Authors: Alanna Nash
Raphael was already caught up in the excitement of Elvis Presley, but the Colonel, too, was compelling.
“In retrospect, I see that he had the impact of someone like Adolf Hitler, because he had an astonishing kind of mental power over the people around him. They would have done anything he
asked them to do. There was no way to keep a secret from him, and I never saw him get defeated. His personality was so big, so overpowering, that when he walked into a room, he took it over, no
matter who was there. They all fell under his spell.”
To test Byron’s loyalty, Parker put him through two trials by fire with his William Morris bosses. The first demanded that Raphael, basically an errand boy, walk into the office of the
all-powerful Abe Lastfogel, sit down, and light up a stogie. Lastfogel detested the smell of smoke and wouldn’t allow it around him, but he had a commendable sense of humor: “What did
you do, boy, lose a bet?”
The second prank, guided by Parker’s quest for revenge, was directed at Lenny Hirshan and had more serious implications. Hirshan, aloof but unctuous with
stars—and so disliked by some in the agency that an assistant would eventually hide raw hamburger under his flowerpot and wait for it to rot—was an easy target. To Byron, he seemed
resentful of the younger men coming up, regarding everyone as competition and scheming to keep them scared for their jobs.
Lately, he was concerned for his own. Hirshan was technically Elvis’s contact at William Morris, but whenever he dropped by Parker’s office at Paramount, the manager just shooed him
away (“Thanks for coming over, Lenny. No, we don’t need anything today”). Since Byron was the envy of the agents for his access to Elvis, Hirshan now began to pump him for
information. The Colonel had a plan.
“Colonel Parker came to Trude and me and explained that Lenny Hirshan was snooping around too much,” Byron remembers. “He said, ‘Trude, write a note in some kind of
shorthand—you know, scribble, scribble, and then carnival talk. Then say, “Leave WMA,” and do some more shorthand that doesn’t mean anything, and then write, “Lenny
Hirshan’s fault.” ’ ”
Trude took out her pad, and handled the note to Parker, who crumpled it up, stamped on it until it bore the print of his heel, and pitched it into the wastebasket.
“Now Byron,” he said, his voice slipping into character as the old Colonel, his tone broadening, his pitch rising, and his accent ripening to reveal his difficulty with
h
’s and
j
’s, “I want you to call Lenny Hirshan and tell him you walked in and saw the Colonel in a meeting with MCA, and you’re reporting back to William
Morris.”
Byron picked up the phone and sailed into the script. “And Mr. Hirshan,” Byron added, measuring the agent’s anxiety, “I’ve got this note that the Colonel
left.” Hirshan, mindful that Parker had no contract with the agency and panicked that he might actually leave, told Byron to bring it right over: “You did a good job. Keep spying on the
Colonel for me.”
The following day, Byron again dialed Hirshan’s number and told him he had some terrible news: the Colonel had seen him retrieving the note, and he knew Byron had delivered it to Hirshan.
Furthermore, they were coming right over.
“We burst into Lenny’s office and Colonel Parker said, ‘Let’s get Abe Lastfogel in here, because if you’re telling my guy to give you stuff from my wastepaper
basket, we’re through.’ Of course, the Colonel had no intention
of leaving—he was too loyal to Mr. Lastfogel—but he loved seeing Lenny squirm. So Mr.
Lastfogel came in and said, ‘Lenny, if that’s true, say it.’ And I said, ‘It’s true, Mr. Lastfogel.’ Lenny looked at me and his eyes were like fire. I had
betrayed him and been a traitor to the people who paid me.”
Byron was about to learn a harsh lesson: if you worked for Colonel Parker, you got hurt, emotionally, professionally, or financially—and the sting never really went away.
“I never should have done it,” Raphael says. “But since I idolized the Colonel, I lost my sense of reality. Everybody who worked for him wanted his approval so desperately, and
when he went into that steely look, or stormed in and out of offices, slamming doors, we were also afraid of his anger. I really think he hypnotized us so that we would endure almost any kind of
treatment.”
Tom Diskin was foremost among them. Already in his mid-thirties, Thomas Francis Diskin revered the Colonel with a complexity of emotions that transcended any father-son relationship. Although he
had reportedly been Parker’s first partner in the Jamboree Productions booking agency and music publishing companies—running the Chicago office before selling his half to Hank
Snow—incorporation papers suggest it was Diskin who originally owned Jamboree Attractions and later took Parker in as a partner, only to be pressured to relinquish his half when Snow and
Parker joined forces.
