The Colonel Read online

  The Colonel didn’t trust them, of course, and he’d rather have Elvis lose money than set him up with someone who might influence him in other decisions, too. Only once did he take Elvis to the Morris offices, and then just to let the agents fraternize with him a little, so he could keep them away from the movie sets. His paranoia raged to such an extent that he refused free work space within the agency, first accepting the offer and then complaining that his suite was “eight doors removed from the donniker [men’s room]. It looks like the little house behind the big house.” But his concerns were otherwise. What if someone should listen in on his phone conversations, maybe secretly tape him, learn of the ways he managed to take far more—sometimes in excess of 50 percent—from his deals on Elvis’s behalf?

  It wasn’t stealing. Hadn’t he chastised Byron when the younger man accidentally walked out of the grocery store with an unchecked magazine in the bottom of his cart? Hadn’t he called Byron on it and made him go back and pay for it? The Colonel was an honest man. And what he took from Elvis was deserved. No other manager worked as hard.

  Still, he made it clear to Lastfogel from the beginning: all checks due to Elvis would be sent directly from the studio to Parker’s office in Memphis and made out to All Star Shows, not to the Morris agency. So what if the Colonel was the only client to demand such an arrangement? Besides, the agency had no contract that strictly bound Elvis or Parker as a client; therefore, the Colonel never signed a check authorization form.

  The beauty of it, as the Colonel saw, was that Presley was completely unconcerned about such matters. When Byron delivered Elvis his weekly check—which the Diskin Sisters sent to California, where Parker would sign it and put it in a sealed envelope—the singer never questioned his cut, even though the figures were seldom broken down, the expenses rarely itemized except on Parker’s own ledger. In fact, Presley seldom looked at the amount. He simply pocketed it and sent it home to his father.

  Lastfogel and company found Parker’s arrangement perplexing, since he then had to turn around and send the agency 10 percent, which they would have deducted automatically before they sent the money on to him. They argued that it was cleaner for his IRS records to have the money come to them first. The Colonel was resolute. He feared no IRS audit, either for himself or for Elvis, he said, because he went directly to the Internal Revenue Service and asked them to calculate what they owed. In fact, Parker said, “I consider it my patriotic duty to keep Elvis in the ninety percent bracket.” Remembering how he’d been stung by the surprise audit in Tampa—the IRS would also question him about the $10,000 buyout of Elvis’s Louisiana Hayride contract—neither he nor Elvis would have any tax shelters, or dare to write off anything but the most legitimate expenses, a practice that made Elvis the largest single taxpayer on a straight income in the country. And while Parker occasionally tossed Bitsy Mott the odd $25 or $50, he was careful not to pay him any more than minimum wage, saying that the IRS precluded paying family members more than outsiders for the same work. “I love to pay taxes,” he would say. “I know when I’m paying taxes that I’m making money.”

  The Morris accountants were stunned. Why would a man who knew the whereabouts of every penny, and went to great lengths to hold on to it, not want to take advantage of the tax breaks? Other than his home in Madison, Parker had no investments, and while the Colonel was informed enough to gainfully advise Byron and Trude on specific stock trades, he didn’t play the market himself because he couldn’t control it.

  There was logic in that, the Morris accountants said, and then nodded their heads in agreement when Parker explained he didn’t want Elvis to become a hapless figure like the boxer Joe Louis, losing his fortune from some obscure IRS ruling. What they didn’t know was that Parker, the illegal alien, lived in fear of any government agency that poked around in his past. The IRS, says Bitsy Mott, “just scared him to death.”

  Already there were rumors that the reason Parker wouldn’t give interviews was because there were things he didn’t want the world to know, and Parker saw the suspicion on Lastfogel’s face. That’s why he realized, early in 1956, that he needed a snitch within the Morris agency itself. He had a certain type in mind for someone he would name as his assistant: small, young, male, quiet, and probably homosexual, someone who was easy to dominate and control, and had no marital problems.

