The Colonel (42 page)

Parker never criticized Elvis to any of his acquaintances, but now he drew a radical plan of action. While the Colonel had always directed almost every facet of Elvis’s existence, he
rationalized that he had involved himself only in Presley’s professional affairs. With both his client and their partnership disintegrating, he would rule with an iron fist.

This was the right thing to do, he told himself, since Elvis was incapable of taking care of himself. Besides, they had wrung almost every dollar out of Hollywood; Wallis and Hazen strongly
believed the next movie,
Paradise, Hawaiian Style,
would be, as Hazen termed it, “Elvis’s last good picture” and would go for only one more,
Easy Come, Easy Go,
once their deal ran out. Charles Boasberg, president of Paramount’s distributing company, had sounded the final knell, writing Wallis that
Frankie and Johnny,
a United Artists film,
“is dying all over the country, and this is his second poor picture in a row. If it weren’t for you lifting him up with some good production in your pictures, Presley would be really
dead by now.”

Parker fought Joe Hazen on virtually every clause of the new contract,
and while Wallis defended him (“I think the Colonel has kept his word with you and has shown
fine spirit characteristic of him,” he wrote to his partner), Hazen at one point called Parker’s changes in the agreement “the height of duplicity . . . he is trying to get his
and we
have
ours.”

But the Colonel also saw it as a triumph.

“One day,” remembers Marty Lacker, “Elvis came up to me and said, ‘The Colonel wants you to take him to Palm Springs.’ I had never done that before, and I thought
it was a very strange request, considering our relationship.

“I went over to his office, and I remember I had on a black pullover sweater. The Colonel looked at me and said, ‘You’re not dressed right. Let me give you a shirt.’ He
opened up a closet and pulled out this ugly, old man’s yellow-and-white-striped shirt. And it had a cigar burn on the front. I said, ‘Colonel, I don’t want your shirt.’ He
said, ‘You sure?’ And he put it back in the closet.

“We started driving, and we got about a half hour out of Palm Springs, and we hadn’t said a word to each other. He was sitting next to me in the front seat. All of a sudden, he
started chuckling, and he said, ‘Boy, I showed those goddamn Jews, didn’t I?’ Just out of the blue. Then he chuckled again. Now, I’m saying to myself, You no-good bastard.
You’ve got to know I’m Jewish. I wanted to take that car and head it into a pole, figure out how to kill him without hurting myself.”

In 1966, Parker would persist in wooing the producers for another film, issuing a “Snowmen’s League Annual Report,” a tongue-in-cheek document listing bogus expenses, grosses,
and profits. At the end, Parker inserted a photo of Elvis and Wallis shaking hands, onto which he had pasted a bizarre likeness of himself standing behind them and wielding a machete. “If you
don’t sign a contract,” it seemed to say, further suggesting that only he had the power to sever ties, “I’ll cut off your arm.”

By now, though, the producers were immune to the Colonel’s ploys.
Easy Come, Easy Go
would almost not be released, Paramount believing it was doubtful the picture could recoup its
cost. After Paramount backed off its advertising campaign and Parker relentlessly complained that he had spent too much of his own money to promote it, Wallis sent him a check for $3,500. But the
veteran filmmaker would never do business with him again.

Things were nearly as dismal at MGM. The prefab method by which “the Elvis movie” was assembled had become painfully obvious, with its tiny production budgets and lack of location
shots for the films supposedly
set in Europe and the Middle East. The grosses were also way down, and the plots had deteriorated to cartoonlike absurdity.
Harum
Scarum,
released in late ’65, had been so ridiculous, the Colonel suggested, that only a talking camel could save it by making the picture an intentional farce. Parker had always told
Elvis never to admit he’d made a mistake, but the manager doubted his own judgment in going along with Sam - Katzman’s eighteen-day shooting schedule. It would take “a fifty-fifth
cousin to P. T. Barnum to sell it,” the Colonel said, and the best thing to do was “book it fast, get the money, then try again.”

Before long, rumors swirled in Tennessee that Elvis was retiring, or that he was looking to hire another manager, or that the Colonel himself was ready to quit managing his star. In February
1966, the Colonel got on the phone to the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
and explained that there wasn’t a word of truth to the rumor, diffusing the situation with bravado, saying,
“Heck yes, I would retire and so would my boy—if we received enough money to retire . . . We have contracts for fourteen additional motion pictures to be made over a period of several
years.”

