When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man
Page 7
The Colonel had a sly, deliberate way of talking. He took his time. You just knew he was grinning, chomping a cigar, turning it slowly in his mouth. He said, "Who are you, son?"
"This is Jerry Weintraub," I told him. "I have a strategy in mind, a way to take Elvis on the road that will mean a lot of money."
He said, "Look here, boy, in the first place, Elvis is not going on the road"--at this point, the mid to late sixties, Elvis was doing movies, and had not been on tour for years--"and, in the second, if he were to go on tour, which he's not, it would not be you taking him. I've got guys lined up for that job, people we need to take care of."
End of conversation.
If there's one piece of advice I can give to young people, to kids trying to break out of Brooklyn and Kankakee, it's this: persist, push, hang on, keep going, never give up. When the man says no, pretend you can't hear him. Look confused, stammer, say, "Huh?" Persistence--it's a cliche, but it happens to work. The person who makes it is the person who keeps on going after everyone else has quit. This is more important than intelligence, pedigree, even connections. Be dogged! Keep hitting that door until you bust it down! I have accomplished almost nothing on the first or second or even the third try--the breakthrough usually comes late, when everyone else has left the field.
I called the Colonel again the next morning.
"What can I do for you, son?"
"Hello, Colonel, this is Jerry Weintraub. I want to take Elvis out on the road."
"You don't give up, do you, boy?"
"No, Colonel, not when I know I'm right."
I called every day for months and months. I did not flip him in the course of one of those calls, but I had planted my name so deep in his brain he would never forget it. Whenever he thought of taking Elvis on tour, he thought of Jerry Weintraub.
One morning, about a year after the dream, the Colonel called me at home.
"Do you still want to take my boy out on the road?"
"Yes, Colonel."
"Well, I'll be at the roulette table at the Hilton International Hotel in Vegas tomorrow at nine A.M. You meet me there with a check for a million dollars, and he's yours."
Great. Wonderful. Terrific. Fantastic. My dream is coming true. All I have to do is raise more money than I have ever seen in my life, and do it in twenty-four hours. Back then, a million dollars was real money. Rockefellers, Carnegies--those were the only people that had money like that. I started making calls, banging on doors, calling in favors, promising, begging--anything to get the cash. This was my shot. I did not want to blow it. I stayed up all night, getting turned down again and again, flying on coffee and adrenaline. "No," "Don't have it," "Are you crazy?" "Who do you think I am?" "A million dollars? Ha, ha, ha!" "You've lost your mind," "I will get back to you when my oil well hits"--these are the kinds of responses I was getting. I was desperate, running out of time.
Finally, late that night, I got a call back from an old friend. He said there was a guy in Seattle named Lester Smith who owned radio stations, lots of radio stations, and was a tremendous Elvis fan--this guy might give you the money just to be in business with Presley. So I called the guy--his business manager was on an extension--and I made the pitch. They wanted to see proposals, papers, and so on. I didn't blame them. I would want to see these things, too, but there was no time. "I would like to," I told him, "but I have just a few hours to get a check and meet Colonel Parker in Vegas. So, at this point, it's yes or no. You're going to have to trust me on the rest."
As he was saying yes, I was getting my keys, pulling on my coat, heading out the door. I went to the airport and got a plane. I stared out the window at the desert. I took a cab to the hotel, checked into my room, called the Colonel. "I'm getting the money," I told him, "but I'm going to need a little more time."
"All right," he said. "You have till three P.M. But that's it. You know where to meet me."
I rushed over to the bank, one of those cash-and-carry places downtown. What a sight! The place had a gold crown over the door and it was all purple and it looked less like a bank than a whorehouse. I went to the woman at the front desk. "My name is Jerry Weintraub," I told her. "I'm waiting for a million dollar wire transfer. I'm going to need a cashier's check for the same amount." She looked at me like I was nutty, maybe a bank robber. I had long hair in those days, sideburns and boots, and I was telling this girl I planned to leave there with a million dollars. I sat in a big chair, looking through the windows as I waited for the money to come in. It was a strange afternoon, spent suspended between my life as it had been and my life as it was going to be. Elvis was the biggest star in the world. If I took him on the road, if I promoted him, nothing would be the same. I knew that. Finally, after I had been daydreaming for two hours--I was pushing against the new deadline--the president of the bank, a young guy, asked me to follow him into his office.
