The Colonel Read online

  Understandably, with such limited prospects, Parker was hoping to worm his way into a job like Peasy’s. Hoffman got him a break at Rubin & Cherry, but a front-office job remained beyond his grasp. Back on the Jones outfit, he talked his way into selling a few ads, yet the front ranks seemed closed to him there, as well.

  And so he scrambled to do what he could, including “cherry pie,” or jobs wheedled out of his fellow showfolk, even something as menial as guarding the railroad cars. All the while, he indoctrinated himself further into the closed, secret society of the carnival, he and Kaplan resorting, when they needed to talk business in front of the townies and not be understood, to the gibberish of carny lingo.

  For a time during this early period, the young Parker moonlighted as a pitchman on a sideshow—in part to lose his stutter and Dutch accent and learn to talk “American.” He also ran a “mitt camp,” or fortune-telling booth, tracing his customers’ occupations by the calluses on their hands. He could look into the eyes of the gullible, read the life history on their face, and communicate with them silently, almost controlling the very words they said.

  6

  DANCING CHICKENS, TOOTHLESS LIONS, AND RODEO COWBOYS

  CARL J. SEDLMAYR was indisputably the man to see. In just twelve years, the success of his Royal American Shows, headquartered in Tampa, had made him the modern “King of the Carnivals.” The Nebraskan, a former fountain pen salesman, had ventured into the carnies in 1907 as a talker on a sideshow. In 1921, he purchased the Siegrist & Silbon Shows, and after two years, changed the name to Royal American—“Royal” to appeal to Canada, where he hoped to take his outfit for part of the season, and “American” to rouse the patriotism of those back home.

  Sedlmayr, whose fierce eyes and formidable, turned-down mouth hid a kind heart and a genuine liking for his employees, was a man of honor. He had built the Royal American Shows’ reputation by carrying nothing less than clean, high-class entertainment and by creating the extraordinarily diverse “World’s Largest Midway” that treated its customers as patrons, and not as “marks.”

  The skilled showman also knew the supreme selling point of meeting personally with the fair committees who might book his outfit exclusively on their grounds. By this method, he managed to replace Johnny J. Jones as the resident show at the Florida State Fair and establish decades-long relationships with other fairs and venues throughout the country. The Memphis Cotton Carnival, where a teenage Elvis Presley would win a stuffed teddy bear at a baseball concession in the early 1950s, was among them.

  In 1925, Sedlmayr upped his ante by partnering with the equally respected Curtis and Elmer Velare, a brother team who started as acrobats with the C. W. Parker Shows and who would go on to help found the Showmen’s League.

  When the Velares joined forces with Carl Sedlmayr, who early on saw the potential of outlining the carnival rides with neon tubing, their fellow troupers correctly forecast that they would mold the Royal American into the greatest collective amusement organization in the world. In 1933, the show pushed all larger competitors aside to reign as the leader in the industry (“a mile of magnificent, stupendous midway!”), with more than a thousand workers boarding the Royal American’s seventy private red-and-white train cars each spring.

  Tom Parker, whose frustration over his stalled career mounted daily, knew that a position on the Royal American would do wonders for his reputation. And so he approached Sedlmayr, asking to represent the carnival in an office-echelon job. He knew all about publicity, press agents, and advertising, he said. Peasy Hoffman had trained him.

  Sedlmayr recognized an overly zealous hustler when he saw one. And so he turned Parker over to the harder-hearted business manager, Elmer Velare, who noted Parker’s fractured English, wondered how solid a character he was, and delivered the word that the front office didn’t need a new man just then.

  “The Colonel told me that Velare didn’t think he could handle it,” remembers Larry Davis. “The shame of it is that the Colonel had a lot to teach the carnival, rather than learn from it.”

  But for now, either no one at Royal American realized Parker’s worth, or the Velares considered his brash enthusiasm a vulgarity better-suited to running a mitt camp. Yet Sedlmayr admired the young man’s moxie, and told Curtis Velare, the concession manager, to put him in an ice cream booth. Parker soon worked his way into other concessions, running wooden sticks through candy apples for Ruby Velare in her cotton-candy stand and cutting a deal with her during the off-season to provide the treats he sold on the streets of Tampa.

