The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  “The times when I was there,” remembers Gabe Tucker, “he’d say, - ‘Let’s go down and play, fellers.’ He’d give me a handful of hundred-dollar chips and say, ‘Play some, Gabe, play some.’ He’d take a chance on anything—covered every number on a roulette wheel. I told him, ‘Colonel, you can’t win playin’ like you play.’ But he’d just stack ’em up all over and make sure that nobody sat at that table except us. If somebody tried to muscle in, he’d have us all get out those cigars—‘Now light that up, light that up!’—and they didn’t stay too long. We never did play with somebody we didn’t know.”

  With the opening of the El Rancho, built in 1941 on vacant land destined to become the Strip—at first only a two-lane highway beckoning jaded Los Angeles residents to a playground in the desert—Las Vegas began to take its first steps as a gambling mecca, followed soon by the gangster glamour of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel and Milton Prell’s Hotel Sahara, the “Jewel of the Desert.” Parker and Arnold were playing the North Africa–themed Sahara, where plaster camels stood as sentinels at the hotel’s entrance, when the two had the spat that led to their breakup in 1953.

  Prell, the first hotel executive to offer big-name attractions in Strip lounges, was one of the earliest gambling figures in the state. He’d opened Club Bingo in 1947, enlarging it in 1952 to become the Sahara, and went on to build and operate the Lucky Strike Club and the Mint downtown. But Prell had plenty of help. The Sahara was built with West Coast bookie and extortion profits, as well as Oregon race-wire money. And while the hotel would be controlled by a number of mobster families through the years, Prell himself was the front man for the Detroit branch of the Cosa Nostra. He’d given 20 percent interest in the Sahara to its Phoenix-based contractor, Del Webb, who’d also built Siegel’s Flamingo, and whose company would become a major force in the gaming industry, leasing casino space.

  The Colonel took a liking to Prell, a Montana native and former Los Angeles jeweler, who extended him a high line of casino credit, met him frequently for breakfast, and sat around the pool with him, deep in conversation. The two formed an intimacy unlike any other in Parker’s personal history, and Prell became the one man the Colonel turned to whenever he needed a favor in Vegas.

  Parker was normally too paranoid to allow himself such a close relationship. When his brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott, signed on to head Elvis’s security, Parker bluntly laid it on the table: “Bitsy, I trust you more than anyone else. But you have one fault. You make too many friends.”

  It was imperative to Parker that he and Prell stay on the best of terms, and the Colonel went out of his way to show the hotel manager the utmost respect. When Byron told the Colonel he’d lost $100 at blackjack and written the casino a cold check—one he planned to warm up as soon as they returned to California—Parker marched his young aide into Prell’s office to apologize and ask for forgiveness. “The check hadn’t even bounced yet, but the Colonel made such a big production out of it that I got the feeling they had some sort of side deal, a definite connection beyond the obvious.”

  The Colonel was adamantly opposed to Byron’s fondness for the tables (“Don’t you know how stupid gamblers are? They’re all nebos!”—carny talk for “dimwit” or an easy mark), and warned him against the evils of the game. In 1954, after several years of taking Marie’s son, Bobby, under his wing and teaching him to become a manager for such acts as country singers George Morgan and Slim Whitman, Parker had sent him home to Tampa after Bobby developed an inordinate interest in blackjack, frequenting both Las Vegas and the after-hours clubs in Nashville. Byron was astonished, then, to see how the Colonel couldn’t leave the dollar slots alone, and how he called on his “mental telepathy and perpetual perception motors” to reconcile his desire to play with his certainty that the odds were against him. “He stared at the slot machine for the longest time, then lit his cigar, and said, ‘I’m hypnotizing it to pay off.’ That’s how confident he was that he could will anyone or anything into doing what he wanted.”

  Parker’s increased interest in gambling and other obsessive-compulsive behaviors may have been a way to keep his thoughts from settling on the secrets of his past, including his botched army career. For the U.S. Army was very much on his mind these days, and had been since early ’56, when Elvis turned twenty-one.

