12

DIRECTIONAL SNOWING

HAL Wallis wanted Loving You to be everything Love Me Tender was not. While the period Western introduced the singing idol to the movie audience and allowed him to learn the rudiments of acting, it did almost nothing to play on Elvis’s natural charm, his exotic good looks, his provocative rock-and-roll dance moves, and the allure of celebrity life.

What Wallis had in mind for Loving You, Presley’s first starring vehicle, was a film loosely based on Elvis’s life, with a story tracing the rapid rise of a backwoods amateur (Deke Rivers) to a national sensation.

The producer was mildly concerned about how the public would react to a swiveling Elvis on the big screen, since just before Elvis’s first Ed Sullivan appearance, Parker learned that church and PTA groups planned on filing a protest with CBS, leading the Colonel to turn down ten days of dates at $250,000 to avoid more screaming-girls publicity. For a while, he toyed with the idea of a “Clean Up Elvis” campaign—that is, photographing the singer in a series of wholesome settings. But the Colonel feared it might boomerang on him, and so he sat tight. No protests were filed after all.

Wallis wanted the script built around the formula used to sell other biopics about entertainers, suggesting that Elvis was just the modern-day Al Jolson, and his music as fun and harmless as the Charleston in the ’20s. In case anyone missed the message, Wallis had it hammered home in a sequence that pokes fun at television censors, and in a scene where Glenda Markle, Deke’s manager (Lizabeth Scott), appears before a small-town city council to defend Deke and rock and roll in general. It was blatant, heavy-handed propaganda—as was Elvis’s line “They make it sound like folks ought to be ashamed just listening to me sing!”—but Wallis saw it as good insurance against criticism from 1950s America.

The man he tapped for the job of writing and directing was Hal Kanter, who, along with cowriter Herbert Baker, fashioned the script somewhat after Mary Agnes Thompson’s original story. Kanter had seen Elvis on the Sullivan Show and knew that “a lot of people, hated him . . . thought he was an instrument of the devil.” Like a lot of sophisticates, Kanter didn’t much care for Presley’s hip gyrations and country attitude, and wrote him off as just a passing fancy, “a nasty little boy,” as he later recalled. Then he saw Elvis’s screen test, found him “orchid-pretty,” and couldn’t take his eyes off him.

To get a better feel for Presley’s world, Kanter, then thirty-nine, flew to Memphis to meet with Elvis at his new, fashionable three-bedroom house on Audubon Drive. From there, he drove with him and his entourage to Shreveport, Louisiana, where Elvis made his farewell appearance on The Louisiana Hayride. An astonished Kanter would use on screen much of what he saw that day, saying privately of the fan reaction, “There were some things that happened there that I couldn’t recreate, because people wouldn’t believe it.”

But it was the Colonel, a “well-fed King Con,” who really dazzled him, hawking tinted photos of Elvis, souvenir programs, and even the Duke of Paducah’s smoked meat sticks at the Shreveport fairgrounds. “I thought the colorful Colonel more interesting than his star.”

Not surprising, a very Colonel-like character turned up in the film as Jim Tallman, a portly, cigar-smoking gubernatorial candidate with a silver tongue who sells snake oil on the side. But Kanter also wrote many of Parker’s personal traits and star-making machinations into the script, with the Markle character playing up the singer’s sex appeal (“I like him—he’s got something for the girls”), talking half of his revenue, staging small riots, and calling her client “our gimmick.”

Wallis shared Kanter’s assessment of Parker, but he also had a grudging respect for him and saw in the Colonel somebody like himself—an energetic promoter with uncanny gifts for manipulating situations to his best advantage.

It was the other side of Parker’s personality that gave the producer fits, particularly once the manager moved into an office on the Paramount lot before filming began, bringing his staff of Tom Diskin, Byron Raphael, and Trude Forsher.

Parker’s only female secretary in Hollywood (except for a “Miss Wood,” who was never seen, and whose signature often resembled Parker’s own), Forsher wasn’t sure she wanted to go to work for the Colonel when she met him socially through her cousins, the Aberbachs. A freelance writer, she demonstrated both a hungry intelligence and a spirited personality. She had no intention of becoming anyone’s secretary, but Parker swayed her with one comment: “Trude, if you come with me now, you’re going to be somebody important. If you don’t, you will have lost your opportunity.”

Forsher, who was somewhat envious of her powerful relatives, found - Parker’s bravado exciting. And the Colonel took comfort in the thick Austrian accent she made no effort to tame. Once in a while, he’d say, “Speak German for me, Trude,” finding a secret transport to a past none of his European friends detected in his speech.

Just as Parker enjoyed Byron’s services courtesy of the William Morris office, he demanded, starting at Twentieth Century–Fox, that the studios reimburse him for Trude’s salary. Now at Paramount, Trude, who ran the office in addition to typing letters and answering the phone, wanted a raise. Parker talked her into a title change instead, and so the lowly secretary became the more lofty sounding “promotion coordinator.”

The Colonel rarely rewarded his employees with bonuses or presents, but he never wanted to look stingy, believing such an image diluted his power. One day he overheard Byron and Trude discussing the split-pea soup they’d enjoyed at the Paramount commissary and, misunderstanding, called them both into his office. “It’s not good for you two to split your soup!” he said, agitated. “People are going to think I’m not paying you enough!”

Parker wanted to be thought of as successful, but it was more important to flaunt his connections than his wealth. And so in his new office dominated by a spread of Texas longhorns, shooting-gallery-prize teddy bears, winking electric signs, and a tiger skin on the floor, he made space for signed photographs of such celebrities as Sammy Davis Jr. and Cecil B. DeMille, the famed producer-director who was then at Paramount working on his biblical epic, The Ten Commandments. In return for such autographs, which he solicited by mail, he often sent a sausage.

