The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  That included playing the good soldier, ad infinitum, beginning with G.I. Blues, the first of several pictures in which he wore a military uniform, a plot device that deeply pleased the Colonel. A musical comedy, G.I. Blues was light, semiautobiographical fare aimed straight at his hardcore fan base. With Elvis romancing a fräulein, baby-sitting an infant, and crooning “Wooden Heart” to a group of children gathered at a puppet show, the picture would prove a “howling success,” in the words of Paul Nathan, ranking the fourteenth highest-grossing film of 1960. Until those numbers came in, the studio would consider Elvis for a version of The Three Penny Opera and a remake of The Rainmaker, but never again would Paramount put him in a gritty drama like King Creole.

  To promote Presley’s return to Hollywood, Parker rolled out the snow machinery as never before. First he reprised the triumphant cross-country trek—so reminiscent of the great political campaigns—setting Elvis up in a private car of the Southern Pacific’s Sunset Limited with a gaggle of reporters, who also witnessed the massive fan turnout on the fifty stops of the three-day trip.

  “We feel sure that by the time G.I. Blues appears on the screens through the world, some of this effort surely will pay off,” Parker wrote Wallis, enclosing a list of plugs he’d secured on TV shows, journalists he’d personally contacted, and even foreign rulers visiting the film set.

  But it already had paid off: Elvis’s arrival in Los Angeles was the lead story on radio and TV, with newspapers shoving Charles de Gaulle’s Canadian visit and the Humphrey-Kennedy debate below the fold on page one. Reporters noted Elvis’s attire, which took a nod from his European stay and reflected what he thought was his new level of sophistication—a black silk mohair tux, ruffled white shirt, black silk ascot, and black suede shoes topped with silver buckles. “His be-rhinestoned cuff links,” said Billboard, “were the size of 50-cent pieces.”

  With a change of studios, Elvis was optimistic that his next film roles would also present him as a changed man. He had barely a month off before he reported to Twentieth Century–Fox in August to begin work on Flaming Star, a dramatic Western in which he played the son of a white father and a Kiowa Indian mother torn between the cultures.

  Producer David Weisbart saw the picture as a showcase for Presley’s acting skills, and appealed to studio head Buddy Adler to keep the musical numbers to a minimum. Unlike Paramount, which presented Elvis primarily as an entertainer, Twentieth Century–Fox believed that selling Elvis as a dramatic actor could attract an even wider audience.

  “I have sweated over the script for the past couple of days trying to find places for Presley to sing,” Weisbart wrote two months before filming began. “I cannot see how it is possible for Elvis to break into song without destroying a very good script. . . . Instead of presenting a gimmicked up picture with Elvis Presley, we’d be offering a pretty legitimate picture that represents growth in Presley’s career and therefore should be fresh and exciting as far as his fans are concerned.”

  But at a lunch with the Colonel the following day, Weisbart was overruled. “We want all the best possible results for this picture,” Parker said, “including the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of exploitation represented by a good record release by Elvis Presley.” The Colonel had no interest in reading the script, he added, and became paranoid when Weisbart asked his input for selecting a director. “I would not know whether you would need a sensitive director or some other director, even if I had read the script,” he followed up in writing, “as this is not one of my qualifications. If someone is using me as a scapegoat, I would like to know the reason. I do not wish to work under any unpleasant conditions over which I have no control.”

  Parker continued to fight the producer at every turn, even when Weisbart asked Freddy Bienstock to find a good title song and three or four others in keeping with the era. The most important thing, Weisbart said, is that the material be selected purely on Elvis’s singing and not be dependent on a modern arrangement and band. The Colonel was quick to balk at those criteria, and at the studio’s selection for the title song, insisting it wouldn’t be a hit single. Weisbart needed to understand the formula: Elvis’s movies would promote the soundtrack albums, and the single from the soundtrack would publicize the film. It was an ideal commercial equation.

  “I think Parker is more interested in selling records than he is [in] building a motion picture career for Presley and making fortunes out of his picture reruns,” Charles Einfield, Fox’s vice president of advertising and publicity, wrote to Weisbart. “It’s a helluva way for a partner to act. Too bad.”

