SOMETIME in 1965, in near secret, the Colonel started taking meetings with Tom Sarnoff, vice president of NBC’s West Coast division. Parker thought Elvis should make a motion picture for television, he told Sarnoff, and after it debuted on the network, he wanted the rights to release it theatrically around the world. The negotiations were long and arduous, and often seemed to stall altogether.
Throughout Elvis’s movie years, Parker had fiercely protected the exclusivity to put his client on television, again demonstrating his shrewdness in using the medium. Only once had he had been thwarted. In 1959, he entered into a deal with Irving Kahn, the TelePrompter inventor, for a 100-city closed-circuit television concert to reintroduce Elvis after his return from the army.
Closed-circuit telecasts were commonplace for champion prizefights, but a recording artist had yet to do one, and Parker enjoyed the publicity of the history-making event. But Wallis and Hazen quickly objected, arguing if the paid TV appearance wasn’t successful, attendance for Presley’s future motion pictures would suffer. Parker scrapped the closed-circuit deal, snippily writing Wallis and Hazen, “I know that both of you must be brokenhearted . . . if there is anything either of you could do to make me feel better, don’t hesitate to go to any lengths to achieve this pleasant goal.”
From that day, Parker plotted his revenge, drafting long, sabre-rattling letters to the producers whenever they aired one of Presley’s films on television. Free showings of any Elvis movie diluted the sales impact of his first-run features, Parker huffed, letting Wallis know that if such practices continued, he “could very well lose the next Presley picture.” But what the Colonel really dreaded was interference as he negotiated a big deal with NBC, which, like RCA, was a corporate arm of General Electric.
In October 1967, Sarnoff and the Colonel came together again. This time they talked about a package deal to include Elvis’s first TV appearance since the Frank Sinatra special of 1960. Three months later, they agreed on a price: $250,000 for a music special and $850,000 for a feature film plus 50 percent of the profits. The film, Change of Habit, a Universal Pictures and NBC production, would pair Elvis with one of his most unlikely leading ladies, Mary Tyler Moore.
But first he would make Charro!, an offbeat film in the vein of Sergio - Leone’s so-called spaghetti Westerns, for National General. The picture would soothe the actor’s ego somewhat. “Charro! is the first movie I ever made without singing a song,” Presley would tell one of the Colonel’s chosen reporters. “I play a gunfighter, and I just couldn’t see a singing gunfighter.” Ultimately, he would agree to croon the title tune.
For the last year, the Colonel had been rethinking his strategy, trying to find projects to challenge Elvis, to rouse him from his lethargy and depression. With Easy Come, Easy Go, Parker had attempted—and failed—to have Wallis cast Elvis in a nonmusical role. And in March of ’67, the Colonel wrote to MGM, encouraging the studio to come up with something meaty for the remaining films on Presley’s contract—no more bikinis and no more nightclub scenes, “which have been in the last fifteen pictures. . . . I sincerely hope that you are looking in some crystal ball with your people to come up with some good, strong, rugged stories.”
Now a televised music special along the lines Sarnoff proposed would let Elvis meet the people eye to eye for his first full-length performance since the U.S.S. Arizona concert in 1961. Taped in June 1968, it would air that December for the holiday season.
“Would TV serve to refurbish that old magic, the sort of thing that gave old ladies the vapors and caused young girls to collect the dust from Elvis’s car for their memory books?” TV Guide asked. Parker thought they would, as did fifty-year-old Bob Finkel, one of four executive producers under exclusive contract to NBC. Sarnoff brought Finkel to the project even before he signed the deal with Parker. Not only had Finkel made his Emmy-winning reputation with variety shows, but more important, Sarnoff believed Finkel might be a match for the High Potentate.
Almost immediately, Parker made him a Snowman—Finkel carried his card in his wallet (“Had to!”)—and the two men developed an easy rapport. But Finkel realized that entertaining the Colonel and keeping him distracted from the show would be a full-time job. He also couldn’t get past Elvis calling him Mr. Finkel, and needed someone to whom the singer could relate. That’s when he placed a call to Binder/Howe Productions, and invited them on board.
