DESPITE what Parker would say about the lack of contact with Elvis during his military service, it did not mean the two men were not in communication. Almost every day after Elvis sailed for Germany, the Colonel wrote him long, chatty letters designed to fill him in on his efforts “to keep your name hot over here,” and to try to boost the singer’s spirits. Immediately, Parker reported spectacular results. The Colonel’s hard work, he wrote, combined with his diversity of promotions—$3 million from souvenirs alone—would bring in more revenue for 1958 than for the year before, even as Elvis spent nearly the entire time in the service. And now the crafty manager had finalized the lucrative movie deals he’d spent months negotiating with Paramount and Twentieth Century–Fox. Parker instructed Elvis to send Fox’s Buddy Adler a thank-you telegram and wrote out the script for him.
Hal Wallis, determined to produce Elvis’s first post-army picture, eventually called G.I. Blues, had agreed to pay $175,000 for the film—$75,000 more than Presley’s fee for King Creole, and $150,000 more than what Elvis was entitled to under the terms of their original contract. Additionally, Wallis and Hazen agreed on options for three more films at $125,000, $150,000, and $175,000 against 7½ percent of gross receipts after the picture earned out. At Twentieth Century–Fox, the Colonel revamped Elvis’s existing deal for one picture at $200,000, with an option for a second at $250,000, and a 50–50 split of profits after expenses.
The new contract with Paramount went a long way in neutralizing Parker’s acid resentment over the initial agreement. “There was not much I could do . . . except get a little more each time we made a picture,” the Colonel wrote in a letter to Elvis and Vernon, who “managed” Elvis in Germany and was more apt to keep in touch than his soldier son. “The facts are now we do not have to call on Wallis every time with our hat in our hands to ask for a little extra.” He added that he had secured a percentage of profits with both deals—something they’d not previously had with either studio—and proudly announced, “This now brings our picture setup in line with a very healthy . . . future. This also will prove to Elvis that he is not backsliding in any way.”
In thanking the Colonel for wrapping up the deals with Paramount and Fox, Presley joked, “This sure is a long tour you sent me on,” and closed his letter by saying, “I’m sorry the commissions are so small in this engagement.”
Parker’s new projects seemed to fill him with élan. His correspondence with Wallis and Hazen took on a giddy wit and playfulness, but Hazen had always found the Colonel repugnant, and was barely able to restrain himself from telling him so, at one point writing to congratulate him for his chutzpah in tipping a Las Vegas bellboy with sandwiches pilfered from the Paramount commissary. His disdain for Parker grew immeasurably after the manager snookered him into buying half a million pocket-sized photographs of Elvis in uniform for promotion. The idea was “to give Mr. Presley some additional income,” as the Colonel termed it. But in taking the printing to his old Tampa friend Clyde Rinaldi and marking up the job for profit, Parker charged Paramount three cents a picture though the commercial rate elsewhere was half a cent.
When Hazen called him on such shenanigans, the Colonel became churlish and indignant. “I am sure,” Parker wrote after one prolonged period of haggling over money, “that both of you will agree that I have endeavored to stay away from . . . you as much as possible in bringing this to its conclusion. In the meantime, I am very happy that my connection with the Salvation Army in the South is strong. As you know, they always have kettles in the street during Christmas . . . it is with great anticipation that I can look forward to not having to share whatever I may get out of these kettles with my associates.” He signed it, “You Know Who.”
Wallis answered these borderline insults quickly and perfunctorily, as if to say that he feared losing the Colonel, despite their binding contract. Parker, a bloodhound when it came to smelling out human weakness, fed on that fear, and it was Wallis who got the brunt of his teasing, not Hazen. Once, when the producer discouraged Parker’s input on a project, repeating, “You’ve just got to get the big picture, Colonel,” Parker took his revenge. A week later, Wallis arrived at his office to find a photo of himself enlarged to the size of a wall and installed behind his desk. The accompanying sign: HERE’S THE BIG PICTURE.
Parker also seemed to have a personal investment in Wallis. In their many letters, the Colonel’s tone was categorically different with Wallis than it was with Hazen; it was Wallis’s approval he sought in begging for a pat on the back for a favor or a job well done (“This again shows you the little Colonel stays on the ball and follows through”). At times, especially when he sent Wallis such gifts as jars of honey, octopus, and even Texas longhorns, his affection appeared genuine. Each year, the Colonel sent Wallis Valentine’s and Father’s Day greetings, usually telegrams “from Elvis and myself . . . your two boys” or, once, “your two orphans, Marie and the Colonel.” After several such missives, one signed with “love,” Wallis responded, “It is nice to be thought of and remembered, even though I am not your father.”
Whatever the paternal complexity of his feelings, Parker was unquestionably thinking of his past in December 1958, when he began writing Wallis strange, autobiographical letters offering story ideas for Elvis’s motion pictures. In easing into the first, he noted the growing popularity of Hawaiian music and Elvis’s “good voice for that type of singing.”
A native love story set in Hawaii with “some tough elements” interested him, he said, particularly if Presley were a stowaway on a large steamer bound for the islands. His suggestion was to frame a plot in which Elvis, dressed in disguise and using another name, ran away from all who pursued him, including the fans and the record companies frantic for more product, only to fall into the hands of “a gang of promoters—con artists—that is snowing Elvis into singing with the natives.”
