The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  The beauty of the special was in watching the metamorphosis take shape. But there may have been more to it. After the first performance, when Howe remembers they had to peel the suit away—“nobody had thought that he’d be so soaking wet you couldn’t get it off”—costumer Bill Belew reported to Binder that they had a problem. Elvis had experienced a sexual emission on stage. “That,” says Binder, “is when I really believed that Parker planted the seed through hypnotism that Elvis was the greatest sex symbol who ever existed. I don’t think he could have built himself up to have an orgasm unless there was a stimuli there to drive him to do that. I just felt it was not a normal act.”

  Today, the production numbers—including a bordello scene that a corporate censor ordered cut but was later aired and restored for home video—seem dated. But the live segments still sizzle and stand among the finest music of Elvis’s career. His performance of “If I Can Dream,” delivered against a backdrop of electric red letters spelling out ELVIS, is a portrait of a man saving his own life.

  When the special, “Singer Presents ELVIS,” aired on December 3, 1968, the majority of critics raved about the return of an authentic American original, some finding poignancy in the performance. “There is something magical about watching a man who has lost himself find his way back home,” Jon Landau wrote in Eye magazine. The program was the number-one show of the season, capturing 42 percent of the viewing audience and giving NBC its biggest ratings triumph of the year. Its soundtrack would soar to number eight on Billboard’s pop album chart.

  Binder and Howe had hoped to have production points on the soundtrack, but no one had provided for potential royalties in the producers’ contract because Parker insisted from the beginning that there wouldn’t be an album. And when Howe brought it up to Parker while Elvis was in Hawaii, “Diskin started a whole tirade about how we were hired not by them, but by NBC to produce a television special, and ‘We’re not discussing records at all.’ We got calls from NBC saying, ‘What are you trying to do, sabotage the show?’ ”

  Parker continued to adamantly deny the existence of a soundtrack album until the day of its release, though late in May, four days after Binder and Howe first proposed the idea to him, he had gotten NBC’s agreement to turn over the audiotapes of the show to RCA without charge, a deal that would have amounted to millions of dollars in music rights. In the end, Elvis got a free album—paid for out of the budget of the special—and the producers received credit for the show, if not the recording, on the back of the album.

  “That was the only argument I had with Colonel Parker,” says Finkel. “He didn’t want any of the Elvis mystique to be eroded by a producer.” So much so that after the trade magazines posted credits for Binder and Howe with the first number-one single, their names suddenly disappeared from future listings—a directive, believes Binder, from the Colonel to RCA to threaten to pull its magazine advertising. Binder returned Parker’s check for $1,500 for all rights and shook his head in the memory of the Colonel’s early promise—“You guys are going to have a million-dollar experience”—his way of compensating for the producer’s meager salary of $15,000.

  In a sense, the Colonel was right. There was no way for Binder to measure the satisfaction of seeing Elvis come back to life as an artist. When they’d screened the whole show after the first edit—ninety minutes, which Binder pared to an hour for broadcast—Elvis laughed and applauded along with the staff, and then asked if he could see it again, alone with Binder. “He watched it three more times, and he said, ‘Steve, I will never sing a song that I don’t believe in, and I will never make a movie that I don’t believe in. I want to do really great things from your new things.’ ”

  Elvis had always reminded Binder of Hamlet, sequestered in his castle of Graceland, with everyone around him for a purpose. Now he let the words sink in, and offered Elvis a new challenge. “I hear you, Elvis,” he said prophetically, “but I don’t know if you’re strong enough to do that.” The singer was taken aback, and Binder explained that Elvis’s “sense of loyalty was confused with whether he should or shouldn’t do things based on his own integrity,” and that he was probably still weak when it came to challenging the Colonel’s business machine. Earlier in the day, Binder, who during rehearsals walked Elvis out on Sunset Boulevard to prove it was possible for him to enjoy a degree of normalcy, had invited Elvis to a pizza-and-beer gathering that afternoon at Bill Belew’s apartment. “I can’t go,” Elvis had said, to which Binder replied, “Why not?” Now, as they left the screening room, Elvis told Binder he wanted to go to Belew’s after all.

