The Colonel and the King, page 17
At the same time it would have been virtually impossible for him to refrain from reminding every RCA executive with whom he had business of any sort that their deal for Elvis was worth more than the paper it was written on. As he wrote to Bill Bullock, “I guess I am one of the few Managers that have so many verbal agreements not in writing.” And, on another occasion, he reminded Bullock (again) that he really needed to explain “the setup we have on our business” to other RCA executives who might not be as “up to date on… the many verbal agreements other than those listed in the contract we now have with the Company,” as there were so many details “that we did agree on but could not be injected into the contract at that time.”
And why was that? Well, quite simply, the most-favored-nation clause that was embedded in the contracts of so many other RCA artists stipulated that should anyone else signed to the label get more favorable terms—a higher royalty rate, for example—they would, too. Which would obviously cost the company a great deal of money if the real terms of RCA’s agreement with Elvis were spelled out in the contract. But Colonel had long since figured out how to get around such unnecessary formalities and secure for his artist terms far in excess of what could be written down on paper. And he was not going to let those commitments, just as strong as anything more conventionally documented, lapse, simply because of a change in personnel. As he wrote to Howard Letts, even higher up in the RCA chain than Bullock, the lack of a written record was “not too important to me as long as I am doing business with you.” But he was concerned about “what would happen in event you would leave the Company for any reason whatsoever.” And he expected some form of irrefutable reassurance.
When it came to marketing, though, there was no room for debate. Here Colonel had certain fixed principles, which revolved around a single immutable rule: if you had a product the public wanted, there was no substitute for market scarcity as an inducement to sales. This was a lesson he had first learned from Joe Frank, and he saw no reason to add any refinements to it now. The same principle applied to movies, television, records, even personal appearances, but most of all to the scheduling of Elvis’ record releases. His mantra, repeated early and often, was, “We must be careful not to smother the market,” and he took great pride in the way he chose to exploit that market as well. He directed every detail of the marketing campaign, right down to the smallest elements of design, which, far from exploring any fancy new advertising techniques or methodology, relied on the tried-and-true methods he had learned in the carnivals and tent shows: directness, simplicity, repetition. If it had been up to him, he might simply have fallen back on Oscar Davis’ old line: “DON’T YOU DARE MISS IT!” All copy and content had to be approved by him, and if it wasn’t, then the product might have to be recalled, as Bill Bullock learned to his dismay when he was forced to recall eighty thousand covers of what would turn out to be one of Elvis’ all-time bestselling albums, Elvis’ Golden Records, because, as Colonel reminded him, “We had a complete understanding for us to have approval.” And, just for the record, Colonel’s complaints were not without merit in this instance.
On the other hand, while there was no question that he believed completely in his own ideas, he was always ready, he told Bullock, to be proved wrong. And if someone else came up with a better idea—which, so far as he could ascertain, had not happened yet—he was more than willing to concede the point. “I have always been happy to bring my ideas to you,” he wrote cheerfully in the midst of a discussion about merchandising, “and I also know that some of them stink… but One only needs a few good setups from time to time to make it pay and all the bad ideas are soon forgotten.…
“I am now preparing myself for the lambasting I will get from all sides when I goof up, and the time must be near for me to goof as I have been too lucky for too long.” But, he concluded philosophically, “I will be in good company as you of course will be with me when we are called upon the red carpet.”
Elvis with Bill Bullock (left) and Steve Sholes. Courtesy of the Graceland Archives
There was one point, however, on which he was unwilling to budge. This was, quite simply, that it was his artist, and his artist alone—not the Colonel, not the company, not the a&r department, not the critics or the naysayers—who was in charge of the music. And it was his artist’s judgment in every respect that was going to prevail, whether it had to do with the sound of the records, the feel of the records, where and when he chose to record, even the order in which the songs that he chose for release should be put out. When in the middle of the summer of 1957 Sholes and Bullock were trying to pressure Colonel to get Elvis to select the songs that he would record at his next session for the Christmas album that Colonel himself had instigated and for which he had devised the most elaborate packaging and promotion campaign, he simply told them, “I spoke to Elvis and it is impossible to pick those tunes till we start recording.… He may at the last minute find another tune that he would like better, if this is too late there is nothing else we can do but forget about it. I cant create something that is impossible to work out. I do not blame Elvis for not putting himself on record that he is going to record a certain number and later feels it does not work out.”