These “con artists” would “exploit” Elvis, Parker wrote, making secret tapes of his performances and “selling records like hotcakes.” No one would know Presley’s true identity until they brought him to Honolulu to do a show, whereupon a frightened Elvis discovered all too late that “he has been promoted into something else.”
“I am this far with the story,” the Colonel told Wallis, but went on to say he had also been thinking of another plot regarding gypsies. As the “rugged type,” Parker said, Elvis would be well cast as a foundling or baby boy stolen “by a bunch of gypsies traveling in wagons [and] sleeping outdoors.” Later, he repeated the idea to associate producer Dick Sokolove, changing the focus to “a gypsy boy, traveling with his mother, who gets into trouble with police.”
No one at the studio could have known that both plots were illuminating glimpses into Parker’s own psyche. His reference to gypsies certainly must have come from memories of his maternal grandfather and the Ponsies’ nomadic lifestyle, while “trouble with the police” resurrects the haunting specter of Anna van den Enden. But the Hawaiian story, set in the islands that Parker so loved during his early army years, and its focus on a tramp steamer stowaway and an exploitative promoter who transforms the young artist into “something else,” shows how clearly the Colonel identified with Elvis. It also demonstrates how well he understood his own role in the undoing of an artist desperate to shake off the trappings of his fame. Wallis rejected both of Parker’s plots, but in responding that he was “definitely interested in a Hawaiian background story for Elvis,” inadvertently nurtured the genesis of Blue Hawaii.
Parker’s scenario of a record company pressuring an artist for more material came straight from the Colonel’s dealings with RCA. Only a month before, Bill Bullock had offered to fly Elvis and four of his friends to Nashville for three days of recording, and the Colonel had refused. Similarly, Steve Sholes suggested that the label pay Parker’s way to Germany to supervise a session there. The Colonel had never been known to decline a free trip, but now he turned on his heel. Absolutely not! RCA had to learn how to manage the product it had and space out the singles twenty weeks apart to avoid “flooding the market.” No one understood sales or promotion as well as he did, he thundered.
The Colonel’s refusal to go to Germany at any time during Elvis’s stay intensified the rumors at RCA that something was amiss with Parker’s citizenship. Even the field reps got to thinking: had he ever gone out of the country for any reason? Yes, after an Eddy Arnold booking in El Paso, Texas, he’d crossed the border into Mexico, but only after insisting that a U.S. marshall accompany him. More suspiciously, when Arnold played Canada’s two biggest cities, Parker claimed illness at the last minute and asked Gabe Tucker to take care of things.
But Parker had gone to Canada with Elvis in 1957, as he shows up in the press clippings from Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. However, it was Bitsy Mott and Tom Diskin who surrounded Presley in most of the photographs. Where was the Colonel? His low profile made Byron Raphael remember something startling Parker once told him: “I’ve got money stashed in places all over the world.”
Byron asked him how he did it, and the Colonel explained that there was a pipeline from Canada to the Cayman Islands that bypassed the IRS. His young aide surmised that Parker’s promoter friends—Oscar Davis, the advance man on the Canadian dates, and Lee Gordon, the Australian who promoted them—had helped, legally depositing Parker’s share of the tour proceeds in foreign bank accounts.
Still, Parker was not about to chance a leap as large as Europe, and when he needed to get what he called “some important papers” to Germany for Elvis’s signature, he called upon an unlikely courier—Judy Gay, Connie B. Gay’s teenaged daughter. Her father, who knew of Parker’s illegality, told her that the Colonel had a fear of flying, and thus couldn’t take the papers himself. But Judy, so in love with her boyfriend she - couldn’t stand the separation, declined, leaving her father’s secretary to make the trip instead.
For two years, a helpless Parker—always nervous at the prospect of advice Elvis might be getting from others—watched as some of his most important business partners went to Europe for private meetings with his client. First, Jean Aberbach and Freddy Bienstock visited Elvis on leave in Paris, and then in August ’59, Hal Wallis arrived in Germany to begin location shooting for G.I. Blues, calling on Elvis at Bad Nauheim. Wallis had asked the Colonel to accompany him on the steamer, but Parker deflected the invitation in several letters that suggested the producer might have more fun sharing his cabin with the more colorful members of - Elvis’s entourage. As to his conspicuous absence, “People thought it was strange,” Bienstock recalls. “But nobody asked him about it.”
In an effort, perhaps, to help Parker rectify his passport problem, Gay, who had been an advisor to several U.S. presidents and organized Special Services shows for the Department of Defense in Europe, invited the Colonel to a number of his famous Vienna, Virginia, barbeques, attended by an array of well-placed politicians.
Parker zeroed in on one in particular—Texas Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson—and in the fall of ’59, volunteered Eddy Arnold’s services when LBJ honored the president of Mexico, Adolfo Lopez Mateos, at his Johnson City ranch. Ordinarily, Parker, who continued to handle some of - Arnold’s bookings, would insult anyone who dared ask for a free performance. But he sanctioned this one for a different payoff—a chance to insinuate himself into photographs with Johnson and former president Harry S Truman.
