The Colonel and the King, page 29
Elvis in the meantime was just about to begin a historic series of recordings at Chips Moman’s American Studios in Memphis. This had come about for a variety of reasons (among other things two of his guys were employed by the studio), but most of all, I would like to think, because Elvis was now committed to looking for musical challenges of his own. Everyone knew that Chips Moman, the thirty-one-year-old cofounder of Memphis’ seminal r&b label, Stax, was a discerning-bordering-on-demanding music producer, with a string of over sixty recent pop and r&b hits over the last eighteen months and a stable of songwriters and musicians who came close to embodying the freewheeling, time-denying spirit of Sam Phillips’ Sun Records. No one at American, or at Sun for that matter, just went through the motions; working with Chips required passionate musical commitment. And that is exactly what Elvis gave, in what amounted to twelve days of lengthy sessions (up to ten or twelve hours a day) stretched out over more than a one-month period.
The result was music of uncommon feeling, forcefulness, and beauty. Much like the 1960 Elvis Is Back! sessions, every song was sung with conviction and purpose (I feel a little guilty shortchanging you of any description of the hard-won process, but check out Careless Love for details), and it seemed incontrovertible that Elvis was once again caught up in nothing but the pure joy of making music.
And Colonel? Well, of course, Colonel wasn’t there. He made no more of a musical contribution than he had to any of Elvis’ earlier epochal musical achievements. That was not his job, he would have said (he did say over and over again, from the start). And he left it to Tom Diskin and Freddy Bienstock to haggle over the publishing arrangements on the one song that really mattered, “Suspicious Minds,” a beautifully articulated piece of meditative pop that Chips had brought to the session. This pretty much sent Chips Moman, who gloried in his own abrasiveness (“I’m kind of a stubborn fellow. I guess I believe in what I do enough, so I think if a guy’s hiring me [to do a job], I believe that’s what he’s hiring me for”), around the bend. If they wanted the publishing so bad, Chips said, they could have their money back and stick it up their ass. Eventually, with RCA representative Harry Jenkins’ support, Chips actually won the day, but Colonel stayed out of it, perfectly content, as he had been watching the NBC television special come into focus, to see Elvis once again so engaged. Because, as he once told Steve Sholes and Bill Bullock long ago, the music was his artist’s business and he had full confidence that his artist knew his business.
On the set of Change of Habit, spring 1969. Courtesy of the Graceland Archives
THE GOPHERS IN THE DESERT
BY THE TIME that Elvis opened in Las Vegas on July 31, the first single to come out of the American sessions, “In the Ghetto,” had reached the top of the pop charts. It was the first number-one hit in seven years for Elvis (number one in Cash Box—in Billboard it only reached number three). Perhaps even more significant was its social message, which was a good deal more explicit than “If I Can Dream,” which had itself reached Cash Box’s Top 10. “Suspicious Minds,” the second release from the American sessions, was his second number-one hit, later that year.
For the Las Vegas opening Colonel papered not just the town but the entire state. (As he told Elvis jokingly, “The gophers in the desert [will] know you’re here! Believe me, everyone in town will know Elvis Presley is coming, but you’re the only one that can bring them in.”) To promote the booking, he had preempted over two hundred forty-eight-foot billboards, took out double-page ads in all the newspapers, secured taxicab tops and bus-stop benches for on-the-go advertising, kept five hundred radio spots going throughout the month, and curried favor with every radio personality in town.
On the night of Barbra Streisand’s closing show (Streisand had opened the International, after Colonel turned down an extra $100,000 for Elvis to fulfill that role because he was not going to subject his artist to an untried and untested room), Colonel and his crew, armed with hammers, ladders, and staple guns, were putting up posters, glossies, banners, pennants, and oversized cardboard records, so that by morning you would never have guessed that this was anything but a theme park dedicated to Elvis Presley. And when Elvis opened two nights later, there was Colonel himself, dressed in a long white butcher’s smock that announced “ELVIS INTERNATIONAL IN PERSON,” as he welcomed fans and celebrities alike with W. C. Fields aplomb.
The Tablecloth Contract. Courtesy of the Graceland Archives
Elvis’ opening night performance bore out all the planning and preparation on both their parts. Elvis had put together a band from scratch and ran through over 150 songs in almost two weeks of rehearsals. Now he took control of the stage as if he had never been away, as he displayed a giddiness and freedom that seemed as joyous as it was spontaneous. Before long he had everyone in the star-studded audience on their feet roaring their approval. Even waitresses who had “recently struggled through the ennuied debut of The Divine Barbra,” as the Los Angeles Herald Examiner put it, “were visibly swooning.”
No one backstage after the show could forget the unabashed emotion shown by both Elvis and Colonel. None of them had ever seen anything like it before. Colonel’s body was visibly shaking as the two men approached each other, then wordlessly embraced. And then, all at once, it was over, and Colonel steered Elvis toward the press conference he had set up on the spur of the moment midway through the show.
For Priscilla it was as if Elvis’ performance were showing her a man she had never seen before. “On the stage he [had] this look, you know, prowling back and forth, pacing like a tiger, and you look and you say, ‘My God, is this the person that I—?’ It was difficult to attach who he was to this person onstage. It was incredible.”
