Authors: Alanna Nash
Wallis vetoed them and held his ground again when Nathan sent the producer a memo saying “the business of Danny using the jagged edges of two broken bottles as a weapon is
unacceptable” to the Breen office, referencing Joseph Breen, Hollywood’s chief censor. “Is it in the [Production] Code?” Wallis scribbled back. “If not, we will use
it.” Thus, Wallis ensured what became Elvis’s most memorable scene. But he also directed screenwriter Oscar Saul to tone down the seamier aspects of the story dealing with mobsters and
whores, and to move the setting from New York to New Orleans, with its rich musical heritage.
Although Parker cajoled Steve Sholes on occasion—for his forty-sixth birthday, Parker presented him with an enormous bead-and-gold-festooned doghouse, custom-built for
Nipper—relations between them remained strained; RCA had no say about which music would be used in the movies and little input as to songs that made up the albums. Through what many at the
company thought was a direct payoff to singles division manager Bill Bullock (“That crooked son of a bitch gave Elvis to the Colonel lock, stock, and barrel,” says a former employee),
Parker continued to wrest control from RCA. Now he dictated almost all terms with the label and determined how many singles the company released each year.
Nonetheless, the company was fired up about the idea of a Dixieland soundtrack, and a representative met with Parker and Paramount officials in California to discuss the deal. They were throwing
around figures—$250,000 as Lenny Hirshan remembers it—when the Colonel stopped the meeting, saying he had someone outside he needed to bring in for an important negotiation. He opened
the door to usher in a balloon salesman—a down-at-the-heels carnival supplier—and as the executives listened, the Colonel cut a deal for “a ton of balloons, cheaper than what the
guy was offering them for, maybe ten cents a hundred.” The men shook their heads, but the message was clear: nobody, from crusty carnies to hot-shot moguls, was going to get the best of the
Colonel.
With
King Creole,
Hal Wallis gave Presley the chance to become the
dramatic actor he yearned to be, matching him with respected director Michael Curtiz
(“For the first time, I know what a director is,” Elvis said later), and an explosive cast of Carolyn Jones, Dean Jagger, and Walter Matthau, with whom the Colonel played cards between
scenes. It was the performance that would forever define his potential, both to him and to those who had never quite believed in him. “Just like in his music, he really got involved in his
acting,” said Curtiz. “You’d look in his eyes, and boy, they were really going.”
Elvis had waited for this moment since high school, lost in the dreamy darkness of the Suzore Number Two Theater in Memphis, his arm around his girl, Dixie Locke. But now it took on new
importance. Scared that rock and roll might be a fad, that his fame would fade away while he was in the army, he hoped he’d do a good enough job on
King Creole
to resume his movie
career when he returned in 1960.
The Colonel sat him down and made the promise that would forever bond Elvis Presley to Tom Parker. “If you go into the army, stay a good boy, and do nothing to embarrass your
country,” the Colonel said; “I’ll see to it that you’ll come back a bigger star than when you left.”
At 6:35
A.M.
on March 24, 1958, the world’s most famous recruit reported to the Memphis draft board, accompanied by his parents and his girlfriend, Anita Wood. He
wore a wan smile and a loud plaid sport jacket over a striped shirt, and carried a leather bag with exactly what the army said to bring—a comb, a razor, a toothbrush, and enough money to last
two weeks. The Colonel was already on hand, chatting with the army brass and the media, and palming off his bargain balloons—now stamped
King Creole
—to the gathering crowd.
“Colonel Parker,” a reporter scribbled down on his pad, “seemed happier than ever.”
Before departing for Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where he’d undergo his famous haircut, Elvis kissed his puffy-eyed mother, hugged his father, and gazed fondly at his ’58 Cadillac.
“Good-bye, you long, black son of a bitch,” he said, drawing a laugh from his fellow soldiers. Then he climbed aboard the bus to leave behind everything he had ever known and begin life
anew as Private Presley. By week’s end, he would be assigned to the Second Armored Division, stationed at Fort Hood, Killeen, Texas.
