The Colonel Read online

  Bitsy Mott says his sister and Parker married in Alabama in 1935, a date Parker has also cited. But Mott doesn’t remember the ceremony (“I guess they went to a justice of the peace or a judge, and a party was too much money”), and documents prove that Marie was not divorced from Willett Sayre until 1936. There is no marriage license on file for them in any state in which they lived or visited for any length of time.

  Parker was inordinately skittish of legal documents throughout his life, fearing, perhaps, that they might lead to a discovery of his alien status. For that reason, the couple may not have officially tied the knot.

  But both Byron Raphael and Gabe Tucker feel certain that Marie and Tom were legally married, since Parker was adamantly opposed to couples living together out of wedlock, a view that may have harkened to his parents’ forced marriage.

  The best guess, then, is that the Parkers simply laid their hands on the - Showmen’s League Bible, said a few somber words, and entered into a “carny wedding.”

  Whatever their situation, the two soon grew inseparable, and Marie proved an asset on the carnival, putting her natural good looks to advantage as a bally girl on the various revues, or “gal shows.” There, she would wear a skimpy costume—little more than Egyptian veils and a few strategic beads and feathers—and sway provocatively to the music.

  Often, Parker would be the talker on these shows, and Marie, as one of the line girls out front, would catch the eye of the yokels who gathered round the platform and excite them to lay down their money to go inside. But once beyond the bally platform, the pretty girls disappeared, leaving the less attractive girls to strip for the customers. In between shows, Marie helped Parker deliver the apples to Mrs. Velare, and worked as a short-order cook in several food concessions he operated on the midway.

  Perhaps the most famous tale from the Parker carnival lore is the foot-long hot dog scam, which dates from this time. In this story, Parker found his niche in the shadow world of the carnival advertising foot-long hot dogs, which had just made a hit at the Chicago World’s Fair. What the customer got, however, was an appropriate size bun with a smidgen of frankfurter tucked in each end and a middle generously filled with slaw and onions. Whenever a sucker wised up to the gyp and returned demanding his money, Parker, who presumably ate the middles himself, feigned surprise and pointed to a hunk of meat carefully arranged on the ground in front of the booth. “You just dropped your meat, son,” he said calmly. “Now move along.”

  Such a stunt, worthy of the best W. C. Fields routine, is merely myth, say Parker’s cronies. But Bobby Ross always swore it was true, adding that the Parkers also manned a hamburger booth where the meat was so stretched with sandwich loaf and food coloring that “by morning, you could have sold those burgers for pancakes, there was so much bread in them. They were basically bread on a bun.”

  By the time Bobby was twelve, he spent his summers working on the carnivals with Tom and Marie, mostly as a shill. The Parkers advertised a daily “free” drawing for a ham with purchase of one concession item, but the pork only served as a prop before landing on the Parkers’ own table. Each afternoon, Tom slapped a big ham on Bobby’s shoulder and had him walk the fairgrounds like an excited schoolboy. “Look what I won!” the child would cry. “If I can win a ham, anybody can!”

  Soon Bobby would leave Granny Mott and travel with Tom and Marie full-time. Parker, only sixteen years older than the boy, treated him as a combination of son and friend, especially as Bobby grew older. He looked after him on the carnival and tried to steer him away from the heavy grift and gambling, warning that a gambler’s dollar was greased. For that reason, Parker kept Bobby out of the pie car when he and Marie took it over as a privileged concession. The dining car on the show train, the pie car was also a kind of rolling casino, with slot machines and games of chance for show people only. It was here, and in the after-hours gambling tents, or “G-tops,” that the carnivals carried for their private use, that Tom Parker indulged his new fascination with gambling, which would grow into an obsession throughout his life.

  For a while, with Jack Kaplan’s help, Parker found a solid bit of luck promoting Coca-Cola throughout Florida. But when that job played out, he was back to taxing his imagination—booking magic shows and even staging a pie-eating contest by advertising the chance to go up against the fattest man on earth, a sideshow performer hired out from Johnny J. Jones’s Congress of Fat People. The carnival had taught Parker the importance of “now” money—getting it square in your hand at the time of the deal, even up front, if possible.

