The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  Almost a year later, Elvis felt isolated and out of control. His mother, Gladys, had been in the hospital for tests. As always, the Colonel, treating him like “property,” didn’t approve of his new girlfriend, Dottie Harmony, a Las Vegas singer and dancer. And worse, the army was making noises about drafting him—he’d already had his preinduction physical. Everything seemed so up in the air. Soon, over Easter of ’57, when he should have been enjoying his new house, a mansion with the lofty name of Graceland, Elvis would tell his minister, the Reverend James Hamill, “I am the most miserable young man you have ever seen.”

  And so on February 23, 1957, when Elvis arrived at Radio Recorders in Hollywood to tape five songs, including “Castles in the Sand,” for the Loving You soundtrack, he had much on his mind. Parker forbade Byron to attend the session, but once he was there, Byron went up to Elvis almost immediately at the Colonel’s suggestion. “Mr. Presley,” he said, “I want to thank you for recording my song.” Raphael could tell that Elvis thought the kid was trying to pressure him—why else would “Byron the Siren,” as Presley playfully called him, address him so formally? Still, Elvis was polite. “Well, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it.”

  From the start, the session proved difficult, as Elvis’s band, Scotty Moore, Bill Black, and D. J. Fontana, struggled with the requirements of soundtrack recording—twenty-nine takes to nail “Don’t Leave Me Now,” and twenty-two for “I Beg of You.” And RCA’s Bill Bullock entered into a prolonged exchange with anyone he could about whether to include the Dave Bartholomew song “One Night,” which Elvis had already toned down, changing “one night of sin,” to “one night with you.”

  During a lull, when Elvis stepped outside to shake off some nervous energy, Jean Aberbach, the more eccentric of the publishing brothers, spoke with Freddy Bienstock, Presley’s Hill and Range liaison, about getting Elvis to record a kiddie song, “Here Comes Peter Cottontail,” that the Aberbachs thought would sell well at Easter. Bienstock, dumbfounded that Aberbach would seriously consider such a thing, laughed him off, so Jean placed the lyrics on Elvis’s music stand. “After the break,” remembers Bienstock, “Elvis came into the studio and looked at the song and said, ‘Who brought that Br’er Rabbit shit in here?’ ”

  Now the Colonel, who always moved quickly for such an obese man, came running out of the control room clapping his hands. “All right, let’s get Byron’s song done next.” As the band readied their instruments and the Jordanaires warmed the “ooh wow wows” of their head arrangement, Elvis hesitated. Haltingly, he launched the first four bars, and then abruptly stopped. “I’m not going to do this goddamn song,” he said, turning to Gordon Stoker. “I hate to disappoint Byron and Trude, but I’m not going to do it for Colonel.” And then he inexplicably broke into “True Love,” the Cole Porter tune that had hit big for Bing Crosby.

  Steve Sholes cut a puzzled look at the Colonel, and Aberbach, who held no publishing rights to Cole Porter, rolled his eyes, bringing a palm to his forehead: “Oh my God, Cole Porter. As though he needs the money.”

  Never before had Elvis crossed the Colonel in public. Parker, who constantly feared the crush of another heart attack, fought to keep his emotions in check and decided to deal with it later in private. But from now on, Parker took stricter measures to ensure that all material Elvis received came solely from the Aberbachs, with one exception—“Are You Lonesome Tonight,” a favorite of Marie’s.

  For Elvis’s third picture, Jailhouse Rock, the Colonel exercised his outside picture clause with Paramount and moved to MGM, claiming his agreement with producer Pandro Berman—$250,000 plus 50 percent of the net profits—was “the biggest deal ever made in Hollywood.”

  One person who was not impressed was Kathryn Hereford, Berman’s associate producer. Hereford had heard all about the Colonel’s “rare” Elvis buttons, country sausage capers, and other bizarre stunts—the first day, he’d arrived at MGM in a mud-splattered car, a transparent move designed to play on his bumpkin persona. Hereford gave him the cold shoulder, advising Berman to put as much distance as possible between him and the wily manager.