  They sped off to Hollywood in Binder’s yellow Mustang convertible—the Memphis Mafia following behind in a Lincoln Continental—only to arrive at Belew’s apartment and find no one there. It was an awkward moment (“the look on Elvis’s face . . .”), and soon they went their separate ways. But back in the screening room, Elvis had scribbled down his private phone number and asked Binder to stay in touch. More than once, the producer called and left messages, but “they were always intercepted. The walls came down immediately. The Colonel wasn’t about to let him get out into the real world. It was tragic.”

  From the beginning of their association, Parker had been afraid that someone younger and more in tune with Elvis’s creativity might come along and pose the ultimate threat to his power and control. Always before, the Colonel had been able to huff and puff and stare down an adversary, but Binder had terrified him. Not only could he relate to Presley as Parker never had, but Binder knew what slumbering promise still lay within Elvis (“There’s no limit to where he can go if he has the material”) and had the psychological leverage to help that talent flourish. Parker saw that he must guard against Binder’s interference with the same ferocity he used to keep his dark secrets at bay. Elvis’s success was not only his livelihood. It was his life.

  Parker would never admit to nearly being toppled, but he would concede to being topped. When the Colonel returned to Palm Springs a day or so after taping ended, he found the towering, electric red letters spelling ELVIS set up and flashing on his front lawn, a generator humming Finkel’s glee. The Colonel, always honoring a deal, wrapped up his cane with a note, “To Commander Bob Finkel from Colonel Tom Parker.”

  The Snowman was melting.

  17

  LAS VEGAS: GLITZ, GREED, AND RUINATION

  SIXTEEN days after the comeback special aired in December 1968, the Colonel finalized the deal to take Elvis into the soon-to-be-built International Hotel, a $60-million resort palace that owner Kerkor “Kirk” Kerkorian promised would be an oasis of tastefulness on the Vegas desert of glitz and greed.

  Kerkorian’s ties to the town went back to the postwar years, when he began operating a flying service to scurry gamblers from California to Nevada. Eventually, with a personal fortune of $100 million from the sale of his Trans International Airlines, Kerkorian began buying casinos, acquiring the Flamingo to use as a training ground for the staff that would run his dream hotel, the International.

  To book the acts for the International’s 2,000-seat showroom—the largest in town—executive vice president Alex Shoofey tapped Bill Miller, the most respected entertainment director since Jack Entratter.

  At the Flamingo, where Shoofey and Miller worked hand-in-glove, Miller brought in everyone from Sandler and Young to Tom Jones. Now for a high-profile act to open the International, he presented five names for Shoofey and the department heads to vote on, including Jones, Frank Sinatra, and Barbra Streisand, who had just won an Academy Award for Funny Girl.

  But Miller had wanted Presley since Parker brought him into the Frontier in ’56 (“I made up my mind when I saw him at the time, I’m going to get Elvis”) and, through Abe Lastfogel, learned that he might be able to make a deal.

  Miller called Parker at his office at MGM and set up a meeting. The Colonel wouldn’t hear of his client going into a new room—too many potential problems with sound and lighting and other bugs to work out. So Miller sig
ned Streisand, and then went back to Parker to see about booking Elvis to follow. “He said, ‘That’s great,’ ” as the veteran entertainment director remembers, and the wheels were in motion.

  Next the Colonel met with Shoofey. During his years at the Sahara and the Flamingo, Shoofey, who brought his team along every time he assumed the head of a new hotel, had earned the nickname “the Cleaver.” Knowing full well that he was in line to become president and director of the International, he watched his every step. And every penny. Of course, the hotel wanted Elvis, he told the Colonel, but Presley was unproven as a stage act after so many years in Hollywood, and especially in Vegas, where he hadn’t appeared in twelve years.

  “Elvis was a question mark, to tell you the truth,” remembers Nick Naff, the hotel’s former advertising director, who had also come over from the Flamingo. But the Colonel, set on outmaneuvering Shoofey for the best deal, convinced him that the town had never seen the kind of business his client would draw.

  “You’re going to find out what an opening is like when Elvis comes in,” Parker boasted, closing his pitch. “They’ll come from all over the world.” Shoofey raised a thick eyebrow, pondered the notion, and then nodded.