"Your cashier's check is being prepared, Mr. Weintraub."
"Right."
"It's made out to Elvis Presley... One million dollars."
"Great."
"That's a lot of money."
"Yes, it sure is."
"What do you plan to do with it?"
"I'm taking Elvis on tour," I said.
This guy's eyes lit up. He said, "Do you need an accountant?"
"I know how you feel," I told him, "and let me think about it, but right now, I need to get that check and get over there or I'm going to miss the Colonel and no one will be going anywhere."
"Of course," he said, giving me the check, this monstrous check. I looked at it and shivered, folded it into my breast pocket, ran out, and caught a cab to the Hilton. I spotted the Colonel as soon as I walked onto the casino floor. You could not miss him. He was wearing a white cowboy hat and a ratty short-sleeved shirt, chomping a cigar. He looked like the guy ripping you off at the county fair. He was the hero of his own movie.
"Colonel Tom Parker?"
"You Jerry Weintraub?"
"Yes, sir."
He looked at me skeptically, through one eye, then asked, "You got the money?"
"I do."
"Wait a minute," he told me, "I want to finish this spin"--he was playing roulette, which is a sucker's game--then said, "Okay, follow me."
We went up to his suite, where he had a little office. He sat behind his desk, then said, "Let's have it."
I took the check out of my pocket, unfolded it, handed it to him. He looked at it for a moment, unlocked a safe, put the check inside, then said, "Okay, Jerry, what do you want to do with my boy?"
"Take him out on the road."
"Good! Let's do it."
Thinking back, I realize there were no papers, no contracts, no nothing. I handed him the check, he took the check, that's it.
The Colonel was amazing. As an old carnie, he really understood how to package and sell. He began in the music business in the 1940s promoting country acts like Minnie Pearl and Hank Snow and Eddie Arnold, but he did not get into the chips until he signed Elvis to a management contract in 1954. He built Presley's career from there, moving him from Sun Records to RCA Victor, getting him into movies, and, in the process, turning the kid from Tupelo into the king of rock and roll. Some critics thought Elvis lost authenticity in the process, but the Colonel was always a big marketing man. If you were walking this earth, he wanted to sell to you. He was, in this way, a true egalitarian. He wanted no one left out. He once scolded me, saying, "To you guys from the coasts, the country is New York and LA. Everything in between is just the blur you fly over. But I'll tell you, that blur is where the audience lives and where you make your money."
I remember the first time I went to his house. He had a statue garden in the yard, with these odd ceramic animals and plastic flamingos. His taste was not my taste--it came from the carnival, the midway. To him, art was a pink elephant. But he taught me how to look at other parts of America. To understand this country, you must understand the paintings in the Whitney Museum in New York, or know how to pretend to
, but you must also understand the flamingos in Colonel Tom's garden. To this day, if you go to my office at Warner Bros., you will see, out front, two plastic flamingos in the grass. This is to remind me where I come from: from the Bronx, yes, but also from the school of Colonel Tom Parker, who taught me how to hawk my wares in every part of America.
People later said the Colonel stole from Elvis, took too much, or did not treat him right. He was vilified. But, as far as I'm concerned, none of that's true. The Colonel never stole anything from Elvis. If he had, I would have known it. I was there. Elvis made all the artistic decisions and did exactly what he wanted to do. Business and promotion--that was what the Colonel cared about. As for the movies, which some people didn't like, Colonel Parker had just two rules. One: It had to have ten songs, because ten songs made a record. Two: Elvis got paid one million dollars. This neat sum, one million, the Colonel loved it. It rolled off his tongue.