At Paramount, Elvis generated so much excitement that director Kanter had to close the set to keep out the studio secretaries and wives and children of the Hollywood elite, all of whom wanted their photo taken with the young star. The Paramount brass, however, was more curious about “this bombastic, driving, one-man minstrel show,” as producer A. C. Lyles called the Colonel. Even Marlon Brando, whose office was down the hall, often stuck his head in the door. The Colonel arrived at the studio each morning at eight (“Let’s open up the tents,” he’d say in carny talk) and stayed until six, thriving on his attention from the Hollywood royalty and the opportunity to negotiate an outrageous deal.

“That was his excitement,” says Raphael, whose main job was to assist Parker in pulling off various snow jobs. “When I would see him on the phone making these deals, there would be little beads of perspiration on his face. He would sit there twirling his cigar in his mouth and be completely enraptured in what he was doing. It was very difficult for him to come down after one of those.”

From the beginning, Parker saw the need to bring the Paramount suits in line, to deflate their pomposity, prove his own preeminence, and bring a relaxed humor to what he viewed as a very stuffy group. His first target: DeMille, a Hollywood god.

He saw his chance on the day he received 10,000 Elvis Presley buttons—large, metal, campaign-style badges with the singer’s picture on them—to promote the new movie.

“Somehow,” Raphael remembers, “DeMille heard about the buttons, and sent an assistant to get one for his granddaughter. The Colonel wanted to know why Mr. DeMille couldn’t come over and ask for himself, and the assistant told him Mr. DeMille was very busy. So the Colonel said, ‘Tell Mr. DeMille that I would like to get him one of these buttons, but I have to check with my lawyers first, because we’re getting ready to make our merchandising deal.’ ”

The next day, Parker directed his staff to pass out the buttons to everyone on the lot, and then sent Trude to DeMille’s office with the message that the Colonel had made a special dispensation, and that Mr. DeMille would be the only person in Hollywood with a rare Elvis button. All we ask, she said, echoing the Colonel, is that Mr. DeMille wear it himself when he goes to his set.

“When DeMille walked out of his office thinking he was the only one at the studio with that button,” says Raphael, “it must have been one of the most humiliating moments of his life. Everybody from the janitors to the guards at the gates was wearing one.”

DeMille never spoke to Parker again, but the Colonel took the risk of making an enemy to prove his point. Later, during the promotion of G.I. Blues, he talked Hal Wallis into donning a paper concessionaire’s hat—perhaps meant to resemble an army cap—and called a photographer to document the moment. “He loved seeing these men that he considered sanctimonious phonies wearing Elvis paraphernalia,” says Raphael, “because he got them all to be little imitation operators, straight out of the carnival world.”

In June 1957, Parker inducted Wallis and Joe Hazen into his fictional Snowmen’s League of America, Ltd. The best known of his nonsensical hijinks, the Snowmen’s League was a takeoff on the Showmen’s League, which promoted the idea of consummate professionalism among carnival workers. Parker’s little club, which he established during the Eddy Arnold era, rewarded another standard of excellence: the ability to con, or “snow.” Its motto: “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!” The Colonel named himself High Potentate and placed an enormous stuffed snowman in his studio office, often posing with it for pictures.

With faultless attention to detail, Parker designed membership cards, certificates, a ribbon-festooned “Snow Award,” and even gag wine labels (THE COLONEL’S PRIVATE STOCK—VINTAGE YEAR 1942). All were emblazoned with a cartoon drawing of a pudgy, top-hat-wearing, cigar-smoking snowman—a benevolent rendering of the Colonel himself.

Parker boasted that the nonprofit club cost nothing to get into but $1,000 to get out. With great fanfare, he inducted those with whom he had business arrangements, or whose favor he curried, such as politicians or high-profile journalists, who protected as much as publicized. Hollywood executives, says Byron Raphael, “begged to belong to that club,” where they rubbed shoulders with members of Presley’s entourage, and RCA reps and corporate brass. “My induction was given to me over dinner, so other people were sure to hear the presentation,” remembers Charlie Boyd, a former RCA field man. “He said it was almost a secret society, and indicated it would open doors for me.”

The coup de grâce of Parker’s little folly was the club’s slickly produced rule book, which the Colonel called a Confidential Report Dealing with Advanced Techniques of Member Snowers, prepared by a team “notably skilled in evasiveness and ineptitude.” A slim volume filled with clever wordplay, its table of contents promised seven chapters on such topics as “Counteracting High Pressure Snowing . . . Melt and disappear technique,” and “Directional Snowing . . . This deals with approach and departure simultaneously.” Anyone who hoped to read such chapters found only sixteen blank pages, followed by text that ended with a “special note” on how the Chief Potentate had allegedly talked the printer into delivering the greatest number of books “at a reduced loss to himself, for which he was very grateful.” As the Colonel summed up, “It is again a sterling example of a good snowman’s willingness to see the other man’s problems and show the greatest understanding without financial involvement.”

Parker had a different snow job in mind for Hal Kanter. The director was surprised to see the Colonel frequently come by the Loving You set, since he had no interest in reading the script, and let Elvis speak for himself when he engaged Kanter about the kind of actor he hoped to become. To Kanter, Parker seemed to be interested only in “how much, not who, where, when, or why,” and once Kanter made his presence known, the Colonel would leave. “I would never know if he was watching in the shadows or not,” Kanter remembers, “but if he wasn’t there, one of his minions would be. There was always somebody around.”

