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Some of them, however, like the white Cossack-style suit, accented with a dangling macramé belt, played up Elvis’s androgynous beauty and made him contemporary with many of rock’s leading figures, who favored a flowing, feminized style of dress. He wore the outfit for at least two of his three run-throughs of the performance with full orchestra accompaniment on July 31, only hours before the show opened at 8:15 P.M.

For days he suffered the kind of debilitating panic attacks that crippled him just before the Singer special. If he seemed at thirty-four to be the King of the Oldy-Moldy-Goldys, or simply fought off technical problems, it would be reported in the press both domestically and overseas, where he had such a stronghold of fans. That would affect business and future touring, which he hoped to resume in 1970.

He would also have to face the invitation-only audience, studded with such celebrities as Cary Grant, Paul Anka, Carol Channing, Fats Domino, Wayne Newton, Ann-Margret and Roger Smith, and most important, Sam Phillips, who had started it all. He was so jittery, in fact, that he asked Joe to tell Marty Lacker and George Klein not to come until the second night. He would start his two-shows-a-night schedule then, and he was afraid the showroom would be half-empty.

But when he finally hit the stage at 10:15, following warm-up sets from the Sweet Inspirations and comedian Sammy Shore, he buried his nervousness in the bravado of the rock-and-roll beat, walking out onto stage left unannounced, and winking to the Imperials as he passed.

Just as he shuffled onstage at his high school variety show, he hesitated for a moment, as if summoning his courage. Then he churned through a repertoire that burned the fires of nostalgia (“Blue Suede Shoes”), and thrilled with the soulful tenderness of the Memphis sessions. He was as much athlete as aesthete, falling to his knees, sliding across the stage, even turning a somersault. The crowd leapt to its feet and stayed there.

Both the establishment and the counterculture press, including the New York Times, the Village Voice, and The New Yorker, rushed to praise, and even the seen-it-all pit bosses said they couldn’t remember such excitement on an opening night.

There to share it was June Juanico, who seemed to speak for most of the women in the audience. “Oh, my God, he was still the most gorgeous creature I have ever laid eyes on. I could hardly control my heart. It was just jumping out of my chest. He knew I was in the audience, and I had to pretend I wasn’t in love with him, because I was with relatives, you know? That was not an easy thing.”

When the Colonel greeted Elvis backstage, he was visibly moved and pulled out of a quick embrace to contain his emotion. Then he made his way to the hotel coffee shop to join Alex Shoofey, the International’s president. There, in blue ballpoint ink, they turned a badly stained tablecloth into a contract. Figuring Elvis’s engagement would break all Vegas records (grossing $1,522,635, with an attendance of 101,500), the hotel boosted his salary to $125,000 a week and extended its option for two engagements a year for five years, through 1974. The Colonel, who always bled a deal for the extra drop, gouged Shoofey for a trip to Hawaii for Elvis and eight companions. The short man smiled, the fat man grinned, and the two shook hands.

Secretly, Shoofey knew he’d just made the best deal in Vegas history, and he’d done it standing on the back of Elvis Presley. Parker had hit the million-dollar mark again and crowed that he had negotiated the most money ever for eight weeks of work in Vegas. But he hadn’t demanded a sliding scale, and instead had signed Elvis to five years for the same amount of money, without an increase.

Why? To protect his own interests with the hotel, for Parker was the most pathological of gamblers. He couldn’t lose money fast enough.

“[The] Colonel was one of the best customers we had,” Alex Shoofey later reported. “He was good for a million dollars