The Colonel (22 page)

Early on, Parker had warned him to cut the comedy from his stage act—a familiar staple of hillbilly music shows of the time, but almost painful to hear today in the
recording of his 1956 Las Vegas debut. Dutifully, after making an off-color remark about marriage (“Why buy a cow when you can steal milk through the fence?”) at a high school concert
in Alabama, Elvis complied. Yet it was nothing for him to belch on stage, and in private his sense of humor, played out with his cousins and cronies, who traveled with him as a pack of good
ol’ boy playmates and protectors, continued to run along the lines of stupefying juvenility, even as Presley eventually cultivated a margin of wit and sophistication.

The portrait of Presley as he really was at twenty-one—acne-scarred, sweet-natured, and simple, except in his music and his peculiar relationships with women (already three at a time
during his
Louisiana Hayride
days) and his parents (whom he affectionately addressed as his “babies”)—was either too dull or too scandalous for Parker to let out.

By the following year, the manager was still taking no chances. When
Time
magazine’s Bob Schulman tried to go backstage with other reporters at Elvis’s 1957 performance at
Seattle’s Sick’s Stadium, he encountered the Colonel, standing fast, like a portly bouncer. “If you want to hear anything about Elvis, you’ve got to talk to me,”
Parker said, both adamant and inflexible. “There was absolutely no access to Elvis himself,” Schulman remembers, “although we could see him through the open door, in this garish
yellow incandescent light. He was leaning back in a camp chair, scratching his scrotum.”

Because the press was usually denied an audience with Elvis, except in the occasional group interview, reporters painted the young inciter of teen frenzy as a reflection of their own reaction to
his behavior. To one, especially after his appearance on the
Berle Show,
where he slowed down the ending of “Hound Dog” and punctuated the beat with pelvic thrusts, he was the
devil’s own sneering son; to another, he was a fighter for freedom on the staid, cultural battlefield. When the city of San Diego banned Elvis’s orgasmic dancing, the media reported it
with all the gravity of a national security breech.

Parker, who tied on a vendor’s apron to peddle both
I LOVE ELVIS
and
I HATE ELVIS
buttons to folks who reacted strongly one way or another,
- didn’t care what the newsmen said as long as they said it—and paid their own admission to the shows. Not even an “Elvis is queer” story got his feathers up. When Gabe
Tucker threw just such a magazine piece on his desk, Parker didn’t say a word until his friend stopped sputtering. “Well,” Parker finally said, “did they spell his name
right?”

To the press, then, it was almost as if there were no Elvis, except what the Colonel made him out to be. In a way, Colonel Parker
was
Elvis, and the singer, in
Parker’s mind, was less a separate entity, a person in his own right, than a vehicle for the Colonel’s wishes, desires, and ego. When Parker, who likewise rationed his own access to the
press, deemed to talk with reporters at all—“If it’s a question, I’ll say ‘yes’ or ‘no’; that’s all the taping I do”—he became the
first entertainment manager to wrap a kind of star quality around himself. Like his title, it gave him a sense of superiority, of grandiosity, and allowed him to think of himself in the third
person. Often, when he was presented with something that displeased him, he remarked, “I don’t think the Colonel is going to like this,” as if he were some mystical entity.

Of course, there was still another reason Parker made sure Elvis wasn’t overexposed on television, and it was mostly green. “If they can see Elvis for nothing, they won’t pay
to see him,” he declared, chewing the soggy end of an Anthony and Cleopatra. That was no way to build an empire, which was just exactly what he had in mind. With the seminal TV appearances,
“Heartbreak Hotel” quickly sold more than one million singles, and continued to sell at a rate of 70,000 copies every week. Eighty-two percent of all American television sets had been
tuned to
The Ed Sullivan Show
the night of Elvis’s first of three guest shots, and the Colonel was able to boast that since he’d come on board, the cost of an Elvis Presley
appearance had jumped from $300 to $25,000 a night, two and a half times what the current top attraction in show business, Martin and Lewis, could command.

“Colonel,” the grateful but bewildered Elvis supposedly said, “you put a lump in my throat.” To which Parker allegedly replied, “And you put a lump in my
wallet.”

