The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  “He was a ball of fire, he worked hard, he got up early, and he was a nondrinker,” Arnold says, reflecting on Parker’s tireless efforts on his behalf. “He had a lot of energy. Actually, he was good at everything. He understood business, he was good with the record company, and he was good with the personal appearances. He was absolutely dedicated to the personality that he represented.”

  Although other managers stayed in their office and used the phone to complete their advance work, Parker crisscrossed the country setting up tours, often staying away for two months at a time, and bringing along for company either Bitsy Mott, Marie’s diminutive brother, or Bevo Bevis, the twenty-six-year-old boy-man. Behind them, Parker towed a humpbacked trailer emblazoned with cartoonish renderings of Eddy’s face, and filled it with posters, fly sheets, signs, pictures, and banners—anything to spread the word that “Eddy Arnold, the Tennessee Plowboy and His Guitar,” as the trailer boasted in foot-high letters, was coming to town.

  “When he was settin’ up a tour,” says Gabe Tucker, “he’d try to get enough money from whoever was promoting it, and, hell, he would go back to the same places sometimes two or three times if it was necessary, makin’ sure folks knowed Eddy was a-comin.’ And he’d tell the promoter, ‘Put it on the radio. My boy can’t draw you no people if they don’t know he’s gonna be here,’ see. He would work on it and stay on it. That’s one reason Eddy got in the bracket that he did, ’cause Tommy worked his ass off. If he was awake,” adds Tucker, “he was preachin’ Eddy Arnold to anybody that’d listen.”

  And like a member of any secret society, Parker knew just where to go when he needed help, back to the place and the people who still churned in his blood. To promote Eddy’s early records, especially, Parker went home to the carnival, where the bearded ladies and the sprightly midgets and the fixers in their pin stripe suits and diamond rings took him in, blaring Arnold’s songs over their loudspeakers as a favor to one of their own.

  Yet “Tommy’s boy,” as the carnies affectionately called the singer, was embarrassed by such display and, on tour, quickly tired of the out-of-the-way drives to thank a hard-bitten carny manager for playing and selling his records.

  “We got somebody up at this turnoff we need to go see,” Parker would begin, driving out in the middle of the pitch-black nowhere, on a night pierced only by the light of the stars. Eddy, knowing what was coming, and chagrined about having to meet some leopard-skinned strongman with a neck like a pillar, finally began to voice his discontent. “Tom, do I have to? Do I have to . . . ? ”

  Eddy was not the only one who chafed at some of the new manager’s methods of doing business. Almost immediately, Parker began to expand Arnold’s tours beyond the bankable South and Southwest, taking the band and the opening act, the straw-hatted comedy duo of Lonzo and Oscar, as far north as Pennsylvania. He also stepped up the schedule, booking more dates than they’d ever played before, which meant they performed five nights during the week, drove all night Friday to get home by Saturday to play the Grand Ole Opry, and then left again on Sunday.

  “It was really too much,” remembers steel guitarist Little Roy Wiggins, who had played behind Paul Howard at fourteen and Pee Wee King at fifteen before joining the Tennessee Plowboys. “I told Parker he was queer for that white line in the middle of the highway, because he just had to run up and down that road like crazy.”

  Once, after Eddy got rolling a little bit, Parker booked him into the city auditorium in Chattanooga, where the promoter had a reputation for not paying the artist. Parker had already gotten half of his money in advance and intended to collect the remaining half in cash before the show started.

  “Tom came back backstage while the musicians were standing there, strumming their guitars, waiting,” Eddy recalls. “And he said to me, - ‘Don’t you hit a lick until I go [waves his hand].’ That would mean he had gotten the money. Well, he went to this gentleman [the promoter], and he said, ‘You know, those singers, they’re funny. They won’t sing a note unless I wave my hand.’ A couple of minutes later, I peeped through the curtain and he waved at me, and we did the show.”

  Despite Arnold’s cachet as an RCA Victor recording artist and a member of the Grand Ole Opry, in the early days the idea of playing any city auditorium would have been a mere pipe dream for Arnold, whose tenure with Parker got off to a modest start. Bitsy Mott remembers the dates included towns in Texas that were so small and remote that the show was literally staged in a barn.

