The Colonel Read online

  THE COLONEL

  Alanna Nash is a feature writer for the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, who has written five books, including Elvis Aaron Presley: Revelations from the Memphis Mafia (“the best Elvis book written to date” – Uncut). She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

  “For all Presley’s talent, The Colonel successfully makes a case that Presley would not have become an icon of American popular culture without Parker’s machinations; he was the key architect of Presley’s career—for both good and bad.”

  —Fred Goodman, New York Times

  “Ranks alongside Fred Goodman’s The Mansion on the Hill and Frederic Dannen’s Hitmen as a classic of music industry reporting.”

  —Billboard

  “A commendably temperate and serious treatment of a story that could have tempted a lesser writer to sensationalism. . . . Nash tells in unprecedented and meticulous detail the full story of Parker’s real history and his audacious posing.”

  —David Hajdu, New York Review of Books

  “Nash doesn’t ask us to forgive Parker, or even like the man, but rather to understand him as a hopeless emotional f**k-up, not the one-dimensional monster most Elvis storytellers resort to. She succeeds, brilliantly. . . . Bloody good read.” Five stars.

  —Uncut

  “The most incisive and comprehensive look at the life of the elusive Colonel available.”

  —Mojo

  ALSO BY ALANNA NASH

  Elvis Aaron Presley: Revelations from the Memphis Mafia (with Billy Smith, Marty Lacker, and Lamar Fike)

  Elvis: From Memphis to Hollywood (with Alan Fortas)

  Golden Girl: The Story of Jessica Savitch

  Behind Closed Doors: Talking with the Legends of Country Music

  Dolly

  For Maria Dons-Maas,

  who searches still for her

  Uncle Andreas

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  1 THE LITTLE DUTCH BOY

  2 BEHAVIOR MOST STRANGE

  3 “ALL GREAT NEPTUNE’S OCEAN”

  4 MISSING IN ACTION

  5 TURNING THE DUKE

  6 DANCING CHICKENS, TOOTHLESS LIONS, AND RODEO COWBOYS

  7 ONE BORN EVERY MINUTE

  8 DEEPER INTO AMERICA

  9 NASHVILLE’S NASAL WHINE: JAMUP AND HONEY, EDDY ARNOLD, AND HANK SNOW

  10 THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS

  11 “ELVIS MAKES PITCHAS”

  12 DIRECTIONAL SNOWING

  13 FRIENDLY PERSUASION: MOGULS, MILITARY MEN, AND MOBSTERS

  14 “MISTAKES SOME-ONE MAY HAVE MADE”

  15 TROUBLE IN THE KINGDOM: THE COLONEL TIGHTENS HIS GRIP

  16 BLACK LEATHER BLUES: THE ’68 SPECIAL

  17 LAS VEGAS: GLITZ, GREED, AND RUINATION

  18 GEEK FEVER

  19 “WE THINK HE OD’D”: THE DEATH OF ELVIS

  20 LIVING TOO LONG: LITIGATION AND LONELINESS

  ENDNOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  Copyright

  Cunning and deceit will serve a man better than force to rise from a base condition to great fortune.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli

  PREFACE

  NO sane person goes to Memphis in the month of August, when the air, rolling off the hard-by Mississippi River, hangs sticky sweet and damp, and the simplest inhalation feels like breathing through burlap. But on August 17, 1977, nothing would have kept me from this place. The day before, Elvis Aaron Presley, the greatest entertainer of the twentieth century and a social force beyond measure, watched his life ebb away on the bathroom floor at his beloved Graceland.

  Now I stood only yards below that bathroom window, numb with confusion at the surreal events that had brought me to the grounds of the most private of rock and roll estates. At twenty-seven, I had been reviewing pop music for The Louisville Courier-Journal for only a few months, but my fanatical interest in the subject dated to Presley’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1956. How could the King of Rock and Roll be dead at forty-two?

