The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  By 1944, Parker had signed on as the booker and advance man, or “general agent,” for the Jamup and Honey tent show, where he met Gabe Tucker (right). (Courtesy of Gabe Tucker)

  As the new manager of country singer Eddy Arnold (left of poster), Parker (far left) staged a 1946 promotion in Tampa to bring out the crowds. (The Country Music Foundation)

  RCA’s Steve Sholes (middle), with hopeful recording artist Dolph Hewitt (left), joins Parker and Eddy Arnold at an industry convention, probably 1949. (The collection of R. A. Andreas and “. . . .and more bears.”)

  Parker, desperate for a title and not yet a “Colonel,” signed this mid-forties portrait to Bobby and Marian Ross as “The Gov.” (Courtesy Sandra Polk Ross and Robert Kenneth Ross)

  Country singer Hank Snow beams beside Elvis Presley, backstage at the Grand Old Opry, December 1957. Parker had cut him out of half of Presley’s management the year before. (The author’s collection/source unknown)

  The Colonel helps Marie celebrate granddaughter Sharon Ross’s first birthday, May 2, 1951. (Courtesy Sandra Polk Ross and Robert Kenneth Ross)

  Elvis joins Parker, sporting fake goatee (back row), with RCA brass Bill Bullock (back row, far left), Steve Sholes (back row, center), and Hill and Range liaison Freddy Bienstock (front row, left), circa 1956. (The collection of Robin Rosaaen)

  As a birthday present for Steve Sholes, Colonel Parker had an elaborate dog house built in honor of Nipper, the RCA mascot. Elvis poses in front of it with the Colonel and Marie (right) at Sholes’s party at the Beverly Hills Hotel, 1957. The “Frank” mentioned in the legend over the door (“The Dog House That Frank Helped Build”) is Y. Frank Freeman, the famed Paramount Pictures executive, and alludes to Elvis’s films helping sell records. (The collection of Robin Rosaaen)

  Loving You, released in 1957, costarred Lizabeth Scott as Glenda Markle, a manipulative press agent and manager who reprised a number of Colonel Parker’s real-life publicity stunts. (Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

  The Colonel and Elvis make merry in a red BMW Isetta “bubble car,” Presley’s Christmas gift to his manager, December 1957. (Nashville Public Library, The Nashville Room)

  When Texas Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson invited Eddy Arnold to entertain Mexico President Adolfo Lopez Mateos at the LBJ ranch in October 1959, Parker went along, and parlayed a meeting into a friendship. Johnson’s daughter, Lynda Bird, watches at right. (Oliver Atkins / George Mason University.)

  Vernon Presley, the Colonel’s ally, accompanied Elvis to Germany in 1958, and conducted business with Parker in the U.S. by letter. Here, Vernon enjoys a press item with his son. (Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

  Parker, dressed in his favorite get-up, a Confederate uniform, dances with Marie at a party on the set of G.I. Blues, 1960. (The collection of the Bitsy Mott Family)

  Parker loved getting the best of Hal Wallis, seen here in the Colonel’s Paramount office in 1960, modeling a paper hat stamped “G.I. Blues.” (Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

  Elvis chuckles at a get well letter the Colonel wrote to Harry Brand, head of publicity for Twentieth Century Fox, during the making of Flaming Star, 1960. From left: Bitsy Mott, Tom Diskin, producer David Weisbart, Parker, Elvis, director Don Siegel, and music/sound effects editor Ted Cain. (The collection of the Bitsy Mott family)

  “We do it this way, we make money; we do it your way, we don’t make money,” Parker seems to be telling his client in this undated photograph, probably from the early 1960s. (The collection of the Bitsy Mott family)

  A cozy pose with Hal Wallis, probably during the making of Blue Hawaii, 1961. (Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

  Parker with “Miz Ree,” as he jokingly called his wife, on Waikiki, 1961. The picture is inscribed to Bobby Ross’s family. (Courtesy of Sandra Polk Ross and Robert Kenneth Ross)

  The Colonel valued few gifts as highly as a ham. Here, on behalf of Tennessee governor Buford Ellington, he has Elvis present one of Tennessee’s finest to Washington State’s first Italian American governor, Albert Rosellini. Elvis was in Seattle filming It Happened at the World’s Fair in September 1962. From left: Rosellini, director Norman Taurog, Elvis, Parker, and producer Ted Richman. (Museum of History and Industry, Seattle)

