Authors: Alanna Nash
The Colonel had railed against Raphael’s marriage from the start. It distracted him from his work, Parker said, and made him reluctant to take the cross-country journeys that Parker loved
so well, visiting the little one-elephant carnivals and backroad diners. Raphael was always amazed to see this mellow side of him, when he told his hillbilly stories and talked about his past, a
period he seemed to have enjoyed more than the present. But otherwise, Byron, who was expected to drive, hated the trips, because the Colonel inexplicably had a buzzer installed on the car that
went off every time the speedometer hit 55. Now, after an argument in which Carolyn objected to Byron’s accompanying Parker on a gambling trip to Las Vegas, the Colonel began working to
undermine the relationship, telling Byron that Carolyn cared nothing for him, that she was just using him for his William Morris connections. Besides, in time, didn’t Byron want to leave the
agency and work for him? Hadn’t Parker told him to call him Pops?
Within two years, the Colonel talked his young aide into divorcing (“It was something he demanded”) and insisted on brokering the arrangement. So that Byron
would be free of alimony payments, Marie, who was fond of Carolyn and cared about her well-being, assumed her support. “The Colonel told me not to worry about it,” Byron remembers.
“And as I think about it, I never saw a lawyer, never went to court. It was all just taken care of.”
Parker, who had struggled to relegate his gambling to friendly pickup games and betting at the dog tracks in Florida and Arizona, began, during this period of accelerated stress, to feel the old
fever and obsess about larger action. On the way back to California from their first Las Vegas trip together, Byron mentioned that he had an uncle who ran a little motel, a dump of a place called
the Silver Sands, in Palm Springs, just one hundred miles south of Hollywood.
Though he had yet to make the trip, the Colonel had been hearing about Palm Springs since before World War II. Unlike Los Angeles, illegal gambling—everything from poker, to craps, to
roulette—was readily available there for high rollers. “They paid the sheriff and everybody to keep it running,” remembers ninety-one-year-old Frank Bogert, the former Palm
Springs mayor. Three hot spots—the well-appointed Dunes Club, with its glamorous New York atmosphere; the 139 Club; and the Cove—admitted customers who weren’t put off by mobsters
brandishing submachine guns, and whispered the password to the hole in the door for a chance to mingle with movie stars and socialites. Palm Springs sounded exactly like everything Parker loved
about Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the ’30s. “Byron,” the Colonel said, “Let’s go see your uncle.”
Parker had frequented Las Vegas since the late ’40s, when Sin City was no more than a little dusty town of 10,000, and the Colonel booked Eddy Arnold into the elite,
cowboy-themed Hotel El Rancho Vegas for Helldorado Days, when floats, parades, and rodeo promoted its Wild West heritage. Initially, Arnold didn’t want to go (“I kept hearing stories
about artists appearing out there and gambling away all their money before they left . . . I thought maybe the hotel management might expect it”), but Parker couldn’t resist the lure of
the green felt jungle.
“The times when I was there,” remembers Gabe Tucker, “he’d say, - ‘Let’s go down and play, fellers.’ He’d give me a handful of hundred-dollar
chips and say, ‘Play some, Gabe, play some.’ He’d take a chance on anything—covered every number on a roulette wheel. I told him,
‘Colonel, you
can’t win playin’ like you play.’ But he’d just stack ’em up all over and make sure that nobody sat at that table except us. If somebody tried to muscle in, he’d
have us all get out those cigars—‘Now light that up, light that up!’—and they didn’t stay too long. We never did play with somebody we didn’t know.”
With the opening of the El Rancho, built in 1941 on vacant land destined to become the Strip—at first only a two-lane highway beckoning jaded Los Angeles residents to a playground in the
desert—Las Vegas began to take its first steps as a gambling mecca, followed soon by the gangster glamour of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel and Milton
Prell’s Hotel Sahara, the “Jewel of the Desert.” Parker and Arnold were playing the North Africa–themed Sahara, where plaster camels stood as sentinels at the hotel’s
entrance, when the two had the spat that led to their breakup in 1953.
