The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  Hirshan respected Parker, and in those days, at least, considered him good for Elvis. But what Hirshan never understood (and Lastfogel did) was that Parker saw himself, and not Elvis, as the client, and that to - Parker’s way of thinking, Elvis’s wishes should never have been Hirshan’s concern. Now Parker would insist that Hirshan, whom he considered snide, sarcastic, and contemptible, never again be allowed at the bargaining table—he got in the way of Parker’s plans. In the future, Lastfogel, not Hirshan, would negotiate the movie deals based on the terms Parker laid out. Always those deals would include a number of perks for Parker, including, on Love Me Tender, an office on the Fox lot, a secretarial staff, and a car and chauffeur at his disposal. Such accommodations were unprecedented for the manager of a star.

  From the beginning, the Colonel turned the “Elvis exploitation office,” as he called it, into his own private midway, with balloons hanging from the ceiling, stuffed animals keeping watch from every corner, and Presley paraphernalia covering the walls. Hullabaloo reigned supreme. At times, Parker summoned his staff, his lieutenant, Tom Diskin, secretary Trude Forsher, and Byron Raphael, on loan from the William Morris office, with the squeeze of a toy puppy dog, one bark for Trude, two barks for Byron, and three barks for Diskin. Sometimes he did the barking himself.

  Parker’s main directive called for everyone to look busy at all times, even if it meant just fashioning rows of paper dolls for hours on end. Letter writing, no matter how meaningless, was a favorite preoccupation, as was the counting of the big Tennessee sausages that Parker obtained from the country comic Whitey Ford (the Duke of Paducah) and gave as gifts to every motion picture icon from Bing Crosby to Ray Bolger.

  But the real order of the day was to have fun at other people’s expense through a series of practical jokes. If the pompous studio heads considered him a bumpkin, walking around with a smelly cigar and his shirttail hanging out, Parker would have the last laugh. The country fool, as they initially pegged him, would soon play out a sort of down-home sting operation, in which he’d out-con the Hollywood moguls, to him the biggest sharks of all.

  One morning, just after Parker had moved on to the Twentieth Century—Fox lot, he gathered his staff and told them that Buddy Adler and Lou Schrieber, who were running the studio, were coming by for their first in-person meeting with the Colonel.

  Parker wanted it to be an event they’d never forget. First, he ordered a sign to read COLONEL PARKER’S WEST COAST OFFICE, which he placed over the men’s room door. Then he stationed everyone in his place. Diskin and Byron were to pick up the phone and make imaginary calls, while Trude was to look studiously secretarial. Then he installed Elvis’s corpulent friend Arthur Hooton, in the shower with a steno pad and a stool.

  “If anybody laughs,” the Colonel said to the group, “you’ll be sent back to wherever you came from.” With that, he unwrapped one of the Duke of Paducah’s country sausages, greased the doorknobs, and disappeared into the men’s room.

  “When Adler and Schrieber came in,” remembers Raphael, “Trude told them that Colonel was waiting for them in his West Coast office.” She pointed in the direction of the men’s room, and Adler opened the door to find “the Colonel sitting on the toilet with his pants down, and this gigantic fat guy in the shower pretending to take dictation. The Colonel said, ‘Come on in, close the door, don’t worry about anything.’ ”

  The handsome and dignified Adler tried to pretend that nothing was out of the ordinary as he listened to a man on a toilet going on about how he intended to promote their motion picture. Schrieber, too stunned to say anything, remained mute.

  “After about five minutes,” says Raphael, “Adler and Schrieber started to smell something horrendous on their hands, because they’d handled the doorknobs. You can imagine what they thought, but they - didn’t want to embarrass anybody. They just wanted to get out of there. And the Colonel just kept talking, keeping them there as long as possible. They didn’t know what to do. They were in shock.”

  Finally, Parker let them go, and the office erupted into hysterics, Byron and Trude realizing their new boss was the kind of man who left people dazed, walking around and talking to themselves. The next day, the manager of Fox’s newest star called Ed Dodelin at RCA and had him send both of the executives a large cabinet television, courtesy of Elvis and the Colonel.

