The Colonel (32 page)

The Colonel filled his days and nights with thoughts of keeping Elvis’s name before the public. No scheme seemed too weird. For a while, he courted the notion of going back out with the
Royal American Shows with an Elvis exhibit, deciding instead to have Al Dvorin, his Chicago friend, hire a twenty-five-member “Elvis Presley Midget Fan Club” to carry a banner through
the Windy City during Juke Box Convention.

Still, he made numerous trips to Tampa to “cut up jackpots” with his old carny pals, particularly in late January, when the Florida State Fair drew so many of the circus managers,
show promoters, and talent buyers who met to plan their summer seasons. One day, he saw that Dale Robertson, the cowboy star, was appearing there and invited him to lunch. Robertson, arriving early
at the restaurant, noticed a copy of the
British crown jewels on display under glass. “When we got ready to leave,” Robertson remembers, “I took another
look at those crown jewels, and there was a card slid up inside the case:
LET
’
S NOT FORGET ELVIS PRESLEY
.
HE
’
S FIGHTING FOR OUR COUNTRY
.”

Soon, the Colonel resumed his own good fight, playing the Hollywood producers off each other for Elvis’s next picture.

On such sojourns to Hollywood, Parker sometimes cornered a few business acquaintances and suggested going to dinner at the Luau, where he enjoyed the spicy Indonesian food of his youth. The men
usually went for one reason: the Colonel, holding court in his favorite throne-backed chair, had the most unusual party trick—he’d have them lay bets on the amount of hot mustard he
could swallow without drinking water.

How he did it they never knew. He didn’t even make a face! But what really got them was when he started on the pepper—whole tablespoons of it, straight from the shaker. A spoonful of
mustard, alternating with a spoonful of pepper, and back and forth again. Torturous! What was the guy trying to do, punish himself?

D
ESPITE
what Parker would say about the lack of contact with Elvis during his military service, it did
not mean the two men were not in communication. Almost every day after Elvis sailed for Germany, the Colonel wrote him long, chatty letters designed to fill him in on his efforts “to keep
your name hot over here,” and to try to boost the singer’s spirits. Immediately, Parker reported spectacular results. The Colonel’s hard work, he wrote, combined with his
diversity of promotions—$3 million from souvenirs alone—would bring in more revenue for 1958 than for the year before, even as Elvis spent nearly the entire time in the service. And now
the crafty manager had finalized the lucrative movie deals he’d spent months negotiating with Paramount and Twentieth Century–Fox. Parker instructed Elvis to send Fox’s Buddy
Adler a thank-you telegram and wrote out the script for him.

Hal Wallis, determined to produce Elvis’s first post-army picture, eventually called
G.I. Blues,
had agreed to pay $175,000 for the film—$75,000 more than Presley’s
fee for
King Creole,
and $150,000 more than what Elvis was entitled to under the terms of their original contract. Additionally, Wallis and Hazen agreed on options for three more films at
$125,000, $150,000, and $175,000 against 7½ percent of gross receipts after the picture earned out. At Twentieth Century–Fox, the Colonel revamped Elvis’s existing deal for one
picture at $200,000, with an option for a second at $250,000, and a 50–50 split of profits after expenses.

The new contract with Paramount went a long way in neutralizing Parker’s acid resentment over the initial agreement. “There was not much I could do . . . except get a little more
each time we made a picture,” the Colonel wrote in a letter to Elvis and Vernon, who “managed”
Elvis in Germany and was more apt to keep in touch than his
soldier son. “The facts are now we do not have to call on Wallis every time with our hat in our hands to ask for a little extra.” He added that he had secured a percentage of profits
with both deals—something they’d not previously had with either studio—and proudly announced, “This now brings our picture setup in line with a very healthy . . . future.
This also will prove to Elvis that he is not backsliding in any way.”

In thanking the Colonel for wrapping up the deals with Paramount and Fox, Presley joked, “This sure is a long tour you sent me on,” and closed his letter by saying, “I’m
sorry the commissions are so small in this engagement.”

