The Colonel Read online

  From then on, whenever Parker could justify a deal as a joint venture, where he and Elvis functioned as equal partners beyond the contractually agreed amount, the Colonel would divide the proceeds 50–50 from the first dollar. They were a team, Elvis and the Colonel, Presley providing the talent, and Parker, through persistence and ingenuity, converting that talent into one of the most lucrative careers in history. “Elvis and the Colonel,” as Parker signed every Christmas card and thank-you letter, was more than just equal billing and ego. It was the Colonel’s own powerful shorthand, a way of telegraphing, “I am as important as Elvis. When I say something, you must listen.”

  If Parker saw his job as getting the best deal for his client—and to market himself right along with Elvis—Oscar Davis questioned some of his tactics, particularly his seizing any opportunity for self-gain. Parker was taken aback. As a former carny, Davis should have known better. The Colonel exercised an honorable boldness in his bludgeoning business practices and, in that sense, never posed as anything other than what he was. Besides, loyalty was within the circle—outsiders were not necessarily afforded the same consideration.

  “You want to tell me how I should do business?” the Colonel barked at his friend, repeating an exchange they’d once had over Eddy Arnold. “Listen, I have $350,000 in the bank. When you have 350,000 and one dollar in your bank account, then you can come and tell me.”

  Indeed, Parker was the largest single depositor at the American National Bank in Madison, Tennessee, where the Colonel still maintained his primary business office, filtering the Elvis money through his new company, All Star Shows. On one of his first trips to Nashville after acquiring Eddy Arnold in the ’40s, Parker had walked into the bank and introduced himself to the owner, whom he remembered as “the only Jewish fella in Madison.”

  “It was a family bank, a little bank, and I wanted to borrow $5,000, because I had no money, and we needed [some for] promotion,” Parker said years later. The banker asked what he had for collateral. Parker responded that he had an old car that he paid $125 for, on time at $4 a month.

  “There’s no value there,” challenged the banker.

  “Well,” said Parker, “even if it was a good car, and I welshed on my pay, what difference does it make what the car is worth?” And so the banker lent him the money just on his face. “I signed the note, I paid him back in about a year and a half, and that still is my bank today,” Parker said in 1993.

  The Colonel, Parker would tell anyone who would listen, was nothing if not loyal.

  12

  DIRECTIONAL SNOWING

  HAL Wallis wanted Loving You to be everything Love Me Tender was not. While the period Western introduced the singing idol to the movie audience and allowed him to learn the rudiments of acting, it did almost nothing to play on Elvis’s natural charm, his exotic good looks, his provocative rock-and-roll dance moves, and the allure of celebrity life.

  What Wallis had in mind for Loving You, Presley’s first starring vehicle, was a film loosely based on Elvis’s life, with a story tracing the rapid rise of a backwoods amateur (Deke Rivers) to a national sensation.

  The producer was mildly concerned about how the public would react to a swiveling Elvis on the big screen, since just before Elvis’s first Ed Sullivan appearance, Parker learned that church and PTA groups planned on filing a protest with CBS, leading the Colonel to turn down ten days of dates at $250,000 to avoid more screaming-girls publicity. For a while, he toyed with the idea of a “Clean Up Elvis” campaign—that is, photographing the singer in a series of wholesome settings. But the Colonel feared it might boomerang on him, and so he sat tight. No protests were filed after all.

  Wallis wanted the script built around the formula used to sell other biopics about entertainers, suggesting that Elvis was just the modern-day Al Jolson, and his music as fun and harmless as the Charleston in the ’20s. In case anyone missed the message, Wallis had it hammered home in a sequence that pokes fun at television censors, and in a scene where Glenda Markle, Deke’s manager (Lizabeth Scott), appears before a small-town city council to defend Deke and rock and roll in general. It was blatant, heavy-handed propaganda—as was Elvis’s line “They make it sound like folks ought to be ashamed just listening to me sing!”—but Wallis saw it as good insurance against criticism from 1950s America.