  Certainly Elvis would be eligible for the draft, but Parker couldn’t have him called up and processed like any other soldier. No, the Colonel would have to negotiate the terms of Elvis’s service with the army itself, through a series of interactions that might raise questions about Parker’s own tours of duty. The prospect must have filled him with trepidation, but for a man who psychologically viewed his client as his beautiful alter ego—always “Elvis and the Colonel”—any thoughts on how to handle Elvis’s army career would have been a projection of Parker’s own patriotism. It also would have triggered an intense desire to relive his own army experience and rectify the past. For that, Elvis would need to be the model soldier, with no blemishes on his record like AWOL, desertion, or discharge for emotional instability.

  To his staff, Parker was consumed only with manipulating the situation for the greatest public relations good. What has never before come to light is exactly how he did it. In the summer of ’56, he began dictating a series of letters to Trude addressed to the Pentagon, requesting that the army assign Elvis to Special Services, so that Presley might bypass boot camp and rigorous training and concentrate all his efforts on entertaining Uncle Sam’s troops.

  But Parker had no intention of Elvis going into Special Services. In fact, that was the last thing he wanted. At every whim, the boy would be made to perform free in front of 20,000 soldiers. The Colonel wouldn’t even be able to sell programs! Worse, each appearance would be filmed and sold to television networks, with every cent going into the army’s coffers. The overexposure would kill Elvis’s motion picture career.

  No, no, Elvis could not go into Special Services. Besides, a public hew and cry would rise up all across the land, from veterans’ groups and congressmen, from mothers and fathers outraged that a hip-shaking hooligan was treated any differently than their boy. Faron Young had done it, but who cared about Faron, strumming his honky-tonk guitar for army recruitment programs? A big star who shirked his duty had hell to pay.

  Why then had Parker made a request for Elvis to go into the army as anything but a regular Joe? Because the Colonel was, as usual, one step ahead of everyone. Now, in secret, he fed a story to Billboard magazine in October ’56—more than a year before Elvis would receive his induction notice—informing the publication that Elvis would be drafted in December ’57 and assigned to Special Services. The magazine telephoned Fort Dix, New Jersey, for confirmation, and learned that, indeed, Elvis was about to get a cushy deal. His hair would not be cut, and after six weeks of basic training, he would be free to resume being Elvis. All he had to do was entertain his fellow soldiers on behalf of his government.

  Presley, learning of this for the first time in Billboard, was stunned and confused. Hadn’t Milton Bowers, chairman of his draft board, promised to notify Elvis privately in advance of just such things? Bowers said yes, but the story had come out of the blue. Elvis read it again. The only people who would know the date of his induction, the magazine reported, were army personnel and Presley’s “closest business associates.”

  For a year, Parker kept Elvis hanging, saying he would talk to the boys in Washington, see what he could do. Elvis’s cronies were perplexed, George Klein, his high school friend, saying, “There’s no war going on, you’re sitting on the top of the world, and all of a sudden you’ve got to go into the army? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Freddy Bienstock was with the Colonel in California when Parker went to deliver the unhappy news. They found Elvis in the dining room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, surrounded by his luckless cousins and Cliff Gleaves, a disheveled runt of a fellow Elvis met in ’56 and kept around for comic relief. The Colonel said he was s
orry. He had done everything possible, but Elvis had to go into the army. Elvis stared in silence, and the cousins looked away. Suddenly Cliff dropped his knife and fork. “What’s going to happen to me? I’ve given him the best years of my life!”

  Parker had outslicked them all—the army, which had long ago besmirched his own service record, and his increasingly ill-tempered client, who needed a cooling-off period, riding around in tanks in Germany in the dead of winter. Now, he told him, Elvis must go back to the draft board and say he wanted to serve his country like any other young man, without preferential treatment of any kind.

  What did it matter if Parker had, in a way, enlisted him? Elvis’s service number would start with “US,” the code for “drafted.” He would look like a hero. And when he got out two years later, he would be visibly tamed, transformed into a pure symbol of America, a clean-cut god for the masses. No more would he personify the music of a subversive and dangerous subculture, led by wild deejays high on pills and payola.

