Authors: Alanna Nash
“That was the only argument I had with Colonel Parker,” says Finkel. “He didn’t want any of the Elvis mystique to be eroded by a producer.” So much so that after
the trade magazines posted credits for Binder and Howe with the first number-one single, their names suddenly disappeared from future listings—a directive, believes Binder, from the Colonel
to RCA to threaten to pull its magazine advertising. Binder returned Parker’s check for $1,500 for all rights and shook his head in the memory of the Colonel’s early
promise—“You guys are going to have a million-dollar experience”—his way of compensating for the producer’s meager salary of $15,000.
In a sense, the Colonel was right. There was no way for Binder to measure the satisfaction of seeing Elvis come back to life as an artist. When they’d screened the whole show after the
first edit—ninety minutes, which Binder pared to an hour for broadcast—Elvis laughed and applauded along with the staff, and then asked if he could see it again, alone with Binder.
“He watched it three more times, and he said, ‘Steve, I will never sing a song that I don’t believe in, and I will never make a movie that I don’t believe in. I want to do
really great things from your new things.’ ”
Elvis had always reminded Binder of Hamlet, sequestered in his castle of Graceland, with everyone around him for a purpose. Now he let the words sink in, and offered Elvis a new challenge.
“I hear you, Elvis,” he said prophetically, “but I don’t know if you’re strong enough to do that.” The singer was taken aback, and Binder explained that
Elvis’s “sense of loyalty was confused with whether he should or shouldn’t do things based on his own integrity,” and that he was probably still weak when it came to
challenging the Colonel’s business machine. Earlier in the day, Binder, who during rehearsals walked Elvis out on Sunset Boulevard to prove it was possible for him to enjoy a degree of
normalcy, had invited Elvis to a pizza-and-beer gathering that afternoon at Bill Belew’s apartment. “I can’t go,” Elvis had said, to which Binder replied, “Why
not?” Now, as they left the screening room, Elvis told Binder he wanted to go to Belew’s after all.
They sped off to Hollywood in Binder’s yellow Mustang convertible—the
Memphis Mafia following behind in a Lincoln Continental—only to arrive at
Belew’s apartment and find no one there. It was an awkward moment (“the look on Elvis’s face . . .”), and soon they went their separate ways. But back in the screening room,
Elvis had scribbled down his private phone number and asked Binder to stay in touch. More than once, the producer called and left messages, but “they were always intercepted. The walls came
down immediately. The Colonel wasn’t about to let him get out into the real world. It was tragic.”
From the beginning of their association, Parker had been afraid that someone younger and more in tune with Elvis’s creativity might come along and pose the ultimate threat to his power and
control. Always before, the Colonel had been able to huff and puff and stare down an adversary, but Binder had terrified him. Not only could he relate to Presley as Parker never had, but Binder
knew what slumbering promise still lay within Elvis (“There’s no limit to where he can go if he has the material”) and had the psychological leverage to help that talent flourish.
Parker saw that he must guard against Binder’s interference with the same ferocity he used to keep his dark secrets at bay. Elvis’s success was not only his livelihood. It was his
life.
Parker would never admit to nearly being toppled, but he would concede to being topped. When the Colonel returned to Palm Springs a day or so after taping ended, he found the towering, electric
red letters spelling
ELVIS
set up and flashing on his front lawn, a generator humming Finkel’s glee. The Colonel, always honoring a deal, wrapped up his cane with a
note, “To Commander Bob Finkel from Colonel Tom Parker.”
The Snowman was melting.
S
IXTEEN
days after the comeback special aired in December 1968, the Colonel finalized the deal to take
Elvis into the soon-to-be-built International Hotel, a $60-million resort palace that owner Kerkor “Kirk” Kerkorian promised would be an oasis of tastefulness on the Vegas desert of
glitz and greed.
Kerkorian’s ties to the town went back to the postwar years, when he began operating a flying service to scurry gamblers from California to Nevada. Eventually, with a personal fortune of
$100 million from the sale of his Trans International Airlines, Kerkorian began buying casinos, acquiring the Flamingo to use as a training ground for the staff that would run his dream hotel, the
International.
To book the acts for the International’s 2,000-seat showroom—the largest in town—executive vice president Alex Shoofey tapped Bill Miller, the most respected entertainment
director since Jack Entratter.
