Authors: Alanna Nash
From the beginning, Parker saw the need to bring the Paramount suits in line, to deflate their pomposity, prove his own preeminence, and bring a relaxed humor to what he viewed as a very stuffy
group. His first target: DeMille, a Hollywood god.
He saw his chance on the day he received 10,000 Elvis Presley buttons—large, metal, campaign-style badges with the singer’s picture on them—to promote the new movie.
“Somehow,” Raphael remembers, “DeMille heard about the buttons, and sent an assistant to get one for his granddaughter. The Colonel wanted to know why Mr. DeMille
couldn’t come over and ask for himself, and the assistant told him Mr. DeMille was very busy. So the Colonel said, ‘Tell Mr. DeMille that I would like to get him one of these buttons,
but I have to check with my lawyers first, because we’re getting ready to make our merchandising deal.’ ”
The next day, Parker directed his staff to pass out the buttons to everyone on the lot, and then sent Trude to DeMille’s office with the message that the Colonel had made a special
dispensation, and that Mr. DeMille would be the only person in Hollywood with a rare Elvis button. All we ask, she said, echoing the Colonel, is that Mr. DeMille wear it himself when he goes to his
set.
“When DeMille walked out of his office thinking he was the only one at the studio with that button,” says Raphael, “it must have been one of the most humiliating moments of his
life. Everybody from the janitors to the guards at the gates was wearing one.”
DeMille never spoke to Parker again, but the Colonel took the risk of making an enemy to prove his point. Later, during the promotion of
G.I. Blues,
he talked Hal Wallis into donning a
paper concessionaire’s hat—perhaps meant to resemble an army cap—and called a photographer to document the moment. “He loved seeing these men that he considered
sanctimonious phonies wearing Elvis paraphernalia,” says Raphael, “because he got them all to be little imitation operators, straight out of the carnival world.”
In June 1957, Parker inducted Wallis and Joe Hazen into his fictional Snowmen’s League of America, Ltd. The best known of his nonsensical hijinks, the
Snowmen’s League was a takeoff on the Showmen’s League, which promoted the idea of consummate professionalism among carnival workers. Parker’s little club, which he established
during the Eddy Arnold era, rewarded another standard of excellence: the ability to con, or “snow.” Its motto: “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!” The Colonel named
himself High Potentate and placed an enormous stuffed snowman in his studio office, often posing with it for pictures.
With faultless attention to detail, Parker designed membership cards, certificates, a ribbon-festooned “Snow Award,” and even gag wine labels (
THE
COLONEL
’
S PRIVATE STOCK—VINTAGE YEAR
1942). All were emblazoned with a cartoon drawing of a pudgy, top-hat-wearing, cigar-smoking snowman—a
benevolent rendering of the Colonel himself.
Parker boasted that the nonprofit club cost nothing to get into but $1,000 to get out. With great fanfare, he inducted those with whom he had business arrangements, or whose favor he curried,
such as politicians or high-profile journalists, who protected as much as publicized. Hollywood executives, says Byron Raphael, “begged to belong to that club,” where they rubbed
shoulders with members of Presley’s entourage, and RCA reps and corporate brass. “My induction was given to me over dinner, so other people were sure to hear the presentation,”
remembers Charlie Boyd, a former RCA field man. “He said it was almost a secret society, and indicated it would open doors for me.”
The coup de grâce of Parker’s little folly was the club’s slickly produced rule book, which the Colonel called a
Confidential Report Dealing with Advanced Techniques of
Member Snowers,
prepared by a team “notably skilled in evasiveness and ineptitude.” A slim volume filled with clever wordplay, its table of contents promised seven chapters on such
topics as “Counteracting High Pressure Snowing . . . Melt and disappear technique,” and “Directional Snowing . . . This deals with approach and departure simultaneously.”
Anyone who hoped to read such chapters found only sixteen blank pages, followed by text that ended with a “special note” on how the Chief Potentate had allegedly talked the printer into
delivering the greatest number of books “at a reduced loss to himself, for which he was very grateful.” As the Colonel summed up, “It is again a sterling example of a good
snowman’s willingness to see the other man’s problems and show the greatest understanding without financial involvement.”