Later that night Colonel met in the hotel coffee shop with International president Alex Shoofey, who suggested that they should just tear up the contract they had recently signed. As far as he was concerned, the International was prepared to exercise its option on the spot and agree to the financial terms Colonel had originally demanded. And so, on a stained pink tablecloth, Colonel outlined the terms of the new deal, which raised Elvis’ salary to $125,000 a week retroactively, with an extension to two engagements a year for five more years, thus guaranteeing Colonel’s yardstick demand of $1 million a year for eight weeks’ work through 1974.
COLONEL IN LOVE
LOANNE MILLER was not at the opening, though she had gone to work for the International earlier that year. A thirty-four-year-old divorcée from Covington, Ohio (the divorce had only recently gone through), she was working as a secretary for the hotel’s executive director. In that capacity she had been instructed to attend a meeting between Colonel’s staff and key International executives, but she had been told by her boss to say and do nothing—she was just there to fill out the International’s numbers.
To her consternation—well, maybe more than that—she found herself sitting between Colonel and International President Alex Shoofey in the dining room of owner Kirk Kerkorian’s private villa on the grounds of the Flamingo Hotel. Her biggest challenge, she recognized, was not just to keep out of their line of communication, but to keep out of their line of sight. “I was continually leaning forward or backward, so as not to block their line of vision of one another.” She was so paralyzed by the situation that she remembered nothing about the luncheon except for one exchange between Shoofey, who would soon become her new boss, and this strange, brusque man, who seemed so utterly sure of himself even in the company of such powerful men. “Mr. Shoofey mentioned to Colonel that with their deal there would be ‘other goodies’—and he made an ‘under the table’ gesture with his hand. Colonel’s immediate reply was, ‘Everything is on top of the table or forget it. We don’t do business that way.’”
She didn’t see Colonel again until the following January, just before Elvis was to open in Las Vegas for the second time, when, after taking notes at another meeting between Colonel Parker and her new boss, she was asked to do some typing for the Colonel in the evening. She was reluctant at first—“I didn’t know if Colonel’s motives were strictly work, and work was all I was interested in”—but she was told by Shoofey’s executive assistant that work was all the Colonel ever had in mind. Nonetheless she dressed down for the occasion—she didn’t want there to be any misunderstanding—and she reported to Colonel’s office–residence complex of six rooms on the hotel’s fourth floor in jeans and a flannel shirt. Everything went fine until, at the end of the evening, he started asking a number of personal questions and then, when he walked her to the elevator, he kissed her on the cheek. “Uh-oh,” Loanne thought to herself. Now it really was beginning to seem personal.
But even though he invited her to sit with him and Tom Diskin and his friend from RCA, George Parkhill, at several shows over the course of the engagement, she never detected anything overt in his manner toward her. One thing that was unmistakable, though, was his deep sense of isolation, though it never interfered with his attention to business. Or the steady stream of kidding that was always accompanied by a twinkle in his eye but almost never by outright laughter.
Soon they started spending time together, and Colonel reserved a suite at the Sahara, so they could have dinner together once in a while, or simply spend an hour or two with each other between shows. When Elvis started touring in the fall, Colonel called her every day from the road. One time, in order to help her sleep, he put together a cassette that he had recorded by the ocean, with Tom Diskin providing sound effects. He called her from Palm Springs whenever he was at home with his wife, who Loanne knew had to have someone with her at all times due to her failing health.
Then, toward the end of the year, Colonel called her from Hollywood to explain that he had “a major problem” and needed her help for a big meeting that was scheduled to be held at the MGM studio. “Several times,” she recalled, “he emphasized how important the meeting was going to be and the great importance of all the people who would be attending.” She flew in on her day off and met him at the studio, then followed Colonel and his staff with some trepidation to the huge doors of the MGM conference room. “Colonel asked, ‘Jim [this is Jim O’Brien, next to Tom Diskin one of Colonel’s most trusted lieutenants], is everyone present for the meeting? And where is Miss Miller’s book to take notes? You know how important this is.’” O’Brien quickly produced a notebook and pen, and Colonel motioned for Loanne to precede him into the room.
I walked through the doors trying to look confident, and immediately stopped in my tracks. The conference room had been set up in a very professional manner with water pitchers, glasses, pads and pencils placed in front of every leather chair at the long rectangular mahogany table. And seated in each chair was—a huge stuffed teddy bear!
“I told you they were big and important,” Colonel said to her, but at least, he reassured her, she didn’t have to take dictation. “They don’t really talk too much.”
Soon after, she moved in with him, very quietly, very privately, in a suite at the Royal Inn on Convention Center Drive, close to the International. Sometimes, during the week, she would cook an early dinner before Elvis’ first show, but on weekends he always flew to Palm Springs to look after Marie.
