The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  As if it were the Colonel’s own wedding, Parker arranged every detail. “It was the Colonel who got the rings, the room, the judge,” Priscilla later said. “We didn’t do any of that. It was all through his connections. We wanted it to be fast, effortless.” Which meant she and Elvis also allowed the Colonel to pick the attendants and the guests, who numbered fewer than twenty. Most of the Memphis Mafia were excluded from the ceremony—a painful slight that would leave bruised feelings for years—but invited to the breakfast, where they mingled with Parker’s gambling buddy, the comedian Redd Foxx.

  Larry Geller, whom Elvis had once asked to be best man, read about the wedding in the newspaper. Stunned, he thought back to the events of the past month. Parker had taken charge of everything in Elvis’s life except the one aspect he should have addressed: Presley’s drug use.

  Grelun Landon, who worked with the Colonel from 1955 on, first as a vice president of Hill and Range and then as an RCA publicist, says that Parker himself didn’t know about the pills during the MGM years, despite Elvis’s ever-present “makeup” case. But others insist that can’t be true—the Colonel was informed about everything that went on—and though their meetings were infrequent, there was no way he couldn’t have recognized the erratic behavior and abnormal perspiration of an addict, even one whose dependence was on prescription drugs, not street narcotics.

  But just as several of the entourage members were in denial about their own drug use, Parker, according to his friends, refused to believe that Elvis was truly in trouble. A more plausible explanation is that in the days before the Betty Ford Clinic, the Colonel didn’t know where to take him for discreet, effective help and loathed risking the loss of work if the truth got out. As a man who spent his whole life covering things up, Parker believed the decent thing was to conceal Elvis’s “weakness.”

  Just as Elvis turned increasingly to drugs in periods of stress, Parker, as his difficulties mounted, visited the gambling tables of Las Vegas for the addictive element of excitement and escape. For many gamblers, the satisfaction—even the thrill—is in losing, not winning, since for pathological gamblers with an impulse control disorder, the game is never about the acquisition of money, but about the action itself. Gambling fed the obsessive twins—Wisdom and Folly—of Parker’s personality, which made him by turns calculating and reckless, self-protective and self-destructive.

  Parker’s losses were now becoming increasingly apparent to his business associates, who saw him as a chronic gambler. Since 1965, he’d been asking for money early on the film contracts, and new RCA president Norman Racusin was well aware that Parker “had a penchant for the tables,” as the label had assigned Harry Jenkins to keep the Colonel happy. That meant Jenkins spent an inordinate amount of time sitting at the craps tables with Parker in Vegas, the Colonel intoning, “Let’s go down to the office” as his signal for some action.

  Jenkins hoped that RCA would reimburse him for the losses he sustained when Parker urged him to throw in a few chips. But the label had no such intention, since it was already occasionally taking care of the Colonel’s debts. Though Parker grossed unfathomable sums of money, little of it came in steadily. In between deals, he began calling on Hal Wallis, the Morris agency, and RCA to cover him, the casinos knowing that someone was always going to be good for his money. If not, they gave him credit, or wrote it off as a favor.

  “I’m sure there was an awful lot going on,” says Parker’s acquaintance Dick Contino, the accordionist who was courted by the mob early in his career and remained a favorite of Sinatra. “It would be an obvious thing. If you’ve got a problem financially, these guys don’t write notes—they ask you what you need. If they like you, you got it. Money is nothing, but respect, everything. My guess is that they asked for their favors in return and got them, maybe unbeknown to Elvis. I wouldn’t criticize Tom for it. Why not?”

  16

  BLACK LEATHER BLUES: THE ’68 SPECIAL

  SOMETIME in 1965, in near secret, the Colonel started taking meetings with Tom Sarnoff, vice president of NBC’s West Coast division. Parker thought Elvis should make a motion picture for television, he told Sarnoff, and after it debuted on the network, he wanted the rights to release it theatrically around the world. The negotiations were long and arduous, and often seemed to stall altogether.

  Throughout Elvis’s movie years, Parker had fiercely protected the exclusivity to put his client on television, again demonstrating his shrewdness in using the medium. Only once had he had been thwarted. In 1959, he entered into a deal with Irving Kahn, the TelePrompter inventor, for a 100-city closed-circuit television concert to reintroduce Elvis after his return from the army.