  Parker had it all figured out. But had the Colonel, in waxing nostalgic about his days as Private Parker in carefree Hawaii, granted the army a codicil, especially after backing out of the Special Services agreement? In November ’57, a month before Elvis received his draft notice, Presley played two dates in Honolulu, booked by Lee Gordon, who won the honor from the Colonel on a roll of the dice. The day after the shows at the Honolulu Stadium, Elvis performed for servicemen at Schofield Barracks, Pearl Harbor. Thus, Elvis’s last show before entering the army was a free one—hardly Parker’s favorite kind. Less than a month later, he would write Harry Kalcheim at William Morris to defend his decision to stop booking Elvis for live performances, citing fear of overexposure—one of his explanations for turning down a myriad of recent offers, including tours of South America, Great Britain, and Australia. At RCA, says Sam Esgro, the story swirled that Parker must have citizenship problems, because no one would turn down such lucrative dates.

  Elvis, who was in constant touch with Milton Bowers at the Memphis draft board, drove down to pick up his induction notice in person on December 19. The deal was set: a two-year tour of duty and, by request of Paramount Studio head Y. Frank Freeman and Elvis himself, a sixty-day deferment to allow Presley to make his second Paramount picture, King Creole, which would go into production in January.

  Paul Nathan and Joe Hazen had argued against putting Presley in the musical drama, based on Harold Robbins’s popular novel A Stone for Danny Fisher, believing the story of an impressionable teen caught up in the underworld of violence and crime was too close to the feel of Jailhouse Rock and reinforced the image of Elvis as a troubled young man.

  Wallis vetoed them and held his ground again when Nathan sent the producer a memo saying “the business of Danny using the jagged edges of two broken bottles as a weapon is unacceptable” to the Breen office, referencing Joseph Breen, Hollywood’s chief censor. “Is it in the [Production] Code?” Wallis scribbled back. “If not, we will use it.” Thus, Wallis ensured what became Elvis’s most memorable scene. But he also directed screenwriter Oscar Saul to tone down the seamier aspects of the story dealing with mobsters and whores, and to move the setting from New York to New Orleans, with its rich musical heritage.

  Although Parker cajoled Steve Sholes on occasion—for his forty-sixth birthday, Parker presented him with an enormous bead-and-gold-festooned doghouse, custom-built for Nipper—relations between them remained strained; RCA had no say about which music would be used in the movies and little input as to songs that made up the albums. Through what many at the company thought was a direct payoff to singles division manager Bill Bullock (“That crooked son of a bitch gave Elvis to the Colonel lock, stock, and barrel,” says a former employee), Parker continued to wrest control from RCA. Now he dictated almost all terms with the label and determined how many singles the company released each year.

  Nonetheless, the company was fired up about the idea of a Dixieland soundtrack, and a representative met with Parker and Paramount officials in California to discuss the deal. They were throwing around figures—$250,000 as Lenny Hirshan remembers it—when the Colonel stopped the meeting, saying he had someone outside he needed to bring in for an important negotiation. He opened the door to usher in a balloon salesman—a down-at-the-heels carnival supplier—and as the executives listened, the Colonel cut a deal for “a ton of balloons, cheaper than what the guy was offering them for, maybe ten cents a hundred.” The men shook their heads, but the message was clear: nobody, from crusty carnies to hot-shot moguls, was going to get the best of the Colonel.

  With King Creole, Hal Wallis gave Presley the chance to become the dramatic actor he yearned to be, matching him with respected director Michael Curtiz (“For the first time, I know what a director is,” Elvis said later), and an explosive cast of Carolyn Jones, Dean Jagger, and Walter Matthau, with whom the Colonel played cards between scenes. It was the performance that would forever define his potential, both to him and to those who had never quite believed in him. “Just like in his music, he really got involved in his acting,” said Curtiz. “You’d look in his eyes, and boy, they were really going.”

  Elvis had waited for this moment since high school, lost in the dreamy darkness of the Suzore Number Two Theater in Memphis, his arm around his girl, Dixie Locke. But now it took on new importance. Scared that rock and roll might be a fad, that his fame would fade away while he was in the army, he hoped he’d do a good enough job on King Creole to resume his movie career when he returned in 1960.