  Occasionally, he still hooked up with Peasy Hoffman to sell ads. But the notion of making an honest dollar through the regular channels of advertising and sales didn’t deliver the zing that Parker got from artfully adding a bit of humbug to his whirl of fast promises. He was particularly proud of the time he talked the owner of a funeral home into letting him bury a human being alive, drilling peepholes in the earth so the curious and macabre could talk to the man—the unfailingly cheerful Kaplan—who said he’d never been more comfortable than he was at that moment in a “breathable” straw casket.

  Just to what extent Parker had become a perpetually scheming promotion machine shows up in the way he turned Franklin Street, the main drag and shopping hub of downtown Tampa, into a virtual carnival lot—selling the staid Jewish proprietors of a furniture store, for example, on a public sleep endurance contest, promising they would keep a throng of people at their display window.

  At Maas Brothers downtown department store, which was the biggest and most elegant store in town—recognized as an emporium of good taste—Parker cultivated the friendship of Isaac and Abe Maas. There he hired on as Santa Claus for the Christmas shows, standing out on Franklin Street in the fluffy red-and-white suit, enticing the children of - Tampa’s well-heeled citizens upstairs into Toyland. He also convinced the Maas brothers that running pony rides in front of their Franklin Street store would add immeasurably to their business.

  Working a deal with Bert Slover to “borrow” four carnival ponies and a small track, Parker then ambled into Rinaldi Printing Company on - Tampa’s Howard Street and asked about having tickets made on credit. For the loan of $5 during the Depression, Parker would reward Clyde Rinaldi in the 1960s by insisting that RCA use the small Tampa firm for much of the massive Elvis printing.

  “He made Mr. Rinaldi rich,” says Gabe Tucker. But Parker also forged an intimacy with him that he extended to few: Clyde Rinaldi was among the handful of people Parker told about his Dutch origins. The men remained close until Rinaldi’s death in 1988.

  Meeting Clyde Rinaldi was one of the rare breaks Parker got in the off-season months of the 1930s, which marked the bleakest period of an already desolate existence. Marie struggled to feed the three of them on fifty cents a day and woke up many mornings wondering how she would do it. On March 6, 1937, both she and Tom registered for Social Security and were assigned numbers just one digit apart. Parker’s original application, which he filled out in ornate, European handwriting, marks the first official appearance of the middle name Andrew. He wrote that his present employer was Park Theatre, a popular movie house located at 448 West Lafayette Street. His birthplace, he claimed, was Huntington, West Virginia. And in listing his parents, he gave life to two people who never existed, Edward Frank Parker and Mary Ida Ponsy (sic). He signed the form at the bottom with great, self-assured flourish.

  In the fall of 1937, Parker suggested to Marie that they send Bobby back to Granny Mott for a time and travel the country. They would hobo when they had to and stay with carny friends when they could. Somewhere along the way, they would find a warm hearth, a bountiful table, and the smile of good fortune.

  Instead, Parker told his brother Ad three decades later, he found a country more paralyzed by economic hardship than he had imagined. For months on end, he and Marie lived on a dollar a week and often slept in horse stables. In the great Southwest, they took shelter on Indian reservations, where Parker, “the
big, wise white man,” told fortunes to the natives and sold sparrows he painted yellow and passed off as canaries.

  During such difficult times, Parker told his brother, he often thought of the family back in Holland. Yet he still stayed silent. “I didn’t want you all to know what I was doing,” he admitted. “In fact, usually I couldn’t afford the writing paper or stamps.”

  When the couple returned to Florida, they moved in with the Motts, but Parker never treated his in-laws to a story about his mysterious past, not even when he sometimes spoke in a foreign language that Bitsy mistook for Yiddish.

  By now, Parker’s desperation led him to draw a thinner line between outright corruption and the petty larceny of the carnival. In a scam that was vaguely reminiscent of his grandfather Ponsie—and that would later serve as the basis for Joe David Brown’s novel Addie Pray, adapted for the 1973 motion picture Paper Moon—Parker traveled the neighboring states posing as a Bible salesman.