  Closed-circuit telecasts were commonplace for champion prizefights, but a recording artist had yet to do one, and Parker enjoyed the publicity of the history-making event. But Wallis and Hazen quickly objected, arguing if the paid TV appearance wasn’t successful, attendance for Presley’s future motion pictures would suffer. Parker scrapped the closed-circuit deal, snippily writing Wallis and Hazen, “I know that both of you must be brokenhearted . . . if there is anything either of you could do to make me feel better, don’t hesitate to go to any lengths to achieve this pleasant goal.”

  From that day, Parker plotted his revenge, drafting long, sabre-rattling letters to the producers whenever they aired one of Presley’s films on television. Free showings of any Elvis movie diluted the sales impact of his first-run features, Parker huffed, letting Wallis know that if such practices continued, he “could very well lose the next Presley picture.” But what the Colonel really dreaded was interference as he negotiated a big deal with NBC, which, like RCA, was a corporate arm of General Electric.

  In October 1967, Sarnoff and the Colonel came together again. This time they talked about a package deal to include Elvis’s first TV appearance since the Frank Sinatra special of 1960. Three months later, they agreed on a price: $250,000 for a music special and $850,000 for a feature film plus 50 percent of the profits. The film, Change of Habit, a Universal Pictures and NBC production, would pair Elvis with one of his most unlikely leading ladies, Mary Tyler Moore.

  But first he would make Charro!, an offbeat film in the vein of Sergio - Leone’s so-called spaghetti Westerns, for National General. The picture would soothe the actor’s ego somewhat. “Charro! is the first movie I ever made without singing a song,” Presley would tell one of the Colonel’s chosen reporters. “I play a gunfighter, and I just couldn’t see a singing gunfighter.” Ultimately, he would agree to croon the title tune.

  For the last year, the Colonel had been rethinking his strategy, trying to find projects to challenge Elvis, to rouse him from his lethargy and depression. With Easy Come, Easy Go, Parker had attempted—and failed—to have Wallis cast Elvis in a nonmusical role. And in March of ’67, the Colonel wrote to MGM, encouraging the studio to come up with something meaty for the remaining films on Presley’s contract—no more bikinis and no more nightclub scenes, “which have been in the last fifteen pictures. . . . I sincerely hope that you are looking in some crystal ball with your people to come up with some good, strong, rugged stories.”

  Now a televised music special along the lines Sarnoff proposed would let Elvis meet the people eye to eye for his first full-length performance since the U.S.S. Arizona concert in 1961. Taped in June 1968, it would air that December for the holiday season.

  “Would TV serve to refurbish that old magic, the sort of thing that gave old ladies the vapors and caused young girls to collect the dust from Elvis’s car for their memory books?” TV Guide asked. Parker thought they would, as did fifty-year-old Bob Finkel, one of four executive producers under exclusive contract to NBC. Sarnoff brought Finkel to the project even before he signed the deal with Parker. Not only had Finkel made his Emmy-winning reputation with variety shows, but more important, Sarnoff believed Finkel might be a match for the High Potentate.

  Almost immediately, Parker made him a Snowman—Finkel carried his card in h
is wallet (“Had to!”)—and the two men developed an easy rapport. But Finkel realized that entertaining the Colonel and keeping him distracted from the show would be a full-time job. He also couldn’t get past Elvis calling him Mr. Finkel, and needed someone to whom the singer could relate. That’s when he placed a call to Binder/Howe Productions, and invited them on board.

  Steve Binder was a twenty-one-year-old wise-beyond-his-years producer-director who’d grown up working in his father’s Los Angeles gas station. He had a rock-and-roll gut and a primal instinct for what was gold and what was dross, having cut his teeth producing the hip TV music series Hullabaloo and The T.A.M.I. Show, a 1964 landmark concert film with a virtual who’s who of rock, including James Brown and the Rolling Stones. More recently, he’d done a Petula Clark special that spawned a thousand headlines in racially uptight America when Clark exchanged an innocent touch with her guest, Harry Belafonte.