  The man he tapped for the job of writing and directing was Hal Kanter, who, along with cowriter Herbert Baker, fashioned the script somewhat after Mary Agnes Thompson’s original story. Kanter had seen Elvis on the Sullivan Show and knew that “a lot of people, hated him . . . thought he was an instrument of the devil.” Like a lot of sophisticates, Kanter didn’t much care for Presley’s hip gyrations and country attitude, and wrote him off as just a passing fancy, “a nasty little boy,” as he later recalled. Then he saw Elvis’s screen test, found him “orchid-pretty,” and couldn’t take his eyes off him.

  To get a better feel for Presley’s world, Kanter, then thirty-nine, flew to Memphis to meet with Elvis at his new, fashionable three-bedroom house on Audubon Drive. From there, he drove with him and his entourage to Shreveport, Louisiana, where Elvis made his farewell appearance on The Louisiana Hayride. An astonished Kanter would use on screen much of what he saw that day, saying privately of the fan reaction, “There were some things that happened there that I couldn’t recreate, because people wouldn’t believe it.”

  But it was the Colonel, a “well-fed King Con,” who really dazzled him, hawking tinted photos of Elvis, souvenir programs, and even the Duke of Paducah’s smoked meat sticks at the Shreveport fairgrounds. “I thought the colorful Colonel more interesting than his star.”

  Not surprising, a very Colonel-like character turned up in the film as Jim Tallman, a portly, cigar-smoking gubernatorial candidate with a silver tongue who sells snake oil on the side. But Kanter also wrote many of Parker’s personal traits and star-making machinations into the script, with the Markle character playing up the singer’s sex appeal (“I like him—he’s got something for the girls”), talking half of his revenue, staging small riots, and calling her client “our gimmick.”

  Wallis shared Kanter’s assessment of Parker, but he also had a grudging respect for him and saw in the Colonel somebody like himself—an energetic promoter with uncanny gifts for manipulating situations to his best advantage.

  It was the other side of Parker’s personality that gave the producer fits, particularly once the manager moved into an office on the Paramount lot before filming began, bringing his staff of Tom Diskin, Byron Raphael, and Trude Forsher.

  Parker’s only female secretary in Hollywood (except for a “Miss Wood,” who was never seen, and whose signature often resembled Parker’s own), Forsher wasn’t sure she wanted to go to work for the Colonel when she met him socially through her cousins, the Aberbachs. A freelance writer, she demonstrated both a hungry intelligence and a spirited personality. She had no intention of becoming anyone’s secretary, but Parker swayed her with one comment: “Trude, if you come with me now, you’re going to be somebody important. If you don’t, you will have lost your opportunity.”

  Forsher, who was somewhat envious of her powerful relatives, found - Parker’s bravado exciting. And the Colonel took comfort in the thick Austrian accent she made no effort to tame. Once in a while, he’d say, “Speak German for me, Trude,” finding a secret transport to a past none of his European friends detected in his speech.

  Just as Parker enjoyed Byron’s services courtesy of the William Morris office, he demanded, starting at Twentieth Century–Fox, that the studios reimburse him for Trude’s salary. Now at Paramount, Trude, who ran the office in addition to typing letters and answering the phone, wanted a raise. Parker talked her into a title change instead, and so the lowly secretary became the more lofty sounding “promotion coordinator.”

  The Colonel rarely rewarded his employees with bonuses or presents, but he never wanted to look stingy, believing such an image diluted his power. One day he overheard B
yron and Trude discussing the split-pea soup they’d enjoyed at the Paramount commissary and, misunderstanding, called them both into his office. “It’s not good for you two to split your soup!” he said, agitated. “People are going to think I’m not paying you enough!”

  Parker wanted to be thought of as successful, but it was more important to flaunt his connections than his wealth. And so in his new office dominated by a spread of Texas longhorns, shooting-gallery-prize teddy bears, winking electric signs, and a tiger skin on the floor, he made space for signed photographs of such celebrities as Sammy Davis Jr. and Cecil B. DeMille, the famed producer-director who was then at Paramount working on his biblical epic, The Ten Commandments. In return for such autographs, which he solicited by mail, he often sent a sausage.

