Authors: Alanna Nash
Tual’s findings rocked the music world and shocked Presley’s fans, as, rumors notwithstanding, no manager-client dealings had been as veiled as those of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis
Presley. Most agreed that the 50 percent commission was particularly egregious, since the majority of personal managers received 10 percent or 15 percent, and only rarely 25 percent. But the ratio
was more complicated than it appeared. “I’m sure a lot of people see him as just this money-grubbing curmudgeon,” points out Parker’s friend Mike Crowley, “but it
wasn’t fifty percent of everything.”
The Colonel, who reacted to the report with anger, was not without sympathy beyond his circle. Says music attorney and author Stan Soocher, “You can’t paint Parker as an angel,
because the overreaching was clear. However, the particularities of the Elvis-Parker-RCA situation may not fully apply to the industrywide standard. A lot of this was a very tough call.”
“Most people would say [the 50 percent commission is] highway robbery,” concurs David Skepner, the manager who built country singer Loretta Lynn into a national figure. “But he
was working under very abnormal conditions, including the drugs, so getting anything accomplished was a miracle.” And, points out RCA’s Joe Galante, “While he
kept getting a higher proportion of the take, he was bringing in more revenues than other managers.”
Indeed, then, if Presley’s gross earnings totaled an estimated $200 million, why shouldn’t the man who wrangled such huge sums receive more than the industry standard, if not 50
percent? In 1968, the British journalist Chris Hutchins asked Parker about a wild rumor floating through the industry. “Is it true,” he ventured, “that you take fifty percent of
everything Elvis earns?” For a moment, Parker seemed speechless. “No,” he finally answered. “That’s not true at all. He takes fifty percent of everything I
earn.” And that’s the way he saw it. The Colonel spent many more hours plying the Elvis trade than Elvis did. And even though he had side deals with the very companies with whom Elvis
did business—from RCA to the Hilton to Management III—Parker gave Presley undiluted attention in refusing to represent other acts on a grand scale.
Elvis himself never balked at the arrangement, and, echoes Barry Coburn, the manager who brought country singer Alan Jackson to prominence, the practices of the industry of the ’60s
shouldn’t be compared to the business ethics of today. “How can you argue with the legacy that remains?” he asks, especially one that continues to influence managers and music
executives alike.
In short, the Colonel was all the things that he appeared to be, both good and bad, and if Parker was the very definition of shrewd, the morality of his decisions was not always discernible as
black or white.
Surprisingly, the estate itself had difficulty making that assessment. Less than three months after Tual delivered his first report and began gathering information for a second, the executors
balked at the guardian’s requests. They argued that he had overstepped his authority and should be removed. They attempted to prevent Tual from continuing his investigation, a move the judge
quickly quashed.
Dr. Beecher Smith III, one of the estate’s Memphis attorneys, denounced Parker as a “shaman” but also praised his doggedness (“When he was working for Elvis, he could
negotiate the gold out of people’s teeth”). Furthermore, Smith cited “contractual barriers” to the recommendation that Parker no longer be a conduit for all of
Presley’s income.
“I’m not prepared to paint Parker black,” Smith said some years later. “There were villainous elements, but . . . [he] was instrumental in establishing many of the things
the estate benefits from today. His greatest sin was not being savvy about the state of the industry during the last five or ten years of Elvis’s life.”
In late 1980, as the investigation continued, Parker received what some considered fateful retribution when he suffered a fall at the RCA Building in Los Angeles, where he
continued to keep an office on the seventh floor. Tripping at the entrance to the elevator, the old man lay beneath his own weight as the automatic door opened and shut repeatedly, breaking and
slamming his right shoulder in relentless assault. The injury would forever limit the mobility of his arm and neck, and age him, in the opinion of friends, by ten years. Until he healed, he
insisted that George Parkhill accompany him to the casinos to pull the handles on the slot machines; subsequently, he referred to the one-armed bandits as his “exercise.”
Shortly after the accident, Tual flew to California, where he held a meeting with Parker and the estate in the Colonel’s hospital room. In a newspaper interview in December 1980, the
lawyer said he felt strange during the visit, expressing his surprise at how the executors “sandbagged” him and refused to question Parker’s 50 percent commission.
