JOSEPH Hazen was sitting in his Park Avenue apartment, reading, one Saturday night in 1956, when the telephone rang. “Joe,” said his neighbor Harriet Ames, “look at this fellow on the television, Elvis Presley. He’s a terrific dancer. He’s quite a character.” Hazen dialed his set to the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show, and, as he remembered years later, immediately called Hal Wallis in California and told him to watch the program.
Some years before, Hazen, then a lawyer with Warner Bros. in New York, had met Wallis, a Warner production chief with a long list of solid commercial films, while on a routine trip to California.
“We chatted,” said Hazen, a son-in-law of Walter Annenberg, the billionaire media mogul and philanthropist who would become the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. In time, the two worked out a 60–40 partnership to produce films independently, Wallis handling the artistic duties and Hazen the financial, with Paramount as their distributor.
The day after Presley’s appearance on Stage Show, Hazen telephoned the William Morris office in New York and spoke with Martin Jurow, an agent in the film department, about a contract for Presley’s services. Wallis, clearly smitten with Elvis’s soulful stare (“There was something about his eyes, a solemn look . . . an expressive face, a new personality that I knew was definitely star material for the screen”), went to work on Colonel Parker, who told Wallis that Elvis would “probably” be out on the West Coast soon and would “consider” the possibility of a meeting.
“I knew instinctively that the Colonel was interested but playing it cool,” Wallis wrote in his autobiography. What he didn’t know was that Parker had set his cap for Wallis back in his dogcatching days, when the Warner Bros. film crew came to Tampa to shoot Air Force.
Through the years, Parker had obsessed about the producer, envying his power and his wealth. He’d followed Wallis’s move to Paramount through the trade papers and fantasized about a day when he would come to Hollywood with an act so big that a man like Wallis would be eating out of his hand.
And so he planned it from the beginning with Elvis, booking him into all of the Paramount-controlled theaters in Florida and up the East Coast, where the singer packed every one he played. The word couldn’t help but get back to Paramount’s top brass.
But it was not just his desire to maximize his client’s talents, or to make him rich and famous beyond anyone’s boldest imagining. Through Hollywood, Parker, now forty-six years old, would also make himself powerful—more omnipotent, even, than the old-line tycoons. His aim was not only to become a figure of respect, but also to build his own legend.
He would become, in effect, too big to be touched, able to forget that he was an illegal alien with no papers. In doing so, Parker would be in his total glory, conducting his professional negotiations and personal manipulations with the outrageous, swashbuckling bravado of a pirate. At no other time would he ever be funnier, deadlier, or as obviously pathological in his business dealings.
The prime target of his discontent was Hal Wallis. Eleven years - Parker’s senior, Wallis was the Hollywood stand-in for Parker’s own father and, in the Colonel’s mind, the ultimate authority figure. To Parker, Wallis symbolized not just every wildly successful Hollywood mogul, but every Jewish son of immigrant parents who had “made it” in America. It would not be enough for Parker to be accepted as an equal by such men. He would have to needle them, bully them, and prove his superiority with whatever means necessary, including chicanery, deceit, and cunning.
When Wallis followed up to set a date for Elvis’s screen test, Parker did what only came naturally: he refused to take his calls. The producer, swearing later that “nothing would stop me from signing this boy for films,” telephoned and telegraphed the Colonel to the point of exasperation. Hazen, who began to envision that part of his job might be to manage the man who managed the star, likewise began a futile telephone campaign.
Finally, the Colonel entered into preliminary contractual agreements and delivered Elvis to Paramount Studios for two days beginning March 26, 1956. There, having been given the material only the night before, Presley performed two dramatic scenes from The Rainmaker, which Wallis was about to shoot with Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn. For a musical number, Elvis lip-synched his new single, “Blue Suede Shoes,” while strumming a prop guitar.
Soon after, RCA’s Steve Sholes and Chick Crumpacker viewed the test in New York and were stunned at what they saw. Presley displayed both a surprisingly natural acting ability and, in the serious love scene, a directness that suggested the work of James Dean or Marlon Brando. “My God, we were agog. It was the talk of the place,” says Crumpacker.
