The Colonel Read online

  Madison was where Marie had become a lady, an accepted member of a sometimes snooty community. But now he was worried about her soul, and perhaps his own. Would Monsignor Rohling perform the funeral, along with a Baptist minister?

  “I thought it was rather unusual,” says the monsignor, since Marie had never been to St. Joseph’s, and, as he recalled, he’d never met her. He also thought it odd because in thirty-three years, he and the Colonel had never spoken about religion, and Parker had never told the priest he was Catholic. But Father Rohling had already figured it out. One day, when he was next door visiting the Diskins, he noticed something interesting. The Colonel, who never forgot who he was or where he came from—sending money to Holland for the flood relief in 1953—kept what the priest surmised was “pictures of family members” on his wall. The one that struck the father most was that of a nun, Parker’s older sister Marie.

  11

  “ELVIS MAKES PITCHAS”

  JOSEPH Hazen was sitting in his Park Avenue apartment, reading, one Saturday night in 1956, when the telephone rang. “Joe,” said his neighbor Harriet Ames, “look at this fellow on the television, Elvis Presley. He’s a terrific dancer. He’s quite a character.” Hazen dialed his set to the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show, and, as he remembered years later, immediately called Hal Wallis in California and told him to watch the program.

  Some years before, Hazen, then a lawyer with Warner Bros. in New York, had met Wallis, a Warner production chief with a long list of solid commercial films, while on a routine trip to California.

  “We chatted,” said Hazen, a son-in-law of Walter Annenberg, the billionaire media mogul and philanthropist who would become the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. In time, the two worked out a 60–40 partnership to produce films independently, Wallis handling the artistic duties and Hazen the financial, with Paramount as their distributor.

  The day after Presley’s appearance on Stage Show, Hazen telephoned the William Morris office in New York and spoke with Martin Jurow, an agent in the film department, about a contract for Presley’s services. Wallis, clearly smitten with Elvis’s soulful stare (“There was something about his eyes, a solemn look . . . an expressive face, a new personality that I knew was definitely star material for the screen”), went to work on Colonel Parker, who told Wallis that Elvis would “probably” be out on the West Coast soon and would “consider” the possibility of a meeting.

  “I knew instinctively that the Colonel was interested but playing it cool,” Wallis wrote in his autobiography. What he didn’t know was that Parker had set his cap for Wallis back in his dogcatching days, when the Warner Bros. film crew came to Tampa to shoot Air Force.

  Through the years, Parker had obsessed about the producer, envying his power and his wealth. He’d followed Wallis’s move to Paramount through the trade papers and fantasized about a day when he would come to Hollywood with an act so big that a man like Wallis would be eating out of his hand.

  And so he planned it from the beginning with Elvis, booking him into all of the Paramount-controlled theaters in Florida and up the East Coast, where the singer packed every one he played. The word couldn’t help but get back to Paramount’s top brass.

  But it was not just his desire to maximize his client’s talents, or to make him rich and famous beyond anyone’s boldest imagining. Through Hollywood, Parker, now forty-six years old, would also make himself powerful—more omnipotent, even, than the old-line tycoons. His aim was not only to become a figure of respect, but also to build his own legend.

  He would become, in effect, too big to be touched, able to forget that he was an illegal alien with no papers. In doing so, Parker would be in his total glory, conducting his professional negotiations and personal manipulations with the outrageous, swashbuckling bravado of a pirate. At no other time would he ever be funnier, deadlier, or as obviously pathological in his business dealings.

  The prime target of his discontent was Hal Wallis. Eleven years - Parker’s senior, Wallis was the Hollywood stand-in for Parker’s own father and, in the Colonel’s mind, the ultimate authority figure. To Parker, Wallis symbolized not just every wildly successful Hollywood mogul, but every Jewish son of immigrant parents who had “made it” in America. It would not be enough for Parker to be accepted as an equal by such men. He would have to needle them, bully them, and prove his superiority with whatever means necessary, including chicanery, deceit, and cunning.