Kanter found out what was on Parker’s mind as the filming wore on. For some time, the Colonel had wanted to publish a book, How Much Does It Cost If It’s Free?, a collection of hokum, blarney, and snow jobs extraordinaire that he would claim was his life story. He planned to insert advertising among its pages to make back its production costs. RCA, he boasted, was buying the back cover for $25,000.

Now all he needed was a ghostwriter, and Kanter seemed just the man—he could write it on weekends, Parker told him. But Kanter, who saw the Colonel as someone who “was happier fleecing the world of its money than the actual making of it,” had no intention of doing such a thing, and told the Colonel to look beyond a book to a film version of his life. The manager brightened, and Kanter was astonished to hear him say that he thought Paul Newman the ideal actor to play him on the screen. Foolishly, perhaps, the director wrote in his autobiography, Kanter replied that he was thinking more of W. C. Fields. Parker’s “pink face turned magenta and he never again mentioned that book in my presence.”

Still, Kanter had enormous respect for what he called Parker’s “genius,” especially after he saw him skillfully maneuver Elvis through a frenzied throng at The Louisiana Hayride. Parker had once tried to work a deal with the Hayride and sponsoring station KWKH, offering to set up an artist service bureau for the fee of $12,000, which the show’s producer, Horace Logan, found preposterous, especially as Parker planned to run it as an extension of Jamboree Productions. Now instead of booking acts on the show, Parker was stealing one in buying out Elvis’s contract. With the help of Bitsy Mott, whom Parker had recently made head of security despite his slight build, the Colonel steered his client past a sea of groping arms and hands, all frantic to touch the star, get an autograph, or in the case of one overexuberant fan, snip a lock of his hair. The director thought Parker’s calling for a wall of police to ring the platform shoulder-to-shoulder had been mere press agentry until Elvis got on stage, and the 9,000 in attendance sent up a roof-lifting scream that lasted the length of his performance.

Afterward, Kanter sidled up to Parker and complimented him on his call: “Now I see why you have the police there.”

“That’s right,” Parker snapped. “If it weren’t for those cops, those sweet little girls would be all over the stage and they’d tear that boy to pieces. That’s why I’ve got to protect him. You people in Hollywood don’t know a damn thing about protection.”

Kanter, trying to make a joke of it, thought of the diminutive head of the William Morris Agency. “I guess Abe Lastfogel would get trampled to death in a crowd like this.” The Colonel sneered: “Abe Lastfogel wouldn’t know where to go to find a crowd like this.” With that, Kanter “knew immediately what his relationship with the Morris office was.”

Lately, Parker had become more disgruntled with the Morris executives, especially as they began to advise him on ways that he and Elvis might better manage their money. The Colonel should set up a corporation to shelter some of it from the tax man, they said, and in fact, they could do it for him. But the Colonel had no interest in any such thing. The Morris brass was surprised. Didn’t he trust them? If that was the case, they could recommend a business manager to help him protect what he and Elvis had.

The Colonel didn’t trust them, of course, and he’d rather have Elvis lose money than set him up with someone who might influence him in other decisions, too. Only once did he take Elvis to the Morris offices, and then just to let the agents fraternize with him a little, so he could keep them away from the movie sets. His paranoia raged to such an extent that he refused free work space within the agency, first accepting the offer and then complaining that his suite was “eight doors removed from the donniker [men’s room]. It looks like the little house behind the big house.” But his concerns were otherwise. What if someone should listen in on his phone conversations, maybe secretly tape him, learn of the ways he managed to take far more—sometimes in excess of 50 percent—from his deals on Elvis’s behalf?

It wasn’t stealing. Hadn’t he chastised Byron when the younger man accidentally walked out of the grocery store with an unchecked magazine in the bottom of his cart? Hadn’t he called Byron on it and made him go back and pay for it? The Colonel was an honest man. And what he took from Elvis was deserved. No other manager worked as hard.

Still, he made it clear to Lastfogel from the beginning: all checks due to Elvis would be sent directly from the studio to Parker’s office in Memphis and made out to All Star Shows, not to the Morris agency. So what if the Colonel was the only client to demand such an arrangement? Besides, the agency had no contract that strictly bound Elvis or Parker as a client; therefore, the Colonel never signed a check authorization form.

The beauty of it, as the Colonel saw, was that Presley was completely unconcerned about such matters. When Byron delivered Elvis his weekly check—which the Diskin Sisters sent to California, where Parker would sign it and put it in a sealed envelope—the singer never questioned his cut, even though the figures were seldom broken down, the expenses rarely itemized except on Parker’s own ledger. In fact, Presley seldom looked at the amount. He simply pocketed it and sent it home to his father.

Lastfogel and company found Parker’s arrangement perplexing, since he then had to turn around and send the agency 10 percent, which they would have deducted automatically before they sent the money on to him. They argued that it was cleaner for his IRS records to have the money come to them first. The Colonel was resolute. He feared no IRS audit, either for himself or for Elvis, he said, because he went directly to the Internal Revenue Service and asked them to calculate what they owed. In fact, Parker said, “I consider it my patriotic duty to keep Elvis in the ninety percent bracket.” Remembering how he’d been stung by the surprise audit in Tampa—the IRS would also question him about the $10,000 buyout of Elvis’s Louisiana Hayride contract—neither he nor Elvis would have any tax shelters, or dare to write off anything but the most legitimate expenses, a practice that made Elvis the largest single taxpayer on a straight income in the country. And while Parker occasionally tossed Bitsy Mott the odd $25 or $50, he was careful not to pay him any more than minimum wage, saying that the IRS precluded paying family members more than outsiders for the same work. “I love to pay taxes,” he would say. “I know when I’m paying taxes that I’m making money.”