Steve Binder was a twenty-one-year-old wise-beyond-his-years producer-director who’d grown up working in his father’s Los Angeles gas station. He had a rock-and-roll gut and a primal instinct for what was gold and what was dross, having cut his teeth producing the hip TV music series Hullabaloo and The T.A.M.I. Show, a 1964 landmark concert film with a virtual who’s who of rock, including James Brown and the Rolling Stones. More recently, he’d done a Petula Clark special that spawned a thousand headlines in racially uptight America when Clark exchanged an innocent touch with her guest, Harry Belafonte.
Bones Howe, Binder’s business partner and the music supervisor on the shows, was a sound guru, currently producing records for the pop groups the Fifth Dimension and the Association. Years before, he’d worked on a number of Elvis’s sessions at Radio Recorders, as the assistant to engineer Thorne Nogar.
Howe remembered what Elvis had been like before Hollywood choked off his ambition, how he produced his own records, listening to stacks of demos over and over, calling for a guitar lick here, a bass thump there, and then danced to his own playbacks turned up loud. He also remembered how much fun Elvis was, flirting with the girls at the stoplight on Sunset Boulevard, rolling down the window just as the light changed, or talking them up the fire escape at the Hollywood Plaza Hotel. Sometimes, he’d flash that crooked grin and invite the teenagers from nearby Hollywood High right into the studio.
Binder and Howe decided the only way to do the special was to create the same relaxed atmosphere in which Elvis made his early records. If they could pull that off, in an interview in which Elvis showed how warm and funny he was, or in a live segment where he just talked about his musical roots, people would see the real Elvis Presley and not the one the Colonel had put on display. Binder told Finkel he was interested only if they could capture the phenomenon of a once-in-a-lifetime personality.
“I wanted Elvis to let the world in on that great big secret,” he says, and Finkel agreed.
In May, at Finkel’s next meeting with the Colonel, which included representatives of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, the special’s only sponsor, Finkel broached the subject of expanding the Christmas theme. He’d like to embrace material from Elvis’s long career, he said. Parker approved, as long as a Christmas song closed the program and Elvis controlled the music publishing throughout. Finkel then met with Elvis, and afterward wrote a memo, saying that the singer was excited about the idea, that Elvis would like the “show to depart completely from the pattern of his motion pictures and from everything else he has done. . . . [He] wants everyone to know what he really can do.”
Three days later, on May 17, the Colonel invited Binder and Howe for a 7:00 A.M. breakfast at his office at MGM. To stall for time, and to figure how he’d play the relationship (he deliberately mispronounced Binder as “Bindle”), Parker put his staff through the “fire drill” routine—demonstrating how quickly they could pack up the office if the studio heads displeased the Colonel—and showed Howe the scrapbooks he kept as the dogcatcher of Tampa. The trio deliberately steered clear of any conversation about the content of the show, other than Parker’s handing Binder an audiotape of a hackneyed Christmas program he routinely supplied to radio.
“This is what I want my boy to do,” he said. To Binder, the genius of the Colonel was that he had grown men terrorized all around him. But Binder was emphatic that he needed a one-on-one meeting with Elvis before he committed to the project.
What the producer didn’t say was that Elvis was thirty-three years old and no longer the rough-and-ready Hillbilly Cat. In Binder’s view, the movies had made Elvis an anachronism in his twenties, as musically relevant to the ’60s as Bing Crosby. “There was no blood and guts of this man left.” If Elvis could recapture the magnificent essence he once was, he’d enjoy a whole new rejuvenation. Otherwise, with his MGM contract about to expire, he’d be lucky to return to grinding out B movies, this time for second-string studios.
The test came later that day in Binder’s office, in what was known as the glass elevator building on Sunset Boulevard in the heart of Hollywood. At first, Binder was caught off-guard by the enormity of Elvis’s presence, which he found surprisingly charismatic and unreal. (“You certainly knew . . . that this was a special person . . . his looks were just phenomenally sculptured, without any weak points.”) But while he found Elvis dynamic, with a great sense of humor, Binder knew he had to talk straight and find out if the greatest white blues singer could relate to the socially conscious ’60s.
To Binder’s relief, “we hit it off pretty well. We joked around a lot.” Elvis told him he was uncomfortable in television, that he hadn’t understood why Steve Allen had made him look silly, singing to a basset hound, and Ed Sullivan had made him seem vulgar, shooting him from the waist up—an idea that Elvis never knew had originated with the Colonel. Binder tried to calm him, saying, “You make a record, and I’ll put pictures to it, and you won’t have to worry about television.” Then the producer eased into the fact that if Elvis didn’t do anything else, he would always be remembered as the great rock-and-roll icon of the past. But to the present generation, he was a relic, a man who hadn’t placed a record at the top of the record charts in six years. Elvis may have been a highly paid movie star, Binder says in retrospect, but “he was not in the business as far as I was concerned.”