  Parker’s antics with the Hollywood power brokers brought a measure of humor to a staid and conservative industry. But the Colonel’s need to diminish and degrade—to terrorize grown men all around him—also served to intimidate them into submission.

  As soon as shooting started on Love Me Tender in August 1956, Parker sent a memo to the producer, David Weisbart. Elvis was understandably nervous about acting in a movie for the first time, the manager said, and suggested it might be prudent for Parker to be on the set, since “a familiar face will help keep this fellow settled down.” Weisbart okayed it, thus giving the Colonel permission to grow bolder in his requests. A month later, Weisbart memoed Buddy Adler that Parker wanted to know if it would be possible for him to receive some kind of screen credit.

  “He’s been so cooperative with us on everything pertaining to Presley,” wrote Weisbart, “that I thought this would not be a bad idea . . . it can read Technical Advisor . . . Col. Tom Parker.” Adler, who bent over backward to make the Colonel happy after the bizarre incident in the men’s room—recently giving him a pair of gold cuff links—wrote back that it was “perfectly okay,” thus setting the precedent for Parker’s credit on all of Presley’s motion pictures.

  Now Parker began flexing more muscle, asking that Elvis’s visitors, including Fox executives, be limited on the set. Furthermore, Parker wanted it understood that he was the man who called the shots, and any access to Elvis would have to go through him. That went for Weisbart (and over at Paramount, Wallis and Hazen); Harry Brand, the Fox publicist; and even the people who made up the call sheets. Trude Forsher would be appointed to phone Elvis at the Beverly Wilshire with his call for the morning.

  One person Parker particularly targeted was Lenny Hirshan. While Hirshan remained Presley’s motion picture agent of record, Parker attempted to shut him out at every turn, working out a code with Elvis’s entourage to alert him when Hirshan came to the studio. It was Hirshan who provided Fox with Elvis’s exact arrival times, but Parker didn’t want Hirshan or his counterpart at the agency, Peter Shaw, anywhere near his star, fearing they would try to undermine the Colonel’s authority. Whenever either man suggested a breakfast meeting, Parker answered, “Sure, six A.M.,” knowing that such an hour was far too early for a Hollywood agent who had been out the night before.

  If Parker was always preoccupied with what he perceived as the hidden agendas of others, says Byron Raphael, at the Morris office Parker’s paranoia was not without foundation. So many of the agents despised the Colonel that “if they could have stolen Elvis away from him, they would have.”

  Early in his association with William Morris, Parker realized that agents were encouraged to nurture strong personal relationships with the clients, both to keep the star with the agency if the client and manager split, and in case the manager became a hindrance. Too, many agents themselves became managers, and with a solid friendship in place, it was easy to wean a star away from a manager who took a hefty percentage of his earnings.

  Parker, who also feared the college-educated Morris agents might influence Elvis’s decisions, made sure that no one at the agency had Elvis’s private phone number, even though the agents had always called such stars as Robert Mitchum and Rita Hayworth directly. And on the movie set, where he would soon spend less time on each picture, Parker encouraged Elvis’s happy-go-lucky cousins and friends from home—the entourage the press would eventually dub the Memphis Mafia—to keep an eye out for anyone who tried to get Elvis alone, especially Hirshan, who insisted he was there only to make sure Elvis got everything he needed.

  In time, Parker would have Hirshan barred from the set, and
in the post-army years, he would be relieved as the contact altogether, “because I was developing too much of a relationship with Elvis,” Hirshan admits. “Also, my thinking processes were not his in terms of the kind of pictures that I would have gotten for Elvis and that Elvis wanted to do.”

  To Elvis, Parker explained it differently. “You can’t trust people in this town,” he said. “There are Jews here, and Jews are going to take advantage of you.” In the future, when the “Jewish” explanation wasn’t applicable, Parker scared Elvis away from would-be advisors by insinuating they were homosexual.

  Presley, who was both loyal to the Colonel and dependent on him for every professional move, remained isolated from the business dealings, both by choice and by his manager’s design. Joe Hazen recognized early that Parker, who became more like a spiteful armed guard than an amiable shepherd, kept things from Elvis that he shouldn’t have, and that, in Hazen’s view, Parker “possessed him. If Elvis had a lawyer on his own, there would have been no Parker. No lawyer would’ve permitted Parker to take over a client like he did.”