Parker had a different snow job in mind for Hal Kanter. The director
was surprised to see the Colonel frequently come by the
Loving You
set, since he had no
interest in reading the script, and let Elvis speak for himself when he engaged Kanter about the kind of actor he hoped to become. To Kanter, Parker seemed to be interested only in “how much,
not who, where, when, or why,” and once Kanter made his presence known, the Colonel would leave. “I would never know if he was watching in the shadows or not,” Kanter remembers,
“but if he wasn’t there, one of his minions would be. There was always somebody around.”
Kanter found out what was on Parker’s mind as the filming wore on. For some time, the Colonel had wanted to publish a book,
How Much Does It Cost If It’s Free?
, a collection
of hokum, blarney, and snow jobs extraordinaire that he would claim was his life story. He planned to insert advertising among its pages to make back its production costs. RCA, he boasted, was
buying the back cover for $25,000.
Now all he needed was a ghostwriter, and Kanter seemed just the man—he could write it on weekends, Parker told him. But Kanter, who saw the Colonel as someone who “was happier
fleecing the world of its money than the actual making of it,” had no intention of doing such a thing, and told the Colonel to look beyond a book to a film version of his life. The manager
brightened, and Kanter was astonished to hear him say that he thought Paul Newman the ideal actor to play him on the screen. Foolishly, perhaps, the director wrote in his autobiography, Kanter
replied that he was thinking more of W. C. Fields. Parker’s “pink face turned magenta and he never again mentioned that book in my presence.”
Still, Kanter had enormous respect for what he called Parker’s “genius,” especially after he saw him skillfully maneuver Elvis through a frenzied throng at
The Louisiana
Hayride.
Parker had once tried to work a deal with the
Hayride
and sponsoring station KWKH, offering to set up an artist service bureau for the fee of $12,000, which the show’s
producer, Horace Logan, found preposterous, especially as Parker planned to run it as an extension of Jamboree Productions. Now instead of booking acts on the show, Parker was stealing one in
buying out Elvis’s contract. With the help of Bitsy Mott, whom Parker had recently made head of security despite his slight build, the Colonel steered his client past a sea of groping arms
and hands, all frantic to touch the star, get an autograph, or in the case of one overexuberant fan, snip a lock of his hair. The director thought Parker’s calling for a wall of police to
ring the platform shoulder-to-shoulder had been mere press agentry until Elvis got on
stage, and the 9,000 in attendance sent up a roof-lifting scream that lasted the length
of his performance.
Afterward, Kanter sidled up to Parker and complimented him on his call: “Now I see why you have the police there.”
“That’s right,” Parker snapped. “If it weren’t for those cops, those sweet little girls would be all over the stage and they’d tear that boy to pieces.
That’s why I’ve got to protect him. You people in Hollywood don’t know a damn thing about protection.”
Kanter, trying to make a joke of it, thought of the diminutive head of the William Morris Agency. “I guess Abe Lastfogel would get trampled to death in a crowd like this.” The
Colonel sneered: “Abe Lastfogel wouldn’t know where to go to
find
a crowd like this.” With that, Kanter “knew immediately what his relationship with the Morris
office was.”
Lately, Parker had become more disgruntled with the Morris executives, especially as they began to advise him on ways that he and Elvis might better manage their money. The Colonel should set up
a corporation to shelter some of it from the tax man, they said, and in fact, they could do it for him. But the Colonel had no interest in any such thing. The Morris brass was surprised.
Didn’t he trust them? If that was the case, they could recommend a business manager to help him protect what he and Elvis had.
The Colonel
didn’t
trust them, of course, and he’d rather have Elvis lose money than set him up with someone who might influence him in other decisions, too. Only once did
he take Elvis to the Morris offices, and then just to let the agents fraternize with him a little, so he could keep them away from the movie sets. His paranoia raged to such an extent that he
refused free work space within the agency, first accepting the offer and then complaining that his suite was “eight doors removed from the donniker [men’s room]. It looks like the
little house behind the big house.” But his concerns were otherwise. What if someone should listen in on his phone conversations, maybe secretly tape him, learn of the ways he managed to take
far more—sometimes in excess of 50 percent—from his deals on Elvis’s behalf?
