The Colonel Read online

  But Parker apparently resented the handsome teen’s popularity, as well as his ease with women, for the quick-witted Bobby had inherited his biological father’s striking good looks and appetite for the opposite sex. In his job as the drugstore delivery boy, he’d sometimes get a call for a quart of ice cream, be invited inside by the lady of the house, and “and be there long enough for the ice cream to melt,” says Sandra Polk Ross. “Colonel suppressed Bobby, because he didn’t want him to have the attention. All of the girls thought he was wonderful.”

  One girl had found Bobby irresistible since the age of twelve. Marian DeDyne, a petite, dark-haired beauty, was Bobby’s constant companion during high school, and on August 18, 1944, two months after Bobby graduated, they married.

  In a photo taken at a family picnic in 1943, Bobby beams to have her beside him, as a pudgy but youthful Parker, dressed in Bermuda shorts, dives into an enormous bowl of ice cream. Such indulgences were not lost on the shelter’s occasional volunteers, who harbored resentment over - Parker’s exacting standards for cleanliness and order, and for his strange and endless requests to be addressed as “Doctor.” Whether anyone had the nerve to say it to his face, secretly they referred to the ever-ballooning Parker with a more sardonic nickname: “Tiny.”

  9

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

  DURING his years of caring for Tampa’s displaced pets, Parker spun off the career that would eventually lead him out of Florida and up to Tennessee—that of a country music concert promoter, booking Grand Ole Opry stars out of Nashville. He started in 1941 as the nation went to war, mostly to earn money for the Humane Society. Parker knew nothing about country-and-western music, with its predominant themes of Mother, death, and the lamentable wages of sin, preferring the sentimental crooning of Gene Austin to the nasal whine of Nashville. But he’d had it on good authority that hillbilly was the music of the common man, in this case, the Florida farmers and working class, who revered the Opry stars as something close to demigods. And so, with a sliver of the proceeds going to the war effort, Parker and two partners rented the great, sprawling Fort Homer W. Hesterly National Guard Armory, a recently completed WPA project on Howard Avenue.

  Parker’s first venture into concert promotion starred the future “King of the Hillbillies” (later changed to “the King of Country Music”), Roy Acuff, and a new comic named Minnie Pearl, who had just joined the Grand Ole Opry in November 1940. That December, she started on the road with Acuff at $50 a week, but only under the directive that she abbreviate her opening patter: “How-dee! I’m just so proud to be here! I’m so proud I could come!” Acuff, the son of a Baptist preacher, got drunk on occasion, but once he became the Opry’s first network radio host in 1939, he kept his professional image clean as a cat’s paw. And so he took his “extra added attraction” aside and spoke in low tones. “Minnie, you’ll have to leave off that last part. It’s just too suggestive.”

  A twenty-nine-year-old college-educated actress, Pearl, née Sarah Ophelia Colley, was the daughter of a prosperous Tennessee lumber man who’d lost his fortune in the crash of ’29. Although the cultured Colley had traveled the Deep South organizing amateur productions of drama and musical comedy—that was where she’d gleaned the inspiration for the character of Minnie Pearl, the country girl in the Mary Janes with

  an eye toward “ketchin’ fellers”—the country music world seemed like a sideshow in comparison. Pearl could hardly believe the lackadaisical way the community lived and conducted its business.

  “When I came along,” she remembered, “nobody owned their home. They lived in trailers or rooming houses. Nobody had any insurance, and very few of them had bank accounts. They carried all the money they had with them. When one of ’em got ready to buy a house, the real estate man would say, ‘How do you intend to take care of this?’ And they’d say, ‘Will cash do?’ They had no idea how big this thing was going to be.”

  In contrast, Pearl discovered, Parker was oddly shrewd about how the music could bring in the dollars. For his first country show, he lined up a promotion with a grocery store chain to sell discount tickets with a newspaper coupon. As Pearl remembered, the audience was large enough to fill the house for several performances.

  “It was the first time we had any connection with anything like that,” she said. “The store paid for the advertising, and many more tickets were sold, because every [grocery] cashier in a three-county area was working what amounted to a box office. The man was thinking even then.”

