An immigrant with a Dark and Troubled Past flees his home and his family and arrives in America to start anew. Inventing a new identity, he scrapes by via military service and various odd jobs and con schemes, before finding his niche as a music promoter. Then he hits the jackpot when he becomes The Svengali manager of the most popular singer in the country, but is still fearful of having his true identity exposed.
It sounds like the plot of some sweeping Picaresque novel, but it's the very real story of Elvis Presley's manager, a story that requires a major amount of untangling to fully understand.
The Boy from Breda
The man who would become Colonel Tom Parker was born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in the city of Breda in the southern part of The Netherlands on June 26, 1909. He was the seventh of eleven children of Adam van Kuijk (a stern, staunchly Catholic former military man and employee of a delivery firm) and his wife Maria Ponsie van Kuijk (a lively woman from a family of parlevinkers, itinerant peddlers who operated out of boats on the country's network of rivers and canals). Dries, as he was nicknamed by the family, was an independent, mischievous young boy, who often clashed with the disciplinarian ways of his father. The van Kuijks were poor, and Dries, who had a knack for getting in trouble as a student, started working at age 11 after being expelled from school for making fun of a teacher's large nose. While he worked a variety of odd jobs, Dries was most captivated by his stints helping out with the kermis, the annual carnival-like festivals that are a storied part of Dutch culture.By his teenage years, van Kuijk decided that he was Outgrowing the Childish Name Dries and insisted on being called Andre. Then, shortly after his 16th birthday in 1925, his world was shaken up when his ill father died at the age of 59. In the spring of 1926, he took off for the United States, possibly as a stowaway on a freight ship, and stayed for almost a year and a half. He briefly lived with a wealthy Dutch family in New Jersey (whom he'd apparently befriended on his Atlantic crossing), worked for carnivals and on the Chatauqua circuit
. He also lived as a hobo for a while, even managing to make it all the way to California. Just as sudden as his disappearance, Andre reappeared in Breda by the autumn of 1927, for reasons that have never been established for certain (which is true for much of his story, as he only left a few fragmentary recollections to his family and colleagues as his first-person accounts of what happened in his early life). But he wasn't comfortable back home, and on May 15, 1929 he left for America again, at age 19, this time for good. It was a rushed departure; he'd left behind his money and most of his clothes.
Across the Ocean
At this point, the young man forged a new identity. He was no longer the Dutchman Andreas van Kuijk, but instead Thomas Andrew Parker, an orphan from Huntington, West Virginia.note While the choice of West Virginia as his putative home state may have been for convenience (Huntington was apparently one of his first American stops in 1929), it was a genius stroke, since it's a state that doesn't really have much of a solid cultural identity. Any oddities in his speech or mannerisms could be explained as West Virginia peculiarities, and most people wouldn't know enough about West Virginia to question it (contrary to the thick accent Tom Hanks used in Elvis (2022), Parker had a fairly Americanized accent in his later years, with a few little quirks like pronouncing "just" as "yust").Faced with destitution in his new land, Parker chose to follow in the footsteps of his father and volunteer for the US Army, despite his undocumented immigrant status. Possibly taking the name Thomas Parker from the captain who interviewed him, Parker served for two years in Hawaii, then was transferred to Pensacola, Florida in 1931. After disappearing for several months, he returned to base, was charged with desertion, and underwent a mental evaluation, which diagnosed him with a psychopathic disorder. Spending some time in an Army hospital, Parker was discharged honorably in 1933.
From there, he drifted down to Tampa, Florida, where many carnivals, circuses and traveling shows had their winter headquarters. He spent the next few years working for carnivals doing everything from tending animals to managing penny arcades and even doing publicity. Parker's carnival work shaped his whole philosophy of life: a love of hype and spectacle, working every possible angle to lure in an audience, and a focus on money above all else, even if he had to resort to questionable means to get it. One of his favorite little schemes was to charge people admission to a show, then charge them again to exit the show. One measure of how much he loved carnival life, even its darker sides, is that his favorite movie by far, which he saw dozens of times, was the 1947 classic carnival-set Film Noir Nightmare Alley.
