The Colonel (45 page)

“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.