“I got the feeling the executors and the attorneys were afraid of Colonel Parker,” he said. “Every time he would laugh, they would laugh. Every time he said yes, they said
yes.” Tual was stunned at the hold Parker seemed to have over the very people he had defrauded out of a fortune—$7 million or $8 million in the last three years alone, he estimated. But
still he admired his cunning: “He had it from the eyebrows up.”
The guardian
ad litem
’s second report, delivered July 31, 1981, was even more damning than the first and elaborated on what Tual considered Parker’s poor management.
Foremost was the RCA buyout (“the worst decision ever made in the history of rock ’n’ roll”), motivated, Tual charged, by Parker’s gambling debts and recent heart
attack, and “the conscious decision to make as much money as he could from Elvis before his inevitable premature death.” Tual also hammered on the surprisingly low figure for which
Elvis played Las Vegas and Parker’s failure to register Presley with BMI for performance royalties as a songwriter.
The latter discovery was a sweet victory for Joe Moscheo, the leader of the Imperials, whom Parker had treated so shabbily in Las Vegas. In 1978, the singer had left the road to go to work for
BMI, where, in learning the system, he routinely checked up on royalties for his songwriter friends. Moscheo was bewildered when he typed in Presley’s name and saw “NA,” not
affiliated.
“Elvis had thirty-three songs that he was credited as either writing or cowriting, including some big ones, like ‘All Shook Up,’ and he never received
any writer performance royalties from BMI from 1955 to 1978,” says Moscheo. In investigating, he learned that “the Colonel would not allow Elvis to sign anything that
Parker didn’t understand or agree to, and evidently, he didn’t understand what all of this performance thing meant. It was just an oversight, but there were hundreds of thousands of
dollars that Elvis never received as a songwriter. Priscilla was furious.”
Tual was likewise enraged, but saved his knockout punch for Parker’s rampant “self-dealing.” He boldly charged the Colonel and RCA with “collusion, conspiracy, fraud,
misrepresentation, bad faith, and overreaching,” asserting the record company paid off Parker to keep Elvis quiet and obedient while the label cheated “the most popular American folk
hero of this century.”
The manager’s side deals with the company constituted a clear conflict of interest, Tual said, as “Colonel Parker could not possibly deal with RCA at arm’s length on
Elvis’s behalf when he was receiving that much money from [the label].” As late as February 1980, RCA paid Parker $50,000 for “services with respect to promotion, merchandising
concepts, and packaging suggestions.”
On August 14, 1981, when thousands of fans gathered in Memphis to pay tribute to Presley on the fourth anniversary of his death, Judge Evans ordered attorneys for the estate to halt further
payments to the manager, as “the compensation received by Colonel Parker is excessive and shocks the conscience of the court,” the judge wrote in a heated opinion. Additionally, he
required the executors to file suit against Parker for alleged fraudulent business practices and ordered an investigation into RCA Records’ dealings with Presley and the estate. Finally, the
judge admonished the executors not to “enter into any future agreements with - Parker” without the court’s approval.
The Colonel was not in attendance, and his attorney, Jack Magids, denied all allegations of impropriety leveled against his client. Parker’s allies, speaking out in his favor, wondered if
Tual’s report would have been different if the Colonel, then seventy-two years of age, were younger and healthier.
But Parker was fully capable of defending himself, he said in interviews with newspaper reporters. Courting the press where he’d once put a price on his time—$25,000 for small talk,
$100,000 for a long conversation—he began to lift the curtain, if only slightly, around the great “Elvis and the Colonel” construct. Parker was shocked, he said in a written
broadside, at what occurred in the probate proceedings, as he had
made “every effort to honor [Elvis’s] name and preserve his memory and dignity.” Such
allegations not only attacked Parker’s reputation, “but also are unfair and insulting to the memory of Elvis and his father, Vernon.” The fact that their relationship lasted
twenty-one years “should say it all,” he added, and insisted “Elvis knew that I provided services for others. He was satisfied with our arrangement, and it worked.”