Prell, the first hotel executive to offer big-name attractions in Strip lounges, was one of the earliest gambling figures in the state. He’d opened Club Bingo in 1947, enlarging it in 1952
to become the Sahara, and went on to build and operate the Lucky Strike Club and the Mint downtown. But Prell had plenty of help. The Sahara was built with West Coast bookie and extortion profits,
as well as Oregon race-wire money. And while the hotel would be controlled by a number of mobster families through the years, Prell himself was the front man for the Detroit branch of the Cosa
Nostra. He’d given 20 percent interest in the Sahara to its Phoenix-based contractor, Del Webb, who’d also built Siegel’s Flamingo, and whose company would become a major force in
the gaming industry, leasing casino space.
The Colonel took a liking to Prell, a Montana native and former Los Angeles jeweler, who extended him a high line of casino credit, met him frequently for breakfast, and sat around the pool with
him, deep in conversation. The two formed an intimacy unlike any other in Parker’s personal history, and Prell became the one man the Colonel turned to whenever he needed a favor in
Vegas.
Parker was normally too paranoid to allow himself such a close relationship. When his brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott, signed on to head Elvis’s security, Parker bluntly laid it on the table:
“Bitsy, I trust you more than anyone else. But you have one fault. You make too many friends.”
It was imperative to Parker that he and Prell stay on the best of terms, and the Colonel went out of his way to show the hotel manager the utmost respect. When Byron told the Colonel he’d
lost $100 at blackjack and written the casino a cold check—one he planned to warm up as soon
as they returned to California—Parker marched his young aide into
Prell’s office to apologize and ask for forgiveness. “The check hadn’t even bounced yet, but the Colonel made such a big production out of it that I got the feeling they had some
sort of side deal, a definite connection beyond the obvious.”
The Colonel was adamantly opposed to Byron’s fondness for the tables (“Don’t you know how stupid gamblers are? They’re all nebos!”—carny talk for
“dimwit” or an easy mark), and warned him against the evils of the game. In 1954, after several years of taking Marie’s son, Bobby, under his wing and teaching him to become a
manager for such acts as country singers George Morgan and Slim Whitman, Parker had sent him home to Tampa after Bobby developed an inordinate interest in blackjack, frequenting both Las Vegas and
the after-hours clubs in Nashville. Byron was astonished, then, to see how the Colonel couldn’t leave the dollar slots alone, and how he called on his “mental telepathy and perpetual
perception motors” to reconcile his desire to play with his certainty that the odds were against him. “He stared at the slot machine for the longest time, then lit his cigar, and said,
‘I’m hypnotizing it to pay off.’ That’s how confident he was that he could will anyone or anything into doing what he wanted.”
Parker’s increased interest in gambling and other obsessive-compulsive behaviors may have been a way to keep his thoughts from settling on the secrets of his past,
including his botched army career. For the U.S. Army was very much on his mind these days, and had been since early ’56, when Elvis turned twenty-one.
Certainly Elvis would be eligible for the draft, but Parker couldn’t have him called up and processed like any other soldier. No, the Colonel would have to negotiate the terms of
Elvis’s service with the army itself, through a series of interactions that might raise questions about Parker’s own tours of duty. The prospect must have filled him with trepidation,
but for a man who psychologically viewed his client as his beautiful alter ego—always “Elvis and the Colonel”—any thoughts on how to handle Elvis’s army career would
have been a projection of Parker’s own patriotism. It also would have triggered an intense desire to relive his own army experience and rectify the past. For that, Elvis would need to be the
model soldier, with no blemishes on his record like AWOL, desertion, or discharge for emotional instability.
To his staff, Parker was consumed only with manipulating the situation
for the greatest public relations good. What has never before come to light is exactly how he did
it. In the summer of ’56, he began dictating a series of letters to Trude addressed to the Pentagon, requesting that the army assign Elvis to Special Services, so that Presley might bypass
boot camp and rigorous training and concentrate all his efforts on entertaining Uncle Sam’s troops.
But Parker had no intention of Elvis going into Special Services. In fact, that was the last thing he wanted. At every whim, the boy would be made to perform free in front of 20,000 soldiers.
The Colonel wouldn’t even be able to sell programs! Worse, each appearance would be filmed and sold to television networks, with every cent going into the army’s coffers. The
overexposure would kill Elvis’s motion picture career.
