Authors: Alanna Nash
Anticipating what the movie would mean for record sales, Parker negotiated a new contract with RCA. Elvis would receive an immediate advance of $135,000 and a weekly paycheck of $1,000, both
against a 5 percent royalty. The one requirement was ten personal appearances to promote his recordings, in person, or on radio or television. Presley immediately hit the road for five cities in
Texas, and the Colonel invited a host of RCA executives to Houston for the performance.
“He had an apartment down there,” remembers Chet Atkins. “We were all sitting around, and he went into the kitchen and brought out a bowl. He had that accent, couldn’t
say
r
’s, and he said, ‘The Colonel’s wefidgerator is gettin’ low on groceries. So I’m gonna pass this bowl around, and I don’t want to hear any silver
or copper fallin’ in it. I want to hear paper.’ So everybody chipped in a few bucks, and he sent Bevo out to get some food. He loved separating people from their money.”
When
Love Me Tender
opened at New York’s Paramount Theater on November 15, 1956, a forty-foot cutout of Elvis decorating its façade, nearly 2,000 fans of all ages lined up,
the queue snaking all the way from Times Square to Eighth Avenue. Once the line reached the
New York Times
Building, the paper’s management asked the police to redirect it across the
street, where it again bottled up traffic on Forty-third Street, all the way across to Grand Central Terminal. Theater manager Charles Einfeld sent the Fox publicity department an ecstatic
telegram: “Spread the news that we have a most sensational attraction!”
Parker, who had staged the gathering as a publicity stunt for newsreel photographers, handing out
ELVIS FOR PRESIDENT
buttons and equipping the fans with professionally
lettered signs (
OK
,
ELVIS
,
LET
’
S REALLY GO
!), had his own advice for theater operators: make
sure to empty the house after every showing.
Now the Colonel couldn’t wait to throw it all in the face of Joe Hazen, using the film’s success to sweeten the bad taste over the Paramount deal. As the studio began developing
Loving You,
Parker bragged to Hazen about his employment on
Love Me Tender.
He inquired, Hazen wrote to Wallis, “as to how much money he was going to get, indicating that he
should be employed in connection with the production of the photoplay, since he knew how to handle Presley.”
Hazen let the comment pass, but the Colonel soon returned to “spew”
about all the deals he’d recently turned down, including $75,000 to have Elvis sing
two songs in another Fox picture. His motive: to force Wallis and Hazen to adjust Presley’s salary on
Loving You.
After several calls from Abe Lastfogel, the producers agreed to give
Elvis a bonus of $25,000, a figure that was to include a fee for Parker’s services as well. As Hazen wrote to Wallis on January 17, 1957, the $25,000 was to be “divided among them
according to their own desires.”
Parker, however, was now of the mind-set that any deal that benefited Elvis should also benefit him in a manner above and beyond his 25 percent commission. Lastfogel, acting on the
Colonel’s instructions, told the producers that Parker would have to turn over the entire $25,000 to Elvis, as he “could not or would not keep any of it personally.” Additionally,
Lastfogel said, Parker, who had originally pledged to remain in Hollywood throughout the production of the picture, now refused to come out to the coast unless he was personally compensated.
On February 7, 1957, Lastfogel wrote to Hazen and Wallis expressing his gratitude for “your paying Elvis Presley and Colonel Parker the additional $50,000.” Parker, too, wrote to
Wallis on the same day. But his letter made it clear: half of that $50,000 was for him. A second contract would be drawn “for the cooperation of Colonel Tom Parker,” who would be listed
as “technical advisor” on the film.
From then on, whenever Parker could justify a deal as a joint venture, where he and Elvis functioned as equal partners beyond the contractually agreed amount, the Colonel would divide the
proceeds 50–50 from the first dollar. They were a team, Elvis and the Colonel, Presley providing the talent, and Parker, through persistence and ingenuity, converting that talent into one of
the most lucrative careers in history. “Elvis and the Colonel,” as Parker signed every Christmas card and thank-you letter, was more than just equal billing and ego. It was the
Colonel’s own powerful shorthand, a way of telegraphing, “I am as important as Elvis. When I say something, you must listen.”