  Over the next few years, Parker tried nearly everything to break through at the carnival—even volunteering his services with an old, toothless lion whose sore gums had set him on a hunger strike. According to a story Parker later recounted with great fanfare, he fashioned a set of false teeth for the beast, smearing the choppers with mustard when it came time for the big cat to go on show. The spicy condiment irritated the lion’s tender palate but guaranteed an authentically fierce roar.

  Such a story has the decided ring of fiction, if for no other reason than its inherent cruelty. As someone who often treated animals with more dignity than he showed to humans, he would not have tolerated such behavior, much less initiated it.

  That rationale is precisely why one of the most famous stories attributed to him—that of the “dancing chickens”—also proves apocryphal. According to legend, Parker carried a hot plate, a gramophone, and a cage of assorted fowl—hens, roosters, or turkeys—with him on the carnivals, a practice that supposedly lasted well into his early days of touring rodeos with country singer Eddy Arnold in the 1940s. Whenever the concession business turned slow or, in Arnold’s case, if a fair slapped an amusement tax on an act without a livestock exhibit, Parker simply covered the hot plate with straw and set it in the cage. Then he plugged it in, dropped the gramophone needle on a fast little number, and gathered the crowds as the poor chickens high-stepped around the cage to keep from burning their feet.

  The great cowboy star Gene Autry swore that the story was true, and that it led to a friendship that endured until Parker’s death. But Gabe Tucker says it never happened with Parker, who merely appropriated the tale and passed it off as his own. According to Tucker, the real perpetrator was Dub Albritten, who told Tucker about it in 1945, and it was a dancing duck, not a chicken.

  By the time Parker started telling the story to others in the Elvis era—usually flourishing a chicken leg at lunch to bring the tale full course—he’d worked out a kicker. “I’d start each week with seven dancin’ chickens and finish with just one,” he’d say, pausing for dramatic effect. “A fella’s gotta eat!”

  Despite his obvious aptitude for myth making, in the 1930s, the Royal American brass still found Parker beneath consideration as a press agent or, for that matter, any job of authority. And so his years there would never amount to anything beyond the camaraderie and pride he enjoyed in being associated with the most celebrated carnival of its day.

  The sting of that early rejection—so reminiscent of Adam van Kuijk’s reinforcement of failure—left a permanent welt on Parker’s consciousness. Long after he attained a measure of wealth and fame that would have staggered Carl Sedlmayr and the Velare brothers, Parker returned to the carnival time and again to brag and gloat and seek approbation.

  Ernie Wenzik, who operated a Pitch ’Til You Win game on the Royal American midway in the 1950s, remembers that Parker kept up with the carnival’s schedule. “He used to come and visit Mr. Sedlmayr every time he was in the neighborhood,” says Wenzik.

  But it was more important that he confront the Velares, who continued to be active in the business well into their elderly years, introducing the ninety-foot-high double sky wheel when most men their age had long since retired. In 1972, Parker finally got his chance, when he spied Elmer Velare at the Showmen’s League convention in Las Vegas.

  “Mr. Velare,” he began. “I’m Tom Parker. I used to work for you on the Royal American. I manage Elv
is Presley. I’m a big promoter now.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said eighty-eight-year-old Elmer Velare, graciously trying to soften the moment. “Why didn’t you do that when you were with us? If I’d known you had this ability, I would have put you to work a long time ago.”

  “Oh, but Mr. Velare,” countered Parker, twisting the knife. “I asked you tens of times to let me be a promoter back in the thirties, and you people wouldn’t let me. You remember that, don’t you, Mr. Velare? I told you I could do it.”

  Parker had managed a miraculous journey from his days with the carnival, but he never got past his need to boast of his accomplishments, or of his relationships with famous people. From nearly his first major interview in the Elvis years, Parker crowed of his friendships with cowboy stars Tom Mix and Ken Maynard, although none of the Mix biographers or Maynard experts can document an association. Maynard and Parker might have made a passing acquaintance when Maynard played the smaller circuses in the 1930s and ’40’s, but there is one other possible explanation, hidden in the details of an embarrassing promotion.