If Elvis was nervous that he had been created by the Colonel, Binder saw, “it was my job to let him believe in himself and his talent.” Both Binder and Howe knew they couldn’t come right out and criticize the Colonel, because Elvis wouldn’t have tolerated it. Howe thought, “Elvis probably felt the guy made a pact with the devil, that without the Colonel he would never have gotten there.”
On the contrary, the Colonel hadn’t been bad for Elvis, Binder allowed. Parker had served his purpose, and he was a marketing genius, though “once he had the stranglehold, he forgot that what he was marketing was built around talent, and manipulated the whole thing with smoke and mirrors.” Instead of having somebody pay the Colonel a million dollars to put Elvis in the kind of plastic commercial movies he’d been doing, Binder added, Elvis should give a great director a million dollars to put him in the right movie.
“He laughed at that, and said, ‘You’re right,’ ” Binder remembers. “He told me he had been burning up inside for years to communicate.” But the producer, who knew that Elvis’s fear would make him great, also said that television was always a risk—the audience would either see a man who had rediscovered himself or they’d be looking at a has-been. How was Elvis’s gut these days? Would he have recorded Jimmy Webb’s progressive and poetic “MacArthur Park,” for example, if Webb had brought it to him instead of actor Richard Harris?
“Definitely,” Elvis said without blinking an eye. That’s when Binder knew that Elvis was thinking of the future and not the past. “I felt very, very strongly that the special was Elvis’s moment of truth,” says Binder, “and that the number-one requirement was honesty.” The singer said he was going to Hawaii to get in shape and just relax for a few weeks with his wife and his newborn daugher, Lisa Marie. Binder promised they’d put together a project that they believed in while he was gone.
In the interim, the producers brought in writers Chris Beard and Allan Blye, who structured the show around the 1909 theater staple The Blue Bird, in which a young man leaves home to find happiness, only to return and discover it in his own backyard. Alfred DiScipio, the Singer sewing machine representative, liked the idea and told the Colonel they should go with it, as it was Elvis’s story, too, a fact underscored by using snippets of Presley’s own music and costume designer Bill Belew’s now-famous black leather suit, a brilliant updating of the ’50s motorcycle jacket. Elvis never really wore a motorcycle jacket—it was Brando who popularized it in the movie The Wild One—but millions of viewers thought he had.
On June 3, Elvis arrived for the start of two weeks of rehearsals at the Binder/Howe offices. “He looked amazing,” Binder remembers, suntanned and fourteen pounds lighter from a crash diet. He loved the script, he told them, and then Howe said if they were really going to go in a new direction, he’d like to dispense with Elvis’s usual Nashville musicians and bring in some of L.A.’s best session players—guitarists Mike Deasy and Tommy Tedesco and drummer Hal Blaine—who’d enliven him with a fresher sound. No matter what they suggested, Elvis nodded yes, which gave Binder pause: “I wanted him to be not that agreeable and easy to work with—I wanted him to roll up his sleeves and make the show something he contributed to a great deal.”
The upbeat mood was shattered barely three days later, when Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles. His murder threw Elvis into an emotional spiral. Already a conspiracy theorist—reinforced, perhaps, by the Colonel’s Sam Cooke story—Elvis showed Binder that he was “quite well read” on the subject. “He told me all the books to read—he was convinced it was not Oswald who killed [John] Kennedy, and he was obsessed with the plot to assassinate RFK.”
During rehearsals, Binder began to see a dichotomy in Elvis’s personality. On his own, or with the guys, Elvis was full of confidence and humor. But in their joint meetings with the Colonel at Burbank’s NBC studios, Elvis seemed weak and isolated. He stood with his hands clasped in front of him, his head down. “Elvis was scared to death of the Colonel’s power,” Binder saw. “He felt shamed. He was very, very submissive.” The producer took note of it as he rolled out his ideas to Parker—he’d like to do some choreographed production numbers with a dance troupe, a straight-ahead concert segment in an arena format, and probably a gospel sequence.
