and lately Elvis had been in the habit of mortgaging Graceland to make his payroll. Shouldn’t they just
continue business as usual? The Colonel could advance the estate $1 million to pay off debts and make it look as if Elvis had some cash in his depleted checking account. Besides, “Elvis
didn’t die. The body did,” Parker said—and would repeat for days on end whenever reporters got close. “It don’t mean a damned thing. It’s just like when he was
away in the army. . . . This changes nothing.”
The Colonel would go on managing Presley’s memory, and on August 23, Vernon signed the official letter, drafted, one suspects, by Parker himself. “I am deeply grateful that you have
offered to carry on in the same old way, assisting me in any way possible with the many problems facing us,” Vernon allegedly wrote. “I hereby would appreciate if you will carry on
according to the same terms and conditions as stated in the contractual agreement you had with Elvis dated January 22, 1976, and I hereby authorize you to speak and sign for me in all these matters
pertaining to this agreement.”
While the Colonel had business on his mind the day of the funeral, several of the mourners gathered in Graceland’s music, dining, and living rooms for the 2:00
P.M.
service on August 18 found his behavior more peculiar than ever, beginning with his dress: a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap, from which protruded unruly tufts of gray-brown hair.
“If Elvis looks down and he sees the Colonel all dressed up, he’s gonna say, ‘What the hell is that?’ ” Parker explained later. “This is the way I always
dress. Informal. No point putting on airs now.” When he saw Tom Hulett dressed appropriately in a tie and black suit, the Colonel told him to go change into his usual
jeans and loafers.
But what galled everyone was that Parker refused to be a pallbearer, and, as Jackie Kahane remembers, “every time he would go past the coffin, he would avert his eyes.” Larry Geller
also found it strange. He remembers the Colonel being stoic.
“He didn’t talk to many people, and he was way in the back. He certainly wasn’t sitting in the front room, and he could have been right down there with Grandma [Minnie Mae
Presley] and Vernon if he’d wanted.” Afterward, Geller expected Parker to have a private moment at the casket before the lid came down for the last time and a white hearse trailed by
seventeen white limousines carried the body to Forest Hill Cemetery. “But it never happened. He wouldn’t walk up. He didn’t even look. You could almost see him struggling
not
to look.”
Kathy Westmoreland was upset with the Colonel for the way he was dressed, but rationalized his actions. “I could see there was pain in his eyes, and he didn’t want to show
it.”
Years later, Parker boasted that he never once wept at the funeral. “No, sir. If anybody had seen my eyes mist up for a second they must have had their hands in my pockets.”
And if Parker wondered just what killed his client, he spoke of it to no one in Presley’s camp. Jackie Kahane thought he had a fairly good idea. “Elvis committed suicide for want of
another term. It saddened me to see such a big talent kill himself.” On the plane, the comedian wrote a eulogy, which he read at the service between performances by gospel groups and remarks
by evangelist Rex Humbard.
“When I joined the TCB group seven years ago,” Kahane began, “I was given simple instructions by Colonel Parker. He said, ‘Jack, keep it clean.’ As an entertainer,
Elvis was the embodiment of clean, wholesome entertainment.”
But as a private citizen, he was something else, a prescription drug addict, not much different from a gutter junkie, except in his drugs of choice. Yet what
had
killed Elvis Presley?
Dr. Elias Ghanem told friends he was certain Elvis had fallen off the toilet and suffocated in the shag carpet, and pointed to his lolling tongue as proof. Others speculated that Elvis had mistaken
the codeine tablets given to him by his dentist for Demerol and had ingested all ten, suffering an allergic reaction.
But a grief-stricken Vernon believed his son had been murdered, either
by a member of the entourage or, he suspected, by Parker himself, especially in light of
Elvis’s growing interest in finding another manager and the Colonel’s monumental gaming debts, his association with nefarious circles, and his inability to sell Elvis’s contract
in California. For that reason, Vernon authorized both a private investigation and an autopsy.
On October 18, Dr. Eric Muirhead, chief of pathology at Baptist Memorial Hospital, took a team to Graceland to explain the autopsy report to Elvis’s father.
According to
The Death of Elvis: What Really Happened,
by Charles C. Thompson II and James P. Cole, the toxicology report showed that Elvis died of a drug overdose, or polypharmacy, the
lethal interaction of a number of drugs taken concurrently. Vernon was told that at the meeting, the authors contend.
The following day, October 19, the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
ran a story by an enterprising staff journalist named Beth Tamke, who reported that Vernon had been told that tests ordered
by Baptist Memorial Hospital showed at least ten different drugs in the singer’s system. - Tamke’s story went on to speculate that the interaction of the drugs might have affected
Elvis’s heart and caused his death.