The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  It started out small—an offer to help a vendor nail the boards together for his booth in exchange for a candied apple. From there, he was promised free admission for helping the roustabouts raise the tents. His mother somehow found out that he intended to aid in the building of the viewing stands and thwarted his plans. But she couldn’t stop him from hiring out as an advance man, bumping along the cobblestone streets of Breda on a high, old-fashioned bicycle with a sandwich board hung over his shoulders.

  Before long, he was working shoulder to shoulder with the principals, first as a circus water boy—following along after the clowns and smoking the butts of the cigars they threw on the ground—then as a feeder and caretaker of animals. And when he got a little older, as a barker.

  “I worked for a gypsy and stood in front of her tent,” he once said. “I waved my cane and called to people who passed by, ‘Have your fortunes told for fifty cents.’ I would get to keep twenty-five cents.” Then came the day when he told a fortune himself and “got to keep the whole fifty cents.”

  With that marriage of commerce and con, and the promotional, marketing, and image-making tricks he was starting to pick up about how to sell a show, the spirit of Tom Parker was beginning to take form in the body of young Dries van Kuijk. Everything that he would ever be would have its genesis in Breda, in the swirl of noise and color and excitement of the fairgrounds and the circus, and in his search for the biggest attraction of all. That quest would ultimately end with a kid from South Memphis, in Tennessee, in another land, far across the ocean.

  As an individual whose entire life was built on lies and fabrications, two key features of Dries van Kuijk’s personality were starting to emerge: his need to hustle as opposed to earn honestly or by merit, and his delight in the con as the highest form of creative achievement.

  Although that is not to say that Dries ever lost his generous streak, which could show itself when least expected—but almost never when called upon by others. As an adult, his largesse had to be spontaneous and self-generated—he intensely disliked being asked for charity—and if possible, involve somebody else’s money. If that proved impossible, the next best thing was to ask a company for free goods, which he would then pass on to promote a good image for himself and to reap the glory of magnanimity. That pattern—which culminated in his frequent donning of a Santa Claus suit, Christmas or not, and dispensing candy to children—apparently began in Holland.

  Each Friday a farmer from the northern village of Teteringen would come to the van Kuijks’ to collect some horse manure and bring fresh straw and hay. He would leave his bicycle parked near the front of the stables. One Friday, he returned to his bicycle, hoping to be home for his noon meal, only to find his transportation missing. Dries had taken the bike to ride to the home of his friend Cees Frijters, who lived on the Ginnikenstraat.

  On the way over, the boy began thinking about the Teteringen farmer and concocted an intricate ruse. Dries and Cees would ride the bike in tandem back to Teteringen, but to visit yet another farmer, one who was unknown to them, who sold fruits and vegetables. Once there, Dries would pretend that he was from England—making up a foreign language out of English and French—so the farmer would give the boys bags full of apples as a token of hospitality.

  The trick worked, and loaded with booty, the boys rode to the Teteringen orphanage. There, according to Engelina, “the orphans stood in a row of twelve, and Dries gave them each an apple.” The rest he took home to his mother.

  Adam van Kuijk was so angry at his son that when the boy finally arrived at the stables that evening, his father sent him straight to bed without any supper, giving the farmer his dinner instead. Later on, Maria, grateful for the fruit for her family, slipped her errant son a sandwich, as she almost always did when Adam sent him upstairs without supper.

  “He would scheme, but always in a good way,” says Mieke Dons-Maas, Engelina’s daughter. “Some people might have thought he was a terrible guy. But others had to laugh because they had fun with him.”

  Through childhood and adulthood, “fun” was uppermost in Dries’s mind. From as long as anyone can remember, the quick-witted boy used his imagination to entertain his younger siblings, making a dull, dreary morning an event to remember.