It wasn’t stealing. Hadn’t he chastised Byron when the younger man accidentally walked out of the grocery store with an unchecked magazine in the bottom of his cart? Hadn’t he
called Byron on it and made him go back and pay for it? The Colonel was an honest man. And what he took from Elvis was deserved. No other manager worked as hard.
Still, he made it clear to Lastfogel from the beginning: all checks due to
Elvis would be sent directly from the studio to Parker’s office in Memphis and made out to
All Star Shows, not to the Morris agency. So what if the Colonel was the only client to demand such an arrangement? Besides, the agency had no contract that strictly bound Elvis or Parker as a
client; therefore, the Colonel never signed a check authorization form.
The beauty of it, as the Colonel saw, was that Presley was completely unconcerned about such matters. When Byron delivered Elvis his weekly check—which the Diskin Sisters sent to
California, where Parker would sign it and put it in a sealed envelope—the singer never questioned his cut, even though the figures were seldom broken down, the expenses rarely itemized
except on Parker’s own ledger. In fact, Presley seldom looked at the amount. He simply pocketed it and sent it home to his father.
Lastfogel and company found Parker’s arrangement perplexing, since he then had to turn around and send the agency 10 percent, which they would have deducted automatically before they sent
the money on to him. They argued that it was cleaner for his IRS records to have the money come to them first. The Colonel was resolute. He feared no IRS audit, either for himself or for Elvis, he
said, because he went directly to the Internal Revenue Service and asked them to calculate what they owed. In fact, Parker said, “I consider it my patriotic duty to keep Elvis in the ninety
percent bracket.” Remembering how he’d been stung by the surprise audit in Tampa—the IRS would also question him about the $10,000 buyout of Elvis’s
Louisiana
Hayride
contract—neither he nor Elvis would have any tax shelters, or dare to write off anything but the most legitimate expenses, a practice that made Elvis the largest single taxpayer
on a straight income in the country. And while Parker occasionally tossed Bitsy Mott the odd $25 or $50, he was careful not to pay him any more than minimum wage, saying that the IRS precluded
paying family members more than outsiders for the same work. “I love to pay taxes,” he would say. “I know when I’m paying taxes that I’m making money.”
The Morris accountants were stunned. Why would a man who knew the whereabouts of every penny, and went to great lengths to hold on to it, not want to take advantage of the tax breaks? Other than
his home in Madison, Parker had no investments, and while the Colonel was informed enough to gainfully advise Byron and Trude on specific stock trades, he didn’t play the market himself
because he couldn’t control it.
There was logic in that, the Morris accountants said, and then nodded their heads in agreement when Parker explained he didn’t want Elvis to become a hapless figure like the boxer Joe
Louis, losing his fortune from
some obscure IRS ruling. What they didn’t know was that Parker, the illegal alien, lived in fear of any government agency that poked
around in his past. The IRS, says Bitsy Mott, “just scared him to death.”
Already there were rumors that the reason Parker wouldn’t give interviews was because there were things he didn’t want the world to know, and Parker saw the suspicion on
Lastfogel’s face. That’s why he realized, early in 1956, that he needed a snitch within the Morris agency itself. He had a certain type in mind for someone he would name as his
assistant: small, young, male, quiet, and probably homosexual, someone who was easy to dominate and control, and had no marital problems.
Byron Raphael was twenty-two years old and earning $45 a week working in the William Morris mail room—the starting job for all would-be agents—on the day he messengered a script to
Colonel Parker’s office at Twentieth Century–Fox. He delivered it to Trude Forsher, who liked his mild-mannered personality and asked him to call back. What Byron didn’t know was
that the Colonel had asked her to be on the lookout. The five-foot-seven Raphael wasn’t gay, but he did fit the rest of the profile: “Most of the guys he hired after me were homosexual,
little, soft-spoken, creative, and neat in appearance.”
When Byron returned to the Colonel’s office, Parker immediately offered him a job, and the younger man turned it down, saying he’d planned on staying at William Morris his whole
career. Parker smiled. “Well, you
will
work for William Morris,” he assured him. “They’ll pay your salary, but you’ll come and be with me.”