The Morris accountants were stunned. Why would a man who knew the whereabouts of every penny, and went to great lengths to hold on to it, not want to take advantage of the tax breaks? Other than his home in Madison, Parker had no investments, and while the Colonel was informed enough to gainfully advise Byron and Trude on specific stock trades, he didn’t play the market himself because he couldn’t control it.

There was logic in that, the Morris accountants said, and then nodded their heads in agreement when Parker explained he didn’t want Elvis to become a hapless figure like the boxer Joe Louis, losing his fortune from some obscure IRS ruling. What they didn’t know was that Parker, the illegal alien, lived in fear of any government agency that poked around in his past. The IRS, says Bitsy Mott, “just scared him to death.”

Already there were rumors that the reason Parker wouldn’t give interviews was because there were things he didn’t want the world to know, and Parker saw the suspicion on Lastfogel’s face. That’s why he realized, early in 1956, that he needed a snitch within the Morris agency itself. He had a certain type in mind for someone he would name as his assistant: small, young, male, quiet, and probably homosexual, someone who was easy to dominate and control, and had no marital problems.

Byron Raphael was twenty-two years old and earning $45 a week working in the William Morris mail room—the starting job for all would-be agents—on the day he messengered a script to Colonel Parker’s office at Twentieth Century–Fox. He delivered it to Trude Forsher, who liked his mild-mannered personality and asked him to call back. What Byron didn’t know was that the Colonel had asked her to be on the lookout. The five-foot-seven Raphael wasn’t gay, but he did fit the rest of the profile: “Most of the guys he hired after me were homosexual, little, soft-spoken, creative, and neat in appearance.”

When Byron returned to the Colonel’s office, Parker immediately offered him a job, and the younger man turned it down, saying he’d planned on staying at William Morris his whole career. Parker smiled. “Well, you will work for William Morris,” he assured him. “They’ll pay your salary, but you’ll come and be with me.”

Raphael was already caught up in the excitement of Elvis Presley, but the Colonel, too, was compelling.

“In retrospect, I see that he had the impact of someone like Adolf Hitler, because he had an astonishing kind of mental power over the people around him. They would have done anything he asked them to do. There was no way to keep a secret from him, and I never saw him get defeated. His personality was so big, so overpowering, that when he walked into a room, he took it over, no matter who was there. They all fell under his spell.”

To test Byron’s loyalty, Parker put him through two trials by fire with his William Morris bosses. The first demanded that Raphael, basically an errand boy, walk into the office of the all-powerful Abe Lastfogel, sit down, and light up a stogie. Lastfogel detested the smell of smoke and wouldn’t allow it around him, but he had a commendable sense of humor: “What did you do, boy, lose a bet?”

The second prank, guided by Parker’s quest for revenge, was directed at Lenny Hirshan and had more serious implications. Hirshan, aloof but unctuous with stars—and so disliked by some in the agency that an assistant would eventually hide raw hamburger under his flowerpot and wait for it to rot—was an easy target. To Byron, he seemed resentful of the younger men coming up, regarding everyone as competition and scheming to keep them scared for their jobs.

Lately, he was concerned for his own. Hirshan was technically Elvis’s contact at William Morris, but whenever he dropped by Parker’s office at Paramount, the manager just shooed him away (“Thanks for coming over, Lenny. No, we don’t need anything today”). Since Byron was the envy of the agents for his access to Elvis, Hirshan now began to pump him for information. The Colonel had a plan.

“Colonel Parker came to Trude and me and explained that Lenny Hirshan was snooping around too much,” Byron remembers. “He said, ‘Trude, write a note in some kind of shorthand—you know, scribble, scribble, and then carnival talk. Then say, “Leave WMA,” and do some more shorthand that doesn’t mean anything, and then write, “Lenny Hirshan’s fault.” ’ ”

Trude took out her pad, and handled the note to Parker, who crumpled it up, stamped on it until it bore the print of his heel, and pitched it into the wastebasket.

“Now Byron,” he said, his voice slipping into character as the old Colonel, his tone broadening, his pitch rising, and his accent ripening to reveal his difficulty with h’s and j’s, “I want you to call Lenny Hirshan and tell him you walked in and saw the Colonel in a meeting with MCA, and you’re reporting back to William Morris.”

Byron picked up the phone and sailed into the script. “And Mr. Hirshan,” Byron added, measuring the agent’s anxiety, “I’ve got this note that the Colonel left.” Hirshan, mindful that Parker had no contract with the agency and panicked that he might actually leave, told Byron to bring it right over: “You did a good job. Keep spying on the Colonel for me.”

The following day, Byron again dialed Hirshan’s number and told him he had some terrible news: the Colonel had seen him retrieving the note, and he knew Byron had delivered it to Hirshan. Furthermore, they were coming right over.

“We burst into Lenny’s office and Colonel Parker said, ‘Let’s get Abe Lastfogel in here, because if you’re telling my guy to give you stuff from my wastepaper basket, we’re through.’ Of course, the Colonel had no intention of leaving—he was too loyal to Mr. Lastfogel—but he loved seeing Lenny squirm. So Mr. Lastfogel came in and said, ‘Lenny, if that’s true, say it.’ And I said, ‘It’s true, Mr. Lastfogel.’ Lenny looked at me and his eyes were like fire. I had betrayed him and been a traitor to the people who paid me.”