Still, Parker’s judgment remained cloudy. His code of loyalty made him stick with inappropriate directors, including Norman Taurog, a quasi-hack best known for directing
Boys Town
with Spencer Tracy in 1938 and Elvis’s own
Blue Hawaii.
Taurog had made a string of Elvis’s films, and Parker requested him more often than his talent—or his
health—warranted. In meeting with Irwin Winkler, who came aboard as the producer of
Double Trouble,
the nearly seventy-year-old Hollywood veteran admitted he was blind in one eye and
couldn’t see well enough to drive. Taurog would be completely sightless within two years of finishing
Double Trouble,
during which time he would direct two more Presley pictures,
Speedway
and
Live a Little, Love a Little,
which would rank among Elvis’s most disappointing efforts.

Even the die-hard fans grumbled that the films weren’t opening at the choice suburban movie houses, but at drive-ins. Worse, they relied on the same old formula—Elvis as a virile
stock car racer, nightclub singer, or crop duster, saddled with a philandering, bumbling sidekick, and searching for true love through implausible dialogue and hackneyed songs. The president of the
Hampshire, England, Elvis Presley Club wrote that the movies were “an insult to Elvis and fans.” Another pleaded to Wallis that someone must help Elvis now “when his career is
beginning to falter,” while an even more prescient voice opined, “I realize that there is not much you can do if Elvis doesn’t care, and sometimes I doubt that he
does.” Despite the fact that exhibitors would soon claim that something must be “radically wrong” with Elvis, judging from his appearance, a lucrative movie offer
came from Japan. But Parker turned it down, saying Elvis was booked through 1969.

Byron Raphael used to ask the Colonel how he could be so strong, refusing certain offers and holding out for unprecedented money elsewhere. Parker explained it was because he had a three-tiered
client—the real reason he hadn’t taken on anyone else to manage. “Byron,” he said, “we don’t need the movie business. If we couldn’t do movies, we could do
personal appearances for $50,000 a night. And if we couldn’t do personal appearances, we could do records. We have gigantic record sales. I wouldn’t do it otherwise.”

But in 1966, RCA again refused the Colonel’s request to sponsor a big tour of personal appearances. He’d asked for $500,000 this time, and as RCA’s Norman Racusin puts it,
“I did not know who the $500,000 was going to.” The company had also become concerned about slipping sales—as musical tastes changed, an album that might have had a standing order
for 2 million copies was down by half—and RCA would soon reduce Elvis’s guaranteed advance. But Parker had other plans for Elvis.
If
he could hold him together.

The first order was to get him focused. For that, the Colonel sent a stronger message to Larry Geller.

One Sunday, he invited Geller and his wife and children to come to Palm Springs and spend the day at the house. After a swim, Parker asked Larry inside, where he began to probe him about his
spiritual beliefs. The telephone rang, and Geller got the strange feeling from the Colonel’s opaque mumbles that the conversation might have been about him.

“He looked at me and he glanced away, and he said ‘Yes, yes, right now. Well, yeah, right.’ But I dismissed it, because I had no reason to be suspicious.”

Parker hung up and suggested they gather the kids and go to Will Wright’s Ice Cream Parlor. Afterward, the Gellers made their good-byes and returned to Los Angeles. “The minute I
drove into the driveway, I saw the back door open,” Larry remembers. “It was a precision strike.”

The intruders had not taken items of monetary value, but Geller’s files on metaphysical topics—parapsychology, astrology, palmistry, and numerology—along with tapes of music
from the Self-Realization church. His clothes, too, were gone. Garbage was dumped upside down in the living room.

Devastated, Geller piled his frightened family in the car and drove to see Elvis. “He shook his head back and forth a few times and said, ‘All right, we know
who did this.’ ” Though Presley set the Gellers up in a hotel until they were ready to return home, Elvis downplayed the incident, saying that at least no one was hurt. But it scared
them both. Says Larry, “We just tried to repress it.”

With Geller seemingly defused, Parker now attacked the second order of business: getting Elvis married.

The strange press release that Parker had written for 1961’s
Wild in the Country
shows that the Colonel had been thinking of this for a long time. “During the making of [the
film],” Parker wrote, “Elvis was asked if the Colonel would object if Elvis married.”

