The Colonel (40 page)

When Joe Pasternak made the first of his two Elvis pictures (
Girl Happy
and
Spinout
), both shot in thirty-two days, the producer took the Colonel aside and said, “Look,
you can’t make a picture where the star takes seventy or eighty percent of the cost.” Parker was resolute. “He said, ‘I’m sending you Elvis Presley.’ He
didn’t want to boost the price up, but he wouldn’t budge on Elvis, and he’d want to save on everything else.”

Elvis resented the financial shortcuts on his films, as well as the shoddy technical workmanship on
Kissin’ Cousins
that prominently showed his stand-in, Lance LeGault, in the
finale march. (“Sam Katzman said, ‘It’s too expensive to shoot it over—no one will even notice,’ ” remembers Yvonne Craig.) But he was particularly crushed to
read an interview with Wallis in the
Las Vegas Desert News and Telegram
in which the producer said it was the profits from the commercially successful Presley pictures that made classy
vehicles like Peter O’Toole’s
Becket
possible. “That doesn’t mean a Presley picture can’t have quality, too,” Wallis added, but the damage was done.

Still, while Presley usually managed to remain calm and professional on the movie sets, his frustration sometimes poured out in the soundtrack sessions at Radio Recorders, where he could barely
hide his discomfort at recording bland and pathetic pop songs like “(There’s) No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car,” “Do the Clam,” and “Petunia, the
Gardener’s
Daughter,” provided by the Hill and Range writers. One day, anguished at a song put before him, Elvis made a crack about somebody in the business.
Everyone laughed, but he quickly recanted. “I didn’t mean that, guys,” he said. “The Colonel told me to always say nice things.”

Freddy Bienstock understood the predicament but was powerless to change it. “Once we started on the MGM contract, with four pictures a year, it was like a factory,” he says.
“Each producer would send me ten or eleven drafts of the script, and I would mark those scenes where a song could be done without being absolutely ridiculous, and then I would give those
scripts to seven or eight songwriting teams. I’d wind up with four or five songs for each spot, and then I would take them to Elvis and he would choose which one to do. But there was no way
to have better music, because from the moment one picture was finished, we would have to get started on the next one.”

Presley was especially embarrassed to be locked up in Hollywood doing mediocre films while the Beatles—who would visit him at his Perugia Way home in Hollywood in August of
’65—threatened his supremacy in musical history, even as his
Roustabout
soundtrack would best their latest album on the charts. But an argument can be made that whatever -
Parker’s intent, Hollywood helped keep Elvis a big star and in the money during a period when his record career might have languished, especially in the protest-and-psychedelic era.

The popular consensus that Parker denied Elvis a significant place in ’60s music history comes under fire from several music journalists, including Michael Streissguth, who doubts that
Elvis—working strictly in music—would have escaped the fate of other ’50s stars. RCA was slow to respond to ’60s rock and roll, and since Elvis wrote none of his own
material, the label would have had difficulty knowing what do to with Presley during those rapidly changing times.

“By dumb luck,” says Streissguth, “the movie years had the effect of preserving Elvis economically while the wild music environment passed over. Elvis was not spent from years
of musical rejection, so when the time was right and people were ready to see him in concert, he was fresh and ready to pounce on the opportunity. Inadvertently, Parker’s decisions in the
early and mid-’60s gave us the great Elvis music of the very late ’60s and early ’70s.”

Starting around 1963, the Colonel, whose physical meetings with Elvis had always been sporadic, became even more remote, spending much of his time in Palm Springs, the hangout for Frank Sinatra
and the
good ol’ boys of Hollywood. For several years, he’d commuted on the weekends, filling the car with weighty bottles of Mountain Valley Spring water and
schlepping Marie’s favorite houseplants from Los Angeles, staying first at the Spa Hotel, where he enjoyed the baths, and then at a house at 888 Regal Drive, compliments of the William Morris
Agency. Then one day in the mid-’60s, he fell over in the driveway with another heart attack—his third—which left him using a cane. Once he grew stronger, he employed it as a
prop.

Byron Raphael ran into him at the Tick Tock restaurant in Los Angeles not long after, and he could tell that something awful had happened. “He’d really changed. He had that cane, and
he was bent over. It shocked me, because he was like an old man.”

