The Colonel (52 page)

The $500,000 sum was subject to Parker and Presley’s new 50–50 agreement, of course, and the Colonel would receive extra monies for his side deals of promoting the records and tours,
as well as developing merchandising and promotional concepts. At Parker’s insistence, Ilberman had to “scream at the lawyers to keep the buyout contract down to three or four
pages.” As for the Colonel’s side deals, says Ilberman, “he always had side deals with everybody. That was the nature of the animal. It was almost a game.”

In the end, RCA paid the pair $10.5 million. Of that, $6 million would go to the Colonel, and $4.5 to Elvis. After taxes, Elvis would retain roughly $2 million for his best work—arguably
the most valuable recordings in popular music. And now his wife was asking for a large chunk of it.

When the divorce decree was finalized in October 1973, Priscilla would receive a cash payment of $725,000, plus $4,200 a month spousal support for a year (after which the payment would balloon
to $6,000 a month for ten years), and $4,000 a month child support. She would also get 5 percent of Elvis’s new publishing companies and half the sale of their California house.

The strain of Elvis’s emotional and physical fatigue showed in his performance at the Sahara in Tahoe in May 1973. Thirty pounds overweight and lethargic, the singer canceled a number of
his shows and went to a local hospital for chest X rays. But according to Marty Lacker, who was present, “He wasn’t sick. He was just tired of all that shit. We flew home, and he was
fine.” The Colonel, who was paid $100,000 for his help with the engagement, returned his fee.

Once Elvis returned to Memphis, an angry Parker contacted Vernon about the open dialogue between Elvis’s friends and family concerning his abuse of prescription medications. The fact that
Elvis was in grave danger was apparent even to Presley’s young daughter, Lisa Marie, who frequently saw him guzzling pills.

“One night when I was about five or six, we were watching TV,” she remembers. “I looked up at him and said, ‘Daddy, Daddy, I don’t want you to die.’ And he
just looked down at me and said, ‘Okay, I won’t. Don’t worry about it.’ I said that to him several times when we were alone together . . . I guess I was picking something
up.”

According to Dr. Nichopoulos, Elvis was a “hard addict” who already suffered from bladder and bowel trouble, conditions that would soon leave him both
incontinent and impotent. Parker didn’t like Dr. Nick and suspected he was one of Elvis’s main sources for drugs. But where else was he getting them? Through lawyer Ed Hookstratten, the
Colonel and Vernon hired John O’Grady to investigate.

Over a period of months, the detective uncovered three physicians and one dentist who kept Elvis supplied with a steady flow of pharmaceuticals. All were summarily threatened, and deliveries
occasionally intercepted. But nothing seemed to work. Elvis had no desire to stop using, and there were too many people willing to enable him.

Some of them were part of Presley’s own entourage. Another was a friend of the group whose husband was a doctor. “There was more dope in that outfit—you have no idea,”
remembered Jackie Kahane.

But the FBI thought it knew of a more potent supplier. In a January 31, 1974, informant report about Mafia and drugs in entertainment, an agent noted, “Organized crime reaps profits from
the entertainers by receiving kickbacks for obtaining their bookings in popular nightspots and in some cases, furnishing the performers with narcotics. Person contacted stated this is true
currently in the case of Elvis Presley. . . . Person contacted stated that Presley is currently psychologically addicted to and a heavy user of cocaine. Because of this, he has turned down an
engagement in England, which would have netted him several million dollars.”

Larry Geller, whom Parker allowed back into the group in 1972, believing he had hypnotic powers, says that for a short time, Elvis did use liquid cocaine, which he obtained from his California
dentist, Dr. Max Shapiro, and administered on Q-Tips stuck up in his nostrils. Soon Presley would begin using Dilaudid, or synthetic heroin. Because only “junkies” shot up, Presley had
members of his entourage inject it into his hip. Dilaudid, often prescribed for terminal cancer patients, would become his favorite narcotic.

As Presley’s drug use escalated, his relationship with Parker continued to unravel. In the summer of ’73, they fought over a variety of issues, from Elvis’s insistence on
recording again in Memphis—this time, at the legendary Stax studios, where his initial sessions collapsed when Elvis was too slurry of speech—to Presley adding a gospel group, Voice, in
Las Vegas. Not only did Parker believe Elvis paid them too much—$100,000 a year—but suspected one of its members helped keep him in drugs.