  A 1960s portrait, signed to Gabe and Sunshine Tucker. (The author’s collection/source unknown)

  Billy Smith sits on the Colonel’s knee during the making of Frankie and Johnny, 1965. (The collection of Maria Columbus)

  The Colonel’s joke button, probably from the 1960s. (Courtesy of Gabe Tucker)

  Tom Diskin, with Marie, raises a glass at a party to celebrate the Parkers’ wedding anniversary, probably in the 1970s. (Courtesy Sandra Polk Ross and Robert Kenneth Ross)

  The Colonel at Hatch Show Print, Nashville, in 1987, with a reproduction of one of his early Elvis concert posters. (Nashville Public Library, The Nashville Room)

  Described as “a combination of con man and Santa Claus” by the New York Times, Parker resembles the latter in this undated portrait in a knit cap. (The author’s collection/source unknown)

  With the author, first meeting, Las Vegas, 1992. (Judy F. May)

  The Colonel and Loanne, 1994. (Alanna Nash)

  Byron Raphael at Parker’s plaque in the Walk of Stars, Palm Springs, Calif., 1998. (Alanna Nash)

  Fed by his father—who was beginning to question the Colonel’s choices, though still bowing to financial concerns, keeping the books and fretting over every penny—Elvis’s constraint found its genesis in the mother-son teachings of Gladys. After her husband went to prison in 1938, it was she who taught her young son to fear authority so that he might survive in a hostile world, never dreaming that he would rise above his social class, where such behavior would become inappropriate.

  Elvis made fun of the Colonel to the guys, yet he remained subservient to his face. His refusal to challenge the Colonel factored into the stunting of his personal growth and development, as well as his self-loathing and escalating drug dependency. He turned his anger inward and numbed it with pills.

  A turning point came in 1963 with the filming of Viva Las Vegas, Elvis’s best MGM picture in the post-army years. With the casting of Ann-Margret, the first costar to generate real electricity with Presley on screen, Parker should have seen that Viva Las Vegas plugged two live wires together, made a formula musical sizzle, and ensured that future films reconnected such high voltage.

  But Parker was threatened by an actress who both competed with his star and engaged Elvis’s attention offscreen, as Ann-Margret did from the start. And it’s true, as the Colonel complained, that it was difficult to distinguish just whose film it was. Instead of playing up their natural chemistry, he grumbled that Ann-Margret got more close-ups and flattering camera angles, and fought to cut their duets to just one song. Finally, he vetoed special billing for her in the advertisements that MGM hoped would help draw audiences beyond the usual Presley fans. “If someone else should ride on our back,” Parker told the studio, “then we should get a better saddle.”

  Parker was likewise clueless as to how the movie rejuvenated his - client’s spirits and musical dynamism, particularly with the jumpy title tune. During filming, the Colonel brought his friend Gene Austin to the set and had Elvis rehearse the tunes to the old crooner for comments.

  “He was singing one song,” recalls Austin’s wife, LouCeil, “and the Colonel said, ‘Now, Elvis, I don’t like about eight bars of that. Call David Houston [Austin’s godson, then a hopeful country singer] and sing it to him, and then tell him to give you the Gene Austin licks for those bars.’ ” Elvis was angry and embarrassed, but kept it to himself, concentrating instead on his banter with Mrs. Austin. “When you’d pay him a compliment,” she remembers, “he’d always say, ‘Thank you, ma’am, honey.’ ”

  After a string of disappointing flicks, Viva Las Vegas, directed by George Sidney (Annie Get Your
Gun), would topple Blue Hawaii as Elvis’s highest-grossing film ever—by 1969, revenues would reach $5.5 million, up from Elvis’s usual picture gross of $3 million. Its success should have shown Parker that spending money for more alluring costars, creative directors, and imaginative scripts would go a long way to assure his client of longevity. However, at the time, all he saw was that Viva Las Vegas had soared over budget.

