Book Review
Elvis' Svengali: Biography of Colonel Tom Parker reads like a thriller
By Charles
R. Cross
Special to The Seattle Times
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AP, 1957 |
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Parker, seen here with Elvis Presley, was "the stuff of
Shakespeare." |
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If there is one figure in 20th-century show business who was even
larger-in-life than Elvis Presley, it was Presley's manager, Colonel
Tom Parker. The Colonel outweighed Elvis by 100 pounds, outlived him
by 20 years and out-earned his charge by crafting deals that gave him
more than 50 percent of Presley's income.
He was hated by fans for pimping his famous client into trashy
movies, feared by anyone who did business with him and known for
boasting that he had never once had so much as one meal with Elvis. In
a nutshell, he hated Elvis, and any Elvis fan hated the Colonel.
Parker was a villain of the first order, and his life, as Alanna Nash
states in the introduction to her splendid book "The Colonel," was
unequivocally "the stuff of Shakespeare."
Yet Parker was colorful. Nash has plenty to work with, retelling
the sordid stories of Parker's pre-Elvis years on the carnival
circuit. The Colonel bragged of his many cons and spun tales of
dancing chickens (aided by hot-plates under their straw) and suckers
born every minute. His eventual collision with Elvis seems almost
pre-ordained, part of the natural evolution of Parker's cons.
Though the relationship between Elvis and his crooked manager has
been examined so many times it is a familiar story, Nash constructs it
so well it reads like a freshly conjured thriller. Nash is best when
she tackles the psychological roots of Parker's con: As an illegal
immigrant the Colonel forever feared deportation, a fact he kept
hidden during Presley's life but one that assured Elvis would never
tour outside the United States. Nash's telling is the definitive
account of Parker's early life in Holland, and though the actual
details can never be confirmed, she leaves a reader convinced that
Parker was also a murderer.
Upon arriving in the United States, Parker sets out to re-create
and rename himself, a task that Nash notes he did with aplomb. "A
master illusionist in business and in the business of life," she
writes, "Tom Parker made things appear and disappear at will, and
created something very great out of nothing — including himself." He
wasn't even really a colonel.
Once Parker hooked up with the naive Presley, he became the most
powerful manager in show business — and the most disliked. He began to
bizarrely talk about himself in the third person ("The Colonel won't
like that"), and he grew fatter, meaner and more pathological as his
power grew. His control over his charge, Elvis, was so great,
particularly when it came to controlling the press, that Nash suggests
"it was almost as if there were no Elvis, except what the Colonel made
him out to be."
Nash quotes one of Parker's aides comparing the Colonel to Adolph
Hitler, but she is careful to paint a full and fair portrait of her
subject, one that also gives Parker his due for the tremendous success
he made of Presley (though always taking his generous cut). "The
Colonel was all the things that he appeared to be," she writes, "both
good and bad, and if Parker was the very definition of shrewd, the
morality of his decisions was not always discernible as black or
white."
Though "The Colonel" is a biography of Parker, it is also essential
reading for Elvis fans, because it provides the first clear and
accurate portrait of the neuroses that kept Presley under Parker's
thumb. Only toward the end of his life does Presley ever seriously
consider firing Parker, planning on giving the job to Tom Hulett of
Seattle's Concerts West.
But Elvis, like a Shakespearean character, can't break free of the
Colonel's hold. His heart proves even weaker than Parker's, and he
dies at 42, strung out on prescription drugs. In his con-man character
until the very end, Parker didn't even shed a tear.
Charles R. Cross is the Seattle author of "Heavier Than Heaven:
A Biography of Kurt Cobain."
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