“What he told me,” says Anne Fulchino, national publicity director for RCA in the ’50s, “was that Parker went to work for
him,
and somewhere along the line,
Diskin ended up being his employee. I said, ‘How could you let that happen, Tom?’ And he said, ‘You know, the Colonel’s quite a guy.’ Since Tom was just a nice, simple
person who had the lowest expectations out of life, I could believe his story.”
Short, stocky, with a crop of blondish red hair capping his everyman’s looks, Diskin was mediocre in every way. He arrived for work each day on a waft of Old Spice, a yes-man in a cheap
suit and washed-out tie. As - Parker’s $250-a-week right-hand man, he might have been expected to wield a modicum of decision-making power. But he was too sweet and meek to assert himself
(“He was an angel,” says RCA’s Sam Esgro), and the Colonel too paranoid and obsessed with details to delegate much responsibility. The lieutenant, then, was put to work on menial
tasks—writing letters to the fan clubs, taking papers to Elvis for signature, and parroting the Colonel’s words to RCA. On the rare occasion, he contacted
the
Aberbachs in regard to a particular song, but his most useful purpose was serving as a buffer between Parker and the people the Colonel didn’t want to see.
Around his boss, Diskin tamped down any resentment or thoughts of his own and remained blissfully obedient. Privately, however, he complained about being Parker’s shadow, describing how
the Colonel talked to him like a needful but not particularly caring parent.
On the road, at the end of the day, Diskin yearned to find a place to knock back a toddy or two and meet some nice girls, go dancing. But the Colonel wouldn’t permit it, fearing it might
lead to dating and marriage, and a possible end to Diskin’s steadfast devotion. In the odd, Walter Mitty moment, he managed to smuggle a girl into his room, but mostly settled for the life of
a eunuch, exchanging playful winks with waitresses. Eventually, he would buy the property adjacent to Parker’s Tennessee home, where his boss could keep a vigilant watch.
As reward, the Colonel cut his lieutenant into a number of Elvis’s business deals, including his music publishing, buying Diskin’s loyalty and his silence. But while he always
addressed him as Mr. Diskin in the company of others, Parker could never resist the opportunity to humiliate him, to remind him that he was not really a business colleague, but a flunky. Despite
Diskin’s serious-mindedness, and the thoroughness with which he attended to his duties, the Colonel found constant fault with his performance, yelling at him in front of Byron and Trude, and
one day calling him in to a meeting with another talent manager and ordering him to tap-dance. Not once did Diskin ever refuse or talk back, even when Parker screamed at him with the force of a
hailstorm. Eventually, Diskin’s silence, along with years of hard drinking, would lead to ulcers and the surgical removal of half his stomach.
In his more benevolent moments, Parker showed strong loyalties to the people he liked. When he needed an opening act for some of Elvis’s early concert dates, for example, he plucked an
Irish tenor named Frankie Connors from the unemployment line, later arranging a screen test for Connors’s daughter, Sharon. He also had a soft spot for Gabe Tucker, assigning him all the
royalties to a song they wrote together. “There were times when he was so gentle he would go into a reverie and almost rock himself to sleep,” says Byron.
When his malevolence came upon him, however, Parker spared no one’s feelings, cloaking cruelty in offbeat humor. He once steered the promoter Lee Gordon into a bad business deal and later
repaid him for his
losses, strictly from friendship and honor. But Parker’s influence had tragic results. Though handsome in his resemblance to Tyrone Power, Gordon
fretted over his ethnicity. “Do you think my nose looks too Jewish?” he repeatedly asked. “Well,” Parker replied, “I wouldn’t eat too many bagels,” and
goaded him into having plastic surgery. “Something happened,” Byron remembers, “and he came out looking a gargoyle, even after repeated surgeries to correct it. It was a horrible
thing. But - that’s how hypnotic the Colonel was in his suggestion.”
A more frequent target was Bevo Bevis, the Colonel’s runabout. Parker looked after him, giving him a job and sending Bevo’s pay home to his mother, who cared for his young daughter
from a hopeless marriage. But Bevo paid dearly for the Colonel’s attention. On one occasion, he was forced to stand at attention in the middle of a rainstorm, as proof of how “my people
listen to me,” as the Colonel snorted to cronies. When he once failed to immediately light his boss’s cigar, Bevo was put out of the car on a late-night highway, told to catch up at a
diner seven miles away, and waved off with the admonition not to hitch a ride, or “I’ll know about it and won’t even consider taking you back!”
