The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  “Perhaps it is to lighten our burdens that the Lord sends us from time to time gay and imaginative men like Colonel Parker, who realize that life is a great big hilarious fruitcake loaded with potential profits,” Look magazine said in 1956.

  In truth, Parker’s most important place in music history may be as the man who almost single-handedly took the carnival tradition first to rock and roll, and then to modern mass entertainment, creating the blueprint for the powerful style of management and merchandising that the music business operates by today. By merely applying the exploitationist tactics of the barker to his own client, he drew a straight line from the bally platform of the old-time carnival to the hullabalooed concert stage.

  Yet, as long as they were associated, Parker, who preferred the bubbly champagne music of Lawrence Welk, never understood the artistic genius of Presley’s surreal hiccups and king-snake moans, his seamless blending of country, pop, and rhythm and blues. Nor could he truly appreciate the elegant electricity of his aesthetic romp. In fact, Parker, who - didn’t know a good song from a bad (“He really was tone deaf,” says RCA’s Joan Deary), often made derisive comments about Elvis’s music. “The first time he heard ‘I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,’ ” Byron Raphael recalls, “he laughed, and said, ‘Can you imagine the kids are going to buy this stuff?’ ”

  Certainly neither Parker nor anyone else had the vision to see what a seismic force Elvis would become, as perhaps the most influential cultural figure of the twentieth century. But a decade earlier, Parker watched Dick Contino wrangle and hump his accordion as the teenagers went crazy. Now he began to fathom that Elvis could combine the threatening sexuality of Marlon Brando and the confused, sensual tension of James Dean and, in the process, give voice to a powerful, rising youth movement, one ravenous and itchy for change and prominence. Its purchasing power—some $7 billion in 1956 alone—would triple the sales of the American recording industry and make Elvis Presley the first RCA artist to gross more than $1 million from a single album.

  However, on the day he first met Presley, Parker was preoccupied with two other performers. His choices reveal how inept he was at judging mainstream taste and in guiding unknown talent.

  Still smitten with the icon of the American cowboy, Parker approached Eddie Dean, the B-movie Western star, who had appeared on the country music charts with “One Has My Name (the Other Has My Heart)” and “I Dreamed of a Hillbilly Heaven.” Parker told him he could score big as “the Golden Cowboy” and, in a foreshadowing of Elvis’s famous stage ensemble, suggested Dean invest in a golden suit or two.

  Since ’52, however, he’d been consumed with the idea of managing Tommy Sands, a Louisiana Hayride alum who had just entered his teens when Parker first saw him perform at Cook’s Hoedown Club in Houston. Soon he had the boy opening dates for Eddy Arnold, who resented his manager’s personal and professional interest in the kid.

  Sands, whose parents were divorced and who rarely saw his own father, found a surrogate daddy in the strange, funny man who seemed to be grooming him more for the movies than a singing career. One day, he made the teen throw dirt on himself and walk several miles to a diner, where Parker waited and posed as an unassuming customer. Sands would pass his “acting test” if he stood at the window and looked hungry enough that the management brought him in and gave him a free meal. “My boy,” Parker told him about this and other stunts, “this is all just part of your education.”

  “Actually,” says Sands, “he wanted me to be Roy Rogers—the next big cowboy movie star. That’s what he saw for me.” And so Parker outfitted the youngster with string ties, cowboy hats, and all manner of Western wear. But Sands didn’t want to be Roy Rogers (“I thought I’d have to be Mr. Clean, married with a family, and I’d never be able to have any girlfriends”), even though he loved Parker and “worshiped the ground that he walked on.”

  And so Parker switched gears and set about getting Sands a recording contract, instructing the teen to send a sample tape to RCA’s Steve Sholes late in 1954 or early ’55. Sholes took a perfunctory listen and immediately returned the tape to the young singer, but when Parker ran into a temporary snag prying Elvis loose from his commitment at Sun Records, he had Diskin get in touch with Sholes. “Since Elvis Presley is pretty securely tied up,” Diskin suggested in a letter, “it might be possible to come out with something in that vein by Tommy.”