  Byron Raphael was twenty-two years old and earning $45 a week working in the William Morris mail room—the starting job for all would-be agents—on the day he messengered a script to Colonel Parker’s office at Twentieth Century–Fox. He delivered it to Trude Forsher, who liked his mild-mannered personality and asked him to call back. What Byron didn’t know was that the Colonel had asked her to be on the lookout. The five-foot-seven Raphael wasn’t gay, but he did fit the rest of the profile: “Most of the guys he hired after me were homosexual, little, soft-spoken, creative, and neat in appearance.”

  When Byron returned to the Colonel’s office, Parker immediately offered him a job, and the younger man turned it down, saying he’d planned on staying at William Morris his whole career. Parker smiled. “Well, you will work for William Morris,” he assured him. “They’ll pay your salary, but you’ll come and be with me.”

  Raphael was already caught up in the excitement of Elvis Presley, but the Colonel, too, was compelling.

  “In retrospect, I see that he had the impact of someone like Adolf Hitler, because he had an astonishing kind of mental power over the people around him. They would have done anything he asked them to do. There was no way to keep a secret from him, and I never saw him get defeated. His personality was so big, so overpowering, that when he walked into a room, he took it over, no matter who was there. They all fell under his spell.”

  To test Byron’s loyalty, Parker put him through two trials by fire with his William Morris bosses. The first demanded that Raphael, basically an errand boy, walk into the office of the all-powerful Abe Lastfogel, sit down, and light up a stogie. Lastfogel detested the smell of smoke and wouldn’t allow it around him, but he had a commendable sense of humor: “What did you do, boy, lose a bet?”

  The second prank, guided by Parker’s quest for revenge, was directed at Lenny Hirshan and had more serious implications. Hirshan, aloof but unctuous with stars—and so disliked by some in the agency that an assistant would eventually hide raw hamburger under his flowerpot and wait for it to rot—was an easy target. To Byron, he seemed resentful of the younger men coming up, regarding everyone as competition and scheming to keep them scared for their jobs.

  Lately, he was concerned for his own. Hirshan was technically Elvis’s contact at William Morris, but whenever he dropped by Parker’s office at Paramount, the manager just shooed him away (“Thanks for coming over, Lenny. No, we don’t need anything today”). Since Byron was the envy of the agents for his access to Elvis, Hirshan now began to pump him for information. The Colonel had a plan.

  “Colonel Parker came to Trude and me and explained that Lenny Hirshan was snooping around too much,” Byron remembers. “He said, ‘Trude, write a note in some kind of shorthand—you know, scribble, scribble, and then carnival talk. Then say, “Leave WMA,” and do some more shorthand that doesn’t mean anything, and then write, “Lenny Hirshan’s fault.” ’ ”

  Trude took out her pad, and handled the note to Parker, who crumpled it up, stamped on it until it bore the print of his heel, and pitched it into the wastebasket.

  “Now Byron,” he said, his voice slipping into character as the old Colonel, his tone broadening, his pitch rising, and his accent ripening to reveal his difficulty with h’s and j’s, “I want you to call Lenny Hirshan and tell him you walked in and saw the Colonel in a meeting with MCA, and you’re reporting back to William Morris.”

  Byron picked up the phone and sailed into the script. “And Mr. Hirshan,” Byron added, measuring the agent’s anxiety, “I’ve got this note that the Colonel left.” Hirshan, mindful that Parker had no contract with the agency and panicked t
hat he might actually leave, told Byron to bring it right over: “You did a good job. Keep spying on the Colonel for me.”

  The following day, Byron again dialed Hirshan’s number and told him he had some terrible news: the Colonel had seen him retrieving the note, and he knew Byron had delivered it to Hirshan. Furthermore, they were coming right over.

  “We burst into Lenny’s office and Colonel Parker said, ‘Let’s get Abe Lastfogel in here, because if you’re telling my guy to give you stuff from my wastepaper basket, we’re through.’ Of course, the Colonel had no intention of leaving—he was too loyal to Mr. Lastfogel—but he loved seeing Lenny squirm. So Mr. Lastfogel came in and said, ‘Lenny, if that’s true, say it.’ And I said, ‘It’s true, Mr. Lastfogel.’ Lenny looked at me and his eyes were like fire. I had betrayed him and been a traitor to the people who paid me.”