  In the end, only two of the four musical numbers remained in the final cut, which especially pleased Elvis, who found the songs embarrassingly lightweight and inappropriate. Director Don Siegel, later to make his name with Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, was so impressed with Elvis’s dramatic ability that he suggested the picture be advertised with the tag line “Elvis Acts!”—a takeoff on the “Garbo Speaks” campaign for the - actress’s first talking picture.

  Those issues were still being sorted out when the studio began planning its next Presley picture, Wild in the Country, with producer Jerry Wald and director Philip Dunne, who had won acclaim for his screenplay of How Green Was My Valley. Already Parker was proving difficult, wanting to cut the forty-five-day shooting schedule in half and, over the objections of his client, harping that the picture must have a minimum of four Elvis songs, preferably five or more. On that point, he had the backing of studio head Spyros Skouras.

  Fox based the film on J. R. Salamanca’s novel The Lost Country, with its plot of an innocent farm boy enmeshed in a tragic affair with his older teacher. In casting Hope Lange, with her icy blond beauty, director Dunne added yet another dimension of class discrepancy, though screenwriter Clifford Odets made the relationship even more taboo in altering the boy’s character to that of an Appalachian delinquent and transforming the teacher into a court-appointed psychiatrist. Dunne found Elvis “an excellent dramatic actor, a natural actor,” and perfect to portray, as Wald said in the story conference, “the gifted individual, the soul born with special wings . . . whose specialness is at once a thing of wonder and beauty and compliment.”

  Throughout filming, Parker, as before, seemed more preoccupied with his record release schedule than with looking out for Elvis’s welfare. He busied himself writing nasty letters complaining about a proposed title change in England—he’d already notified the fan club as to the original title—and about the importance of not leaking any information about the music, as it confused fans about upcoming singles. “I have never advised a studio how to make a picture,” he wrote to Wald. “I am always willing to cooperate, but we know our record business!” Indeed, the Colonel was negotiating a new amendment to Elvis’s RCA contract, which guaranteed Presley $1,000 per week from an earlier contract, plus an annual payment of $300,000 against royalties. Parker instructed RCA to divert $100,000 of it to All Star Shows for promotion, as per his 75–25 split with Elvis.

  Otherwise, the Colonel spent his time at the studio writing press releases, including one with an oddly defensive tone in which he denied being a “Svengali who has hypnotized a country boy into becoming one of the great entertainers of our times.” Furthermore, he wrote, “Elvis picks his own songs for all occasions, including motion pictures. The Colonel’s control in this area consists only of suggestion and . . . eliminating patently unsuitable songs.”

  But for whom? Like Flaming Star, which initially flopped, appearing only one week on the National Box Office Survey, Wild in the Country never found its niche. One faction of the audience came for Elvis’s glitz and grind, another for the pathos of Odets. Both were disappointed. “When we previewed,” Dunne remembered, the audience laughed when we came to the songs . . . they were going with the story. I shot them so they could be dropped out, and I wish they would drop them out of the prints now. They’d see a good movie.”

  Without significant box office, Wild in the Country
would be Elvis’s last challenging dramatic role and his final alliance with a serious director. He seemed to sense it, asking Dunne if they might work together again after his next picture for Paramount, Blue Hawaii. Dunne declined, knowing the future would hold only more typical vehicles, “the usual bikinis, you know.”

  Elvis started principal photography on Blue Hawaii two days after his much-ballyhooed U.S.S. Arizona concert. Apart from a pair of Memphis charity shows in which he warmed up the old magic using elements of “Negro cotton field harmony, camp meeting fervor, Hollywood showmanship, beatnik nonchalance, and some of the manipulations of mass psychology,” as the hometown paper raved, the Hawaii concert, produced, like the Memphis charity shows, by Parker’s old friend Al Dvorin, would be Elvis’s first real return to the stage in more than three years.