Like Bevo, Trude was constantly threatened with termination for some imagined slight. But while the Colonel terrorized her on occasion, usually putting Byron up to some scheme to scare her into
thinking she’d lost her job, the secretary almost always figured out that Parker was bluffing. “I know the inside of the Colonel,” she explains today.
Trude was loyal to a fault, but she took the Colonel’s teasing in stride for another reason. Caught in a crumbling marriage, the vivacious Trude simply transferred her affections to her
boss. During the day, she tried to impress him with how quickly she had learned about show business, and at night, she smuggled home photographs of him, just to have him near.
She knew the relationship would never be romantic and, in fact, considered Marie a good friend, though she rankled if another woman came near the Colonel at the office. Parker noticed her
possessiveness, as did her husband, Bruno, who tired of hearing her sing “Hound Dog” around the house and threatened to leave her and their two young sons, believing she was having an
affair with Elvis. The Colonel was intensely uncomfortable around any female who showed any personal interest in him—he had become especially agitated on the road when a young fan repeatedly
broke into his room and climbed into his bed—and never, ever demonstrated interest in another woman. Now Trude had become a threat: if Bruno didn’t leave her, she would leave him
instead.
In an uncharacteristically soft approach, Parker gently dissuaded her fantasy and finally appealed to what he assumed would be her European sense of hearth and home.
“He went to her,” Byron remembers, “and he said, ‘Trude, your marriage is going to end if you stay here. Take whatever chance you can to work it out. Otherwise
you’ll lose your family.’ And I remember her tears. She said, ‘But Colonel, you and my children, you
are
my family.’ ” For a while, then, the Colonel let her
stay.
Parker intended to make up for more odious maltreatment when he allowed Byron and Trude to play Elvis a ballad, “Castles in the Sand,” that they’d cowritten with the help of a
professional songwriter. They hoped he’d record it for the soundtrack of
Loving You,
and their chances looked good: Steve Sholes was short on material for the session, and Elvis
loved the song so much he sang it all night at his suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Furthermore, the Aberbachs had agreed to publish it as part of the Gladys Music catalog.
The Colonel seldom attended Elvis’s recording sessions, and Presley preferred it that way. At Paramount, he’d had a difficult time getting a satisfactory take on the
soundtrack’s title song, and now at Radio Recorders, he welcomed no distractions in the studio, especially not from Parker, who had an irritating habit of making irrelevant suggestions or
reminiscing about the Gene Austin days. Elvis called him Admiral, as a derisive play on Colonel, although it was a nickname Parker sometimes used for himself, as well as for Marie.
Lately, in private, Elvis had been more defiant with his manager, mostly out of nerves. Everything had gotten so big so fast, it made his head spin. He’d even pulled a movie-prop pistol on
a marine in an argument, and gotten in a fistfight with a service station attendant, which landed him in court. In early ’56, he told reporters that his success “just scares me,”
and that all the hysteria at his concerts “makes me want to cry. How does all this happen to me?”
Almost a year later, Elvis felt isolated and out of control. His mother, Gladys, had been in the hospital for tests. As always, the Colonel, treating him like “property,”
didn’t approve of his new girlfriend, Dottie Harmony, a Las Vegas singer and dancer. And worse, the army was making noises about drafting him—he’d already had his preinduction
physical. Everything seemed so up in the air. Soon, over Easter of ’57, when he should have been enjoying his new house, a mansion with the lofty name of Graceland, Elvis would tell his
minister, the Reverend James Hamill, “I am the most miserable young man you have ever seen.”
And so on February 23, 1957, when Elvis arrived at Radio Recorders in Hollywood to tape five songs, including “Castles in the Sand,” for the
Loving
You
soundtrack, he had much on his mind. Parker forbade Byron to attend the session, but once he was there, Byron went up to Elvis almost immediately at the Colonel’s suggestion.
“Mr. Presley,” he said, “I want to thank you for recording my song.” Raphael could tell that Elvis thought the kid was trying to pressure him—why else would
“Byron the Siren,” as Presley playfully called him, address him so formally? Still, Elvis was polite. “Well, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it.”