Byron was about to learn a harsh lesson: if you worked for Colonel Parker, you got hurt, emotionally, professionally, or financially—and the sting never really went away.

“I never should have done it,” Raphael says. “But since I idolized the Colonel, I lost my sense of reality. Everybody who worked for him wanted his approval so desperately, and when he went into that steely look, or stormed in and out of offices, slamming doors, we were also afraid of his anger. I really think he hypnotized us so that we would endure almost any kind of treatment.”

Tom Diskin was foremost among them. Already in his mid-thirties, Thomas Francis Diskin revered the Colonel with a complexity of emotions that transcended any father-son relationship. Although he had reportedly been Parker’s first partner in the Jamboree Productions booking agency and music publishing companies—running the Chicago office before selling his half to Hank Snow—incorporation papers suggest it was Diskin who originally owned Jamboree Attractions and later took Parker in as a partner, only to be pressured to relinquish his half when Snow and Parker joined forces.

“What he told me,” says Anne Fulchino, national publicity director for RCA in the ’50s, “was that Parker went to work for him, and somewhere along the line, Diskin ended up being his employee. I said, ‘How could you let that happen, Tom?’ And he said, ‘You know, the Colonel’s quite a guy.’ Since Tom was just a nice, simple person who had the lowest expectations out of life, I could believe his story.”

Short, stocky, with a crop of blondish red hair capping his everyman’s looks, Diskin was mediocre in every way. He arrived for work each day on a waft of Old Spice, a yes-man in a cheap suit and washed-out tie. As - Parker’s $250-a-week right-hand man, he might have been expected to wield a modicum of decision-making power. But he was too sweet and meek to assert himself (“He was an angel,” says RCA’s Sam Esgro), and the Colonel too paranoid and obsessed with details to delegate much responsibility. The lieutenant, then, was put to work on menial tasks—writing letters to the fan clubs, taking papers to Elvis for signature, and parroting the Colonel’s words to RCA. On the rare occasion, he contacted the Aberbachs in regard to a particular song, but his most useful purpose was serving as a buffer between Parker and the people the Colonel didn’t want to see.

Around his boss, Diskin tamped down any resentment or thoughts of his own and remained blissfully obedient. Privately, however, he complained about being Parker’s shadow, describing how the Colonel talked to him like a needful but not particularly caring parent.

On the road, at the end of the day, Diskin yearned to find a place to knock back a toddy or two and meet some nice girls, go dancing. But the Colonel wouldn’t permit it, fearing it might lead to dating and marriage, and a possible end to Diskin’s steadfast devotion. In the odd, Walter Mitty moment, he managed to smuggle a girl into his room, but mostly settled for the life of a eunuch, exchanging playful winks with waitresses. Eventually, he would buy the property adjacent to Parker’s Tennessee home, where his boss could keep a vigilant watch.

As reward, the Colonel cut his lieutenant into a number of Elvis’s business deals, including his music publishing, buying Diskin’s loyalty and his silence. But while he always addressed him as Mr. Diskin in the company of others, Parker could never resist the opportunity to humiliate him, to remind him that he was not really a business colleague, but a flunky. Despite Diskin’s serious-mindedness, and the thoroughness with which he attended to his duties, the Colonel found constant fault with his performance, yelling at him in front of Byron and Trude, and one day calling him in to a meeting with another talent manager and ordering him to tap-dance. Not once did Diskin ever refuse or talk back, even when Parker screamed at him with the force of a hailstorm. Eventually, Diskin’s silence, along with years of hard drinking, would lead to ulcers and the surgical removal of half his stomach.

In his more benevolent moments, Parker showed strong loyalties to the people he liked. When he needed an opening act for some of Elvis’s early concert dates, for example, he plucked an Irish tenor named Frankie Connors from the unemployment line, later arranging a screen test for Connors’s daughter, Sharon. He also had a soft spot for Gabe Tucker, assigning him all the royalties to a song they wrote together. “There were times when he was so gentle he would go into a reverie and almost rock himself to sleep,” says Byron.

When his malevolence came upon him, however, Parker spared no one’s feelings, cloaking cruelty in offbeat humor. He once steered the promoter Lee Gordon into a bad business deal and later repaid him for his losses, strictly from friendship and honor. But Parker’s influence had tragic results. Though handsome in his resemblance to Tyrone Power, Gordon fretted over his ethnicity. “Do you think my nose looks too Jewish?” he repeatedly asked. “Well,” Parker replied, “I wouldn’t eat too many bagels,” and goaded him into having plastic surgery. “Something happened,” Byron remembers, “and he came out looking a gargoyle, even after repeated surgeries to correct it. It was a horrible thing. But - that’s how hypnotic the Colonel was in his suggestion.”

A more frequent target was Bevo Bevis, the Colonel’s runabout. Parker looked after him, giving him a job and sending Bevo’s pay home to his mother, who cared for his young daughter from a hopeless marriage. But Bevo paid dearly for the Colonel’s attention. On one occasion, he was forced to stand at attention in the middle of a rainstorm, as proof of how “my people listen to me,” as the Colonel snorted to cronies. When he once failed to immediately light his boss’s cigar, Bevo was put out of the car on a late-night highway, told to catch up at a diner seven miles away, and waved off with the admonition not to hitch a ride, or “I’ll know about it and won’t even consider taking you back!”