  While Hawaii always nurtured the Colonel’s jovial side—he did a hula dance for Bob Moore when the bass player brought his home movie camera out on the beach—he positively reveled in his opportunity to lord it over the admirals and generals who came to a meeting in Parker’s suite at the Hawaiian Village Hotel, and invited two of Hawaii’s top radio deejays, Ron Jacobs and Tom Moffatt, to witness his fun. As Parker predicted, the brass arrived full of skepticism about this Tennessee Colonel, whose suite resembled a carnival booth, with Elvis’s promotional pictures and movie posters plastered on the walls and RCA Nipper dogs peering out from behind the furniture.

  “He started snowing them,” recalls Jacobs, “telling them how important they were to the security of the world. After that, he said if they’d just line up, why, he’d give them a little something from Elvis. So all these guys in charge of the military in the Pacific and Asia got in line and stood there anxiously, and Parker went over to a trunk that was full of Elvis memorabilia. Then the Colonel reached in very carefully, almost secretly, and stingily started handing out these tiny Elvis pocket calendars, one to each admiral and general.”

  As they left, “one of the admirals saluted him!” Moffatt adds. “It was ‘yes, sir’ to the Colonel.”

  Yet not everyone was awed. When one high-ranking officer had the temerity to ask for a complimentary pass to the show, Parker refused, barking that ticket sales were to tally nearly $52,000, and, “every penny . . . must go to the fund!” Why, even he and Elvis were buying their own way in. But then the Colonel got a glint in his eye and reconsidered, purposely seating the admiral between the black chauffeur he’d been assigned and a navy seaman who had just joined up. To have such authority figures under his thumb, aggrandizing him and soiling themselves in public in one fell swoop, apparently brought the Colonel supreme joy.

  Parker had booked his old friend Minnie Pearl on the bill, and until the moment they arrived at the Honolulu International Airport, she hadn’t realized “how encapsulated Elvis was in his fame.” With three thousand screaming women scurrying to get to the plane, “I began to get these chilling feelings that maybe I didn’t want to be all that close to Elvis—the fans were all along the route he was taking to the hotel, and my husband was afraid that we’d be trampled trying to get inside. I felt myself being lifted completely off my feet by all these people.

  “We did the show on a Saturday, and Sunday afternoon, a bunch of us were down on Waikiki Beach, cavorting and kidding and having a big time. We got to talking about how we wished Elvis could come down and be with us, and we turned and looked up at his penthouse, which was facing the ocean. He was standing on the balcony, looking down at us, this solitary figure, lonely looking, watching us have such a good time. He was just getting ready to start making the film, and he literally was a prisoner because of the fans. We sat there on the beach and talked about how it would be—what a price you pay for that sort of fame.”

  In preparation for Blue Hawaii, Wallis wrote Parker with strict orders for Elvis to get into shape. “It is very important that [he] look lean and hard, and well-tanned . . . he should have a good overall coat of tan on his body as well as his face. I will appreciate it if you will talk to him about watching his weight.” At the end, Wallis recommended a good sun lamp.

  Blue Hawaii, Elvis’s first fun-in-the-sun bikini picture, would follow the musical format of G.I. Blues, whose success had made it the prototype for all the Wallis-Presley musicals to follow. But now Blue Hawaii would surpass it. The 1961 film would easily recoup its $2 million cost and effectively doom Elvis’s chances of moving beyond its stultifying structure. It would also mark the first of seven Elvis pictures directed by Norman Taurog.

  In wedding an exotic setting and plenty of romance to a fourteen-song framework—three more than even G.I. Blues allowed—Wallis perfected his winning Elvis formula. Nearly all the movies Elvis made after 1960 would be assembled around Elvis’s personality—or the Hollywood moguls’ perception of it—the way larger movies were once fashioned around female stars such as Shirley Temple or Mae West. The Wallis productions, especially, were the last in a series of Hollywood vehicles guaranteed to pull a certain bankable gross just because of who was in them, leading the producer himself to remark, “A Presley picture is the only sure thing in show business.”

  Couldn’t Parker see that such somnambulistic fare would squander his client’s talent and suffocate his spirit? Most likely not. As the Colonel indicated to Weisbart, he was woefully aware of his inability to judge either a good script or a fine director. Likewise, he had difficulty discerning a good performance from a mediocre one and relied on the judgment of others to plan Elvis’s future in films.