  Sholes wrote back and tactfully stated that Sands would not be a suitable replacement for Elvis, but, in a move probably meant to appease the Colonel more than anything else, offered the “possibility that we could record Tommy on some of the Rhythm and Blues type Country and Western music.” Several years earlier, Parker had flown Sands to New York and Nashville to record, as he recalls, seven songs, “but my voice hadn’t changed yet, and nothing sold.” His producer, Chet Atkins, puts it differently: “He was just one of those pretty faces.”

  Parker saw his inability to develop Sands into a major artist as a singular defeat. (“The fact that he didn’t make a winner out of Tommy was a burr under his saddle—God, he couldn’t stand to be a loser,” says Gabe Tucker.) And so he refused to relinquish hope, picking up Sands in the summers and driving him wherever Parker had a show going, “priming me for whatever the next move was going to be,” Sands says.

  Finally, in 1957, Parker found his vindication when NBC’s Kraft Television Theatre produced “The Singing Idol,” a drama closely based on Elvis’s story, with the Colonel portrayed as a twisted psychopath. Kraft had wanted Elvis for the role, but Parker turned them down and recommended Sands, going so far as to call Tommy’s manager, Cliffie Stone. As Sands remembers it, Parker paid for his plane ticket for the audition.

  The show was an enormous hit—even Elvis was impressed—and critics raved over the newcomer’s acting and singing. Within the week, Sands, who had signed with Ken Nelson at Capitol Records on the strength of the Kraft contract, saw his single “Teenage Crush” go to number three on the pop charts and sell 800,000 copies.

  “That really made him,” recalled Stone. “In six months he’d become a fantastic star—The [Ed] Sullivan Show, This Is Your Life, and all the rest.” Only then, reports Gabe Tucker, was Parker able to loosen that burr from his saddle, boasting about how he was being consulted about “the actor who is going to play me” in the 1958 theatrical version, Sing, Boy, Sing.

  Parker’s initial failure to launch Sands, coupled with his eagerness to shine again in the eyes of the William Morris Agency, was no small part of his drive to make Elvis America’s number-one attraction.

  But while the Morris office denies it today, in 1955, no one at the agency, in either New York or California, put much faith in Presley’s ability to last beyond a quick, if bizarre, blaze of fame.

  Parker began campaigning to interest Harry Kalcheim in Presley months before he finally got the singer signed on the dotted line, and while Kalcheim politely responded that Elvis had “a very special type of voice,” he didn’t seem overly impressed, noting in a February 1955 letter to Parker that he had mislaid Elvis’s photograph. Parker wrote back in March that he felt certain Presley could succeed if he was “exploited properly,” and stayed on Kalcheim even as the RCA deal had yet to close.

  It was Hollywood that most occupied Parker’s thoughts, and even as he knew he’d have to build Elvis into a national phenomenon before he could move him into motion pictures, his desire was so strong that he - couldn’t help but plant the idea with his William Morris contact.

  Kalcheim, located in the New York office and more involved with television than motion pictures, eventually responded that perhaps Elvis could make a Hollywood short. On November 14, 1955, the day before RCA gave Sam Phillips the $35,000 to buy out Presley’s Sun contract, Parker told Kalcheim that he was “interested in making a picture with this boy. However, we must be very careful to expose him in a manner befitting his personality, which is something like the James Dean situation.” Perhaps, he added, in the wake of Dean’s tragic death
in a car accident two months earlier, Warner Bros. had a shelved film property that might work well for Elvis.

  “Believe me,” Parker said, “if you ever follow one of my hunches, follow up on this one and you won’t go wrong.”

  On November 23, 1955, eight days after RCA secured Elvis’s recording contract, Kalcheim wrote to Sam Fuller of NBC to inform him that the label had “just tied up a youngster, Elvis Presley, a sensational singer very much on the order of Johnnie Ray.” Kalcheim was hoping that Fuller might make room for a Presley appearance on an NBC-TV show and notified Parker he’d gotten the ball rolling.