While working the carnivals he met Marie Mott, a fellow carnival employee, and they got married in 1935...maybe. There's no record of a marriage license for the couple, suggesting it was a common-law marriage, though they stayed together until her death in 1986. Around this time he also had his first taste of music management by assisting Gene Austin, a hugely popular crooner of The Roaring '20s who'd fallen on hard times, in headlining a traveling show. Parker eventually got hired by the prestigious Royal American carnival and angled for a front office job, but the carnival's owners were suspicious of him and he never was promoted.
By 1940, Parker decided to go back to Tampa and get the first real steady job of his life, as a field agent for the local chapter of the Humane Society. While he enjoyed rescuing animals, the important part of the job for him was to organize various benefit shows for the group. It was in this capacity that Parker began to make connections with the Country Music community in Nashville. At some point in The '40s, Parker decided to become a full-time showbiz manager. On the advice of other music pros, he signed up-and-coming country singer Eddy Arnold in 1945. At the same time, Parker began to perfect his own image as a pudgy, bombastic, flamboyantly-dressed scheming classic Southern huckster, whose Refuge in Audacity tactics earned him respect. He'd even given himself a title, the Gov, but by the latter part of The '40s managed to finagle an even more impressive moniker from a real governor, when Gov. Jimmie Davis granted him the honorary title of Colonel in the Louisiana State Guard. Given his love of practical jokes and putting things over on unsuspecting people, Parker must have secretly relished the irony of a former Army deserter who could now call himself a colonel.note
Under the Colonel's tutelage, Arnold became one of the genre's first superstars, but after a while tension grew between the two, over financial issues and artistic questions, and Arnold relieved Parker of his managerial duties in 1953 (he still retained his services for concert bookings, and the two remained on good personal terms for the rest of their lives). While Arnold certainly didn't suffer in the aftermath (if anything, he became more popular), in many ways Parker came out on the better end of the deal. Parker's management strategy for Arnold sounds very familiar: saturation marketing, a heavy emphasis on merchandising, savvy use of the emerging medium of television (Arnold hosted a network variety show in the early 50s), a sweetheart deal with the Hill & Range music publishing company, and even movies (Parker arranged two Non-Actor Vehicle films for Arnold—Feelin' Rhythm in 1949 and Hoedown in 1950); Parker had a solid template he'd perfected with Arnold, he just needed another client who could push things to the stratosphere. In the meantime, he foundered a bit after losing Arnold, eventually getting into a partnership with country star Hank Snow, who wanted to branch out into the business side of things, and even briefly trying his hand at Professional Wrestling management (which he certainly had the personality for).
The Colonel Meets Elvis
Toward the end of 1954, Parker became aware of Elvis Presley, a 19-year-old from Memphis who'd been causing a stir on radio's Louisiana Hayride and on tours through east Texas, with his novel blend of country and rhythm & blues influences, and an electrifying stage presence. Presley's management was up in the air at that point, with his guitarist Scotty Moore handling the duties but obviously overwhelmed as Elvis' star grew, former Hank Williams manager Oscar Davis (who's credited with tipping Parker off about Elvis) interested in taking over, and Sam Phillips, who'd signed Elvis to Sun Records, retaining his recording rights. Parker, a Bunny-Ears Lawyer type who, eccentric image aside, had picked up a lot about contracts and negotiations over the years, deftly navigated between all this, and, with his longstanding connection with RCA Records (Eddy Arnold's label) to sweeten the pot, secured Elvis as a client. The parents of Elvis had mixed feelings about Parker: Vernon shared Parker's enthusiasm for making money, but Gladys thought he was shady and untrustworthy.The story of the rise of Elvis is now a cornerstone of American pop culture and doesn't need to be rehashed here, but suffice it to say that Elvis wouldn't have become Elvis without Parker as his manager. For many people, the colorful, blustery Parker was just as much a phenomenon as Elvis, and he got constant press coverage. Parker worked every possible promotional angle for his star. He even had I LOVE ELVIS and I HATE ELVIS buttons pressed up for sale. Which is why his contacts at RCA and the William Morris agency found it strange that Parker turned down lucrative offers to have Elvis tour through the UK, Australia and South America, with a brief 1957 Canadian tour being the only shows Elvis would ever do outside the US. They started to suspect that he might be a foreigner with immigration problems that prevented him from getting a passport (he did travel to Canada for those 1957 shows, back when passports weren't really needed between the two countries, but kept a low profile; he also crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico briefly a few years earlier when Eddy Arnold played in El Paso, talking some US Marshals into accompanying him).