At the Flamingo, where Shoofey and Miller worked hand-in-glove, Miller brought in everyone from Sandler and Young to Tom Jones. Now for a high-profile act to open the International, he presented
five names for Shoofey and the department heads to vote on, including Jones, Frank Sinatra, and Barbra Streisand, who had just won an Academy Award for
Funny Girl
.
But Miller had wanted Presley since Parker brought him into the Frontier in ’56 (“I made up my mind when I saw him at the time, I’m going to get Elvis”) and, through Abe
Lastfogel, learned that he might be able to make a deal.
Miller called Parker at his office at MGM and set up a meeting. The Colonel wouldn’t hear of his client going into a new room—too many
potential problems with
sound and lighting and other bugs to work out. So Miller signed Streisand, and then went back to Parker to see about booking Elvis to follow. “He said, ‘That’s great,’
” as the veteran entertainment director remembers, and the wheels were in motion.
Next the Colonel met with Shoofey. During his years at the Sahara and the Flamingo, Shoofey, who brought his team along every time he assumed the head of a new hotel, had earned the nickname
“the Cleaver.” Knowing full well that he was in line to become president and director of the International, he watched his every step. And every penny. Of course, the hotel wanted
Elvis, he told the Colonel, but Presley was unproven as a stage act after so many years in Hollywood, and especially in Vegas, where he hadn’t appeared in twelve years.
“Elvis was a question mark, to tell you the truth,” remembers Nick Naff, the hotel’s former advertising director, who had also come over from the Flamingo. But the Colonel, set
on outmaneuvering Shoofey for the best deal, convinced him that the town had never seen the kind of business his client would draw.
“You’re going to find out what an opening is like when Elvis comes in,” Parker boasted, closing his pitch. “They’ll come from all over the world.” Shoofey
raised a thick eyebrow, pondered the notion, and then nodded.
And so they began to hammer out the details, with the rumor floating through town that Milton Prell, Shoofey’s old boss at the Sahara, had really been the one to broker the deal for the
Colonel. “Prell got money from the mob for putting the deal together,” says one longtime Vegas insider.
In July 1969, Elvis would begin a four-week engagement at the International showroom, performing two shows a night, seven nights a week. No other entertainer had ever committed to such a
punishing routine; most usually enjoyed Monday or Tuesday night off. As compensation for such an all-out run, Parker demanded $100,000 a week, out of which Elvis and the Colonel would pay the
musicians and backup vocalists. “Mark my words,” Parker said. “Elvis will be the first star in Las Vegas to make money for the showroom, apart from whatever his fans drop out in
the casino. You’ll never have an empty seat,” he added. “I can promise you that.”
Shoofey, a long-faced Canadian with a degree in business administration from St. John’s University, mulled it over and ran the numbers. The International would want an option for a second
appearance. But Parker
had his needs, too, including complimentary suites at the hotel for both Elvis and him and the right to film a concert documentary. Shoofey agreed.
Then the two shook hands, and Parker lined up the publicity pictures, in which Elvis posed signing his “contract” at the International’s construction site, with Shoofey and Miller
flanking him in hard hats. It was only for show—Elvis would sign the official contract in April. But the photograph was historic. Never again would the Colonel give the hotel such access to
his star.
The picture would become a prized possession for Bruce Banke, Nick Naff’s assistant and the executive assigned to look after the Colonel. (“Actually, I think I was about the third
one, and I was the one that stuck.”) Banke would deliver Elvis’s weekly paychecks, order the big floral arrangements Parker placed in the hotel foyer each holiday, and be at the
Colonel’s constant beck and call. In return, Parker treated him with unusual affection. “We were very close. I loved that man. He was like a father to me.”
In securing Elvis’s comeback in Las Vegas, the greatest carnival midway of all, Parker hoped to achieve two goals: to feed the ferocious beast that had become his gambling habit, and to
reinvent and validate Presley to a new generation, building on the entertainer’s renewed popularity from the television special. The money from Vegas couldn’t touch what Elvis would
make on the road, but first Parker needed to generate sizzle about Presley’s return to live performance.
