Colonel Parker Meets Sinatra

Colonel Tom Parker did a lot of things right for his client, Elvis Presley, especially in the first decade of the King’s career.  He was a shrewd negotiator who always got “his boy” top dollar and red-carpet treatment.  Parker rarely met his match and almost always got his way, but once in a while he over-reached. 

The following excerpt from Channeling Elvis: How Television Saved the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll describes one notable confrontation between the Colonel and one of the few stars who reached the same heights that Elvis did:  Frank Sinatra. 

“Perhaps inevitably, it was a confrontation between Sinatra and Colonel Parker that proved perhaps more memorable than his duet with Elvis. It seems that the Fontainebleau Hotel did not have enough seats to permit all of its guests to attend the taping of the show. Most of them would be given to VIPs or, through the Colonel, to Presley’s fan club members in order to ensure the King a friendly and enthusiastic crowd. To avoid squabbles among guests over any remaining tickets, the hotel decided to patch the taping into its closed-circuit television system so that all guests could watch it in the comfort of their rooms. When the Colonel got wind of this, he demanded that his boy receive additional compensation.

“The unpleasant task of breaking this news to Sinatra fell to Jim Washburn, who remembers having ‘several problems with Parker. I found out that the hotel had almost completed their closed-circuit system, where they could feed the show to every room. The manager there wanted more tickets for the residents of the hotel, and we didn’t have that many seats, so I authorized our engineers to hook up their system so they could get this stuff in the rooms. Colonel Parker heard about it—and we’re already paying Elvis a hideous amount of money—and he said, “I want another $2,000 because of this dumb hookup.” I went in to see Frank, who was shaving, and I said, “Frank, the Colonel wants another two because of this.”  Frank just put down the razor and, still in his bathrobe, went down the elevator with me and went up to the Colonel and said “You and the hillbilly, out of here!”’  In a rare instance of backing down, ‘the Colonel said “Hey, wait a minute. I’m just kidding the kid [Washburn].”  Frank just looked at him and said “Don’t kid the kid.”  Frank was a little pissed.’ It was a rare failure of Parker brinkmanship and uncharacteristic of him to back down to anyone, even Frank Sinatra. Perhaps they were both bluffing, or maybe Parker was simply proving that nothing got by him.”

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