The Colonel (43 page)

“The Colonel took us out in the hall,” Marty Lacker remembers, “and he said, ‘Goddamn you guys, why do you let him get this way? He’s going to mess up everything!
They’ll tear up the contract!’ ”

Then he turned to Larry Geller. “Get those books out of here right now!” he bellowed. “Do you understand me? Right now!”

Afterward, says Lacker, “the Colonel went back in and talked to Elvis, and he said, ‘Here’s the way it is. From now on, you’re going to listen to everything I say.
Otherwise, I’m going to leave you, and that will ruin your career, and you’ll lose Graceland and you’ll lose your fans. And because I’m going to do all this extra work for
you, I want fifty percent of your contract.’ ”

Parker prepared a new agreement, backdating it to January 1. In setting down terms for a joint venture, the Colonel wrote that he would continue to collect a 25 percent commission on
Elvis’s standard movie salaries and record company advances, but All Star Shows would now receive 50 percent of profits or royalties beyond basic payments from both the film and the record
contracts, including “special,” or side, deals. The commission would be deducted before any division of royalties and profits. Their merchandising split would remain the same.

Lacker was surprised at how quickly Elvis had okayed such an arrangement, but the foreman didn’t know about the clinical depths of Elvis’s depression, nor about a conversation that
had taken place between Parker and Presley sometime the year before.

They were talking about Sam Cooke, the great soul singer who died in a shooting outside a hooker’s seedy motel room in 1964. Cooke had also recorded for RCA—in fact, his live
At
the Copa
album was released the month of his death. But it wasn’t the manager of L.A.’s Hacienda Motel who killed him, as the press reported, Parker told Elvis. The Mafia got him.
Cooke was stepping out of line, the Colonel said, getting involved in civil rights, spouting off about things he shouldn’t. He was warned, but he wouldn’t shut up. Word came down and
the hit was made.

The mob wasn’t gangsters in the streets anymore, Parker explained. It was heads of corporations like RCA, the East Coast, Sicilian families—
men whose last
names ended in vowels, men with uncles called Jimmy “the Thumb.”

“Colonel told Elvis, ‘You’ve got to behave yourself. You can only go so far,’ ” says Larry Geller. “And Elvis knew the Colonel was a dangerous
enemy.”

A week or so after the fall, when Presley regained his strength, Parker called a meeting at Rocca Place. Priscilla and Vernon had flown out from Memphis, and along with Elvis and the guys, they
sat around the living room as Parker rolled out a list of changes: one, Joe Esposito was to be the lone foreman. Two, no one was to talk about religion to Elvis, and Geller could no longer be alone
with him. And three, there was too much money going out. Everyone’s salary would be cut back, and several people had better start looking for jobs.

In the end, no one was fired, and only one person left voluntarily, when Larry Geller quit the following month. But the guys had never seen Elvis so docile. He never took his eyes off the floor,
and he never spoke up.

At 9:41 on the morning of May 1, 1967, Elvis and Priscilla were married by Nevada Supreme Court Judge David Zenoff in a small, surprise ceremony in Milton Prell’s suite
at the new Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. “She was absolutely petrified, and Elvis was so nervous he was almost bawling,” the justice remembers. Afterward, owner Prell laid out a $10,000
champagne breakfast with suckling pig and poached salmon, and then the couple flew to Palm Springs on Frank Sinatra’s Learjet to begin their honeymoon.

As if it were the Colonel’s own wedding, Parker arranged every detail. “It was the Colonel who got the rings, the room, the judge,” Priscilla later said. “We didn’t
do any of that. It was all through his connections. We wanted it to be
fast,
effortless.” Which meant she and Elvis also allowed the Colonel to pick the attendants and the guests,
who numbered fewer than twenty. Most of the Memphis Mafia were excluded from the ceremony—a painful slight that would leave bruised feelings for years—but invited to the breakfast,
where they mingled with Parker’s gambling buddy, the comedian Redd Foxx.

Larry Geller, whom Elvis had once asked to be best man, read about the wedding in the newspaper. Stunned, he thought back to the events of the past month. Parker had taken charge of everything
in Elvis’s life except the one aspect he should have addressed: Presley’s drug use.