Elvis himself was more concerned with following through on his promise to Steve Binder—to restore his credibility as an artist. To that end, he took the advice of Memphis Mafia member
Marty Lacker to make his next album not in Nashville, with its factorylike approach to recording, but in Memphis, at Chips Moman’s American Studios. Elvis - hadn’t recorded in his
hometown since the Sun years, and Moman was renowned for his soulful cache of studio musicians and his hit-making synthesis of pop and rhythm and blues. The combination, Lacker thought, just might
help provide the magic to keep Elvis focused and inspired in the studio. Presley agreed and, during the first two months of 1969, recorded some of his most enduring music, including
“Suspicious Minds,” “Kentucky Rain,” and “In the Ghetto.”
However, from the beginning, the project was fraught with tension, as both the label and Hill and Range grumbled at the arrangement. RCA policy dictated that all of its artists record in the
company’s own studios, using only RCA staff producers. Parker backed Elvis’s request to record
in Memphis, but sent Tom Diskin to the session, where RCA producer
Felton Jarvis and label veep Harry Jenkins huddled together. Freddy Bienstock and Lamar Fike, the gatekeepers for Hill and Range, were equally watchful, knowing that Chips was also a songwriter and
music publisher and that Lacker, who moonlighted as a song plugger and often worked with Moman, had been encouraging Presley to reach beyond the tired Hill and Range repertoire to keep pace with
the innovative rockers of the ’60s.
Moman, who had produced more than one hundred hit singles, knew that his reputation was on the line with the Presley session. And while “Kentucky Rain,” a Hill and Range song by up
and coming writer Eddie Rabbitt, seemed a good choice, Moman found the majority of the songs that Bienstock and Fike presented sorely lacking. “There were a lot of bad songs in there,”
he recalls, “and I told them that if I had to cut all of those Hill and Range songs, I didn’t want to do it.”
Only days before the first session, songwriter Mac Davis had brought Moman a song that mirrored the social consciousness of the times. Moman knew that Elvis had never recorded anything as
controversial as “In the Ghetto,” but the song built on the humanitarian spirit of “If I Can Dream,” and the producer thought it a perfect statement for a man whose music
was rooted in black culture.
“He liked the song,” Moman remembers. “But after we cut it, there was a big discussion about whether it would be right for his image. Of course, back at that time, the racial
thing was still hot and heavy.”
Freddy Bienstock had another consideration, since the Aberbachs - didn’t control the publishing, and inquired whether Mac Davis would be willing to give up part of “In the
Ghetto” for Elvis to record the song. Such a practice rankled the producer (“I just thought that was wrong”), and while Davis conceded, Moman was not about to relinquish even a
fraction of two songs in his own publishing company, “Mama Liked the Roses” and the spectacular “Suspicious Minds,” which Elvis had already laid down on tape. A
confrontation quickly ensued.
“I wasn’t angry about it,” remembers Freddy Bienstock. “Those sessions were very good. I would become aware of what songs Elvis wanted to do, and if the publishing rights
were available, I would pick them up. ‘Suspicious Minds’ was more difficult [to obtain] than ‘In the Ghetto,’ because ‘Suspicious Minds’ had been recorded
before. [But] Chips and I became friends.”
Moman remembers it differently. “Their deal was that they weren’t
going to record any song that they didn’t have the publishing on. I was ready to erase
the tapes and just let it go. I ended the session and sent the musicians home and asked all of the Elvis people to leave my studio.”
As tempers flared, Tom Diskin walked over to the phone and dialed his boss. If Moman wouldn’t cooperate, Parker told his lieutenant, they’d either go around him or dismiss him
altogether. But RCA’s Harry Jenkins recognized that “Suspicious Minds” could be a career record for Elvis and took it upon himself to mediate the situation at the next day’s
session.
“In all the years that I have been involved with Elvis,” Jenkins told the group, “I’ve never opened my mouth about songs or anything else. But that boy [Moman] is right,
and we are going to finish this session however he wants to do it.”
That August, “Suspicious Minds” became Elvis’s first number-one single in seven years, and the last he would ever have. The American Studios sessions would spawn two albums,
the first,
From Elvis in Memphis,
garnering a lead review in
Rolling Stone
magazine. But Parker saw only that Chips Moman had challenged his way of doing business, even as Felton
Jarvis altered the producer’s recording of “Suspicious Minds” by adding “live” horns and a false fadeout at the end. Like Steve Binder, Moman would be banished
forever. When Elvis requested that Parker hire Moman’s studio band to back him during his upcoming appearance in Vegas, Diskin replied that the group was unavailable.