Like Bevo, Trude was constantly threatened with termination for some imagined slight. But while the Colonel terrorized her on occasion, usually putting Byron up to some scheme to scare her into thinking she’d lost her job, the secretary almost always figured out that Parker was bluffing. “I know the inside of the Colonel,” she explains today.

Trude was loyal to a fault, but she took the Colonel’s teasing in stride for another reason. Caught in a crumbling marriage, the vivacious Trude simply transferred her affections to her boss. During the day, she tried to impress him with how quickly she had learned about show business, and at night, she smuggled home photographs of him, just to have him near.

She knew the relationship would never be romantic and, in fact, considered Marie a good friend, though she rankled if another woman came near the Colonel at the office. Parker noticed her possessiveness, as did her husband, Bruno, who tired of hearing her sing “Hound Dog” around the house and threatened to leave her and their two young sons, believing she was having an affair with Elvis. The Colonel was intensely uncomfortable around any female who showed any personal interest in him—he had become especially agitated on the road when a young fan repeatedly broke into his room and climbed into his bed—and never, ever demonstrated interest in another woman. Now Trude had become a threat: if Bruno didn’t leave her, she would leave him instead.

In an uncharacteristically soft approach, Parker gently dissuaded her fantasy and finally appealed to what he assumed would be her European sense of hearth and home.

“He went to her,” Byron remembers, “and he said, ‘Trude, your marriage is going to end if you stay here. Take whatever chance you can to work it out. Otherwise you’ll lose your family.’ And I remember her tears. She said, ‘But Colonel, you and my children, you are my family.’ ” For a while, then, the Colonel let her stay.

Parker intended to make up for more odious maltreatment when he allowed Byron and Trude to play Elvis a ballad, “Castles in the Sand,” that they’d cowritten with the help of a professional songwriter. They hoped he’d record it for the soundtrack of Loving You, and their chances looked good: Steve Sholes was short on material for the session, and Elvis loved the song so much he sang it all night at his suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Furthermore, the Aberbachs had agreed to publish it as part of the Gladys Music catalog.

The Colonel seldom attended Elvis’s recording sessions, and Presley preferred it that way. At Paramount, he’d had a difficult time getting a satisfactory take on the soundtrack’s title song, and now at Radio Recorders, he welcomed no distractions in the studio, especially not from Parker, who had an irritating habit of making irrelevant suggestions or reminiscing about the Gene Austin days. Elvis called him Admiral, as a derisive play on Colonel, although it was a nickname Parker sometimes used for himself, as well as for Marie.

Lately, in private, Elvis had been more defiant with his manager, mostly out of nerves. Everything had gotten so big so fast, it made his head spin. He’d even pulled a movie-prop pistol on a marine in an argument, and gotten in a fistfight with a service station attendant, which landed him in court. In early ’56, he told reporters that his success “just scares me,” and that all the hysteria at his concerts “makes me want to cry. How does all this happen to me?”

Almost a year later, Elvis felt isolated and out of control. His mother, Gladys, had been in the hospital for tests. As always, the Colonel, treating him like “property,” didn’t approve of his new girlfriend, Dottie Harmony, a Las Vegas singer and dancer. And worse, the army was making noises about drafting him—he’d already had his preinduction physical. Everything seemed so up in the air. Soon, over Easter of ’57, when he should have been enjoying his new house, a mansion with the lofty name of Graceland, Elvis would tell his minister, the Reverend James Hamill, “I am the most miserable young man you have ever seen.”

And so on February 23, 1957, when Elvis arrived at Radio Recorders in Hollywood to tape five songs, including “Castles in the Sand,” for the Loving You soundtrack, he had much on his mind. Parker forbade Byron to attend the session, but once he was there, Byron went up to Elvis almost immediately at the Colonel’s suggestion. “Mr. Presley,” he said, “I want to thank you for recording my song.” Raphael could tell that Elvis thought the kid was trying to pressure him—why else would “Byron the Siren,” as Presley playfully called him, address him so formally? Still, Elvis was polite. “Well, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it.”

From the start, the session proved difficult, as Elvis’s band, Scotty Moore, Bill Black, and D. J. Fontana, struggled with the requirements of soundtrack recording—twenty-nine takes to nail “Don’t Leave Me Now,” and twenty-two for “I Beg of You.” And RCA’s Bill Bullock entered into a prolonged exchange with anyone he could about whether to include the Dave Bartholomew song “One Night,” which Elvis had already toned down, changing “one night of sin,” to “one night with you.”

During a lull, when Elvis stepped outside to shake off some nervous energy, Jean Aberbach, the more eccentric of the publishing brothers, spoke with Freddy Bienstock, Presley’s Hill and Range liaison, about getting Elvis to record a kiddie song, “Here Comes Peter Cottontail,” that the Aberbachs thought would sell well at Easter. Bienstock, dumbfounded that Aberbach would seriously consider such a thing, laughed him off, so Jean placed the lyrics on Elvis’s music stand. “After the break,” remembers Bienstock, “Elvis came into the studio and looked at the song and said, ‘Who brought that Br’er Rabbit shit in here?’ ”

Now the Colonel, who always moved quickly for such an obese man, came running out of the control room clapping his hands. “All right, let’s get Byron’s song done next.” As the band readied their instruments and the Jordanaires warmed the “ooh wow wows” of their head arrangement, Elvis hesitated. Haltingly, he launched the first four bars, and then abruptly stopped. “I’m not going to do this goddamn song,” he said, turning to Gordon Stoker. “I hate to disappoint Byron and Trude, but I’m not going to do it for Colonel.” And then he inexplicably broke into “True Love,” the Cole Porter tune that had hit big for Bing Crosby.