Joe Hazen was likewise startled, writing in a memo to Wallis on June 11, 1956, that Elvis’s “meteoric rise is unquestionably a freak situation, but that still does not detract from the fact that as a straight actor the guy has great potentialities.” Later, Hazen would reiterate with Parker that Elvis should, of course, sing in his movies, “but his dramatic abilities and talents should be carefully and steadily developed so . . . he can do strong dramatic parts as well as sing.”
Nothing would have pleased Presley more. In fact, the former movie theater usher had just told Wallis, “My ambition has always been to become a motion picture actor—a good one, sir.”
But Wallis had other ideas. “The idea of tailoring Elvis for dramatic roles is something that we never attempted,” Wallis said years later. “We didn’t sign Elvis as a second Jimmy Dean. We signed him as a number-one Elvis Presley.”
Parker went along with it for two reasons: first, he saw Presley’s movie career primarily as a vehicle for selling concert tickets and records, and more important, privately he had little faith in Elvis’s acting abilities, even though Presley frequently recited whole scenes of Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause, trying to convince his manager that he could carry a dramatic film.
When Elvis arrived in Los Angeles for his screen test, waiting for him at the airport were Parker, his assistant Tom Diskin, and Leonard Hirshan, the young William Morris agent who’d been assigned as Presley’s representative for motion pictures. Lenny, as the guys in the office called him, was amused to see the new singing sensation step off the plane with a camera around his neck, like any other hick tourist.
Hirshan had been with William Morris just five years, but now, with Martin Jurow in New York, he was about to negotiate one of the most infamous contracts in the Morris agency’s history. Acting on the advice to get Presley as much work as possible before his star burned out, Hirshan encouraged Parker to take Wallis and Hazen’s best offer—a contract for one motion picture and options for six more.
On the surface, a seven-picture contract might have seemed impressive. But, in effect, it was a commitment for only one picture and amounted to a basic deal. Not only was it nonexclusive—Parker was allowed to make one “outside” picture each year with another studio—but the financial terms befitted a total unknown: $15,000 for the first film, $20,000 for the second, $25,000 for the third, and up to $100,000 for the seventh. Furthermore, it offered no billing structure, no script approval, and no perks of any kind. Nonetheless, Wallis, Hazen, Presley, and Parker signed the two-page document on April 2, 1956.
The contract, which governed the making of Loving You and King Creole, would be bolstered with bonuses and completely rewritten in October 1958. But it stuck in Parker’s craw for his entire Hollywood career.
Always skittish about a situation beyond his control, and hypervigilant against deception and disgrace, Parker was paranoid that the Hollywood sharpies would shortchange him if they could. Now he was livid to discover that his own agency had made a deal that necessitated a special waiver from the Screen Actors Guild, as the terms fell below the minimum provisions—$25,000 a year salary—of the Guild contract. He was further infuriated to learn, once Loving You began filming, that both of Elvis’s costars, Wendell Corey and Lizabeth Scott, were paid far more than Presley, and in a great display of authority that Parker would often repeat, he threatened to pull Elvis off the picture.
While Parker was grateful to Abe Lastfogel and the Morris agency for representing him through the Eddy Arnold era, he realized, in this first real lesson about the agency-studio relationship, that the Morris office gave him poor advice. (“When the Colonel demanded to renegotiate, Lastfogel tried everything he could to convince him to take less money,” remembers Byron Raphael.) He also saw that a major talent agency with hundreds of clients would not risk its relationship with the movie companies over the fate of a single star.
Still, under California law, only an agent, and not a manager, could close a binding deal for a client with a studio. So the Colonel knew he needed Lastfogel for a variety of reasons, and not just to get Elvis prestige engagements like the New Frontier in Vegas, where Parker had embarrassed the agency by insisting on cash, and not a check, in advance. (“No check is good. Some are pretty good, but they got an atom-bomb testing place out there in the desert. What if some feller pressed the wrong button?”) But from then on, Parker would always be wary of any Morris agent. And he would carry a special grudge against Lenny Hirshan, who would come to bear the full weight of the Colonel’s revenge mentality.
At first, Parker pretended that all was well. When he dropped by the agency, he regaled the agents with his usual self-serving stories of his carny past, and recalled how, in the Eddy Arnold era, he’d sent a small boy to pick up the souvenir books that folks left under their seats at the shows. “Sold ’em again at the next stop!” Parker bragged, sliding into the line with a wink and a round-faced grin.