But wait: even if he was an undocumented immigrant, Parker had served in the Army and was married (if not formally) to an American citizen. And he had powerful friends in government, including then-Senator Lyndon Johnson. He easily could've gained amnesty, and then probably American citizenship, if he'd wanted to. One of the few logical reasons he might pass up the opportunity would be if he'd committed some crime before he left Holland and was afraid of extradition.
Well...
Let's go back to Breda and May of 1929. Anna van den Enden, the 23-year-old newlywed bride of a neighborhood grocer, was found murdered in her house, just three blocks away from the van Kuijk residence, in an apparent home invasion robbery. One curious detail investigators found was that the assailant had spread pepper around the body, probably to throw off any scent that bloodhounds could pick up. Within a day of the murder, Andre van Kuijk (who'd worked as a carnival animal tender, including dogs, at one point) suddenly left for America.
To be fair, there's no physical evidence linking him to the crime, and the Breda police never named him as either a suspect or person of interest, but as Parker's Dutch origins came to light following Elvis' death, some people started putting two and two together. Parker as a fugitive certainly makes for a good explanation for his illogical actions, including his estrangement from his Dutch family. They only learned of his whereabouts when his sister saw him standing next to Elvis in a magazine photo. The son of his brother Ad van Kuijk (also named Ad) sent Parker a letter asking if he was his uncle. Parker sent an odd letter in return, addressed to "Master Ad van Kuyk"[sic] (misspelling his own birth surname speaks volumes about Parker's alienation from his past), initially starting out in third-person, as though it was written by a secretary, then suddenly lapsing into first-person, including this cryptic statement: "Mistakes some-one [sic] may have made without meaning to do so." Whoever killed Anna van den Enden took that secret to the grave, but it's worth mentioning that under Dutch law, the statute of limitations for crime suspects to be validly arrested is 30 years. Whoever killed her was a free man after May of 1959. And Parker doesn't seem like someone who would've been aware of the ins-and-outs of Dutch criminal law. Parker only divulged his Dutch origins to a few select people in his life, and Elvis doesn't seem to have been one of them.
Whatever happened in 1929, by the end of The '50s, Parker had Elvis' career carefully managed down to the smallest points. An underappreciated turn of events was the death of Gladys in 1958. She could no longer provide any resistance to Parker, and he knew the ineffectual, like-minded Vernon would rubberstamp any plans he came up with. Parker successfully steered Presley's Army stint, and subsequent focus on movies and a more broadly appealing, if less-distinctive, pop direction in his music.note He locked Elvis into a longterm movie deal, and when they started becoming less profitable, he just shifted the strategy to working on volume, releasing lower-budgeted movies on a fairly quick turnaround schedule (roughly a new movie every four months by the middle of The '60s), with no concern for quality. As a result, Elvis started slipping into irrelevance.
But couldn't Parker see that diluting the quality of Elvis' works would eventually drive people away, while, on the other hand, taking the time to do something worthwhile would pay dividends? Maybe, but three broad themes emerge in Parker's story. One is good old-fashioned greed. Parker, exploiting Presley's lack of business sense, took a flat rate of 25% of Elvis' profits, very high for a manager (for comparison, Brian Epstein only claimed 25% of The Beatles if they hit a certain high profit threshold, and never more than that). Another is Parker being a world-class Control Freak. He absolutely insisted on having the final say on everything Elvis, right down to his personal life. Presley's 1967 marriage to longtime girlfriend Priscilla Beaulieu was largely arranged by Parker, and Parker essentially ordered Elvis to cut off ties with his friend Larry Geller, a hairdresser who'd gotten Elvis interested in spiritual pursuits (Elvis had even sampled LSD under Geller's guidance). Parker even displayed this controlling streak with other business associates, dictating who and when they should marry. And lastly, Parker's Never My Fault attitude. He always had a ready excuse for any negative turn in Presley's career, usually painting himself as an outside-the-box thinker looking out for Elvis' longterm stability.