Grelun Landon, who worked with the Colonel from 1955 on, first as a vice president of Hill and Range and then as an RCA publicist, says that Parker himself didn’t
know about the pills during the MGM years, despite Elvis’s ever-present “makeup” case. But others insist that can’t be true—the Colonel was informed about
everything
that went on—and though their meetings were infrequent, there was no way he couldn’t have recognized the erratic behavior and abnormal perspiration of an addict,
even one whose dependence was on prescription drugs, not street narcotics.

But just as several of the entourage members were in denial about their own drug use, Parker, according to his friends, refused to believe that Elvis was truly in trouble. A more plausible
explanation is that in the days before the Betty Ford Clinic, the Colonel didn’t know where to take him for discreet, effective help and loathed risking the loss of work if the truth got out.
As a man who spent his whole life covering things up, Parker believed the decent thing was to conceal Elvis’s “weakness.”

Just as Elvis turned increasingly to drugs in periods of stress, Parker, as his difficulties mounted, visited the gambling tables of Las Vegas for the addictive element of excitement and escape.
For many gamblers, the satisfaction—even the thrill—is in losing, not winning, since for pathological gamblers with an impulse control disorder, the game is never about the acquisition
of money, but about the action itself. Gambling fed the obsessive twins—Wisdom and Folly—of Parker’s personality, which made him by turns calculating and reckless, self-protective
and self-destructive.

Parker’s losses were now becoming increasingly apparent to his business associates, who saw him as a chronic gambler. Since 1965, he’d been asking for money early on the film
contracts, and new RCA president Norman Racusin was well aware that Parker “had a penchant for the tables,” as the label had assigned Harry Jenkins to keep the Colonel happy. That meant
Jenkins spent an inordinate amount of time sitting at the craps tables with Parker in Vegas, the Colonel intoning, “Let’s go down to the office” as his signal for some action.

Jenkins hoped that RCA would reimburse him for the losses he sustained when Parker urged him to throw in a few chips. But the label had no such intention, since it was already occasionally
taking care of the Colonel’s debts. Though Parker grossed unfathomable sums of money, little of it came in steadily. In between deals, he began calling on Hal Wallis, the Morris agency, and
RCA to cover him, the casinos knowing that
someone was always going to be good for his money. If not, they gave him credit, or wrote it off as a favor.

“I’m sure there was an awful lot going on,” says Parker’s acquaintance Dick Contino, the accordionist who was courted by the mob early in his career and remained a
favorite of Sinatra. “It would be an obvious thing. If you’ve got a problem financially, these guys don’t write notes—they ask you what you need. If they like you, you got
it. Money is nothing, but respect, everything. My guess is that they asked for their favors in return and got them, maybe unbeknown to Elvis. I wouldn’t criticize Tom for it. Why
not?”

S
OMETIME
in 1965, in near secret, the Colonel started taking meetings with Tom Sarnoff, vice president
of NBC’s West Coast division. Parker thought Elvis should make a motion picture for television, he told Sarnoff, and after it debuted on the network, he wanted the rights to release it
theatrically around the world. The negotiations were long and arduous, and often seemed to stall altogether.

Throughout Elvis’s movie years, Parker had fiercely protected the exclusivity to put his client on television, again demonstrating his shrewdness in using the medium. Only once had he had
been thwarted. In 1959, he entered into a deal with Irving Kahn, the TelePrompter inventor, for a 100-city closed-circuit television concert to reintroduce Elvis after his return from the army.

Closed-circuit telecasts were commonplace for champion prizefights, but a recording artist had yet to do one, and Parker enjoyed the publicity of the history-making event. But Wallis and Hazen
quickly objected, arguing if the paid TV appearance wasn’t successful, attendance for Presley’s future motion pictures would suffer. Parker scrapped the closed-circuit deal, snippily
writing Wallis and Hazen, “I know that both of you must be brokenhearted . . . if there is anything either of you could do to make me feel better, don’t hesitate to go to any lengths to
achieve this pleasant goal.”

From that day, Parker plotted his revenge, drafting long, sabre-rattling letters to the producers whenever they aired one of Presley’s films on television. Free showings of any Elvis movie
diluted the sales impact of his first-run features, Parker huffed, letting Wallis know that if such practices continued, he “could very well lose the next Presley picture.” But what
the Colonel really dreaded was interference as he negotiated a big deal with NBC, which, like RCA, was a corporate arm of General Electric.