That began a nine-year correspondence between Parker and the future president and his family, including daughter Lynda, who would visit on the set of one of Elvis’s films. Almost immediately, Parker inducted Johnson into the Snowmen’s League, making a supremely useful ally. Two months after the Virginia barbeque, Johnson wrote to Parker using words that must have seemed golden: “I hope our paths cross again in the days ahead, and that you will always feel free to call on me as your friend at any time for anything.” Apparently, the Colonel did just that. A mere two weeks later, Johnson told him he was “certainly counting on you to give the office a ring when you get to Washington.”
Parker had several reasons to visit the nation’s capital in late ’59 and early ’60. In August, he and Marie had gone to Hawaii for what appeared to be a simple vacation, especially as Marie had nagged him to take her there, only to develop a severe case of diverticulitis from eating raw pineapple. But Parker had more than just sight-seeing on his mind. In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had approved the creation of a memorial to the U.S.S. Arizona, the resting place for 1,177 crewmen who perished on the battleship in the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. Now the Colonel wanted to see if he might be able to use such a noble cause to his advantage, meeting with the chairman of the Arizona Memorial Committee, H. Tucker Grantz, to offer Elvis for a benefit show.
With Grantz’s backing, Parker flew to Washington in September ’59 for a meeting at the Pentagon. There, he first met with E. J. Cottrell, the army information officer who was Parker’s chief liaison in Washington. Cottrell would soon fly to Germany to confer with Elvis about the benefit show. He reported to the Colonel that Elvis was homesick, but in good shape and continuing to do a fine job for his country. He would also arrange for Presley to lend his byline to a recruitment article for This Week magazine, later reprinted in The Army Blue Book as “What Elvis Presley Learned About the Army.” (“If I had only one piece of advice to give to a friend . . . I’d say don’t keep your troubles corked up. . . . Work harder, talk to a good friend. . . . Don’t jump with all four feet into a mess you’ll never be able to wipe away.”)
Just what transpired during the Pentagon meeting isn’t known, but Parker tantalized Joe Hazen with the barest details in a letter. “My special meeting in Washington Tuesday for lunch was fun and I must tell you about it next time,” he wrote. “I did meet a new General and he now wants a snowcard into my club. This I told him would be rather hard to do as we have no way of knowing if he deserves one at this time.”
Might the High Potentate have swapped a membership and the promise of an Elvis show for a secret from his past? Was the favor of destroying his own military records—or perhaps any mention of his illegality in the files of the FBI and the INS—too much to ask in return?
There is no proof that he did. But with Parker, who used every ounce of human flesh for even the slightest leverage, it is inconceivable that he did not. What a high he must have had that day, this military deserter and illegal alien, with a general in the U.S. Army groveling to belong to his phantom club and addressing him as Colonel.
Parker’s interaction with army officials buoyed Hal Wallis, who hoped Elvis might receive an early release to begin work on G.I. Blues. Paul Nathan, Wallis’s associate producer, learned in the summer of ’59 that the army was willing to accommodate the actor Russ Tamblyn, who had a picture waiting for him at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Nathan apprised Wallis and added in an interoffice memo that Abe Lastfogel “feels they would do the same for Elvis, if we notify them that we are ready to go.”
But when Hazen spoke with Parker, the manager was adamant that no such request be made. Elvis must not be seen as shirking even one day of military service. Besides, despite the U.S.S. Arizona concert and the movie deals—which included, at Elvis’s request, two “serious” pictures at Fox—Parker was still finalizing his plans for Presley’s return.
With Lastfogel’s help, he had just arranged a splashy television special to be called “Frank Sinatra’s Welcome Home Party for Elvis Presley.” The appearance would net Elvis $125,000, more than Sinatra would receive as the host, and expose him to an older audience. Cleaned up, tuxedo-clad, and defused of his rock-and-roll passion—in effect, neutered—Elvis would now be safe and palatable for adult consumption. After the Sinatra special, even the pompadour would be gone. What remained was negotiating a new royalty deal with RCA, the endgame to - Parker’s steady rationing of product.
The Colonel hammered the last nail of the deal in place only two days before Elvis’s plane touched down at McGuire Air Force Base near Fort Dix, New Jersey. Under the terms of the contract, any soundtrack recording would count toward Elvis’s quota of two LPs and eight single sides each year. Both Elvis and the Colonel would receive a .75 percent recoupable royalty on top of the usual 5 percent royalty. And Parker, who was granted approval on all advertising, promotion, and publicity, would receive an annual $27,000 for supplying photographs for record covers and general “exploitational” support, over and above the cost of postage and materials. The last clause especially rankled RCA’s Anne Fulchino, who believed that Bill Bullock had let Parker into her office one weekend to appropriate all of her picture files and negatives, thus allowing the Colonel to charge RCA for property it already owned.