Years later, I was at a meeting at the Beverly Wilshire with Colonel Parker and Hal Wallis, a Paramount producer who worked with Elvis on many movies, including Love Me Tender. He wanted Elvis for Harum Scarum, a Rudolph Valentino-type film. After going through various details, the men finally got to the salary. "Well, look, Colonel, I know the usual terms," said Wallis, "but this is a different kind of movie, with a different kind of budget. We can't pay Elvis a million dollars."
"You know what he gets," said the Colonel. "Give us the money, tell us where to be, and we'll make a movie. If not, I'm not sure why you're here."
"You don't understand," said Wallis. "This is an Academy Award film. Elvis is going to win the Academy Award."
"Oh, you're right, I didn't understand," said the Colonel. "An Academy Award! That is something. Tell you what, Hal. You give me a million dollars, and when he gets the Academy Award, I will give you back five hundred thousand."
Wallis then went directly to Elvis. "I have something amazing for you," he said. "You will play a role like Rudolph Valentino would have played. You will look like Valentino in The Sheik. He was the most handsome man in the world; you will be more handsome. This is going to make you into a great actor as well as a movie star."
"Okay," said Elvis, "but who was Valentino? I don't know anything about him."
"We'll get you books," says Wallis. "You'll learn all about him."
So Elvis starts reading up on Valentino, and learns, among other things, that Valentino was nasty, temperamental, and hard to work with, and always came late to the set. So what does Elvis do? Well, he's an actor now. He becomes Valentino. He behaves in a way he never behaved. If you wanted to do a picture with Elvis in eighteen days, it was done in eighteen days. If you wanted him on the set at 6:00 A.M., he was there at 5:30. Now he's coming late and he is leaving early, disappearing, ignoring direction. Nobody can control him. Hal Wallis finally calls the Colonel. He says, "Colonel, you've got to do something about Elvis."
The Colonel says, "It's very simple, Hal. Tell him he's not Rudolph Valentino."
That, as far as I know, was the extent of the Colonel's creative involvement in Presley's career.
After I gave the Colonel the cashier's check, he brought me to meet Elvis, who had a suite in the Hilton International. He must've been performing there at the time.
We knocked on the door, went in, and there was Elvis. He was in his thirties, about five years older than I was. It was his Sun God phase, scarves, flare-legged jumpsuits, white boots, hair long and breaking like a wave from forehead to the nape of his neck. Hal Wallis was right. He was a handsome man. "This is Jerry Weintraub," the Colonel told him. "He's the man I told you about, who paid a million dollars for you. He's going to work with us."
Elvis shook my hand and said, "It's an honor, sir. I appreciate it. There is only one thing I ask when we're on the road: Please make sure, when I perform, that every seat is filled. And please make sure my fans are in the front rows--not the big shots."
Elvis was older than me. He was also the biggest star in the world. Yet he called me sir. It's how he was raised. He was uneducated and country, but really, in many ways, a true gentleman. What happened to him later, with the drugs and the weight, was a tragedy.
We went on the road a few weeks after that. We picked the cities and dates and arenas. I did all this with Tom Hulett, who was my partner in the concert business. We did everything together. It was a groundbreaking tour. It changed the nature of the business. Before that, the concert business had been broken into territories, each region of the country controlled by a local promoter--who picked the venue, sold the tickets, arranged the publicity, and so on. There was no such thing as a national tour. An artist moved from fiefdom to fiefdom, and the manager cut deals with local power brokers--the man who "owned" Philadelphia, the man who "owned" Buffalo--who made subsidiary deals with local police, local unions, local arena operators. This system was byzantine and wasteful. At each step, the local promoter paid off and kicked back, cut sweetheart deals, cooked the books, even took profits from the hit tours to pay for the dogs. When the artists came off the road, they always had less money than they believed they had earned.
