The Colonel

by Alanna Nash

  The day before that first Sullivan Show appearance, RCA’s Norman Racusin and a company attorney met with the Colonel in his suite at New York’s Warwick Hotel to amend Elvis’s contract, wiping out the $40,000 advance against royalties. Elvis and his cousins knocked on the door, coming to tell the Colonel they were going to Radio City Music Hall. Parker, fearing Elvis might get into a ruckus, wasn’t pleased, but Presley promised they’d just see the stage show and come back. Finally, Parker acquiesced.

  “Elvis was still standing there,” Racusin recalls, “and Parker said, ‘Now what?’ ” Elvis said, “I need some money.” Parker reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of cash and handed Elvis two one-hundred-dollar bills. “Now remember,” he admonished, “don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself.” “We won’t,” Elvis said.

  Things had moved so fast. Less than a year before, Parker had told a Texas teenager, Kay Wheeler, that she was free to start the first national Elvis Presley Fan Club. “Elvis is just one of our many attractions, and at the present time there are no fan club facilities for him, and we have no immediate plans for any,” Carolyn Asmus, Parker’s secretary, informed her by letter. Soon, Tom Diskin was sending her photos to mail out, and Elvis asked Wheeler, already well known as a “bop dancer,” to teach him her special “rock ’n’ bop” steps during a performance in San Antonio.

  But when the club’s membership quickly grew into the tens of thousands, Parker announced he was forming the “official” Elvis Presley Fan Club and, unlike Wheeler, charging a fee for the distribution of photographs, membership cards, and newsletters. After Elvis’s national TV appearances, the money poured into the little Madison, Tennessee, post office like a slot machine gone berserk.

  Bill Denny, the scion of Grand Ole Opry manager Jim Denny, who had famously turned Elvis down for Opry membership in 1954, was a Vanderbilt University student at the time. Through his father, he found a job that summer working for Colonel Tom Parker. Part of his routine was to drive a pickup down to the Madison post office “a couple of times a day” and load it up with mail, sometimes bringing along Bevo Bevis, who lived with the Parkers, to help with the bulging canvas sacks.

  By now, Parker had hired Tom Diskin’s quiet, loyal, and devoutly Catholic sisters, Mary and Patti. The Colonel booked them as a minor-league, supporting act under the name of the Dickens Sisters during the Eddy Arnold years, acquiring their brother, who managed them, in the deal. The sisters now worked in the shed Parker had converted to an office in back of the house, and with the help of Jimmy Rose, whom the Colonel temporarily installed as the new fan club president, they processed the astounding flow of fan mail, mostly by assembly line, dropping the money into a big metal tub on the floor. “No one really counted it, because it didn’t matter,” as Denny recalls. “If you were a kid someplace, and you wanted a picture of Elvis, you got it.”

  Within months, the task became so overwhelming that Parker paid Charlie Lamb $10,000 to take over the operation and moved the whole thing to a rented cafeteria in Nashville’s Masonic Lodge Building. Lamb installed twenty-one women to assemble Elvis packages of a picture, a membership card, and a button. But almost immediately, as Lamb remembers, “this thing became a beautiful, successful nightmare.” The cash came in at such a rate that Lamb couldn’t deposit it fast enough and asked the bank to send an armored car to collect it. Finally, after Presley’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in September 1956, Parker made a deal with Hank Saperstein, the merchandiser, to assume the fulfillment through his company, Special Projects.

  However, Parker’s idea was not to make money off the fans so much as it was to make it off deals, since he was never really concerned with selling Elvis to the public, but to the people who sold the public, first to the executives who controlled the television and radio networks, then the press, and soon the motion picture moguls. Above all, he enjoyed the fine art of negotiation, of winning, and of getting the best of the other man, even if it was a friend like Lee Gordon, who, along with Oscar Davis, promoted many of Elvis’s early shows.

  Since his days with Eddy Arnold, Parker never allowed a promoter to make more money than he did on an act. Where many promoters would hire a performer for $200 and take in $10,000 on the show, Parker, who refused to book Elvis into any venue that wouldn’t sell out and leave people clamoring to buy tickets (“a real stroke of genius,” says Sam Phillips), routinely adjusted the cost. That way, the promoter, who took the risk and did the real work in advancing the show, couldn’t cheat him on the ticket count, but he couldn’t make much profit, either. “You don’t have to be nice to people on the way up if you’re not coming back down,” Parker allegedly joked.

  From the beginning of their relationship, Parker, whose agreement with Elvis was for a 25 percent commission on all monies, royalties, or profits, also charged Elvis for any expenses, as he had Eddy Arnold. It was part of the game with the Colonel that he would pay nothing out of his own pocket, no matter how small or trivial. If he had lunch with someone, and his companion wouldn’t pick up the cost of his meal, Parker later wrote it off against Presley’s 75 percent, figuring Elvis was his only client, and that in one way or another, the conversation would have benefited his career.