Now the Colonel, who had dangled the carrot of naming Binder as the director of Elvis’s next motion picture, seemed not so amenable. “I think what pissed him off more than anything about me is that I wasn’t one of his lackeys,” Binder remembers.
“Whenever Parker basically told me that I couldn’t do what I was doing, the Colonel would look at Elvis and say, ‘Right, Elvis?’ And Elvis would say, ‘Yes, Colonel.’ And Parker would say, ‘So Steve, we aren’t going to do that, are we?’ And I’d say, ‘If that’s what Elvis wants, then we won’t do it.’ And then we would walk out of the office, and Elvis would lighten up and jab me in the ribs and say, ‘We are going to do it. To hell with Colonel Parker.’ But he never did stand up to him in front of me.”
Once the rehearsals shifted to NBC, Bob Finkel, or Finkels, as Parker called him, did his best to keep the Colonel “happy and in tune,” playing liar’s poker with him, and engaging in a series of pranks. When the Colonel presented Finkel with an autographed photo of himself in a Confederate uniform, Finkel donned a ridiculously large hat and had himself photographed in an Admiral Hornblower outfit, with a sword at his side and a ribbon across his chest. He signed the picture, “To Colonel Tom Parker from Commander Bob Finkel.”
The executive producer showed up at work one day to find his office, as well as Parker’s, guarded by men from the William Morris office dressed as Buckingham Palace guards, with red jackets and furry hats. “They wouldn’t laugh, they wouldn’t smile, and they wouldn’t let me in my own door,” Finkel remembers. “The Colonel was peeping around the corner.” A week later, Finkel was preparing to go home when he discovered that his office door had been duct-taped shut from the outside.
Binder and Howe, who were also represented by the Morris agency, were horrified by Parker’s humiliation of the young agent-trainees, and at his gall in having himself “guarded” like royalty. But Finkel put up with it all because it kept Parker away from Binder, “who would have died on this show if the Colonel had continued to harass him.”
Finkel had also become fond of Parker, whom he called Tom. He’d heard about his immigration problems and knew that the latest movie contracts specified no foreign location shooting. Binder said maybe Interpol was looking for him and the Colonel feared arrest. Finkel couldn’t quite imagine that, but he realized Parker was in a quandary. He couldn’t take Elvis to Europe because “something prevented him from going through the gate,” and he wouldn’t let any other promoter take Presley overseas because “he was afraid Elvis would run away.”
On the other hand, Finkel believed the Colonel was misunderstood (“I knew a side of him that many people didn’t know”), and that he was a better person than he got credit for being. He saw it in the way he cared for his wife, Marie, whom he visited on weekends in Palm Springs. The month before, she had undergone the first of two hip replacement surgeries, and Parker kept nurses at her side around the clock.
“One day, I said, ‘Tom, you’ve been pulling pranks on me all through this escapade,’ ” Finkel remembers. “ ‘I’m going to do something to you, and I think it’ll be the best trick. I’m going to trust you to decide, because you are an honest man. But if you think I topped you, I want your cane.’ And he said, ‘You’ve got it.’ ”
In mid-June, the group faced its first major crisis over the firing of Billy Strange, the one person Elvis had requested on the project. Strange, the show’s musical director, had cowritten the song “Memories,” a keynote ballad, which set a poignant tone. But his scheduling conflicts kept him from coming up with arrangements in a timely manner. He and Binder argued about it, and when he taunted the producer (“You can’t fire me”), Binder replaced him with Billy Goldenberg, Barbra Streisand’s former musical accompanist, who had also worked on Hullabaloo.
Goldenberg would ultimately change the direction of Elvis’s music, creating a sophisticated new sound in moving the singer from a small rhythm section to a thirty-nine-piece orchestra. But at the time, the Colonel was not pleased with Strange’s removal, especially as a song he cowrote with Mac Davis, “A Little Less Conversation,” would help promote Elvis’s movie Live a Little, Love a Little when the film was released in late fall. Parker cornered Binder and told him he was going to pull the plug on his job, and furthermore, there could be no special because Elvis would never accept the fact that Strange was gone. Even Finkel’s intervention did not cool the Colonel down.