To most people, Parker explained he just had a bad back, and pointed to an exercise contraption and the elastic brace he wore around his waist and upper torso for proof. But he was convinced he
couldn’t survive yet another coronary, casually telling associates, “You don’t see any hearses with luggage racks on them,” and made the decision to spend the rest of his
life as if there were no tomorrow.

Only the biggest and the most would do. First, he wanted a new house in Palm Springs. He went to work on Abe Lastfogel’s wife, Frances, paying her a visit while she was in the hospital,
hauling in a big vase of flowers and sweet-talking her into letting him have the larger, $250,000 one-floor plan house at 1166 Vista Vespero. There Marie would make everything in the house blue and
white, right down to the drapes and bedsheets and even gravel in the driveway. And the Colonel coud relax by the pool and get RCA to install a commercial freezer for the vast amounts of meat he
bought and inventoried like gold, even as he struggled to keep his weight in check. Parker didn’t mind being fat—as far as he was concerned, his size suited him and added to his
psychological heft. But his doctor dictated otherwise.

Sometimes Parker showed up at Elvis’s recording sessions and tried to lift his client’s mood. On occasion, he ordered lunch in for everyone, and routinely traded jokes with bassist
Bob Moore, who had known the Colonel since the Eddy Arnold years and considered Parker “a great, great man,” and with Buddy Harman, who drummed on at least nine of the soundtracks and
likewise found him to be “a pretty nice old codger, really.” It was a sentiment Parker went out of his way to foster with the Nashville musicians, if not necessarily with the L.A.
players. Moore, who’d been on nearly all the movie recordings, remembers the time he
walked into the control room where Hal Wallis was sitting in the producer’s
chair. “Boy,” the Colonel said to Wallis, “get up and go get me some coffee. Let Bob sit here.”

At other times, it was Elvis he humiliated in front of the movie execs. After Wallis sent Parker a letter complaining that Elvis looked “soft, fat, and jowly around the face” in
Viva Las Vegas,
asking the Colonel to have a talk with him about his weight, Parker grilled Marty Lacker about his - boss’s eating habits at a recording session. “He’s
just been eating what he always eats,” Lacker said, at which point Parker banged his cane on the floor and then raised it in the air, yelling, “Don’t lie to me! Tell
me!”

But it wasn’t so much Presley’s eating habits that altered his looks as it was his pharmaceutical habit, according to Lacker, one of the entourage members who alternately carried
Presley’s black makeup kit, which the singer filled with pills. Often, they dictated his moods.

At the next session, it was Elvis who couldn’t contain his rage. “He had this big orchestra in there,” remembers Lacker, “and he started singing. He didn’t settle
for the first take. They were getting ready to do it again, and Elvis reached his breaking point. He started ranting, ‘I’m tired of all these fucking songs, and I’m tired of these
damn movies! I get in a fight with somebody in one scene, and in the next one I’m kissing the dog. What difference does it make how many times we do this song? I’ll tell you what. You
just cut the tracks for this next movie, and I’ll come in later and put my voice on.’ ”

Shortly after, the Colonel invited Elvis to join him and Marie and the Tuckers for dinner, but Presley declined, much to Parker’s embarrassment. “Colonel just damned near begged him,
and he wouldn’t do it,” Tucker remembers. For years, the Colonel had boasted of never mixing business and pleasure with his client, not even the simple sharing of a meal. (“You do
your thing and I’ll do my thing, and it’ll be beautiful,” he had said.) Elvis was in no mood to start now.

With the movie and record deals in place, Parker found himself with plenty of time for something he now considered doubly important: having fun. When he got a call from a promoter about possibly
taking Presley out on tour, he’d tell him Elvis was tied up for the next three and a half years, but he’d be happy to rent the gold lamé suit for the weekend for $5,000. Or maybe
they’d be interested in Elvis’s cars. He had a tour of those going out soon, and he wasn’t even kidding about that one.

Parker spent much of the day in his fun-house offices at Paramount and MGM cutting up with the cost-free additions to his staff—Jim
O’Brien, his private
secretary, on loan from Hill and Range; Irv Schecter and John Hartmann, supplied by the William Morris office; and Grelun Landon, courtesy of RCA. Soon, Gabe Tucker would also be there on the
Morris dime.