  At Paramount, Elvis generated so much excitement that director Kanter had to close the set to keep out the studio secretaries and wives and children of the Hollywood elite, all of whom wanted their photo taken with the young star. The Paramount brass, however, was more curious about “this bombastic, driving, one-man minstrel show,” as producer A. C. Lyles called the Colonel. Even Marlon Brando, whose office was down the hall, often stuck his head in the door. The Colonel arrived at the studio each morning at eight (“Let’s open up the tents,” he’d say in carny talk) and stayed until six, thriving on his attention from the Hollywood royalty and the opportunity to negotiate an outrageous deal.

  “That was his excitement,” says Raphael, whose main job was to assist Parker in pulling off various snow jobs. “When I would see him on the phone making these deals, there would be little beads of perspiration on his face. He would sit there twirling his cigar in his mouth and be completely enraptured in what he was doing. It was very difficult for him to come down after one of those.”

  From the beginning, Parker saw the need to bring the Paramount suits in line, to deflate their pomposity, prove his own preeminence, and bring a relaxed humor to what he viewed as a very stuffy group. His first target: DeMille, a Hollywood god.

  He saw his chance on the day he received 10,000 Elvis Presley buttons—large, metal, campaign-style badges with the singer’s picture on them—to promote the new movie.

  “Somehow,” Raphael remembers, “DeMille heard about the buttons, and sent an assistant to get one for his granddaughter. The Colonel wanted to know why Mr. DeMille couldn’t come over and ask for himself, and the assistant told him Mr. DeMille was very busy. So the Colonel said, ‘Tell Mr. DeMille that I would like to get him one of these buttons, but I have to check with my lawyers first, because we’re getting ready to make our merchandising deal.’ ”

  The next day, Parker directed his staff to pass out the buttons to everyone on the lot, and then sent Trude to DeMille’s office with the message that the Colonel had made a special dispensation, and that Mr. DeMille would be the only person in Hollywood with a rare Elvis button. All we ask, she said, echoing the Colonel, is that Mr. DeMille wear it himself when he goes to his set.

  “When DeMille walked out of his office thinking he was the only one at the studio with that button,” says Raphael, “it must have been one of the most humiliating moments of his life. Everybody from the janitors to the guards at the gates was wearing one.”

  DeMille never spoke to Parker again, but the Colonel took the risk of making an enemy to prove his point. Later, during the promotion of G.I. Blues, he talked Hal Wallis into donning a paper concessionaire’s hat—perhaps meant to resemble an army cap—and called a photographer to document the moment. “He loved seeing these men that he considered sanctimonious phonies wearing Elvis paraphernalia,” says Raphael, “because he got them all to be little imitation operators, straight out of the carnival world.”

  In June 1957, Parker inducted Wallis and Joe Hazen into his fictional Snowmen’s League of America, Ltd. The best known of his nonsensical hijinks, the Snowmen’s League was a takeoff on the Showmen’s League, which promoted the idea of consummate professionalism among carnival workers. Parker’s little club, which he established during the Eddy Arnold era, rewarded another standard of excellence: the ability to con, or “snow.” Its motto: “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!” The Colonel named himself High Potentate and placed an enormous stuffed snowman in his studio office, often posing with it for pictures.

  With faultless attention to detail, Parker designed membership cards, certificates, a ribbon-festooned “Snow Award,” and even gag wine labels (THE COLONEL’S PRIVATE STOCK—VINTAGE YEAR 1942). All were emblazoned with a cartoon drawing of a pudgy, top-hat-wearing, cigar-smoking snowman—a benevolent rendering of the Colonel himself.

  Parker boasted that the nonprofit club cost nothing to get into but $1,000 to get out. With great fanfare, he inducted those with whom he had business arrangements, or whose favor he curried, such as politicians or high-profile journalists, who protected as much as publicized. Hollywood executives, says Byron Raphael, “begged to belong to that club,” where they rubbed shoulders with members of Presley’s entourage, and RCA reps and corporate brass. “My induction was given to me over dinner, so other people were sure to hear the presentation,” remembers Charlie Boyd, a former RCA field man. “He said it was almost a secret society, and indicated it would open doors for me.”