  The child was so accomplished at storytelling, in fact, that the van Kuijk children began looking forward to bedtime. “They all slept in the loft, the boys on one side and the girls on the other, with a door and some curtains separating them,” Mieke Dons-Maas remembers her mother saying. “They’d get ready for sleep, and lay in their beds, and the girls would call out, Okay, Dries, . . . tell.’ And Dries would open the door and tell his stories. He was unique in all the family.”

  Indeed, he seemed to be driven by something that the others weren’t. “He never hurt anyone, but he was always up to something,” remembers sister Nel. “He did everything that the others didn’t dare.”

  And seemed to relish it. When his father was away delivering packages, he even risked leading the other children in play in the stables—an area off limits for such antics—and always assumed the starring role. On rainy days, he began by closing the big stable door and pulling out the spare carts and the karos, or horse-drawn coach, and letting the children jump gleefully among them. When they tired of that, he climbed to the top of the silos where the hay was dropped down to the horses, and repeatedly slid down the big copper pipe.

  For his big finale, the young performer would walk on the backs of the horses, doing tricks and balancing acts as he jumped from one to the other—“even on the back of the meanest horse,” says Mieke Dons-Maas; “the stallion who stood apart from all the others in another box.”

  Dries had no fear of the stallion, nor of most creatures. From the age of seven, he had begun putting on little tent shows and charging admission, and he was prone to take all sorts of animals into the living quarters and let them run free. But when he impetuously sold the goat to the circus for one guilder and the promise of free tickets for all the van Kuijks the week the big top was in town, the boy got a beating.

  Dries’s clashes with his father became more routine as he grew older, more independent, and headstrong. As the instigator of the children’s more outlandish games, he was considered mutinous, and his father began to punish him in ways that seemed overly severe.

  The breaking point came shortly after Dries began working for a small local circus on the Kloosterplein, run by a family named van Bever. The van Bevers couldn’t compete with the big European outfits; all they had to offer was a trumpet-playing clown, a dancing midget, and a wild donkey that bucked like a bronco (“Stay on his back five minutes and win five guilders!”). But Dries was guaranteed work there every season, and the little circus had something that stimulated his drive and imagination: Madam van Bever was a skilled and accomplished horse trainer, with a desire to work a string of elegant Lipizzaner stallions into the act.

  Each day as Dries helped Madam van Bever with these horses, he was struck by how graceful and romantic they were in comparison to his - father’s plodding work animals. And then it hit him: Why couldn’t he train his father’s horses to do some of the same tricks?

  On Sundays, Dries was appointed to mind the stables. With no deliveries scheduled that day, there wasn’t much for him to do except sit and nod off to the occasional sound of a swishing horse tail. On these Sunday afternoons, the story goes, Dries would spread the children’s blankets on the stable floor to muffle the sound of hoofbeats, so that his mother wouldn’t hear upstairs. Promising his siblings that he would have a big surprise for them in a few weeks if they simply left him alone, he would lead two horses from their stalls and train them to trot in a circle while he stood on their backs. After several sessions, he could straddle the two in an act as precise as any he had admired at the circus.

  Finally, the Sunday came when Dries was ready to share his secret. He called for his brothers and sisters, invited a few neighborhood children, and showed them where to stand
along the stable walls. Then he moved easily among the big horses, untying first two, then two more, and leading them out of their stalls.

  Now Dries positioned the horses around him in a ring. Drawing himself up with the bearing of a ringmaster, he cracked his father’s long, thin wagoner’s whip, and as if by magic, the tired, old workhorses snapped to attention, rearing on their hind legs, pawing the air, and then prancing around the stables as if they’d been grand and glorious show animals all their lives.

  Just as Dries was bringing the beasts to a kneel-and-curtsy farewell, his father burst through the big double doors with a force that froze every child in his place. He stood with his hands behind him on the latch, his face twisted in anger. Dries’s antics not only endangered the valuable animals—what if they’d injured their backs?—but threatened the family’s very livelihood. If the firm were to hear of this, Adam could lose his job and be tossed out on the street with nowhere to live, his reputation forever sullied.

