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Louisville
Courier-Journal review of THE COLONEL: The Extraordinary
Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley. July 13,
2003. By Wade Hall
When you finish reading Alanna Nash's engrossing new
biography of Colonel Tom Parker, famous for managing Elvis
Presley's entire career, you will have formed a mental
lexicon of words to describe the faux colonel, which might
include the following: dreamer, schemer, entrepreneur,
braggart, prankster, hustler, liar, con man, soldier,
deserter, vagabond, manipulator, and murderer. Call him what
you will-and he may have been all of these-you will not call
this biography boring. The Colonel (as with us Kentucky
colonels, he was commissioned an honorary one in Louisiana)
steps boldly forth in Nash's big book, larger than most
lives and one of the most innovative figures in
entertainment history.
Exactly who was Colonel Parker? We
may never know, but Nash seems to know more about him than
anyone else. He was surely not what he seemed to be. In many
ways, he was the archetypal American outlaw hero, the
stranger who comes suddenly into our midst with a new name
and no known past, remakes himself and becomes a great
success using all the tricks of survival. Parker lived most
of his 87 years as a public figure, but with calculation and
cunning he left a scant paper trail for his biographers.
According to Nash, he had good reasons to hide a life that
included many sinister and criminal elements. He could
easily have taken as his mentor a 19th century picaresque
blackleg named Simon Suggs, created by American humorist
Johnson J. Hooper, whose motto was "It is good to be shifty
in a new country." Both were ready to recast their lives
when a richer opportunity came along. Parker even changed
his name periodically as if to signal the mileposts of his
career.
The inscrutable Parker learned early in his life to
show people "what he wanted them to see, and to cover up the
rest." He was an amazing storyteller whose skill at
exaggeration and fabrication protected and benefited him to
the end. Nash introduces us to Parker on June 18, 1994, some
17 years after Elvis' death, and the day after O.J.
Simpson's frantic Bronco run. It is the second of three
visits she will have with Parker, and she senses the
"perverse pride" that the old man obviously has in
belonging, with Simpson, to a "fraternity of rogues," men
who take risks and beat the odds. Parker's dark underside
was still largely unlighted in January of 1997, when he died
of a stroke.
He had not reckoned with the sleuthing tenacity
of Louisville-based author Alanna Nash. With a mountain of
evidence amassed from hundreds of sources-ranging from
interviews with Parker, his family, business associates,
friends, enemies and numerous country musicians to legal
documents and printed information-she has pieced together a
mosaic of a self-invented man driven to make money any way
he could. She has ferreted out the secrets and filled in
most of the blanks in Parker's truly checkered life, from
his asexual marriage to his obscure origins in Breda,
Holland, where he was born in 1907 and named Andreas
Cornelis van Kuijk, the seventh child of a large Catholic
family.
Nash pursues her quarry relentlessly from his
erratic youth in Holland through his spectacular rise to
power and wealth in the United States to his death and
cremation. After he arrives permanently in America-at the
port of Mobile-in 1929, under mysterious circumstances, this
son of a Dutch stable keeper rises steadily through the
ragged ranks of carnival and Chautauqua shows and circuses
and a Florida humane society, then through his skillful
transformation from a Tampa dogcatcher to a country music
promoter and entrepreneur, with a shifting stable of stars
that included Roy Acuff, Minnie Pearl, Pee Wee King, Eddy
Arnold, Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow and then the King himself.
And what a match they were, both men being consumed by "the
raging fire of ambition." When the ultimate huckster met the
ultimate pop talent in the mid-1950s, and Elvis Presley
became Colonel Parker's "property," it was a twosome made in
entertainment heaven; and, despite developing tensions, it
lasted until each man fell into the hell he created for
himself. For Elvis it was drugs. For Parker, the Great
Gatsby of entertainment history, it was compulsive gambling.
Although the title suggests an almost exclusive focus on the
relationship of Parker and Presley, the book is actually a
comprehensive biography of Parker, of which the climactic
Elvis episode is, of course, the most important. Indeed,
Nash suggests that Parker's major legacy may transcend his
work with Elvis. "Parker's most important place in music
history," she concludes, "may be as the man who almost
single-handedly took the carnival tradition first to rock
and roll, and then to modern mass entertainment, creating
the blueprint for the powerful style of management and
merchandising that the music business operates by today." No
one knows American country music better than Alanna Nash.
No
one is such an indefatigable researcher and writer as she
is. However, even after her exhaustive searches down the
labyrinthine paths of Parker's hidden life and her laudable
efforts to separate facts from folklore, Parker remains a
man of some mystery and much contradiction, which is perhaps
as it should be. The man who molded and marketed Elvis into
a superstar wore a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap to his
funeral.
This book's highly readable storyline is enhanced
by Nash's lean, crisp style-heightened by occasional
rhetorical flourishes-and the narrative flows as smoothly as
one of Elvis's mellow songs-say, "Love Me Tender" or
"Kentucky Rain. Even when covering familiar ground,
especially in the much-plowed field of Elvis studies, she
does so with increased depth and richness, often with new
information and insights.
As Nash suggests, biography
writing is sometimes an exercise in explaining a subject to
himself. Indeed, had Parker lived long enough to read Nash's
new biography of him, he would have better understood who he
was. Fans of Elvis and the entertainment industry will
certainly learn a lot about American popular culture from
this book. But its main subject is the uniquely American
story of a man born Andreas van Kuijk in Holland who came to
America and became Colonel Tom Parker. Nash calls Parker's
life, warts and all, "a remarkable journey." And so it was.
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