Steve Sholes cut a puzzled look at the Colonel, and Aberbach, who held no publishing rights to Cole Porter, rolled his eyes, bringing a palm to his forehead: “Oh my God, Cole Porter. As though he needs the money.”

Never before had Elvis crossed the Colonel in public. Parker, who constantly feared the crush of another heart attack, fought to keep his emotions in check and decided to deal with it later in private. But from now on, Parker took stricter measures to ensure that all material Elvis received came solely from the Aberbachs, with one exception—“Are You Lonesome Tonight,” a favorite of Marie’s.

For Elvis’s third picture, Jailhouse Rock, the Colonel exercised his outside picture clause with Paramount and moved to MGM, claiming his agreement with producer Pandro Berman—$250,000 plus 50 percent of the net profits—was “the biggest deal ever made in Hollywood.”

One person who was not impressed was Kathryn Hereford, Berman’s associate producer. Hereford had heard all about the Colonel’s “rare” Elvis buttons, country sausage capers, and other bizarre stunts—the first day, he’d arrived at MGM in a mud-splattered car, a transparent move designed to play on his bumpkin persona. Hereford gave him the cold shoulder, advising Berman to put as much distance as possible between him and the wily manager.

In turning his attention to the development of Jailhouse Rock, Parker stayed in constant contact with the Aberbachs, who had pinned new hopes on the soundtrack. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, both twenty-four-year-old Hill and Range songwriters who were already major figures in the R&B world, were commissioned to write four songs for the picture, including the famous production number in which Elvis distills the genius of his erotically undulating stage moves. The team, which had written the title song for Loving You, had a piano in their room at the Gorham Hotel in New York, and one weekend, Jean Aberbach came up and “pushed a chair in front of the door, sat down, and went to sleep,” remembers Stoller. “He wouldn’t move until we were finished.”

Soon after, Julian Aberbach told Leiber to expect a contract from the Colonel; they intended to groom the writing team for other movies, as well. While Elvis frequently signed blank agreements at Parker’s instruction, Leiber was flabbergasted to open his mail and find just such a contract and a note instructing him to affix his signature and return it at once. “I called [the Colonel] and said, ‘There’s nothing on it.’ And he said they’d fill it in later. . . . It struck me as a great practical joke.”

Breaking with his usual habit, the Colonel visited the set of Jailhouse Rock several times, one day bringing along Jim Denny, the powerful Nashville music publisher and Grand Ole Opry manager. Gordon Stoker, who viewed Parker as “a necessary evil,” was surprised at the Colonel’s audacity, knowing how painful it would be for Elvis to see the man who had once rejected him from the Opry.

Now, on the set, “Denny walked over to Elvis and said, ‘I just wanted you to know that I’ve always had faith in you and always believed in you,’ ” Stoker recalls. “Elvis said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Denny,’ and turned around to us and whispered, ‘That bastard thinks I’ve forgotten the way he broke my heart.’ ”

Denny’s visit, following weeks of long hours of filming and a myriad of other problems, so upset Elvis that he asked to take the day off. The difficulties with Scotty, Bill, and D.J. in the recording studio gave rise to a host of resentments, mostly over money. The musicians worked for $200 a week on the road—$100 off—always with the promise that as Elvis became more famous, their salary would increase. Since Elvis was now the biggest star in the world, Scotty had grown impatient. Soon he and Bill would resign, but later reconsider, asking for a raise of $50 per week and a flat payment of $10,000. Colonel reminded Presley that nothing was ever put in writing (“Besides, Steve Sholes doesn’t like them”) and demanded Elvis cut them loose, a decision that would come to a head in a matter of months. “The Colonel had a grip on everybody but me, Scotty, and Bill,” says D. J. Fontana. “He couldn’t tell us what to do, ’cause we could go to Elvis, see?”

Normally afraid to question Parker’s judgment, Elvis complained to his cousin Junior Smith that he thought the Colonel had steered him wrong. What the hell did that old lardass know about music? Besides, - he’d also heard that Parker had blown a lot of money over a paid advertising deal gone bad. Furthermore, he hadn’t liked it that Parker kept a net around him, turning down Robert Mitchum’s invitation for Elvis to appear in Thunder Road. “He just wants to use your name,” Parker said, but to Elvis, it seemed as if he didn’t want him talking to other people, period, especially if they were in the business. One day, the Colonel found out that Mike Stoller was up in the suite at the Beverly Wilshire, playing pool, and ordered Elvis to ask him to leave. Jerry Leiber saw that Elvis “was trapped by his dependency on the Colonel,” that “he worshiped him as a maker and savior,” but “despised him because he was never able to take control of his own life.”

Elvis’s dissatisfaction leaked back to the Colonel, who flew into a rage and gathered his staff in his office, telephoning the set for Elvis to come at once and bellowing into the receiver. (“I don’t care if he is shooting! Send him over!”). Elvis, shaken by Parker’s fury, took a seat at the Colonel’s direction. “Elvis, Trude’s here, Byron’s here, Tom’s here,” Parker began in a voice husky with emotion. “I’m saying in front of all of these witnesses that if you don’t think I’ve done the right thing by you, you walk out this minute and you’re free. Go get yourself another manager. But if you stay, - you’re going to do what I tell you. Do you understand me?” Elvis nodded, resigned in the future to hold his tongue. “He got me this far, made me a big star,” he told his pals. “I’m going to stick with him.”

