The Colonel Read online

  “It was obvious Tom knew his business by the way he went about things,” the singer wrote in his autobiography, Gene Austin’s Ol’ Buddy. “In a short while, he had the show going full blast. It looked like we would never know anything but success and money.”

  Such sweet victory convinced Parker, with his almost maniacal need for control, that he, and not Jack Garns, should guide Gene’s career. In becoming an important manager, Parker saw, he might attain a level of power, fame, and wealth on his own. As he told Gabe Tucker years later, “The stars come and go, but a manager can work until he dies.”

  Little by little, Parker began to find reasons to circle back to the show, to get closer to Austin and to ease out the hapless Garns, much the way he would outmaneuver others in the early days of Elvis Presley’s career.

  Whether Parker actually became Austin’s manager during those years, as he later claimed, is open to dispute. But the two became fast friends, and whenever the opportunity allowed, they headed for Hot Springs, Arkansas, to sample the glamour of the fast life—of racetracks and night life and illegal gambling, a smooth sleight of hand practiced in elegant casinos that doubled as meeting places for big-name entertainers and notorious racketeers.

  The giddy atmosphere of Hot Springs clearly agreed with him. In a picture taken there in 1939, a grinning Parker strolls down the sidewalk arm in arm with Hoxie Tucker, and in his hepcat sunglasses, two-tone shoes, and combed-back hair—thinning dramatically with each passing year—Parker was the very definition of the confident con on the make. Walking the streets of Hot Springs, Arkansas, that summer day, Andreas van Kuijk unmasked Tom Parker for what he was, the hustler extraordinaire. Never again would he allow himself to appear so slick and unguarded.

  At the season’s end, Austin crowed about his “proud, bulging bank account.” But it was then that Austin learned that the government was attaching most of the show’s profits for back taxes. Now Parker was forced to be creative in keeping the show up and running. When the troupe played Tupelo, Mississippi, he found prophetic good luck in the hometown of then five-year-old Elvis Presley. “We sold out and made enough money to get out of town,” Parker remembered years later, speaking in that same small town, and adding how he’d left the tires off the truck as collateral for the grocer, “which we did in a lot of small cities in those depressed times.”

  However, when the outcome was different and they still owed a local hotel, Parker would string up a big banner—HELD OVER BY POPULAR DEMAND!—and the show would stay on until the bill was paid.

  The Star-O-Rama Canvas Theatre continued to limp along for several months, but only through Parker’s reliance on human nature. Before he took to the road each time, he’d have Austin sign a fistful of checks, which he presented at gas stations with his usual pomp and flourish, telling everybody how grand it was to work for the great Gene Austin. - “That’s a real autograph there—you might want to hang that on the wall!” he’d suggest to the owners, since each check framed meant one fewer cashed, a stunt he would repeat with Elvis in the mid-’50s.

  Finally, though, there was no stopping the inevitable, which arrived during a tour of Virginia in 1940, when a marshal attached the gate receipts and equipment.

  In the bleak days of 1940, with a family to care for and no money coming in, Parker found it more difficult to believe that things would soon get better, especially for a Dutchman whose accent sounded vaguely German as the country inched closer to conflict overseas.

  On September 1, 1939, the citizens of Tampa unfolded the Morning Tribune to find the banner headline of WAR and the chilling news that German planes had just bombed Warsaw.

  Within a year of that terrible day, two events transpired that might have dramatically altered the fate of both Andreas van Kuijk and Thomas Parker.

  The first was the congressional passage of the Smith Act, or the Alien Registration Act of 1940, which required all non-U.S. citizens to register with the federal government.

  Fathered by Congressman Howard Smith of Virginia, the act was aimed at curbing subversive activities. But in forcing all aliens to register, at its heart, the act worked to offer legalization to millions who had not followed proper channels to remain in the country. Instead of being deported, as dictated by previous laws, an illegal alien would now be allowed to stay if he could prove five years of residence with good moral character, or if he showed that deportation would result in serious economic detriment to a spouse, parent, or minor child who was a U.S. citizen or a lawfully permanent resident.

