The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  Now the Colonel, who had dangled the carrot of naming Binder as the director of Elvis’s next motion picture, seemed not so amenable. “I think what pissed him off more than anything about me is that I wasn’t one of his lackeys,” Binder remembers.

  “Whenever Parker basically told me that I couldn’t do what I was doing, the Colonel would look at Elvis and say, ‘Right, Elvis?’ And Elvis would say, ‘Yes, Colonel.’ And Parker would say, ‘So Steve, we aren’t going to do that, are we?’ And I’d say, ‘If that’s what Elvis wants, then we won’t do it.’ And then we would walk out of the office, and Elvis would lighten up and jab me in the ribs and say, ‘We are going to do it. To hell with Colonel Parker.’ But he never did stand up to him in front of me.”

  Once the rehearsals shifted to NBC, Bob Finkel, or Finkels, as Parker called him, did his best to keep the Colonel “happy and in tune,” playing liar’s poker with him, and engaging in a series of pranks. When the Colonel presented Finkel with an autographed photo of himself in a Confederate uniform, Finkel donned a ridiculously large hat and had himself photographed in an Admiral Hornblower outfit, with a sword at his side and a ribbon across his chest. He signed the picture, “To Colonel Tom Parker from Commander Bob Finkel.”

  The executive producer showed up at work one day to find his office, as well as Parker’s, guarded by men from the William Morris office dressed as Buckingham Palace guards, with red jackets and furry hats. “They wouldn’t laugh, they wouldn’t smile, and they wouldn’t let me in my own door,” Finkel remembers. “The Colonel was peeping around the corner.” A week later, Finkel was preparing to go home when he discovered that his office door had been duct-taped shut from the outside.

  Binder and Howe, who were also represented by the Morris agency, were horrified by Parker’s humiliation of the young agent-trainees, and at his gall in having himself “guarded” like royalty. But Finkel put up with it all because it kept Parker away from Binder, “who would have died on this show if the Colonel had continued to harass him.”

  Finkel had also become fond of Parker, whom he called Tom. He’d heard about his immigration problems and knew that the latest movie contracts specified no foreign location shooting. Binder said maybe Interpol was looking for him and the Colonel feared arrest. Finkel couldn’t quite imagine that, but he realized Parker was in a quandary. He couldn’t take Elvis to Europe because “something prevented him from going through the gate,” and he wouldn’t let any other promoter take Presley overseas because “he was afraid Elvis would run away.”

  On the other hand, Finkel believed the Colonel was misunderstood (“I knew a side of him that many people didn’t know”), and that he was a better person than he got credit for being. He saw it in the way he cared for his wife, Marie, whom he visited on weekends in Palm Springs. The month before, she had undergone the first of two hip replacement surgeries, and Parker kept nurses at her side around the clock.

  “One day, I said, ‘Tom, you’ve been pulling pranks on me all through this escapade,’ ” Finkel remembers. “ ‘I’m going to do something to you, and I think it’ll be the best trick. I’m going to trust you to decide, because you are an honest man. But if you think I topped you, I want your cane.’ And he said, ‘You’ve got it.’ ”

  In mid-June, the group faced its first major crisis over the firing of Billy Strange, the one person Elvis had requested on the project. Strange, the show’s musical director, had cowritten the song “Memories,” a keynote ballad, which set a poignant tone. But his scheduling conflicts kept him from coming up with arrangements in a timely manner. He and Binder argued about it, and when he taunted the producer (“You can’t fire me”), Binder replaced him with Billy Goldenberg, Barbra Streisand’s former musical accompanist, who had also worked on Hullabaloo.

  Goldenberg would ultimately change the direction of Elvis’s music, creating a sophisticated new sound in moving the singer from a small rhythm section to a thirty-nine-piece orchestra. But at the time, the Colonel was not pleased with Strange’s removal, especially as a song he cowrote with Mac Davis, “A Little Less Conversation,” would help promote Elvis’s movie Live a Little, Love a Little when the film was released in late fall. Parker cornered Binder and told him he was going to pull the plug on his job, and furthermore, there could be no special because Elvis would never accept the fact that Strange was gone. Even Finkel’s intervention did not cool the Colonel down.