Parker’s new projects seemed to fill him with élan. His correspondence with Wallis and Hazen took on a giddy wit and playfulness, but Hazen had always found the Colonel repugnant,
and was barely able to restrain himself from telling him so, at one point writing to congratulate him for his chutzpah in tipping a Las Vegas bellboy with sandwiches pilfered from the Paramount
commissary. His disdain for Parker grew immeasurably after the manager snookered him into buying half a million pocket-sized photographs of Elvis in uniform for promotion. The idea was “to
give Mr. Presley some additional income,” as the Colonel termed it. But in taking the printing to his old Tampa friend Clyde Rinaldi and marking up the job for profit, Parker charged
Paramount three cents a picture though the commercial rate elsewhere was half a cent.

When Hazen called him on such shenanigans, the Colonel became churlish and indignant. “I am sure,” Parker wrote after one prolonged period of haggling over money, “that both of
you will agree that I have endeavored to stay away from . . . you as much as possible in bringing this to its conclusion. In the meantime, I am very happy that my connection with the Salvation Army
in the South is strong. As you know, they always have kettles in the street during Christmas . . . it is with great anticipation that I can look forward to not having to share whatever I may get
out of these kettles with my associates.” He signed it, “You Know Who.”

Wallis answered these borderline insults quickly and perfunctorily, as if to say that he feared losing the Colonel, despite their binding contract. Parker, a bloodhound when it came to smelling
out human weakness, fed on that fear, and it was Wallis who got the brunt of his teasing, not Hazen. Once, when the producer discouraged Parker’s input on a project, repeating,
“You’ve just got to get the big picture, Colonel,” Parker
took his revenge. A week later, Wallis arrived at his office to find a photo of himself enlarged
to the size of a wall and installed behind his desk. The accompanying sign:
HERE
’
S THE BIG PICTURE
.

Parker also seemed to have a personal investment in Wallis. In their many letters, the Colonel’s tone was categorically different with Wallis than it was with Hazen; it was Wallis’s
approval he sought in begging for a pat on the back for a favor or a job well done (“This again shows you the little Colonel stays on the ball and follows through”). At times,
especially when he sent Wallis such gifts as jars of honey, octopus, and even Texas longhorns, his affection appeared genuine. Each year, the Colonel sent Wallis Valentine’s and
Father’s Day greetings, usually telegrams “from Elvis and myself . . . your two boys” or, once, “your two orphans, Marie and the Colonel.” After several such missives,
one signed with “love,” Wallis responded, “It is nice to be thought of and remembered, even though I am not your father.”

Whatever the paternal complexity of his feelings, Parker was unquestionably thinking of his past in December 1958, when he began writing Wallis strange, autobiographical letters offering story
ideas for Elvis’s motion pictures. In easing into the first, he noted the growing popularity of Hawaiian music and Elvis’s “good voice for that type of singing.”

A native love story set in Hawaii with “some tough elements” interested him, he said, particularly if Presley were a stowaway on a large steamer bound for the islands. His suggestion
was to frame a plot in which Elvis, dressed in disguise and using another name, ran away from all who pursued him, including the fans and the record companies frantic for more product, only to fall
into the hands of “a gang of promoters—con artists—that is snowing Elvis into singing with the natives.”

These “con artists” would “exploit” Elvis, Parker wrote, making secret tapes of his performances and “selling records like hotcakes.” No one would know
Presley’s true identity until they brought him to Honolulu to do a show, whereupon a frightened Elvis discovered all too late that “he has been promoted into something else.”

“I am this far with the story,” the Colonel told Wallis, but went on to say he had also been thinking of another plot regarding gypsies. As the “rugged type,” Parker
said, Elvis would be well cast as a foundling or baby boy stolen “by a bunch of gypsies traveling in wagons [and] sleeping outdoors.” Later, he repeated the idea to associate producer
Dick Sokolove, changing the focus to “a gypsy boy, traveling with his mother, who gets into trouble with police.”

No one at the studio could have known that both plots were illuminating glimpses into Parker’s own psyche. His reference to gypsies certainly must have come from
memories of his maternal grandfather and the Ponsies’ nomadic lifestyle, while “trouble with the police” resurrects the haunting specter of Anna van den Enden. But the Hawaiian
story, set in the islands that Parker so loved during his early army years, and its focus on a tramp steamer stowaway and an exploitative promoter who transforms the young artist into
“something else,” shows how clearly the Colonel identified with Elvis. It also demonstrates how well he understood his own role in the undoing of an artist desperate to shake off the
trappings of his fame. Wallis rejected both of Parker’s plots, but in responding that he was “definitely interested in a Hawaiian background story for Elvis,” inadvertently
nurtured the genesis of
Blue Hawaii.

