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