The William Morris agents shook their heads at such shenanigans. But sometimes, sharing the sentiments of the RCA label heads, they didn’t know quite what to believe about this man to whom life seemed to be little more than a romp through a carnival fun house, filled with smoke and mirrors. The weirdest talk came from the record company, where the story went around that during his circus days, Parker had married the bearded lady. One RCA department head claimed to have seen the “full shadow of a real blue beard” on Marie, and as crazy as it sounded, nobody put anything past Parker, especially since the gossip made him seem more of an outlandish character and less an intimidating adversary.
At the least, such stories sent mixed signals, but the lighter ones hid Parker’s seething animosity, which began to manifest itself in other ways, primarily in humiliating the Morris agents in public. When Elvis played the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles in October 1957, Sam Weisbord, the president of William Morris, requested twenty-five complimentary tickets for his executives. Parker, who customarily gave no passes and despised being asked for something free if he thought the petitioner could afford it, grudgingly sent over three tickets, for Weisbord, Lastfogel, and Norman Brokaw, an up-and-comer at the agency who headed the West Coast television department.
The powerful agents, none of whom stood taller than five feet three, were shocked to discover that their seats were not in the first rows, as was customary for VIPs, but in a section far in the back.
Joe Hazen and Hal Wallis had already gotten embroiled in one of Parker’s classic power plays in November 1956. As the script for Loving You began to take form—centering on a naïve young performer very much like Presley himself—they asked if Elvis might confer with the cowriter Herbert Baker. Parker, who had demanded early that all communication go through him, carefully keeping Elvis under wraps to the Morris agents and to the producers, insisting that Presley wanted to spare himself any business or professional contacts, sent word by Abe Lastfogel that the answer was no.
Always hot-tempered about imagined criticism or slights, Parker complained that the producers appeared to have lost interest in Presley, because no representative from Paramount had attended his show at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium in June 1956—a time when Elvis was subjected to considerable public criticism.
Hazen responded that it was not their custom to appear at every opening of a performer they had under contract. Yet, he cited, both he and Wallis had flown to Las Vegas in April for Elvis’s debut at the New Frontier, and Wallis had attempted to invite Elvis to his home for dinner several times, and to lunch at the Paramount commissary. But Parker remained adamant—the balance of power had now shifted to him.
This glimmer at how churlish and abrasive the Colonel could be prompted Hazen to memo Wallis that “Parker has a peeve about neglect.” Before long, the producers would have stronger words for Parker in private, Wallis vowing he’d rather try to close a deal with the devil, and Hazen ranting, “I wouldn’t be a hundred feet away from him! He’s an obnoxious, terrible man. Terrible man!”
Parker doubtless took pride in such reactions, in how his irascibility provoked and exasperated others, while he was able to remain cool and in control of his emotions. But secretly he was smarting over a remark Hazen had made about Love Me Tender, Presley’s first picture, which Elvis had made for Twentieth Century–Fox under the Wallis-Hazen loan-out clause, designed in part to let another studio test the waters.
A month before Love Me Tender was released, Hazen screened a rough cut of the film to see what kind of property he’d bought, and when Parker came to New York for Elvis’s second appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in late October, Hazen met with Parker and Harry Kalcheim at New York’s Warwick Hotel.
As Elvis’s first film, Hazen said, Love Me Tender would probably do very big business. But, he added, “very confidentially—and as man to man,” neither Wallis nor Paul Nathan, Wallis’s associate producer, was particularly impressed with it. In fact, they’d considered it “crap.” The Colonel bristled and responded that the studio was making some changes that he had recommended. With those “methods that have been very helpful to us on personal appearances,” he was certain the picture would be improved.
Parker first considered the project when he got a call from Buddy Adler, one of the last of the Hollywood power producers who had just succeeded Darryl Zanuck as Fox’s top executive.
“I was in his office when the call came,” remembers Freddy Bienstock, who as the Aberbachs’ younger cousin became Elvis’s liaison with Hill and Range Music, particularly in the movie years. “Buddy Adler told him he’d just gotten this fantastic property. He said it would make Elvis a movie star, and he’d like to send the Colonel the script. The Colonel said, ‘There’s no sense in sending me the script, because I can’t read. The only thing I’m interested in is how much you’re gonna pay me.’ ”
Adler countered with the fact that Elvis had never done a picture before, and the studio would be taking a chance on him: “We’ll give you $25,000.”