  Byron was about to learn a harsh lesson: if you worked for Colonel Parker, you got hurt, emotionally, professionally, or financially—and the sting never really went away.

  “I never should have done it,” Raphael says. “But since I idolized the Colonel, I lost my sense of reality. Everybody who worked for him wanted his approval so desperately, and when he went into that steely look, or stormed in and out of offices, slamming doors, we were also afraid of his anger. I really think he hypnotized us so that we would endure almost any kind of treatment.”

  Tom Diskin was foremost among them. Already in his mid-thirties, Thomas Francis Diskin revered the Colonel with a complexity of emotions that transcended any father-son relationship. Although he had reportedly been Parker’s first partner in the Jamboree Productions booking agency and music publishing companies—running the Chicago office before selling his half to Hank Snow—incorporation papers suggest it was Diskin who originally owned Jamboree Attractions and later took Parker in as a partner, only to be pressured to relinquish his half when Snow and Parker joined forces.

  “What he told me,” says Anne Fulchino, national publicity director for RCA in the ’50s, “was that Parker went to work for him, and somewhere along the line, Diskin ended up being his employee. I said, ‘How could you let that happen, Tom?’ And he said, ‘You know, the Colonel’s quite a guy.’ Since Tom was just a nice, simple person who had the lowest expectations out of life, I could believe his story.”

  Short, stocky, with a crop of blondish red hair capping his everyman’s looks, Diskin was mediocre in every way. He arrived for work each day on a waft of Old Spice, a yes-man in a cheap suit and washed-out tie. As - Parker’s $250-a-week right-hand man, he might have been expected to wield a modicum of decision-making power. But he was too sweet and meek to assert himself (“He was an angel,” says RCA’s Sam Esgro), and the Colonel too paranoid and obsessed with details to delegate much responsibility. The lieutenant, then, was put to work on menial tasks—writing letters to the fan clubs, taking papers to Elvis for signature, and parroting the Colonel’s words to RCA. On the rare occasion, he contacted the Aberbachs in regard to a particular song, but his most useful purpose was serving as a buffer between Parker and the people the Colonel didn’t want to see.

  Around his boss, Diskin tamped down any resentment or thoughts of his own and remained blissfully obedient. Privately, however, he complained about being Parker’s shadow, describing how the Colonel talked to him like a needful but not particularly caring parent.

  On the road, at the end of the day, Diskin yearned to find a place to knock back a toddy or two and meet some nice girls, go dancing. But the Colonel wouldn’t permit it, fearing it might lead to dating and marriage, and a possible end to Diskin’s steadfast devotion. In the odd, Walter Mitty moment, he managed to smuggle a girl into his room, but mostly settled for the life of a eunuch, exchanging playful winks with waitresses. Eventually, he would buy the property adjacent to Parker’s Tennessee home, where his boss could keep a vigilant watch.

  As reward, the Colonel cut his lieutenant into a number of Elvis’s business deals, including his music publishing, buying Diskin’s loyalty and his silence. But while he always addressed him as Mr. Diskin in the company of others, Parker could never resist the opportunity to humiliate him, to remind him that he was not really a business colleague, but a flunky. Despite Diskin’s serious-mindedness, and the thoroughness with which he attended to his duties, the Colonel found constant fault with his performance, yelling at him in front of Byron and Trude, and one day calling him in to a meeting with another talent manager and ordering him to tap-dance. Not once did Diskin ever refuse or talk back, even when Parker screamed at him with the force of a hailstorm. Eventually, Diskin’s silence, along with years of hard drinking, would lead to ulcers and the surgical removal of half his stomach.

  In his more benevolent moments, Parker showed strong loyalties to the people he liked. When he needed an opening act for some of Elvis’s early concert dates, for example, he plucked an Irish tenor named Frankie Connors from the unemployment line, later arranging a screen test for Connors’s daughter, Sharon. He also had a soft spot for Gabe Tucker, assigning him all the royalties to a song they wrote together. “There were times when he was so gentle he would go into a reverie and almost rock himself to sleep,” says Byron.