The Colonel would follow to Fort Chaffee, to cheerfully marshal photographers, share Elvis’s first army meal, and try to sneak a Southern string necktie into the army’s standard
clothing issue. And he would make several visits to Fort Hood, in between planning the release of Elvis’s singles during his two-year tour of duty. Though Steve Sholes had
fought the Colonel to build up a backlog of recordings, the label had scarcely any material, and now the April release, “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”/“Doncha Think
It’s Time,” performed poorly in comparison to recent singles. During his two-week furlough, when he returned home to Memphis, Elvis, in regulation khaki uniform, tie, and hat, drove to
Nashville for what would be his last studio recording session for two years. Backed by Nashville’s crack A-team session players, assembled by Chet Atkins, he cut five steamy, uptempo numbers
for a flow of product, including “I Need Your Love Tonight” and “A Big Hunk o’ Love,” which would help restore his prominence on radio.
But how long, he wondered, would it last? At Fort Hood, Elvis, who had always suffered from sleep disturbance and nightmares, was visited by a haunting dream: when he came out of the army,
everything was gone—no songs on the charts, no fans at the Graceland gates, not even a specter of the Colonel. Elvis asked his friend Eddie Fadal, a former deejay who opened his Waco home to
him, to help him get some medication—uppers to ease him through the day and downers to let him sleep. It was easy: “My father knew all the doctors in town,” says Fadal’s
daughter, Janice.
Elvis had long pilfered diet pills from his alcoholic mother, Gladys, whom the image-conscious Colonel had encouraged to lose weight for the family publicity photos. Now, nothing a physician
might provide eased the pain of their separation. During basic training, Elvis called home, and as Fadal later remembered, “When he got her on the line, all he said was, ‘Mama . . .
’ And, apparently, she said, ‘Elvis . . . ’ And from then on, for a whole hour, they were crying and moaning on the telephone—hardly a word was spoken.”
Soon Elvis installed the family and his pal Lamar Fike in a three-bedroom rental house near the base. But Gladys’s health, which had declined in the months leading to Elvis’s
enlistment, grew steadily worse. A doctor in Killeen suspected hepatitis and suggested she return to Tennessee at once. On August 8, she boarded a train for Memphis, where she died six days later
at Methodist Hospital at the age of forty-six.
Elvis was inconsolable. When Lamar Fike arrived at the hospital shortly after Elvis received the news, “that elevator opened, and I’ve never heard such crying and screaming and
hollering in my life. This wailing. Almost like wolves. It made me shudder. I came around the corner and Elvis was walking towards me, and he said, ‘Lamar, Satnin’ isn’t
here.’ And I said, ‘I know, Elvis, I know.’ ”
Later that day, Elvis was still in no shape to speak with the funeral director, leaving the task to his father, the Colonel, and Freddy Bienstock.
“When the funeral director came to Graceland,” remembers Bienstock, “Vernon was crying and carrying on, and it was mostly bunk, because he was cheating all over the place.
Everybody knew it. But he was saying, through these not very convincing tears, ‘The best of everything. Give her the best of everything.’ The fellow marked it all down and left very
quickly, and the moment he walked out the door, the crying stopped. Vernon turned to Colonel Parker and said, ‘Don’t let him take advantage of me in my hour of grief.’ ”
Gladys Presley had never made any secret of her dislike of Tom Parker, and he steered clear of her whenever possible. (“I suppose I was never comfortable around her,” Parker said,
“but I was managing Elvis, not his parents.”) Now that she was gone, the Colonel moved to forge a new alliance with Vernon, who shared the Colonel’s hunger for money under the
table. Parker, who privately complained that Elvis’s family was “shit . . . they were awful people,” would always work to keep Vernon happy, but it suited him fine that Vernon
talked of moving to Germany to keep his son company, taking along his mother, Minnie Mae, who would be a housekeeper for the all-male household. With Gladys out of the way, the Presleys would be
easier to control than ever.
The Colonel himself was not going to Europe, he explained to reporters, because he had too much work to do stateside. All the publicity, all the sales, all the films and music came through his
office. There were records to promote, motion pictures to negotiate, exhibitors to notify, fan clubs to contact. Even the Elvis merchandising would add an army theme. But first, there would be a
grand send-off at the Brooklyn pier.
In early ’56, during rehearsals for one of Elvis’s
Stage Show
appearances, Anne Fulchino, RCA’s national publicity director, was astonished to feel the arms of Tom
Parker slipping around her shoulders. Two years earlier, mistakenly believing that Fulchino had discouraged a
Look
magazine photographer from taking his picture on the RCA Country Caravan,
he had threatened to have her job. When Chick Crumpacker spoke up, saying that was unfair, Parker, misunderstanding his words, assailed him. “Don’t you call me a square!” he
bristled, leaving everyone properly stunned.