  When Wallis followed up to set a date for Elvis’s screen test, Parker did what only came naturally: he refused to take his calls. The producer, swearing later that “nothing would stop me from signing this boy for films,” telephoned and telegraphed the Colonel to the point of exasperation. Hazen, who began to envision that part of his job might be to manage the man who managed the star, likewise began a futile telephone campaign.

  Finally, the Colonel entered into preliminary contractual agreements and delivered Elvis to Paramount Studios for two days beginning March 26, 1956. There, having been given the material only the night before, Presley performed two dramatic scenes from The Rainmaker, which Wallis was about to shoot with Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn. For a musical number, Elvis lip-synched his new single, “Blue Suede Shoes,” while strumming a prop guitar.

  Soon after, RCA’s Steve Sholes and Chick Crumpacker viewed the test in New York and were stunned at what they saw. Presley displayed both a surprisingly natural acting ability and, in the serious love scene, a directness that suggested the work of James Dean or Marlon Brando. “My God, we were agog. It was the talk of the place,” says Crumpacker.

  Joe Hazen was likewise startled, writing in a memo to Wallis on June 11, 1956, that Elvis’s “meteoric rise is unquestionably a freak situation, but that still does not detract from the fact that as a straight actor the guy has great potentialities.” Later, Hazen would reiterate with Parker that Elvis should, of course, sing in his movies, “but his dramatic abilities and talents should be carefully and steadily developed so . . . he can do strong dramatic parts as well as sing.”

  Nothing would have pleased Presley more. In fact, the former movie theater usher had just told Wallis, “My ambition has always been to become a motion picture actor—a good one, sir.”

  But Wallis had other ideas. “The idea of tailoring Elvis for dramatic roles is something that we never attempted,” Wallis said years later. “We didn’t sign Elvis as a second Jimmy Dean. We signed him as a number-one Elvis Presley.”

  Parker went along with it for two reasons: first, he saw Presley’s movie career primarily as a vehicle for selling concert tickets and records, and more important, privately he had little faith in Elvis’s acting abilities, even though Presley frequently recited whole scenes of Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause, trying to convince his manager that he could carry a dramatic film.

  When Elvis arrived in Los Angeles for his screen test, waiting for him at the airport were Parker, his assistant Tom Diskin, and Leonard Hirshan, the young William Morris agent who’d been assigned as Presley’s representative for motion pictures. Lenny, as the guys in the office called him, was amused to see the new singing sensation step off the plane with a camera around his neck, like any other hick tourist.

  Hirshan had been with William Morris just five years, but now, with Martin Jurow in New York, he was about to negotiate one of the most infamous contracts in the Morris agency’s history. Acting on the advice to get Presley as much work as possible before his star burned out, Hirshan encouraged Parker to take Wallis and Hazen’s best offer—a contract for one motion picture and options for six more.

  On the surface, a seven-picture contract might have seemed impressive. But, in effect, it was a commitment for only one picture and amounted to a basic deal. Not only was it nonexclusive—Parker was allowed to make one “outside” picture each year with another studio—but the financial terms befitted a total unknown: $15,000 for the first film, $20,000 for the second, $25,000 for the third, and up to $100,000 for the seventh. Furthermore,
it offered no billing structure, no script approval, and no perks of any kind. Nonetheless, Wallis, Hazen, Presley, and Parker signed the two-page document on April 2, 1956.

  The contract, which governed the making of Loving You and King Creole, would be bolstered with bonuses and completely rewritten in October 1958. But it stuck in Parker’s craw for his entire Hollywood career.

  Always skittish about a situation beyond his control, and hypervigilant against deception and disgrace, Parker was paranoid that the Hollywood sharpies would shortchange him if they could. Now he was livid to discover that his own agency had made a deal that necessitated a special waiver from the Screen Actors Guild, as the terms fell below the minimum provisions—$25,000 a year salary—of the Guild contract. He was further infuriated to learn, once Loving You began filming, that both of Elvis’s costars, Wendell Corey and Lizabeth Scott, were paid far more than Presley, and in a great display of authority that Parker would often repeat, he threatened to pull Elvis off the picture.