  “One time, Colonel produced a show at some ballpark, where he advertised somebody’s famous white horse,” Alan Fortas remembered. “I’m not sure whose horse this was, but it might have been Ken Maynard’s horse, Tarzan, or this big cream-colored horse that Tom Mix had, Comanche. Anyway, something happened, and they couldn’t get him. So Colonel said, ‘Hell, just take that black one over there and whitewash him,’ which was an old circus trick. But just as they were bringing him across the field, damn if it didn’t start rainin’! By the time they got to where they were going, that horse was coal black.”

  He was “always intrigued by cowboys and cowboy stars,” Parker’s friend Oscar Davis observed. His fascination with all things Western never wavered, and resulted in his hiring Nudie Cohen of Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors to create Elvis Presley’s famed gold lamé tuxedo.

  More important, the infatuation was behind his insistence that Presley make such Western-themed pictures as Love Me Tender; Stay Away, Joe; and Charro!

  If the Western image appears to be a curious choice for a man of his background, somewhere in his psyche, Parker seemed to believe he was a product of that pioneering spirit of the West, seen in his fondness for cowboy hats, and the logo of an old-fashioned covered wagon (“We Cover the Nation”) that adorned his business stationery. During the 1964 U.S. presidential campaign, he “loaned” the logo to Lyndon Johnson, gifting him with a thirteen-inch, hand-carved wagon that doubled as a lamp and carried the words ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ on its cloth tenting. Parker hoped it would inspire a promotional giveaway to symbolize - Johnson’s Texas fortitude.

  Yet if Parker did not genuinely embrace the romance of the Old West, it was a perfect ruse for an illegal alien. What could be more American—and by extension, patriotic—than a cowboy, a figure who stood for all things good and virtuous? Certainly not his antithesis, the outlaw. It was always a white hat Parker wore, never a black one.

  7

  ONE BORN EVERY MINUTE

  IN February 1935, when the Royal American Shows played the Florida State Fair at Tampa’s Plant Field, Tom Parker sauntered up to the Hav-A-Tampa cigar stand with his mind on free samples. Marie Frances Mott, a dark-haired beauty queen with something of a racy reputation, took one look at the well-dressed man with the strange blue eyes and was only too happy to comply. She parted her Kewpie doll mouth and flashed a smile of even white teeth, and then sweetened her cracker’s drawl with the honey of seduction. “You work on the carnival?” she asked, stringing the words out to lay a hint of promise in between. Suddenly, Parker was interested in more than just stogies.

  Tom Parker had perhaps shown no interest in girls to his friends back in Holland, but on the Johnny J. Jones show, said Jack Kaplan, he demonstrated that the old circus maxim—“a pussy pulls stronger than an elephant”—was true. Like any good con man, Tom Parker was a charmer, and what he didn’t see at first was that Marie Mott, in laughing at his jokes and complimenting his clothes, was conning him right back. Three months away from her twenty-seventh birthday, and a full thirteen months older than Parker, she, like him, had a secret in her soul.

  Born in Pembroke, Florida, on May 18, 1908, she was one of six children of Susie Ardelia Woodard and Elisha Mott, a rough-hewn Spanish-American War veteran who plied his trade as a blacksmith and iron worker, and subsidized his meager income as a dirt farmer. The family picked up and moved whenever the land played out.

  Unlike her more sedate sisters, Lula Mae and Gertrude, Marie was a high-strung, hyperactive child, and already something of a wildcat by her teens, much to the consternation of her uneducated but moral-minded mother. Although she retained some of the tenets of her hard-shell Baptist upbringing (shunning alcohol, for instance), the high-spirited Marie could turn the air blue with her language.

  “She was a piss cutter, and Granny Mott couldn’t do a thing with her,” says her daughter-in-law, Sandra Polk Ross. Still, her natural beauty was enough to see her run for queen of the Gasparilla Parade—part of an annual celebration to salute buccaneer Jose Gaspar and re-create the invasion of Tampa—and ride triumphantly on the lead float. “Colonel fell in love with Marie because he liked her spirit—and she had that flash in her eye, too,” according to Ross. “He thought she was the prettiest thing he ever saw.”