Elvis’s consent on the contract was required but assumed, even as the overall deal benefited his manager more than him. To Elvis and Vernon, it didn’t matter—what they had was so much more than they’d ever expected. And the Colonel had kept his client’s name in the headlines for the two years he was away, something Elvis never thought possible. Often, Parker said, he used his own money to do it, all the while turning down requests to manage other artists as diverse as actress Natalie Wood and comedian Brother Dave Gardner, with whom the Colonel often supped in Hollywood. No matter that he had done so because Parker considered both performers too headstrong to control. All Elvis knew was that he and his manager were an unbeatable combination. And in the Colonel’s eyes, they were more than a team, more even than a partnership. It was not something either of them could easily explain.
When newly promoted Sergeant Elvis Presley arrived at Fort Dix in the early morning of March 3, 1960, he was met with the fanfare usually reserved for returning war heroes. The band played “Auld Lang Syne” as he walked from the plane in the midst of a late-winter blizzard, beaming for the fireworks of flashbulbs as snowflakes pelted his uniform. Startlingly handsome, his features lean and chiseled, Elvis looked happy to be home, even as one reporter noted a suggestion of sadness when he smiled. “Go get ’em, Elvis!” somebody yelled, and he shot a lopsided grin.
In truth, the nervous flyer was somewhat sedated, having spent a restless night in the arms of a new girlfriend, this one named Priscilla, and he had ingested a fair number of pills on the flight to steady his nerves. The Colonel quickly led him into a press conference, where he said about the only thing on his mind was to rest up at home for the next few weeks. The following day, Estes Kefauver, the Tennessee senator who made his reputation as a crusader against organized crime, now a friend of Parker, would read his “Tribute to Elvis Presley” into the Congressional Record, praising the singer’s willingness to become “just another G.I. Joe.”
On hand to greet Elvis that morning at Fort Dix were Steve Sholes; Jean Aberbach; nineteen-year-old Nancy Sinatra (who brought two lace shirts as a promotional stunt for Elvis’s upcoming TV special with her father); various William Morris representatives; and Hal Wallis, who had momentarily distracted the Colonel, allowing a Life magazine photographer and his assistant to move in and pose Elvis outside the C-in-C barracks for a cover shot. The Colonel, always quick as a cat, suddenly appeared and planted his full girth in front of Elvis, barring the view of the cameraman. Unless they had a check for $25,000, Parker said (“You don’t think I’m going to let you put my boy on the cover without us getting paid for it, do you?”), Life would have to wait.
Starting at 3:00 A.M., “the Colonel went through that day like a force of nature—just this fierce constructive energy,” says Robert Kotlowitz, now a noted novelist, but in 1960 a thirty-five-year-old RCA classical music publicist ready to jump to magazines. He got the nod to accompany Parker to Fort Dix because he was the only one back from lunch when the Colonel came in to arrange the trip, Parker storming through the office, stopping briefly to call an army recruiting officer and float the rumor that Elvis would re-enlist. Kotlowitz had seen how Bill Bullock took orders from him, but even on a military base, the manager was in charge. “None of the relationships I saw were in any way conventional or even normal,” he says. “You did what he told you to do, or if you didn’t, he was finished with you.”
Soon, Kotlowitz would see a very different side of the Colonel, as Elvis spent two days at Fort Dix and then began a welcome-home train trip to Memphis, courtesy of RCA. Parker wanted the pleasant young publicist to come along, and told him to be at the Trenton, New Jersey, station to make sure the train arrived on the right track and to prevent anyone from boarding their private cars. But first he uttered a warning: under no circumstances should Kotlowitz tell anybody what time this train would be stopping in any town—they’d be deluged with reporters and fans, and everything would be a horrible mess. “Of course,” Kotlowitz says, “every little village we went through, there were two thousand girls out there at two o’clock in the morning. He’d tipped off every stationmaster by saying, ‘Presley’s coming through at 2:15 A.M. Do not tell press.’ ”
Parker, however, hadn’t just alerted the press—he’d had his staff call them collect and invite them aboard. One reporter who accepted was David Halberstam, who beautifully captured the freewheeling atmosphere for the Nashville Tennessean. Elvis, he wrote, was “like a happy young colt. . . . He wrestled with some of his bodyguards, winked at the girls in the station, and clowned with his ever-faithful manager and merchandiser, Col. Tom Parker. ‘Man, it feels good to be going home,’ Presley said. ‘So good.’ Then he put a hand over the Colonel’s receding hairline and said, ‘Andy Devine [the tubby Hollywood character actor], - that’s who it is. Andy Devine.’ ‘Quit pulling my hair out,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’m just massaging it for you,’ Presley said. ‘Every time you massage,’ [the Colonel countered], ‘I have a little less left.’ ”
When the train reached Memphis, Kotlowitz was ready to fly home to New York. But Parker asked him to stay—Elvis was traveling to Nashville for a recording session, and then he’d take another special railroad car to Miami to do the Frank Sinatra television special. Certainly RCA would want a press representative along, he said, though Kotlowitz’s main function was to be an audience for the Colonel, who seemed to have adopted him. “On the train, he would wake me up every morning by standing on my bed, straddling me, and ringing this cowbell. I knew I was ‘in’ when I saw him doing that, and it was wonderful. I had the time of my life. But we were an unlikely couple, let me tell you.”
