The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  Parker spent much of the day in his fun-house offices at Paramount and MGM cutting up with the cost-free additions to his staff—Jim O’Brien, his private secretary, on loan from Hill and Range; Irv Schecter and John Hartmann, supplied by the William Morris office; and Grelun Landon, courtesy of RCA. Soon, Gabe Tucker would also be there on the Morris dime.

  On occasion, Parker referred to O’Brien as Sergeant. But as usual, nobody had any real rank except Diskin, whose desk, a third the size of - Parker’s, was in the Colonel’s private office at MGM. The rest were privates who helped Parker carry out his schemes.

  Each morning, the staff arrived at the mazelike Elvis Exploitations offices at MGM and prepared a list of VIP birthdays so the Colonel could make his congratulatory calls, the aides lining up in front of a microphone in the office and singing to whomever their boss had on the phone. “I thought it was kind of rank,” remembers John Hartmann, who went on to manage David Crosby and Graham Nash, Canned Heat, and the group America, “but I did it anyway.”

  “We didn’t hurt ourselves workin’,” says Tucker, whose MGM office was in Clark Gable’s old dressing room, and whose duties included tamping down the Colonel’s pipe, which replaced the cigars when Parker got upset. Tucker also ran the “cookhouse,” a so-called carnival kitchen Parker made by throwing an oilcloth over the conference room table, adding ketchup bottles and kitchen chairs, and promoting a stove and refrigerator from the studio so Parker could cook slumgullion, a boiled stew that hearkened to his hobo days.

  Most of the time they ordered food in. But after Easy Come, Easy Go, the Colonel would appropriate actor Bob Isenberg from the cast to wear a chef’s hat and serve occasional lunch guests like Abe Lastfogel, who choked down the slices of ham the Colonel piled on to watch the little Jewish man squirm. When that grew tiresome, Parker totaled up the free meals he’d gotten in the last month, instructing Tucker to pick a name from the directory of MGM executives and call to say, “The Colonel thinks you ought to invite us to supper.”

  Soon, the requests grew more elaborate and grand. The president of RCA sent him a check for $1 million without any paperwork when Parker asked for a loan for Vernon Presley, allegedly to buy a Memphis skating rink. The Colonel liked his tests.

  He began spending weeks at a time in Palm Springs, where Milton Prell had a house (they both also kept an apartment at the Wilshire Comstock in L.A.), and where he could keep a closer eye on his neighbor, Hal Wallis. The producer continued to humor him, sending him, while on a trip to England, a small dish from the Elephant Club for Parker’s collection. Parker wrote him a letter, thanking him for swiping it. “I could tell you that I bought it, but I know that you would have a lot more respect for me if you felt that I had lifted it,” Wallis replied.

  Their relationship remained cordial but strained, although Wallis succeeded in getting the Colonel to read perhaps his first script, for the carnival-themed Roustabout, which Wallis produced in part to honor - Parker’s colorful past. (“Of course, we want you to be associated with the project, as I know how close this type of life is to you,” he wrote.) Afterward, Parker sent Wallis an affectionate letter in which he complimented the producer’s ability to make a picture jell. “You have a certain magic wand that makes these things come out even, even if other people - don’t understand it all the time,” he said. “This I respect more than I can put in words.”

  Parker may have meant the flattery as a kind of balm. “When I was doing Roustabout,” recalls the screenwriter Allan Weiss, “I went down to Palm Springs and spent a weekend with the Colonel, interviewing him specifically on his circus background. When I got back, Hal Wallis said, ‘How did it go?’ I told him it went fairly well, and I thought we had a good subject for Elvis. Then he said, ‘It was an expensive weekend.’ I thought, ‘Oh, my God, is he referring to the hotel I stayed at, or what?’ I learned later that the Colonel had billed him for his time.”

  Wallis took such things in stride, but the two could also go for days and not speak. Afterward, in Palm Springs, it would be as if the incident had never happened, Parker going to dinner and tossing his hat on one of Wallis’s priceless Rodin sculptures just to rankle his host, or asking the producer to play golf with Marie’s grandson, Tommy, when the boy and his sister, Sharon, came for the summer. Later, the Colonel would throw a black-tie party and invite Wallis, among others, answering the door wearing nothing but Bermuda shorts.