  When Elvis signed his seven-picture deal with Paramount, he told reporters he wouldn’t be singing in the movies because “I want to be the kind of actor that stays around for a long time.” The way he understood it, his role in Love Me Tender was strictly dramatic. And so he was dismayed to learn from the Colonel that he would perform four songs, in part to allow RCA to capitalize on the movie’s success—the title song, a reworking of the folk air “Aura Lee,” would sell more than 2.5 million singles by Christmas—and to help Steve Sholes get out a second album for the crucial fourth quarter.

  Disappointed, and then angry to realize he’d been duped, Elvis balked. Everything was happening so fast. The criticism of his stage act had actually made him cry. (“I’d sooner cut my throat than be vulgar. You’ve seen my folks. They’re respectable God-fearin’ people. They wouldn’t let me do anything vulgar.”) Now, with the pressure of learning how to make movies, he couldn’t sleep. And the Colonel was even saying he couldn’t use his band on the soundtracks, but rather studio musicians with whom he’d have no rapport.

  Parker took him aside and laid it on the line. “Look,” he said, “it’s pretty easy. We do it this way, we make money. We do it your way, we - don’t make money.” Presley, who as a small child promised his mother he would lead the family out of debt, and who continually heard the stern admonishment of his father not to cross the Colonel, gave in. “Okay,” Elvis said, “let’s make money.”

  Now Parker, as heady with power as any despotic dictator, was equally forceful with Fox, setting another precedent for Presley’s movie years when he insisted that the songs Elvis recorded for the soundtrack be assigned to Presley’s own publishing company, and not the studio’s.

  Through an arrangement with the Aberbachs, who organized Elvis Presley Music with ownership split equally between the singer and Hill and Range, Elvis would receive cowriting credit along with Vera Matson. In this case, the point was moot—most of the melodies were in the public domain, and Matson was the wife of the film’s musical director, Ken Darby. But in the future, Parker and the Aberbachs adhered to a closed-door policy, using only those writers—primarily Otis Blackwell, Ben Weisman, and the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller—who were willing to give up a portion of their royalties in exchange for Elvis recording their songs. “For the first twelve years of his recording life,” says Freddy Bienstock, “Elvis didn’t look at a song unless I brought it to him.”

  Neither Parker nor the Aberbachs saw anything wrong with “cut-ins,” as they were called. The practice was fairly common, though viewed as unethical today. The Colonel likewise considered it only good business when he and the Aberbachs later structured two of Presley’s publishing companies to give 40 percent ownership to Parker, 15 percent to Elvis, and 45 percent to Parker’s friends, with Parker then taking 25 percent of - Presley’s 15 percent as commission. After all, Parker rationalized, Elvis was his only client.

  Constantly jockeying for position and control, the Colonel had much to coordinate as Love Me Tender began shooting. But while Parker stayed on the phone to RCA, or orchestrated his office hijinks (one of his favorite tricks was to “hypnotize” the staff to quack, bark, or dance like a trained bear when guests like Tommy Sands dropped by), his attention was sorely needed elsewhere. Elvis had reported to the lot only a week after the contract was signed, and filming began with one of the most dramatic sequences of the story, the homecoming scene in the farmhouse, which Weisbart termed “a very rough way for even the experienced members of our cast to begin shooting, let alone Presley who has yet to get his feet wet in the medium.”

  Although Elvis had been the producer’s third choice for the lead, everyone from Frank McCarthy, Fox’s director of censorship, to Presley’s costar, the revered character actress Mildred Dunnock, was surprised at - Elvis’s assurance as an actor. Dunnock, who had coached him in the delivery of lines, praised him as “a beginner who had one of the essentials of acting, which is to believe.” But the picture was on an escalated schedule, since Presley had personal appearances to fulfill, and the Morris office still thought his career might be over by the time the movie came out. And with Adler complaining that the film was over budget, Elvis was often photographed in one take, from less than flattering angles.

