The Colonel Read online

  Andre’s hobo experience ultimately left two indelible imprints: a romantic fondness for slumgullion, a boiled meat stew that hobos prepared in a large pot on an open fire, and a respect and sentimentality for hobos. In the 1950s, when Elvis Presley was a rising Hollywood star, Parker cajoled the studio commissary to make up dozens of sandwiches, which he took to the hobo hangouts at the Los Angeles train stops.

  But on this, his first trip to the United States, he was on the receiving end of charity more often than not. When he reached Los Angeles, he had no compunction about taking sustenance at the Midnight Mission. There, after vowing to welcome Christ into his life, he would repeat a religious mantra and be rewarded with a hot meal and a hard bed.

  Years later, he would tell the story and end it with a funny punch line: “If you’re going to stay at the Midnight Mission, be sure you get there by seven o’clock.” It was true—the dinner hour was from five-thirty to six, and the beds were likely filled by seven. But the statement also served as a metaphor for his deeper beliefs—that to succeed, you had to stay one step ahead of everybody else, know how to manipulate the system, and dig for everything you got.

  Nonetheless, to everyone’s surprise, Andre showed up back in Holland on his mother’s birthday, September 2, 1927, after being gone nearly a year and a half. Had he saved his second summer’s wages from Chautauqua and bought a third-class ticket home, as his sister Nel believes? Or had he simply been caught and deported, even though the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has no record of it?

  However he made passage back, he timed his arrival in Breda for nine - o’clock in the evening, when the family had gathered for Maria’s celebration. Stylishly dressed in an American suit and long, striped tie, his arms full of presents for all, he knocked on the door of the little Boschstraat house. At eighteen, Andre seemed every inch the successful prodigal son. But no matter how hard the family begged and pleaded, there was one thing he wouldn’t talk about: exactly what he had been doing in America.

  For the next two weeks, he seemed happy to be home. When his eldest sister, Adriana, married a mechanic named Antonius H. W. “Toon” van Gurp on September 15, Andre was the life of the party.

  Demonstrating both the spirit and the theatrics of Chautauqua, he jumped up on a table, threw his arms out like an experienced orator, and launched into a poem about a smart but lazy lad who squandered his future and ended up as a bellhop. From there, he danced a funny, one-legged jig. And then he finished entertaining the crowd with a short concert of songs, including one that was so risqué that members of the family stole a sideways glance at Maria.

  But within a month his mood had darkened again. Breda was no longer the place of his youth. Many of his favorite haunts had been torn down. He kept to himself, rarely looking up his old friends Cees Frijters and Karel Freijssen. For a young man who had tasted the excitement of New York, tent Chautauqua, and hanging under trains, Breda was sorely lacking.

  And as Europe was sliding toward a depression, the odd jobs were more difficult to come by. According to his sister Nel, he served a short stint with the river police during this time.

  Finally, he took a job with a shipping company called Huysers on the Prinsenkade, loading and unloading barges on the waterfront. Huysers, later the maker of Jansen boats and automobiles, was an old customer of van Gend en Loos, and Andre probably got his job by reminding the owner of the days when he and his father had delivered the company’s packages. Now he would be doing the same thing, only carrying heavier packing cases and parcels on and off the boats in numbing repetition—and he had to be at work at 6:00 A.M.

  Andre wouldn’t have tolerated such a job before his trip to America, but now he saw it as a means to an end. Huysers also owned the Stad Breda, which made a daily run between Breda and Rotterdam, and as soon as the ship needed a deckhand, Andre would arrange for the transfer.

  When the day came, he moved back to the port city, but instead of living with his uncle, he opted for a bunk at Huysers’s rough-and-tumble employee hostel on the top floor of the office. He stored his good clothes and a few personal belongings in a locked trunk, which he positioned near his cot.