  The coup de grâce of Parker’s little folly was the club’s slickly produced rule book, which the Colonel called a Confidential Report Dealing with Advanced Techniques of Member Snowers, prepared by a team “notably skilled in evasiveness and ineptitude.” A slim volume filled with clever wordplay, its table of contents promised seven chapters on such topics as “Counteracting High Pressure Snowing . . . Melt and disappear technique,” and “Directional Snowing . . . This deals with approach and departure simultaneously.” Anyone who hoped to read such chapters found only sixteen blank pages, followed by text that ended with a “special note” on how the Chief Potentate had allegedly talked the printer into delivering the greatest number of books “at a reduced loss to himself, for which he was very grateful.” As the Colonel summed up, “It is again a sterling example of a good snowman’s willingness to see the other man’s problems and show the greatest understanding without financial involvement.”

  Parker had a different snow job in mind for Hal Kanter. The director was surprised to see the Colonel frequently come by the Loving You set, since he had no interest in reading the script, and let Elvis speak for himself when he engaged Kanter about the kind of actor he hoped to become. To Kanter, Parker seemed to be interested only in “how much, not who, where, when, or why,” and once Kanter made his presence known, the Colonel would leave. “I would never know if he was watching in the shadows or not,” Kanter remembers, “but if he wasn’t there, one of his minions would be. There was always somebody around.”

  Kanter found out what was on Parker’s mind as the filming wore on. For some time, the Colonel had wanted to publish a book, How Much Does It Cost If It’s Free?, a collection of hokum, blarney, and snow jobs extraordinaire that he would claim was his life story. He planned to insert advertising among its pages to make back its production costs. RCA, he boasted, was buying the back cover for $25,000.

  Now all he needed was a ghostwriter, and Kanter seemed just the man—he could write it on weekends, Parker told him. But Kanter, who saw the Colonel as someone who “was happier fleecing the world of its money than the actual making of it,” had no intention of doing such a thing, and told the Colonel to look beyond a book to a film version of his life. The manager brightened, and Kanter was astonished to hear him say that he thought Paul Newman the ideal actor to play him on the screen. Foolishly, perhaps, the director wrote in his autobiography, Kanter replied that he was thinking more of W. C. Fields. Parker’s “pink face turned magenta and he never again mentioned that book in my presence.”

  Still, Kanter had enormous respect for what he called Parker’s “genius,” especially after he saw him skillfully maneuver Elvis through a frenzied throng at The Louisiana Hayride. Parker had once tried to work a
deal with the Hayride and sponsoring station KWKH, offering to set up an artist service bureau for the fee of $12,000, which the show’s producer, Horace Logan, found preposterous, especially as Parker planned to run it as an extension of Jamboree Productions. Now instead of booking acts on the show, Parker was stealing one in buying out Elvis’s contract. With the help of Bitsy Mott, whom Parker had recently made head of security despite his slight build, the Colonel steered his client past a sea of groping arms and hands, all frantic to touch the star, get an autograph, or in the case of one overexuberant fan, snip a lock of his hair. The director thought Parker’s calling for a wall of police to ring the platform shoulder-to-shoulder had been mere press agentry until Elvis got on stage, and the 9,000 in attendance sent up a roof-lifting scream that lasted the length of his performance.

  Afterward, Kanter sidled up to Parker and complimented him on his call: “Now I see why you have the police there.”

  “That’s right,” Parker snapped. “If it weren’t for those cops, those sweet little girls would be all over the stage and they’d tear that boy to pieces. That’s why I’ve got to protect him. You people in Hollywood don’t know a damn thing about protection.”

  Kanter, trying to make a joke of it, thought of the diminutive head of the William Morris Agency. “I guess Abe Lastfogel would get trampled to death in a crowd like this.” The Colonel sneered: “Abe Lastfogel wouldn’t know where to go to find a crowd like this.” With that, Kanter “knew immediately what his relationship with the Morris office was.”

  Lately, Parker had become more disgruntled with the Morris executives, especially as they began to advise him on ways that he and Elvis might better manage their money. The Colonel should set up a corporation to shelter some of it from the tax man, they said, and in fact, they could do it for him. But the Colonel had no interest in any such thing. The Morris brass was surprised. Didn’t he trust them? If that was the case, they could recommend a business manager to help him protect what he and Elvis had.