  Underneath his various guises, however, the Colonel wrestled with increasingly dark moods of depression. Aside from his concern about his heart and his growing estrangement from Elvis, he was deeply worried about Marie.

  In the past, there were times when he’d avoided going to Palm Springs because he didn’t want to have to put up with her carrying on about her cats—a dog lover, his ardor barely extended to felines, and he was jealous of her doting on a particular male cat named Midnight.

  “I was at the house one day,” remembers Lamar Fike, “and Colonel and I were sitting in the den, talking. Marie came in all distraught and said, ‘Midnight’s on the roof! Midnight’s on the roof!’ Colonel said, ‘He’ll come down.’

  “She came back in a little while and said, ‘Midnight’s still on the roof! Do something!’ So Colonel went out with a hose about as big as a - fireman’s, with tremendous pressure, and aimed it at that cat, and blew it over the garage and the porte cochere, and out into the street. It landed on its feet, but boy, was it surprised! Colonel came back in and said, ‘Now, that’s how you get a cat off a roof.’ ”

  Lately, though, he’d demonstrated more compassion. Marie’s health had begun to deteriorate. She complained to Gabe Tucker and to her brother, Bitsy, that living with the Colonel was constant stress, and sometimes he got on her nerves so badly she suffered debilitating headaches that left her unable to think straight. But the Colonel believed it was more than that; her mind seemed to be slipping, and sometimes her rantings, he said in off-the-cuff remarks, drove him crazy. Since she was also becoming severely arthritic, after the Tuckers moved out Parker hated to leave her alone, so first he had RCA sales manager Jack Burgess stay up all night with her and play cards. When Burgess grew weary, it was Irv Schecter, one of Marie’s favorites, who got the call. Schecter was probably only too glad to be out of Parker’s office, where the Colonel thought his William Morris recruit had developed ulcers.

  It was during the 1964 making of Roustabout that Elvis met Larry Geller, who would become one of the most significant members of the Memphis Mafia and perhaps Presley’s purest friend.

  A hairdresser in Jay Sebring’s tony salon, Geller first showed up at Presley’s home on Perugia Way in April ’64 at the invitation of entourage member Alan Fortas. Elvis had heard good things about his work, Fortas told him. Affable and expressive, Geller talked at length to Elvis about his dedication to spiritual studies and the metaphysical, which seemed to set the singer’s curiosity on fire.

  “What you’re talking about,” Elvis said, hungry for discussion, “is what I secretly think about all the time. You don’t know what this means to me.” They talked of Elvis’s purpose in life, and the singer confessed he felt “chosen” but didn’t know why. “I’ve always felt this unseen hand guiding my life ever since I was a little boy,” he said. “Why was I plucked out of all of the millions of millions of lives to be Elvis?”

  The next day, at Elvis’s request, Geller showed up at Paramount with a copy of The Impersonal Life, a book he thought would aid Presley in his quest. From then on, Elvis would read such books every day, dedicating himself to the study of Eastern religion and the spiritual path, with Larry as his personal teacher. Almost immediately, the entourage, as well as Parker and Priscilla, viewed Geller with suspicion, seeing him as a disruptive interloper who threatened the status quo.

  Toward the end of 1964, however, Parker had much bigger things on his mind than bickering among the Elvis camp. That December, he signed a contract with United Artists for two pictures (Frankie and Johnny and Clambake) at $65
0,000 each. But more important, with the help of Abe Lastfogel, who said it couldn’t be done, he succeeded in completing a deal with MGM for the benchmark figure of $1 million.

  Lastfogel thought Parker was crazy, bringing Gabe Tucker in for some light banter to distract the studio lawyers, and insisting he wouldn’t do the deal unless MGM threw in the ashtray that lay on the conference room table. But in the end, he nailed down a deal for three pictures, the first commanding $1 million—$250,000 of which would be paid in $1,000 weekly installments over five years—and the next two drawing $750,000 each. Profit participation was set at 40 percent.

  The Colonel couldn’t contain his glee. He’d finally gotten the best of them all—Wallis, Hazen, Lastfogel, everyone. By sheer gall and snow-manship, Parker had succeeded in making Elvis the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, and his career total was even more impressive: since the beginning of their relationship, he’d brokered deals that had earned Presley $35 million. But to the Colonel’s great disappointment, Elvis didn’t seem particularly pleased about the new contract. In fact, since the May departure of Joe Esposito, the foreman of the entourage and the Colonel’s chief spy, Parker couldn’t even get his client on the phone.