  I stepped to the edge of the press pool and gazed down the long driveway. There, to the soft sounds of crying, scores of fans who had succumbed to heat and grief lay prostrate on the grass. Behind them, thousands of mourners stood in line behind the famed gates that bore the resemblance of the man who lay in his casket inside Graceland’s foyer. All of us were waiting to hear the same news—the hour when the public visitation might begin.

  It was then that Dick Grob, head of Presley’s security, walked out of the house and stopped where I was standing with John Filiatreau, a respected Courier-Journal columnist who had flown down with me on the company plane.

  Grob raised his bullhorn: “Any members of the press who want to view the body, line up behind these two,” he announced, and put his hands on our shoulders. The single rule: no lingering—the line must move at all times. I turned to John. “You first,” I said, and he obliged me as we made our way inside.

  There before us, in a large copper-lined casket, lay a swollen figure dressed in a white business suit, a blue dress shirt, and a silver tie, his skin a white and waxy hue.

  A woman cried out: “He looks like a tub!”

  Not to me, he didn’t. But he also didn’t look like Elvis Presley. I went through the line again, my mind racing with the possibilities of a hoax, a plausible explanation for the unthinkable. When I tried to ease my way through a third time, a guard pulled me out. “You’ve been through twice,” he said. “Only get one shot.”

  Today, I have no doubt that Elvis Presley occupied that coffin. But in 1977, as eager as I was to gaze once more at that famous face, one man refused to look at all.

  “It’s so strange,” remembers Larry Geller, a member of Presley’s entourage who styled Elvis’s hair for his funeral. “We all wore our black suits. But Colonel Parker wore a Hawaiian floral shirt and a baseball cap. And never walked up to the casket. Very strange. Very strange, indeed.”

  INTRODUCTION

  “DID you see it?” the old man asked, shifting his mountainous heap of flesh to the edge of the chair, his eyes open wide and twinkling. “What a hell of a thing! Unbelievable!”

  It was June 18, 1994, the day after O. J. Simpson’s infamous Bronco run, and Colonel Tom Parker, with his attentive wife, Loanne, at his side, held court for two visitors at the N’Orleans Restaurant, a meat ’n’ two joint in a run-of-the-mill strip mall named Lucky’s on the outskirts of the gambling capital of the world.

  Like the rest of the country, Parker had been mesmerized by Simpson’s bizarre highway chase. But now his reaction, with his face momentarily frozen in awe, spoke silently of something else—not of a fascination with sports or the subtleties of race relations, but of a sort of perverse pride, perhaps, in an elite and remarkable fraternity of rogues. Or at the very least, in a man who had taken a terrible risk, and managed to beat the odds.

  This was my second of three visits with Parker, whose own survivor instincts so defied description that many thought him indestructible. Yet less than three years later, also in Vegas, far from his birthplace of Breda, Holland, where he first learned the art of the hustle as an errand boy in Dutch fairs, circuses, and carnivals, he succumbed to the complications of a stroke at the age of eighty-seven.

  A master illusionist in business and in the business of life, Tom Parker made things appear and disappear at will, and created something very great out of nothing—including himself. Out of respect for that, if nothing else, I went back to say good-bye.

  The giant marquee outside the Las Vegas Hilton was both sweet and succinct (FAREWELL, COLONEL PARKER), but not everybody knew what it meant.

  “You here to gamble?” asked my taxi driver, who had shuttled me in
from the airport on a late January day in 1997 and who had uttered not a word until tip time.

  “No, I’m going to the memorial service for Colonel Parker.”

  A beat. “Dat the fried chicken guy?”

  At least one cynical obituary writer, Serene Dominic, seconded that thought in a Phoenix New Times article headed “Cooked the Colonel’s Way—Colonel Tom Parker Has Kicked the Bucket, and the Original Recipe for Rock ’n’ Roll Rotisserie Goes with Him.” But the 160 mourners who filtered into Ballroom D saw him as one of the last giants and true iconoclasts of the century—a penniless immigrant who slipped into the country, befriended U.S. presidents and corporate CEOs, created both an icon and a $4-billion business, and never let any of it get in the way of what mattered most—playing the game.

