Authors: Alanna Nash
But to reporters who contacted him later, Vernon insisted it was too early to say whether drugs played a role in his son’s demise, and added a baffling statement: “I can’t
straighten it out by telling another lie.”
On October 21, Dr. Jerry Francisco, Shelby County medical examiner, appeared at a news conference and passed out a press release that said Elvis Presley died of “hypertensive heart
disease, with coronary artery disease as a contributing factor.” According to Francisco, who had signed the death certificate the day before, Elvis died of cardiac arrhythmia, although he
conceded that no fewer than eight drugs had been present in Presley’s body. “Prescription drugs found in his blood were not a contributing factor,” Francisco said. “Had
these drugs not been there, he still would have died.”
Earlier that month, CBS-TV aired “Elvis in Concert,” which had been taped in Omaha, Nebraska, on June 19, and in Rapid City, South Dakota, on June 21. The special, which many fans
and entourage members say never should have been broadcast, revealed a legend colliding with myth, too fat to move and too often short of breath. Big and bloated, Elvis stumbled through his lyrics,
slurred his speech, and sweated like a man on fire. In the end, he was all chins, gut, and gospel singer hair, a shocking caricature of a once brilliant talent.
Three years after Elvis’s death, Parker told Larry Hutchinson, chief investigator
to the district attorney general for Memphis, that he first noticed Elvis’s
drugs in the late ’60s, “not that it specially concerned me,” as Elvis always showed up to do his work in the movies. But other than their confrontation in 1974, when Presley told
his manager to stay out of his personal life, “I couldn’t get involved,” the Colonel said.
After that, Parker insisted, he was oblivious of any real problem. “I was aware he was treated by physicians in Las Vegas and Palm Springs, but I had no personal experience of his visits.
Sonny West told me one time that he was getting prescriptions in other people’s names, but I - didn’t know about that.”
Yet while he knew that Dr. Nick was often in the dressing room before a performance, Parker testified, “I never saw Elvis being given drugs, though I know that Dr. Nick has said he
prepared medications for Elvis before he went on stage and when he came off.” Likewise, “I never heard of him being admitted to the hospital for an overdose of drugs. I was concerned
sometimes, but I couldn’t talk to him about it . . . It’s a sad situation. I had no control over him. That was Elvis’s choice.”
In September 1978, the Colonel staged a fan festival, Always Elvis, at the Las Vegas Hilton, where he, Vernon, and Priscilla would dedicate a life-size bronze statue of the singer in the lobby.
The convention was booked into the hotel’s new Pavilion, where Elvis was to have performed that year. Always Elvis, which offered, for a price separate from the $15 general admission, a
multimedia show that Jerry Weintraub later took on the road, was the first of many events that would prove the Colonel right: Elvis didn’t die after all.
“It was just like when Elvis would be there at the Hilton for the summer festival,” says Presley collector Robin Rosaaen. “Banners hung outside the Hilton and from the roof
tops—carnival was the atmosphere, and money was the name of the game.”
The Colonel was in his glory, working the crowd as the Memphis Mafia mingled with the fans. When the statue was unveiled, fans packed the showroom, and a throng of entertainers, including Robert
Goulet and Sammy Davis Jr., sat in the plush booths, as if waiting to see Elvis himself.
Indeed, his clothes were already there, on ghoulish display and draped on mannequins, inspiring a now-famous
Saturday Night Live
sketch in which Elvis’s coat toured the nation.
Nothing was too outlandish. Charlie Hodge charged $5 to have his picture taken with fans, and the Colonel, sitting in a vendor’s booth with a cigar clinched between yellowed teeth, hawked and
signed his own Elvis poem for a buck.
Robert Hilburn, rock critic for the
Los Angeles Times,
happened upon
the Colonel that day and drew the old man out. “We made a hell of a team,” Parker
said once the crowd cleared. “I thought we’d go on forever, but . . .” He stared out into the huge room, leaning on the pearl-handled cane that had become his favorite, and paused
as if trying to think of something more to say. “Sure,” he finally added, answering a question that Hilburn never asked. “Sure, I loved him.”
“I sat with him there for a week, signing autographs,” says Jackie Kahane, who emceed the event. “And in the course of talking, he referred to Elvis as being like a son. But I
don’t think Colonel was capable of demonstrating love. That was always the problem.”
