4th August 1969, Monday

[Graeme]

Day number 12628Site Date Map

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14 minutes over 2 clips of footage take during this engagement.

      

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[Graeme]

      

14 minutes over 2 clips of footage take during this engagement.

      

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[Alan]

      Sitting on a red Spanish sofa in the sitting room of his backstage suite with four of the Memphis Mafia, he was sipping form a bottle of 7-Up, and worrying the the dry Las Vegas air was getting to his throat. He'd slimmed down to appear in the NBC Special the previous year, and now he was even slimmer - the result, he said, of a strict diet and sweating off several pounds during every show. He didn't mention the slimming pills he'd been taking. As he chatted, quiet and friendly, saying how he wanted to make another r and b album, he played some air-guitar and sang a little of his favourite Beatles song 'I Saw HerStanding There', and then promised that he would soon play on stage in Britain.
      'I know I keep saying I'll come to England one day, but I will.'
      The Colonel, meanwhile, ina short-sleeved shirt and shapeless trousers, sat seperately, watching like a gamekeeper to ensure that nothing amiss was uttered.
      The chat was good-humoured, Elvis laughing at himself when, asked which his favourite current group was, he replied without thinking 'the Platters', whonwere hardly current. The Beatles had sent a telegram wishing him well for his opening, which he'd had taped to the door; while some of the guys were amused by the girl who had thrown a pair of panties at him on stage the previous night, which he'd caught and with which he'd wiped his brow.
      Only when asked about his films did he glance anxiously towards the Colonel. 'I wouldn't be being honest with you if I said I wasn't ashamed of some of the movies I've been in and some of the songs I had to sing in them. I'd like to say they were good, but I can't. I had to do them. I signed contracts when I came out of the army.
      'I knew a lot of the songs in them were bad and it used to bother the heck out of me. But they fitted the situation.' But there would not, he insisted, be any more bad movies.
      'I've been wanting to perform on stage again for the last nine [sic] years, and it's been building up inside of me since about 1965, until the strain became intolerable. I got all het up about it. I don't think i could have left it much longer. The time is right.
      As for money, he laughed. 'I've no idea about the money. I don't want to know. You can stuff it.'
      At which point the Colonel quickly explained his own situation. 'Can we just say this,' he interrupted. 'The Colonel has nothing to do with Mr Presley's finances. That's all done by his father, Mr Vernon Presley, his accountant. He can flush all his money away, if he wants to. I won't care.
      Elvis must have registered thelittle dig. He'd been hearing it for fourteen years. What he might not have realised in that week of triumph was that with the International Hotel already picking up the option for him to appear there summer and winter for another five years - without and inflation clause - it was also ensuring that the Colonel would be there for a month twice a year, too. For a gambling man like Parker that would be very convenient.
      Certainly it would be more convenient than going on a European tour, and later that week Parker would contradict his client over breakfast with this author. Elvis, he said, woukdn't be going to Britain any time soon. The Colonel's wife, 'Mrs Parker', had some medical problems and wouldn't be fit to travel, and it wouldn't be right for him to leave her behind, he explained.
      There would always be an excuse for Tom Parker to never have to leave the United States