  In turning his attention to the development of Jailhouse Rock, Parker stayed in constant contact with the Aberbachs, who had pinned new hopes on the soundtrack. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, both twenty-four-year-old Hill and Range songwriters who were already major figures in the R&B world, were commissioned to write four songs for the picture, including the famous production number in which Elvis distills the genius of his erotically undulating stage moves. The team, which had written the title song for Loving You, had a piano in their room at the Gorham Hotel in New York, and one weekend, Jean Aberbach came up and “pushed a chair in front of the door, sat down, and went to sleep,” remembers Stoller. “He wouldn’t move until we were finished.”

  Soon after, Julian Aberbach told Leiber to expect a contract from the Colonel; they intended to groom the writing team for other movies, as well. While Elvis frequently signed blank agreements at Parker’s instruction, Leiber was flabbergasted to open his mail and find just such a contract and a note instructing him to affix his signature and return it at once. “I called [the Colonel] and said, ‘There’s nothing on it.’ And he said they’d fill it in later. . . . It struck me as a great practical joke.”

  Breaking with his usual habit, the Colonel visited the set of Jailhouse Rock several times, one day bringing along Jim Denny, the powerful Nashville music publisher and Grand Ole Opry manager. Gordon Stoker, who viewed Parker as “a necessary evil,” was surprised at the Colonel’s audacity, knowing how painful it would be for Elvis to see the man who had once rejected him from the Opry.

  Now, on the set, “Denny walked over to Elvis and said, ‘I just wanted you to know that I’ve always had faith in you and always believed in you,’ ” Stoker recalls. “Elvis said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Denny,’ and turned around to us and whispered, ‘That bastard thinks I’ve forgotten the way he broke my heart.’ ”

  Denny’s visit, following weeks of long hours of filming and a myriad of other problems, so upset Elvis that he asked to take the day off. The difficulties with Scotty, Bill, and D.J. in the recording studio gave rise to a host of resentments, mostly over money. The musicians worked for $200 a week on the road—$100 off—always with the promise that as Elvis became more famous, their salary would increase. Since Elvis was now the biggest star in the world, Scotty had grown impatient. Soon he and Bill would resign, but later reconsider, asking for a raise of $50 per week and a flat payment of $10,000. Colonel reminded Presley that nothing was ever put in writing (“Besides, Steve Sholes doesn’t like them”) and demanded Elvis cut them loose, a decision that would come to a head in a matter of months. “The Colonel had a grip on everybody but me, Scotty, and Bill,” says D. J. Fontana. “He couldn’t tell us what to do, ’cause we could go to Elvis, see?”

  Normally afraid to question Parker’s judgment, Elvis complained to his cousin Junior Smith that he thought the Colonel had steered him wrong. What the hell did that old lardass know about music? Besides, - he’d also heard that Parker had blown a lot of money over a paid advertising deal gone bad. Furthermore, he hadn’t liked it that Parker kept a net around him, turning down Robert Mitchum’s invitation for Elvis to appear in Thunder Road. “He just wants to use your name,” Parker said, but to Elvis, it seemed as if he didn’t want him talking to other people, period, especially if they were in the business. One day, the Colonel found out that Mike Stoller was up in the suite at the Beverly Wilshire, playing pool, and ordered Elvis to ask him to leave. Jerry Leiber saw that Elvis “was trapped by his dependency on the Colonel,” that “he worshiped him as a maker and savior,” but “despised him because he was never able to take control of his own life.”

  Elvis’s dissatisfaction leaked back to the Colonel, who flew into a rage and gathered his staff in his office, telephoning the set for Elvis to come at once and bellowing into the receiver. (“I don’t care if he is shooting! Send him over!”). Elvis,
shaken by Parker’s fury, took a seat at the Colonel’s direction. “Elvis, Trude’s here, Byron’s here, Tom’s here,” Parker began in a voice husky with emotion. “I’m saying in front of all of these witnesses that if you don’t think I’ve done the right thing by you, you walk out this minute and you’re free. Go get yourself another manager. But if you stay, - you’re going to do what I tell you. Do you understand me?” Elvis nodded, resigned in the future to hold his tongue. “He got me this far, made me a big star,” he told his pals. “I’m going to stick with him.”

  Whenever anyone had the nerve to ask about such confrontations, the Colonel explained, “It’s better to be feared than liked.” But Parker had been decidedly on edge since learning the story line for Jailhouse Rock, which, unlike the sophisticated comedy of Loving You, traded on the dark side of Presley’s rebel persona and the shadowy business practices of rock and roll.