And the Colonel said, as Bienstock remembers, “ ‘That’s exactly what I want. Now, how much are you going to pay Elvis?’ ”
The number Parker had in mind was a staggering $1 million. No other movie star commanded anything near that salary for a single picture, but Parker was in love with the sound of the figure, with the power it conveyed, and with the audacity it took to demand it.
Adler was stunned. “Not even Jack Lemmon gets that,” he told the Colonel. “Well,” said Parker, “maybe he needs a new manager.”
Immediately, the Colonel called Abe Lastfogel and told him Elvis needed a million up front to make Adler’s picture, a Civil War–era drama with the working title The Reno Brothers. Secretly, he hoped for $100,000.
Lastfogel was taken aback at such moxie, but assured the Colonel that while no one would pay his asking price, he could beat the Paramount deal. Several days later, Lastfogel phoned back to say that naturally Fox wouldn’t go for the million, but they’d come up to $75,000 and give Elvis top billing with his name above the title. Parker, who had begun to insist on one-page contracts at RCA and resented the studios’ attempt to confuse him with talk of grosses and percentages of profits, held firm. “Better take this, Tom,” Lastfogel said. “Believe me, this is as high as they’re going.”
“Go back to ’em,” Parker barked, knowing full well that Presley’s name was everything to the project, “and tell them to give the Colonel the money he wants, and they won’t have to give Elvis any billing.”
In the end, Elvis received the target price of $100,000 and costar credit and, at Parker’s insistence, the written promise of a bonus if the picture grossed more than $5 million. Fox also took an option for two other films—Flaming Star and Wild in the Country—at $150,000 and $200,000. But Parker lived for the day when the studios would have to pay his million-dollar demand. “Elvis makes pitchas,” he took to saying to himself as a sort of maniacal mantra.
Leonard Hirshan was the agent who found Love Me Tender and who helped finalize the deal with Lastfogel and Parker. In retrospect, he says, he ended up learning from his client’s country approach to Hollywood negotiation, particularly “in getting the most for your client, not to give up early, but to hang in there. Whenever I said, ‘Colonel, if we don’t take this, we’re going to lose it,’ ” he recalls, “the Colonel said, ‘You can’t lose it—you never had it.’ ”
Hirshan respected Parker, and in those days, at least, considered him good for Elvis. But what Hirshan never understood (and Lastfogel did) was that Parker saw himself, and not Elvis, as the client, and that to - Parker’s way of thinking, Elvis’s wishes should never have been Hirshan’s concern. Now Parker would insist that Hirshan, whom he considered snide, sarcastic, and contemptible, never again be allowed at the bargaining table—he got in the way of Parker’s plans. In the future, Lastfogel, not Hirshan, would negotiate the movie deals based on the terms Parker laid out. Always those deals would include a number of perks for Parker, including, on Love Me Tender, an office on the Fox lot, a secretarial staff, and a car and chauffeur at his disposal. Such accommodations were unprecedented for the manager of a star.
From the beginning, the Colonel turned the “Elvis exploitation office,” as he called it, into his own private midway, with balloons hanging from the ceiling, stuffed animals keeping watch from every corner, and Presley paraphernalia covering the walls. Hullabaloo reigned supreme. At times, Parker summoned his staff, his lieutenant, Tom Diskin, secretary Trude Forsher, and Byron Raphael, on loan from the William Morris office, with the squeeze of a toy puppy dog, one bark for Trude, two barks for Byron, and three barks for Diskin. Sometimes he did the barking himself.
Parker’s main directive called for everyone to look busy at all times, even if it meant just fashioning rows of paper dolls for hours on end. Letter writing, no matter how meaningless, was a favorite preoccupation, as was the counting of the big Tennessee sausages that Parker obtained from the country comic Whitey Ford (the Duke of Paducah) and gave as gifts to every motion picture icon from Bing Crosby to Ray Bolger.