“There was a day of tremendous pressures and tension,” Binder remembers. Goldenberg wasn’t convinced that he and Elvis could find common musical ground. (“I’m a Jewish kid from New York who grew up on Broadway. What am I doing playing ‘Hound Dog’?”) And while Elvis accepted the reason for Strange’s dismissal, he wasn’t sure he wanted anyone tampering with his sound. It scared him nearly senseless when he walked into the studio and saw the horns and the strings, and he called Binder aside and told him he had to promise to send everybody home if he didn’t like it. Binder gave him his word, and finally, both Elvis and Goldenberg took a leap of faith.
“When Elvis heard the first note of the session at Western Recorders, he loved it,” Binder says. “He had his sunglasses on and was standing next to Billy on the podium, and he looked into the control booth at me and gave me the high sign, like, ‘We’re going to be okay.’ He just fell out, and he never once questioned anything that we did musically. That was the one moment when he knew it would all come together.”
By now, Elvis had literally moved into the NBC studios, the staff converting the dressing rooms into sleeping quarters. At the end of each day, Binder and Finkel were fascinated to watch Elvis jam and cut up with his buddies Charlie Hodge, Joe Esposito, and Alan Fortas, an overgrown sweetheart who reminded Binder of the character Lenny in the novel Of Mice and Men.
In contrast, Howe found it boring. “Music was [Elvis’s] most interesting side—the rest was just a bunch of guys hanging out in a room telling jokes. I mean, how smart were those guys?” But Finkel saw the interaction as comedic: “If Elvis put his hands on his hips, two guys in back of him put their hands on their hips.” Binder thought they were all spies for the Colonel, but he also saw something else. “I wanted to capture in almost a documentary what was going on inside the man.” If he could sneak a camera into the dressing room and photograph that informality and playfulness, the audience would get a glimpse of an intimate Elvis that no one beyond his family and entourage had ever seen.
“Absolutely not,” Parker said, vetoing the idea. But eventually he weakened and gave Binder the right to re-create it, thus inspiring the now-famous “improv” section of the special in which Elvis sits in a boxing ring of a stage with Hodge and musicians Scotty Moore and D. J. Fontana. When Presley balked at the idea of telling stories about his early years (“I’m not sure it’s . . . a good idea . . . What if I can’t think of anything to say?”), Binder and Allan Blye made a list of topics they’d heard him talk about in private and threw in a question about modern music to update his image. Fortas was also added to help Elvis feel at home.
The Colonel no longer seemed to have dust in his heart, but a larger test came when Binder presented Elvis with a new song, “If I Can Dream.” The producer wanted to close the show with something that made a statement about how Elvis felt about the world, youth, and the Vietnam War. For that, he needed a big, idealistic, and emotional ballad that showed the core of the man who had reacted so solemnly to the shootings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., a man who had grown up in the prejudiced South, “but who was really above all that.”
Songwriter Earl Brown stayed up all night conjuring it, and the next day, Binder had Brown and Goldenberg go to Elvis’s dressing room and play it for him. “That’s a hit song,” Howe said. Elvis thought it might be a little too Broadway the way Billy rendered it, and Bones said, “You can do it with a real bluesy feel.”
“Let me hear it again,” Elvis said. Billy played it seven or eight times, and Elvis looked up. “Okay, I’ll do it.”
Elsewhere in the building, the Colonel stiffened like a flatiron, telling Finkel, “Over my dead body will Elvis sing an original song at the end of the show! We had a deal for a Christmas song!” Finkel argued that the script had evolved into a different concept, and now there was no need for a Christmas song. “Plus we got Elvis to take a stand. That in itself was a miracle.”
Finally, the Colonel said that the song could stay, even though it wasn’t “Elvis Presley material.” But, Binder recalls, Parker “instantly” had the copyright registered to protect the publishing. “That was all he was interested in.” Once recording started, Parker stationed Freddy Bienstock at the studio to make sure no one interfered with song selection, and Bienstock instructed Lamar Fike, by then a Hill and Range employee, to pick up deals on anything he could.
However, the Colonel still lobbied for a Christmas song somewhere in the program. Finkel says Parker’s arrogance wasn’t exactly carved in stone—he thought a traditional carol would appeal to more conservative viewers, and he was pondering a new holiday album somewhere down the line. Perhaps he’d also argued out of contract obligation—he’d given his word to Tom Sarnoff that this would be a holiday special, something Sarnoff was willing to ignore. But mostly, Binder holds, his insistence lay in splintering spite; Parker savored a taste of victory.