  “There was a day of tremendous pressures and tension,” Binder remembers. Goldenberg wasn’t convinced that he and Elvis could find common musical ground. (“I’m a Jewish kid from New York who grew up on Broadway. What am I doing playing ‘Hound Dog’?”) And while Elvis accepted the reason for Strange’s dismissal, he wasn’t sure he wanted anyone tampering with his sound. It scared him nearly senseless when he walked into the studio and saw the horns and the strings, and he called Binder aside and told him he had to promise to send everybody home if he didn’t like it. Binder gave him his word, and finally, both Elvis and Goldenberg took a leap of faith.

  “When Elvis heard the first note of the session at Western Recorders, he loved it,” Binder says. “He had his sunglasses on and was standing next to Billy on the podium, and he looked into the control booth at me and gave me the high sign, like, ‘We’re going to be okay.’ He just fell out, and he never once questioned anything that we did musically. That was the one moment when he knew it would all come together.”

  By now, Elvis had literally moved into the NBC studios, the staff converting the dressing rooms into sleeping quarters. At the end of each day, Binder and Finkel were fascinated to watch Elvis jam and cut up with his buddies Charlie Hodge, Joe Esposito, and Alan Fortas, an overgrown sweetheart who reminded Binder of the character Lenny in the novel Of Mice and Men.

  In contrast, Howe found it boring. “Music was [Elvis’s] most interesting side—the rest was just a bunch of guys hanging out in a room telling jokes. I mean, how smart were those guys?” But Finkel saw the interaction as comedic: “If Elvis put his hands on his hips, two guys in back of him put their hands on their hips.” Binder thought they were all spies for the Colonel, but he also saw something else. “I wanted to capture in almost a documentary what was going on inside the man.” If he could sneak a camera into the dressing room and photograph that informality and playfulness, the audience would get a glimpse of an intimate Elvis that no one beyond his family and entourage had ever seen.

  “Absolutely not,” Parker said, vetoing the idea. But eventually he weakened and gave Binder the right to re-create it, thus inspiring the now-famous “improv” section of the special in which Elvis sits in a boxing ring of a stage with Hodge and musicians Scotty Moore and D. J. Fontana. When Presley balked at the idea of telling stories about his early years (“I’m not sure it’s . . . a good idea . . . What if I can’t think of anything to say?”), Binder and Allan Blye made a list of topics they’d heard him talk about in private and threw in a question about modern music to update his image. Fortas was also added to help Elvis feel at home.

  The Colonel no longer seemed to have dust in his heart, but a larger test came when Binder presented Elvis with a new song, “If I Can Dream.” The producer wanted to close the show with something that made a statement about how Elvis felt about the world, youth, and the Vietnam War. For that, he needed a big, idealistic, and emotional ballad that showed the core of the man who had reacted so solemnly to the shootings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., a man who had grown up in the prejudiced South, “but who was really above all that.”

  Songwriter Earl Brown stayed up all night conjuring it, and the next day, Binder had Brown and Goldenberg go to Elvis’s dressing room and play it for him. “That’s a hit song,” Howe said. Elvis thought it might be a little too Broadway the way Billy rendered it, and Bones said, “You can do it with a real bluesy feel.”

  “Let me hear it again,” Elvis said. Billy played it seven or eight times, and Elvis looked up. “Okay, I’ll do it.”


  Elsewhere in the building, the Colonel stiffened like a flatiron, telling Finkel, “Over my dead body will Elvis sing an original song at the end of the show! We had a deal for a Christmas song!” Finkel argued that the script had evolved into a different concept, and now there was no need for a Christmas song. “Plus we got Elvis to take a stand. That in itself was a miracle.”

  Finally, the Colonel said that the song could stay, even though it wasn’t “Elvis Presley material.” But, Binder recalls, Parker “instantly” had the copyright registered to protect the publishing. “That was all he was interested in.” Once recording started, Parker stationed Freddy Bienstock at the studio to make sure no one interfered with song selection, and Bienstock instructed Lamar Fike, by then a Hill and Range employee, to pick up deals on anything he could.