Yet within a month, as lawyers closed in and public sentiment turned vicious, Parker felt the need to speak again. The man with the hide of a rhinoceros had “nervous energy” in his
voice as he talked with a reporter from the Memphis
Press-Scimitar,
insisting that Tual hadn’t given the whole picture of his relationship with the late singer. And for the first
time, he criticized his client.
Far from being malleable and easily controlled, Elvis was “moody” and “headstrong,” Parker said, and had to be forced to honor his commitments. Though he refused to
discuss Elvis’s drug problem, the Colonel hinted that theirs was not an easy relationship, and that Presley, lacking self-motivation, was often desultory, his actions unpredictable.
“Sometimes,” he told the reporter in an uncharacteristic display of emotion, “it was such a heartache to keep [him] going.”
But what the Colonel really hoped to convey revolved around the issue of fiduciary trust. According to Parker, Elvis frequently refused his advice on important business deals. “He wanted
to always make the final decision,” Parker said. “That’s the way it was. He had a mind of his own.”
At the heart of his argument was the RCA buyout, which the Colonel claimed was greatly misunderstood. “Keep in mind,” he said, “that Elvis approved all of the contracts with
RCA. Elvis was fully aware of the entire transaction, and it was his decision. I had absolutely nothing to hide.”
Despite the fact that Presley’s older songs “weren’t selling” and earned very little, he said, “when [RCA] approached us about the buyout, I was not interested. I
thought it was a stupid idea to even consider it.” However, both Elvis and Vernon “really pushed” for the deal and instructed Parker to counter the offer of $3 million. In getting
the price to $5 million he ended the uncertainty of regular income from royalties. As a result, “Elvis’s decisions in 1973 were correct,” he maintained, adding that the agreement
was “the best deal under the circumstances.”
The Colonel also patted himself on the back. Though he negotiated a new recording contract at the same time as the buyout, Parker said, Elvis failed to produce the required albums every year. To
prevent the label
from balking on the guaranteed royalty, the Colonel assembled tape recordings of live concerts, which RCA accepted in lieu of studio recordings. Thus,
Parker argued, he kept Presley from violating his contract. As for having no auditing clause, most of the artists of the day didn’t have one, but he had been smart to insist on dollars and
cents per unit protection.
Still, the accusations flew, and soon the executors took a different legal tack, asserting Parker never had a permit to act as Elvis’s manager. Yet with its limited resources—less
than $5 million in real cash—the estate was on the brink of bankruptcy and loathe to tie itself up in expensive litigation, especially as the Internal Revenue Service had recently demanded
payment of $14.6 million in additional taxes. The estate had undervalued Graceland itself, the IRS charged, as well as the worth of Elvis’s royalty rights for films, records, and television
specials.
And, executors knew, Parker would fight back. In March 1982, he filed suit, calling his relationship with Elvis a partnership and citing the January 2, 1967, agreement as proof. (“I never
saw anything to indicate it was a partnership,” says Tual.) The Colonel maintained he was due $1.6 million that he advanced Elvis in the months before his death, and asked a Nevada court to
order the Presley estate liquidated. In the meantime, he sought the right to promote Presley’s name and to gain full control of the business that he and Elvis shared, the profits to be
divided between him and Lisa Marie.
With litigation already stretching from California to Tennessee, in May 1982, RCA Records filed suit in U.S. District Court in New York against the executors, Tual, and Parker.
That’s when the Colonel played his toughest card.
Flushed out by Albert Goldman’s book
Elvis,
which in 1981 reported that Parker had been born Andreas van Kuijk in Breda, Holland, Parker spoke publicly for the first time about
his European origins and forfeiture of his Dutch citizenship. In legal papers filed in response to the suit, he claimed that he could not be sued under federal law because “I am advised by my
attorneys that the Court lacks jurisdiction over the subject matter of the complaint and the cross-claims herein, since I am not a citizen of the United States or any foreign country for purposes
of diversity jurisdiction.”
Or, as Parker told
Variety,
“Yes, I am a man without a country.”
The revelation drew gasps from Parker’s acquaintances and spawned additional newspaper headlines. But still it failed to trigger an INS or
FBI check. “That old
son of a bitch was some kind of magician,” his foes whispered, “unless someone like Lyndon Johnson fixed things for him.”