The Colonel Read online

  According to Aberbach, Parker, as Arnold’s manager, received 25 percent of Eddy’s $20,000, “which was more than justified, because he had [only] one artist. He always had a deal, and he was without any doubt an excellent deal maker and skilled negotiator. But he was honest.”

  Honesty, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. As the Aberbachs’ cousin, music publisher Freddy Bienstock points out Parker always had side deals, too, and especially with RCA Victor, where in a very real sense, he was the client, not Eddy Arnold and, later, not even Elvis Presley. From the beginning of his association with the label, it was obvious to Parker that there was plenty of money to go around, especially for the man who had the gumption to speak up and demand it, a man whose key to survival, as Gabe Tucker asserts, was always to have something better than a contract—maybe a little something to remind a guy about when the circumstance demanded.

  Arnold, while grateful for the astonishing level of success he found under Parker—by 1952, he was no longer the hayseed Grand Ole Opry performer, but the star of his own network television show—chafed at certain aspects of the Colonel’s flamboyant style.

  Indeed, Parker seemed to want to control every facet of Arnold’s life. (“All Eddy takes care of is his toothbrush and his drawers,” the Colonel crowed.) The two men clashed about the direction of Eddy’s music—the singer, who now hated the “Plowboy” moniker, hoped to embrace a more sophisticated sound—and Arnold was continually embarrassed by Parker’s shabby dress, his braggadocio (“Which one of our planes did you come down in today?” he’d ask Eddy in a crowded elevator), and his use of carny promotions, such as parading an elephant through Nashville’s downtown streets to advertise Arnold’s appearances.

  Yet far more troubling to Arnold was Parker’s alleged involvement with the careers of other performers. The familiar rumor that the Colonel sold Hadacol—the patent medicine made up mostly of ethyl alcohol—or secretly booked the entertainers for the Hadacol Caravan appears not to be based in fact. But Parker was working with Hank Snow and Tommy Sands through his new company, Jamboree Attractions, which rankled Arnold down deep. Together, they’d sold nearly 30 million records, and the way Arnold saw it, the 25 percent he paid Parker was for exclusivity. Then in the summer of 1953 came an embarrassing blowup in Las Vegas.

  According to Roy Wiggins, Eddy, then playing the Sahara Hotel, was alone in his room when the phone rang, and the caller, thinking he had Tom Diskin, Parker’s new lieuenant, on the line, said, “Tell the Colonel that show we got together with Hank Snow is doing okay.” Arnold, angry and shaken, went down to the coffee shop to confront the Colonel and saw him hide something under the table—Parker would later claim it was an ad he had taken out to surprise his client—as he approached. An argument ensued outside, “and by the time I walked up,” remembers Wiggins, “they were at it pretty good.” Eddy drew back his fist—“Don’t hit him!” yelled a frightened Marie Parker—and the singer later sent a telegram that informed his manager he was no longer in need of his services.

  The firing left Parker humiliated and deeply wounded, and the stress of it all so unraveled him that shortly after, the Colonel suffered the first of many heart attacks. Although his weight, which had hovered dangerously around three hundred pounds, dropped dramatically during his recovery, he told almost no one about his illness, afraid that the clients like Snow, and Rod Brasfield, and Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters—who were beginning to come to him and Diskin, for bookings, if not always for “direction,” as he called it—would desert him.

  Worse, he feared he would lose his power at RCA, as Sholes, shifting his allegiance to Arnold, “treated him like a flea-bitten alley dog, and him and Sholes was never the greatest of friends after that,” Gabe Tucker recalls. Immediately, he put the squeeze on Sholes and Singles Division Manager Bill Bullock—who was being whispered about as “the Colonel’s guy”—to let him manage the upcoming RCA Victor Country Caravan, a package tour designed to showcase the label’s country stars, with Hank Snow headlining.

  Set for spring of ’54, the Caravan was the brainchild of Bob McCluskey, who’d gotten $50,000 allocated for it, and was now being pressured to involve Parker. McCluskey said that the Colonel could help with some of the dates, but he didn’t want him in control of the money, “as he’d already gotten a reputation that was quite unsavory, and I was responsible for all that dough.” The next thing McCluskey knew, he was out of a job, and Parker was in charge of the venture. “He got the money up front,” says McCluskey, “and I was told that the money he didn’t spend was his, as no one would ask for it to be returned.”