  Bones Howe, Binder’s business partner and the music supervisor on the shows, was a sound guru, currently producing records for the pop groups the Fifth Dimension and the Association. Years before, he’d worked on a number of Elvis’s sessions at Radio Recorders, as the assistant to engineer Thorne Nogar.

  Howe remembered what Elvis had been like before Hollywood choked off his ambition, how he produced his own records, listening to stacks of demos over and over, calling for a guitar lick here, a bass thump there, and then danced to his own playbacks turned up loud. He also remembered how much fun Elvis was, flirting with the girls at the stoplight on Sunset Boulevard, rolling down the window just as the light changed, or talking them up the fire escape at the Hollywood Plaza Hotel. Sometimes, he’d flash that crooked grin and invite the teenagers from nearby Hollywood High right into the studio.

  Binder and Howe decided the only way to do the special was to create the same relaxed atmosphere in which Elvis made his early records. If they could pull that off, in an interview in which Elvis showed how warm and funny he was, or in a live segment where he just talked about his musical roots, people would see the real Elvis Presley and not the one the Colonel had put on display. Binder told Finkel he was interested only if they could capture the phenomenon of a once-in-a-lifetime personality.

  “I wanted Elvis to let the world in on that great big secret,” he says, and Finkel agreed.

  In May, at Finkel’s next meeting with the Colonel, which included representatives of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, the special’s only sponsor, Finkel broached the subject of expanding the Christmas theme. He’d like to embrace material from Elvis’s long career, he said. Parker approved, as long as a Christmas song closed the program and Elvis controlled the music publishing throughout. Finkel then met with Elvis, and afterward wrote a memo, saying that the singer was excited about the idea, that Elvis would like the “show to depart completely from the pattern of his motion pictures and from everything else he has done. . . . [He] wants everyone to know what he really can do.”

  Three days later, on May 17, the Colonel invited Binder and Howe for a 7:00 A.M. breakfast at his office at MGM. To stall for time, and to figure how he’d play the relationship (he deliberately mispronounced Binder as “Bindle”), Parker put his staff through the “fire drill” routine—demonstrating how quickly they could pack up the office if the studio heads displeased the Colonel—and showed Howe the scrapbooks he kept as the dogcatcher of Tampa. The trio deliberately steered clear of any conversation about the content of the show, other than Parker’s handing Binder an audiotape of a hackneyed Christmas program he routinely supplied to radio.

  “This is what I want my boy to do,” he said. To Binder, the genius of the Colonel was that he had grown men terrorized all around him. But Binder was emphatic that he needed a one-on-one meeting with Elvis before he committed to the project.

  What the producer didn’t say was that Elvis was thirty-three years old and no longer the rough-and-ready Hillbilly Cat. In Binder’s view, the movies had made Elvis an anachronism in his twenties, as musically relevant to the ’60s as Bing Crosby. “There was no blood and guts of this man left.” If Elvis could recapture the magnificent essence he once was, he’d enjoy a whole new rejuvenation. Otherwise, with his MGM contract about to expire, he’d be lucky to return to grinding out B movies, this time for second-string studios.

  The test came later that day in Binder’s office, in what was known as the glass elevator building on Sunset Boulevard in the heart of Hollywood. At first, Binder was caught off-guard by the enormity of Elvis’s presence, which he found surprisingly charismatic and unreal. (“You certainly knew . . . that this was a special person . . . his looks were just phenomenally sculptured, without any weak points.”) But while he found Elvis dynamic, with a great sense of humor, Binder knew he had to talk straight and find out if the greatest white blues singer could relate to the socially conscious ’60s.

  To Binder’s relief, “we hit it off pretty well. We joked around a lot.” Elvis told him he was uncomfortable in television, that he hadn’t understood why Steve Allen had made him look silly, singing to a basset hound, and Ed Sullivan had made him seem vulgar, shooting him from the waist up—an idea that Elvis never knew had originated with the Colonel. Binder tried to calm him, saying, “You make a record, and I’ll put pictures to it, and you won’t have to worry about television.” Then the producer eased into the fact that if Elvis didn’t do anything else, he would always be remembered as the great rock-and-roll icon of the past. But to the present generation, he was a relic, a man who hadn’t placed a record at the top of the record charts in six years. Elvis may have been a highly paid movie star, Binder says in retrospect, but “he was not in the business as far as I was concerned.”