  “He would go into a town and read the obituaries and then have the names embossed on a box of Bibles that he got in other cities by doing work for churches,” Byron Raphael remembers him saying. “He always chose men’s names, because he figured the widows were soft touches. He’d walk up and ring their doorbells, ask for the husband by name, and then pretend he didn’t know he had died. And then he’d say, ‘That’s such a shame, because he’d ordered this Bible and paid five dollars on it.’ ”

  More often than not, the grieving widow, struck by her late husband’s devotion to the Lord and his eerie premonition of death, gladly forked over the balance owed as a last fulfillment of his wishes. But if she didn’t, Parker would sometimes be “visited” by the voice of the dearly departed (“Is that my Helen there?”). A guy had to be careful, though, and save that gimmick as a last resort. “He had no conscience,” says Raphael. “He thought it was funny.”

  Both Tom and Marie continued to dupe the unsuspecting in bolder and more blatant ways as hard times wore on. As with the Bible scam, Parker would brag about his survival methods in years to come. In the 1960s, he showed Gabe Tucker how he would walk through a marketplace and eat enough produce on the spot to make a meal. Likewise, Marie would pilfer, or “cloat” in carny language, a bag of flour from the concessions stands to carry them through.

  But Marie would not be able to stop with a mere bag of flour.

  “The truth is, Marie was a kleptomaniac all of her life,” says her daughter-in-law Sandra Polk Ross. “I’m not sure when it started, but she was good at it—whatever she could palm or pocket. When I first met Bob, and Marie would say she wanted to go shopping, Bob would tell me to take her and keep an eye on her, and pay for whatever she took, and Colonel would reimburse me.”

  In the carnival years, the showman who had spent his life treading the line between deals and ideals found it increasingly difficult to tell the difference in the kind of cleverness and deceit born of need and the shameful violation of others.

  During the late 1950s, in his early Hollywood days with Presley, Parker stunned the old-guard studio heads when he suggested how they could really make money on their pictures: charge the audience $1.50 to get in and another $3 to get out. It was exactly what he had done in the carnival when he staged a tent show in a cow pasture, far away from the midway, and designated one flap as the only exit. Once outside the tent, the furious patrons had a choice of walking a quarter of a mile through a field covered in cow manure or renting one of Parker’s ponies to carry them through. Parker, like most of the carnies of the era, saw nothing reprehensible about it.

  In the spring of 1954, when RCA Records sent the Colonel out to tour some of its hillbilly stars as the RCA Country Caravan, Brad McCuen, one of the company’s Southern field men, was assigned to accompany the prickly Parker on the road.

  As part of their conversations during the long drives, Parker regaled McCuen, a child of the Depression, with the hijinks of his carnival life in the 1930s. He shared the details of how he and two grifting confederates—known in the trade as the “broad mob”—would set up the unsuspecting mark for crooked game operations, staging the three-card monte, in which a shill makes a bettor think he can win by cheating the dealer, or the shell game, in which the pea under the shell was actually under the table. As he told McCuen, you had to know how to choose your sucker, see when he was just about to buckle, and seize the psychological moment. To know when it arrived . . . Ah! That was the art of grifting!

  According to Byron Raphael, Parker thought there was no finer practitioner than Jew Murphy, an old-fashioned peddler turned flimflam man.

  “The Colonel took me to this one little carnival in Louisiana just so I could see him,” remembers Raphael. “Murphy would stand by this wagon full of shiny objects, and he’d start by saying, ‘Who’ll give me a dollar for one of these beautiful lighters?’ And people would crowd around and give him a buck.

  “The Colonel would turn to me and say, ‘Now watch how he hypnotizes people.’ And it was the most amazing thing. Murphy would give somebody a clock, and thirty or forty people would start waving five-dollar bills over their heads. His assistant would rush through the crowd and pull that money right out of their hands.” Everyone received a piece of merchandise, but it was always a “lumpy,” some substandard item, never one of the beautiful clocks from the first row of the wagon.