  However, the Colonel still lobbied for a Christmas song somewhere in the program. Finkel says Parker’s arrogance wasn’t exactly carved in stone—he thought a traditional carol would appeal to more conservative viewers, and he was pondering a new holiday album somewhere down the line. Perhaps he’d also argued out of contract obligation—he’d given his word to Tom Sarnoff that this would be a holiday special, something Sarnoff was willing to ignore. But mostly, Binder holds, his insistence lay in splintering spite; Parker savored a taste of victory.

  “In my last meeting with the Colonel, Bob and I were asked to go up to Sarnoff’s office,” he explains. “They said, ‘The Colonel’s telling us that we cannot air the show unless we have a Christmas song in it.’ ” Binder listened quietly. All the songs Parker suggested were threadbare standards, tunes Perry Como might have done. The old man glared at the young producer through antediluvian slits, his energy vehement.

  “The Colonel just sat there staring at me, and instead of avoiding his eyes, I stared right back at him. I remember our eyes just locked on each other, and I said, ‘Are you ordering me to put a Christmas song in the show, or are you asking me to put a Christmas song in the show?’ In essence, it was ‘ordering,’ and that’s how ‘Blue Christmas’ got added to the improv. His will was so strong that I think he felt in his heart of hearts he could will anybody into anything.”

  On June 23, Elvis prerecorded “If I Can Dream” in several fervent takes. To Howe and Binder, it was a staggering moment, an almost religious resurrection. Howe put him out on the floor with a hand mike, and he sang the song in front of the string section, complete with knee drops. “The string players were sitting there with their mouths open,” Howe remembers. “They had never seen anything like this.”

  Yet the more extraordinary performance came later, when the producers sent everybody home, and Elvis rerecorded the vocal in the dark, so engulfed in the emotion he ended up writhing on the cement floor, down on his side, in a fetal position. After four takes, he went into the control room, and Binder played the recording back for him fifteen times in a row. Elvis listened with the fascination of a man who was hearing the sound of his own rebirth.

  Early in the project, the Colonel told Binder he’d never interfere when things were going well. “On the outside,” says Binder, “the Colonel was very unhappy with what was happening. But being a good businessman, once he realized that Elvis had bought into what we wanted to do, there’s no doubt that he saw we were on to something special and he shouldn’t rock the boat.”

  In fact, Parker was more cognizant than Binder imagined. The show had intrinsic value as a program that would also sell albums. But the Colonel had all along planned for the event to be a springboard for the next phase of Elvis’s career. Largely on the strength of the television special, Parker would make his client the highest-paid performer in Las Vegas. “The only way he could set it up was to show how Elvis would perform with a group behind him,” says Lamar Fike. “That’s why Colonel envisioned the special.”

  On June 25, with an eye toward building Elvis’s new public profile, Parker, in a bright blue sport shirt and Tyrolean hat, presented his refurbished attraction to fifty visiting TV editors at an evening press conference on NBC’s Rehearsal Stage 3.

  One reporter wondered if Elvis’s curving sideburns wouldn’t be “old hat in this day of the post-Beatle. . . . He suggests a nice boy trying to be pleasant.” But once the Colonel cracked a few jokes to set the mood, the singer, making a grand entrance in an electric blue shirt, black pants, leather wristbands, and “a diamond ring as big as a Ping-Pong ball,” captivated the room. Why was Elvis doing TV? “We figured it was about time—before I grow too old.” Had he changed? “No, but I pick my material more carefully.” Were small towns the backbone of his audience? “Yes, ma’am. I’ve never done well in big cities.”

  Elvis was smiling, but under his breath, the producers heard him mutter, “Oh, wow! Not that one again.” Soon the Colonel sprung him in full pitchman’s style—“Right over here, folks, get your picture taken with Elvis”—and then the big man stood aside to avoid the rush.

