Authors: Alanna Nash
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.