The Colonel (44 page)

“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.