  While Parker was grateful to Abe Lastfogel and the Morris agency for representing him through the Eddy Arnold era, he realized, in this first real lesson about the agency-studio relationship, that the Morris office gave him poor advice. (“When the Colonel demanded to renegotiate, Lastfogel tried everything he could to convince him to take less money,” remembers Byron Raphael.) He also saw that a major talent agency with hundreds of clients would not risk its relationship with the movie companies over the fate of a single star.

  Still, under California law, only an agent, and not a manager, could close a binding deal for a client with a studio. So the Colonel knew he needed Lastfogel for a variety of reasons, and not just to get Elvis prestige engagements like the New Frontier in Vegas, where Parker had embarrassed the agency by insisting on cash, and not a check, in advance. (“No check is good. Some are pretty good, but they got an atom-bomb testing place out there in the desert. What if some feller pressed the wrong button?”) But from then on, Parker would always be wary of any Morris agent. And he would carry a special grudge against Lenny Hirshan, who would come to bear the full weight of the Colonel’s revenge mentality.

  At first, Parker pretended that all was well. When he dropped by the agency, he regaled the agents with his usual self-serving stories of his carny past, and recalled how, in the Eddy Arnold era, he’d sent a small boy to pick up the souvenir books that folks left under their seats at the shows. “Sold ’em again at the next stop!” Parker bragged, sliding into the line with a wink and a round-faced grin.

  The William Morris agents shook their heads at such shenanigans. But sometimes, sharing the sentiments of the RCA label heads, they didn’t know quite what to believe about this man to whom life seemed to be little more than a romp through a carnival fun house, filled with smoke and mirrors. The weirdest talk came from the record company, where the story went around that during his circus days, Parker had married the bearded lady. One RCA department head claimed to have seen the “full shadow of a real blue beard” on Marie, and as crazy as it sounded, nobody put anything past Parker, especially since the gossip made him seem more of an outlandish character and less an intimidating adversary.

  At the least, such stories sent mixed signals, but the lighter ones hid Parker’s seething animosity, which began to manifest itself in other ways, primarily in humiliating the Morris agents in public. When Elvis played the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles in October 1957, Sam Weisbord, the president of William Morris, requested twenty-five complimentary tickets for his executives. Parker, who customarily gave no passes and despised being asked for something free if he thought the petitioner could afford it, grudgingly sent over three tickets, for Weisbord, Lastfogel, and Norman Brokaw, an up-and-comer at the agency who headed the West Coast television department.

  The powerful agents, none of whom stood taller than five feet three, were shocked to discover that their seats were not in the first rows, as was customary for VIPs, but in a section far in the back.

  Joe Hazen and Hal Wallis had already gotten embroiled in one of Parker’s classic power plays in November 1956. As the script for Loving You began to take form—centering on a naïve young performer very much like Presley himself—they asked if Elvis might confer with the cowriter Herbert Baker. Parker, who had demanded early that all communication go through him, carefully keeping Elvis under wraps to the Morris agents and to the producers, insisting that Presley wanted to spare himself any business or professional contacts, sent word by Abe Lastfogel that the answer was no.

  Always hot-tempered about imagined criticism or slights, Parker complained that the producers appeared to have lost interest in Presley, because no representative from Paramount had attended his show at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium in June 1956—a time when Elvis was subjected to considerable public criticism.

  Hazen responded that it was not their custom to appear at every opening of a performer they had under contract. Yet, he cited, both he and Wallis had flown to Las Vegas in April for Elvis’s debut at the New Frontier, and Wallis had attempted to invite Elvis to his home for dinner several times, and to lunch at the Paramount commissary. But Parker remained adamant—the balance of power had now shifted to him.

  This glimmer at how churlish and abrasive the Colonel could be prompted Hazen to memo Wallis that “Parker has a peeve about neglect.” Before long, the producers would have stronger words for Parker in private, Wallis vowing he’d rather try to close a deal with the devil, and Hazen ranting, “I wouldn’t be a hundred feet away from him! He’s an obnoxious, terrible man. Terrible man!”