“ ‘The Colonel would have nothing to say about it,’ Elvis replied with more than usual emphasis. ‘I probably would talk it over with him as a friend and as a man I
respect, but never in the sense of asking his permission.’

“ ‘When the boy wants to marry, I hope he’ll ask me to help him do it,’ ” Parker said.

“Like a wise father,” the press release went on, “Colonel Parker takes an interest in the girls Elvis escorts, but doesn’t interfere. He probably would step in if he
thought Elvis were making some dreadful mistake, but it would be as a counselor, not as a commanding officer.”

In 1966, however, there was another commanding officer to consider. Priscilla was almost twenty-one now, and her stepfather, the newly promoted Lieutenant Colonel Beaulieu, was sounding off
about Elvis’s promise to make her his wife. He’d called in recent months and uttered what Elvis took to be some mild threats, and Parker didn’t know how long he could hold him
off. If Elvis reneged, and Priscilla went to the papers, it could look very bad—the headlines would scream how he’d harbored an underage girl and broken her heart.

Priscilla was beginning to think he was never going to marry her, especially as he was dating Ann-Margret, who told reporters she was in love with Presley but didn’t know if they would
marry. A scared Priscilla had flown out to Hollywood to try to break up the romance, but the Colonel had sent her home to Memphis so no one would ask questions about their relationship, too.

Suddenly, everyone was thinking seriously about marriage. The Colonel figured it would end Elvis’s obsession with religion, keep him away from Ann-Margret and her smart young team of
managers, and
stem Elvis’s growing fixation with guns and law enforcement. Priscilla hoped it would make him grow up—why did he need all those guys around for
slot car races and water balloon fights, anyway? And Vernon, who still pretended to take care of Elvis’s personal business (“My daddy doesn’t do anything,” Elvis had once
accurately answered when asked Vernon’s profession), would be happy if it quelled his son’s incessant spending. At the end of 1966, Elvis would negotiate to buy a $300,000 ranch in
Mississippi and blow a fortune on trucks, horses, and trailers for his friends. Parker liked to see Elvis burn through his money—it kept him working—but it made Vernon’s head
spin.

Yes, they agreed, Elvis must get married. Furthermore, Elvis shouldn’t be so remote; he needed to stay in closer touch with the ol’ Colonel. And so in September ’66, Elvis
leased a home in Palm Springs, where he spent Thanksgiving with his manager. But the stress was taking its toll. On the way home to Memphis, Elvis heard “The Green, Green Grass of Home”
on the radio and broke down when he arrived at Graceland, telling Marty Lacker, “I walked in the door, and I saw my mama standing there. I saw her, man.”

Just before Christmas, Elvis proposed to Priscilla. A vague date was set for the following year. Elvis couldn’t find it in him to tell Ann-Margret and simply stopped taking her calls.

With his skewed moral center, Parker believed that forcing Elvis to marry was an honorable move, even if Elvis himself was not emotionally committed. “When I fall deeply in love it will
happen,” he’d told Hedda Hopper five years earlier. “I’ll decide on the spur of the moment, but it won’t be an elopement . . . but a church wedding.”

When Elvis reported for wardrobe fittings for
Clambake,
his twenty-fifth film, in March of ’67, the studio was shocked to discover that he had ballooned to 200 pounds, up 30 from
his usual 170. “He ate out of depression,” says entourage member Jerry Schilling. “The movies were boring to him, and when he didn’t have a challenge, he always got
depressed.” Parker was furious. Elvis began trying to melt the weight off with diet pills, but on top of the sleeping tablets and his usual arsenal of mood-altering drugs, the medications
made him dizzy.

One night at his new rental house on Rocca Place, Elvis got up to use the toilet and tripped over a television cord in the bathroom and hit his head on the sunken tub. By morning, he had a
golfball-size lump, and he was woozy when he staggered out of the bedroom and asked the guys to take a look. Esposito phoned the Colonel, thus setting in motion
the events
that led to Parker’s most egregious attachment of Elvis’s earnings.

By the time the Colonel arrived at the house, along with several white-uniformed nurses and a doctor carrying portable X-ray equipment, Elvis could barely hold his head up. The diagnosis was a
mild concussion, but the start of the movie would have to be delayed by several weeks.