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Posted on Sun, Sep. 28, 2003
The King's Keeper
Was Elvis' manager a murderer who got very lucky?
By Stephen G. Michaud
Special to the Star-Telegram
The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel
Tom Parker and Elvis Presley
Visit Graceland in Memphis, and you'll see every
imaginable artifact of Elvis Presley's brief life,
from gaudy leather jumpsuits to walls lined with
gold and platinum records; his airplanes, his
cars, his handguns, the "meditation garden" near
the swimming pool where Elvis is buried next to
his parents. There's kitsch everywhere.
Yet you can scour the mansion at 3734 Elvis
Presley Blvd., as well as the souvenir shops
across the street, and find hardly a hint of the
man who arguably made it all happen, Presley's
dark-hearted alter ego, Colonel Tom Parker.
The Colonel was a polarizing presence, "a big
likable Dutchman and a nice fellow," as one old
acquaintance described him, "but he was really
nothing but a half-assed promoter who eventually
lucked into a hot property."
Journalist Alanna Nash, in her heavily detailed
new study, The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of
Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley, makes a
convincing case for a very different Colonel
Parker, a shadowy, deeply troubled figure whose
lust for money and power fueled Elvis' phenomenal
career as surely as the King's exceptional talents
did -- "The man," she writes, "who almost
single-handedly took the carnival tradition first
to rock and roll, and then to modern mass
entertainment, creating a blueprint for the
powerful style of management and merchandising
that the music business operates by today."
The Colonel was devious, dangerous and, at one
point, certifiably deranged. His real name was
Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, known to his family as
Dries, born June 28, 1909, in the Dutch village of
Breda. The name Tom Parker was pure fiction, a
handle he invented after illegally entering the
United States in 1929. There were several possible
reasons that Andreas Kuijk wanted a brand-new
identity when he hit the new world. The one that
Nash explores with keenest interest is the murder
of a 23-year-old shopkeeper's wife in Breda on May
17, 1929, the same day Kuijk suddenly lit out for
America.
If Parker was a killer, as Nash strongly suspects,
a hint of the demons that drove him to homicide
surfaced in 1933 when he was sentenced to 60 days
of solitary confinement for going AWOL from the
U.S. Army. When he was released, the author
reports, "his speech was an incoherent rush of
sound, punctuated by terrifying bursts of paranoia
and rage." Parker was institutionalized at a
psychiatric facility, probably St. Elizabeth's
Hospital in Washington, D.C. When he was
discharged in August of that year, an Army
doctor's diagnosis was "Psychosis, Psychogenic
Depression, acute, on basis of Constitutional
Psychopathic State, Emotional Instability."
Parker appears to have spent most of the rest of
his life on the run, from his past and from
himself. For the next 15 years he was principally
a carnie, an itinerant hustler working in the main
for circuses, crisscrossing the United States,
employed at everything from scamming the rubes to
washing the elephants. He seemed instinctively to
know how to separate otherwise prudent (often
poor) individuals from their money and reveled in
the ease with which he did it. When he managed
Elvis, the Colonel slipped his hands into deeper
pockets.
Unlike many other salesmen, the Colonel did not
need to believe in a product to successfully
market it. In fact, he seemed more at home running
cons and shakedowns than he did as anointed
trustee of the 20th century's hottest
entertainment property. Parker never liked
Presley's music (he preferred Lawrence Welk),
doubted his star had staying power (he tried twice
to sell his management contract) and spent very
little time with Elvis, preferring to be on the
road, alone, or wheeling and dealing on the phone
from his house basement office in Madison, Tenn.
Yet he made Elvis by far the highest-paid act of
his time, whether it was concert dates or record
contracts, and put him into dozens of lucrative,
if often ludicrous, movies. Harem Scarem, as Nash
points out, would be on anyone's top-10
worst-films list.
In the end, the psychic cost to Elvis proved too
high. Although Nash does not blame Parker for the
King's low self-regard and weakness for
prescription drugs, it is clear from her reporting
that the Colonel probably accelerated Presley's
downward spiral to death, in his bathroom at
Graceland, at age 42.
Yet Parker, who died in 1997, paid a price, too.
Presented by Nash as shrewd, even miserly, in
almost every dealing, the Colonel did have one
weakness -- gambling. In the early days of an
empty belly and even emptier wallet, the gaming
had no effect on a nonexistent bottom line. Later,
when money was no object, Tom Parker completely
capitulated to his addiction. According to the
author, he realized in excess of $100 million
income as Elvis' manager (about the same as that
of his client), yet he died with less than $1
million in the bank. Apparently, the vast bulk of
the missing money was left on the roulette tables
of Las Vegas.
Nash entered well-traveled book territory when she
took on The Colonel; she lists 59 books in her
bibliography. Yet The Colonel is full of original
reporting -- sometimes at a bit higher resolution
than a general reader might require, but
nonetheless impressive work. She has produced a
compelling look at an amazing American saga.
B+
The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel
Tom Parker and Elvis Presley
by Alanna Nash
Nonfiction
Simon & Schuster, $25
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Stephen G. Michaud is an author who lives in
Dallas.
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