But the real order of the day was to have fun at other people’s expense through a series of practical jokes. If the pompous studio heads considered him a bumpkin, walking around with a smelly cigar and his shirttail hanging out, Parker would have the last laugh. The country fool, as they initially pegged him, would soon play out a sort of down-home sting operation, in which he’d out-con the Hollywood moguls, to him the biggest sharks of all.
One morning, just after Parker had moved on to the Twentieth Century—Fox lot, he gathered his staff and told them that Buddy Adler and Lou Schrieber, who were running the studio, were coming by for their first in-person meeting with the Colonel.
Parker wanted it to be an event they’d never forget. First, he ordered a sign to read COLONEL PARKER’S WEST COAST OFFICE, which he placed over the men’s room door. Then he stationed everyone in his place. Diskin and Byron were to pick up the phone and make imaginary calls, while Trude was to look studiously secretarial. Then he installed Elvis’s corpulent friend Arthur Hooton, in the shower with a steno pad and a stool.
“If anybody laughs,” the Colonel said to the group, “you’ll be sent back to wherever you came from.” With that, he unwrapped one of the Duke of Paducah’s country sausages, greased the doorknobs, and disappeared into the men’s room.
“When Adler and Schrieber came in,” remembers Raphael, “Trude told them that Colonel was waiting for them in his West Coast office.” She pointed in the direction of the men’s room, and Adler opened the door to find “the Colonel sitting on the toilet with his pants down, and this gigantic fat guy in the shower pretending to take dictation. The Colonel said, ‘Come on in, close the door, don’t worry about anything.’ ”
The handsome and dignified Adler tried to pretend that nothing was out of the ordinary as he listened to a man on a toilet going on about how he intended to promote their motion picture. Schrieber, too stunned to say anything, remained mute.
“After about five minutes,” says Raphael, “Adler and Schrieber started to smell something horrendous on their hands, because they’d handled the doorknobs. You can imagine what they thought, but they - didn’t want to embarrass anybody. They just wanted to get out of there. And the Colonel just kept talking, keeping them there as long as possible. They didn’t know what to do. They were in shock.”
Finally, Parker let them go, and the office erupted into hysterics, Byron and Trude realizing their new boss was the kind of man who left people dazed, walking around and talking to themselves. The next day, the manager of Fox’s newest star called Ed Dodelin at RCA and had him send both of the executives a large cabinet television, courtesy of Elvis and the Colonel.
Parker’s antics with the Hollywood power brokers brought a measure of humor to a staid and conservative industry. But the Colonel’s need to diminish and degrade—to terrorize grown men all around him—also served to intimidate them into submission.
As soon as shooting started on Love Me Tender in August 1956, Parker sent a memo to the producer, David Weisbart. Elvis was understandably nervous about acting in a movie for the first time, the manager said, and suggested it might be prudent for Parker to be on the set, since “a familiar face will help keep this fellow settled down.” Weisbart okayed it, thus giving the Colonel permission to grow bolder in his requests. A month later, Weisbart memoed Buddy Adler that Parker wanted to know if it would be possible for him to receive some kind of screen credit.
“He’s been so cooperative with us on everything pertaining to Presley,” wrote Weisbart, “that I thought this would not be a bad idea . . . it can read Technical Advisor . . . Col. Tom Parker.” Adler, who bent over backward to make the Colonel happy after the bizarre incident in the men’s room—recently giving him a pair of gold cuff links—wrote back that it was “perfectly okay,” thus setting the precedent for Parker’s credit on all of Presley’s motion pictures.
Now Parker began flexing more muscle, asking that Elvis’s visitors, including Fox executives, be limited on the set. Furthermore, Parker wanted it understood that he was the man who called the shots, and any access to Elvis would have to go through him. That went for Weisbart (and over at Paramount, Wallis and Hazen); Harry Brand, the Fox publicist; and even the people who made up the call sheets. Trude Forsher would be appointed to phone Elvis at the Beverly Wilshire with his call for the morning.
One person Parker particularly targeted was Lenny Hirshan. While Hirshan remained Presley’s motion picture agent of record, Parker attempted to shut him out at every turn, working out a code with Elvis’s entourage to alert him when Hirshan came to the studio. It was Hirshan who provided Fox with Elvis’s exact arrival times, but Parker didn’t want Hirshan or his counterpart at the agency, Peter Shaw, anywhere near his star, fearing they would try to undermine the Colonel’s authority. Whenever either man suggested a breakfast meeting, Parker answered, “Sure, six A.M.,” knowing that such an hour was far too early for a Hollywood agent who had been out the night before.