By now, almost everyone could see that something was wrong with Elvis.
The Hollywood Reporter
was dismayed at the star’s August engagement,
calling his
opening-night show “one of the most ill-prepared, unsteady, and most disheartening performances of his Las Vegas career. . . . It is a tragedy . . . and absolutely depressing to see Elvis in
such diminishing stature.” The Colonel, who had broken his ankle before going to Vegas, hobbled around on a dark brown bamboo cane, trying to exercise damage control.

Ironically, during that same engagement, Presley accidentally fractured the ankle of one of his female guests while demonstrating a karate hold in his suite. It was this mishap that first
brought Elvis into contact with Elias Ghanem, the Hilton’s house doctor, who was called to administer aid. The thirty-four-year-old Lebanese immigrant had been born in Israel as one of two
sons of a wealthy oil company executive, and after interning at UCLA medical school, came to Vegas as an emergency room physician in 1971. Currently, he was opening the first of a string of
twenty-four-hour medical centers on Joe W. Brown Drive near the Las Vegas Hilton. During his off hours, the doctor could be found at the racetrack or hobnobbing with celebrities.

Soon Ghanem would become Presley’s favorite Las Vegas physician, the entertainer giving him a Stutz Bearcat and Mercedes. But according to Kathy Westmoreland, “Elvis was worse”
after Ghanem came around. Not only was Ghanem lax with a prescription pad, but, says Westmoreland, “he was flaky. He thought he
was
Elvis in a way. He came into Elvis’s
dressing room wearing one of his jumpsuits a couple of times. Had his hair darkened and everything.”

Elvis was not amused, yet he would come to rely on Ghanem for treatment of a variety of ailments. The doctor recognized that Elvis’s health was in freefall, that his weight was in the
unhealthy range, his liver fatty, and his colon unnaturally sluggish. More and more, Presley seemed to put himself in life-threatening situations.

On October 11, 1973, two days after his divorce was final, Elvis, now addicted to Demerol, had trouble breathing while flying home to Memphis from Los Angeles. Dr. Nichopoulos put him in Baptist
Memorial Hospital for tests. Colonel Parker, who did not visit his client during any of his hospital stays, informed the press that the singer suffered from pneumonia, but in truth, the stay
amounted to a detox, as the Demerol incident was one of three overdoses that year alone. At Dr. Nick’s suggestion, Elvis’s next Vegas engagement, in January 1974, would be cut from four
weeks to two. Meanwhile, the doctor suggested that Elvis take up racquetball for exercise.

When Presley began rehearsals at RCA Studios in Los Angeles earlier that month, he auditioned a new bass player, Duke Bardwell. The Louisiana native, a lifelong Elvis fan,
was “nervous as a chicken in a yard full of roosters.” As the first one there, he picked up a few tidbits—Elvis had gained some weight since the last tour and had been put on a
diet of 500 calories a day, plus injections of “something that sounded like rabbit urine.”

When the double doors swung open, Bardwell caught one glimpse of Elvis and thought he was “watching a Fellini movie. It was all there . . . the funky glasses, the cape, the little black
cheroot, the high collar . . . and a big, nickel-plated pistol, which he pulled out of his belt and handed to one of the boys.

“We rocked along for an hour or so, and when they decided to take a break, I found myself standing next to Elvis. I said, ‘I know you have a lot of martial arts training, so I was
wondering why you carry a gun.’ He put that top lip up a little and said, ‘That’s to handle anything from six feet out. Six feet in, I got it covered.’ I was left pondering
that while he walked away, and then he spun around and threw a punch that stopped with one of his big rings actually touching my nose. I never saw it coming, but it left me with a red face, a
racing heart, and the realization that he could have missed by a half inch and driven my nose bone through my brain.”

Elvis’s behavior grew even more reckless once he got to Vegas. Shooting out a chandelier. Firing randomly when he couldn’t find Dr. Ghanem. Narrowly missing Linda Thompson,
indisposed in the bathroom, while aiming at a porcelain owl. Some nights, when the pills dulled the nerves in his esophagus, members of the entourage pulled food from his throat to keep him from
choking. More than once, his heart stopped beating, and a frenzied Dr. Nick injected the organ with Ritalin to get it pumping again.

Such rescues became increasingly commonplace. In May 1974, Elvis took a young fan named Paige to Palm Springs after his closing night in Tahoe. Partying on liquid Hycodan, Elvis accidentally
overdosed them both, their body temperatures falling dangerously low in Presley’s frigid bedroom. The girl, who had frequently attended his Tahoe shows with her mother, suffered permanent
effects.

