Tom Parker, pictured here in 1957 with 21-year-old Presley, said of the singer: ‘He’s like most other 21-year-old fellows… he tries to live right.’The Canadian Press
- Title: The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley, and the Partnership That Rocked the Word
- Author: Peter Guralnick
- Genre: Biography
- Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
- Pages: 603
Colonel Tom Parker, the Dutch impresario, one-time carnival man and Elvis Presley’s long-time manager, operated in what he called the Wonderful World of Show Business. He also saw it as snow business. From reading Peter Guralnick’s soberly illuminating The Colonel and the King, one thing is clear: There was no show business like the Colonel’s snow business.
Snowing is the art of the bamboozle − somewhere between selling and persuading, Guralnick explains, “not all that far removed from good-natured conning.” Which leads us to the question many have asked over the years: Was Presley the Colonel’s mark?
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Guralnick attempts to answer that question with help from a treasure trove of the Colonel’s warehoused archives that include tens of thousands of letters, some reproduced in the book. There were also scrapbooks chronicling Presley’s public life.
The Hound Dog singer’s rise in the 1950s seemed tornado-fuelled and Faustian, from a truck-driving mama’s boy to leg-shaking, lip-sneering pop-culture phenomenon in such short time. Then came the demise after Presley’s army hitch, with music giving way to an unsatisfying film career, followed by a brief, glorious comeback era that began in 1968 but never fully took hold. For most of the 1970s, until his death in 1977, Presley was a bloated, bygone nonentity.
Many view the Colonel as a lever-pulling Svengali who did not have his iconic client’s best interests at heart. Music producer Phil Spector, for one, was convinced the Colonel hypnotized the King.
In Baz Luhrmann’s hallucinatory 2022 biopic Elvis, the Colonel was presented as the jowly, devilish antagonist, played by Tom Hanks in a fat suit and with a distracting accent. Luhrmann’s positioning of Parker as the story’s villain was unsubtle, albeit understandable in the Hollywood scheme of things.
Guralnick is not beholden to a major studio. He is an Elvis scholar, having previously written the acclaimed Presley biographies Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. His music writing credentials are impeccable; his reputation as a historian unimpeachable.
That said, with The Colonel and the King, he’s on the Colonel’s side. His defence of Parker is subtle and impassionate − certainly not a snow job, yet a defence nevertheless. The book was written with the co-operation of Elvis Presley Enterprises and the support of the late Loanne Parker, the Colonel’s widow.
The Colonel, of course, was not an actual colonel. Guralnick devotes seven chapters to the “strange child” born Andreas Cornelius van Kuijk in Breda, Holland, in 1909. The details on the mystery man are captivating.
“I was born with an adult mind in a child’s body,” Parker wrote. “I didn’t want to be like other children my age, and wouldn’t even try, so I was punished.”
A man misunderstood from the beginning, then. Guralnick’s book about a shadowy figure seen by some as a huckster who concealed his origins for years is a thorough work of demystification.
The Dutchman arrived to the United States in 1926 as a 17-year-old stowaway on a Holland America liner. At some point he landed in Huntington, W.V., which he claimed as his birthplace. Three years later, in Hawaii, he joined the U.S. Army, enlisting as Tom Parker. The so-called Colonel’s actual rank never exceeded Private First Class.
Discharged, he took to the circus circuit before landing a job as an advance man for a travelling tent show headlined by crooner Gene Austin. Later, he worked with country singers Eddy Arnold and Canada’s Hank Snow before devoting himself exclusively to Presley.
When Parker got Elvis out of his Sun Records contract with Sam Phillips to sign a lucrative deal with RCA, the naïve young singer seemed to be firmly in thrall of his new manager.
“Words can never tell you how my folks and I appreciate what you did for me,” Presley wrote in a telegram. “I have always known and now my folks are assured that you are the best and most wonderful person I could ever hope to work with. Believe me when I say I will stick with you thru thick and thin and do everything I can to uphold your faith in me…”
The promise was kept. The pair stayed manager and exclusive client even after the latter’s death.
In a recent interview with The New York Times, Guralnick said he saw his work with this book as “restoring Colonel to his rightful place in history.” To that end, Parker is presented as a straight shooter. “All snow jobs have to be honest,” he is quoted as saying.
When a business associate winked about a deal and made an under-the-table gesture with his hand, the Colonel had none of it. “Everything is on top of the table or forget it,” he said. “We don’t do business that way.”
There is the common belief that Parker’s complicated diplomatic status was the reason Presley never toured internationally (save for three Canadian concerts in 1957). Indeed, Parker was not a U.S. citizen, and he claimed his Dutch citizenship was forfeited when he joined the U.S. military.
Still, Parker’s physical presence on a Presley tour abroad wasn’t absolutely necessary. The real issue, according to Guralnick, had to do with crossing international borders with all of Presley’s prescription medication. Is that even a plausible explanation: a worry about pills prescribed by a physician, for a rock star, in the 1970s?
When it comes to Parker’s exorbitant 50-per-cent commission on Presley’s earnings in his last years, the author offers the Colonel’s rationalization without challenge. By restricting his practice to a single client, Parker reasoned, he was making substantial financial sacrifices, and to compensate for those sacrifices, it was necessary to structure a “different kind of deal.”
Parker died Jan. 21, 1997, at the age of 87. In the book’s title, he’s still in 50/50 with Elvis. Let it snow.