  “Andreas van Kuijk!” he bellowed. “You will never amount to anything!”

  With all the children looking on, Adam methodically unbuckled and removed his thick harness belt, then commanded his wayward son to bend over a chair. Dries van Kuijk would get the whipping of his life—one that would surely knock this circus folly out of him for good.

  The story of Adam’s beating the boy while the others watched would go a long way to explain the origin of a third key trait that showed up in - Dries’s personality in adulthood: his need to humiliate others around him, especially those in subordinate positions.

  Whether the story of the horses is rooted in truth—some of the siblings believe it to be a fabrication—certainly the boy’s relationship with his stern, authoritarian father left a scar on his psychological make-up. With his mother, who nurtured and forgave him, he could be himself. But his father made him feel only like an unlovable failure.

  And so, until the boy could physically get away from the grim side of his home life, he would begin to learn how to suspend his tender and affectionate feelings, to be resilient and strong in the face of adversity, while acting as if nothing were wrong. He also began to retreat more into himself, to compartmentalize his life, and to live several lives at once, one at home, and another while he was away. Finally, he learned to show the people in each life only what he wanted them to see. In some ways, he grew to be as inscrutable, obdurate, and obstinate as his father.

  Secrecy had been part of Dries’s personality since the age of five, but now the pattern became more pervasive, even with his mother. For example, Engelina remembered that Maria had given each of her children a drawer—a place for himself—in a big hutch, where they kept small treasures.

  “You could close the drawer, but my brother’s had a lock on it so that nobody could get into it,” she said. But as Marie remembers, “our mother was clever. She drew out all the drawers so that she could get in and discover all our secrets.” The result was that Dries began to feel as if no one could be trusted.

  If ten-year-old Dries could not get the attention and respect he craved at home, he found it in actions that were valued by his peers, winning approval and admiration from his fellow students by acting out.

  Maria van Kuijk could have placed her son in a free school for the children of the poor. But her pride and Catholic propriety directed that she pay the equivalent of fifty cents a week for Dries to go to the all-boys St. Antoniusschool, run by the friars of the order of Huijbergen, and located on the Karrestraat.

  From the beginning, Dries chafed against the rigid rules of the Huijbergen brothers, who corrected wayward students with harsh, punitive, and often sadistic methods, including the smart sting of a strap.

  As the class clown, the boy was often in trouble, making jokes about the teachers or the subjects of their lessons, proving himself someone to be contended with, and trying the friars’ mercy. Then came the day when he scored a 3 out of 10 on an exam, and was ordered to take the paper home and get his father’s signature. But Dries was either too ashamed or too afraid to show it, and so he forged his father’s handwriting. He was found out, and the brothers doled out a distinctly Dutch punishment, making him kneel with his knees shoved into a pair of wooden shoes until he could no longer tolerate the pain.

  Yet even that did not deter his mischief, and so the van Kuijks enrolled him in the public elementary school, the Openbare Lagere School, on the Boschstraat, near their home. Dries didn’t settle in to the new school any more easily than the first, and was often truant, leaving school anytime he took a notion. He spent such afternoons rambling around, looking for adventure down at the Prinsenkade, where he watched the ships, visiting an uncle on his boat at the inland harbor of Oosterhout, hanging out at the abandoned World War I defenses at the Nonnenveld, and hitchhiking to any nearby village when a circus or fair was in town.

  The child thought he wanted to escape Breda and his family altogether. But at eleven, that was impossible. Still, he made a halfhearted attempt at running away from home, sneaking aboard the passenger train to Rotterdam, where he was caught and turned over to his father.

  His schooling came to an end in the fifth grade, after a typical adolescent prank on the birthday of one of his teachers. The man had been cursed with a generous and unfortunate nose, the object of much ridicule among his students. This day, when the teacher was called out of the classroom, Dries rose from his seat, walked to the front of the class, and wrote, “Long live the nose!” on the blackboard. His classmates jeered and giggled, but on returning, the infuriated teacher expelled the boy on the spot. It was just as well—Dries no doubt would have quit the following year, at the end of primary school.