  “We used to play all those places,” he says, “and sometimes you had to kick the debris out of your way before you could let people come in—cows had been in there, you know. We set up wooden benches, and it was ‘A dollar a ticket, sit where you like.’ I used to hear him say that all the time.”

  The early tours were heady experiences for the young troupers, who were constantly learning something new about the business, and about each other. Parker vowed to always carry a fresh cigar, so that when the negotiations started and the questions came, he could light the stogie, puff some fire through it until he coaxed an orange hue at its end, and set it up for business in the corner of his mouth. By then, he’d had time to consider his answer.

  Parker’s habit of seeing how much he could get for as little as he could give reached new heights of audacity as Eddy’s career heated up. The manager found it increasingly necessary to remain in Nashville when the group came in off the road. As he had done from the beginning, Parker took it for granted that he was welcome to stay with Eddy and his wife, Sally, a Kentucky girl whom Arnold married in late 1941 while performing with Pee Wee King.

  One guest in the house had been enough for the Arnolds, who tried to keep their business and home life separate. But now Parker brought the hapless Bevo, whom Parker called Arnold’s “tour manager” in the press, and Marie, who exuded a certain chilliness to both Sally and Roy - Wiggins’s wife, Joyce. And before long, Bobby Ross, who hoped to become a manager or promoter after apprenticing with Parker (he would eventually handle Slim Whitman and assist the Colonel in winning - Whitman’s first record contract), came up from Tampa and moved in right along with them. The foursome stayed anywhere from three or four days to nearly a month.

  This parasitic arrangement fit the pattern of Parker’s freeloading days of old, and seemed not to bother the thrifty Dutchman in the slightest, no matter who it inconvenienced. Eddy and Sally had recently bought a five-room redbrick bungalow in Madison, about seven miles west of downtown Nashville. But since Eddy’s mother, Georgia, often lived there, too, and the couple welcomed the birth of daughter Jo Ann in December 1945, the house was full.

  Fifty years later, Sally Arnold still rolled her eyes when the subject came up, too much of a Southern lady to say more. At the time, Eddy managed to keep his composure, until Parker also took over Arnold’s newly rented office in the upstairs of a Madison real estate firm.

  “Tommy told him, ‘Plowboy, you need a place where you can store all of your songbooks,’ ” Gabe Tucker remembers. “And hell, he just dropped the shuck on him then. Eddy paid for the whole thing, and Tommy had a bigger office than Eddy did and never paid a nickel on it. Eddy started to say something to him about it, and Tommy said, ‘Well, me taking care of you. Give me a better place to do it.’ He never paid for office space, nowhere, his whole life.”

  It was at this point, after the Parkers had imposed on the Arnolds’ hospitality for a particularly long and grating stay, that Eddy prompted one of Parker’s most famous lines. As the singer wrote in his autobiography, “I said to him once when he was managing me, ‘Tom, why don’t you get yourself a hobby—play golf, go boating, or something?’ He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘You’re my hobby.’ ”

  The Arnolds found relief only after Parker bought a small but stately fieldstone home nearby on Madison’s Gallatin Road.

  By the time Parker assumed Arnold’s management, the Tennessee Plowboy, who would become one of the most prolific hit-making artists of all time, had made his f
irst indelible mark with “Each Minute Seems a Million Years.” The song rose to the number five spot in Billboard’s tabulation of best-selling “folk” music.

  To move beyond any initial blush of success, however, Eddy needed an energetic team working in tandem. While Steve Sholes, the heavy-set and avuncular head of RCA Records’ country and R&B divisions, was already in place, Tom Parker would head that team and rely on it for his own advancement in the industry. Eventually he would bring all the players to the group that would later figure so heavily in taking Elvis to the top, most prominently Hill and Range music publishers Jean and Julian Aberbach, and Harry Kalcheim and Abe Lastfogel of the powerful William Morris Agency. Nearly every major career move he guided for Arnold—a string of chart-topping records, the judicious use of early television, a foray into Hollywood movies, and even engagements in Las Vegas—served as the blueprint for Parker’s plan with Elvis.