“In my last meeting with the Colonel, Bob and I were asked to go up to Sarnoff’s office,” he explains. “They said, ‘The Colonel’s telling us that we cannot air the show unless we have a Christmas song in it.’ ” Binder listened quietly. All the songs Parker suggested were threadbare standards, tunes Perry Como might have done. The old man glared at the young producer through antediluvian slits, his energy vehement.
“The Colonel just sat there staring at me, and instead of avoiding his eyes, I stared right back at him. I remember our eyes just locked on each other, and I said, ‘Are you ordering me to put a Christmas song in the show, or are you asking me to put a Christmas song in the show?’ In essence, it was ‘ordering,’ and that’s how ‘Blue Christmas’ got added to the improv. His will was so strong that I think he felt in his heart of hearts he could will anybody into anything.”
On June 23, Elvis prerecorded “If I Can Dream” in several fervent takes. To Howe and Binder, it was a staggering moment, an almost religious resurrection. Howe put him out on the floor with a hand mike, and he sang the song in front of the string section, complete with knee drops. “The string players were sitting there with their mouths open,” Howe remembers. “They had never seen anything like this.”
Yet the more extraordinary performance came later, when the producers sent everybody home, and Elvis rerecorded the vocal in the dark, so engulfed in the emotion he ended up writhing on the cement floor, down on his side, in a fetal position. After four takes, he went into the control room, and Binder played the recording back for him fifteen times in a row. Elvis listened with the fascination of a man who was hearing the sound of his own rebirth.
Early in the project, the Colonel told Binder he’d never interfere when things were going well. “On the outside,” says Binder, “the Colonel was very unhappy with what was happening. But being a good businessman, once he realized that Elvis had bought into what we wanted to do, there’s no doubt that he saw we were on to something special and he shouldn’t rock the boat.”
In fact, Parker was more cognizant than Binder imagined. The show had intrinsic value as a program that would also sell albums. But the Colonel had all along planned for the event to be a springboard for the next phase of Elvis’s career. Largely on the strength of the television special, Parker would make his client the highest-paid performer in Las Vegas. “The only way he could set it up was to show how Elvis would perform with a group behind him,” says Lamar Fike. “That’s why Colonel envisioned the special.”
On June 25, with an eye toward building Elvis’s new public profile, Parker, in a bright blue sport shirt and Tyrolean hat, presented his refurbished attraction to fifty visiting TV editors at an evening press conference on NBC’s Rehearsal Stage 3.
One reporter wondered if Elvis’s curving sideburns wouldn’t be “old hat in this day of the post-Beatle. . . . He suggests a nice boy trying to be pleasant.” But once the Colonel cracked a few jokes to set the mood, the singer, making a grand entrance in an electric blue shirt, black pants, leather wristbands, and “a diamond ring as big as a Ping-Pong ball,” captivated the room. Why was Elvis doing TV? “We figured it was about time—before I grow too old.” Had he changed? “No, but I pick my material more carefully.” Were small towns the backbone of his audience? “Yes, ma’am. I’ve never done well in big cities.”
Elvis was smiling, but under his breath, the producers heard him mutter, “Oh, wow! Not that one again.” Soon the Colonel sprung him in full pitchman’s style—“Right over here, folks, get your picture taken with Elvis”—and then the big man stood aside to avoid the rush.
The following day, June 26, was Parker’s fifty-ninth birthday. Finkel arranged a party on the set with a big cake, but the others had a more pointed surprise. Writers Chris Beard and Allan Blye, privy to the Binder-Parker feud, wrote a parody of “It Hurts Me,” with lyrics including “The whole town is talking, they’re calling me a fool for listening to Binder’s same old lies,” and ending with the Colonel’s rote complaint: “Is it too much to ask for one lousy, tired Christmas song?” Elvis sang it to him amid peals of laughter.
It was a crucial moment, a public humiliation and stunning defeat, delivered in the bright wrappings of celebration. Binder had won his duel with the Colonel, and after wresting control of Elvis away from Parker, the producer had given it back to the artist himself. Now Elvis made a mockery of the man who had guided his every move.
“I have no proof to back it up,” says Binder, “but I felt the Colonel had the magic power. And I believe that before Elvis did anything, the Colonel would take him quietly into a room and use his amateur hypnotism talent on him. Elvis was very insecure. But fifteen minutes later, he would come out oozing confidence, convinced that he was the greatest performer who ever walked on the stage.”