  If Elvis was nervous that he had been created by the Colonel, Binder saw, “it was my job to let him believe in himself and his talent.” Both Binder and Howe knew they couldn’t come right out and criticize the Colonel, because Elvis wouldn’t have tolerated it. Howe thought, “Elvis probably felt the guy made a pact with the devil, that without the Colonel he would never have gotten there.”

  On the contrary, the Colonel hadn’t been bad for Elvis, Binder allowed. Parker had served his purpose, and he was a marketing genius, though “once he had the stranglehold, he forgot that what he was marketing was built around talent, and manipulated the whole thing with smoke and mirrors.” Instead of having somebody pay the Colonel a million dollars to put Elvis in the kind of plastic commercial movies he’d been doing, Binder added, Elvis should give a great director a million dollars to put him in the right movie.

  “He laughed at that, and said, ‘You’re right,’ ” Binder remembers. “He told me he had been burning up inside for years to communicate.” But the producer, who knew that Elvis’s fear would make him great, also said that television was always a risk—the audience would either see a man who had rediscovered himself or they’d be looking at a has-been. How was Elvis’s gut these days? Would he have recorded Jimmy Webb’s progressive and poetic “MacArthur Park,” for example, if Webb had brought it to him instead of actor Richard Harris?

  “Definitely,” Elvis said without blinking an eye. That’s when Binder knew that Elvis was thinking of the future and not the past. “I felt very, very strongly that the special was Elvis’s moment of truth,” says Binder, “and that the number-one requirement was honesty.” The singer said he was going to Hawaii to get in shape and just relax for a few weeks with his wife and his newborn daugher, Lisa Marie. Binder promised they’d put together a project that they believed in while he was gone.

  In the interim, the producers brought in writers Chris Beard and Allan Blye, who structured the show around the 1909 theater staple The Blue Bird, in which a young man leaves home to find happiness, only to return and discover it in his own backyard. Alfred DiScipio, the Singer sewing machine representative, liked the idea and told the Colonel they should go with it, as it was Elvis’s story, too, a fact underscored by using snippets of Presley’s own music and costume designer Bill Belew
’s now-famous black leather suit, a brilliant updating of the ’50s motorcycle jacket. Elvis never really wore a motorcycle jacket—it was Brando who popularized it in the movie The Wild One—but millions of viewers thought he had.

  On June 3, Elvis arrived for the start of two weeks of rehearsals at the Binder/Howe offices. “He looked amazing,” Binder remembers, suntanned and fourteen pounds lighter from a crash diet. He loved the script, he told them, and then Howe said if they were really going to go in a new direction, he’d like to dispense with Elvis’s usual Nashville musicians and bring in some of L.A.’s best session players—guitarists Mike Deasy and Tommy Tedesco and drummer Hal Blaine—who’d enliven him with a fresher sound. No matter what they suggested, Elvis nodded yes, which gave Binder pause: “I wanted him to be not that agreeable and easy to work with—I wanted him to roll up his sleeves and make the show something he contributed to a great deal.”

  The upbeat mood was shattered barely three days later, when Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles. His murder threw Elvis into an emotional spiral. Already a conspiracy theorist—reinforced, perhaps, by the Colonel’s Sam Cooke story—Elvis showed Binder that he was “quite well read” on the subject. “He told me all the books to read—he was convinced it was not Oswald who killed [John] Kennedy, and he was obsessed with the plot to assassinate RFK.”

  During rehearsals, Binder began to see a dichotomy in Elvis’s personality. On his own, or with the guys, Elvis was full of confidence and humor. But in their joint meetings with the Colonel at Burbank’s NBC studios, Elvis seemed weak and isolated. He stood with his hands clasped in front of him, his head down. “Elvis was scared to death of the Colonel’s power,” Binder saw. “He felt shamed. He was very, very submissive.” The producer took note of it as he rolled out his ideas to Parker—he’d like to do some choreographed production numbers with a dance troupe, a straight-ahead concert segment in an arena format, and probably a gospel sequence.