  Despite Presley’s remarkable portrayal in King Creole, Wallis believed that Elvis couldn’t carry a picture without music. And Byron Raphael remembers going with Parker to a meeting with producer Joe Pasternak long before he made Girl Happy and Spinout in the mid-’60s. Pasternak, famous for musicals, had a dramatic property in mind for Elvis, and asked him to do a reading. Afterward, the producer told Parker, “He really can’t act. He just doesn’t have it.” In their four-year association, Raphael says, “the only criticism I ever heard the Colonel make of Elvis was about his acting. He never believed that Elvis was going to be an actor. Not for a second.” And nothing he saw changed his mind.

  Parker used to tell his staff that the key to successful management was trying different tactics. “It doesn’t matter if you do ten stupid things,” - he’d say, “as long as you do one smart one.” Here was his prime example. As long as Elvis made the upbeat musicals that Wallis wanted, he was assured of working in Hollywood. Blue Hawaii was the first of a new five-picture deal with Wallis, which paid $175,000 for the first three and $200,000 each for the remaining two.

  Elvis was surprised to learn of such a demanding movie schedule. It - didn’t leave much time for touring—and he wanted to go to Europe—or making records, apart from the movie soundtracks. In Germany, he’d worked on expanding his range and making his voice fuller, and he was eager for more operatic songs, like “It’s Now or Never,” to show it off.

  But after the U.S.S. Arizona concert, the Colonel was in no hurry to return Elvis to the concert stage anytime soon. He’d rather people paid to see Presley in the movies, and they might tire of him if Elvis did too many personal appearances. While Parker had been an extraordinary promoter, in time he would turn into an unconscionable manager. In fact, the Colonel no longer thought of his client’s needs so much as he did his own.

  In Hollywood, Parker was a steel wall of power, something he could never be in representing Presley, the concert artist. Therefore, California was where they would stay, where the Colonel could have almost anything he wanted, free for the asking, with the biggest names in show business at his beck and call. In making or confirming all the big decisions on Presley’s pictures, and by refusing to let Wallis or even William Morris have direct access to Elvis, Parker became not only a true power broker, but the “producer” of Presley’s pictures. He’d just picked up a two-picture deal with the Mirisch Brothers and United Artists for $500,000 each and 50 percent of the profits; in January 1961, he’d close
a four-picture agreement with MGM at a salary of $400,000 per picture, plus $100,000 for expenses, with profit participation equal to the Mirisch deal.

  Until the end of his life, Parker told a story that was likely untrue but illuminated his core philosophy. According to the tale, the Colonel, Wallis, and Abe Lastfogel met at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to discuss a deal for Elvis to play a part in a picture based on what Wallis promised was an Academy Award–winning script.

  “That’s fine,” the Colonel said. “When do you start?” Wallis gave him the date, and the Colonel turned to Lastfogel. “Sounds good, Abe. We get a million dollars, and we’ll be there.”

  Wallis spoke up. “No, Colonel, you don’t understand. I said this was an Academy Award–winning script. I only want to pay $500,000, not a million.”

  “Oh,” the Colonel replied, “I didn’t get that part of it. Well, tell you what we’ll do. You send us the million, and the day Elvis goes up and gets the Academy Award, we’ll send you back $500,000.”

  Parker put little store in industry kudos. “They’ll never win any Academy Awards,” he said of Elvis’s films in 1960. “All they’re good for is to make money.”

  At last, the Colonel had his dancing chicken.

  14

  “MISTAKES SOME-ONE MAY HAVE MADE”

  WHILE negotiating the film deals that would carry Elvis through the decade, the Colonel was heavy with worry. Since the late autumn of ’60, he had received a series of troubling letters from Holland that threatened to topple the delicate balance of his world.

  In the spring of 1960, a Dutch housewife named Nel Dankers–van Kuijk visited her hairdresser in Eindhoven, and thumbed through the new issue of Rosita, a Belgian women’s magazine. There she saw a photograph that stopped her heart. A young American singing star, Elvis Presley, just home from the army in his handsome dress blues, waved to his fans from the doorway of a train.