  The following day, June 26, was Parker’s fifty-ninth birthday. Finkel arranged a party on the set with a big cake, but the others had a more pointed surprise. Writers Chris Beard and Allan Blye, privy to the Binder-Parker feud, wrote a parody of “It Hurts Me,” with lyrics including “The whole town is talking, they’re calling me a fool for listening to Binder’s same old lies,” and ending with the Colonel’s rote complaint: “Is it too much to ask for one lousy, tired Christmas song?” Elvis sang it to him amid peals of laughter.

  It was a crucial moment, a public humiliation and stunning defeat, delivered in the bright wrappings of celebration. Binder had won his duel with the Colonel, and after wresting control of Elvis away from Parker, the producer had given it back to the artist himself. Now Elvis made a mockery of the man who had guided his every move.

  “I have no proof to back it up,” says Binder, “but I felt the Colonel had the magic power. And I believe that before Elvis did anything, the Colonel would take him quietly into a room and use his amateur hypnotism talent on him. Elvis was very insecure. But fifteen minutes later, he would come out oozing confidence, convinced that he was the greatest performer who ever walked on the stage.”

  The problem was that Elvis had now met a better hypnotist.

  During the next few days, Billy Goldenberg came in to watch some of the taping, and invariably passed by Parker’s broom closet of an office. The arranger was surprised to see the Colonel always sitting alone, leaning on his cane, never joining Elvis and the guys, or huddling with his client except before a performance. In fact, he’d never witnessed one affectionate exchange between them.

  “Every time I walked by, the Colonel would say, ‘Come on in, boy, and let’s talk a little bit,’ ” Goldenberg remembers. “I’d been told he was the most terrible man in the world, but I liked him. I used to go right in and smile. I wouldn’t say that underneath I knew how kind he was, because he never talked about himself. But it didn’t seem real, any of it. He always reminded me of the characters that Sidney Greenstreet or Burl Ives or Orson Welles played—he was all those people put together. It was like he was playing a game of some sort, putting on the whole world.”

  Indeed, Parker had a particularly onerous prank in store for Goldenberg and the rest of the team. On June 27, a day after the Colonel’s belittling birthday event, Elvis rehearsed the gospel medley, taped an amusement park scene early in the afternoon, and then retired to his dressing room to rest before his two one-hour sets in front of a live audience that evening. But when show time drew near and only twenty-five people lined up outside, the head of guest relations alerted a frenzied staff. Parker had insisted on receiving all 328 tickets for each show and distributing them to a typical Elvis audience (“You want the blond bouffant hairdo”), flying fans in from all across the country if need be.

  Now it was clear he had inexcusably bungled the ticket distribution, and Binder believed it was out of pure malevolence, since the Colonel had made him promise he wouldn’t use the improv if he didn’t like it. The staff went scrambling, calling a radio stati
on to jump on the air with the news that seats were still available, and running across the street to Bob’s Big Boy restaurant to hustle up an audience.

  A second crisis fell when Elvis panicked shortly before the six o’clock taping, saying he felt “sheer terror” that he might freeze once he got out on stage. Only once had Binder seen him depressed, when Finkel told him they might need to lighten his hair (“Do you think my hair’s too black?” Elvis asked incredulously). But now, “he sat in that makeup chair and literally trembled, just really sweated,” Howe recalls. “He said, ‘What am I going to do if they don’t like me?’ ” Binder forced him to make the effort as a personal favor: “If you get out there and you have nothing to say, and you can’t remember a song, then say ‘thank you’ and come back. But you’ve got to go out there.”

  In his first real performance in seven years, Elvis hit a level he had not found since his seminal Sun recordings. Although visibly nervous—his hand shook at the start—he joked and bantered about the highlights of his career in a way that both revalidated his achievements and rendered him fresh. And when he launched into the rockabilly and blues that fueled the engine of his life, his energy blazed raw, stark, and palpable, his voice showing a tough exuberance, his looks telegraphing a hint of cruelty. By the time he taped the arena segment two days later, he’d summoned such confidence that he resembled not so much a man, but a panther, feral in his sleek black leather suit, growling, groaning, shaking, and strutting across the stage.