  A responsible manager would have spoken up about how his client looked in the dailies—when the film was released, one critic compared Elvis to a sausage, another to a hunk of lamb—except that Parker didn’t care about Elvis’s development as an actor, only about how the film sold product and promoted the live shows.

  At times, he even seemed to resent the attention that Elvis commanded. When Trude Forsher remarked to her boss that she understood all the excitement about Elvis (“He has magnetism”), the Colonel turned on her. “Magnetism?” he said. “With all his magnetism, if I hadn’t taken him off that truck, he would still be driving it.”

  And so Parker went along with the decision to rush Elvis through his motion picture debut, and in disregarding nearly all the wishes of his client, forged the first link in Presley’s long chain of artistic disappointments. But from a purely commercial standpoint, the Colonel was right. The film would make back its cost in less than three weeks.

  Anticipating what the movie would mean for record sales, Parker negotiated a new contract with RCA. Elvis would receive an immediate advance of $135,000 and a weekly paycheck of $1,000, both against a 5 percent royalty. The one requirement was ten personal appearances to promote his recordings, in person, or on radio or television. Presley immediately hit the road for five cities in Texas, and the Colonel invited a host of RCA executives to Houston for the performance.

  “He had an apartment down there,” remembers Chet Atkins. “We were all sitting around, and he went into the kitchen and brought out a bowl. He had that accent, couldn’t say r’s, and he said, ‘The Colonel’s wefidgerator is gettin’ low on groceries. So I’m gonna pass this bowl around, and I don’t want to hear any silver or copper fallin’ in it. I want to hear paper.’ So everybody chipped in a few bucks, and he sent Bevo out to get some food. He loved separating people from their money.”

  When Love Me Tender opened at New York’s Paramount Theater on November 15, 1956, a forty-foot cutout of Elvis decorating its façade, nearly 2,000 fans of all ages lined up, the queue snaking all the way from Times Square to Eighth Avenue. Once the line reached the New York Times Building, the paper’s management asked the police to redirect it across the street, where it again bottled up traffic on Forty-third Street, all the way across to Grand Central Terminal. Theater manager Charles Einfeld sent the Fox publicity department an ecstatic telegram: “Spread the news that we have a most sensational attraction!”

  Parker, who had staged the gathering as a publicity stunt for newsreel photographers, handing out ELVIS FOR PRESIDENT buttons and equipping the fans with professionally lettered signs (OK, ELVIS, LET’S REALLY GO!), had his own advice fo
r theater operators: make sure to empty the house after every showing.

  Now the Colonel couldn’t wait to throw it all in the face of Joe Hazen, using the film’s success to sweeten the bad taste over the Paramount deal. As the studio began developing Loving You, Parker bragged to Hazen about his employment on Love Me Tender. He inquired, Hazen wrote to Wallis, “as to how much money he was going to get, indicating that he should be employed in connection with the production of the photoplay, since he knew how to handle Presley.”

  Hazen let the comment pass, but the Colonel soon returned to “spew” about all the deals he’d recently turned down, including $75,000 to have Elvis sing two songs in another Fox picture. His motive: to force Wallis and Hazen to adjust Presley’s salary on Loving You. After several calls from Abe Lastfogel, the producers agreed to give Elvis a bonus of $25,000, a figure that was to include a fee for Parker’s services as well. As Hazen wrote to Wallis on January 17, 1957, the $25,000 was to be “divided among them according to their own desires.”

  Parker, however, was now of the mind-set that any deal that benefited Elvis should also benefit him in a manner above and beyond his 25 percent commission. Lastfogel, acting on the Colonel’s instructions, told the producers that Parker would have to turn over the entire $25,000 to Elvis, as he “could not or would not keep any of it personally.” Additionally, Lastfogel said, Parker, who had originally pledged to remain in Hollywood throughout the production of the picture, now refused to come out to the coast unless he was personally compensated.

  On February 7, 1957, Lastfogel wrote to Hazen and Wallis expressing his gratitude for “your paying Elvis Presley and Colonel Parker the additional $50,000.” Parker, too, wrote to Wallis on the same day. But his letter made it clear: half of that $50,000 was for him. A second contract would be drawn “for the cooperation of Colonel Tom Parker,” who would be listed as “technical advisor” on the film.