In October 1967, Sarnoff and the Colonel came together again. This time they talked about a package deal to include Elvis’s first TV appearance since the Frank Sinatra special of 1960.
Three months later, they agreed on a price: $250,000 for a music special and $850,000 for a feature film plus 50 percent of the profits. The film,
Change of Habit
, a Universal Pictures and
NBC production, would pair Elvis with one of his most unlikely leading ladies, Mary Tyler Moore.

But first he would make
Charro!
, an offbeat film in the vein of Sergio - Leone’s so-called spaghetti Westerns, for National General. The picture would soothe the actor’s ego
somewhat. “
Charro!
is the first movie I ever made without singing a song,” Presley would tell one of the Colonel’s chosen reporters. “I play a gunfighter, and I
just couldn’t see a singing gunfighter.” Ultimately, he would agree to croon the title tune.

For the last year, the Colonel had been rethinking his strategy, trying to find projects to challenge Elvis, to rouse him from his lethargy and depression. With
Easy Come, Easy Go,
Parker had attempted—and failed—to have Wallis cast Elvis in a nonmusical role. And in March of ’67, the Colonel wrote to MGM, encouraging the studio to come up with something
meaty for the remaining films on Presley’s contract—no more bikinis and no more nightclub scenes, “which have been in the last fifteen pictures. . . . I sincerely hope that you
are looking in some crystal ball with your people to come up with some good, strong, rugged stories.”

Now a televised music special along the lines Sarnoff proposed would let Elvis meet the people eye to eye for his first full-length performance since the U.S.S.
Arizona
concert in 1961.
Taped in June 1968, it would air that December for the holiday season.

“Would TV serve to refurbish that old magic, the sort of thing that gave old ladies the vapors and caused young girls to collect the dust from Elvis’s car for their memory
books?”
TV Guide
asked. Parker thought they would, as did fifty-year-old Bob Finkel, one of four executive producers under exclusive contract to NBC. Sarnoff brought Finkel to the
project even before he signed the deal with Parker. Not only had Finkel made his Emmy-winning reputation with variety shows, but more important, Sarnoff believed Finkel might be a match for the
High Potentate.

Almost immediately, Parker made him a Snowman—Finkel carried his card in his wallet (“Had to!”)—and the two men developed an easy rapport.
But
Finkel realized that entertaining the Colonel and keeping him distracted from the show would be a full-time job. He also couldn’t get past Elvis calling him Mr. Finkel, and needed someone to
whom the singer could relate. That’s when he placed a call to Binder/Howe Productions, and invited them on board.

Steve Binder was a twenty-one-year-old wise-beyond-his-years producer-director who’d grown up working in his father’s Los Angeles gas station. He had a rock-and-roll gut and a primal
instinct for what was gold and what was dross, having cut his teeth producing the hip TV music series
Hullabaloo
and
The T.A.M.I. Show,
a 1964 landmark concert film with a virtual
who’s who of rock, including James Brown and the Rolling Stones. More recently, he’d done a Petula Clark special that spawned a thousand headlines in racially uptight America when Clark
exchanged an innocent touch with her guest, Harry Belafonte.

Bones Howe, Binder’s business partner and the music supervisor on the shows, was a sound guru, currently producing records for the pop groups the Fifth Dimension and the Association. Years
before, he’d worked on a number of Elvis’s sessions at Radio Recorders, as the assistant to engineer Thorne Nogar.

Howe remembered what Elvis had been like before Hollywood choked off his ambition, how he produced his own records, listening to stacks of demos over and over, calling for a guitar lick here, a
bass thump there, and then danced to his own playbacks turned up loud. He also remembered how much fun Elvis was, flirting with the girls at the stoplight on Sunset Boulevard, rolling down the
window just as the light changed, or talking them up the fire escape at the Hollywood Plaza Hotel. Sometimes, he’d flash that crooked grin and invite the teenagers from nearby Hollywood High
right into the studio.

Binder and Howe decided the only way to do the special was to create the same relaxed atmosphere in which Elvis made his early records. If they could pull that off, in an interview in which
Elvis showed how warm and funny he was, or in a live segment where he just talked about his musical roots, people would see the real Elvis Presley and not the one the Colonel had put on display.
Binder told Finkel he was interested only if they could capture the phenomenon of a once-in-a-lifetime personality.