The problem was that Elvis had now met a better hypnotist.
During the next few days, Billy Goldenberg came in to watch some of the taping, and invariably passed by Parker’s broom closet of an office. The arranger was surprised to see the Colonel always sitting alone, leaning on his cane, never joining Elvis and the guys, or huddling with his client except before a performance. In fact, he’d never witnessed one affectionate exchange between them.
“Every time I walked by, the Colonel would say, ‘Come on in, boy, and let’s talk a little bit,’ ” Goldenberg remembers. “I’d been told he was the most terrible man in the world, but I liked him. I used to go right in and smile. I wouldn’t say that underneath I knew how kind he was, because he never talked about himself. But it didn’t seem real, any of it. He always reminded me of the characters that Sidney Greenstreet or Burl Ives or Orson Welles played—he was all those people put together. It was like he was playing a game of some sort, putting on the whole world.”
Indeed, Parker had a particularly onerous prank in store for Goldenberg and the rest of the team. On June 27, a day after the Colonel’s belittling birthday event, Elvis rehearsed the gospel medley, taped an amusement park scene early in the afternoon, and then retired to his dressing room to rest before his two one-hour sets in front of a live audience that evening. But when show time drew near and only twenty-five people lined up outside, the head of guest relations alerted a frenzied staff. Parker had insisted on receiving all 328 tickets for each show and distributing them to a typical Elvis audience (“You want the blond bouffant hairdo”), flying fans in from all across the country if need be.
Now it was clear he had inexcusably bungled the ticket distribution, and Binder believed it was out of pure malevolence, since the Colonel had made him promise he wouldn’t use the improv if he didn’t like it. The staff went scrambling, calling a radio station to jump on the air with the news that seats were still available, and running across the street to Bob’s Big Boy restaurant to hustle up an audience.
A second crisis fell when Elvis panicked shortly before the six o’clock taping, saying he felt “sheer terror” that he might freeze once he got out on stage. Only once had Binder seen him depressed, when Finkel told him they might need to lighten his hair (“Do you think my hair’s too black?” Elvis asked incredulously). But now, “he sat in that makeup chair and literally trembled, just really sweated,” Howe recalls. “He said, ‘What am I going to do if they don’t like me?’ ” Binder forced him to make the effort as a personal favor: “If you get out there and you have nothing to say, and you can’t remember a song, then say ‘thank you’ and come back. But you’ve got to go out there.”
In his first real performance in seven years, Elvis hit a level he had not found since his seminal Sun recordings. Although visibly nervous—his hand shook at the start—he joked and bantered about the highlights of his career in a way that both revalidated his achievements and rendered him fresh. And when he launched into the rockabilly and blues that fueled the engine of his life, his energy blazed raw, stark, and palpable, his voice showing a tough exuberance, his looks telegraphing a hint of cruelty. By the time he taped the arena segment two days later, he’d summoned such confidence that he resembled not so much a man, but a panther, feral in his sleek black leather suit, growling, groaning, shaking, and strutting across the stage.
The beauty of the special was in watching the metamorphosis take shape. But there may have been more to it. After the first performance, when Howe remembers they had to peel the suit away—“nobody had thought that he’d be so soaking wet you couldn’t get it off”—costumer Bill Belew reported to Binder that they had a problem. Elvis had experienced a sexual emission on stage. “That,” says Binder, “is when I really believed that Parker planted the seed through hypnotism that Elvis was the greatest sex symbol who ever existed. I don’t think he could have built himself up to have an orgasm unless there was a stimuli there to drive him to do that. I just felt it was not a normal act.”
Today, the production numbers—including a bordello scene that a corporate censor ordered cut but was later aired and restored for home video—seem dated. But the live segments still sizzle and stand among the finest music of Elvis’s career. His performance of “If I Can Dream,” delivered against a backdrop of electric red letters spelling out ELVIS, is a portrait of a man saving his own life.
When the special, “Singer Presents ELVIS,” aired on December 3, 1968, the majority of critics raved about the return of an authentic American original, some finding poignancy in the performance. “There is something magical about watching a man who has lost himself find his way back home,” Jon Landau wrote in Eye magazine. The program was the number-one show of the season, capturing 42 percent of the viewing audience and giving NBC its biggest ratings triumph of the year. Its soundtrack would soar to number eight on Billboard’s pop album chart.
