The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  “When the funeral director came to Graceland,” remembers Bienstock, “Vernon was crying and carrying on, and it was mostly bunk, because he was cheating all over the place. Everybody knew it. But he was saying, through these not very convincing tears, ‘The best of everything. Give her the best of everything.’ The fellow marked it all down and left very quickly, and the moment he walked out the door, the crying stopped. Vernon turned to Colonel Parker and said, ‘Don’t let him take advantage of me in my hour of grief.’ ”

  Gladys Presley had never made any secret of her dislike of Tom Parker, and he steered clear of her whenever possible. (“I suppose I was never comfortable around her,” Parker said, “but I was managing Elvis, not his parents.”) Now that she was gone, the Colonel moved to forge a new alliance with Vernon, who shared the Colonel’s hunger for money under the table. Parker, who privately complained that Elvis’s family was “shit . . . they were awful people,” would always work to keep Vernon happy, but it suited him fine that Vernon talked of moving to Germany to keep his son company, taking along his mother, Minnie Mae, who would be a housekeeper for the all-male household. With Gladys out of the way, the Presleys would be easier to control than ever.

  The Colonel himself was not going to Europe, he explained to reporters, because he had too much work to do stateside. All the publicity, all the sales, all the films and music came through his office. There were records to promote, motion pictures to negotiate, exhibitors to notify, fan clubs to contact. Even the Elvis merchandising would add an army theme. But first, there would be a grand send-off at the Brooklyn pier.

  In early ’56, during rehearsals for one of Elvis’s Stage Show appearances, Anne Fulchino, RCA’s national publicity director, was astonished to feel the arms of Tom Parker slipping around her shoulders. Two years earlier, mistakenly believing that Fulchino had discouraged a Look magazine photographer from taking his picture on the RCA Country Caravan, he had threatened to have her job. When Chick Crumpacker spoke up, saying that was unfair, Parker, misunderstanding his words, assailed him. “Don’t you call me a square!” he bristled, leaving everyone properly stunned.

  “I want to apologize, I was wrong,” he said of the incident backstage in ’56. Fulchino knew that wasn’t the Colonel’s way (“I thought, good God, what is going on here?”) and realized it could only mean one thing: Parker had few contacts with the New York press and needed help in coordinating Elvis’s debarkation, already under discussion at the label. Now, with the date upon them, Fulchino spoke with the Colonel. Instead of the army band blasting John Philip Sousa marches, they’d have them play Elvis songs at the pier. And Fulchino would call out 125 members of the media, including photographers Al Wertheimer and Henri Dauman, who would make the most memorable images of the day.

  On September 22, 1958, soon after Elvis’s troop train pulled into the Brooklyn Army Terminal, Private Presley emerged smiling from a conference with the Colonel and a group of army officials. To a flurry of flashbulbs, he kissed a WAC, signed autographs, and finally sat down at a table with a gaggle of microphones to answer questions, a prominent bank of recruitment posters behind him. Did he miss show business? “I miss my singing career very much, and at the same time, the army is a pretty good deal, too.” Had his music contributed to juvenile delinquency? “I don’t see that,” Elvis said, “because I’ve tried to live a straight, clean life, not set any kind of a bad example.”

  Steve Sholes beamed, the Aberbachs puffed up with pride, and Fulchino, who two years earlier chided an awkward young singer for greeting RCA executives with a buzzer on his finger (“That may be big in Nashville, but it will never go in New York”), felt a stir of emotion. Parker, standing off to the side, did nothing for a moment but hold tight to a gift from Paramount Studios—a fruit basket, always a prize to the Colonel, a reminder of his visits to the greengrocer as a hungry lad in Holland.

  Wertheimer, a German émigré who’d spent considerable time chronicling a carefree Presley in ’56, was saddened to see what a managed personality Elvis had become. The photographer snapped his shutter as the Colonel, who always surprised him by correctly pronouncing his difficult, Teutonic surname, “pushed his stubby little fist in Elvis’s back,” guiding him through the well-wishers and out to the pier.

  Elvis, carrying a mysterious shoe box that the Colonel had given him, waved to photographers, and struggled to hoist a too-heavy duffle bag to his shoulders, smiling obligingly as he climbed the gangplank of the U.S.S. Randall eight times so everyone might get a good shot. The two thousand relatives of his fellow soldiers, there for their own happy send-offs, joined in the waving for the newsreels.