Parker’s scenario of a record company pressuring an artist for more material came straight from the Colonel’s dealings with RCA. Only a month before, Bill Bullock had offered to fly
Elvis and four of his friends to Nashville for three days of recording, and the Colonel had refused. Similarly, Steve Sholes suggested that the label pay Parker’s way to Germany to supervise
a session there. The Colonel had never been known to decline a free trip, but now he turned on his heel. Absolutely not! RCA had to learn how to manage the product it had and space out the singles
twenty weeks apart to avoid “flooding the market.” No one understood sales or promotion as well as he did, he thundered.

The Colonel’s refusal to go to Germany at any time during Elvis’s stay intensified the rumors at RCA that something was amiss with Parker’s citizenship. Even the field reps got
to thinking: had he ever gone out of the country for any reason? Yes, after an Eddy Arnold booking in El Paso, Texas, he’d crossed the border into Mexico, but only after insisting that a U.S.
marshall accompany him. More suspiciously, when Arnold played Canada’s two biggest cities, Parker claimed illness at the last minute and asked Gabe Tucker to take care of things.

But Parker had gone to Canada with Elvis in 1957, as he shows up in the press clippings from Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. However, it was Bitsy Mott and Tom Diskin who surrounded Presley in
most of the photographs. Where was the Colonel? His low profile made Byron Raphael remember something startling Parker once told him: “I’ve got money stashed in places all over the
world.”

Byron asked him how he did it, and the Colonel explained that there
was a pipeline from Canada to the Cayman Islands that bypassed the IRS. His young aide surmised that
Parker’s promoter friends—Oscar Davis, the advance man on the Canadian dates, and Lee Gordon, the Australian who promoted them—had helped, legally depositing Parker’s share
of the tour proceeds in foreign bank accounts.

Still, Parker was not about to chance a leap as large as Europe, and when he needed to get what he called “some important papers” to Germany for Elvis’s signature, he called
upon an unlikely courier—Judy Gay, Connie B. Gay’s teenaged daughter. Her father, who knew of Parker’s illegality, told her that the Colonel had a fear of flying, and thus
couldn’t take the papers himself. But Judy, so in love with her boyfriend she - couldn’t stand the separation, declined, leaving her father’s secretary to make the trip
instead.

For two years, a helpless Parker—always nervous at the prospect of advice Elvis might be getting from others—watched as some of his most important business partners went to Europe
for private meetings with his client. First, Jean Aberbach and Freddy Bienstock visited Elvis on leave in Paris, and then in August ’59, Hal Wallis arrived in Germany to begin location
shooting for
G.I. Blues,
calling on Elvis at Bad Nauheim. Wallis had asked the Colonel to accompany him on the steamer, but Parker deflected the invitation in several letters that
suggested the producer might have more fun sharing his cabin with the more colorful members of - Elvis’s entourage. As to his conspicuous absence, “People thought it was strange,”
Bienstock recalls. “But nobody asked him about it.”

In an effort, perhaps, to help Parker rectify his passport problem, Gay, who had been an advisor to several U.S. presidents and organized Special Services shows for the Department of Defense in
Europe, invited the Colonel to a number of his famous Vienna, Virginia, barbeques, attended by an array of well-placed politicians.

Parker zeroed in on one in particular—Texas Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson—and in the fall of ’59, volunteered Eddy Arnold’s services when LBJ honored the president of
Mexico, Adolfo Lopez Mateos, at his Johnson City ranch. Ordinarily, Parker, who continued to handle some of - Arnold’s bookings, would insult anyone who dared ask for a free performance. But
he sanctioned this one for a different payoff—a chance to insinuate himself into photographs with Johnson and former president Harry S Truman.

That began a nine-year correspondence between Parker and the future president and his family, including daughter Lynda, who would visit on
the set of one of Elvis’s
films. Almost immediately, Parker inducted Johnson into the Snowmen’s League, making a supremely useful ally. Two months after the Virginia barbeque, Johnson wrote to Parker using words that
must have seemed golden: “I hope our paths cross again in the days ahead, and that you will always feel free to call on me as your friend at any time for anything.” Apparently, the
Colonel did just that. A mere two weeks later, Johnson told him he was “certainly counting on you to give the office a ring when you get to Washington.”