The next time Kotlowitz heard from Parker, some two months later, the manager invited him to join Elvis and the entourage in Las Vegas, that “sunny place for shady people,” as the old-time mob called it. Parker kept his gambling to minor stakes, as far as Kotlowitz could tell, but the Colonel never liked to let any of his young acolytes see him stay too long at the tables.
A year before, he had written to Hal Wallis about his exploits in Vegas and at the dog tracks in Phoenix and Tampa (“One of the dogs may sue us for betting on him while he had piles”), having lost the $50 that Wallis had him place as an “investment.” But lately, he had again become preoccupied with the spin of the roulette wheel, the siren call for his favorite diversion, his “road game.”
Often, he would get the itch and decide overnight to go, telephoning Freddy Bienstock to fly out from New York. “He would lose fortunes,” Bienstock remembers. “Besides the roulette table, he would stand at the craps table and lose and lose. He couldn’t stand it. One time I said, ‘Come on, let’s go.’ And he got furious and said, ‘Don’t you tell me! It’s my money!’ I never said anything anymore.”
“I think the reason for his gambling and going to Vegas was primarily to look like a big shot,” says Julian Aberbach. “That’s the way they treat the [high rollers], and that is the way they get them.”
Undoubtedly, Parker wanted to rub shoulders with all the ruling lords of Vegas, particularly as he began to gamble all around town. George Wood and Hershey Martin of William Morris’s variety department were Lastfogel’s emissaries to the mob, providing much of the talent for the night clubs and showrooms of the Mafia-owned hotels. The Colonel got to know Martin, a Damon Runyonesque character, during Elvis’s ill-fated engagement at the New Frontier in ’56. Now he asked Martin to introduce him to Jack Entratter, the co-owner of the Sands Hotel. Entratter booked only the biggest and classiest entertainers for the Copa Room, but with an illegal twist—paying one amount specified under the contract, and another in money meant only for gambling.
By the early ’60s, the Sands was known to be controlled by more mobs than any other casino in Nevada, an estimated sixteen from Brooklyn to L.A. Entratter’s connections were legendary; he’d been the manager of the Mafia-owned Copacabana in the ’40s when it was New York’s most popular nightclub. There, Entratter, six foot, portly, and flashing a crooked smile, first became friends with Frank Sinatra, a relationship that ushered in the Rat Pack’s dominance at the Sands. Since Parker never dealt with underlings, only the top power people everywhere, it was the syndicate-owned Wilbur Clark he chatted up while gambling at the Desert Inn, and Jack Entratter, known as Mr. Entertainment, that he sought out at the Sands, the hot spot for high rollers from Texas, New York, and Hollywood. On more than one occasion, he dined there with another William Morris client and the host of Presley’s “Welcome Home” special, Sinatra himself.
Parker would find more and more reasons to go to the mob paradise of Vegas, which was also becoming a favorite playground for Elvis. But the Colonel was always careful to stop Presley from appearing in photographs with the “wise guys” who wanted to brag about an association. It was one thing for Elvis to be photographed with Prell, who through some kind of arrangement—believed to be only a wink and a handshake—served as Mafia protection, buffering Elvis from the more obvious and frightening mob leaders who would otherwise demand performances, payments, and more. In fact, Elvis would spend his twenty-seventh birthday in Vegas, at one point posing with Prell while cutting a ridiculously tall cake, festooned with two confectionary Hotel Sahara marquees (TO ELVIS FROM MILTON PRELL) to commemorate the occasion. But beyond Prell, whose reputation was cleaner than most, Parker drew the line. - He’d seen what the appearance of such friendships had done to Sinatra.
“The Colonel demanded everything to be squeaky clean,” says one former RCA employee, “But it would have been impossible for him to do some of the things that he did without the Mafia—in the music business, in television, and in the movies—because until the early ’70s, it was as important to have a working relationship with the mob as it was to have a lawyer and accountant.”
Elvis had gone back to Las Vegas immediately after completing G.I. Blues with Juliet Prowse in June 1960. Prowse, a sometime girlfriend of Sinatra, pursued a career as a dancer in European nightclubs before coming to Hollywood, and her brief sexual trysts with Elvis stirred his fantasies of wicked nights in Paris.
Parker had succeeded in emasculating Elvis’s dangerous hooligan image of 1956, but underneath it all, the seemingly conservative, sanitized Elvis had come home from Europe a more licentious man than the boy who’d left. The showgirls of the Lido and the Moulin Rouge in Paris were far more decadent than the Vegas dancers he’d known, and his familiarity with pills, especially uppers, was so educated and obsessive that he talked seriously of buying his own drugstore for a steady supply.
Furthermore, other members of his entourage, especially Lamar Fike, who’d accompanied him to Germany, also shared his fondness and encouraged his indulgence. “He got just wild as a goat in ’60, because he was loose from the army, which he hated with a passion,” says Fike. “After the service, the biggest change, other than becoming harder, was that he became much more what people thought he should be.”