  In the role of Vince Everett, an ex-con turned rock star, Elvis began to demonstrate a formidable ability to handle dramatic material, particularly in the movie’s grittier scenes. Guided by a volatile temper, Vince accidentally kills a man in a barroom brawl. Sentenced to prison, Vince meets fellow convict Hunk Houghton (Mickey Shaughnessy), a country singer who boasts of being as big as Eddy Arnold or Roy Acuff. Houghton teaches him to sing and play guitar, and when Vince’s talent emerges, Hunk, who lines his cell walls with pictures of Hank Snow and Ernest Tubb, offers to become his manager (“Alone, you’d be like a lamb in a pack of wolves”). But the manipulative Hunk is still a con at heart, demanding 50 percent of Vince’s money and withholding his fan mail to keep the budding star from realizing how popular he’s become.

  Jailhouse Rock secretly mirrors a series of events in the collective Presley-Parker past, including Vernon Presley’s six-month stint in the Mississippi State Penitentiary in the late ’30s for altering a check from a dairy farmer named Orville Bean, who held the Presleys’ mortgage. While the references to Parker’s earlier show business associates were hardly coincidental, the Colonel, who never established even the slightest curiosity in Elvis’s previous motion picture scripts, seemed to have an unusual investment in this one. Before the title was finalized, he wrote a memo to Pandro Berman suggesting they call the picture Don’t Push Me Too Far or Trouble Is My Name.

  Had Parker identified with the character of Vince Everett, the young man who ended a life in an instant of anger? Certainly he had begun to demonstrate odd obsessions that hinted at unwelcome thoughts and deeper worries, including personal safety. At home in Tennessee, he installed iron bars on all the windows and wired the house with an extensive antiburglar system. In part, this was because Marie, who stayed behind during the early Hollywood years, was “deathly afraid to be alone,” in the words of a friend, keeping the house dark with the curtains drawn in all the rooms but the kitchen, and insisting on a female companion whenever her husband was out of town.

  Ordinarily, the old carny practiced a form of self-hypnotism, boasting that he could train himself to filter out certain feelings or people altogether (“Don’t you know that I can put you out of my mind so I don’t even know that you exist?”). But lately the stuff within him had proved bigger than his ability to handle it—he seemed eternally frustrated, unable to rest, routinely pacing back and forth in his apartment at the Beverly Wilshire—and his demons gained prominence. He fought back his anxiety with a driving need for rigidity, ritual, and control.

  Where Parker had always insisted on an almost militaristic atmosphere in the office (“Like he was going to call roll,” says Gordon Stoker), he now stepped up his efforts to have it run like a little Pentagon, offering a self-satisfied smile whenever anyone referred to his staff as “the Colonel’s army.” Since he tended to fuss if even a single item was out of place, Trude saw to it that the office was immaculate. At home in Madison, Mary Diskin knew that she might be asked to open the drawers for inspection at any time, and followed orders to make sure that all the pens were grouped together and faced the same direction, and the pencils sharpened to a rapier’s point, their erasers perfect.

  Both secretaries were puzzled by the secrecy with which the Colonel insisted on, typing some of his letters himself, hunched over the typewriter like a hawk, shielding the paper from view. On those occasions, the secretaries knew never to peek in the out box afterward, lest the Colonel think they were checking up on him.

  What baffled Byron was Parker’s habit of sitting at his desk, repeatedly stacking and centering piles of papers without apparent purpose, and his insistence on showering three or four times a day, afterward splashing on a liberal amount of 4711 cologne, the German scent that Napoleon was said to have diluted in his bath. “If we would go out for a meal, or even coffee, he would come back to the Beverly Wilshire and take a shower.” Unusually preoccupied with body odor and his own feces, according to several, he had, says Byron, “an almost Macbethean compulsion to be clean.” Soon, preoccupied with the notion of germs, he would drink almost nothing but Mountain Valley Spring Water.