On occasion, Parker referred to O’Brien as Sergeant. But as usual, nobody had any real rank except Diskin, whose desk, a third the size of - Parker’s, was in the Colonel’s
private office at MGM. The rest were privates who helped Parker carry out his schemes.

Each morning, the staff arrived at the mazelike Elvis Exploitations offices at MGM and prepared a list of VIP birthdays so the Colonel could make his congratulatory calls, the aides lining up in
front of a microphone in the office and singing to whomever their boss had on the phone. “I thought it was kind of rank,” remembers John Hartmann, who went on to manage David Crosby and
Graham Nash, Canned Heat, and the group America, “but I did it anyway.”

“We didn’t hurt ourselves workin’,” says Tucker, whose MGM office was in Clark Gable’s old dressing room, and whose duties included tamping down the Colonel’s
pipe, which replaced the cigars when Parker got upset. Tucker also ran the “cookhouse,” a so-called carnival kitchen Parker made by throwing an oilcloth over the conference room table,
adding ketchup bottles and kitchen chairs, and promoting a stove and refrigerator from the studio so Parker could cook slumgullion, a boiled stew that hearkened to his hobo days.

Most of the time they ordered food in. But after
Easy Come, Easy Go,
the Colonel would appropriate actor Bob Isenberg from the cast to wear a chef’s hat and serve occasional lunch
guests like Abe Lastfogel, who choked down the slices of ham the Colonel piled on to watch the little Jewish man squirm. When that grew tiresome, Parker totaled up the free meals he’d gotten
in the last month, instructing Tucker to pick a name from the directory of MGM executives and call to say, “The Colonel thinks you ought to invite us to supper.”

Soon, the requests grew more elaborate and grand. The president of RCA sent him a check for $1 million without any paperwork when Parker asked for a loan for Vernon Presley, allegedly to buy a
Memphis skating rink. The Colonel liked his tests.

He began spending weeks at a time in Palm Springs, where Milton Prell had a house (they both also kept an apartment at the Wilshire Comstock in L.A.), and where he could keep a closer eye on his
neighbor, Hal Wallis. The producer continued to humor him, sending him, while on a
trip to England, a small dish from the Elephant Club for Parker’s collection. Parker
wrote him a letter, thanking him for swiping it. “I could tell you that I bought it, but I know that you would have a lot more respect for me if you felt that I had lifted it,” Wallis
replied.

Their relationship remained cordial but strained, although Wallis succeeded in getting the Colonel to read perhaps his first script, for the carnival-themed
Roustabout,
which Wallis
produced in part to honor - Parker’s colorful past. (“Of course, we want you to be associated with the project, as I know how close this type of life is to you,” he wrote.)
Afterward, Parker sent Wallis an affectionate letter in which he complimented the producer’s ability to make a picture jell. “You have a certain magic wand that makes these things come
out even, even if other people - don’t understand it all the time,” he said. “This I respect more than I can put in words.”

Parker may have meant the flattery as a kind of balm. “When I was doing
Roustabout,
” recalls the screenwriter Allan Weiss, “I went down to Palm Springs and spent a
weekend with the Colonel, interviewing him specifically on his circus background. When I got back, Hal Wallis said, ‘How did it go?’ I told him it went fairly well, and I thought we had
a good subject for Elvis. Then he said, ‘It was an expensive weekend.’ I thought, ‘Oh, my God, is he referring to the hotel I stayed at, or what?’ I learned later that the
Colonel had billed him for his time.”

Wallis took such things in stride, but the two could also go for days and not speak. Afterward, in Palm Springs, it would be as if the incident had never happened, Parker going to dinner and
tossing his hat on one of Wallis’s priceless Rodin sculptures just to rankle his host, or asking the producer to play golf with Marie’s grandson, Tommy, when the boy and his sister,
Sharon, came for the summer. Later, the Colonel would throw a black-tie party and invite Wallis, among others, answering the door wearing nothing but Bermuda shorts.

Underneath his various guises, however, the Colonel wrestled with increasingly dark moods of depression. Aside from his concern about his heart and his growing estrangement from Elvis, he was
deeply worried about Marie.

In the past, there were times when he’d avoided going to Palm Springs because he didn’t want to have to put up with her carrying on about her cats—a dog lover, his ardor barely
extended to felines, and he was jealous of her doting on a particular male cat named Midnight.