  Raphael believes that Parker gleaned much of his skewed business philosophy from Murphy and the older confidence men of his ilk: in the real workaday world, you either conned somebody, or you got conned. It was as simple as that. “He told me that was what life was about, and he meant it,” says Raphael. “He treated everything like a carnival.”

  8

  DEEPER INTO AMERICA

  IN 1938 Parker was running a penny arcade on the Royal American, selling picture cards of movie stars, cowboys, and sports heroes, dispensed in sliding slot machines for one cent apiece, when he met Gene Austin, the first of several men who took his bravado seriously.

  The popular singer was working the theater circuit to support his first and only Western film, Songs and Saddles. Parker, smitten with the notion of meeting a living legend—the high-voiced crooner was known far and wide as “the Voice of the Southland”—approached him and told him of his background in carnivals, “starting as a boy with his family,” as Austin would remember. The carny laid it on thick, promising that as a “crackerjack press agent and manager,” he knew every important contact in the region.

  Austin had no need for Parker’s services just then, but the singer took his address and noted that Parker was “a great salesman who had the ability to back up his conversation.” Several months later, Austin got in touch.

  In his prime, Gene Austin had been a sensation beyond all imagining. The best-known singer of the late 1920s, Austin became not just the first crooner, making way for Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby, but the first true pop star, with the attendant fame and adulation that would later grace the careers of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles. From 1924 to 1934, he sold an astonishing 86 million records—5 million alone of “My Blue Heaven,” an upbeat ballad that celebrated the domestic bliss of “Just Molly and me /And baby makes three.” Grown men blubbered.

  Austin’s first royalty check from RCA Victor Records totaled $96,000, an almost unfathomable sum in the pre–income tax years of the ’20s. But soon that and the $17 million that followed disappeared like a wispy dream, squandered on nights of carousing with famous friends like Louisiana politician Huey Long and jazz great Louis Armstrong, and on the buying of cars, mansions, and speakeasies.

  By the time Austin hooked up with Tom Parker in the late ’30s, it was all but over. The ’29 crash had nearly buried the entertainment industry, and when it recovered, Bing Crosby had eclipsed him in popularity. Austin, a two-fisted drinker who had begun to experience throat problems ten years earlier, doubted that his voice would hold up much longer.

  On the night he chanced to meet Parker, Austin, then thirty-eight years old,
was just about to headline a tour of the Star-O-Rama Canvas Theater, a traveling tent show that traversed the rural South in nine large trucks. That’s when he sent a wire to Parker, who agreed to meet him in Atlanta and showed up with Marie in tow. On the surface, Gene Austin and Tom Parker—or Tommy, as he called him—made an odd couple, the tuxedoed toast of the town and the coarse young carny with his righteous disregard for Middle America’s social norms and etiquette. But Austin took an immediate liking to Parker, who loved to hear about the grander escapades of Austin’s career, when as a young heartthrob, Austin would return to his hotel room to find women hiding under the bed. Parker was enthralled; what he wouldn’t give for an act like that!

  For now, Parker busied himself with the job at hand, which was to help Austin’s new manager, Jack Garns, secure bookings for the tent show and to promote them with the carnival techniques he’d learned from Peasy Hoffman. Driving an old panel truck with its best days behind it, Parker traveled the backwoods towns of the South to stake out a prime lot for Hoxie Tucker, the boss canvas man responsible for hauling and maintaining the three-ring tents. Then he set about securing permits, lining up sponsors, scheduling advertising, handing out flyers, and finally billing posters, plastering the paper sheets on anything that didn’t move, using a glue made out of flour and water. In essence, his job was to do almost anything he could to drum up business, ballyhoo the star, and diddle the townsfolk into a close approximation of frenzy.

  That included the restaurateurs, from whom he not only solicited tie-in advertising, but also promoted free meals, hinting that the troupe might want to eat there every night, never mentioning that the Star-O-Rama carried its own cookhouse.