No, no, Elvis could not go into Special Services. Besides, a public hew and cry would rise up all across the land, from veterans’ groups and congressmen, from mothers and fathers outraged
that a hip-shaking hooligan was treated any differently than their boy. Faron Young had done it, but who cared about Faron, strumming his honky-tonk guitar for army recruitment programs? A big star
who shirked his duty had hell to pay.
Why then had Parker made a request for Elvis to go into the army as anything but a regular Joe? Because the Colonel was, as usual, one step ahead of everyone. Now, in secret, he fed a story to
Billboard
magazine in October ’56—more than a year before Elvis would receive his induction notice—informing the publication that Elvis would be drafted in December
’57 and assigned to Special Services. The magazine telephoned Fort Dix, New Jersey, for confirmation, and learned that, indeed, Elvis was about to get a cushy deal. His hair would not be cut,
and after six weeks of basic training, he would be free to resume being Elvis. All he had to do was entertain his fellow soldiers on behalf of his government.
Presley, learning of this for the first time in
Billboard,
was stunned and confused. Hadn’t Milton Bowers, chairman of his draft board, promised to notify Elvis privately in
advance of just such things? Bowers said yes, but the story had come out of the blue. Elvis read it again. The only people who would know the date of his induction, the magazine reported, were army
personnel and Presley’s “closest business associates.”
For a year, Parker kept Elvis hanging, saying he would talk to the boys in Washington, see what he could do. Elvis’s cronies were perplexed, George Klein, his high school friend, saying,
“There’s no war going on, you’re sitting on the top of the world, and all of a sudden you’ve got to go into the army? It doesn’t make sense.”
Freddy Bienstock was with the Colonel in California when Parker went to deliver the unhappy news. They found Elvis in the dining room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel,
surrounded by his luckless cousins and Cliff Gleaves, a disheveled runt of a fellow Elvis met in ’56 and kept around for comic relief. The Colonel said he was sorry. He had done everything
possible, but Elvis had to go into the army. Elvis stared in silence, and the cousins looked away. Suddenly Cliff dropped his knife and fork. “What’s going to happen to me? I’ve
given him the best years of my life!”
Parker had outslicked them all—the army, which had long ago besmirched his own service record, and his increasingly ill-tempered client, who needed a cooling-off period, riding around in
tanks in Germany in the dead of winter. Now, he told him, Elvis must go back to the draft board and say he wanted to serve his country like any other young man, without preferential treatment of
any kind.
What did it matter if Parker had, in a way, enlisted him? Elvis’s service number would start with “US,” the code for “drafted.” He would look like a hero. And when
he got out two years later, he would be visibly tamed, transformed into a pure symbol of America, a clean-cut god for the masses. No more would he personify the music of a subversive and dangerous
subculture, led by wild deejays high on pills and payola.
Parker had it all figured out. But had the Colonel, in waxing nostalgic about his days as Private Parker in carefree Hawaii, granted the army a codicil, especially after backing out of the
Special Services agreement? In November ’57, a month before Elvis received his draft notice, Presley played two dates in Honolulu, booked by Lee Gordon, who won the honor from the Colonel on
a roll of the dice. The day after the shows at the Honolulu Stadium, Elvis performed for servicemen at Schofield Barracks, Pearl Harbor. Thus, Elvis’s last show before entering the army was a
free one—hardly Parker’s favorite kind. Less than a month later, he would write Harry Kalcheim at William Morris to defend his decision to stop booking Elvis for live performances,
citing fear of overexposure—one of his explanations for turning down a myriad of recent offers, including tours of South America, Great Britain, and Australia. At RCA, says Sam Esgro, the
story swirled that Parker must have citizenship problems, because no one would turn down such lucrative dates.
Elvis, who was in constant touch with Milton Bowers at the Memphis draft board, drove down to pick up his induction notice in person on December 19. The deal was set: a two-year tour of duty
and, by request of Paramount Studio head Y. Frank Freeman and Elvis himself, a sixty-day
deferment to allow Presley to make his second Paramount picture,
King
Creole,
which would go into production in January.
Paul Nathan and Joe Hazen had argued against putting Presley in the musical drama, based on Harold Robbins’s popular novel
A Stone for Danny Fisher,
believing the story of an
impressionable teen caught up in the underworld of violence and crime was too close to the feel of
Jailhouse Rock
and reinforced the image of Elvis as a troubled young man.