  When his malevolence came upon him, however, Parker spared no one’s feelings, cloaking cruelty in offbeat humor. He once steered the promoter Lee Gordon into a bad business deal and later repaid him for his losses, strictly from friendship and honor. But Parker’s influence had tragic results. Though handsome in his resemblance to Tyrone Power, Gordon fretted over his ethnicity. “Do you think my nose looks too Jewish?” he repeatedly asked. “Well,” Parker replied, “I wouldn’t eat too many bagels,” and goaded him into having plastic surgery. “Something happened,” Byron remembers, “and he came out looking a gargoyle, even after repeated surgeries to correct it. It was a horrible thing. But - that’s how hypnotic the Colonel was in his suggestion.”

  A more frequent target was Bevo Bevis, the Colonel’s runabout. Parker looked after him, giving him a job and sending Bevo’s pay home to his mother, who cared for his young daughter from a hopeless marriage. But Bevo paid dearly for the Colonel’s attention. On one occasion, he was forced to stand at attention in the middle of a rainstorm, as proof of how “my people listen to me,” as the Colonel snorted to cronies. When he once failed to immediately light his boss’s cigar, Bevo was put out of the car on a late-night highway, told to catch up at a diner seven miles away, and waved off with the admonition not to hitch a ride, or “I’ll know about it and won’t even consider taking you back!”

  Like Bevo, Trude was constantly threatened with termination for some imagined slight. But while the Colonel terrorized her on occasion, usually putting Byron up to some scheme to scare her into thinking she’d lost her job, the secretary almost always figured out that Parker was bluffing. “I know the inside of the Colonel,” she explains today.

  Trude was loyal to a fault, but she took the Colonel’s teasing in stride for another reason. Caught in a crumbling marriage, the vivacious Trude simply transferred her affections to her boss. During the day, she tried to impress him with how quickly she had learned about show business, and at night, she smuggled home photographs of him, just to have him near.

  She knew the relationship would never be romantic and, in fact, considered Marie a good friend, though she rankled if another woman came near the Colonel at the office. Parker noticed her possessiveness, as did her husband, Bruno, who tired of hearing her sing “Hound Dog” around the house and threatened to leave her and their two young sons, believing she was having an affair with Elvis. The Colonel was intensely uncomfortable around any female who showed any personal interest in him—he had become especially agitated on the road when a young fan repeatedly broke into his room and climbed into his bed—and never, ever demonstrated interest in another woman. Now Trude had become a threat: if Bruno didn’t leave her, she would leave him instead.

  In an uncharacteristically soft approach, Parker gently dissuaded her
fantasy and finally appealed to what he assumed would be her European sense of hearth and home.

  “He went to her,” Byron remembers, “and he said, ‘Trude, your marriage is going to end if you stay here. Take whatever chance you can to work it out. Otherwise you’ll lose your family.’ And I remember her tears. She said, ‘But Colonel, you and my children, you are my family.’ ” For a while, then, the Colonel let her stay.

  Parker intended to make up for more odious maltreatment when he allowed Byron and Trude to play Elvis a ballad, “Castles in the Sand,” that they’d cowritten with the help of a professional songwriter. They hoped he’d record it for the soundtrack of Loving You, and their chances looked good: Steve Sholes was short on material for the session, and Elvis loved the song so much he sang it all night at his suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Furthermore, the Aberbachs had agreed to publish it as part of the Gladys Music catalog.

  The Colonel seldom attended Elvis’s recording sessions, and Presley preferred it that way. At Paramount, he’d had a difficult time getting a satisfactory take on the soundtrack’s title song, and now at Radio Recorders, he welcomed no distractions in the studio, especially not from Parker, who had an irritating habit of making irrelevant suggestions or reminiscing about the Gene Austin days. Elvis called him Admiral, as a derisive play on Colonel, although it was a nickname Parker sometimes used for himself, as well as for Marie.

  Lately, in private, Elvis had been more defiant with his manager, mostly out of nerves. Everything had gotten so big so fast, it made his head spin. He’d even pulled a movie-prop pistol on a marine in an argument, and gotten in a fistfight with a service station attendant, which landed him in court. In early ’56, he told reporters that his success “just scares me,” and that all the hysteria at his concerts “makes me want to cry. How does all this happen to me?”