Binder and Howe had hoped to have production points on the soundtrack, but no one had provided for potential royalties in the producers’ contract because Parker insisted from the beginning that there wouldn’t be an album. And when Howe brought it up to Parker while Elvis was in Hawaii, “Diskin started a whole tirade about how we were hired not by them, but by NBC to produce a television special, and ‘We’re not discussing records at all.’ We got calls from NBC saying, ‘What are you trying to do, sabotage the show?’ ”
Parker continued to adamantly deny the existence of a soundtrack album until the day of its release, though late in May, four days after Binder and Howe first proposed the idea to him, he had gotten NBC’s agreement to turn over the audiotapes of the show to RCA without charge, a deal that would have amounted to millions of dollars in music rights. In the end, Elvis got a free album—paid for out of the budget of the special—and the producers received credit for the show, if not the recording, on the back of the album.
“That was the only argument I had with Colonel Parker,” says Finkel. “He didn’t want any of the Elvis mystique to be eroded by a producer.” So much so that after the trade magazines posted credits for Binder and Howe with the first number-one single, their names suddenly disappeared from future listings—a directive, believes Binder, from the Colonel to RCA to threaten to pull its magazine advertising. Binder returned Parker’s check for $1,500 for all rights and shook his head in the memory of the Colonel’s early promise—“You guys are going to have a million-dollar experience”—his way of compensating for the producer’s meager salary of $15,000.
In a sense, the Colonel was right. There was no way for Binder to measure the satisfaction of seeing Elvis come back to life as an artist. When they’d screened the whole show after the first edit—ninety minutes, which Binder pared to an hour for broadcast—Elvis laughed and applauded along with the staff, and then asked if he could see it again, alone with Binder. “He watched it three more times, and he said, ‘Steve, I will never sing a song that I don’t believe in, and I will never make a movie that I don’t believe in. I want to do really great things from your new things.’ ”
Elvis had always reminded Binder of Hamlet, sequestered in his castle of Graceland, with everyone around him for a purpose. Now he let the words sink in, and offered Elvis a new challenge. “I hear you, Elvis,” he said prophetically, “but I don’t know if you’re strong enough to do that.” The singer was taken aback, and Binder explained that Elvis’s “sense of loyalty was confused with whether he should or shouldn’t do things based on his own integrity,” and that he was probably still weak when it came to challenging the Colonel’s business machine. Earlier in the day, Binder, who during rehearsals walked Elvis out on Sunset Boulevard to prove it was possible for him to enjoy a degree of normalcy, had invited Elvis to a pizza-and-beer gathering that afternoon at Bill Belew’s apartment. “I can’t go,” Elvis had said, to which Binder replied, “Why not?” Now, as they left the screening room, Elvis told Binder he wanted to go to Belew’s after all.
They sped off to Hollywood in Binder’s yellow Mustang convertible—the Memphis Mafia following behind in a Lincoln Continental—only to arrive at Belew’s apartment and find no one there. It was an awkward moment (“the look on Elvis’s face . . .”), and soon they went their separate ways. But back in the screening room, Elvis had scribbled down his private phone number and asked Binder to stay in touch. More than once, the producer called and left messages, but “they were always intercepted. The walls came down immediately. The Colonel wasn’t about to let him get out into the real world. It was tragic.”
From the beginning of their association, Parker had been afraid that someone younger and more in tune with Elvis’s creativity might come along and pose the ultimate threat to his power and control. Always before, the Colonel had been able to huff and puff and stare down an adversary, but Binder had terrified him. Not only could he relate to Presley as Parker never had, but Binder knew what slumbering promise still lay within Elvis (“There’s no limit to where he can go if he has the material”) and had the psychological leverage to help that talent flourish. Parker saw that he must guard against Binder’s interference with the same ferocity he used to keep his dark secrets at bay. Elvis’s success was not only his livelihood. It was his life.
Parker would never admit to nearly being toppled, but he would concede to being topped. When the Colonel returned to Palm Springs a day or so after taping ended, he found the towering, electric red letters spelling ELVIS set up and flashing on his front lawn, a generator humming Finkel’s glee. The Colonel, always honoring a deal, wrapped up his cane with a note, “To Commander Bob Finkel from Colonel Tom Parker.”
The Snowman was melting.