  Andre had no trust for the sailors, who knew better than to invite him for a night of drinking, or offer to introduce him to a girl. Now, at nearly twenty, he had turned into a good-looking, bright-eyed lad with a slim face and an impish smile. At times, he could look almost sensual, like a dreamy young poet. The fact that he’d rather take long walks by himself than spend the evening in the company of a pretty girl was the subject of comment among the others.

  Then one day in May 1929, Andre failed to show up for work. His fellow crewmen thought he was just late, or maybe sick. But Andre would never step foot on the boat again. Somehow, at some time, he had quietly slipped away. No one seemed to know why, or where he had gone.

  Two months later, in July, Huysers returned Andre’s trunk to Maria van Kuijk’s house on Boschstraat. The family opened it to find three of his treasured suits, a rosary, a Bible, his identification papers, and a small purse containing what appeared to be his savings. He had taken nothing with him but two shirts and two pairs of undershorts. Why had the boy who so adored dressing up left behind his expensive clothes? Even more perplexing, why had someone who so valued money abandoned his hard-earned gains, especially if he was planning to move halfway around the world? He had even left behind his unopened birthday presents, which the family had sent for his special day in June.

  On one of his last trips home to Breda, he had dropped by Adriana and Toon’s upstairs apartment on the Haagdijk. “I remember it like yesterday,” Adriana said nearly fifty years later. “We were standing in the kitchen. He gave my little son, who was just born, a hand, and then left for Rotterdam.”

  It was a long time before the family heard from him again.

  Finally, a missive arrived, written in English, simply saying their brother had gone away. The family was bewildered. And he had signed it with the most quizzical name: Andre/Tom Parker.

  “He just changed identity,” says Marie, who believes he chose the name Tom Parker in homage to a stowaway who was thrown overboard. “He wanted to remain unknown.” There would be more sporadic letters, and after awhile, he would sign them solely with his new moniker.

  Usually, he gave no return address, offering just enough information to let the family know he was all right. The letters were carefully worded, teasing almost, more for what they didn’t say than for the news they conveyed. Sometimes he sent photographs that suggested he was having a ball—a small black-and-white snapshot in which he stood next to a large American car in some tropical setting, and another one of himself by a swimming pool. The family thought he must be a chauffeur for a very rich man.

  Then came a third, provocative photograph that placed him between two other men, sitting on a beach in an old-fashioned one-piece bathing suit, his legs drawn up and his knees together, his hands crossed in front of him in an almost feminine pose.

  Just where was Andre, and what was he doing? And who in the world was this Tom Parker, who had such a strong hold over him?

  Thirty-one years would pass before the family would learn that answer.

  3

  “ALL GREAT NEPTUNE’S OCEAN”

  Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

  Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather

  The multitudinous seas incarnadine

  Making the green one red.

  —Macbeth, ACT 2, SCENE 2

  IN 1957, Colonel Tom Parker was riding cross-country, returning to California from his home in Tennessee. Behind the wheel was twenty-three-year-old Byron Raphael, a William Morris agent-in-training that Parker plucked from the mail room a year earlier to become the first of his Morris-paid assistants. The “Parker School for Trainees” would become part of Hollywood legend for both the rigor and the humiliation that the manager foisted on his “students.” But at the time, Raphael only knew that he loved and
feared the man he called Pops.

  Parker, whose marriage was childless, would tell the young man he thought of him as his adopted son. Whether that was entirely true, certainly on that 2,000-mile road trip, he trusted Raphael enough to share one of his closest secrets.

  “We were driving through Hobbs, New Mexico,” Raphael begins, “and it was snowing. I couldn’t keep the car on the road—we were sliding everywhere—and we stopped at this little motel. There were very few rooms available, so I had to share a room with him that night.

  “He started out by telling me about how he was made a colonel by the governor of Louisiana. And then he said, ‘Where do you think I was born?’ I said, ‘Well, I guess Tennessee.’ And he just told me the story. He said he made a deal with somebody to come over, and he worked in the kitchen of the ship, as a dishwasher, I think.