If Parker saw his job as getting the best deal for his client—and to market himself right along with Elvis—Oscar Davis questioned some of his tactics, particularly his seizing any
opportunity for self-gain. Parker was taken aback. As a former carny, Davis should have known better. The Colonel exercised an honorable boldness in his bludgeoning business practices and, in that
sense, never posed as anything other than what he was. Besides, loyalty was
within
the circle—outsiders were not necessarily afforded the same consideration.
“You want to tell me how I should do business?” the Colonel barked at his friend, repeating an exchange they’d once had over Eddy Arnold. “Listen,
I have $350,000 in the bank. When you have 350,000 and
one dollar
in your bank account, then you can come and tell me.”
Indeed, Parker was the largest single depositor at the American National Bank in Madison, Tennessee, where the Colonel still maintained his primary business office, filtering the Elvis money
through his new company, All Star Shows. On one of his first trips to Nashville after acquiring Eddy Arnold in the ’40s, Parker had walked into the bank and introduced himself to the owner,
whom he remembered as “the only Jewish fella in Madison.”
“It was a family bank, a little bank, and I wanted to borrow $5,000, because I had no money, and we needed [some for] promotion,” Parker said years later. The banker asked what he
had for collateral. Parker responded that he had an old car that he paid $125 for, on time at $4 a month.
“There’s no value there,” challenged the banker.
“Well,” said Parker, “even if it was a good car, and I welshed on my pay, what difference does it make what the car is worth?” And so the banker lent him the money just
on his face. “I signed the note, I paid him back in about a year and a half, and that still is my bank today,” Parker said in 1993.
The Colonel, Parker would tell anyone who would listen, was nothing if not loyal.
H
AL
Wallis wanted
Loving You
to be everything
Love Me Tender
was not. While the period
Western introduced the singing idol to the movie audience and allowed him to learn the rudiments of acting, it did almost nothing to play on Elvis’s natural charm, his exotic good looks, his
provocative rock-and-roll dance moves, and the allure of celebrity life.
What Wallis had in mind for
Loving You,
Presley’s first starring vehicle, was a film loosely based on Elvis’s life, with a story tracing the rapid rise of a backwoods
amateur (Deke Rivers) to a national sensation.
The producer was mildly concerned about how the public would react to a swiveling Elvis on the big screen, since just before Elvis’s first
Ed Sullivan
appearance, Parker learned
that church and PTA groups planned on filing a protest with CBS, leading the Colonel to turn down ten days of dates at $250,000 to avoid more screaming-girls publicity. For a while, he toyed with
the idea of a “Clean Up Elvis” campaign—that is, photographing the singer in a series of wholesome settings. But the Colonel feared it might boomerang on him, and so he sat tight.
No protests were filed after all.
Wallis wanted the script built around the formula used to sell other biopics about entertainers, suggesting that Elvis was just the modern-day Al Jolson, and his music as fun and harmless as the
Charleston in the ’20s. In case anyone missed the message, Wallis had it hammered home in a sequence that pokes fun at television censors, and in a scene where Glenda Markle, Deke’s
manager (Lizabeth Scott), appears before a small-town city council to defend Deke and rock and roll in general. It was blatant, heavy-handed propaganda—as was Elvis’s line “They
make it sound like folks ought to be ashamed just listening to me sing!”—but Wallis saw it as good insurance against criticism from 1950s America.
The man he tapped for the job of writing and directing was Hal Kanter,
who, along with cowriter Herbert Baker, fashioned the script somewhat after Mary Agnes
Thompson’s original story. Kanter had seen Elvis on the
Sullivan Show
and knew that “a lot of people, hated him . . . thought he was an instrument of the devil.” Like a
lot of sophisticates, Kanter didn’t much care for Presley’s hip gyrations and country attitude, and wrote him off as just a passing fancy, “a nasty little boy,” as he later
recalled. Then he saw Elvis’s screen test, found him “orchid-pretty,” and couldn’t take his eyes off him.
To get a better feel for Presley’s world, Kanter, then thirty-nine, flew to Memphis to meet with Elvis at his new, fashionable three-bedroom house on Audubon Drive. From there, he drove
with him and his entourage to Shreveport, Louisiana, where Elvis made his farewell appearance on
The Louisiana Hayride.