  Parker doubtless took pride in such reactions, in how his irascibility provoked and exasperated others, while he was able to remain cool and in control of his emotions. But secretly he was smarting over a remark Hazen had made about Love Me Tender, Presley’s first picture, which Elvis had made for Twentieth Century–Fox under the Wallis-Hazen loan-out clause, designed in part to let another studio test the waters.

  A month before Love Me Tender was released, Hazen screened a rough cut of the film to see what kind of property he’d bought, and when Parker came to New York for Elvis’s second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in late October, Hazen met with Parker and Harry Kalcheim at New York’s Warwick Hotel.

  As Elvis’s first film, Hazen said, Love Me Tender would probably do very big business. But, he added, “very confidentially—and as man to man,” neither Wallis nor Paul Nathan, Wallis’s associate producer, was particularly impressed with it. In fact, they’d considered it “crap.” The Colonel bristled and responded that the studio was making some changes that he had recommended. With those “methods that have been very helpful to us on personal appearances,” he was certain the picture would be improved.

  Parker first considered the project when he got a call from Buddy Adler, one of the last of the Hollywood power producers who had just succeeded Darryl Zanuck as Fox’s top executive.

  “I was in his office when the call came,” remembers Freddy Bienstock, who as the Aberbachs’ younger cousin became Elvis’s liaison with Hill and Range Music, particularly in the movie years. “Buddy Adler told him he’d just gotten this fantastic property. He said it would make Elvis a movie star, and he’d like to send the Colonel the script. The Colonel said, ‘There’s no sense in sending me the script, because I can’t read. The only thing I’m interested in is how much you’re gonna pay me.’ ”

  Adler countered with the fact that Elvis had never done a picture before, and the studio would be taking a chance on him: “We’ll give you $25,000.”

  And the Colonel said, as Bienstock remembers, “ ‘That’s exactly what I want. Now, how much are you going to pay Elvis?’ ”

  The number Parker had in mind was a staggering $1 million. No other movie star commanded anything near that salary for a single picture, but Parker was in love with the sound of the figure, with the power it conveyed, and with the audacity it took to demand it.

  Adler was stunned. “Not even Jack Lemmon gets that,”
he told the Colonel. “Well,” said Parker, “maybe he needs a new manager.”

  Immediately, the Colonel called Abe Lastfogel and told him Elvis needed a million up front to make Adler’s picture, a Civil War–era drama with the working title The Reno Brothers. Secretly, he hoped for $100,000.

  Lastfogel was taken aback at such moxie, but assured the Colonel that while no one would pay his asking price, he could beat the Paramount deal. Several days later, Lastfogel phoned back to say that naturally Fox wouldn’t go for the million, but they’d come up to $75,000 and give Elvis top billing with his name above the title. Parker, who had begun to insist on one-page contracts at RCA and resented the studios’ attempt to confuse him with talk of grosses and percentages of profits, held firm. “Better take this, Tom,” Lastfogel said. “Believe me, this is as high as they’re going.”

  “Go back to ’em,” Parker barked, knowing full well that Presley’s name was everything to the project, “and tell them to give the Colonel the money he wants, and they won’t have to give Elvis any billing.”

  In the end, Elvis received the target price of $100,000 and costar credit and, at Parker’s insistence, the written promise of a bonus if the picture grossed more than $5 million. Fox also took an option for two other films—Flaming Star and Wild in the Country—at $150,000 and $200,000. But Parker lived for the day when the studios would have to pay his million-dollar demand. “Elvis makes pitchas,” he took to saying to himself as a sort of maniacal mantra.

  Leonard Hirshan was the agent who found Love Me Tender and who helped finalize the deal with Lastfogel and Parker. In retrospect, he says, he ended up learning from his client’s country approach to Hollywood negotiation, particularly “in getting the most for your client, not to give up early, but to hang in there. Whenever I said, ‘Colonel, if we don’t take this, we’re going to lose it,’ ” he recalls, “the Colonel said, ‘You can’t lose it—you never had it.’ ”