  Marie Mott was not only pretty—she carried the exciting stigma of a divorcée. Where Tom Parker was still relatively inexperienced in matters of sex (“I knew he had a girl for a short while in North Carolina,” said Jack Kaplan), Marie had deserted her husband, Willett Man Eagler Sayre, in Jacksonville only a month earlier. Furthermore, she had another husband, Robert Burl Ross, in her past and, on the day she first met Tom Parker, a nearly ten-year-old son, Robert B. Ross Jr., to raise.

  And the comely Marie held yet another surprise. Asked in 1983 about his sister’s family, Marie’s younger brother, Elisha Mott Jr., known as Bitsy, said, “She had two children by Ross. The other one died at birth. We have no record of it.”

  The last statement may have been true, but the second certainly - wasn’t. Bitsy Mott had full knowledge of the survival of William Ross, who was born July 4, 1928, in Tampa. Billy had arrived with the deformity of a clubfoot, but was otherwise a startlingly beautiful child.

  The Rosses had already split by the time of Billy’s birth, and whether Marie believed that having a handicapped child hurt her chances of landing another man, in 1929, she packed Billy, then a year old, off to the Florida Children’s Home, where he was adopted two years later by a Plant City farming family, used and abused as a field hand—and as a kind of “play toy” for their older son.

  With Marie off living the wild life, Granny Mott reared Bob Jr. with the help of her husband Bitsy, who was only seven years older, and viewed Bobby as a younger brother to mentor and protect. The boy was still living with his grandparents when Marie married for the second time and moved to Jacksonville with Sayre. But soon she was back in Tampa, and in a matter of months—shortly after meeting Parker—she phoned Sayre to tell him it was over and found only his mother at home.

  “She said she was in love with another man,” Mrs. W. S. Sayre reported to the court. But Marie never brought action for divorce, leaving it up to Sayre to file. The court found her guilty of “willful, continuous and obstinate desertion of the complainant,” and granted Sayre the final decree on March 18, 1936.

  Marie Mott Ross Sayre was then free to marry Tom Parker. But what was it that really drew them together, apart from Parker’s realization that having an American wife and stepson could come in handy if he were ever in trouble with the immigration officials?

  “I believe they were in love, plain and simple,” says Sandra Polk Ross. “He was a fine cut of a man in those early pictures. And she was such a handsome woman and so trim. Marie was a hot number when she was young, and he had her on a pedestal.”

  Whether or not Tom and Marie enjoyed a vigorous sex life, after years of struggling
on his own, Parker needed a woman to take care of him. At his lowest point—when the Velares and Sedylmayr continually turned him down—he craved the reassuring words that might have come from Maria van Kuijk, who always comforted him after confrontations with his father.

  Marie, whose name so resembled his mother’s, and who was older than he and more seasoned in various ways of the world, was a perfect choice for a surrogate mother and lover. And she had one more irresistible quality: Marie Mott was an exceptional cook, specializing in the heavy Southern fare that Parker had become accustomed to in his travels. Surprisingly, he let Marie all but rule him.

  “I think he loved her as much as he could love any woman,” says Byron Raphael. “But later on, when I knew him, I got the distinct impression that he might not have liked women sexually. In fact, I was certain that the Colonel was asexual. He couldn’t relate to a soft, romantic woman, but he could somehow relate to this bossy kind of lady. She had a coarse, dominant quality about her, and that apparently attracted him.”

  To Marie, an uneducated woman with a child to support in the heart of the Depression, any man who took a genuine interest in her must have seemed like a lifeline on the open sea. And with Marie’s appetite for adventure, Parker would have seemed an appealing companion for a life that broke with conventional tastes, regular work hours, and confinement to a single location. In short, they made a good team.

  And so they married, as Parker would tell the Associated Press, “in 1932, while wintering with a carnival in Tampa.”

  Or did they? As usual with the saga of Tom Parker, the most mundane of facts often prove to be illusions. Parker was still in the service in 1932, stationed at Fort Barrancas. Certainly he might have married Marie during a furlough, or in his months of desertion from the army. But the Florida Office of Vital Statistics, checking the years of 1927 to 1946, finds no record of marriage between the two.