  Now the band was into its third rendition of “Tutti Frutti” as Elvis took his place at the rail of the ship and loosened the lid of the shoe box, waiting for the boat to jostle and creak and signal its leave from the harbor. Only then did he empty its contents, fluttering, like so much confetti, hundreds of tiny Elvis images down the side of the boat, onto the pier, and into the scrambling hands of his fans.

  Twenty-nine years earlier, Parker had come to this country on a series of ships, and now the man he had built into a symbol of America was leaving it, going to Germany, to a land where the Colonel could not go, a country too close to Holland, where a young woman died violently at the hands of a psychopath in the back of a quiet fruit shop. Twenty-nine years later, her strange murder, marked by a series of dark blows and a baffling trail of pepper, remained to be solved.

  Henri Dauman, camera in hand, found the Colonel deep in thought, watching the vessel until it disappeared on the horizon, taking with it both his provision and his protection. Once Elvis joined the army, Parker said in 1980, “I barely saw him for the next two years. There was very little contact, especially after he left for Germany. He called three or four times. I never got any letters. I got one thank-you note one time, but that was all he ever wrote. He did his duty.”

  Now, except for Diskin, Marie, and Bevo, who sat day after day in the Madison office, pasting sympathy cards for Gladys’s death into scrapbooks, the Colonel was alone. Trude would soon be gone, Parker saying he no longer needed a secretary in California, though she would return for a short time in 1960, before her divorce battle. And Byron, fearing - he’d turn into Tom Diskin if he stayed, would go back to William Morris. There, he would work in the music and motion picture departments, but after the awful incident with Lenny Hirshan, never advance as an agent. Parker had sacrificed his career.

  The Colonel filled his days and nights with thoughts of keeping Elvis’s name before the public. No scheme seemed too weird. For a while, he courted the notion of going back out with the Royal American Shows with an Elvis exhibit, deciding instead to have Al Dvorin, his Chicago friend, hire a twenty-five-member “Elvis Presley Midget Fan Club” to carry a banner through the Windy City during Juke Box Convention.

  Still, he made numerous trips to Tampa to “cut up jackpots” with his old carny pals, particularly in late January, when the Florida State Fair drew so many of the circus managers, show promoters, and talent buyers who met to plan their summer seasons. One day, he saw that Dale Robertson, the cowboy star, was appearing there and invited him to lunch. Robertson, arriving early at the restaurant, noticed a copy of the British crown jewels on display under glass. “When we got ready to leave,” Robertson remembers, “I took another look at those crown jewels, and there was a card slid up inside the case: LET’S NOT FORGET ELVIS PRESLEY. HE’S FIGHTING FOR OUR COUNTRY.”

  Soon, the Colonel resumed his own good fight, playing the Hollywood producers off each other for Elvis’s next picture.

  On such sojourns to Hollywood, Parker sometimes cornered a few business acquaintances and suggested going to dinner at the Luau, where he enjoyed the spicy Indonesian food of his youth. The men usually went for one reason: the Colonel, holding court in his favorite throne-backed chair, had the most unusual party trick—he’d have them lay bets on the amount of hot mustard he could swallow without drinking water. />
  How he did it they never knew. He didn’t even make a face! But what really got them was when he started on the pepper—whole tablespoons of it, straight from the shaker. A spoonful of mustard, alternating with a spoonful of pepper, and back and forth again. Torturous! What was the guy trying to do, punish himself?

  13

  FRIENDLY PERSUASION: MOGULS, MILITARY MEN, AND MOBSTERS

  DESPITE what Parker would say about the lack of contact with Elvis during his military service, it did not mean the two men were not in communication. Almost every day after Elvis sailed for Germany, the Colonel wrote him long, chatty letters designed to fill him in on his efforts “to keep your name hot over here,” and to try to boost the singer’s spirits. Immediately, Parker reported spectacular results. The Colonel’s hard work, he wrote, combined with his diversity of promotions—$3 million from souvenirs alone—would bring in more revenue for 1958 than for the year before, even as Elvis spent nearly the entire time in the service. And now the crafty manager had finalized the lucrative movie deals he’d spent months negotiating with Paramount and Twentieth Century–Fox. Parker instructed Elvis to send Fox’s Buddy Adler a thank-you telegram and wrote out the script for him.

