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The
Colonel
In The Colonel, Alanna Nash, the author of Golden Girl: The
Story of Jessica Savitch, explores in depth the amazing
story of Colonel Tom Parker, the man behind the legend and
the myth of Elvis Presley. The result is a book that reads
like the most riveting of real-life detective stories―and
will completely change your view of Presley’s life, success,
and death.
While scores of books have been written about Elvis Presley,
this is the first meticulously researched biography of Tom
Parker written by anyone who knew him personally. And for
anyone truly interested in the performer many consider the
greatest and most influential of the twentieth century, it
is impossible to understand how Elvis came to be such a
phenomenon without examining the life and mind of Parker,
the man who virtually controlled Elvis’s every move.
Alanna Nash has been covering the story of Elvis Presley and
Colonel Tom Parker since the day of Presley’s funeral in
Memphis, Tennessee. She was the first journalist allowed to
view Presley’s body, a compelling and surprising sight. But
the profile of Parker, attending the funeral in a Hawaiian
shirt and a baseball cap, was even stranger, and led her to
investigate the man behind the myth.
Filled with startling new material, her book challenges even
the most familiar precepts of the Presley saga ―everything
we presumed about Parker’s handling of the world’s most
famous entertainer must now be reevaluated in the light of
the information Nash reveals about Parker, who cared little
for Presley beyond what the singer could do to bolster the
Colonel’s precarious position as an illegal alien.
It has been known for 20 years that Thomas Andrew Parker
was, in fact, born in Holland as Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk.
But Nash has dug much deeper, and in a masterpiece of
reporting, unearthed never-before-seen documents, including
Parker’s army records and psychiatric evaluations, and the
original police report of an unsolved murder case in Holland
which lies at the heart of the Parker mystery. In the
process of weighing the hard and circumstantial evidence,
she answers the biggest riddle in the history of the music
industry, as it becomes clear that every move Parker made in
the handling of Elvis Presley―from why Elvis never performed
in Europe, to why he didn’t halt Elvis’s drug use, to why he
put him in so many mediocre movies, and even the Colonel’s
direction of Presley’s army career―was designed to protect
Parker’s own secrets.
Nash's disclosures, backed up by more than 300 interviews,
investigators’ reports, declassified government documents,
and never-before-revealed information from Parker’s Dutch
family members, include the following:
― There is evidence to suggest that at age 20, Parker, then
still known as Andreas Cornelis Van Kuijk, bludgeoned a
woman to death in his native Holland. Within days, he
disappeared under the cloak of darkness and fled to America.
He took no money, clothing, or identifying papers, and left
without saying goodbye to his family. Although he worked his
way over as a galley hand on a freighter, after docking, he
refused to pick up his paycheck.
― Soon after his arrival in the U.S., van Kuijk changed his
name to Tom Parker and entered the U.S. Army. Shortly into
his second tour of duty, Pfc. Parker deserted his unit,
suffered a nervous breakdown, spent four months in Walter
Reed Army Hospital, and was discharged for reasons of
“Psychosis, Psychogenic Depression, acute, on basis of
Constitutional Psychopathic State, Emotional Instability.”
― From that moment on, the Colonel tried to completely bury
his past. Claiming to be a native of West Virginia, the son
of carnival workers, he left almost no paper trail, and
cultivated the friendship of politicians, including Lyndon
B. Johnson, yet never became a U.S. citizen, and never made
any attempt to do so. To this day, there exists no marriage
license, INS record, or FBI file on this man, though Elvis’s
FBI file totals 663 pages. Parker kept his Dutch origins
secret from his clients—singers Gene Austin, Eddy Arnold,
and Hank Snow, before Elvis—and even his American family.
― Troubled by the specter of death, wary of women, and
frightened that his past would be uncovered, the Colonel
suffered nightmares and often flew into uncontrollable rages
that terrified his office staff.
Elvis Presley, as one of Parker's unwitting victims, paid a
major price for the Colonel’s past and his overwhelming need
to be more important than his client--so powerful as to be
“untouchable.” As a result, Presley was never allowed to
reach his potential and died in drug-induced frustration
over his stunted and mismanaged career.
In this amazing, impeccably written, and vastly entertaining
book, Alanna Nash also pays tribute to Parker, the
tactician--the man who had the largest impact on American
music of any non-musician, and who did as much as Dwight
David Eisenhower to reshape the postwar U.S., inventing the
rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle through the merchandising of the
singer he called in carnival terms, “my attraction.” Nash
proves that the only figure in American popular culture as
fascinating as Elvis Presley is Colonel Tom Parker, the man
who shaped Elvis, who in turn helped shape us.
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