  From the instant he took over Arnold’s career, Parker began building momentum, not just for Arnold, but for himself. In what would serve as his lifelong pattern of artist and record company relations, he kept his client as isolated from the record label as possible. By appearing to make himself indispensable to both parties, he hoped to increase his importance and clout, while manipulating his client’s knowledge of the intricacies of the deals.

  Above all, it was imperative that the record label executives—and others in the trade—see Parker as a figure of equal or greater stature to his artist. In magazine and newspaper advertisements he coupled his name with that of Eddy’s—UNDER EXCLUSIVE MANAGEMENT OF THOMAS A. PARKER—in letters nearly the same size as those employed for Arnold’s. The idea was to convey not only Parker’s insistence that they were a team, but that Parker was a deal maker worthy of celebration and reward. Already he was having large studio portraits taken of himself, in which he smiled broadly from within the proud confines of an expensive pinstripe suit. He signed them “the Gov.”

  Three years later, in October 1948, Parker seized the opportunity to obtain a more prestigious title on a trip to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. With Gabe Tucker in tow, he called on an old carny acquaintance, Bob Greer, then an aide to Governor Jimmie Davis, who’d had an earlier taste of fame as a country singer with “You Are My Sunshine.” Parker and Greer carried on about their old shenanigans—“cutting up jackpots” in the carny vernacular—and Tucker, amused by Parker’s outrageous stories of the showman’s swindle, declared that anyone who could snow with such velocity should have a title, and put the request to Greer. Thrilled at the prospects of such an inspired con, Parker refused to leave town until the document, which commissioned him as a Louisiana colonel, with all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities thereunto appertaining, was in his hands.

  Until now, Parker had requested that the members of Arnold’s band refer to him as Popsy, a feigned intimacy designed to wheedle favors out of them. (“You like your room? Buy Popsy a cigar.”) But things had changed.

  “He turned around,” as Tucker remembers, “and said, ‘In the future, Mr. Tucker, you will make sure that everybody addresses me as Colonel.’ ” And so the former army deserter now carried what many construed as a military title.

  In his early years with Arnold, Parker was dictatorial in the extreme, laying down the law with theater managers over concession rights, and stripping Arnold’s band members of the songbook sales they shared in arrangement with Eddy. Now the old carny kept the songbook money for himself and his family, sending Bitsy and Bevo out in the aisles with their arms loaded up with books, pictures, and programs, and installing Marie at a table in the lobby.

  “The specter of Tom selling pictures and records down the aisles of a venue was one to behold,” says Bob McCluskey, former general promotion manager for RCA Victor. “That, to my knowledge, no pop manager had ever done.”

  But it also sent a seething shiver through Little Roy Wiggins. Parker delighted in stirring up trouble among the band members, who, before his arrival, had enjoyed an easy camaraderie. Since they never seemed to have an argument when he wasn’t around, eventually they recognized it as a control mechanism, Tucker seeing how Parker loved it when “all of us would run to him so he could be the great fixer,” and how the tales of internal bickering gave him a window onto everything that went on with his star.

  When Eddy told Parker that Wiggins was irate at the loss of $100 a week in songbook commissions and intimated he might quit, Parker sent the message that he didn’t care what Little Roy did. “Coinnal,” as Wiggins mocked the way Parker pronounced his new title and his inability to say r’s, had decided that’s the way it was going to be.

  With pressure building, an altercation was inevitable, and it came one night in El Paso, Texas, when Eddy played a private party there. Afterward, Wiggins, drinking a beer, headed for the bus to take him to the hotel.

  “Where do you think you’re going with that beer in your hand?” demanded one of Parker’s staffers. “You’re not getting on this bus with that beer.”

  “Just who in the hell says I’m not?” countered the five-foot Wiggins, empowered by the brew.

  “The Colonel says you’re not.”