  Hal Wallis, determined to produce Elvis’s first post-army picture, eventually called G.I. Blues, had agreed to pay $175,000 for the film—$75,000 more than Presley’s fee for King Creole, and $150,000 more than what Elvis was entitled to under the terms of their original contract. Additionally, Wallis and Hazen agreed on options for three more films at $125,000, $150,000, and $175,000 against 7½ percent of gross receipts after the picture earned out. At Twentieth Century–Fox, the Colonel revamped Elvis’s existing deal for one picture at $200,000, with an option for a second at $250,000, and a 50–50 split of profits after expenses.

  The new contract with Paramount went a long way in neutralizing Parker’s acid resentment over the initial agreement. “There was not much I could do . . . except get a little more each time we made a picture,” the Colonel wrote in a letter to Elvis and Vernon, who “managed” Elvis in Germany and was more apt to keep in touch than his soldier son. “The facts are now we do not have to call on Wallis every time with our hat in our hands to ask for a little extra.” He added that he had secured a percentage of profits with both deals—something they’d not previously had with either studio—and proudly announced, “This now brings our picture setup in line with a very healthy . . . future. This also will prove to Elvis that he is not backsliding in any way.”

  In thanking the Colonel for wrapping up the deals with Paramount and Fox, Presley joked, “This sure is a long tour you sent me on,” and closed his letter by saying, “I’m sorry the commissions are so small in this engagement.”

  Parker’s new projects seemed to fill him with élan. His correspondence with Wallis and Hazen took on a giddy wit and playfulness, but Hazen had always found the Colonel repugnant, and was barely able to restrain himself from telling him so, at one point writing to congratulate him for his chutzpah in tipping a Las Vegas bellboy with sandwiches pilfered from the Paramount commissary. His disdain for Parker grew immeasurably after the manager snookered him into buying half a million pocket-sized photographs of Elvis in uniform for promotion. The idea was “to give Mr. Presley some additional income,” as the Colonel termed it. But in taking the printing to his old Tampa friend Clyde Rinaldi and marking up the job for profit, Parker charged Paramount three cents a picture though the commercial rate elsewhere was half a cent.

  When Hazen called him on such shenanigans, the Colonel became churlish and indignant. “I am sure,” Parker wrote after one prolonged period of haggling over money, “that both of you will agree that I have endeavored to stay away from . . . you as much as possible in bringing this to its conclusion. In the meantime, I am very happy that my connection with the Salvation Army in the South is strong. As you know, they always have kettles in the street during Christmas . . . it is with great anticipation that I can look forward to not having to share whatever I may get out of these kettles with my associates.” He signed it, “You Know Who.”

  Wallis answered these borderline insults quickly and perfunctorily, as if to say that he feared losing the Colonel, despite their binding contract. Parker, a bloodhound when it came to smelling out human weakness, fed on that fear, and it was Wallis who got the brunt of his teasing, not Hazen. Once, when the producer discouraged Parker’s input on a project, repeating, “You’ve just got to get the big picture, Colonel,” Parker took his revenge. A week later, Wallis arrived at his office to find a photo of himself enlarged to the size of a wall and installed behind his desk. The accompanying sign: HERE’S THE BIG PICTURE.

  Parker also seemed to have a personal investment in Wallis. In their many letters, the Colonel’s tone was categorically different with Wallis than it was with Hazen; it was Wallis’s approval he sought in begging for a pat on the back for a favor or a job well done (“This again shows you the little Colonel stays on the ball and follows through”). At times, especially when he sent Wallis such gifts as jars of honey, octopus, and even Texas longhorns, his affection appeared genuine. Each year, the Colonel sent Wallis Valentine’s and Father’s Day greetings, usually telegrams “from Elvis and myself . . . your two boys” or, once, “your two orphans, Marie and the Colonel.” After several such missives, one signed with “love,” Wallis responded, “It is nice to be thought of and remembered, even though I am not your father.”