  The success of the Roy Acuff concert spurred Parker to expand his involvement in the country music milieu, and now he approached Acuff about becoming his manager. But Acuff, whose sister, Sue, lived in Tampa and knew his reputation (“You don’t want the dogcatcher!”), found Parker’s techniques far too radical for the Opry’s staid image.

  Acuff, the biggest star on the Opry other than Bill Monroe, saw that Parker was right when he told him he needed to gauge his fee to a percentage of whatever the promoter took in, plus a guarantee. But no one else in country music was doing it, and it just didn’t seem the Christian way. Besides, Parker wanted complete control of Acuff’s career, which the stony-faced bandleader found intolerable.

  Yet for a brief period, the two men discussed Acuff’s invitation for Parker to move to Nashville. But when Parker told the star he wanted him to leave the Opry, which paid only scale, for more lucrative personal appearances, the management deal died on the vine. Still, Parker hung tight as an Alabama tick, and to try to ease him out gently, Acuff let him book the dates he still had open, and arranged for him to market his new Roy Acuff Flour throughout Florida.

  Before they parted, Acuff gave the budding entrepreneur one piece of gold-plated advice: Eddy Arnold. Now, that was a young man to keep an eye on. The smooth-voiced singer was the featured vocalist for Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys, and he “could charm the warts off a hog’s back.” It was only a matter of time before a talent like that went solo. Any record company would fall over itself to snag him.

  In 1942, Parker and his partners branched out their country concert promotions, not so much to benefit the Humane Society, but to benefit themselves. More and more, Parker began distancing himself from his duties at the shelter to learn more about the Nashville way of doing business. As Acuff had advised him, he kept the name Eddy Arnold fresh in his mind.

  Away from his job, Parker now began to wear a string tie to accentuate his new persona as a Southern eccentric. He also worked to make his speech more folksy and smoothed some of the rough edges off his accent, although he would always retain a hint of a lisp. When he got nervous, which was rare, he lapsed into a strange linguistic valley between Dutch and English, and involuntarily substituted the word me for I, as in, “Me got to go now.” Whether he intended it, the slip only served to make him seem more of an insular, small-town character.

  Soon Parker was booking shows in tandem with two of country -music’s best promoters, the congenial J. L. Frank and Oscar Davis. Parker shared an immediate affinity with the latter. The gravel-voiced Rhode Islander had come to concert promotions from a career in the carnival, where he toured a girl “frozen alive” in ice, going on to present her at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Like Parker, Davis never really left the carnival, and his signature slogan—“Don’t You Dare Miss It!”—was straight out of carny parlance.

  Parker saw that Joe Frank was a valuable ally for a variety of reasons, but he also had a hidden motive for wanting to cultivate him: Frank was Pee Wee King’s father-in-law and managed King’s Golden West Cowboys band. That put Parker one step closer to the young Eddy Arnold.

  By 1942, Parker must have marveled at the twists of fate that had delivered such events in his life. In the last two years, the thirty-three-year-old had moved from near destitution to a position of relative prosperity. Now his sideline of concert promotions not only offered a new challenge and an avenue back into show business, with its all-import
ant contacts, but also dramatically altered the course of Parker’s life. The concerts proved more lucrative than he imagined, even as the profits were split among his partners. He saw how independent promoters and managers such as Joe Frank and Oscar Davis had been sharp to recognize the nearly limitless potential of the burgeoning country music business, and he intended to claim a large piece of it for himself.

  However, Parker’s rash of good fortune also triggered a potential problem in the form of an Internal Revenue Service audit. For an illegal alien who had refused to comply with the Smith Act, the demand to appear before an agent of the federal government must have been terrifying.

  And so Parker approached the IRS situation as he would every other tight spot of his life—with a snow job. He began by putting a false bottom, about four inches deep, in the kind of small trunk that show people carried, and then gathered every bill that he could find. Outside the - auditor’s office, he carefully arranged a wad of papers so that several poked out of the lips of the trunk and, once inside, dumped the lot on the agent’s desk with a ceremonious whoosh! Then, like a magician, he continued to make them appear—from his pockets, his hat, his pants legs—in a dazzling display.