The day before that first
Sullivan Show
appearance, RCA’s Norman Racusin and a company attorney met with the Colonel in his suite at New York’s Warwick Hotel to amend
Elvis’s contract, wiping out the $40,000 advance against royalties. Elvis and his cousins knocked on the door, coming to tell the Colonel they were going to Radio City Music Hall. Parker,
fearing Elvis might get into a ruckus, wasn’t pleased, but Presley promised they’d just see the stage show and come back. Finally, Parker acquiesced.

“Elvis was still standing there,” Racusin recalls, “and Parker said, ‘Now what?’ ” Elvis said, “I need some money.” Parker reached into his pocket
and pulled out a roll of cash and handed Elvis two one-hundred-dollar
bills. “Now remember,” he admonished, “don’t do anything to draw attention to
yourself.” “We won’t,” Elvis said.

Things had moved so fast. Less than a year before, Parker had told a Texas teenager, Kay Wheeler, that she was free to start the first national Elvis Presley Fan Club. “Elvis is just one
of our many attractions, and at the present time there are no fan club facilities for him, and we have no immediate plans for any,” Carolyn Asmus, Parker’s secretary, informed her by
letter. Soon, Tom Diskin was sending her photos to mail out, and Elvis asked Wheeler, already well known as a “bop dancer,” to teach him her special “rock ’n’
bop” steps during a performance in San Antonio.

But when the club’s membership quickly grew into the tens of thousands, Parker announced he was forming the “official” Elvis Presley Fan Club and, unlike Wheeler, charging a
fee for the distribution of photographs, membership cards, and newsletters. After Elvis’s national TV appearances, the money poured into the little Madison, Tennessee, post office like a slot
machine gone berserk.

Bill Denny, the scion of Grand Ole Opry manager Jim Denny, who had famously turned Elvis down for Opry membership in 1954, was a Vanderbilt University student at the time. Through his father, he
found a job that summer working for Colonel Tom Parker. Part of his routine was to drive a pickup down to the Madison post office “a couple of times a day” and load it up with mail,
sometimes bringing along Bevo Bevis, who lived with the Parkers, to help with the bulging canvas sacks.

By now, Parker had hired Tom Diskin’s quiet, loyal, and devoutly Catholic sisters, Mary and Patti. The Colonel booked them as a minor-league, supporting act under the name of the Dickens
Sisters during the Eddy Arnold years, acquiring their brother, who managed them, in the deal. The sisters now worked in the shed Parker had converted to an office in back of the house, and with the
help of Jimmy Rose, whom the Colonel temporarily installed as the new fan club president, they processed the astounding flow of fan mail, mostly by assembly line, dropping the money into a big
metal tub on the floor. “No one really counted it, because it didn’t matter,” as Denny recalls. “If you were a kid someplace, and you wanted a picture of Elvis, you got
it.”

Within months, the task became so overwhelming that Parker paid Charlie Lamb $10,000 to take over the operation and moved the whole thing to a rented cafeteria in Nashville’s Masonic Lodge
Building. Lamb installed twenty-one women to assemble Elvis packages of a picture, a membership card, and a button. But almost immediately, as Lamb remembers,
“this
thing became a beautiful, successful nightmare.” The cash came in at such a rate that Lamb couldn’t deposit it fast enough and asked the bank to send an armored car to collect it.
Finally, after Presley’s first appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
in September 1956, Parker made a deal with Hank Saperstein, the merchandiser, to assume the fulfillment through his
company, Special Projects.

However, Parker’s idea was not to make money off the fans so much as it was to make it off deals, since he was never really concerned with selling Elvis to the public, but to the people
who
sold
the public, first to the executives who controlled the television and radio networks, then the press, and soon the motion picture moguls. Above all, he enjoyed the fine art of
negotiation, of winning, and of getting the best of the other man, even if it was a friend like Lee Gordon, who, along with Oscar Davis, promoted many of Elvis’s early shows.

