The Most Famous Partnership in Showbiz History—The Real Story of Colonel Parker and Elvis Presley

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. Greg McDonald’s got his start in show business as a teenager after meeting Elvis Presley and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, while changing their air conditioning filters in Parker’s Palm Springs, California home. Greg went on to manage Ricky Nelson for seventeen years and worked under Colonel Parker and Elvis shortly after Parker began managing Presley in the 1950s. Here’s Greg with three Elvis Presley story.

00:00:46
Speaker 2: When I was a teenager, Colonel had an office at MGM Studios. It was called the Elvis Exploitation Office. That’s what it said on the door. In those days, an exploitation officer was a real thing. Now it sounds terrible, but it really wasn’t. So the exploitation officer at a studio was a big deal. They wouldn’t give a manager a free office, but they would give a star free office one of the actors. So they called that Elvis’s office at MGM. It was there for years. So the Colonel had formed a club. He and Elvis formed a club called the Snowman’s League. Well, the Snowman’s League. The first member was Elvis and the Colonel, and, you know, Priscilla and just about everybody in the Memphis Mafia, all of us. I was in it. It was just a fictitious club, very funny. It’s a club of guys with great senses of humor. Really didn’t mean any. So it became very, very prestigious in Hollywood to have a snow card. For Colonel Parker to give you a snow card, that meant you were in Elvis’s private club, and it really became something. Oh, it became a joke, but it was also very serious. All the people at the William Morris Agency, the big guys, all belonged to the Snowman’s League, and they’d have luncheons, and it was just fun and great. Colonel had a great sense of humor, great sense of human. So the issue with the Snowman’s League is you could never ask for a card. You had to be offered a card. You couldn’t ask for. And it cost nothing to get in the Snowman’s League, but it cost $10,000 to get out. It was a joke, but it was. It was all the big agents in Hollywood and producers. Pretty soon they all started wanting to be in the Snowman’s League, but the Colonel had to invite them. So again, I’m just a teenager at MGM, and I’m out in a hallway answering the phone, and in through the door comes Kirk Kerkorian. Well, Kirk Kerkorian owned MGM, and Kirk Kerkorian owned the International Hotel in Las Vegas. He built it where, at the time, Elvis was working, so he was not only our employer. He had made movies with Elvis, and he owned MGM Studios. So he comes up to me, and I’m a teenage kid, and he said — he’s a billionaire — and he says, “Do you think that you could go in there, young man, and ask Colonel Parker if I could have a snow card?” Now, this is a billionaire asking a kid if he could have a snow card. And I said, “Well, sure, you know.” So I walked in the office, and the Colonel had heard it over the partition. He goes, he flags him out to tell me to tell him now. So I come back out, and he said, he said. The Colonel didn’t say anything. He didn’t make an offer. Kerkorian came in three times before. He had us make up a snow card with his name on. And he owned the building, he owned all of MGM, but he wanted that snow card. Out here in the desert, some of our mailboxes are mounted on little blocks in front of the house. Down, you know, you could certainly reach and grab with. “I’m going to run, make a run to the hardware store.” He kept stealing Elvis’s mailbox, so he decided he was going to replace it himself, which, of course, he had no tools and no skills either. So we went to Alan Ladd Hardware downtown in Palm Springs, and a friend of mine that ran the store for Alan Hardware and is ultimately as White. We’d wake him up at two and three o’clock in the morning to open the store so Elvis could pick a mailbox. We did it three times. People kept stealing his mailbox. It was hilarious. Whatever you need and a whole lot hold! They got it on over into hardware. So, Elvis is trying to mount the mailbox. Was hilarious. He had no mechanical skills whatsoever. And I ended up putting on later, but it was; we were out. Three’d be out there all night trying to install that mailbox. The Memphis Mafia guys used to call me at my home. Elvis and the Colonel installed a red phone in my bedroom by my bed, and the phone would ring, and one of the guys would say, “Elvis wants you to come up. He wants to see.” Well, he really didn’t, but they wanted me to come up. So I finally figured out that they were trying to get me to come up and stay at the Chino Canyon house so they could go be with their wives and girlfriends, and I could stay there with Elvis because somebody had to be at the house with Elvis. So I go up there, and Elvis is off in the bedroom, and one by one the guys all leave, and I’m sitting in the living room alone, and Elvis finally comes out, and we spend the whole evening together sitting in the living room watching silly shows. And he decides he wants to go down to Germaine’s Liquor, which is down on the corner, and he wanted some cigarellos and some soda, and he just got a black Stutz Bearcat. And he says, “Come on, let’s go! You want to drive? You want to drive the new car?” I said, “Sure.” It was really a cool car. It was really a fancy potty out. It was good-looking. So we get in the car and go down to Germaine’s, and it’s Spring Break in Palm Springs, and there’s hundreds of kids around the store and in the store. So Elvis is not walking the store, and he thinks he’s incognito. And he’s got these big glasses and this big belt in this jumpsuit. It’s a running suit, not his show jumpsuit. So he thinks he’s incognito. So we go in. He goes back to the store and break the fix the stuff up, and we go up to the checkout counter, and all these people are around the checkout, and I notice everybody is looking at Elvis, of course, but they’re watching his pants. Well, what’s happening is there’s a big lump going down his leg, and as it hits the bottom of his pants, it’s a barrel of a gun that clinks out onto the floor. Now everybody looking it. Elvis is backing up, and the girls behind the desk see the gun, and they’re scared to death. So he looks at me. He says, “You should probably pick that up.” Oh, man, I just got out of the army. I didn’t want anything to do with guns. So I reached down and I picked this giant gun up by the barrel, and I’m holding it by the barrel, and the girls at the counter are scared to death. They think we’re robbing them, and I go, “We’re not robbing you. This is Elvis.” I’m trying to tell the girls, “This is Elvis.” You’re really young girls. I’m not sure they knew who he was. And I noticed in the down the road in the back of the store there’s a girl on the phone. She’s calling the cops. Well, I want to pay him. They won’t take my money. And I’m holding this big pistol by the barrel, and Elvis is now backing out of the store out the front door. The car is parked right in front of the doors, so he gets into the passenger side, and I’m still, guys, still got to pay the bill. They won’t take my money. And I bring that gun outside to him, and I hand it to him, and he’s laughing in tears, laughing, takes it, so funny. And we drive off down onto Palm Canyon Drive, and we just know the cops are going to stop the sending man because we’re so obvious. But we did. And I said to Colonel, “If you get arrested, the Colonel’s going to kill me!” So, going out with him was: he never carried any money, never carried any money, and he always had several guns on. So it was an evening with Elvis.

00:09:36
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the editing, production, and storytelling by our own Greg Hangler. And a special thanks to Greg McDonald. He’s the author of Elvis and the Colonel and Insider’s look at the most legendary partnership in show business. That story about the Snowman’s League was just so good in Kirk Kerkorian. And he was like, basically, the first big super-rich guy, practical billionaire, who was also a world famous. He owned MGM and the International Hotel. And that’s where Elvis did his never-ending residency was at the International Hotel. And there’s Colonel Tom Parker yanking old Kerkorian’s chain, wouldn’t let him in the Snowman’s Club, turned him now, not once, but twice. That’s a sense of humor right there, folks, and also had some depth to it. Hey, look, you may be the boss, but I represent the King. I’m with the King, and we’re going to let you know that we don’t work for you, we work together. Three Elvis stories brought to us by Greg McDonald. Here on Our American Stories.