  To Parker’s extraordinary luck, the auditor happened to have a thundering headache—the staid IRS agent had uncharacteristically tied one on the night before.

  “Tom said the guy started pacing back and forth, just holding his head,” remembers Gabe Tucker. “And Tom told him, ‘Hell, let’s count ’em up and see if I owe you something. If I do, me’ll pay it. But I can’t be up here all week.’ It didn’t take him long to get out of there, and after all that, he didn’t owe a damn thing.”

  But trouble with the IRS would remain one of Parker’s biggest fears, and in the future, he would do almost anything to avoid the tax man’s scrutiny and suspicion.

  He had gotten an even bigger scare in January 1942, when he received the draft board’s questionnaire to determine his classification for military service. As before, the record shows that he made no mention of his previous army experience, but with Bobby then still at home, he argued that he should be classified 3-A, or “deferred for dependency reasons.” The board accepted his claim.

  In March 1944, the draft board came calling again, reclassifying Parker as 1-A, or “available for military service.” With that, Parker, whose weight already exceeded that of most healthy males of his height and age group, began piling on food in an effort to have himself reclassified 4-F. Soon, with a stack of three chins bobbing on a thick stalk of a neck and his great protuberance of a belly expanding from his imposing waist, he swelled to such proportions as to resemble his personal totem, the elephant. But it did the trick.

  To those around him, Parker undoubtedly appeared to go through the war years without showing the slightest hint of concern about the European front or the effects of a bombing campaign on neutral Holland. But at the same time that his sister Johanna, hoping to learn some word of him, was passing his photograph among American soldiers liberating the Netherlands, Andreas van Kuijk, dressed in his dogcatcher’s uniform, sat at his desk in the Hillsborough County Humane Society, writing secret missives to a soldier wearing the uniform of the Dutch army in the city of Tilburg, some fifteen miles east of Breda. The soldier, who was serving in the Prinses Irene Brigade, a Dutch unit attached to the U.S. Army, was sorry to report before the war’s end that the woman about whom his correspondent inquired, Maria Ponsie van Kuijk, had died. To the recipient, half a world away, the news was stunning. It would take a gathering around God’s table before Andre would see his mother again.

  “When I heard that Mother was dead,” he told his brother Ad in 1961, “for me, Holland was also dead. She was my only real tie to Holland.” But it wasn’t until that late date of 1961 that Andre learned that the sad news from the Dutch soldier had been a tragic misunderstanding. Maria van Kuijk had, indeed, lived through the war, but she had also hurled herself into her grief—surely her son himself had not survived, or he would have sent some sort of sign. Now she lay under the good earth with an inconsolable heart, never knowing that her Andre was still alive in America, evolving into the Someone he promised he would be.

  In August 1942, Parker became fixated on the name of a man he thought might help him attain that dream. A Warner Bros. film crew came to Tampa to shoot a war movie called Air Force, and the production staff asked if the Humane Society could bring a couple of appealing dogs to Drew Field. Parker was only too happy to be around big-name show people again and held a laughing canine to pose with actor Gig Young for a Tampa Tribune photographer.

  “Who is the head man here?” Parker had demanded on arriving. “The director is Howard Hawks,” he was told. “Yes, but who is the very top man?” “That would be Hal Wallis.” The producer was in California, and unable to go to Florida. But Wallis would be the name Parker remembered.

  Other film crews would come to Tampa, drawn by the city’s balmy weather and the long hours of daylight. The following winter, MGM brought Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne to town to make A Guy Named Joe. The Humane Society was again called on to provide animal costars, and Parker, desperate to make the acquaintance of anyone in the film community, invited the camera crew on a family outing.

  Still, he obsessed about Wallis. In the old days, the pickpockets, grifters, and gamblers who traveled by rail often had their victim marked before they ever boarded the train. And so was it with Parker and Wallis. The producer could be his ticket in Hollywood.