  “Well, fuck the Coinnal!” Roy cursed in anger, and then went to Eddy and explained what happened. “I’ll kill that big, fat, sloppy mother,” he spewed. Eddy calmed him, said Parker was wrong, and he would speak to him about it tomorrow. But back at the hotel, goaded on by Vic Willis of the Willis Brothers, a featured act on Arnold’s shows, Wiggins could stand it no longer, remembering every slight he’d endured since Parker came on board—how he’d advised Arnold to take the band off a percentage basis and put them on salary, and how he’d cut them out of Arnold’s record royalties, something Eddy promised when he formed the band in 1943. Finally, Wiggins picked up the phone and called the Colonel himself. “It’s one of the things I am proudest of in my life,” says Wiggins. “I cussed him for thirty minutes—at least thirty minutes—until, well, he got to cryin’, really.”

  A tearful Parker tried to explain about the beer. “Don’t you know about insurance?” he said.

  “Don’t run that ‘snowplow’ at me,” Wiggins retorted. “I ain’t drivin’ that damn bus.”

  For three days, the men saw not one glimpse of each other. Then Wiggins was on the hotel elevator when it stopped on Parker’s floor. “Woy,” said Parker, standing in the door and waiting to get on, “I want to talk to you. Everything’s all right between me and you, except one thing. Did you say, ‘Fuck the Coinnal?’ ”

  “I had embarrassed him in front of his flunkies,” remembers Wiggins. “I think that really got through to him.”

  In time, the enigmatic Parker held himself above almost everyone—certainly the powers at RCA—in a nearly Machiavellian thirst to seize and hold power. That obsession, unencumbered by the usual ethical, moral, or social values (even his brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott, felt compelled to call him “sir”), would grow in direct proportion to Parker’s success, first with Arnold, whom he elevated to the number-one-selling country artist, and later with Elvis. Parker saw it only as maximizing the opportunity, both for his client and for himself.

  Perhaps Parker’s earliest test came in his negotiations with Jean and Julian Aberbach, the Viennese Jews who would become an essential spoke in the wheel that drove Eddy’s career.

  In 1944, only five years after Jean immigrated to the United States to work for Chappel Music, the Aberbach brothers founded Hill and Range Songs, Inc., a Los Angeles and New York–based company that specialized in C&W tunes.

  By the end of 1945, when most New York publishers saw no percentage in country-and-western music, the visionary Aberbachs had three songs at the top of the charts and $50,000 in the bank. Not surprising, then, the Aberbachs took keen notice of newcomer Arnold and particularly of the success that publishers Fred Forster and Wally Fowler enjoyed when the young singer recorded their songs. To sew up a rising star like Arnold—to have him predisposed to select songs from their catalog—would be a fine
thing. And so before Eddy’s recording session in early 1946, Jean and Julian, at Sholes’s invitation, met with Arnold, Parker, and the RCA producer to present songs and perhaps work out an agreement.

  In the immediate years to follow, the Aberbachs—shrewd, sophisticated, fastidiously dressed, and displaying such cultured accents and gracious European manners that some pronounced them “oily”—offered an array of incentives to induce label executives, artists, and managers to do business.

  Thus, before Arnold’s first session of 1946—his third session with Sholes and his fourth overall—the Aberbachs presented Eddy with a check for $20,000, a substantial amount of money for the time, but perhaps not so large considering what they hoped to get in return.

  “It was really for nothing, you see,” explains the erudite Julian Aberbach. “We promised Eddy that every good song that we had we would submit to him first before we went to any other artist. Then we tried to get the best songs that we had that would fit Eddy Arnold.”

  Beginning with the March 1946 recording session, where Arnold recorded two Hill and Range songs, the uptempo “Can’t Win, Can’t Place, Can’t Show” and “Chained to a Memory,” which climbed to number three on the Billboard chart, most Eddy Arnold sessions included at least one tune published by Hill and Range. For a time, says Bob McCluskey, “almost every release of any importance was a Hill and Range song.”

  To McCluskey, it was almost certain that Sholes, a family man, was secretly on the take, and that Parker, who exploited the greed of others, knew it. “If Eddy got the twenty grand, what do you think Sholes got? [They] obviously owed [their] soul to Hill and Range after taking the money. Once it’s in your pocket, there is no turning back, because they have you and they can talk.”