  And so they began to hammer out the details, with the rumor floating through town that Milton Prell, Shoofey’s old boss at the Sahara, had really been the one to broker the deal for the Colonel. “Prell got money from the mob for putting the deal together,” says one longtime Vegas insider.

  In July 1969, Elvis would begin a four-week engagement at the International showroom, performing two shows a night, seven nights a week. No other entertainer had ever committed to such a punishing routine; most usually enjoyed Monday or Tuesday night off. As compensation for such an all-out run, Parker demanded $100,000 a week, out of which Elvis and the Colonel would pay the musicians and backup vocalists. “Mark my words,” Parker said. “Elvis will be the first star in Las Vegas to make money for the showroom, apart from whatever his fans drop out in the casino. You’ll never have an empty seat,” he added. “I can promise you that.”

  Shoofey, a long-faced Canadian with a degree in business administration from St. John’s University, mulled it over and ran the numbers. The International would want an option for a second appearance. But Parker had his needs, too, including complimentary suites at the hotel for both Elvis and him and the right to film a concert documentary. Shoofey agreed. Then the two shook hands, and Parker lined up the publicity pictures, in which Elvis posed signing his “contract” at the International’s construction site, with Shoofey and Miller flanking him in hard hats. It was only for show—Elvis would sign the official contract in April. But the photograph was historic. Never again would the Colonel give the hotel such access to his star.

  The picture would become a prized possession for Bruce Banke, Nick Naff’s assistant and the executive assigned to look after the Colonel. (“Actually, I think I was about the third one, and I was the one that stuck.”) Banke would deliver Elvis’s weekly paychecks, order the big floral arrangements Parker placed in the hotel foyer each holiday, and be at the Colonel’s constant beck and call. In return, Parker treated him with unusual affection. “We were very close. I loved that man. He was like a father to me.”

  In securing Elvis’s comeback in Las Vegas, the greatest carnival midway of all, Parker hoped to achieve two goals: to feed the ferocious beast that had become his gambling habit, and to reinvent and validate Presley to a new generation, building on the entertainer’s renewed popularity from the television special. The money from Vegas couldn’t touch what Elvis would make on the road, but first Parker needed to generate sizzle about Presley’s return to live performance.

  Elvis himself was more concerned with following through on his promise to Steve Binder—to restore his credibility as an artist. To that end, he took the advice of Memphis Mafia member Marty Lacker to make his next album not in Nashville, with its factorylike approach to recording, but in Memphis, at Chips Moman’s American Studios. Elvis - hadn’t recorded in his hometown since the Sun years, and Moman was renowned for his soulful cache of studio musicians and his hit-making synthesis of pop and rhythm and blues. The combination, Lacker thought, just might help provide the magic to keep Elvis focused and inspired in the studio. Presley agreed and, during the first two months of 1969, recorded some of his most enduring music, including “Suspicious Minds,” “Kentucky Rain,” and “In the Ghetto.”

  However, from the beginning, the project was fraught with tension, as both the label and Hill and Range grumbled at the arrangement. RCA policy dictated that all of its artists record in the company’s own studios, using only RCA staff producers. Parker backed Elvis’s request to record in Memphis, but sent Tom Diskin to the session, where RCA producer Felton Jarvis and label veep Harry Jenkins huddled together. Freddy Bienstock and Lamar Fike, the gatekeepers for Hill and Range, were equally watchful, knowing that Chips was also a songwriter and music publisher and that Lacker, who moonlighted as a song plugger and often worked with Moman, had been encouraging Presley to reach beyond the tired Hill and Range repertoire to keep pace with the innovative rockers of the ’60s.

  Moman, who had produced more than one hundred hit singles, knew that his reputation was on the line with the Presley session. And while “Kentucky Rain,” a Hill and Range song by up and coming writer Eddie Rabbitt, seemed a good choice, Moman found the majority of the songs that Bienstock and Fike presented sorely lacking. “There were a lot of bad songs in there,” he recalls, “and I told them that if I had to cut all of those Hill and Range songs, I didn’t want to do it.”