  Elvis had picked this time to show a rare spurt of independence. In early October, when he reported to Allied Artists to begin preproduction on Tickle Me, he told the Colonel and everyone on the set that it was important to him to be home in Memphis for Thanksgiving. As filming wore on and delays ensued, Elvis realized that the schedule would be tight, but still he kept quiet. Finally, he got his release on Tuesday, November 24, two days before Thanksgiving, with a caravan of cars and a Dodge mobile home yet to transport cross-country.

  In late February, Presley went to Nashville to record the soundtrack for Harum Scarum, the first of the three MGM pictures, a Sam Katzman quickie with a plot that called for Elvis to wear a turban, be kidnapped by a gang of assassins, and perform with a Middle Eastern dancing troupe—a scenario that seemed to combine Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik with the Hawaiian and gypsy stories Parker had suggested to Hal Wallis years before. The session, Presley’s first time in a recording studio in eight months, went poorly as the former rocker balked at singing such lyrics as “Come hear my desert serenade.” Parker, who had kept tabs on Elvis’s mounting dissatisfaction, began sending letters to Marty Lacker, the new Memphis Mafia foreman, stressing the importance of the “caravan superintendent,” as he called him, getting Elvis and company to the coast on time to begin filming.

  Elvis, however, was in no hurry to report to California, preferring to spend time with Larry Geller in meditation and study. Weeks went by, and Parker’s continuous calls went unheeded. “Elvis is not ready to come back,” Marty reported, and it did no good for Parker to scream. He was beside himself with anxiety, the studio telephoning night and day and talking breach of contract. To duck their calls, he finally staged an elaborate ruse, having Marie phone Harry Jenkins, who in late 1963 replaced Bill Bullock at RCA in New York.

  “My husband is deathly ill,” Marie whispered into the phone. “It’s a bad situation.” She’d just ordered a hospital bed for him, in fact, and she needed Jenkins to get the word to MGM and to Gabe Tucker, relaxing in Houston after months out on the road touring Elvis’s cars. Jenkins dutifully reported the grave news: “Gabe, Colonel is bad sick. Marie wants you to come out and take care of him.” Tucker, afraid that Parker had suffered another heart attack, caught the first plane, only to find the Colonel himself waiting to pick him up.

  “Goddamn, Colonel, you scared the hell out of me. Mr. Jenkins said you was in bad shape.”

  “Well, I didn’t feel good yesterday.”

  They went home, and Tucker knew there was something wrong after all. “He said, ‘Let’s sit out by the pool,’ ” and Parker told him the whole story. Secretly, the Colonel’s employee rooted for Elvis. “I thought, well, by God, Elvis showed him this time. For a change he stood up.” But Parker was somehow sympathetic, too—craving a kind word and a compliment. No manager had ever accomplished what he had, or taken a star to such heights. Now he’d made a once-in-a-lifetime deal for a client who didn’t even care, a client who was surely slipping out of his grasp.

  “He asked me, ‘Gabe, would you get my bed turned?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ ” Afterward, Tucker rolled it out beside the pool for him, helped him into it, and made him as comfortable as he could. He wondered if Parker wasn’t sick after all. Then he plugged in the outside phone.

  The two old friends sat there for a minute reminiscing about how far - they’d come in twenty-five years. Soon, the phone started ringing nonstop—Elvis still hadn’t reported to the studio. “They was on him somethin’ awful. I never heard such cussin’ and carryin’ on, and he didn’t usually do that. Finally, I said, ‘Colonel, why don’t you tell ’em to kiss your ass? You got all the money you need. You can just tell everybody that you managed the highest-paid truck driver in the world.’ And he laughed, but he said, ‘Goddamn, Gabe, that ain’t funny.’ ”

  It was March before Elvis gave in. The caravan left Memphis so late in the day that they needed to drive straight through, without the usual night’s rest in Amarillo or Albuquerque. But during a brief stop at a motel for a shower and a change of clothes, Elvis took Larry aside. Intellectually, he understood all the books Larry gave him, but he’d never had the kind of profound spiritual experience they described.