  The Alien Registration Act of 1940 should have thrilled Andreas van Kuijk. Not only did it offer amnesty for his eleven years of illegal residency, but as with his U.S. Army experience, it could set him on a path to become a U.S. citizen. Yet as Tom Parker, he had a decidedly strange reaction to this extraordinary opportunity—he ignored it. And in doing so, he passed up a chance to easily resolve his illegal status.

  The irony, says Marian Smith of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, is that “as an overstayed crewman [from 1929], after three to five years, he might have been nondeportable, in that the statutes of limitations would have run out on that offense. But to not register at all [in 1940] was a big violation. And yet we have no record of him.”

  Why would Parker be so reckless? His reaction to the second important event of 1940, that of the first peacetime draft law in U.S. history, was just as strange.

  For on October 16, when Thomas Andrew Parker went to local board 1 in the First National Bank Building to fill out his registration card and establish a classification record, he made no mention of prior service in any branch of the armed services. By using his new middle name, he silently insisted that it was Thomas Parker who had served in the U.S. Army, not Thomas Andrew Parker. Tom Parker dared not chance resurrecting old ghosts from his past, especially one from 1933 who had undergone a particularly horrific stay at Walter Reed Army Hospital.

  Perhaps because the Parkers never stayed long in one place, in filling out the registration card, Parker gave the Motts’ address—1210 West Platt Street—as his own. And in big-shot style, he named Gene Austin, 181 South Poinsettia Place, Hollywood, California, as his employer.

  Parker’s real source of income during this time was far less glamorous than any alliance with Hollywood. After the heady experience of guiding Austin’s career, Parker was now reduced to tending animals at the fairgrounds, where he also ran pony rides, employing a string of six ponies he’d bought in Kentucky while scouting locations for Austin.

  Aside from the ownership of the horses—which he got neighbor children to groom by pretending to name one after each of them—he was no further along than when he first came out of the army.

  Now that the off-season had arrived, Parker struggled to make ends meet, and as usual in such dire situations, turned to a scam. He dug a hole in the front yard, erected a three-foot-high tarpaulin wall around it, installed one of the ponies in the hole, filled dirt in around the animal’s feet, and covered its legs with straw to make it appear shorter than normal. Then he hammered a sign into the ground: SEE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST PONY—ONLY 10 CENTS! The neighbors reported him to the authorities, who threatened to haul him in.

  Yet just as Parker’s days of working his beloved ponies appeared at an end, he received perhaps the keenest stroke of good fortune of his thirty-one years. In the late fall of 1940, he heard about an opening for a field agent at the Hillsborough County Humane Society, the shelter for homeless animals.

  The Humane Society position seemed custom made for Parker’s unusual background—a job that allowed him to indulge his love and understanding of animals while calling on his skills as a promoter. In between rescuing mewing kittens hung in trees and caring for the occasional stray cow, Parker was to spearhead fund-raising drives that would bring the shelter into the black.

  The job paid a salary, of course, the first steady paycheck Parker received since the early months of the Gene Austin tent show. But it was the perks of the job th
at turned Parker’s head, especially the furnished, rent-free apartment, which ran the full length of the second floor of the Humane Society, located in a pretty, ornate building festooned with Spanish accents at 3607 North Armenia Avenue, then a remote area of West Tampa.

  The apartment was large enough for Tom, Marie, and fifteen-year-old Bobby—certainly bigger than any living quarters the family had occupied before—and if it bothered Parker that the arrangement was eerily reminiscent of the van Kuijk family’s rooms over the van Gend en Loos stables, he quickly dismissed such thoughts upon learning what else the job had to offer. Should he convert his automobile into an “emergency ambulance” for the transportation of animals, for example, the shelter would furnish his gasoline and tires, even if the country entered the war and such commodities became rationed.

  In this fashion, Parker could feed his insatiable lust for free goods and services, as well as gloat that he had been able to manipulate the system as never before. The job gave him the appearance of a county official, with a status and authority that elevated him, if only slightly, above the average citizen. He would wear a furnished uniform of light shirt, dark pants, and official cap and visor, which delighted him beyond reason.