  Next Parker moved to bolster his standing with the William Morris office—with Hollywood—where, despite the two dreadful B Westerns, Feudin’ Rhythm and Hoedown, Eddy Arnold made for Columbia Pictures in 1949, Parker had hoped to wield as big a stick as he had in the music business. He’d check into the Hotel Knickerbocker for a month at a time, trying to appear the part.

  Now, all he could think of was something that occurred on his first trip to New York to meet Harry Kalcheim, who worked in the personal appearance division of the agency’s Gotham office. On the plane, Parker struck up a conversation with a man who bragged that he’d just made a big deal with William Morris. By coincidence, Parker noted, they were staying at the same hotel. But when the plane landed, the Morris office had a gleaming black limousine waiting for its important new client, while Parker was left to take the bus.

  Several days later, Parker was having breakfast at the hotel when he looked out the window to see the big shot sitting on his suitcase. Now it was he who waited on a bus. “Where’s your limo?” Parker asked. “The deal fell through,” came the reply. Parker never forgot it, and it served as a harsh reminder of a very real truth: the minute you no longer had something the power brokers wanted, you were out.

  “As the last of the carnies to really make it in Hollywood,” says Byron Raphael, “the Colonel was extremely jealous of the very well bred Jewish guys at William Morris. He resented them, and yet he also needed their respect. So although he made fun of the fact that he was accepted by what he considered to be the cream of New York and Hollywood, secretly he desired it terribly.”

  Eventually, Parker would strike a deal with Arnold to handle at least a portion of his bookings, in part to save face with the Morris agency. But for the time being, he took another kind of solace.

  “Plowboy,” he drawled into the phone, knowing how the name would irritate Eddy, “we’ve got to talk. You sent me this wire that said we was through, but you never said nothin’ about settlin’ up.”

  “What do you mean?” Arnold asked.

  “Well, if you’re not happy with me, and you don’t want to be associating with me anymore,” Parker said, “then it’s gonna cost you $50,000.” Arnold, conservative about nearly everything, and especially about money, swallowed hard and reminded Parker that they never had a contract, just a gentleman’s agreement. “No, Plowboy, there’s more to it than that,” the fat man said, and Arnold suggested they meet with his Nashville attorney, Bill Carpenter.

  On the day of the appointment, Parker arrived at Carpenter’s office with an old leather bag stuffed full of papers, which he emptied into a small mountain on the lawyer’s desk—the IRS trick redone. As the lawyer began sifting through the pile, Parker took a folded paper from his pocket and started reading aloud from the last contract he’d negotiated for Arnold with RCA, one that gave the singer five cents a record, the largest royalty rate possible, equal to that of Perry Como.

  Furthermore, Parker explained, the most favored nation clause dictated that if anybody negotiated a higher royalty rate in the future, Eddy got that, too. The agreement was good for seven years, Parker reminded them, and it carried his signature, not Eddy’s. Now, didn’t $50,000 seem reasonable, stacked against 25 percent of whatever royalties Arnold made for the remainder of those seven years? The singer sank deep in his chair. “Eddy,” Bill Carpenter said flatly, “pay him.” />
  For a man who had shied away from contracts, Parker had become exceptionally skilled in using them to his advantage. “Colonel Tom got me out of a contract one time that I didn’t want to be in,” recalled the country star Marty Robbins. “He did it as a favor. I was really hung up bad. Colonel Tom said, ‘Do you want out of that contract?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ And sure enough, he got me out. I would have been hung up for six years at a big percent.” Robbins subsequently turned down Parker’s offer to sign him to Jamboree Attractions, but in pledging to work for the Colonel anytime he wanted, Robbins forged the kind of contract Parker liked best—an unwritten one.

  And sometimes two contracts were better than one. Hank Snow, who became a partner in Jamboree Attractions in late 1954, lining up package tours for himself, Bill Haley and the Comets, Andy Griffith, Elvis Presley, and others, found out just how learned, and treacherous, Parker had become in early 1956, when the Colonel returned to Nashville from a trip to Memphis with dual contracts in his pocket.