  “I explained to him that it had nothing to do with an intellectual perception,” Geller says, “that it was more of an emotion, a surrendering of the ego to God.” They continued their discussion on the drive, Elvis steering the mobile home and Larry riding shotgun, the other entourage members in the back and following in separate cars.

  They drove the rest of the night, and it was well into the next day before Elvis realized he’d gotten separated from the rest of the group. Elvis told Larry he was glad they were lost—“I need to be away from everyone, because I’m really into something important within myself.”

  By that time, they were in Arizona, near Flagstaff, approaching the famous San Francisco Peaks, in the land of the Hopi Indians. It was coming on dusk when Elvis peered into the electric-blue sky and suddenly said, “Look, man! Do you see what I see? What the hell is Joseph Stalin doing in that cloud?” Larry said he saw it, too, and then the image dissolved back into a fluffy cloud again.

  Suddenly, Elvis pulled the mobile home over and, jumping out, yelled, “Follow me, man!” Then he took off into the desert. When Larry caught up with him, Presley had tears rolling down his cheeks. “It happened!” Elvis said, hugging his friend. “I thought God was trying to tell me something about myself, and I remember you saying, ‘It’s not a thing in your head. It has to do with your heart.’ I said, ‘God, I surrender my ego. I surrender my whole life to You.’ And it happened!” The face of Stalin had turned into the face of Christ.

  “It was like a lightning bolt went right through him,” Geller recounts. “He said, ‘Larry, I know the truth now. I don’t believe in God anymore. Now I know that God is a living reality. He’s everywhere. He’s within us. He’s in everyone’s heart.”

  When they returned to California, Elvis took his friend into the den of the rental home on Perugia Way and told him he’d made a decision. After such an intense experience, he couldn’t go back to making “teenybopper movies” again. He wanted to quit show business and do something important with his life. “In fact, Larry,” he said, “I want you to find me a monastery. I’m not making a move until you tell me what to do.”

  Geller froze and then, thinking fast, told Elvis he could use his vision to make a difference in his films and in his records. “You’ve got the greatest career in the history of show business!” Geller told him. “You are the legend of them all! You are Elvis!”

  Geller’s words found their target. “He got that gorgeous grin on his face, and he said, ‘Yeah, well, to tell you the truth, I can’t imagine Priscilla next to me in some monastery, raking leaves.’ �
�� But Larry knew the conversation meant trouble. At the word monastery, collective groans rose from the other side of the louvered doors. Says Geller, “I realized that five minutes later, Colonel Parker would know everything, and the little wheels in his head would start to turn.” Soon, Parker would also learn about Elvis’s involvement with an ecumenical movement called the Self-Realization Fellowship, based in Pasadena and run by a disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda named Sri Daya Mata. And the Colonel certainly wouldn’t like that.

  The fallout started several weeks afterward on the soundstage of Harum Scarum. To keep their relationship strictly business, the Colonel made few appearances on the movie sets, and when he did, he held court, saying, “Where’s a chair for the Colonel?” and expecting the Memphis Mafia to snap to attention, bringing him water and lighting his German cigars with the yellow tips. Geller was always uncomfortable when he added, “And bring a chair for Larry . . . You sit with me, Larry.”

  “He knew that I had Elvis’s ear, and that Elvis was changing, and he couldn’t figure me out.” Sometimes, Parker even asked Geller to give him a haircut or invited him to share the whirlpool bath at the Spa in Palm Springs. It was always tense between them, but this day, Geller knew the Colonel had a different tack, and he wasted no time in getting to it.

  “Larry,” he began, “I think you’ve missed your calling. You’re tall, and have such a commanding presence. I can see you dressed up in a tuxedo, standing on the stage. You have the quality to hypnotize people.”

  By now, the Colonel had reinstalled his pipeline, Joe Esposito, who shared co-foreman duties with Marty Lacker. Elvis seemed resigned to the arrangement, telling Geller he knew the Colonel had been taking care of Joe all of those years, and that he didn’t care. Several days later, with the picture completed, Esposito reported that Parker had called and wanted his client to come over to MGM right away. Geller was blow-drying Elvis’s hair in the bathroom, and they stopped and gathered the rest of the guys and piled into two cars.