A larger test of Parker’s fatherly affection came closer to home in the months just after Presley’s death. Suddenly and without warning, the Colonel inexplicably pulled all his
advertising accounts from his stepson, Bob Ross and, according to Ross’s widow, Sandra, gave the business to Jerry Weintraub.
By that time, through the Colonel’s influence, the Rosses had handled accounts for Rick Nelson, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Frank Sinatra, and Olivia Newton-John. It all dried up,
and the couple sustained huge financial losses just as Bob’s multiple sclerosis worsened. With the added stress of the economic strain, Ross suffered a fatal heart attack and died ten days
after his fifty-third birthday, in July 1978.
“You could say the Colonel killed him,” Sandra offers. “But when Bobby was dying, Colonel called him three times in one day to see how he was. Bobby said in amazement,
‘Three times in one day. He really does care.’ And I think he did. He just didn’t understand the ramifications of what he did.”
Parker sent Tom Diskin to the funeral. Marie, now lost to the ravages of her disease, never knew her son was dead.
A matter of weeks after Bob Ross’s death, his widow opened the door to see a ghost. Billy Ross, Bobby’s fifty-one-year-old clubfooted brother, whom Marie had given to the Florida
Children’s Home as an infant, stood in the transom. “I thought I would die. He looked so much like Bobby, and even sounded like him.” Sandra found his story heartbreaking, but the
visit upset her terribly. “It was just too much, too soon. And I didn’t know what he wanted out of me.”
What he wanted was his heritage. Adopted by a Plant City dirt-farming family, Billy had endured a difficult life. They had worked him like a mule in the fields, and their natural children had
never accepted him, even barring him from sitting with them at their mother’s funeral.
For years, he had tried to discover his real identity. Once he had gotten his
birth records unsealed, his search led him to Bitsy Mott, who referred him to Sandra and the Colonel. Billy was bitter that his real mother had lived a luxurious life as the wife of a famous
entertainment manager, and resentful that his brother, Bob, had led such a grandiose existence, mixing and mingling with starlets in Hollywood and hanging out with Elvis Presley.
Now he demanded two things: a meeting with Marie and his share of the pie. Otherwise, he would write a book about his story; he had, in fact, begun a manuscript. He intended to petition the
courts to restore his name to Ross.
Both Sandra and the Colonel explained that Marie was in no shape to see him, and that if by some miracle she did understand who he was, the shock might kill her. But Billy persisted, hoping he
could somehow restore his mother’s mind and win her heart.
Parker, who remembered the importance of a mother’s love, wrestled with the problem for a time and finally acquiesced, flying Billy and his wife and children to Palm Springs to see Marie,
who had no idea why this stranger had come to meet her. Billy’s book never appeared. Sandra Ross believes the Colonel simply bought him off to protect Marie’s reputation, the way
he’d handled so many problems before.
However, the Colonel was to realize a new set of problems in the events that began on June 26, 1979, when Vernon died on Parker’s seventieth birthday. Elvis’s father had resisted
naming Priscilla the new executor to his son’s estate, but she had cajoled him into it, citing the interest of Lisa Marie, Elvis’s sole beneficiary. To keep the money straight, Vernon
named Joe Hanks, Elvis’s certified public accountant, and the National Bank of Commerce in Memphis, as co-executors.
Immediately after Vernon’s death, Parker approached Priscilla about carrying on his arrangement with the estate. By now, she and the co-executors had put together an impressive board of
directors to maximize income from one of the most famous names on the planet.
In 1979, the estate’s income would be $1.2 million, much of it from the 160 licenses the Colonel had arranged. Parker would get half of the money. And sometimes more.
That year, Dennis Roberts, Elvis’s optician, got a call from the Colonel about designing a line of eyeglasses to be licensed through Boxcar. Roberts met Parker at his office at the RCA
Building in Los Angeles and, in the course of conversation, made a casual inquiry.