  Through it all, he remained as individualistic, as shrewd, rude, crude, and fun-loving as ever. At his death, he still delighted in practicing what he called the art of “snowing,” the exquisitely performed act of separating people from their money, leaving them with a smile on their face and melting away before they realized what had taken place.

  While some would argue that Parker’s very body was a temple to gluttony, greed, and feeding off the dimmer wits of others, it was the Snowman his friends had come to honor this day, his widow, Loanne, posing an intriguing question.

  “I want to leave you with just one thought,” she said, addressing the crowd, which had passed a lobby-card-size photo of the couple at the entrance. “If Thomas A. Parker had never existed, how would each of your lives be different today?”

  One person who couldn’t answer that question was Elvis Aaron Presley, whose piped-in versions of “Memories” and “How Great Thou Art” opened and closed the service with ghostly reverence. The Elvis Presley who had first come to Vegas in 1956 as an acne-faced adolescent left it twenty years later as a pathetic, corseted cartoon, his body blown from years of abuse, his spirit picked hollow.

  For all of the twenty years that Parker outlasted his greatest discovery, he would also have to live with the allegations that he had destroyed him, stifling his artistry in third-rate Hollywood formula pictures, suffocating his ambition in 837 Vegas performances from 1969 to 1976, and killing his will to live by refusing to challenge him in meaningful ways—a European tour, a dramatic film role to reclaim his self-respect, a crack at a memorable song.

  Whether regarded as a meretricious and evil confidence man, or as a brilliant marketer and strategist, as remarkable as the star he managed, no figure in all of entertainment is more controversial, colorful, or larger than life than Tom Parker. “He was so immense, so gigantic in his way,” remembers writer Robert Kotlowitz, an RCA publicist in the late ’50s and early ’60s. “His style was equivalent to a great politician’s, with so much flamboyance and wit and, underneath it all, cunning. He had to beat the whole world.”

  Yet at his death, Parker was blasted by rock critic Dave Marsh as “the most overrated person in the history of show business,” and assessed by Dutch journalist and filmmaker Constant Meijers as “a nobody who needed a somebody to be anybody.” To this day, a favorite debate question among pop music journalists is whether Elvis, whom the Colonel often referred to in carnival terms as “my attraction,” would have remained a regional act without Parker’s guidance, or if the young performer was such a blazing comet that no one could have stopped his streak across the sky.

  The probability is that neither man would have been as big in his field without the other, Parker realizing, like P. T. Barnum, that the promotion of a curiosity was just as important as the curiosity itself. A chameleon who was many things to many people, Parker has his staunch defenders—as a visionary, a businessman, and a friend, even by those who got up from the losing side of the bargaining table. And while Parker probably would have referred to himself as a promoter more than anything else, having marketed the icon most recognizable in all the world after Coca-Cola, Chet Atkins, who dealt with many of the biggest artists during his tenure as an RCA Records executive, pronounced Parker “the best manager I ever saw. . . . Whatever he cost Elvis, he was worth it, because Elvis would’ve . . . lost that luster in no time if it hadn’t been for the Colonel.”

  Mike Crowley, who traveled with Parker in the concert years of the ’70s and is now a talent manager himself, speaks, like many, of Parker’s loyalty, and also justifies his treatment of Elvis, the addict. “Nobody killed Elvis except Elvis, and nobody could have helped Elvis but Elvis. The only other thing he could have done was walk away.”

  Parker himself never bothered to address his critics, nor did he try to carve out much middle ground in the debate of whether he was the devil or angel in Elvis’s own private hell. When pressed about his handling or mishandling of Elvis, he’d merely bristle, stamp his cane into the ground, and repeat his stock answer: “I sleep good at night.”

  Beyond that, the old Dutchman who understood America far better than most Americans simply threw out the line he’d used for decades to keep himself out of headlines (“Elvis is my only client and my life, so I never give out stories about myself”), allegedly because he was writing a memoir to be called How Much Does It Cost If It’s Free? But it was an excuse he had concocted to keep others from looking too closely at the hocus-pocus of his life, and from having to explain himself, especially in light of a 1980 lawsuit in which the state of Tennessee accused him of “overreaching” in his fiduciary responsibilities to Presley.