  At MGM, Parker preferred working with men like Sam “King of the Quickies” Katzman and Joe Pasternak, who guaranteed tight shooting schedules and production costs, and welcomed the fact that the Colonel rarely requested story conferences. Katzman nonetheless asked the Colonel to read the screenplay for Kissin’ Cousins, but Parker told him it would cost him $10,000 and then diffused such an outrageous demand with a vote of confidence similar to what he’d told Elvis: “If you didn’t know what you were doing, you wouldn’t be here.” Kissin’ Cousins was an embarrassment to Elvis, however, and Katzman would go on to make the worst picture of Elvis’s career, Harum Scarum.

  When Joe Pasternak made the first of his two Elvis pictures (Girl Happy and Spinout), both shot in thirty-two days, the producer took the Colonel aside and said, “Look, you can’t make a picture where the star takes seventy or eighty percent of the cost.” Parker was resolute. “He said, ‘I’m sending you Elvis Presley.’ He didn’t want to boost the price up, but he wouldn’t budge on Elvis, and he’d want to save on everything else.”

  Elvis resented the financial shortcuts on his films, as well as the shoddy technical workmanship on Kissin’ Cousins that prominently showed his stand-in, Lance LeGault, in the finale march. (“Sam Katzman said, ‘It’s too expensive to shoot it over—no one will even notice,’ ” remembers Yvonne Craig.) But he was particularly crushed to read an interview with Wallis in the Las Vegas Desert News and Telegram in which the producer said it was the profits from the commercially successful Presley pictures that made classy vehicles like Peter O’Toole’s Becket possible. “That doesn’t mean a Presley picture can’t have quality, too,” Wallis added, but the damage was done.

  Still, while Presley usually managed to remain calm and professional on the movie sets, his frustration sometimes poured out in the soundtrack sessions at Radio Recorders, where he could barely hide his discomfort at recording bland and pathetic pop songs like “(There’s) No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car,” “Do the Clam,” and “Petunia, the Gardener’s Daughter,” provided by the Hill and Range writers. One day, anguished at a song put before him, Elvis made a crack about somebody in the business. Everyone laughed, but he quickly recanted. “I didn’t mean that, guys,” he said. “The Colonel told me to always say nice things.”

  Freddy Bienstock understood the predicament but was powerless to change it. “Once we started on the MGM contract, with four pictures a year, it was like a factory,” he says. “Each producer would send me ten or eleven drafts of the script, and I would mark those scenes where a song could be done without being absolutely ridiculous, and then I would give those scripts to seven or eight songwriting teams. I’d wind up with four or five songs for each spot, and then I would take them to Elvis and he would choose which one to do. But there was no way to have better music, because from the moment one picture was finished, we would have to get started on the next one.”

  Presley was especially embarrassed to be locked up in Hollywood doing mediocre films while the Beatles—who would visit him at his Perugia Way home in Hollywood in August of ’65—threatened his supremacy in musical history, even as his Roustabout soundtrack would best their latest album on the charts. But an argument can be made that whatever - Parker’s intent, Hollywood helped keep Elvis a big star and in the money during a period when his record career might have languished, especially in the protest-and-psychedelic era.

  The popular consensus that Parker denied Elvis a significant place in ’60s music history comes under fire from several music journalists, including Michael Streissguth, who doubts that Elvis—working strictly in music—would have escaped the fate of other ’50s stars. RCA was slow to respond to ’60s rock and roll, and since Elvis wrote none of his own material, the label would have had difficulty knowing what do to with Presley during those rapidly changing times.

  “By dumb luck,” says Streissguth, “the movie years had the effect of preserving Elvis economically while the wild music environment passed over. Elvis was not spent from years of musical rejection, so when the time was right and people were ready to see him in concert, he was fresh and ready to pounce on the opportunity. Inadvertently, Parker’s decisions in the early and mid-’60s gave us the great Elvis music of the very late ’60s and early ’70s.”

  Starting around 1963, the Colonel, whose physical meetings with Elvis had always been sporadic, became even more remote, spending much of his time in Palm Springs, the hangout for Frank Sinatra and the good ol’ boys of Hollywood. For several years, he’d commuted on the weekends, filling the car with weighty bottles of Mountain Valley Spring water and schlepping Marie’s favorite houseplants from Los Angeles, staying first at the Spa Hotel, where he enjoyed the baths, and then at a house at 888 Regal Drive, compliments of the William Morris Agency. Then one day in the mid-’60s, he fell over in the driveway with another heart attack—his third—which left him using a cane. Once he grew stronger, he employed it as a prop.