  The Colonel sat him down and made the promise that would forever bond Elvis Presley to Tom Parker. “If you go into the army, stay a good boy, and do nothing to embarrass your country,” the Colonel said; “I’ll see to it that you’ll come back a bigger star than when you left.”

  At 6:35 A.M. on March 24, 1958, the world’s most famous recruit reported to the Memphis draft board, accompanied by his parents and his girlfriend, Anita Wood. He wore a wan smile and a loud plaid sport jacket over a striped shirt, and carried a leather bag with exactly what the army said to bring—a comb, a razor, a toothbrush, and enough money to last two weeks. The Colonel was already on hand, chatting with the army brass and the media, and palming off his bargain balloons—now stamped King Creole—to the gathering crowd. “Colonel Parker,” a reporter scribbled down on his pad, “seemed happier than ever.”

  Before departing for Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where he’d undergo his famous haircut, Elvis kissed his puffy-eyed mother, hugged his father, and gazed fondly at his ’58 Cadillac. “Good-bye, you long, black son of a bitch,” he said, drawing a laugh from his fellow soldiers. Then he climbed aboard the bus to leave behind everything he had ever known and begin life anew as Private Presley. By week’s end, he would be assigned to the Second Armored Division, stationed at Fort Hood, Killeen, Texas.

  The Colonel would follow to Fort Chaffee, to cheerfully marshal photographers, share Elvis’s first army meal, and try to sneak a Southern string necktie into the army’s standard clothing issue. And he would make several visits to Fort Hood, in between planning the release of Elvis’s singles during his two-year tour of duty. Though Steve Sholes had fought the Colonel to build up a backlog of recordings, the label had scarcely any material, and now the April release, “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”/“Doncha Think It’s Time,” performed poorly in comparison to recent singles. During his two-week furlough, when he returned home to Memphis, Elvis, in regulation khaki uniform, tie, and hat, drove to Nashville for what would be his last studio recording session for two years. Backed by Nashville’s crack A-team session players, assembled by Chet Atkins, he cut five steamy, uptempo numbers for a flow of product, including “I Need Your Love Tonight” and “A Big Hunk o’ Love,” which would help restore his prominence on radio.

  But how long, he wondered, would it last? At Fort Hood, Elvis, who had always suffered from sleep disturbance and nightmares, was visited by a haunting dream: when he came out of the army, everything was gone—no songs
on the charts, no fans at the Graceland gates, not even a specter of the Colonel. Elvis asked his friend Eddie Fadal, a former deejay who opened his Waco home to him, to help him get some medication—uppers to ease him through the day and downers to let him sleep. It was easy: “My father knew all the doctors in town,” says Fadal’s daughter, Janice.

  Elvis had long pilfered diet pills from his alcoholic mother, Gladys, whom the image-conscious Colonel had encouraged to lose weight for the family publicity photos. Now, nothing a physician might provide eased the pain of their separation. During basic training, Elvis called home, and as Fadal later remembered, “When he got her on the line, all he said was, ‘Mama . . . ’ And, apparently, she said, ‘Elvis . . . ’ And from then on, for a whole hour, they were crying and moaning on the telephone—hardly a word was spoken.”

  Soon Elvis installed the family and his pal Lamar Fike in a three-bedroom rental house near the base. But Gladys’s health, which had declined in the months leading to Elvis’s enlistment, grew steadily worse. A doctor in Killeen suspected hepatitis and suggested she return to Tennessee at once. On August 8, she boarded a train for Memphis, where she died six days later at Methodist Hospital at the age of forty-six.

  Elvis was inconsolable. When Lamar Fike arrived at the hospital shortly after Elvis received the news, “that elevator opened, and I’ve never heard such crying and screaming and hollering in my life. This wailing. Almost like wolves. It made me shudder. I came around the corner and Elvis was walking towards me, and he said, ‘Lamar, Satnin’ isn’t here.’ And I said, ‘I know, Elvis, I know.’ ”

  Later that day, Elvis was still in no shape to speak with the funeral director, leaving the task to his father, the Colonel, and Freddy Bienstock.