Another interesting little thread is the psychological undertones of their relationship. While many associates felt that Parker saw Elvis as a surrogate son, his behavior really seems more like a Stage Dad than anything else. There's plenty of evidence that Parker viewed Presley as sort of a younger, idealized alter ego of himself, with an undercurrent of wish-fulfillment in many Elvis projects. Parker had worked in traveling shows, served in the Army in Hawaii, and loved Las Vegas. Elvis had numerous projects involving traveling shows (Roustabout, the "Guitar Man" production number in the 1968 TV special, The Trouble with Girls—about a Chatauqua company), Hawaii (his 1960 concert there, Blue Hawaii, Girls! Girls! Girls!, Paradise, Hawaiian Style, the Aloha From Hawaii TV special) and Vegas (his 1956 Vegas stint, Viva Las Vegas!, the late-career Vegas years). Fans of The Beach Boys who read about Parker will find some very intriguing parallels between him and Murry Wilson.
So why didn't Elvis stand up to Parker when his career was in its doldrums? He made some attempts, but Parker's Never My Fault gambits always worked. He would invoke an alleged deathbed promise he made to Gladys Presley to look after her son (so Elvis rejecting Parker meant he'd rejected his own sainted mother), or would imply that RCA Records had deep connections with The Mafia, and would kill off Elvis if he dropped Parker (Parker told Elvis that Sam Cooke was murdered for defying RCA). The one major time Presley stood up to Parker was with the comeback special, when the producers successfully talked Elvis into siding with them in rejecting Parker's plan to make a bland Christmas Special, in favor of a dynamic Revisiting the Roots show. One reason Parker willingly took the loss (but not without a fight) is that Parker saw the special as merely the first chapter in the next phase of Presley's career.
From Hollywood to Vegas
The special was a huge success, followed by the Memphis recording sessions that produced some of Elvis' most enduring music (like the From Elvis in Memphis album and the hits "Suspicious Minds" and "Kentucky Rain"). It seemed like Elvis had new leverage, and Parker could perhaps take it easy now that his boy was back on top. But Parker's new plans were grueling: movies were now replaced by seven-day-a-week Vegas hotel stints, followed by long road tours. Elvis, with a shaky marriage and a longterm enthusiasm for using pharmaceutical drugs recreationally, couldn't sustain this pace and had become quite a mess by the first part of The '70s.The 1972-75 period saw some great triumphs, like the sold out Madison Square Garden shows and the Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite TV special, but this was also the period where Parker made his most questionable business decisions. One was increasing his share to 50% of the Elvis profits. Parker would claim that this was really him and Elvis agreeing to a "business partnership", but most everyone shook their heads when news of this came to light. Another was his 1973 deal to sell all of the Elvis back catalog to RCA for $5 million. Not only was this a ridiculously paltry sum, maybe ten times less than the catalog's actual value ($5 million is equivalent to $35 million in today's money), but now RCA had basically no incentive to care about the latest Elvis recordings, when they could endlessly repackage his classic material and rack up huge profit margins. Then he famously played hardball with Barbra Streisand over casting Elvis as the male lead in A Star Is Born (1976), leading to the withdrawal of an offer to play a role that could've relauched his film career. Naturally, Parker had excuses for all of these, namely that he was looking out for Elvis and his troubles, and perhaps was also keeping in mind his own history of heart attacks. But still, Elvis, whose personal relationship with Parker was strained (on tours Parker would stay in different hotels from Elvis and would often leave for the next city before the show even started), finally had enough, and with the backing of Vernon, told Parker he was going to fire him in 1974. Parker retaliated by asking Elvis for a $2 million buyout payment. Elvis couldn't afford it, so nothing changed.
But if Parker was resigned to being his manager, why didn't he do anything about Elvis' drug problems? Among the Elvis inner circle, this is hotly debated. Some think Parker didn't know about the drugs, others think he knew, but was afraid of the scandal that might happen if Elvis went to rehab, or just hoped Elvis could deal with it on his own. But another factor was that Parker was struggling with his own major addiction problem: gambling. By The '70s he was millions of dollars in debt (reports say he lost around a million dollars a year gambling).