  The same summer that Wallis’s crew came to town, Parker was so heady with success that he made a wild decision. The man whose mission seemed to be to bilk anyone and everyone out of as many goods and services as possible, moved his family out of the free apartment over the Humane Society and into a ranch home at 4218 San Pedro in the newly developed Palma Ceia area of South Tampa.

  For the time being, Parker tried to restrict his promotions to three key Florida cities—Orlando, Daytona Beach, and Jacksonville, where he would hire a woman named Mae Boren Axton, who did promotion and publicity to offset her occasional songwriting—and listed himself as a “traveling agent” in the Tampa directory. Working out of the San Pedro house, he called his new venture Tom Parker’s Hillbilly Jamboree and had a box of business cards printed for Ottie P. Johnson, “advertising manager” for press and radio.

  In early 1943, through an arrangement with J. L. Frank, Parker booked Pee Wee King and His Golden West Cowboys into a Tampa hotel for a Humane Society show and dance. From there, the band played three weeks of theater dates for him throughout Florida, most of them by the bicycle method, an exhausting practice that required them to play two theaters in the same night, running back and forth between the venues while a movie showed. Joe Frank had praised Parker’s style to his son-in-law, and King understood why—Parker was one of the most energetic men he’d ever seen.

  “Regardless of how big the advance sale was, he always tried harder to get bigger crowds, and he was always very good to the entertainers,” King said.

  Parker, who had a tin ear and cared nothing about music or individual performers other than how many tickets they sold, brought King’s band to Florida for two reasons: first, to flatter Joe Frank by booking his son-in-law and, more important, to get a good look at Eddy Arnold.

  He assessed Arnold’s square-jawed profile and liked what he saw. Then he wondered if the tall twenty-four-year-old with the full-throated baritone could be the heir to the kind of fortune and record sales that the faded Gene Austin had known in his heyday and, better still, if Arnold had the screen presence to carry a Hollywood film. But he made no move to offer a management contract once Arnold left King’s band that May: Marie was adamantly opposed to pulling up stakes and moving to Nashville, and Parker feared that Joe Frank would want to keep Eddy in his personal stable.

  The next time Parker and Arnold met was the fall of 1943. By now, Eddy had assembled his own band, the Tennessee Plowboys, and the foursome, dressed in country gentlemen a
ttire, picked and sang live each morning for the farmers and early risers over Nashville’s WSM radio. Arnold also occasionally appeared on an early-evening show that was produced out of the WSM studios before the Opry. One such Saturday night, Arnold was tuning up before that show when Parker, who happened to be in Nashville on one of his talent-scouting trips, heard - Arnold’s name on a station promo and rushed over to catch the singer before he went on the air.

  “He introduced himself to me,” Arnold remembered, and started with the homespun patter that he’d refined to seductive art—said he’d heard a lot of good things about Eddy since he’d gone out on his own, had just seen the profile of him in Radio Mirror magazine, and hoped they’d work together soon. Then he lit into his management pitch.

  Arnold smiled a toothy grin and thanked him but explained that he was already in negotiation with Dean Upson, the WSM Artist Service Bureau chief, about that very thing.

  “Well,” Parker added, “I manage Gene Austin, you know.” Arnold’s face lit up, and the Tampa dogcatcher knew he’d rolled a lucky seven. Gene Austin had long been one of Eddy’s inspirations. And so it was with two agendas that Parker took Austin backstage at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium for a Grand Ole Opry performance not long after that meeting with Arnold at WSM. Austin had filed for bankruptcy the previous year, and if Parker could get him on the Opry to do a song or two, maybe book some club dates out of it, he’d be only too happy to help an old friend. If in the process Parker should just happen to give Eddy Arnold the thrill of his life by introducing him to his hero, well, certainly there’d be no harm in that.

  Arnold recalls that when they talked in earnest, Parker didn’t mince words. “Tom was obviously interested in finding a new, young artist,” Arnold says. “Seemed like he knew what he was talking about. And I was a hungry boy.”

  After that, Parker began to pop up more and more around Nashville, getting in Eddy’s face whenever possible. Sooner or later, he would find a way to woo the Plowboy.