  Only days before the first session, songwriter Mac Davis had brought Moman a song that mirrored the social consciousness of the times. Moman knew that Elvis had never recorded anything as controversial as “In the Ghetto,” but the song built on the humanitarian spirit of “If I Can Dream,” and the producer thought it a perfect statement for a man whose music was rooted in black culture.

  “He liked the song,” Moman remembers. “But after we cut it, there was a big discussion about whether it would be right for his image. Of course, back at that time, the racial thing was still hot and heavy.”

  Freddy Bienstock had another consideration, since the Aberbachs - didn’t control the publishing, and inquired whether Mac Davis would be willing to give up part of “In the Ghetto” for Elvis to record the song. Such a practice rankled the producer (“I just thought that was wrong”), and while Davis conceded, Moman was not about to relinquish even a fraction of two songs in his own publishing company, “Mama Liked the Roses” and the spectacular “Suspicious Minds,” which Elvis had already laid down on tape. A confrontation quickly ensued.

  “I wasn’t angry about it,” remembers Freddy Bienstock. “Those sessions were very good. I would become aware of what songs Elvis wanted to do, and if the publishing rights were available, I would pick them up. ‘Suspicious Minds’ was more difficult [to obtain] than ‘In the Ghetto,’ because ‘Suspicious Minds’ had been recorded before. [But] Chips and I became friends.”

  Moman remembers it differently. “Their deal was that they weren’t going to record any song that they didn’t have the publishing on. I was ready to erase the tapes and just let it go. I ended the session and sent the musicians home and asked all of the Elvis people to leave my studio.”

  As tempers flared, Tom Diskin walked over to the phone and dialed his boss. If Moman wouldn’t cooperate, Parker told his lieutenant, they’d either go around him or dismiss him altogether. But RCA’s Harry Jenkins recognized that “Suspicious Minds” could be a career record for Elvis and took it upon himself to mediate the situation at the next day’s session.

  “In all the years that I have been involved with Elvis,” Jenkins told the group, “I’ve never opened my mouth about songs or anything else. But that boy [Moman] is right, and we are going to finish this session however he wants to do it.”

  That August, “Suspicious Minds” became Elvis’s first number-one si
ngle in seven years, and the last he would ever have. The American Studios sessions would spawn two albums, the first, From Elvis in Memphis, garnering a lead review in Rolling Stone magazine. But Parker saw only that Chips Moman had challenged his way of doing business, even as Felton Jarvis altered the producer’s recording of “Suspicious Minds” by adding “live” horns and a false fadeout at the end. Like Steve Binder, Moman would be banished forever. When Elvis requested that Parker hire Moman’s studio band to back him during his upcoming appearance in Vegas, Diskin replied that the group was unavailable.

  In July, Elvis flew to Los Angeles to begin working up his show with a small group of handpicked musicians. Later, he would add the International’s thirty-eight-piece orchestra, led by Bobby Morris, and two vocal groups—the Sweet Inspirations, a black female vocal quartet that had backed Aretha Franklin and recorded with Moman, and the Imperials, the male gospel quartet Presley had long admired. As he’d done before the TV special, Elvis slacked off the pharmaceuticals and toned his body, hoping to be in peak physical condition for his grueling performance schedule.

  Parker, meanwhile, became a constant presence at the hotel. In between readying the advertising blitz for Elvis’s engagement, he could usually be found in the hotel’s casino, or playing the ponies in the race book.

  In fact, Parker operated as if he owned the place. Slipping into the mode of advance man, he commanded complete control of the promotion, with the hotel footing the bill.

  “The campaign that he produced was unbelievable,” remembers Shoofey. “He had every billboard in the entire city, not only in Vegas, but leading all the way to California.”

  And while Parker left the print ads to the hotel, he fiercely oversaw every detail of the radio spots, many of which lasted only twenty seconds. “I did the commercials personally under the Colonel’s supervision, but [it was really] more the supervision under the Colonel’s dictation,” says Naff. “He insisted only the word Elvis be used in the entire commercial, except to tag it at the end where and when he was appearing. So [it was just] ‘Elvis! Elvis! Elvis!’ What he tried to do was virtually blanket [Las Vegas] with the fact that Elvis was in town.”