That included playing the good soldier, ad infinitum, beginning with G.I. Blues, the first of several pictures in which he wore a military uniform, a plot device that deeply pleased the Colonel. A musical comedy, G.I. Blues was light, semiautobiographical fare aimed straight at his hardcore fan base. With Elvis romancing a fräulein, baby-sitting an infant, and crooning “Wooden Heart” to a group of children gathered at a puppet show, the picture would prove a “howling success,” in the words of Paul Nathan, ranking the fourteenth highest-grossing film of 1960. Until those numbers came in, the studio would consider Elvis for a version of The Three Penny Opera and a remake of The Rainmaker, but never again would Paramount put him in a gritty drama like King Creole.
To promote Presley’s return to Hollywood, Parker rolled out the snow machinery as never before. First he reprised the triumphant cross-country trek—so reminiscent of the great political campaigns—setting Elvis up in a private car of the Southern Pacific’s Sunset Limited with a gaggle of reporters, who also witnessed the massive fan turnout on the fifty stops of the three-day trip.
“We feel sure that by the time G.I. Blues appears on the screens through the world, some of this effort surely will pay off,” Parker wrote Wallis, enclosing a list of plugs he’d secured on TV shows, journalists he’d personally contacted, and even foreign rulers visiting the film set.
But it already had paid off: Elvis’s arrival in Los Angeles was the lead story on radio and TV, with newspapers shoving Charles de Gaulle’s Canadian visit and the Humphrey-Kennedy debate below the fold on page one. Reporters noted Elvis’s attire, which took a nod from his European stay and reflected what he thought was his new level of sophistication—a black silk mohair tux, ruffled white shirt, black silk ascot, and black suede shoes topped with silver buckles. “His be-rhinestoned cuff links,” said Billboard, “were the size of 50-cent pieces.”
With a change of studios, Elvis was optimistic that his next film roles would also present him as a changed man. He had barely a month off before he reported to Twentieth Century–Fox in August to begin work on Flaming Star, a dramatic Western in which he played the son of a white father and a Kiowa Indian mother torn between the cultures.
Producer David Weisbart saw the picture as a showcase for Presley’s acting skills, and appealed to studio head Buddy Adler to keep the musical numbers to a minimum. Unlike Paramount, which presented Elvis primarily as an entertainer, Twentieth Century–Fox believed that selling Elvis as a dramatic actor could attract an even wider audience.
“I have sweated over the script for the past couple of days trying to find places for Presley to sing,” Weisbart wrote two months before filming began. “I cannot see how it is possible for Elvis to break into song without destroying a very good script. . . . Instead of presenting a gimmicked up picture with Elvis Presley, we’d be offering a pretty legitimate picture that represents growth in Presley’s career and therefore should be fresh and exciting as far as his fans are concerned.”
But at a lunch with the Colonel the following day, Weisbart was overruled. “We want all the best possible results for this picture,” Parker said, “including the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of exploitation represented by a good record release by Elvis Presley.” The Colonel had no interest in reading the script, he added, and became paranoid when Weisbart asked his input for selecting a director. “I would not know whether you would need a sensitive director or some other director, even if I had read the script,” he followed up in writing, “as this is not one of my qualifications. If someone is using me as a scapegoat, I would like to know the reason. I do not wish to work under any unpleasant conditions over which I have no control.”
Parker continued to fight the producer at every turn, even when Weisbart asked Freddy Bienstock to find a good title song and three or four others in keeping with the era. The most important thing, Weisbart said, is that the material be selected purely on Elvis’s singing and not be dependent on a modern arrangement and band. The Colonel was quick to balk at those criteria, and at the studio’s selection for the title song, insisting it wouldn’t be a hit single. Weisbart needed to understand the formula: Elvis’s movies would promote the soundtrack albums, and the single from the soundtrack would publicize the film. It was an ideal commercial equation.
“I think Parker is more interested in selling records than he is [in] building a motion picture career for Presley and making fortunes out of his picture reruns,” Charles Einfield, Fox’s vice president of advertising and publicity, wrote to Weisbart. “It’s a helluva way for a partner to act. Too bad.”
In the end, only two of the four musical numbers remained in the final cut, which especially pleased Elvis, who found the songs embarrassingly lightweight and inappropriate. Director Don Siegel, later to make his name with Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, was so impressed with Elvis’s dramatic ability that he suggested the picture be advertised with the tag line “Elvis Acts!”—a takeoff on the “Garbo Speaks” campaign for the - actress’s first talking picture.
Those issues were still being sorted out when the studio began planning its next Presley picture, Wild in the Country, with producer Jerry Wald and director Philip Dunne, who had won acclaim for his screenplay of How Green Was My Valley. Already Parker was proving difficult, wanting to cut the forty-five-day shooting schedule in half and, over the objections of his client, harping that the picture must have a minimum of four Elvis songs, preferably five or more. On that point, he had the backing of studio head Spyros Skouras.
Fox based the film on J. R. Salamanca’s novel The Lost Country, with its plot of an innocent farm boy enmeshed in a tragic affair with his older teacher. In casting Hope Lange, with her icy blond beauty, director Dunne added yet another dimension of class discrepancy, though screenwriter Clifford Odets made the relationship even more taboo in altering the boy’s character to that of an Appalachian delinquent and transforming the teacher into a court-appointed psychiatrist. Dunne found Elvis “an excellent dramatic actor, a natural actor,” and perfect to portray, as Wald said in the story conference, “the gifted individual, the soul born with special wings . . . whose specialness is at once a thing of wonder and beauty and compliment.”
