August 24, 2003 Sunday FINAL EDITION



SECTION: ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT, Pg. 7J

LENGTH: 688 words

HEADLINE: REVELATIONS ON THE MAN WHO MISHANDLED ELVIS

BODY:

Pop aficionados have long considered "Colonel" Tom Parker the bete noire of the life and career of his only client, Elvis Presley.

Had Presley only changed management, this view goes, Presley would never have sung so many awful songs, acted in so many bad movies, taken so many drugs and ended his short life, as Alanna Nash memorably writes in her biography of Parker, as "a pathetic, corseted cartoon, his body blown from years of abuse, his spirit picked hollow."

Nash, a journalist who has written biographies of tragic newswoman Jessica Savitch and singer Dolly Parton, and compiled a book of Presley table-talk by members of the singer's Memphis Mafia entourage, isn't out to write a rehabilitative account of Parker's career.

Indeed, he comes off in these well-written, thoroughly researched pages as a mostly crummy human being who relentlessly took as much money as he could from Presley while frequently marketing him as though the tornado from Tupelo was a talking hippopotamus: Balloons, buttons, pocket calendars and midget parades.

Nonetheless, Parker's contribution, as Nash points out, was decisive. He brought the merchandising techniques and fleece-the-suckers spirit of his beloved carnivals to the world of pop culture, which never thereafter was the same.

Parker is essentially the father of the aggressive movie and soundtrack tie-in, and those purveyors of Harry Potter doodads, for one, should cast a respectful bow each morning in the direction of his shade before tallying the receipts.

Parker wasn't a real colonel, nor, as Albert Goldman first showed in his 1981 book on Presley, was he even an American. He was an illegal immigrant from the Netherlands named Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, seventh of 11 children born to a deliveryman and his wife in the town of Breda.

Nash's first 100 pages or so are devoted to van Kuijk-Parker's early life. He wrapped up his formal education in the fifth grade, left home for the big city of Rotterdam at 16, and somehow got onto a ship bound for the United States.

He spent a year and a half in the States working for carnivals and a Chautauqua show before heading back home in 1927. But he was too restless to stay, and vanished again in 1929, on the very same night that a young newlywed named Anna van den Enden was found bludgeoned to death in the kitchen behind her husband's shop. The case never has been solved, but Nash suggests, on slim but persuasive circumstantial evidence, that van Kuijk might have been responsible.

Back in the States, he entered the Army for a couple of years, but deserted and was packed off to Walter Reed for psychological examination. In another important scoop, Nash reveals that van Kuijk, now calling himself Thomas Parker, was discharged in 1933 after being diagnosed as a psychopath.

He made his way to Tampa and the carnival life, and was working as a field agent for the Hillsborough County Humane Society when he began to do music promotion in the early 1940s.

In 1954, Parker heard about a young truck driver tearing up the airwaves on the Louisiana Hayride radio show, and the rest is not so much history as legend.

Nash's book features a great deal of psychobiography. She paints Parker as a paranoid obsessive who cut himself off from his large Dutch family, and who turned down million-dollar deals for Presley to tour in Europe, probably because he was afraid of being questioned about the van den Enden death. Nash suggests that when his gambling debts in Las Vegas spiraled into the millions, he signed Presley up for a punishing number of dates to bring in the cash.

And yet. Odious as Parker was - he died in 1997 - and as many head-shaking moments of disbelief as there are in this book, Nash puts much of the blame for the tragedy of Elvis Presley on the entertainer himself.

It was Presley's failure to respect his own gifts that led him to put too much faith in Parker. Judging by the evidence in The Colonel, Presley would have preferred to be a serious movie actor, and had he found someone to steer him in that direction, he might be among us still.