  Whatever the paternal complexity of his feelings, Parker was unquestionably thinking of his past in December 1958, when he began writing Wallis strange, autobiographical letters offering story ideas for Elvis’s motion pictures. In easing into the first, he noted the growing popularity of Hawaiian music and Elvis’s “good voice for that type of singing.”

  A native love story set in Hawaii with “some tough elements” interested him, he said, particularly if Presley were a stowaway on a large steamer bound for the islands. His suggestion was to frame a plot in which Elvis, dressed in disguise and using another name, ran away from all who pursued him, including the fans and the record companies frantic for more product, only to fall into the hands of “a gang of promoters—con artists—that is snowing Elvis into singing with the natives.”

  These “con artists” would “exploit” Elvis, Parker wrote, making secret tapes of his performances and “selling records like hotcakes.” No one would know Presley’s true identity until they brought him to Honolulu to do a show, whereupon a frightened Elvis discovered all too late that “he has been promoted into something else.”

  “I am this far with the story,” the Colonel told Wallis, but went on to say he had also been thinking of another plot regarding gypsies. As the “rugged type,” Parker said, Elvis would be well cast as a foundling or baby boy stolen “by a bunch of gypsies traveling in wagons [and] sleeping outdoors.” Later, he repeated the idea to associate producer Dick Sokolove, changing the focus to “a gypsy boy, traveling with his mother, who gets into trouble with police.”

  No one at the studio could have known that both plots were illuminating glimpses into Parker’s own psyche. His reference to gypsies certainly must have come from memories of his maternal grandfather and the Ponsies’ nomadic lifestyle, while “trouble with the police” resurrects the haunting specter of Anna van den Enden. But the Hawaiian story, set in the islands that Parker so loved during his early army years, and its focus on a tramp steamer stowaway and an exploitative promoter who transforms the young artist into “something else,” shows how clearly the Colonel identified with Elvis. It also demonstrates how well he understood his own role in the undoing of an artist desperate to shake off the trappings of his fame. Wallis rejected both of Parker’s plots, but in responding that he was “definitely interested in a Hawaiian background story for Elvis,” inadvertently nurtured the genesis of Blue Hawaii.

  Parker’s scenario of a record company pressuring an artist for more material came straight from the Colonel’s dealings with
RCA. Only a month before, Bill Bullock had offered to fly Elvis and four of his friends to Nashville for three days of recording, and the Colonel had refused. Similarly, Steve Sholes suggested that the label pay Parker’s way to Germany to supervise a session there. The Colonel had never been known to decline a free trip, but now he turned on his heel. Absolutely not! RCA had to learn how to manage the product it had and space out the singles twenty weeks apart to avoid “flooding the market.” No one understood sales or promotion as well as he did, he thundered.

  The Colonel’s refusal to go to Germany at any time during Elvis’s stay intensified the rumors at RCA that something was amiss with Parker’s citizenship. Even the field reps got to thinking: had he ever gone out of the country for any reason? Yes, after an Eddy Arnold booking in El Paso, Texas, he’d crossed the border into Mexico, but only after insisting that a U.S. marshall accompany him. More suspiciously, when Arnold played Canada’s two biggest cities, Parker claimed illness at the last minute and asked Gabe Tucker to take care of things.

  But Parker had gone to Canada with Elvis in 1957, as he shows up in the press clippings from Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. However, it was Bitsy Mott and Tom Diskin who surrounded Presley in most of the photographs. Where was the Colonel? His low profile made Byron Raphael remember something startling Parker once told him: “I’ve got money stashed in places all over the world.”

  Byron asked him how he did it, and the Colonel explained that there was a pipeline from Canada to the Cayman Islands that bypassed the IRS. His young aide surmised that Parker’s promoter friends—Oscar Davis, the advance man on the Canadian dates, and Lee Gordon, the Australian who promoted them—had helped, legally depositing Parker’s share of the tour proceeds in foreign bank accounts.

  Still, Parker was not about to chance a leap as large as Europe, and when he needed to get what he called “some important papers” to Germany for Elvis’s signature, he called upon an unlikely courier—Judy Gay, Connie B. Gay’s teenaged daughter. Her father, who knew of Parker’s illegality, told her that the Colonel had a fear of flying, and thus couldn’t take the papers himself. But Judy, so in love with her boyfriend she - couldn’t stand the separation, declined, leaving her father’s secretary to make the trip instead.