  For a while, he spent his days helping his father. In the last ten years, - Adam’s health had steadily declined. Now, in addition to his diabetes, he suffered lung problems, rheumatism, and a swelling in his feet that sometimes made it difficult for him to make his rounds.

  But after Dries injured his hand—one of the heavy coaches slipped while he was greasing a wheel, and his mother had to rush him to the doctor—the teen began looking for someone else to assist his father.

  Away from the stables, Dries’s first jobs were menial, at best. For a while, he went down to the train station each day and carried luggage for busy travelers. Then he got a job as a delivery boy for a grocery store, but was soon let go, and from there went to the same jam factory where his brother Sjef had once worked. Both jobs should have pleased him, since food was like gold to him. But he found these tasks boring.

  He much preferred the kind of pickup work he got when the dog show booked several days at Breda’s Concordia Theatre. Unlike a thoroughbred kennel show, this was an exhibition of performing dogs who did tricks on command—hounds who hopped like rabbits, poodles who danced the cancan line on two legs—much like a canine circus. There he would feed and groom the animals, and receive the handsome sum of five guilders for his trouble. Better still, he would learn more about the training of dogs.

  The lad found regular employment again selling and checking tickets on a trolley that ran between Breda and Oosterhout. But the bitter wind whipped through the trolley, and after a while, he decided he’d had enough.

  Finally, at fifteen, things began to look up when he went to work for a barber and his wife who ran a shop on the Oude Vest. The couple, who had no children, pampered the boy as their own, paying him ten cents a day. They made excuses for their young assistant if he left customers with soap in their hair when he heard music out in the street or, for a lark, shaved half a man’s face and let him walk out with the other half still covered with stubble.

  Despite such behavior, the barber and his wife wanted to adopt the teenager and bring him into the business full-time. Maria didn’t like the idea of her son living elsewhere, but with Dries’s combative attitude toward his father, she advised him to take advantage of his opportunity. In the end, however, Dries wasn’t interested. He wanted only to be his own boss, to make his money on his own tim
e, in his own way. And he harbored resentment toward those who had “made it.”

  “Possessing money was very important for him,” remembers Marie. The family knew one thing for certain: “Don’t touch his wallet.”

  One of the reasons Dries wanted money was to buy fine clothes. Engelina recalled that “he was very conscious about how he looked,” and Marie remembers that “if Mother didn’t iron his collar properly, he would throw it away and not wear it.”

  At sixteen, the boy was growing up and now requested that he no longer be addressed by the diminutive name of Dries, but by the more proper sounding Andre. Still, he didn’t seem to be concerned with much of a social life. Other than his friendship with Cees Frijters, he almost insisted on a kind of apartness from the rest of the world. Even the idea of getting together in a crowd and sharing a few brews didn’t appeal to him, after he experimented with beer early on and found that it made him a violent drunk. Later, in middle age, he would drink perhaps half a bottled beer in social situations, but no more.

  “He would never drink a complete beer,” remembers Joe Esposito, foreman of Elvis’s Memphis Mafia. “He told me, ‘I can’t drink. I completely change when I drink, my personality does. I get very mean.’ ”

  Above all in his teen years, he seemed completely disinterested in any attachment to the opposite sex. “I’m sure that by the time he was seventeen, he still had not been with a girl,” says Marie. “He had no sexual interests whatsoever.” While that may have been normal for the culture of the times, the boy may have also felt trapped by the dangers of dependency. But whether he was truly asexual, or if there was perhaps some sexual squeamishness among several of the van Kuijk children—Marie volunteers that she and her husband lived as brother and sister for fifty-three years—Marie says she can’t imagine why her brother eventually married, unless it was to be cared for.