  But secretly, Kalcheim had little faith that anything of importance would happen for Parker’s new charge. In 1955, Byron Raphael, then a new William Morris employee, happened upon a memo from Harry Kalcheim, addressed to all of the members of the West Coast office.

  “Essentially,” remembers Raphael, “it said, ‘We’ve signed a new act, Elvis Presley, who’s managed by Colonel Parker, who had Eddy Arnold.’ And it went on to say, ‘We’ve surveyed all our agents on the East Coast, and our opinion is that Presley’s not going to make it. At most, he’ll simply be a passing phenomenon. So get him as much work as you can, and as fast as you can.’ ”

  Parker never saw that memo, but he knew that the deals that the Morris office was pursuing were not in Elvis’s best interest. It was also clear that Kalcheim didn’t share his enthusiasm or his timetable for establishing Elvis as a national artist. When Kalcheim suggested that Parker book Elvis on a series of dates in New York and New Jersey to increase his exposure, Parker ignored the advice.

  What’s more, in a move that angered Kalcheim, Parker, who had no written contract with the Morris agency, entered into a deal with an independent agent, Steve Yates. Beginning in January 1956, Yates booked Elvis for four consecutive weeks on CBS-TV’s Stage Show, the popular Saturday-night vaudeville program hosted by jazz greats Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. There Elvis would debut his first RCA single, “Heartbreak Hotel,” with a bump-and-grind musical backing that was not much different from what Presley’s drummer, D. J. Fontana, played in strip joints.

  When Kalcheim learned of the Stage Show bookings, which stretched into six appearances, he fired off a blustery note. Parker answered with a convoluted letter that tap-danced around his use of Yates and chided Kalcheim for simply sending out letters and waiting for a response.

  “I don’t think this artist was pitched full force,” he barked, often lapsing into run-on sentences and the peculiar sentence structure of a man who learned English later in life. “You know as well as I do offering a new artist is one thing but selling one is another. If I waited for some-one to call me with deals all the time, I would have to start selling candy apples again.”

  The upshot was that on January 31, 1956, the Morris office prepared a memo that gave the agency the exclusive right to represent Elvis with the American Federation of Musicians, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the American Guild of Variety Artists, the Screen Actors Guild, and for “general services” and “general materials and packages.”

  That memo, addressed to Colonel Parker, gave the manager “final approval of all contracts to be entered into for Elvis Presley during the term of the respective exclusive agency agreements.” Two signatures appeared at the bottom: Nat Lefkowitz, of the Morris agency’s contract department, and Elvis Presley, who signed his compact autograph in blue fountain pen ink. In agreeing to such an arrangement—six weeks before he signed a final contract with Parker—Elvis effectively granted the Colonel total control over almost every facet of his career.

  What Parker didn’t tell the agency was that even though he knew the power of television could make Elvis an immense star all across the United States, he, too, privately feared that Elvis’s fame would be fleeting, admitting as much to his stepson, Bobby Ross. And so, Parker rationalized, drawing again on his carnival past, he would give the people just enough to whet their appetite and fire their imagination—book him on all the top television programs, including The Milton Berle Show, The Steve Allen Show, and the most prestigious of all, The Ed Sullivan Show—and then perhaps never let him appear on television again. Certainly, he would limit his exposure to the press.

  By not allowing Elvis to be seen or heard in interviews, Parker made him into the object of nearly limitless romantic fantasy, from a pious innocent who loved his mama and his Lord to a wiggling, greasy god of sex. Controlling his interviews would also make Elvis more exotic and mysterious, and obscure the fact that the young man who proved so effortlessly hypnotic in performance was, in real life, an immature and underdeveloped personality, a sort of charming “idiot savant,” as the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller would dub him.