  Byron Raphael ran into him at the Tick Tock restaurant in Los Angeles not long after, and he could tell that something awful had happened. “He’d really changed. He had that cane, and he was bent over. It shocked me, because he was like an old man.”

  To most people, Parker explained he just had a bad back, and pointed to an exercise contraption and the elastic brace he wore around his waist and upper torso for proof. But he was convinced he couldn’t survive yet another coronary, casually telling associates, “You don’t see any hearses with luggage racks on them,” and made the decision to spend the rest of his life as if there were no tomorrow.

  Only the biggest and the most would do. First, he wanted a new house in Palm Springs. He went to work on Abe Lastfogel’s wife, Frances, paying her a visit while she was in the hospital, hauling in a big vase of flowers and sweet-talking her into letting him have the larger, $250,000 one-floor plan house at 1166 Vista Vespero. There Marie would make everything in the house blue and white, right down to the drapes and bedsheets and even gravel in the driveway. And the Colonel coud relax by the pool and get RCA to install a commercial freezer for the vast amounts of meat he bought and inventoried like gold, even as he struggled to keep his weight in check. Parker didn’t mind being fat—as far as he was concerned, his size suited him and added to his psychological heft. But his doctor dictated otherwise.

  Sometimes Parker showed up at Elvis’s recording sessions and tried to lift his client’s mood. On occasion, he ordered lunch in for everyone, and routinely traded jokes with bassist Bob Moore, who had known the Colonel since the Eddy Arnold years and considered Parker “a great, great man,” and with Buddy Harman, who drummed on at least nine of the soundtracks and likewise found him to be “a pretty nice old codger, really.” It was a sentiment Parker went out of his way to foster with the Nashville musicians, if not necessarily with the L.A. players. Moore, who’d been on nearly all the movie recordings, remembers the time he walked into the control room where Hal Wallis was sitting in the producer’s chair. “Boy,” the Colonel said to Wallis, “get up and go get me some coffee. Let Bob sit here.”

  At other times, it was Elvis he humiliated in front of the movie execs. After Wallis sent Parker a letter complaining that Elvis looked “soft, fat, and jowly around the face” in Viva Las Vegas, asking the Colonel to have a talk with him about his weight, Parker grilled Marty Lacker about his - boss’s eating habits at a recording session. “He’s just been eating what he always eats,” Lacker said, at which point Parker banged his cane on the floor and then raised it in the air, yelling, “Don’t lie to me! Tell me!”

  But it wasn’t so much Presley’s eating habit
s that altered his looks as it was his pharmaceutical habit, according to Lacker, one of the entourage members who alternately carried Presley’s black makeup kit, which the singer filled with pills. Often, they dictated his moods.

  At the next session, it was Elvis who couldn’t contain his rage. “He had this big orchestra in there,” remembers Lacker, “and he started singing. He didn’t settle for the first take. They were getting ready to do it again, and Elvis reached his breaking point. He started ranting, ‘I’m tired of all these fucking songs, and I’m tired of these damn movies! I get in a fight with somebody in one scene, and in the next one I’m kissing the dog. What difference does it make how many times we do this song? I’ll tell you what. You just cut the tracks for this next movie, and I’ll come in later and put my voice on.’ ”

  Shortly after, the Colonel invited Elvis to join him and Marie and the Tuckers for dinner, but Presley declined, much to Parker’s embarrassment. “Colonel just damned near begged him, and he wouldn’t do it,” Tucker remembers. For years, the Colonel had boasted of never mixing business and pleasure with his client, not even the simple sharing of a meal. (“You do your thing and I’ll do my thing, and it’ll be beautiful,” he had said.) Elvis was in no mood to start now.

  With the movie and record deals in place, Parker found himself with plenty of time for something he now considered doubly important: having fun. When he got a call from a promoter about possibly taking Presley out on tour, he’d tell him Elvis was tied up for the next three and a half years, but he’d be happy to rent the gold lamé suit for the weekend for $5,000. Or maybe they’d be interested in Elvis’s cars. He had a tour of those going out soon, and he wasn’t even kidding about that one.