As he wrote to Steve Sholes on another occasion, “Elvis is completely aware of what is going on and this situation has been brought to his attention.” But then, maybe to emphasize his point, more likely just to get Sholes’ goat, he couldn’t resist adding dryly, “I have never interfered with the selection of songs or records, but only handle the business end which keeps me pretty busy.”
Busier and busier, in fact. Record sales continued at the same unprecedented pace—new gimmicks and new sources of income were constantly opening up, and Colonel dismissed any suggestion that Elvis was “slipping” (there had even been talk at RCA that their newest star, Harry Belafonte, one of Mrs. Parker’s favorites, might soon rival Elvis in sales) with a casual flick of his cigar. There was plenty of room in the business for everyone, he said. “We all know that every artist must level off at some phase of the business. Fortunately, I have enough foresight to prepare myself for such an event and still be happy.…
“Remember my slogan—‘One must come down to be able to get on top again’. There is no place as far as I am concerned about being on the top, except a snow man on top of the Himalaya Mountains, and I don’t think they are making records up there. If they did, they would melt anyway in the heated conversations that are held at the buck passing meetings.”
ELVIS’S SECOND MOTION PICTURE, and the first in which he played the lead role, Loving You, turned out to be a big box-office success, and Hal Wallis felt vindicated—at least up to a point. Of course, it would have been a bigger hit, Wallis and his partner, Joe Hazen, couldn’t help but remind Colonel, if he and Elvis hadn’t gone ahead and made that dreadful Fox picture first. To which Colonel countered relatively mildly that he and Elvis were well aware that Love Me Tender wasn’t going to win any Academy Awards, and that everyone agreed that Loving You was a much better picture, but more to the point, he wanted to be sure Wallis was aware that he and Mrs. Parker had spent the week of the movie’s New York opening working the lobby of the Brooklyn Paramount with folios and photos to help raise money for hurricane relief.
For all the goodwill and bonhomie that he was willing to put in evidence, however, it would be impossible to overestimate how angry Colonel still felt about the deal he had signed almost at gunpoint (though, to be fair, he blamed no one but himself). “I now know more than ever that I should have held out for my First deal with Wallis,” he wrote to Abe Lastfogel in July, as if Lastfogel needed reminding. “There is of course no way possible for us to come out under this setup other than blow a lot of money.”
Two months later, he underscored his point by suggesting that he could hardly be expected to come out to the West Coast and set up his office there on a semipermanent basis with the money that Wallis was offering. This time, he emphasized to Lastfogel, he was expecting much better representation from Morris than he had gotten on the original deal. “I am not complaining,” he said, “but only want to go on record in plenty of time.”
He did at least concede to his friend that the agency had done a good job on the picture they had just concluded for MGM, the one “outside” picture for 1957 that they were promised in their contract with Wallis. He had bypassed Fox, with whom he continued to have the most cordial of relationships, but their very respectable offer of $150,000 was far eclipsed by MGM’s guarantee of $250,000 plus an almost unheard-of 50 percent of the net profits over $500,000. Jailhouse Rock (for which Colonel proposed as alternate titles either Don’t Push Me Too Far or Trouble Is My Name) also provided Elvis with the kind of rugged rebel role that both he and Colonel had been seeking, and of course provided him with endless opportunities to remind Hal Wallis that not everybody was a piker. Which paid off to some degree at least, Colonel might have admitted, though only under duress, because Wallis eventually raised Elvis’ pay for the next Paramount picture, now scheduled to start just after the new year, to $100,000, four times what he was contractually guaranteed, but still, Colonel felt, hardly sufficient for a star of his magnitude.