“I said, ‘You know I made 488 pairs of eyeglasses for Elvis,’ ” as Roberts remembers. “He went, ‘Yeah.’ ” I said,
‘What happened to all of them?’ The Colonel said, ‘I don’t know. I was never social with the man.’ I said, ‘Colonel, Elvis spent over a quarter of a million
dollars on glasses. The EPs and the TCBs that I designed are fourteen-karat gold. Some of them have diamonds and sapphires in them.’ He said, ‘You gotta be kidding.’ And he picked
up the phone and buzzed some aide to call Graceland, and when he got ’em on the phone, he said, ‘I want you to round up all of Elvis’s glasses and overnight ’em to me
immediately.’ And that was the last anybody ever saw of Elvis Presley’s eyeglasses, except the very few that have shown up at auction.”
Roberts wasn’t thrilled with the way his Boxcar deal turned out. “It cost me about $135,000 for licensing and inventory, but it never really jelled because the Colonel didn’t
come through with his promise to promote them. He was more consumed with his Elvis musical whiskey decanters. He thought those were the rip-off of the century. He said, ‘We’re getting
$200 for these things!’ ”
But if Roberts wasn’t pleased with Parker’s efforts, the co-executors were, even as Priscilla admits “it was a shock to all of us” that Elvis had left so little money.
Three days after Vernon’s death, on June 29, 1979, they wrote the Colonel a letter directing him to carry on pursuant to his agreement with Vernon. All income for the estate would be
forwarded to Parker, who would then deduct his 25 percent to 50 percent and forward the balance to the estate.
In May 1980, the co-executors filed a petition to approve Parker’s compensation agreement and ratify all payments of commission, even as the estate’s lawyers raised an eyebrow.
“We weren’t aware of the extent of Parker’s commissions until Vernon died,” says D. Beecher Smith II, one of the Memphis attorneys who helped settle Presley’s estate.
“Vernon had been relatively secretive about it. We filed a petition with the probate court to rule on the propriety of the commissions.”
That decision would alter the Colonel’s saga in ways no one could have imagined.
W
HEN
Priscilla and the co-executors petitioned Shelby County, Tennessee, probate court to allow Parker to
continue representing the estate, they expected a quick rubber-stamping of the agreement. But Judge Joseph Evans was astonished to discover that the Colonel had been guaranteed half of
Presley’s income while the singer was alive, and even more amazed that the estate would sanction such an arrangement now that Parker had no artist to manage.
As such, in a move that stunned the executors, he appointed a thirty-eight-year-old Memphis attorney, Blanchard E. Tual, to investigate Parker’s compensation agreement and to
“represent and defend the interests of Lisa Marie Presley.” In legal terms, Tual was to act as the twelve-year-old’s guardian
ad litem.
Tual spent four months looking into Parker’s financial dealings with the estate. On September 30, 1980, he filed a three-hundred-page report that concluded that it was inappropriate for
the executors to rely on the January 22, 1976, agreement as a basis to continue a full relationship with the Colonel, and argued that “all agreements with Elvis Presley terminated on his
death.” He recommended that the court not approve the 50 percent commission Parker received for administration, as it was “excessive, imprudent, unfair to the estate, and beyond all
reasonable bounds of industry standards.” And he implored the court to immediately order all monies due the estate be paid directly to the executors and not to Parker, and to enjoin the
executors from paying the Colonel any further commissions pending the conclusion of his investigation.
Finally, in what would become the most infamous part of the report, the lawyer, who had conferred with three nationally recognized music
business attorneys, charged that
Parker had been guilty of “self-dealing and overreaching” and that he had “violated his duty both to Elvis . . . and to the estate.” As proof, Tual cited the Boxcar
agreement, which gave Parker 56 percent control of the company, apart from the 50 percent individual commission.
But the Colonel was not the only one who came under fire. The guardian
ad litem
also found fault in Parker’s handling of the royalty revenue from Presley’s publishing
agreements. Tual chided the executors for not giving the Colonel definite guidelines and limits in writing, and for refusing to challenge Parker’s statements, which the guardian
ad
litem
found “unsatisfactory” in failing to clarify if the figures were gross or net. Such reports, he said, were “totally unreliable in determining what actual monies passed
through Parker’s hands.” He asked that the Colonel provide a statement of his present net worth as well as his past income tax returns, and he demanded that the executors secure a full
audit from RCA, since Parker’s agreements did not contain the standard auditing clause customary in every recording contract. Additionally, Tual called for accountings from all of the
entertainment companies with which Parker did business—from the William Morris Agency to Factors to the movie studios to Concerts West.