  “The way he arranged it, he was supposed to stay sixty days and then go back. And he said they were going to give him a paycheck when he landed, but he didn’t want to get the check, because he felt they might find out where he was. So he never picked it up, even though he had no money. All he wanted to do was get to this country and disappear into the heartland to start working in carnivals.”

  His route, from what he told various sources, was through the island of Curaçao, in the Dutch West Indies, via England. From Rotterdam, he sailed for one of the British ports, probably Southampton, with a possible stop in France to pick up cargo. If he took a passenger ship to England, he likely would have jumped to a tramper or a freighter for the run to the Dutch West Indies, since the passenger ships concerned themselves with North Atlantic trade.

  Eventually, he wrote home that an English friend had given him the papers he needed—presumably a passport and visa—to enter the United States. But whether the friend arranged for him to “become” Tom Parker during his layover in the British Isles or, as Nel believes, while Andre was still in Holland, is unknown. And if he already had a Dutch passport, as several members of the family believe, the more curious question is why he needed another in a different name.

  Whatever the answers, he seemed to be going to a lot of trouble. In Curaçao, he apparently changed boats again and quickly moved on.

  From here, the picture of Andre van Kuijk, just weeks away from his twentieth birthday, begins to blur. In all probability, he entered the United States through the gulf port of Mobile, Alabama, although the names recorded in the ships’ manifests for that year fail to bear witness to Andreas van Kuijk or Thomas Parker. Dirk Vellenga, the journalist who chronicled Parker’s Dutch origins, first for the Breda newspaper De Stem and later in a biography, Elvis and the Colonel, speculates that Andre came in on a rumrunner, a boat transporting illegal liquor to America. According to Lloyd Shearer of Parade magazine, Parker himself said he gained entry through Mobile on a Dutch fishing boat. Either way, that would have been the boat that issued the paycheck he never picked up.

  For some reason, those events were on Parker’s mind in 1957, the morning after his late-night disclosure to Byron Raphael in a roadside motel.

  “That’s when he told me the rest of the story—how fearful he was that he might be deported, or if he ever left the country, that he might not be able to get back in.

  “He said, ‘You know, Byron, we’re never going to be able to take Elvis abroad to do personal appearances.’ By that time, Elvis was already the biggest star in Japan, and also in Germany. And the offers from Europe were for many millions of dollars, even then.”

  Since Parker’s personality was so forceful (“He gave you the feeling that he was omnipotent,” says Raphael), it never occurred to the teenager to ask him why he didn’t call on his powerful friends to solve his passport problems, especially given his celebrity and wealth.

  But now the answer seems obvious. It wasn’t that Parker couldn’t leave the country. Through the years, he accumulated many influential friends in all ranks of government—including President Lyndon B. Johnson—who could have solved his problem with a single phone call. The truth of the matter was that Parker didn’t want to leave the country. And not even the promise of money beyond his wildest dreams could stir him from his spot.

  For a man who judged the worth of every deal by money alone, such virulent aversion to international travel begs two nagging questions: Why had he never registered with the U.S. government, bypassing, as late as 1940, the safety net of the Alien Registration Act, which required all aliens to comply with the law, but did not discriminate between legal and illegal residents? And what was outside the refuge of the United States that frightened a man who otherwise seemed afraid of nothing?

  “The Smith Act, or the Alien Registration Act of 1940, wouldn’t have necessarily made him legal,” explains Marian Smith, historian at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, D.C., but as an overstayed seaman, Parker could have registered and applied for certain kinds of relief. “And I am curious as to why he didn’t,” she muses. “Failure to register was subject to punishment, but I’m sure he could have later just paid a fine. It’s very odd.”

  The search for his mysterious truth spawned a host of imaginative explanations through the years. The first is the theory that he might have been a low-level government spy, or carried papers for the leaders of a radical social movement. But although the U.S. government used Dutch citizens as drops in Nazi-occupied territory in the years before World War II, Andre was long gone from Europe by then. Besides, his family says he demonstrated no political agenda, and the selflessness of such an act—even if paid—doesn’t fit his psychological make-up.