LOANNE LOVED to listen to his stories, especially when he had an audience of young William Morris agents or PR men who had never heard them before or friends, for that matter, who never tired of hearing them again. But she soon came to realize that the stories, with their loose, expandable story lines and, always, the snappy punch line at the end, were more in the nature of “fables” than linear accounts. He loved to talk about hoboing across the country, tell stories of desperate times, and good times, too, but for all the intimacy that she and Colonel shared, however much it seemed he wanted to confide his feelings to her, she couldn’t help but sense all that he was leaving out. He told her a little about the army (“He detested it—he said he hated losing his freedom to go when and where he wanted”), more about traveling with the circus and the carnivals, but he never said anything about his family, his childhood, in anything but the most emotionally and geographically disguised terms. I don’t think it really surprised her when he finally told her years later of his real origins, of how his father had treated him—but I wonder sometimes if she ever felt betrayed. And I hope she didn’t.
Living with Colonel, she said, was learning to live with constant criticism. “He was a wonderful man, but not an easy one,” she told me. And, with a clarity of vision that in no way undercut her single-minded devotion to him, she came to see him as “an introvert who had to learn to act like an extrovert in order to survive. When Colonel was not confident, he bluffed his way—and for him that worked.” Loanne was by nature a very optimistic person, and she came to see “all the adjustments he had to make throughout his life” as obstacles he had overcome. “I’m [still] dazzled at his ability to assume new roles.”
One time she was out on the road with him advancing Elvis’ first, extended ’70s tour, and Colonel saw a story in the Salt Lake City paper about a traveling circus that had just arrived in town. He took her to the show that afternoon, and afterward they went backstage, where he traded stories with all the show folk, performers and roustabouts alike. She had never seen him so relaxed, all his worries and cares just seeming to melt away. “He was like a child again,” she said, “all wide-eyed and happy to be back in the world he had known.” She only wished she were able to spark such moments herself, she would have given anything to see him so jaunty and at ease more of the time—but, whatever the challenges of the relationship, she knew for a certainty that this was one of the happiest times in her life.
EIGHTEEN
On the Road Again
THE TOURING STARTED almost without warning or even proper preparation.
It had begun with a kind of trial run prompted by the persistence of a brash young manager and promoter named Jerry Weintraub. Weintraub had recently acquired a partner, Tom Hulett, cofounder of Concerts West, the biggest concert promotion company in the country (Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Led Zeppelin, among others), and they first approached Colonel in Las Vegas in the summer of 1970. Colonel was intrigued by Weintraub, who did all the talking and was not above underscoring the monumental significance of the enterprise he was promoting, so, in his customary fashion, Colonel gave the two of them a task to accomplish.
All they had to do was come up with $240,000 for four dates on a six-city tour that was scheduled to begin in less than a month. That, and follow the Colonel’s instructions to a T.
They did—and evidently they did their job well enough that Colonel gave them another chance to prove themselves on a more carefully considered (but not too carefully considered) eight-day-long tour in November. But this time he raised the stakes. This time, he told Weintraub, he was going to give Weintraub and Hulett’s company, Management III, the entire tour, but in exchange they were going to have to present him with a $1 million deposit as an earnest of their good faith.
Once again they rose to the challenge, but not before Colonel conveyed to Weintraub something he was not sure the promoter fully understood (or to be more accurate, what he was certain that Weintraub did not understand): that the fans came first, that no one was to be given precedence over them, that they were to be considered at all times the “privileged customers.” And as long as he worked with Weintraub, for the next seven years, he felt obligated to repeat that message—and he was never sure that it was getting through.
Tom Hulett, in a buoyant mood. Courtesy of the Graceland Archives
Weintraub’s partner, Tom Hulett, on the other hand, was clearly a young man who knew his business. He knew the buildings and the building managers, and he proved his mettle on the first date on the first tour when he set up a big-box sound system for Elvis with both broadcast and monitoring capabilities. On Colonel’s instructions, Tom Diskin had provided Hulett with a stage diagram that mimicked the Las Vegas setup as much as possible, so that when Elvis walked out onstage he would feel comfortable. Hulett had nearly finished the installation when Diskin spotted the giant speakers being moved in. What the hell are those? he demanded, and when Hulett said it was their sound system, the normally mild-mannered Diskin said, “We don’t use sound systems. There’s one in the building.” That was when Tom Hulett realized, Oh, of course, they hadn’t toured since 1957—there were no sound systems then.
Landing in Phoenix for the first date on the first tour, September 9, 1970. Courtesy of the Graceland Archives
In the end, it was agreed that the decision would be left to Elvis. At the start of the show, Hulett said, “I was a nervous wreck. “I’m standing right by the side of the stage ready to pop the button to turn the system off, and Elvis starts the show, and in the middle of the first three notes, probably for the first time in his life, he heard himself. And he stopped and looked to his left and smiled and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to have one heckuva show tonight.’”
The eight-day second tour, in November, was an unqualified success. Elvis’ Las Vegas show had started to get a little goofy around this time, but there was nothing perfunctory about his performance on the tour. And at its conclusion Elvis and Colonel had $500,000 to divide on the newly established two-thirds–one-third basis they had adopted for live engagements (these would soon include Las Vegas), whose success was largely dependent upon the energy and inventiveness of Colonel’s promotion. The monetary return told them both that they could make a lot more money on the road than they could in Las Vegas. Or at this point, for that matter, from making movies.