What was beginning to concern him more and more, though, was his growing suspicion that, however well his artist was being compensated financially, the motion picture industry as a whole was not taking Elvis’ artistic aspirations seriously. From the beginning their aim—his aim and Elvis’—had been to see him take his place with James Dean and Marlon Brando in the forefront of genuinely revolutionary contemporary actors. (“This boy Elvis Presley has the same type of personality and talents along the line of James Dean,” he had written to Harry Kalcheim in November 1955, before Harry even knew who Elvis Presley was.) As he wrote to Abe Lastfogel in the summer of 1957, in the first of several letters on the subject, “Regarding the story Wallis has in mind [this was the upcoming Paramount picture, for which they were still negotiating a contract, which would turn out to be King Creole] I believe we must have some idea what it is and if Elvis will feel at all like doing the type of picture Wallis is planning, I know he is not at all interested in doing a repeat of the type of pictures we have just made all 3 of them are somehow of the same order with the Second picture somewhat better and the Third a pretty good acting part in this type story. [But] I cant understand the thinking of any studio to want to keep on this same idea.”
Elvis, Tennessee Williams, Colonel, Laurence Harvey, and Hal Wallis, on the set of G. I. Blues, 1960. “He was the most gallant of men,” Tennessee said of Elvis. Williams did everything he could to get Elvis to play the part of Val Xavier, the character inspired by Elvis in his play Orpheus Descending (later the film The Fugitive Kind), but even he recognized that it was an unrealistic expectation. Courtesy of the Graceland Archives
Or, as he wrote to Elvis in August, presenting him with an astronomical new offer that MGM had just put on the table: “The money is not as important right now to make a picture if the story is not right for you.… I agree with you that I would like to keep the next picture down to a real story and perhaps no singing other than the title song where they do not see you sing at all but acting only.” If Elvis didn’t like the role, as Colonel suspected he would not, “I would much rather break off trying to get a deal on this story with Metro now—and have them look for something better to your liking.”
Which would appear to have been the last word on the subject, although it turned out to be a moot point anyway, when Hal Wallis blocked them from making a second outside picture that year, and the following year Elvis was drafted.
THERE WAS no question in Tom Parker’s mind that they were going in the right direction—and that they were doing it together. He spent a great deal of time and effort on his communications with Elvis, trying to find the right tone to convey what needed to be said, sometimes serious, other times jocular, alternately caring and breezy, but always with the purpose of underscoring that the two of them were in this together, by themselves, and that whatever he did was intended to serve one goal, and one goal only, Elvis’ best interests. Perhaps the most revealing of any of the letters he wrote to Elvis is one he wrote in April of 1957, which touched on many subjects but whose naked essence can be summed up as follows. (See the Letters section for more of this very long letter.)
You can let me have your ideas on this anyway you see it, but remember that the strength you have lies in how we handle the proper business setup along with your talents. Your talent is your own, you are tops in this and there has never been a time except when I knew you were in trouble that I stuck my nose in this, and only then when you asked me what I thought. I know you can barrel any of this better yourself; at the same time I also think I am as good as you are with your talents in smoking out the best for us. This I appreciate you knowing and having the confidence in me on this, as I can also see your strength in buffing people off towards me when they try to get you involved in making a business deal. I also buff them off when they try to sell me on a song as I tell them Elvis picks his own songs; if he likes them or a certain song then he tells me and I’ll get him the best deal I can.… I know that you have a certain quality in you the same as I have that can feel our way thru most any snow job except if we lend a foolish ear.…
I know that you understand me better than any-one for you have a very carefull Eye. I am a great deal like you—very sensitive—but only people I love can hurt me.