  The second tale—that he fled Holland after “knifing a man to death in a fairgrounds brawl”—sounds more plausible. The alleged incident was reported in 1997 in the British tabloid The People, as an introduction to a memoir by reporter Chris Hutchins. But, alas, Hutchins says he has “no recollection of such a story,” and furthermore hasn’t the faintest idea how it landed atop his published piece. The FBI, credited as the source, is equally unaware of such occurrence.

  However, the third story is harder to shake off. If true, it could answer every question about the enigmatic behavior of Colonel Thomas Andrew Parker.

  In the days just after Elvis Presley’s death in August 1977, Dirk Vellenga was sitting at his desk at De Stem when he received an anonymous phone call. It was a man’s voice: “Do you know that Colonel Tom Parker comes from Breda? His name is van Kuijk, and his father was a stable-keeper for van Gend en Loos on the Vlaszak.”

  While this information had been published before, first by Dineke Dekkers in the fan club magazine It’s Elvis Time in 1967, and then in Hans Langbroek’s 1970 eccentric booklet The Hillbilly Cat, Vellenga thought it only rumor. His curiosity now piqued, he began poking around in the ashes of Parker’s early years, interviewing his family and schoolmates, and soon began to sift out the fragments of the life of - Breda’s most famous nonresident. The first of Vellenga’s splashy articles appeared in the newspaper in September 1977 and started the taciturn reporter on a quest—perhaps an obsession—that drives him still today. Even though he long ago left reporting to become an editor, he has continued to file stories on the subject every few years, even as late as 1997, twenty years after he began.

  At the end of one of his pieces, Vellenga posed a question: “Did something serious happen before Parker left that summer in 1929 for America, or maybe in the 1930s when he broke all contact with his family in Breda?”

  One reader thought he knew the answer and in 1980 mailed a letter to Vellenga at the newspaper. The document had a hushed, dark-alley tone, as if its author were afraid that someone might be reading over his shoulder. It carried no signature, but the urgency and gravity of the words made it seem somehow real, as if the author experienced an unburdening in the telling:

  Gentlemen:

  At last, I want to say what was told to me 19 years ago about this Colonel Parker. My mother-in-law said to me, if anything comes to light about this Parker, tell them that his name
is van Kuijk and that he murdered the wife of a greengrocer on the Boschstraat in Breda. This murder has never been solved. But look it up, and you will discover that he, on that very night, left for America and adopted a different name. And that is why it is so mysterious. That’s why he does not want to be known. But believe me, this is the truth and nothing but the truth. It has been told to me in confidence. I have been carrying it around with me for years, and am glad now that I can tell you what happened. This is the truth. Thank you.

  At first, Vellenga hardly knew what to think. Could it be true? The reporter was intrigued to find that, indeed, there had been such a murder. Anna van den Enden, a twenty-three-year-old newlywed, the wife of the potato trader Wilhelmus “Willem” van den Enden, had been bludgeoned to death in the kitchen of her home behind the shop. The crime was what the Dutch call a roofmoord, a murder with intention of robbery, since the bedroom and bathroom had been ransacked in an apparent search for money.

  More surprising, the date—May 17, 1929—coincided with Andre’s sudden disappearance.

  Today, a careful reading of the original police report—handwritten in Dutch and numbering more than 130 pages—reveals a woefully inadequate investigation of the crime. The murder weapon, possibly a crowbar, was never positively identified. No background check was done on the victim. And once several witnesses reported seeing Anna’s brother-in-law, Jan van den Enden, a contractor, near the shop that morning, police focused solely on him, detaining him as a suspect. Eventually, however, he was released, and no one was ever brought to justice for Anna’s murder. The crime remains unsolved to this day.