  From the outset, Parker tackled the job with gusto, setting up a meticulous log of every ambulance run and rescue mission. In November 1940, he recorded in precise handwriting, “Beating pony. Columbus Drive. Complaint settled,” and, “Goat no water. Okay. McBerry St.” Later, he turned more loquacious: “Horse with no shoe pulling ice wagon. Sixth Avenue. Man warned to get shoes on horse.” And, “Boys shooting birds. Belmont Heights. Field agent gave boys lecture.”

  The Hillsborough County Humane Society was in desperate need of an image boost and makeover, and the new field agent started out with a myriad of plans for raising money. He first asked local businessmen to donate money for pet supplies, but that stopped when the word got out that Parker had traded cases of animal food for tuna fish and prime cuts of meat that the Parkers would eat themselves. Then he staged a dog’s “fall” into a deep but narrow hole so he could take up a collection to hire a midget to crawl down for the “rescue.” Few who came to the Humane Society for any reason left without a pet, and within a year of Parker’s appointment, the Humane Society was solvent. What nobody understood, Parker thought, was that he didn’t really give away fluffy kittens and snowball pups. He sold magic.

  In seeking frequent newspaper coverage for the shelter’s activities, Parker also made himself a familiar figure in the community. He delighted in dressing up as Santa and giving puppies away to children at Christmas. And by donning the Santa Claus suit—which he reprised at the Maas Brothers department store to earn money for the pound—Parker, in essence, wore yet another “uniform,” casting himself as the compassionate philanthropist, a figure to be loved and trusted. He would return to the role each December throughout his life, both because he enjoyed giving presents to children and because the persona made him out to be a star. In his hungrier moments, he sometimes asked the children if they wouldn’t like to take Santa out for a hamburger afterward.

  Parker’s assistant during the Humane Society days was a twenty-three-year-old flunky with the unlikely name of Bevo Bevis. Mildly mentally retarded from birth, Jason Boyd Bevis Jr. had lost his father, a Phenix City, Alabama, undertaker, at age twelve, and moved to Tampa with his mother and brother shortly thereafter. In regarding Parker as a surrogate father, even calling him Pops, Bevo, with his simpleton’s stare, was all too happy to carry out any request.

  The field agent treated Bevo almost like a child, using him to do a lot of the grunt work that Bobby or Marie wouldn’t tackle without a fuss. - Bevo’s family resented how Parker took advantage of the boy’s disability to assign him the most undesirable tasks, but in the presence of others, Parker referred to him as Mr. Bevis.

  Bevo came in particularly handy when Parker set up one of his most inspired and creative moneymaking schemes, that of the pet cemetery. First, Parker called for a “high-level conference” with Bevo in the large yard that ran behind the building and the wire pens out back, telling him they were about to embark on a “great adventure.” Then he instructed him to cut down the overgrowth, pick up the broken bottles and debris, and manicure the grass.

  “As you know, Mr. Bevis,” he explained, “we have many important people coming out here. We’re going to start a new project, and you will be meeting some of the leading citizens in the course of it. I want them to address you by your new title, General Manager of Perpetual Care for Deceased Pets.”

  As Bevo readied the lot, Parker visited a monument company and talked the owner into making a free doggy tombstone (HERE LIES SPOT, A BELOVED AND FAITHFUL COMPANION), promising that many of Tampa’s bereaved pet owners would soon set their precious dogs and cats to eternal rest behind the shelter. Bevo dug a small hole in the backyard, pushed up a mound of dirt, and placed Spot’s marker at the head.

  Parker was pleased with himself. No pet lover could resist it. He’d pay the monument company $15 and charge the owners $50. But why stop there? “Bevo,” he called across the yard, “can you make little coffins?” Bevo was hardly a carpenter, but he told Pops he would try, and soon Parker figured he could hike the cost of a Fido funeral up to $100 with the casket and a promise to decorate the grave with fresh daisies, castoffs he got free from the neighborhood florists.