And perhaps in a canny attempt to underscore all that they had in common, perhaps simply out of the affectionate regard he had come to feel for both of Elvis’ parents (more likely from a combination of the two), he brought Gladys Presley, the person who occupied a singular place in Elvis’ heart, directly into the picture. “When we all think back,” he wrote, explicitly including the entire family, “we can count on One hand the real friends we all have and those that are still with us even if things look gloomy and rough. Advise is free even when its bad or good, but to get advise from people that have nothing to show for themselves for knowing so much is always something to be carefull about tak[ing]. Remember my slogan how much does it cost if its Free.… Your mother was very wise when she told me that she judged people by what they did and were doing, not what they had done that was wrong.”
And, after three pages more of very specific practical advice, it was signed, as always, “Your Pal, Admiral Snow to you,” just another twist on a joke that for Colonel alone had endless permutations but for communications between himself and his artist—who, like his mother, was well aware of all the phonies that surrounded them—had its own special meaning in the secret language that they shared.
PERHAPS BECAUSE the boy was so much younger, perhaps because he himself was so much more experienced now, he felt comfortable bringing up subjects for discussion with Elvis that he never would have raised with Eddy Arnold. He would never have tried to talk politics with Eddy, for example—Eddy had very decided ideas of his own. But with Elvis he was not above steering the boy in directions he believed Elvis would have wanted to go, if he simply had more information on the matter. He actively encouraged Elvis to endorse Adlai Stevenson in his own way in the 1956 presidential campaign (“I don’t dig the intellectual bit, but I’m telling you, man, he knows the most”) because Stevenson’s nomination would give his friend, Tennessee’s progressive governor Frank Clement, a chance at the vice presidential slot.
Similarly, when the world reacted with outrage to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary that fall, Colonel, in an unprecedented gesture of untempered idealism, urged Elvis to take part in a benefit concert for Hungarian relief (“I sincerely believe this to be a very good effort for us… to do all we can to help”), and when that appeared to have at least temporarily stalled, made sure that the subject was brought up in Elvis’ third and final appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in January. Sullivan, who had himself been a major advocate for the movement, introduced Elvis as “feeling so keenly about Hungarian relief” that he urged everyone watching to contribute whatever they could and wanted his fans to know that he had chosen the song he was about to sing, Black gospel pioneer Thomas A. Dorsey’s classic composition “Peace in the Valley,” in support of the Hungarian cause.
But perhaps his most outspoken political action was one in which his hand was not even seen. An unfounded rumor had sprung up in the Black community in the spring and summer of 1957 that Elvis Presley was a racist, that he had said—in Boston, where he had never performed, on a national TV program on which he had not appeared—“The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.” Nothing could have been further from the truth, but as Colonel well knew, countering a rumor like that was a practically impossible task. So when Jet magazine, a pocket-sized publication that billed itself as “The Weekly Negro News Magazine,” requested an interview with Elvis—at a time when Colonel was blocking all interviews with anyone—he gave his okay for Jet’s star reporter, Louie Robinson, to come on the set of Jailhouse Rock and give Elvis a chance to speak for himself.
Elvis seized the opportunity, as Colonel knew he would, speaking freely with Robinson and declaring, “I never said anything like that, and people who know me know I wouldn’t have.” He cited his attendance at Black churches like East Trigg in Memphis, presided over by the trailblazing Memphis preacher, gospel composer, and civil rights leader, William Herbert Brewster, and called attention to all the influences he had absorbed from Black music, both sacred and secular. He could never hope to surpass the achievements of great artists like Fats Domino or the Ink Spots’ Bill Kenny, he told Robinson, who interviewed a number of Elvis’ Black friends and acquaintances, going all the way back to Tupelo, and concluded his story with a quote from an unnamed “business associate” of Elvis, which the writer clearly endorsed. “It’s a stupid rumor. To Elvis people are people, regardless of race, color, or creed.… He doesn’t even think along those lines. It’s not in his nature.”