“He said to me one time, ‘If I wasn’t a celebrity, I’d be put away, because I’m crazy,’ ” Jackie Kahane recalled. “I saw him wiped
out—
wiped out
—crawling on the bloody floor! I couldn’t bear to watch him. One time my wife said to him, ‘Elvis, you were great tonight.’ And he said,
‘You saw the best imitation of Elvis Presley that he’s ever done.’ ”

As his client continued deteriorating, the Colonel largely looked away. At least two members of Elvis’s band maintain that Parker didn’t know the extent of the
addiction, or how sick Presley was, even as the singer deliberately cut a festering hole in his hand to get stronger drugs. Others say, in retrospect, that the Colonel still didn’t know
precisely what to do and hoped Elvis’s doctors would find a way to help him manage his habit. The Colonel himself later said that he could complain only when Elvis did a bad show, but as
“every performer has good days and bad days,” and Presley balanced the off-nights with outstanding performances, he mostly stayed silent.

“I suppose I really began to get concerned at the beginning of 1974,” Parker would later tell Larry Hutchinson, chief investigator to the district attorney general for Memphis.
“I got worried. He’d gained too much weight and he looked terrible. Now I spoke out . . . told him he did not look well. He said, ‘No disrespect, Colonel, but I know what
I’m doing. Stay out of my personal life.’ ”

While most people around Presley were puzzled as to why the Colonel—who had ruled almost every aspect of Elvis’s life—stood by as Elvis destroyed himself, Duke Bardwell put it
down to Parker’s “lack of humanity . . . because Colonel was the only one that could help.”

“There’s no question in my mind that the Colonel knew Elvis was dying,” says Byron Raphael, who had been invited back for one of Elvis’s Vegas openings. “And not
only did he do nothing to stop it, but in a way, through omission, he was a coconspirator. There was really no strong relationship between the Colonel and Elvis anymore. He had lost his control,
and that had to be a terrible thing for him. The real deadliness of Colonel Parker was that he believed the living Elvis had become an impediment to his management style and ambition. He
didn’t really want him to die, but he knew that was the only way out, and considering the condition Elvis was in, the best thing that could have happened. Because Elvis was easier to control
dead than alive. And more valuable, too, from merchandising alone. So he just stepped out of the way and let fate take its course. That way, he and Vernon could continue making the kinds of deals
that the Colonel always dreamed of making.”

In planning for the inevitable, the Colonel approached Vernon in 1974 about setting up a company to oversee the merchandising of Elvis’s nonperformance products, as well as Presley’s
new music publishing companies. Parker called it Boxcar Enterprises, taking the name from the
gambling term for double sixes in the game of craps, and had a logo designed
with a pair of dice adorning a railroad car.

Boxcar would become the sole entity through which Presley’s commercial rights were marketed. But the stock split was distinctly loaded toward the Colonel and his friends, who made up the
board of directors and first officers of the corporation. Of the 500 shares issued, Parker owned 200, or 40 percent of the company, with Elvis, Tom Diskin, Freddy Bienstock, and George Parkhill
(who was leaving RCA to work for the Colonel) each receiving 75 shares, or 15 percent control.

The salaries were also similarly skewed. At the outset, the Colonel paid himself $27,650 a year, while Elvis received $2,750. Tom Diskin and George Parkhill earned $4,750 each for 1974, though
by 1976 the salaries would fluctuate wildly, with Parker earning $36,000, Diskin $46,448, and Elvis $10,500. Just why the star received so little of the company built around his legend was never
explained.

Parker intended Boxcar to be a record company as well. George Parkhill, who “actually almost lived with the Colonel,” remembered Bruce Banke, was to be in charge of its every-day
operation and product distributed through RCA. Yet Boxcar’s one and only long-playing album was
Having Fun with Elvis On Stage,
an embarrassing spoken-word recording made up solely
of Elvis’s between-songs prattle, replete with burps, belches, and bad jokes.

But the label also pressed one single, “Growing Up in a Country Way,” by what the Colonel called a “green-grass group,” Bodie Mountain Express with Kirk Seeley. While the
band hailed from California and regularly played Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland, the incongruous jacket photo showed four mountaineer ish young men in overalls and straw hats holding
acoustic instruments. They stood behind the heavier Seeley, who wore a white suit and shoes, and strove mightily to look like Elvis: the Grand Ole Opry meets Vegas.