If Parker was always preoccupied with what he perceived as the hidden agendas of others, says Byron Raphael, at the Morris office Parker’s paranoia was not without foundation. So many of the agents despised the Colonel that “if they could have stolen Elvis away from him, they would have.”
Early in his association with William Morris, Parker realized that agents were encouraged to nurture strong personal relationships with the clients, both to keep the star with the agency if the client and manager split, and in case the manager became a hindrance. Too, many agents themselves became managers, and with a solid friendship in place, it was easy to wean a star away from a manager who took a hefty percentage of his earnings.
Parker, who also feared the college-educated Morris agents might influence Elvis’s decisions, made sure that no one at the agency had Elvis’s private phone number, even though the agents had always called such stars as Robert Mitchum and Rita Hayworth directly. And on the movie set, where he would soon spend less time on each picture, Parker encouraged Elvis’s happy-go-lucky cousins and friends from home—the entourage the press would eventually dub the Memphis Mafia—to keep an eye out for anyone who tried to get Elvis alone, especially Hirshan, who insisted he was there only to make sure Elvis got everything he needed.
In time, Parker would have Hirshan barred from the set, and in the post-army years, he would be relieved as the contact altogether, “because I was developing too much of a relationship with Elvis,” Hirshan admits. “Also, my thinking processes were not his in terms of the kind of pictures that I would have gotten for Elvis and that Elvis wanted to do.”
To Elvis, Parker explained it differently. “You can’t trust people in this town,” he said. “There are Jews here, and Jews are going to take advantage of you.” In the future, when the “Jewish” explanation wasn’t applicable, Parker scared Elvis away from would-be advisors by insinuating they were homosexual.
Presley, who was both loyal to the Colonel and dependent on him for every professional move, remained isolated from the business dealings, both by choice and by his manager’s design. Joe Hazen recognized early that Parker, who became more like a spiteful armed guard than an amiable shepherd, kept things from Elvis that he shouldn’t have, and that, in Hazen’s view, Parker “possessed him. If Elvis had a lawyer on his own, there would have been no Parker. No lawyer would’ve permitted Parker to take over a client like he did.”
When Elvis signed his seven-picture deal with Paramount, he told reporters he wouldn’t be singing in the movies because “I want to be the kind of actor that stays around for a long time.” The way he understood it, his role in Love Me Tender was strictly dramatic. And so he was dismayed to learn from the Colonel that he would perform four songs, in part to allow RCA to capitalize on the movie’s success—the title song, a reworking of the folk air “Aura Lee,” would sell more than 2.5 million singles by Christmas—and to help Steve Sholes get out a second album for the crucial fourth quarter.
Disappointed, and then angry to realize he’d been duped, Elvis balked. Everything was happening so fast. The criticism of his stage act had actually made him cry. (“I’d sooner cut my throat than be vulgar. You’ve seen my folks. They’re respectable God-fearin’ people. They wouldn’t let me do anything vulgar.”) Now, with the pressure of learning how to make movies, he couldn’t sleep. And the Colonel was even saying he couldn’t use his band on the soundtracks, but rather studio musicians with whom he’d have no rapport.
Parker took him aside and laid it on the line. “Look,” he said, “it’s pretty easy. We do it this way, we make money. We do it your way, we - don’t make money.” Presley, who as a small child promised his mother he would lead the family out of debt, and who continually heard the stern admonishment of his father not to cross the Colonel, gave in. “Okay,” Elvis said, “let’s make money.”
Now Parker, as heady with power as any despotic dictator, was equally forceful with Fox, setting another precedent for Presley’s movie years when he insisted that the songs Elvis recorded for the soundtrack be assigned to Presley’s own publishing company, and not the studio’s.