But if you tried to go around the local promoters and cut your own deals, you would find yourself frozen out of the territory. No one would rent you the hall if it was not through the local guy, who was, after all, kicking money back to the operator. But the balance changed when I was booking Elvis. I was finally able to cut deals directly with the arenas, as no one would turn away the show. Elvis was simply too big. If you said no, someone else would say yes, meaning you would miss out on the biggest payday ever. This was what I had meant when I told the Colonel I had a better way to take Elvis on the road. I cut out the middleman, which drove down costs and increased profits, meaning more money for everyone. What's more, I structured the deal as a production, like a play, in which Elvis, the Colonel, and I split the profits. I was not an agent taking a percentage, I was a partner taking a share. If Elvis saved money, I saved money; if Elvis was enriched, I was enriched. Since one person booked the entire tour, there were also economies of scale. I got better deals because I put on more shows. As a result, artists who signed with me--I am talking about later, after I went out with Elvis--made more money. Which attracted more artists. Which meant the local operators, if they wanted shows for their arenas, had to work with me. This is how I broke the old system.
None of this was easy. Every local promoter wanted me destroyed. I was ending their reign. It was a tremendous fight, but I knew if I came out intact I would have a new livelihood: This became my company, Concerts West, which, within a few years, was the largest concert business in the world. In this way, I became the most hated man in the industry. But as Don Corleone said, "It's better to be feared than loved."
When I booked that first Elvis tour, I did not know what I was doing. I was such a neophyte. Being as naive as I was about the business, I had Elvis open on the Fourth of July in Miami Beach. Have you ever been to Miami Beach in the middle of July? It's a swamp. It's five million degrees and humid as hell. No one is there, and no one should be. We booked the convention center, which had ten thousand seats.
About two weeks out, I called the guy who ran the box office. I asked him how we were doing.
"Great," he said. "We're sold out."
"Really? Sold out? Already? That's fantastic."
I thought for a moment, then said, "Hey, what do you think of a matinee?"
"Great!" he said. "You'll have no problem selling it. Demand is through the roof."
I went back and asked the Colonel.
"Yeah, yeah," he said. "Book it."
One day. Two shows. Twenty thousand seats. Big-time show business.
As soon as we stepped off the plane in Miami, we needed a shower. The heat waves shimmered. Anything more than fifty yards away looked like a mirage. The concierge from the Fontainebleau sent a limousine to pick us up. I got in, smiling. The Colonel just stood there.
"Hey, come on," I said. "What are you waiting for?"
Instead, he climbed into the station wagon that had been sent for the luggage.
I dropped off my bags and went to the arena.
I walked into the box office and asked for the guy I had been talking to on the phone. I wanted to check the gate. The concert was the next afternoon. He was sitting in the office, holding this huge stack of tickets, smiling.
"What are those?" I asked.
"What are what, Mr. Weintraub?"
"In your hand," I said.
"These are your tickets," he said. "For Elvis. The matinee."
"Are people coming to pick them up?" I asked.
"No, Mr. Weintraub. These are the tickets that have not sold."
"What do you mean? You said you would sell them all."
There were maybe five thousand tickets in his hand--half the house. My mind was racing, a single word tolling in my mind: disaster, disaster, disaster! What did Elvis tell me, his one thing? "I just don't want to sing to any empty seats."
I got close to the ticket seller, looked into his cold, pinprick eyes. "Why did you tell me we were sold out?" I asked.
He shrugged and said, "I was just telling you what you wanted to hear."
I went wild, grabbed him by the shirt, shook him, swearing. He grinned. I picked him up, slammed him into the wall. People came running. They pulled me off. Someone said, "Take it easy. You're gonna kill him!" I stormed out, trying to cool down, trying to think. My career is going to be over before it begins. I walked outside, then followed the street to the beach. I was thinking about the concert, about what would happen when Elvis saw all those empty seats. What can I do? Give away the tickets, confess to Elvis, throw myself on the mercy of the Colonel?
On the way back to the arena, I passed the county jail, a windowless fortress just across from the Civic Center. I wandered around the arena until Elvis showed up with his entourage for rehearsal and sound check. I pulled the Colonel aside.