Throughout filming, Parker, as before, seemed more preoccupied with his record release schedule than with looking out for Elvis’s welfare. He busied himself writing nasty letters complaining about a proposed title change in England—he’d already notified the fan club as to the original title—and about the importance of not leaking any information about the music, as it confused fans about upcoming singles. “I have never advised a studio how to make a picture,” he wrote to Wald. “I am always willing to cooperate, but we know our record business!” Indeed, the Colonel was negotiating a new amendment to Elvis’s RCA contract, which guaranteed Presley $1,000 per week from an earlier contract, plus an annual payment of $300,000 against royalties. Parker instructed RCA to divert $100,000 of it to All Star Shows for promotion, as per his 75–25 split with Elvis.
Otherwise, the Colonel spent his time at the studio writing press releases, including one with an oddly defensive tone in which he denied being a “Svengali who has hypnotized a country boy into becoming one of the great entertainers of our times.” Furthermore, he wrote, “Elvis picks his own songs for all occasions, including motion pictures. The Colonel’s control in this area consists only of suggestion and . . . eliminating patently unsuitable songs.”
But for whom? Like Flaming Star, which initially flopped, appearing only one week on the National Box Office Survey, Wild in the Country never found its niche. One faction of the audience came for Elvis’s glitz and grind, another for the pathos of Odets. Both were disappointed. “When we previewed,” Dunne remembered, the audience laughed when we came to the songs . . . they were going with the story. I shot them so they could be dropped out, and I wish they would drop them out of the prints now. They’d see a good movie.”
Without significant box office, Wild in the Country would be Elvis’s last challenging dramatic role and his final alliance with a serious director. He seemed to sense it, asking Dunne if they might work together again after his next picture for Paramount, Blue Hawaii. Dunne declined, knowing the future would hold only more typical vehicles, “the usual bikinis, you know.”
Elvis started principal photography on Blue Hawaii two days after his much-ballyhooed U.S.S. Arizona concert. Apart from a pair of Memphis charity shows in which he warmed up the old magic using elements of “Negro cotton field harmony, camp meeting fervor, Hollywood showmanship, beatnik nonchalance, and some of the manipulations of mass psychology,” as the hometown paper raved, the Hawaii concert, produced, like the Memphis charity shows, by Parker’s old friend Al Dvorin, would be Elvis’s first real return to the stage in more than three years.
While Hawaii always nurtured the Colonel’s jovial side—he did a hula dance for Bob Moore when the bass player brought his home movie camera out on the beach—he positively reveled in his opportunity to lord it over the admirals and generals who came to a meeting in Parker’s suite at the Hawaiian Village Hotel, and invited two of Hawaii’s top radio deejays, Ron Jacobs and Tom Moffatt, to witness his fun. As Parker predicted, the brass arrived full of skepticism about this Tennessee Colonel, whose suite resembled a carnival booth, with Elvis’s promotional pictures and movie posters plastered on the walls and RCA Nipper dogs peering out from behind the furniture.
“He started snowing them,” recalls Jacobs, “telling them how important they were to the security of the world. After that, he said if they’d just line up, why, he’d give them a little something from Elvis. So all these guys in charge of the military in the Pacific and Asia got in line and stood there anxiously, and Parker went over to a trunk that was full of Elvis memorabilia. Then the Colonel reached in very carefully, almost secretly, and stingily started handing out these tiny Elvis pocket calendars, one to each admiral and general.”
As they left, “one of the admirals saluted him!” Moffatt adds. “It was ‘yes, sir’ to the Colonel.”
Yet not everyone was awed. When one high-ranking officer had the temerity to ask for a complimentary pass to the show, Parker refused, barking that ticket sales were to tally nearly $52,000, and, “every penny . . . must go to the fund!” Why, even he and Elvis were buying their own way in. But then the Colonel got a glint in his eye and reconsidered, purposely seating the admiral between the black chauffeur he’d been assigned and a navy seaman who had just joined up. To have such authority figures under his thumb, aggrandizing him and soiling themselves in public in one fell swoop, apparently brought the Colonel supreme joy.
Parker had booked his old friend Minnie Pearl on the bill, and until the moment they arrived at the Honolulu International Airport, she hadn’t realized “how encapsulated Elvis was in his fame.” With three thousand screaming women scurrying to get to the plane, “I began to get these chilling feelings that maybe I didn’t want to be all that close to Elvis—the fans were all along the route he was taking to the hotel, and my husband was afraid that we’d be trampled trying to get inside. I felt myself being lifted completely off my feet by all these people.
“We did the show on a Saturday, and Sunday afternoon, a bunch of us were down on Waikiki Beach, cavorting and kidding and having a big time. We got to talking about how we wished Elvis could come down and be with us, and we turned and looked up at his penthouse, which was facing the ocean. He was standing on the balcony, looking down at us, this solitary figure, lonely looking, watching us have such a good time. He was just getting ready to start making the film, and he literally was a prisoner because of the fans. We sat there on the beach and talked about how it would be—what a price you pay for that sort of fame.”