Whenever anyone had the nerve to ask about such confrontations, the Colonel explained, “It’s better to be feared than liked.” But Parker had been decidedly on edge since learning the story line for Jailhouse Rock, which, unlike the sophisticated comedy of Loving You, traded on the dark side of Presley’s rebel persona and the shadowy business practices of rock and roll.

In the role of Vince Everett, an ex-con turned rock star, Elvis began to demonstrate a formidable ability to handle dramatic material, particularly in the movie’s grittier scenes. Guided by a volatile temper, Vince accidentally kills a man in a barroom brawl. Sentenced to prison, Vince meets fellow convict Hunk Houghton (Mickey Shaughnessy), a country singer who boasts of being as big as Eddy Arnold or Roy Acuff. Houghton teaches him to sing and play guitar, and when Vince’s talent emerges, Hunk, who lines his cell walls with pictures of Hank Snow and Ernest Tubb, offers to become his manager (“Alone, you’d be like a lamb in a pack of wolves”). But the manipulative Hunk is still a con at heart, demanding 50 percent of Vince’s money and withholding his fan mail to keep the budding star from realizing how popular he’s become.

Jailhouse Rock secretly mirrors a series of events in the collective Presley-Parker past, including Vernon Presley’s six-month stint in the Mississippi State Penitentiary in the late ’30s for altering a check from a dairy farmer named Orville Bean, who held the Presleys’ mortgage. While the references to Parker’s earlier show business associates were hardly coincidental, the Colonel, who never established even the slightest curiosity in Elvis’s previous motion picture scripts, seemed to have an unusual investment in this one. Before the title was finalized, he wrote a memo to Pandro Berman suggesting they call the picture Don’t Push Me Too Far or Trouble Is My Name.

Had Parker identified with the character of Vince Everett, the young man who ended a life in an instant of anger? Certainly he had begun to demonstrate odd obsessions that hinted at unwelcome thoughts and deeper worries, including personal safety. At home in Tennessee, he installed iron bars on all the windows and wired the house with an extensive antiburglar system. In part, this was because Marie, who stayed behind during the early Hollywood years, was “deathly afraid to be alone,” in the words of a friend, keeping the house dark with the curtains drawn in all the rooms but the kitchen, and insisting on a female companion whenever her husband was out of town.

Ordinarily, the old carny practiced a form of self-hypnotism, boasting that he could train himself to filter out certain feelings or people altogether (“Don’t you know that I can put you out of my mind so I don’t even know that you exist?”). But lately the stuff within him had proved bigger than his ability to handle it—he seemed eternally frustrated, unable to rest, routinely pacing back and forth in his apartment at the Beverly Wilshire—and his demons gained prominence. He fought back his anxiety with a driving need for rigidity, ritual, and control.

Where Parker had always insisted on an almost militaristic atmosphere in the office (“Like he was going to call roll,” says Gordon Stoker), he now stepped up his efforts to have it run like a little Pentagon, offering a self-satisfied smile whenever anyone referred to his staff as “the Colonel’s army.” Since he tended to fuss if even a single item was out of place, Trude saw to it that the office was immaculate. At home in Madison, Mary Diskin knew that she might be asked to open the drawers for inspection at any time, and followed orders to make sure that all the pens were grouped together and faced the same direction, and the pencils sharpened to a rapier’s point, their erasers perfect.

Both secretaries were puzzled by the secrecy with which the Colonel insisted on, typing some of his letters himself, hunched over the typewriter like a hawk, shielding the paper from view. On those occasions, the secretaries knew never to peek in the out box afterward, lest the Colonel think they were checking up on him.

What baffled Byron was Parker’s habit of sitting at his desk, repeatedly stacking and centering piles of papers without apparent purpose, and his insistence on showering three or four times a day, afterward splashing on a liberal amount of 4711 cologne, the German scent that Napoleon was said to have diluted in his bath. “If we would go out for a meal, or even coffee, he would come back to the Beverly Wilshire and take a shower.” Unusually preoccupied with body odor and his own feces, according to several, he had, says Byron, “an almost Macbethean compulsion to be clean.” Soon, preoccupied with the notion of germs, he would drink almost nothing but Mountain Valley Spring Water.

Raphael saw even more surprising sides of Parker when he went home with the Colonel to Tennessee after filming wrapped on Jailhouse Rock in June of ’57. In the Dutch custom, Parker put a lot of emphasis on the observance of birthdays, especially his own. For his forty-eighth, on June 26, Marie gave him a large party, and the Colonel reveled in the merriment with his Nashville cronies.

But late that night, Byron awoke to “these horrible sounds . . . like an animal wailing, the strangest sound that I ever heard in my life.” The next day, over breakfast, he told Marie what he’d heard (“Maybe it was a cat outside”) and asked if everything was all right. “Oh, I don’t know, Byron,” she said. “Elvis forgot Colonel’s birthday.” Raphael, mystified that such a small slight made “this powerful strong man cry all night long,” went to Presley, who took off one of his rings with the instructions to tell the Colonel he just hadn’t delivered it in time. Parker knew the truth, but he’d already walled off his vulnerability and repaired the cracks in his emotional fortress.

By now, Byron had married an aspiring actress, Carolyn Cline, and the Colonel and Marie invited the couple to come live with them in Madison. The Colonel had one peculiar rule for the newlyweds as long as they were under his roof: no hand-holding, which Byron interpreted to mean no displays of affection of any kind. The Parkers had separate bedrooms (“They were like an old couple, but they really weren’t that old”), and Raphael was under the impression that theirs was not a physical relationship and perhaps never had been. “There wasn’t the faintest sign . . . he just didn’t have a physical love for any woman.”

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.

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.

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?