  The purpose of the trip had been to sign twenty-one-year-old Presley to a management deal. Gladys Presley distrusted the Colonel from the beginning, and Parker had called in Snow, one of her favorite singers, to sweet-talk Elvis’s mother into giving her approval. Now, if on the advice of his mother, Elvis balked at the first contract, which Parker carried in his left coat pocket, he had another one ready in his right. What Snow - didn’t learn until later was that the only difference in the contracts was that one bound Presley to Hank Snow Enterprises– Jamboree Attractions and the other strictly to Parker, as the “sole and exclusive Advisor, Personal Representative, and Manager in any and all fields of public and private entertainment.” It was the latter contract that Presley signed, forever cutting Snow out of the most lucrative deal in all of show business.

  10

  THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS

  JUST how and when Colonel Tom Parker first took note of Elvis Presley will always be one of the unanswerable questions in the history of rock and roll. Not surprisingly a handful of men take credit for informing Parker about the combustible “Hillbilly Cat” who, starting in late 1954, performed regularly on The Louisiana Hayride radio program, broadcast out of Shreveport over KWKH, a powerful, 50,000-watt station that sent its signal across and beyond the southern United States.

  The likelihood is that Presley’s appearances on the Hayride and in supporting tours throughout Texas made such a stir that Parker, desperately on the lookout for another artist with the potential of an Eddy Arnold, began hearing about him from a number of sources, including Texarkana deejay Uncle Dudley (Ernest Hackworth) and Gabe Tucker, who had left Eddy’s band to play local clubs and do radio work in Houston.

  What really turned his head, though, was a report from his old friend Oscar Davis. In October 1954, Davis, on a trip to Memphis to do advance work for Parker for an Arnold appearance at Ellis Auditorium, dropped by WMPS radio to record his advertising spots. There, disc jockey Bob Neal played him “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” the b-side of the first single by the teenaged Elvis Presley, who, Neal told Davis, packed a local dive, the Eagle’s Nest, night after night with screaming women.

  That evening, Davis went out to the club with Neal, who was booking Presley around the region. “I said, ‘Bob, this guy is incredible. I’d like to meet him,’ ” as Davis recalled. Neal brought him over to the table, and the following Sunday, when Elvis came backstage at Ellis Auditorium to talk further with Davis and meet Eddy Arnold and his backup group, the Jordanaires, the faded impresario made a tentative deal to take over Presley’s management from his guitarist, Scotty Moore.

  That Monday, Davis returned to Nashville, and drove out to Parker’s house. He found the Colonel sitting outside his office on that warm fall day, enjoying an informal lunch with Charlie Lamb, a former carny who now worked in the country music business as a journalist and advertising agent.

  “It was really Oscar who found Elvis,” Lamb says. “He came over and said, ‘I saw the darnedest act you ever imagined, this kid who does this twisting around and so forth.’ The Colonel’s eyes popped open, and he said, ‘Where was he? Who is he?’ And he got up from the table and pulled his car out and left. He still wasn’t back when I went out the next day.”

  Was Parker checking out Oscar’s discovery? If so, Parker kept it to himself when he returned to Nashville. But suddenly, as Elvis’s drummer, D. J. Fontana, remembers, Parker began turning up at Presley’s show dates in Texarkana. “We would see him walkin’ around, hanging back in the shadows, but he never would say nothin’. A lot of people just didn’t want to deal with him.”

  Bob Neal, who assumed Presley’s management duties on January 1, 1955, most certainly wanted to deal with Parker, hoping this “razzle-dazzle character, but honest and very sharp, shrewd dealer,” as he later called him, would put Elvis on the package tours that Parker took out to other parts of the country.

  On January 15, 1955, Parker and Tom Diskin traveled to Shreveport to watch Elvis—decked out in a rust-colored suit, a black-dotted purple tie, and pink socks—perform three songs for the Hayride audience. Afterward, they met with Neal and worked out an arrangement by which Parker, as an agent of Hank Snow Attractions, would handle Elvis’s bookings, which Parker promised would likely include “one of the big resort hotels in Nevada.”

  By now, Parker was already scheming to take total control of the new sensation. But until Neal’s management contract expired the following year (“I always felt that Elvis was going to be a big artist, but I never would have believed how big, so I just preferred to drop out of the scene,” Neal said later), the Colonel was careful not to tip his hand, not even to Oscar Davis.