Since his days with Eddy Arnold, Parker never allowed a promoter to make more money than he did on an act. Where many promoters would hire a performer for $200 and take in $10,000 on the show,
Parker, who refused to book Elvis into any venue that wouldn’t sell out and leave people clamoring to buy tickets (“a real stroke of genius,” says Sam Phillips), routinely
adjusted the cost. That way, the promoter, who took the risk and did the real work in advancing the show, couldn’t cheat him on the ticket count, but he couldn’t make much profit,
either. “You don’t have to be nice to people on the way up if you’re not coming back down,” Parker allegedly joked.

From the beginning of their relationship, Parker, whose agreement with Elvis was for a 25 percent commission on all monies, royalties, or profits, also charged Elvis for any expenses, as he had
Eddy Arnold. It was part of the game with the Colonel that he would pay nothing out of his own pocket, no matter how small or trivial. If he had lunch with someone, and his companion wouldn’t
pick up the cost of his meal, Parker later wrote it off against Presley’s 75 percent, figuring Elvis was his only client, and that in one way or another, the conversation would have benefited
his career.

Elvis didn’t question such things, and as with the William Morris memo that gave Parker complete control over Presley’s film and television contracts, the singer wasn’t
interested in the fine print. “As long as Elvis can write a check for something he wants, he doesn’t care how much money is in the bank,” Parker bragged to associates, and it was
true. Elvis had put his total trust in Parker, and after a while, he never
even glanced at the checks that Parker had his associates hand deliver. Shortly after they closed
the RCA deal, Elvis sent his manager a telegram that pledged his absolute loyalty, in words that would later come back to haunt him:

What Elvis didn’t know at the time was that Parker collected money from side deals and outright hucksterism that likely never made it into his meticulous
recordkeeping.

“Promoters would come in to try to get an Elvis Presley concert,” remembers Byron Raphael, “and they’d ask what it would cost. The Colonel wouldn’t tell them.
He’d say, ‘Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to bring in $50,000 in cash, and I want you to put it on the bed. And if it’s enough money, we’ll do a personal
appearance for you. And if it isn’t enough money, you don’t get the personal appearance, but I keep ten percent just for my time.’ And people would do it.”

Such chutzpah demonstrates Parker’s two major rules of business: first, that everything costs—there’s no free lunch; and second, always know where the money is before you make
the deal.

In service to his second rule, and purely for fun, Parker, whose Madison office was in the knotty-pine basement of his home, preferred to answer his business phone himself, rather than filter
the calls through his secretary. He was in his element, says Bill Denny, surrounded by his banks of phones, each with a series of buttons and lines.

“When someone would ask for Colonel Parker,” Denny remembers, “he would say, ‘Well, he’s on the phone right now.’ He’d find out who it was, and if it
was someone he was in a deal with, he’d put them on hold. Then he’d come back a little later and say that the Colonel was still talking. And he’d really hammer them around. Many
times I heard him trying to put a deal together, and he’d say, ‘Well, if you don’t take it now, the next call is going to cost you $10,000 more.’ ”

As a smart manager booking Elvis’s personal appearances in the ’50s, Parker insisted on a minimum of 50 percent to 60 percent of the money
up front; often the
full amount was expected with the return of a signed contract. Those promoters lucky enough to be allowed to pay on the date of the show knew to have cash, and not a check, ready before the
performance, because, as Parker said, laughing, “I don’t want to end up with cider in my ear.”

Still stinging from the days when carnival promoters left him holding the bag, he didn’t care what people thought about his tactics, preferring they found him difficult than stupid. Ninety
percent of the people that he came up with in the business, he often said, were broke.

But it was not a lavish lifestyle Parker hoped to achieve. In fact, the Parkers didn’t live beyond their means—they lived far below them. In full carny promotional mode, he might
stroll around in fawn-colored pants, suspenders, white shoes, a pink satin shirt with elvis embroidered on the pocket, worn loose and untucked like a lady’s blouse to cover his stomach, and
either a bowler or a five-gallon hat. But aside from ordering the occasional custom-made cowhide sport jacket or white linen suit from - Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors, Parker kept away from
flamboyant clothes. Since the Eddy Arnold years, he had often dressed like a vagrant as part of his act, hoping to appear poorer and more homespun than he really was, to throw people off and give
him an edge in negotiations.