In preparation for Blue Hawaii, Wallis wrote Parker with strict orders for Elvis to get into shape. “It is very important that [he] look lean and hard, and well-tanned . . . he should have a good overall coat of tan on his body as well as his face. I will appreciate it if you will talk to him about watching his weight.” At the end, Wallis recommended a good sun lamp.
Blue Hawaii, Elvis’s first fun-in-the-sun bikini picture, would follow the musical format of G.I. Blues, whose success had made it the prototype for all the Wallis-Presley musicals to follow. But now Blue Hawaii would surpass it. The 1961 film would easily recoup its $2 million cost and effectively doom Elvis’s chances of moving beyond its stultifying structure. It would also mark the first of seven Elvis pictures directed by Norman Taurog.
In wedding an exotic setting and plenty of romance to a fourteen-song framework—three more than even G.I. Blues allowed—Wallis perfected his winning Elvis formula. Nearly all the movies Elvis made after 1960 would be assembled around Elvis’s personality—or the Hollywood moguls’ perception of it—the way larger movies were once fashioned around female stars such as Shirley Temple or Mae West. The Wallis productions, especially, were the last in a series of Hollywood vehicles guaranteed to pull a certain bankable gross just because of who was in them, leading the producer himself to remark, “A Presley picture is the only sure thing in show business.”
Couldn’t Parker see that such somnambulistic fare would squander his client’s talent and suffocate his spirit? Most likely not. As the Colonel indicated to Weisbart, he was woefully aware of his inability to judge either a good script or a fine director. Likewise, he had difficulty discerning a good performance from a mediocre one and relied on the judgment of others to plan Elvis’s future in films.
Despite Presley’s remarkable portrayal in King Creole, Wallis believed that Elvis couldn’t carry a picture without music. And Byron Raphael remembers going with Parker to a meeting with producer Joe Pasternak long before he made Girl Happy and Spinout in the mid-’60s. Pasternak, famous for musicals, had a dramatic property in mind for Elvis, and asked him to do a reading. Afterward, the producer told Parker, “He really can’t act. He just doesn’t have it.” In their four-year association, Raphael says, “the only criticism I ever heard the Colonel make of Elvis was about his acting. He never believed that Elvis was going to be an actor. Not for a second.” And nothing he saw changed his mind.
Parker used to tell his staff that the key to successful management was trying different tactics. “It doesn’t matter if you do ten stupid things,” - he’d say, “as long as you do one smart one.” Here was his prime example. As long as Elvis made the upbeat musicals that Wallis wanted, he was assured of working in Hollywood. Blue Hawaii was the first of a new five-picture deal with Wallis, which paid $175,000 for the first three and $200,000 each for the remaining two.
Elvis was surprised to learn of such a demanding movie schedule. It - didn’t leave much time for touring—and he wanted to go to Europe—or making records, apart from the movie soundtracks. In Germany, he’d worked on expanding his range and making his voice fuller, and he was eager for more operatic songs, like “It’s Now or Never,” to show it off.
But after the U.S.S. Arizona concert, the Colonel was in no hurry to return Elvis to the concert stage anytime soon. He’d rather people paid to see Presley in the movies, and they might tire of him if Elvis did too many personal appearances. While Parker had been an extraordinary promoter, in time he would turn into an unconscionable manager. In fact, the Colonel no longer thought of his client’s needs so much as he did his own.
In Hollywood, Parker was a steel wall of power, something he could never be in representing Presley, the concert artist. Therefore, California was where they would stay, where the Colonel could have almost anything he wanted, free for the asking, with the biggest names in show business at his beck and call. In making or confirming all the big decisions on Presley’s pictures, and by refusing to let Wallis or even William Morris have direct access to Elvis, Parker became not only a true power broker, but the “producer” of Presley’s pictures. He’d just picked up a two-picture deal with the Mirisch Brothers and United Artists for $500,000 each and 50 percent of the profits; in January 1961, he’d close a four-picture agreement with MGM at a salary of $400,000 per picture, plus $100,000 for expenses, with profit participation equal to the Mirisch deal.
Until the end of his life, Parker told a story that was likely untrue but illuminated his core philosophy. According to the tale, the Colonel, Wallis, and Abe Lastfogel met at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to discuss a deal for Elvis to play a part in a picture based on what Wallis promised was an Academy Award–winning script.
“That’s fine,” the Colonel said. “When do you start?” Wallis gave him the date, and the Colonel turned to Lastfogel. “Sounds good, Abe. We get a million dollars, and we’ll be there.”
Wallis spoke up. “No, Colonel, you don’t understand. I said this was an Academy Award–winning script. I only want to pay $500,000, not a million.”
“Oh,” the Colonel replied, “I didn’t get that part of it. Well, tell you what we’ll do. You send us the million, and the day Elvis goes up and gets the Academy Award, we’ll send you back $500,000.”
Parker put little store in industry kudos. “They’ll never win any Academy Awards,” he said of Elvis’s films in 1960. “All they’re good for is to make money.”
At last, the Colonel had his dancing chicken.