  Early on, Parker had warned him to cut the comedy from his stage act—a familiar staple of hillbilly music shows of the time, but almost painful to hear today in the recording of his 1956 Las Vegas debut. Dutifully, after making an off-color remark about marriage (“Why buy a cow when you can steal milk through the fence?”) at a high school concert in Alabama, Elvis complied. Yet it was nothing for him to belch on stage, and in private his sense of humor, played out with his cousins and cronies, who traveled with him as a pack of good ol’ boy playmates and protectors, continued to run along the lines of stupefying juvenility, even as Presley eventually cultivated a margin of wit and sophistication.

  The portrait of Presley as he really was at twenty-one—acne-scarred, sweet-natured, and simple, except in his music and his peculiar relationships with women (already three at a time during his Louisiana Hayride days) and his parents (whom he affectionately addressed as his “babies”)—was either too dull or too scandalous for Parker to let out.

  By the following year, the manager was still taking no chances. When Time magazine’s Bob Schulman tried to go backstage with other reporters at Elvis’s 1957 performance at Seattle’s Sick’s Stadium, he encountered the Colonel, standing fast, like a portly bouncer. “If you want to hear anything about Elvis, you’ve got to talk to me,” Parker said, both adamant and inflexible. “There was absolutely no access to Elvis himself,” Schulman remembers, “although we could see him through the open door, in this garish yellow incandescent light. He was leaning back in a camp chair, scratching his scrotum.”

  Because the press was usually denied an audience with Elvis, except in the occasional group interview, reporters painted the young inciter of teen frenzy as a reflection of their own reaction to his behavior. To one, especially after his appearance on the Berle Show, where he slowed down the ending of “Hound Dog” and punctuated the beat with pelvic thrusts, he was the devil’s own sneering son; to another, he was a fighter for freedom on the staid, cultural battlefield. When the city of San Diego banned Elvis’s orgasmic dancing, the media reported it with all the gravity of a national security breech.

  Parker, who tied on a vendor’s apron to peddle both I LOVE ELVIS and I HATE ELVIS buttons to folks who reacted strongly one way or another, - didn’t care what the newsmen said as long as they said it—and paid their own admission to the shows. Not even an “Elvis is queer” story got his feathers up. When Gabe Tucker threw just such a magazine piece on his desk, Parker didn’t say a word until his friend stopped sputtering. “Well,” Parker finally said, “did they spell his name right?”

  To the press, then, it was almost as if there were no Elvis, except what the Colonel made him out to be. In a way, Colonel Parker was Elvis, and the singer, in Parker’s mind, was less a separate entity, a person in his own right, than a vehicle for the Colonel’s wishes, desires, and ego. When Parker, who likewise rationed his own access to the press, deemed to talk with reporters at all—“If it’s a question, I’ll say ‘yes’ or ‘no’; that’s all the taping I do”—he became the first entertainment manager to wrap a kind of star quality around himself. Like his title, it gave him a sense of superiority, of grandiosity, and allowed him to think of himself in the third person. Often, when he was presented with so
mething that displeased him, he remarked, “I don’t think the Colonel is going to like this,” as if he were some mystical entity.

  Of course, there was still another reason Parker made sure Elvis wasn’t overexposed on television, and it was mostly green. “If they can see Elvis for nothing, they won’t pay to see him,” he declared, chewing the soggy end of an Anthony and Cleopatra. That was no way to build an empire, which was just exactly what he had in mind. With the seminal TV appearances, “Heartbreak Hotel” quickly sold more than one million singles, and continued to sell at a rate of 70,000 copies every week. Eighty-two percent of all American television sets had been tuned to The Ed Sullivan Show the night of Elvis’s first of three guest shots, and the Colonel was able to boast that since he’d come on board, the cost of an Elvis Presley appearance had jumped from $300 to $25,000 a night, two and a half times what the current top attraction in show business, Martin and Lewis, could command.

  “Colonel,” the grateful but bewildered Elvis supposedly said, “you put a lump in my throat.” To which Parker allegedly replied, “And you put a lump in my wallet.”