Word: presleys
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Fawn-colored pants, white shoes, a pink satin shirt with ELVIS embroidered on the back and a small Presley hat decorated with the hero's picture-all these festooned a fat, balding, cigar-smoking man in a four-room executive suite on the Paramount lot in Hollywood. Thomas Andrew ("Colonel") Parker, 49, is the discoverer, manager and part owner of Elvis Presley; although he tries very hard to look every inch a rube, he is known on all horizons of show business as the shrewdest pitchman who ever came out of a small-time carny into the big time...
Although he has a sizable cut of Presley's estimated $2,000,000 a year income, Parker still clings to his carny ways. Once when Elvis appeared at Dallas' Cotton Bowl, Hollywood friends found Manager Parker near the main gate, selling Presley-autographed photos. His explanation: "Don't you ever get so big you won't sell pictures." He has sold other things, too, at Presley performances. Bucking custom, he makes newsmen pay for their own tickets, seldom passes out freebees even to close business associates, has been known to peddle war-surplus binoculars...
...Presley depends completely on Parker, never talks to the press unless the Colonel nods, is content to look after the hips while the man he calls Admiral looks after the Presley legend. Meanwhile, a legend is growing around Parker himself that might very well reduce P. T. Barnum to the size of Tom Thumb...
Horsehair Curls. It was Presley who came to Parker: by 1955 the Colonel (the title, he claims, is an honor conferred on him by several Governors) was the top manager in the country-music field. Elvis then had little more than a guitar and an inguinocutaneous tremor-"Who is Parsley?," Parker's friends kept asking him-but RCA was looking for just such a boy and had been trying to buy Presley's contract from Sun records without success. Freelancer Parker talked RCA into putting up $35,000, an unheard-of sum for a relative unknown. Sun sold...
...American cinemusical. The hero is a young Sohobo (Laurence Harvey) who calls himself a talent agent because he books skiffle bands and strip acts into low resorts. One night in an espresso parlor he hears a teen-age rockney (Cliff Richard) who bangs bongo and makes noises like Elvis Presley. The agent rooks the dope into a fifty-fifty split of all his earnings, soon makes him a major platter personality, TV type and subject of sociological concern ("Drums," a psychiatrist declares, "may be his means of evacuating tension"). In the end, of course, the yob gets with...