Through an arrangement with the Aberbachs, who organized Elvis Presley Music with ownership split equally between the singer and Hill and Range, Elvis would receive cowriting credit along with Vera Matson. In this case, the point was moot—most of the melodies were in the public domain, and Matson was the wife of the film’s musical director, Ken Darby. But in the future, Parker and the Aberbachs adhered to a closed-door policy, using only those writers—primarily Otis Blackwell, Ben Weisman, and the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller—who were willing to give up a portion of their royalties in exchange for Elvis recording their songs. “For the first twelve years of his recording life,” says Freddy Bienstock, “Elvis didn’t look at a song unless I brought it to him.”
Neither Parker nor the Aberbachs saw anything wrong with “cut-ins,” as they were called. The practice was fairly common, though viewed as unethical today. The Colonel likewise considered it only good business when he and the Aberbachs later structured two of Presley’s publishing companies to give 40 percent ownership to Parker, 15 percent to Elvis, and 45 percent to Parker’s friends, with Parker then taking 25 percent of - Presley’s 15 percent as commission. After all, Parker rationalized, Elvis was his only client.
Constantly jockeying for position and control, the Colonel had much to coordinate as Love Me Tender began shooting. But while Parker stayed on the phone to RCA, or orchestrated his office hijinks (one of his favorite tricks was to “hypnotize” the staff to quack, bark, or dance like a trained bear when guests like Tommy Sands dropped by), his attention was sorely needed elsewhere. Elvis had reported to the lot only a week after the contract was signed, and filming began with one of the most dramatic sequences of the story, the homecoming scene in the farmhouse, which Weisbart termed “a very rough way for even the experienced members of our cast to begin shooting, let alone Presley who has yet to get his feet wet in the medium.”
Although Elvis had been the producer’s third choice for the lead, everyone from Frank McCarthy, Fox’s director of censorship, to Presley’s costar, the revered character actress Mildred Dunnock, was surprised at - Elvis’s assurance as an actor. Dunnock, who had coached him in the delivery of lines, praised him as “a beginner who had one of the essentials of acting, which is to believe.” But the picture was on an escalated schedule, since Presley had personal appearances to fulfill, and the Morris office still thought his career might be over by the time the movie came out. And with Adler complaining that the film was over budget, Elvis was often photographed in one take, from less than flattering angles.
A responsible manager would have spoken up about how his client looked in the dailies—when the film was released, one critic compared Elvis to a sausage, another to a hunk of lamb—except that Parker didn’t care about Elvis’s development as an actor, only about how the film sold product and promoted the live shows.
At times, he even seemed to resent the attention that Elvis commanded. When Trude Forsher remarked to her boss that she understood all the excitement about Elvis (“He has magnetism”), the Colonel turned on her. “Magnetism?” he said. “With all his magnetism, if I hadn’t taken him off that truck, he would still be driving it.”
And so Parker went along with the decision to rush Elvis through his motion picture debut, and in disregarding nearly all the wishes of his client, forged the first link in Presley’s long chain of artistic disappointments. But from a purely commercial standpoint, the Colonel was right. The film would make back its cost in less than three weeks.
Anticipating what the movie would mean for record sales, Parker negotiated a new contract with RCA. Elvis would receive an immediate advance of $135,000 and a weekly paycheck of $1,000, both against a 5 percent royalty. The one requirement was ten personal appearances to promote his recordings, in person, or on radio or television. Presley immediately hit the road for five cities in Texas, and the Colonel invited a host of RCA executives to Houston for the performance.
“He had an apartment down there,” remembers Chet Atkins. “We were all sitting around, and he went into the kitchen and brought out a bowl. He had that accent, couldn’t say r’s, and he said, ‘The Colonel’s wefidgerator is gettin’ low on groceries. So I’m gonna pass this bowl around, and I don’t want to hear any silver or copper fallin’ in it. I want to hear paper.’ So everybody chipped in a few bucks, and he sent Bevo out to get some food. He loved separating people from their money.”
When Love Me Tender opened at New York’s Paramount Theater on November 15, 1956, a forty-foot cutout of Elvis decorating its façade, nearly 2,000 fans of all ages lined up, the queue snaking all the way from Times Square to Eighth Avenue. Once the line reached the New York Times Building, the paper’s management asked the police to redirect it across the street, where it again bottled up traffic on Forty-third Street, all the way across to Grand Central Terminal. Theater manager Charles Einfeld sent the Fox publicity department an ecstatic telegram: “Spread the news that we have a most sensational attraction!”