  Parker respected Davis enough to lend him money on occasion—“Oscar lived high, wide, and handsome,” remembers the Nashville attorney Richard H. Frank Sr.—and the two were bound beneath the skin by their carny experiences and their fondness for illegal gambling. They also shared a curious mind-set that let them find a way to always justify their actions, even if it meant disposing of people without ever once looking back. Years before, like the Colonel’s own Marie, who had given away the clubfooted baby, Davis had simply walked out on his wife and five-year-old son, never to see or acknowledge them again. “He was a deserter, plain and simple,” says Oscar Davis Jr.

  The Colonel had little compunction about how he counseled Davis, - who’d lost his last big client, the great Hank Williams, to an overdose of hooch, chloral hydrate, and fame. Now, only two years after that fatal incident—Parker himself had booked Hank for one night in Texarkana—Davis made no secret of the fact that he hoped to take over - Presley’s management. “The guy will get nowhere on Sun Records,” Parker began, and rolled out a host of other objections. The two argued, Parker told his friend he’d gotten “too excited” over this Presley kid, and “I became completely discouraged about the whole thing,” Davis said.

  Parker was a skilled tactician who approached any negotiation with the forethought of a master chess player, knowing all the possible strategies and the likelihood of how the moves would play out. Brushing aside Davis more easily than he could dispense with Hank Snow or even the easygoing Neal, Parker turned his attention to Sam Phillips, who operated the Sun Records label. Without foundation, Parker started the rumor that Presley’s contract was for sale. Phillips, stunned to learn of the gossip, struck back with the breathtaking demand of $35,000.

  “I thought, hey, I’ll make ’em an offer that I know they will refuse, and then I’ll tell ’em they’d better not spread this poison anymore,” Phillips remembers. “I absolutely did not think Tom Parker could raise the $35,000, and that would have been fine. But he raised the money, and damn, I couldn’t back out then.” Parker sent him a $5,000 deposit, with RCA later paying Phillips his asking price, plus a $5,000 bonus for Elvis.

  All $40,000 would be recoupable against royalties, but still the label was nervous. “We must have met for a half hour before I put my approval on it,” remembers Norman Racusin, RCA’
s chief financial officer at the time. “It was a lot of money, but Steve [Sholes] was so aggressive about this, he would have gone over my head if I turned him down anyhow.” Later, Sholes watched Carl Perkins come on strong with “Blue Suede Shoes,” and phoned Phillips to ask, “Did I buy the wrong boy?” No, Phillips assured him, he did not. By that time, the company had refunded the Colonel’s deposit, but Parker forever insisted it was his money that bought the contract and his money that was at risk.

  Yet it wasn’t until Presley’s appearance in Jacksonville, Florida, in May 1955, before 14,000 fans, that Parker fully realized what he had.

  “Girls, I’ll see you all backstage,” Elvis joked at the end of his show, and about half the crowd broke through the police barricade, a throng following him into the dugout locker room, trying to tear off his clothes. “He was on top of the showers, trying to get away from people—guys and girls trying to grab a shoe or just anything,” remembered fellow performer Marty Robbins, who’d joined the bill as a way to repay Parker’s favor of the year before.

  As a carnival man who only understood things in dollars and cents, Parker knew what brought ’em into the big tent. In a real sense, Elvis was just a male version of Marie and all the other thinly veiled dancing girls who tantalizingly promised the big striptease but never quite paid off. But now Parker realized that Elvis’s popularity could go beyond even that, to the kind of riots that Frank Sinatra had inspired in his heyday. And from then on, when he went to Elvis’s shows, it was the crowd Parker watched, not Elvis. That emotion could make him a very rich man, almost overnight.

  Once Parker created his grand marketing plan, enlisting the full help of RCA Victor and the William Morris Agency, it would take no more than a year to make Elvis the biggest-selling artist in the music business and the highest-paid performer on TV. And when he accepted a nearly $40,000 advance from the Beverly Hills movie merchandiser Hank Saperstein to turn Elvis into a brand name, licensing seventy-eight different articles, from Elvis charm bracelets, Elvis lipstick in “Hound Dog” orange, and Elvis scarves, dolls, plastic guitars, and glow-in-the-dark busts, Parker’s entrepreneurial vision raked in some $22 million, apart from what the fans spent on concerts and records. No artist had ever exploded on the scene with the volcanic impact of Elvis Presley in 1956, and no manager before Tom Parker had ever been so brilliantly, or blatantly, capitalistic. At a time when most managers did little more for their artists than book concert dates, Parker perpetually figured out new ways to exploit his star.