After Elvis
Of course, Elvis would die in 1977, but it often seemed like Parker had been preparing for this inevitability. After learning the news, Parker's first phone call was to Vernon Presley. His second phone call was to the merchandiser who produced the Farrah Fawcett swimsuit poster. For Parker, the death was almost a godsend. As one of his associates put it, a dead Elvis was easier to control than a living Elvis. So Parker oversaw a major merchandising campaign, which struck many as crass, but generated tons of money, and continued the push after Vernon Presley's death in 1979.But with Elvis gone, there was renewed scrutiny on Parker, and his Dark and Troubled Past was about to catch up with him. Stories of his Dutch background had long circulated in The Netherlands, but were often dismissed as mere rumor or fantasy. But acting on an anonymous tip in 1977, Dutch journalist Dirk Vellenga uncovered all the details, reporting them in a series of newspaper articles. Using Vellenga's research, Albert Goldman covered Parker's Dutch origins in his best-selling, controversial 1981 biography Elvis, making the story public knowledge once and for all. While this may have temporarily humbled Parker, he found a way to use it to his advantage. Facing legal pressure from both the Elvis estate (acting on behalf of his daughter Lisa Marie) and RCA, Parker claimed that he couldn't be sued because he was stateless. He never sought US citizenship, but by serving in the US Army, he'd forfeited his Dutch citizenship. Shortly after that, he settled his legal fights out of court. But was that the truth? One Elvis expert has contacted the Dutch government, who said that he always remained on file as a Dutch citizen, since they never received formal word of his military service.
Parker spent his final years in Las Vegas, ravaged by heart disease, diabetes, gout and strokes (as it turned out, much of this was hereditary, with his van Kuijk siblings in Holland suffering the same ailments). Still, by that point he'd achieved living legend status, albeit because of his Elvis ties. He died on January 21, 1997 at age 87, following a fall caused by a massive stroke. He left behind a complicated legacy, with many of his associates recalling him fondly as a person, even if they didn't care for him as a businessmannote .
Biographies of Parker:
- Elvis and the Colonel by Dirk Vellenga and Mick Farren (1989), based on Vellenga's reporting, gives the details of Andre van Kuijk's Dutch youth, but rehashes a number of tall tales that Consummate Liar Parker told about his carnival years. Very scathing portrayal of Parker's dealings with Elvis in his final years.
- The Colonel by Alanna Nash (2003) benefits from extensive research and Nash having known Parker personally. It also was the first time that his possible connection to the Anna van den Enden murder was revealed publicly (Vellenga knew about the story, but couldn't report on it while Parker was alive). Both books unfortunately dwell too heavily on the more sordid parts of Elvis' declining years.
Film and television portrayals of Parker:
- Pat Hingle—Elvis (1979 Made-for-TV Movie)
- Hugh Gillin—Elvis and Me (1988 Made-for-TV Movie)
- Beau Bridges—Elvis and the Colonel: The Untold Story (1993 Made-for-TV Movie)
- Randy Quaid—Elvis (2006 Mini Series)
- John Carroll Lynch—Shangri-La Suite (2016 fictionalized Crime Drama film)
- Gene Jones—Vinyl (2016, 1 episode)
- Billy Gardell—Sun Records (2017 Mini Series)
- Tom Hanks—Elvis (2022)
Parodies and Shout-Outs to Parker:
- The Simpsons: "Colonel Homer" has Homer becoming the manager of Country Music singer Lurleen Lumpkin, taking on the nickname Colonel Homer and wearing the type of garish cowboy garb that Parker was known for.
- Saturday Night Live: A 1989 sketch featured clips from Waikiki Hockey, allegedly an Elvis-like movie that guest host Wayne Gretzky starred in, which is credited as "A Colonel Tom Parker Production".
- Carl Hiaasen's novel Basket Case features a Savannah Monitor lizard whose owner (an obituary writer), names him "Colonel Tom", because he received the lizard on the anniversary of Parker's death.