  If a pet owner happened to stop by and express surprise at the condition of the flowers, Parker would frown and shake his head. “I wish you could have been here yesterday when we placed them. They’re a bit wilted now, but they looked sensational then. Isn’t that right, Mr. Bevis?”

  Bevo Bevis would thread his way in and out of Parker’s life until his death at age sixty-two in 1980. Their relationship was always marred by mutual frustration, and during that forty-year span, Parker fired him almost as many times as Bevo quit and went home to Tampa. As time went on, Parker treated him with increasing cruelty, making him the butt of jokes and placing him in countless humiliating situations.

  “Colonel took care of Bevo, but he was rough on Bevo, too,” remembers Parker’s friend Al Dvorin. “He made Bevo the fall guy.”

  Despite all of his shortcomings and annoying faults, the pathetic Bevo was, in essence, the first in a long line of younger associates on whom Parker conferred the title of son. Through the years, there would be at least a dozen such young men—from Byron Raphael, to the actor George Hamilton, to the concert promoters Mike Crowley and Greg McDonald, to country music’s LeGarde twins, Ted and Tom.

  Just why Parker needed so many surrogates, especially since he already had a stepson in Bobby Ross, begs the question. And since Parker, from all reports, adored children, the fact that he and Marie had no offspring of their own sets up another debate.

  Certainly the Parkers were devoted to each other. At the Humane Society, Marie helped him care for the animals and marshaled the bookkeeping records. She would work right by Parker’s side through the Eddy Arnold era. And though the world of country music and rock and roll was a hotbed of sexuality, no story ever circulated of Parker having affairs, at least not in the years when Marie was vital and healthy.

  “He was always so crazy about Marie in the days that I was around him,” says music executive Buddy Killen, who first met the Parkers in the early ’50s. And then came that weird exchange during the Country and Western Disc Jockey convention, when Killen walked out of Nashville’s Andrew Jackson Hotel just as the Parkers walked in.

  “Marie yelled, ‘Hey Buddy!’ And she held her arms out and I ran over and hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. And Tom said, ‘Hey, boy, stop that! Don’t do that anymore!’ And he was very serious. I was just a kid, so I wasn’t interested in his wife. But he didn’t like anybody kissing on her, even a little peck.”

  In Killen’s estimation, the Parkers had a fabulous marriage. But the union may have been based more on the practicalities of partnership, - Parker’s display of jealousy notwithstanding
. “I know he and Marie - weren’t happy at home, or at least not as the years went on,” says Gabe Tucker. The main problem, both Tucker and Bitsy Mott assert, was - Parker’s domination. “As for kids,” says Tucker, “he liked kids, but he - didn’t want them around too long.”

  Parker’s perceived fear of emotional intimacy, except with select friends through the years, seemed to spill over into a fear of another kind. Whether rooted in anger or in his need to control, Parker often had a violent reaction to being touched, especially by a woman. Someone as non-threatening as a coffee shop waitress, taking his elbow as she poured a cup of coffee, could raise an outburst in him that ruined the day.

  Agreeing with Byron Raphael, psychologist Peter Whitmer believes Parker was simply asexual. One family member believes he was sterile, the after effects of mumps he suffered from at age nine.

  Instead of having his own children, then, Parker found it more desirable to choose them, as with his surrogate sons, who tended to revere him as a heroic figure, and most of all, wouldn’t think of drawing too much attention to themselves in Parker’s presence.

  Bobby Ross’s refusal to adhere to Parker’s notion of the father-son alliance was at the core of a relationship that became difficult over time. Bobby looked at Parker more as an older friend than as a father, and Parker, who never legally adopted him, seems to have held him at emotional bay.

  By his high school years, Bobby had begun to exert his independence, finding employment first as a delivery boy for a local drugstore, and then at Tampa Shipbuilding, saving enough money to buy a used car. The youngster either earned, or was provided with, whatever accoutrements he needed in those crucial years of peer pressure, dating, and social growth, and Bobby proved to be a popular boy at school, his senior class voting him the “most athletic” with the “ideal senior smile.”