Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [318]
It was a shattering moment, and Anita fought to hold back tears. But she collected herself. “No,” she told him. “It’s for the best. We wouldn’t have our wonderful children, Elvis.” But they would always love each other, they both knew that, and there were things between them no one could ever take away.
He wished she would come back again. He’d sat with Cliff Gleaves once, playing records, spinning “Funny How Time Slips Always” over and over. “You know why I’m playin’ it, Cliff,” he said. “My heart still burns for Anita.”
On this night in 1973, he didn’t care about the present. He only cared about the past.
The Hollywood Reporter, in its opening night review, noted his “lack of energy and interest” and attributed it to illness. The guys knew it ran deeper than the flu. He canceled several of his midnight shows, and even Alex Shoofey sympathized with the situation.
“He didn’t have breathing room, you know? It was a continuous thing. I even said to the Colonel one time, ‘Give him a breather, Colonel, gosh! You know, he needs a little rest.’ He said, ‘Oh, he’s young. Don’t worry. He loves every moment of it.’ I think he could have let up a little, given him a little more time off.”
But when four South American men jumped up onstage near the end of his show on February 18, it pushed him over the edge. The men had just been overexuberant fans, and probably drunk, and the guys had quickly wrestled them off. In a dramatic display, Elvis knocked one back into the audience, and then told the stunned crowd, “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen. I’m sorry I didn’t break his goddamned neck is what I’m sorry about.”
He was paranoid now, delusional, his behavior drug-induced. In the early hours of the morning, high on pills, he convinced himself that Mike Stone had sent the dark-skinned men to kill him. Climbing the walls, waving guns around, and ranting (“Mike Stone has to die!”), Elvis ordered Red to arrange a hit on the karate champion.
“He really felt that way,” Joe says. “He was the man, the masculine guy who was hurt by his wife, and ‘I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch!’ He kept harping on getting it done until finally we said, ‘Okay, we have someone who’ll kill him for you.’ And he said, ‘Well, we’ll talk about it later,’ and dropped the subject.”
Things were closing in on him. Priscilla wanted more money for the divorce, and he didn’t readily have it. He was overextended now as it was. But RCA wondered if Elvis would be interested in selling his master recordings, or back catalogue, for $3 million.
At first Parker rejected the offer—accepting meant the label would never again have to pay royalties on records released before March 1, 1973, and Elvis would have no control over how the songs would be used. Yet Vernon argued otherwise, insisting it was a quick cure for many of Elvis’s financial ills. And so the Colonel sat down with RCA’s Mel Ilberman and when he’d finished negotiating, the label paid Elvis $5.4 million for all rights to every one of his songs.
It would have been a paltry sum under any circumstances. But then Parker delivered Elvis a second blow, sliding a new management contract before him. All income from Elvis’s recordings would now be divided fifty-fifty from the first dollar, making Elvis and the Colonel pure and equal partners. The RCA monies would be subjected to that agreement, of course, and the Colonel would receive extra monies for his side deals. RCA paid the pair $10.5 million total, and of that, $6 million went to the Colonel, and $4.5 to Elvis. After taxes, Elvis would see $2 million for the most valuable recordings in the history of popular music.
Much of it would go to Priscilla. When the divorce decree was finalized in October 1973, she received a cash payment of $725,000, plus spousal and child support, as well as part of Elvis’s new publishing companies, and half the sale of the Hillcrest house.
By the time Elvis played the Sahara Tahoe in May 1973, the strain was