Parker, who had staged the gathering as a publicity stunt for newsreel photographers, handing out ELVIS FOR PRESIDENT buttons and equipping the fans with professionally lettered signs (OK, ELVIS, LET’S REALLY GO!), had his own advice for theater operators: make sure to empty the house after every showing.
Now the Colonel couldn’t wait to throw it all in the face of Joe Hazen, using the film’s success to sweeten the bad taste over the Paramount deal. As the studio began developing Loving You, Parker bragged to Hazen about his employment on Love Me Tender. He inquired, Hazen wrote to Wallis, “as to how much money he was going to get, indicating that he should be employed in connection with the production of the photoplay, since he knew how to handle Presley.”
Hazen let the comment pass, but the Colonel soon returned to “spew” about all the deals he’d recently turned down, including $75,000 to have Elvis sing two songs in another Fox picture. His motive: to force Wallis and Hazen to adjust Presley’s salary on Loving You. After several calls from Abe Lastfogel, the producers agreed to give Elvis a bonus of $25,000, a figure that was to include a fee for Parker’s services as well. As Hazen wrote to Wallis on January 17, 1957, the $25,000 was to be “divided among them according to their own desires.”
Parker, however, was now of the mind-set that any deal that benefited Elvis should also benefit him in a manner above and beyond his 25 percent commission. Lastfogel, acting on the Colonel’s instructions, told the producers that Parker would have to turn over the entire $25,000 to Elvis, as he “could not or would not keep any of it personally.” Additionally, Lastfogel said, Parker, who had originally pledged to remain in Hollywood throughout the production of the picture, now refused to come out to the coast unless he was personally compensated.
On February 7, 1957, Lastfogel wrote to Hazen and Wallis expressing his gratitude for “your paying Elvis Presley and Colonel Parker the additional $50,000.” Parker, too, wrote to Wallis on the same day. But his letter made it clear: half of that $50,000 was for him. A second contract would be drawn “for the cooperation of Colonel Tom Parker,” who would be listed as “technical advisor” on the film.
From then on, whenever Parker could justify a deal as a joint venture, where he and Elvis functioned as equal partners beyond the contractually agreed amount, the Colonel would divide the proceeds 50–50 from the first dollar. They were a team, Elvis and the Colonel, Presley providing the talent, and Parker, through persistence and ingenuity, converting that talent into one of the most lucrative careers in history. “Elvis and the Colonel,” as Parker signed every Christmas card and thank-you letter, was more than just equal billing and ego. It was the Colonel’s own powerful shorthand, a way of telegraphing, “I am as important as Elvis. When I say something, you must listen.”
If Parker saw his job as getting the best deal for his client—and to market himself right along with Elvis—Oscar Davis questioned some of his tactics, particularly his seizing any opportunity for self-gain. Parker was taken aback. As a former carny, Davis should have known better. The Colonel exercised an honorable boldness in his bludgeoning business practices and, in that sense, never posed as anything other than what he was. Besides, loyalty was within the circle—outsiders were not necessarily afforded the same consideration.
“You want to tell me how I should do business?” the Colonel barked at his friend, repeating an exchange they’d once had over Eddy Arnold. “Listen, I have $350,000 in the bank. When you have 350,000 and one dollar in your bank account, then you can come and tell me.”
Indeed, Parker was the largest single depositor at the American National Bank in Madison, Tennessee, where the Colonel still maintained his primary business office, filtering the Elvis money through his new company, All Star Shows. On one of his first trips to Nashville after acquiring Eddy Arnold in the ’40s, Parker had walked into the bank and introduced himself to the owner, whom he remembered as “the only Jewish fella in Madison.”
“It was a family bank, a little bank, and I wanted to borrow $5,000, because I had no money, and we needed [some for] promotion,” Parker said years later. The banker asked what he had for collateral. Parker responded that he had an old car that he paid $125 for, on time at $4 a month.
“There’s no value there,” challenged the banker.
“Well,” said Parker, “even if it was a good car, and I welshed on my pay, what difference does it make what the car is worth?” And so the banker lent him the money just on his face. “I signed the note, I paid him back in about a year and a half, and that still is my bank today,” Parker said in 1993.
The Colonel, Parker would tell anyone who would listen, was nothing if not loyal.