  Raphael saw even more surprising sides of Parker when he went home with the Colonel to Tennessee after filming wrapped on Jailhouse Rock in June of ’57. In the Dutch custom, Parker put a lot of emphasis on the observance of birthdays, especially his own. For his forty-eighth, on June 26, Marie gave him a large party, and the Colonel reveled in the merriment with his Nashville cronies.

  But late that night, Byron awoke to “these horrible sounds . . . like an animal wailing, the strangest sound that I ever heard in my life.” The next day, over breakfast, he told Marie what he’d heard (“Maybe it was a cat outside”) and asked if everything was all right. “Oh, I don’t know, Byron,” she said. “Elvis forgot Colonel’s birthday.” Raphael, mystified that such a small slight made “this powerful strong man cry all night long,” went to Presley, who took off one of his rings with the instructions to tell the Colonel he just hadn’t delivered it in time. Parker knew the truth, but he’d already walled off his vulnerability and repaired the cracks in his emotional fortress.

  By now, Byron had married an aspiring actress, Carolyn Cline, and the Colonel and Marie invited the couple to come live with them in Madison. The Colonel had one peculiar rule for the newlyweds as long as they were under his roof: no hand-holding, which Byron interpreted to mean no displays of affection of any kind. The Parkers had separate bedrooms (“They were like an old couple, but they really weren’t that old”), and Raphael was under the impression that theirs was not a physical relationship and perhaps never had been. “There wasn’t the faintest sign . . . he just didn’t have a physical love for any woman.”

  The Colonel had railed against Raphael’s marriage from the start. It distracted him from his work, Parker said, and made him reluctant to take the cross-country journeys that Parker loved so well, visiting the little one-elephant carnivals and backroad diners. Raphael was always amazed to see this mellow side of him, when he told his hillbilly stories and talked about his past, a period he seemed to have enjoyed more than the present. But otherwise, Byron, who was expected to drive, hated the trips, because the Colonel inexplicably had a buzzer installed on the car that went off every time the speedometer hit 55. Now, after an argument in which Carolyn objected to Byron’s accompanying Parker on a gambling trip to Las Vegas, the Colonel began working to undermine the relationship, telling Byron that Carolyn cared nothing for him, that she was just using him for his William Morris connections. Besides, in time, didn’t Byron want to leave the agency and work for him? Hadn’t Parker told him to call him Pops?

  Within two years, the Colonel talked his young aide into divorcing (“It was something he demanded”) and insisted on brokering the arrangement. So that Byron would be free of alimony payments, Marie, who was fond of Carolyn and cared about her well-being, assumed her support. “The Colonel told me not to worry about it,” Byron remembers. “And as I think about it, I never saw a lawyer, never went to court. It was all just taken care of.”

  Parker, who had struggle
d to relegate his gambling to friendly pickup games and betting at the dog tracks in Florida and Arizona, began, during this period of accelerated stress, to feel the old fever and obsess about larger action. On the way back to California from their first Las Vegas trip together, Byron mentioned that he had an uncle who ran a little motel, a dump of a place called the Silver Sands, in Palm Springs, just one hundred miles south of Hollywood.

  Though he had yet to make the trip, the Colonel had been hearing about Palm Springs since before World War II. Unlike Los Angeles, illegal gambling—everything from poker, to craps, to roulette—was readily available there for high rollers. “They paid the sheriff and everybody to keep it running,” remembers ninety-one-year-old Frank Bogert, the former Palm Springs mayor. Three hot spots—the well-appointed Dunes Club, with its glamorous New York atmosphere; the 139 Club; and the Cove—admitted customers who weren’t put off by mobsters brandishing submachine guns, and whispered the password to the hole in the door for a chance to mingle with movie stars and socialites. Palm Springs sounded exactly like everything Parker loved about Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the ’30s. “Byron,” the Colonel said, “Let’s go see your uncle.”

  Parker had frequented Las Vegas since the late ’40s, when Sin City was no more than a little dusty town of 10,000, and the Colonel booked Eddy Arnold into the elite, cowboy-themed Hotel El Rancho Vegas for Helldorado Days, when floats, parades, and rodeo promoted its Wild West heritage. Initially, Arnold didn’t want to go (“I kept hearing stories about artists appearing out there and gambling away all their money before they left . . . I thought maybe the hotel management might expect it”), but Parker couldn’t resist the lure of the green felt jungle.