An astonished Kanter would use on screen much of what he saw that
day, saying privately of the fan reaction, “There were some things that happened there that I couldn’t recreate, because people wouldn’t believe it.”
But it was the Colonel, a “well-fed King Con,” who really dazzled him, hawking tinted photos of Elvis, souvenir programs, and even the Duke of Paducah’s smoked meat sticks at
the Shreveport fairgrounds. “I thought the colorful Colonel more interesting than his star.”
Not surprising, a very Colonel-like character turned up in the film as Jim Tallman, a portly, cigar-smoking gubernatorial candidate with a silver tongue who sells snake oil on the side. But
Kanter also wrote many of Parker’s personal traits and star-making machinations into the script, with the Markle character playing up the singer’s sex appeal (“I like
him—he’s got something for the girls”), talking half of his revenue, staging small riots, and calling her client “our gimmick.”
Wallis shared Kanter’s assessment of Parker, but he also had a grudging respect for him and saw in the Colonel somebody like himself—an energetic promoter with uncanny gifts for
manipulating situations to his best advantage.
It was the other side of Parker’s personality that gave the producer fits, particularly once the manager moved into an office on the Paramount lot before filming began, bringing his staff
of Tom Diskin, Byron Raphael, and Trude Forsher.
Parker’s only female secretary in Hollywood (except for a “Miss Wood,” who was never seen, and whose signature often resembled Parker’s own), Forsher wasn’t sure
she wanted to go to work for the Colonel when she met him socially through her cousins, the Aberbachs.
A freelance writer, she demonstrated both a hungry intelligence and a
spirited personality. She had no intention of becoming anyone’s secretary, but Parker swayed her with one comment: “Trude, if you come with me now, you’re going to be somebody
important. If you don’t, you will have lost your opportunity.”
Forsher, who was somewhat envious of her powerful relatives, found - Parker’s bravado exciting. And the Colonel took comfort in the thick Austrian accent she made no effort to tame. Once
in a while, he’d say, “Speak German for me, Trude,” finding a secret transport to a past none of his European friends detected in his speech.
Just as Parker enjoyed Byron’s services courtesy of the William Morris office, he demanded, starting at Twentieth Century–Fox, that the studios reimburse him for Trude’s
salary. Now at Paramount, Trude, who ran the office in addition to typing letters and answering the phone, wanted a raise. Parker talked her into a title change instead, and so the lowly secretary
became the more lofty sounding “promotion coordinator.”
The Colonel rarely rewarded his employees with bonuses or presents, but he never wanted to look stingy, believing such an image diluted his power. One day he overheard Byron and Trude discussing
the split-pea soup they’d enjoyed at the Paramount commissary and, misunderstanding, called them both into his office. “It’s not good for you two to split your soup!” he
said, agitated. “People are going to think I’m not paying you enough!”
Parker wanted to be thought of as successful, but it was more important to flaunt his connections than his wealth. And so in his new office dominated by a spread of Texas longhorns,
shooting-gallery-prize teddy bears, winking electric signs, and a tiger skin on the floor, he made space for signed photographs of such celebrities as Sammy Davis Jr. and Cecil B. DeMille, the
famed producer-director who was then at Paramount working on his biblical epic,
The Ten Commandments.
In return for such autographs, which he solicited by mail, he often sent a
sausage.
At Paramount, Elvis generated so much excitement that director Kanter had to close the set to keep out the studio secretaries and wives and children of the Hollywood elite, all of whom wanted
their photo taken with the young star. The Paramount brass, however, was more curious about “this bombastic, driving, one-man minstrel show,” as producer A. C. Lyles called the Colonel.
Even Marlon Brando, whose office was down the hall, often stuck his head in the door. The Colonel arrived at the studio each morning at eight (“Let’s open up the tents,”
he’d say in carny
talk) and stayed until six, thriving on his attention from the Hollywood royalty and the opportunity to negotiate an outrageous deal.
“That was his excitement,” says Raphael, whose main job was to assist Parker in pulling off various snow jobs. “When I would see him on the phone making these deals, there
would be little beads of perspiration on his face. He would sit there twirling his cigar in his mouth and be completely enraptured in what he was doing. It was very difficult for him to come down
after one of those.”