“I want to apologize, I was wrong,” he said of the incident backstage in ’56. Fulchino knew that wasn’t the Colonel’s way (“I thought, good God, what is going
on here?”) and realized it could only mean one thing:
Parker had few contacts with the New York press and needed help in coordinating Elvis’s debarkation, already
under discussion at the label. Now, with the date upon them, Fulchino spoke with the Colonel. Instead of the army band blasting John Philip Sousa marches, they’d have them play Elvis songs at
the pier. And Fulchino would call out 125 members of the media, including photographers Al Wertheimer and Henri Dauman, who would make the most memorable images of the day.
On September 22, 1958, soon after Elvis’s troop train pulled into the Brooklyn Army Terminal, Private Presley emerged smiling from a conference with the Colonel and a group of army
officials. To a flurry of flashbulbs, he kissed a WAC, signed autographs, and finally sat down at a table with a gaggle of microphones to answer questions, a prominent bank of recruitment posters
behind him. Did he miss show business? “I miss my singing career very much, and at the same time, the army is a pretty good deal, too.” Had his music contributed to juvenile
delinquency? “I don’t see that,” Elvis said, “because I’ve tried to live a straight, clean life, not set any kind of a bad example.”
Steve Sholes beamed, the Aberbachs puffed up with pride, and Fulchino, who two years earlier chided an awkward young singer for greeting RCA executives with a buzzer on his finger (“That
may be big in Nashville, but it will never go in New York”), felt a stir of emotion. Parker, standing off to the side, did nothing for a moment but hold tight to a gift from Paramount
Studios—a fruit basket, always a prize to the Colonel, a reminder of his visits to the greengrocer as a hungry lad in Holland.
Wertheimer, a German émigré who’d spent considerable time chronicling a carefree Presley in ’56, was saddened to see what a managed personality Elvis had become. The
photographer snapped his shutter as the Colonel, who always surprised him by correctly pronouncing his difficult, Teutonic surname, “pushed his stubby little fist in Elvis’s
back,” guiding him through the well-wishers and out to the pier.
Elvis, carrying a mysterious shoe box that the Colonel had given him, waved to photographers, and struggled to hoist a too-heavy duffle bag to his shoulders, smiling obligingly as he climbed the
gangplank of the U.S.S.
Randall
eight times so everyone might get a good shot. The two thousand relatives of his fellow soldiers, there for their own happy send-offs, joined in the waving
for the newsreels.
Now the band was into its third rendition of “Tutti Frutti” as Elvis took his place at the rail of the ship and loosened the lid of the shoe box,
waiting for
the boat to jostle and creak and signal its leave from the harbor. Only then did he empty its contents, fluttering, like so much confetti, hundreds of tiny Elvis images down the side of the boat,
onto the pier, and into the scrambling hands of his fans.
Twenty-nine years earlier, Parker had come to this country on a series of ships, and now the man he had built into a symbol of America was leaving it, going to Germany, to a land where the
Colonel could not go, a country too close to Holland, where a young woman died violently at the hands of a psychopath in the back of a quiet fruit shop. Twenty-nine years later, her strange murder,
marked by a series of dark blows and a baffling trail of pepper, remained to be solved.
Henri Dauman, camera in hand, found the Colonel deep in thought, watching the vessel until it disappeared on the horizon, taking with it both his provision and his protection. Once Elvis joined
the army, Parker said in 1980, “I barely saw him for the next two years. There was very little contact, especially after he left for Germany. He called three or four times. I never got any
letters. I got one thank-you note one time, but that was all he ever wrote. He did his duty.”
Now, except for Diskin, Marie, and Bevo, who sat day after day in the Madison office, pasting sympathy cards for Gladys’s death into scrapbooks, the Colonel was alone. Trude would soon be
gone, Parker saying he no longer needed a secretary in California, though she would return for a short time in 1960, before her divorce battle. And Byron, fearing - he’d turn into Tom Diskin
if he stayed, would go back to William Morris. There, he would work in the music and motion picture departments, but after the awful incident with Lenny Hirshan, never advance as an agent. Parker
had sacrificed his career.