  If Elvis was unknowable by his manager’s design, the Colonel was beyond knowing, even to his own family. In 1980, Parker’s brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott, who spent many years on the road in the Colonel’s employ, was asked to explain the man he’d known for nearly half a century. “That man’s a mystery,” he said, and little more, for not even he knew that Parker had a secret to protect, a secret that colored nearly everything he did.

  On the surface, it would appear only that Parker had entered the country illegally and had never become a naturalized U.S. citizen. But if something darker had happened in the distant Netherlands, it must have been deep, shameful, and nearly unforgivable, at least to Parker himself. Certainly he never talked about it, or about his Dutch upbringing, to either Presley or any of his previous clients. And when the Colonel’s stepson, Bobby Ross, died in 1978, it was without benefit of the knowledge that the man who had reared him from the age of ten had not been born as Thomas Andrew Parker in Huntington, West Virginia, as he always claimed, but as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk—known as Andre to his Dutch biological family.

  I first met Colonel Parker in December 1992, and I wondered then how the secret of his origins—revealed to the world at large in 1981—impacted the all-dominating decisions he made in shaping nearly every event in the life and career of Elvis Presley.

  At first glance, Presley and Parker appeared to have little in common except the raging fire of ambition, shaped by a shameless ferocity both struggled to keep hidden. Yet I discovered as I began to research this book that in the strange choreography of chance and coincidence, the fates of Elvis Aaron Presley and Thomas Andrew Parker were bound by two still surging events, and the pull each incident had on both of them.

  Despite the hundreds of books profiling Presley and his career, the story of the relationship between these men, I saw, had yet to be uncovered. Parker was a man of not just one, but many secrets, and the keeper of several fantastic tales he fought to preserve, with Elvis almost always paying too much of the price.

  On each of my three visits with Colonel Parker, I sat across the table from him and looked into his eyes—hypnotic pools of unearthly blue—and wondered, Just who are you?

  And so I decided to research the story chronologically, trying to find the boy who became the man. That mission took me to Holland, where I met with the kindest and most cooperative sources on this book: Parker’s Dutch family, who were as mystified by his behavior and as dedicated to finding the truth as I was.

  Over a period of three years, I interviewed and corresponded wi
th several members of the van Kuijk clan, including the Colonel’s ninety-two-year-old sister, Marie. And with the help of American journalist Bill Burk, I established an ongoing and treasured friendship with Parker’s niece, Mieke Dons-Maas, who worked so hard in the 1990s to try to reunite her mother, Engelina, with her brother in America. Along with her husband, Ted, and friends Angelo Somers and Hanneke Neutkens, who spent years gathering materials for a proposed Parker foundation, we united as a team, chasing the apparition of a lad who had walked the Breda streets so long ago on the first leg of his remarkable journey.

  In the end, my research led me to realize that the tale of Colonel Thomas Andrew Parker, né Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, is, beneath the veil of secrecy, a tragedy, and very nearly the stuff of Shakespeare.

  The following is my attempt to resolve the conundrum of his life.

  —Alanna Nash

  1

  THE LITTLE DUTCH BOY

  TO a first-time visitor, the town of Breda, Holland, is a picture postcard of European charm and character. The prettiest metropolis in Noord-Brabant, Holland’s largest province, which stretches from Zeeland, a large Delta area opening on the North Sea, to within three miles of the German border, Breda was originally built as a strategic fortress at the convergence of the Mark and the Aa Rivers. The town now boasts all the ultramodern facilities as a commercial and industrial center, but the remnants of the wall that surrounded the city at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the glassy canals that run all through the town, and the old, ornate architectural façades serve as reminders of its past.

  Today, the van Gend en Loos building at Veemarktstraat 66, for example, houses an upscale menswear shop, Joep Krusemeyer Herenmode. In the late 1980s, the structure was targeted for demolition, but saved because of its historic significance. Having survived some three hundred years, the building remains one of the six oldest in Breda. It was here that the man who would later call himself Colonel Tom Parker was born.