  Elvis didn’t question such things, and as with the William Morris memo that gave Parker complete control over Presley’s film and television contracts, the singer wasn’t interested in the fine print. “As long as Elvis can write a check for something he wants, he doesn’t care how much money is in the bank,” Parker bragged to associates, and it was true. Elvis had put his total trust in Parker, and after a while, he never even glanced at the checks that Parker had his associates hand deliver. Shortly after they closed the RCA deal, Elvis sent his manager a telegram that pledged his absolute loyalty, in words that would later come back to haunt him:

  Dear Colonel, Words can never tell you how my folks and I appreciate what you did for me. I’ve always known and now my folks are assured that you are the best, most wonderful person I could ever hope to work with. Believe me when I say I will stick with you through thick and thin and do everything I can to uphold your faith in me. Again, I say thanks, and I love you like a father. Elvis Presley.

  What Elvis didn’t know at the time was that Parker collected money from side deals and outright hucksterism that likely never made it into his meticulous recordkeeping.

  “Promoters would come in to try to get an Elvis Presley concert,” remembers Byron Raphael, “and they’d ask what it would cost. The Colonel wouldn’t tell them. He’d say, ‘Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to bring in $50,000 in cash, and I want you to put it on the bed. And if it’s enough money, we’ll do a personal appearance for you. And if it isn’t enough money, you don’t get the personal appearance, but I keep ten percent just for my time.’ And people would do it.”

  Such chutzpah demonstrates Parker’s two major rules of business: first, that everything costs—there’s no free lunch; and second, always know where the money is before you make the deal.

  In service to his second rule, and purely for fun, Parker, whose Madison office was in the knotty-pine basement of his home, preferred to answer his business phone himself, rather than filter the calls through his secretary. He was in his element, says Bill Denny, surrounded by his banks of phones, each with a series of buttons and lines.

  “When someone would ask for Colonel Parker,” Denny remembers, “he would say, ‘Well, he’s on the phone right now.’ He’d find out who it was, and if it was someone he was in a deal with, he’d put them on hold. Then he’d come back a little later and say that the Colonel was still talking. And he’d really hammer them around. Many times I heard him trying to put a deal together, and he’d say, ‘Well, if you don’t take it now, the next call is going to cost you $10,000 more.’ ”

  As a smart manager booking Elvis’s personal appearances in the ’50s, Parker insisted on a minimum of 50 percent to 60 percent of the money up front; often the full amount was e
xpected with the return of a signed contract. Those promoters lucky enough to be allowed to pay on the date of the show knew to have cash, and not a check, ready before the performance, because, as Parker said, laughing, “I don’t want to end up with cider in my ear.”

  Still stinging from the days when carnival promoters left him holding the bag, he didn’t care what people thought about his tactics, preferring they found him difficult than stupid. Ninety percent of the people that he came up with in the business, he often said, were broke.

  But it was not a lavish lifestyle Parker hoped to achieve. In fact, the Parkers didn’t live beyond their means—they lived far below them. In full carny promotional mode, he might stroll around in fawn-colored pants, suspenders, white shoes, a pink satin shirt with elvis embroidered on the pocket, worn loose and untucked like a lady’s blouse to cover his stomach, and either a bowler or a five-gallon hat. But aside from ordering the occasional custom-made cowhide sport jacket or white linen suit from - Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors, Parker kept away from flamboyant clothes. Since the Eddy Arnold years, he had often dressed like a vagrant as part of his act, hoping to appear poorer and more homespun than he really was, to throw people off and give him an edge in negotiations.

  However, as Parker became more prosperous, he began to lavish luxuries on Marie. In Florida, the old-timers insist that Marie was always a rung above her husband on the social ladder, even with her impoverished origins and wild behavior. While others find it hard to believe (“Let’s say she wasn’t too much with the social graces—they were two of a kind, and nothing was ever going to change them,” ventures RCA publicity director Anne Fulchino), Marie’s union with Parker would, in time, allow her to reinvent herself, despite her husband’s own rough manners.

  As Maria van Kuijk had done, Marie would use the carriage of matrimony to separate from her past and rise to a higher social level, replete with the attendant costume jewelry, high-end clothing, and an endless array of shoes, remembering how, during the Depression, she’d worn cardboard liners to cover the holes in the soles. “She had a twelve-foot closet just for coats,” says her daughter-in-law Sandra Polk Ross, including a full-length white mink for which she went to New York to pick out the pelts. The irony was that other than when she traveled (“She was the only person I knew who brought her whole big jewelry chest with her,” recalls Ann Dodelin, whose husband, Ed, was RCA’s national record sales manager), she mostly kept her finery put away, preferring a more modest way of dress in public. She was happiest, some say, playing poker with her best friend, Mother Maybelle Carter.

  Parker denied her almost nothing, because, as his acolyte and friend the booking agent Hubert Long once observed, she was “the Colonel’s stable base.” Yet something about his psychological make-up made him unable to discard worn-out, useless objects. He directed Marie’s thinking along the same lines, even to moldy food left too long in the refrigerator. On occasion, people took notice.

  During his years with Arnold, Parker forged a close friendship with the well-known country disc jockey and promoter Connie B. Gay, who operated out of the Washington, D.C., area. Plainspoken and earthy (he once described Hank Williams as “a goner, just a pile of shit mixed with alcohol and pills”), Gay had worked as a huckster and street-corner salesman during the Depression, gathering a crowd by holding up a Gila monster and announcing, “I’m gonna eat this thing!”

  When the Colonel first acquired Elvis, it was natural that he continue the association with his old friend. He allowed Gay to book Presley on one of his country music cruises down the Potomac in March 1956, but “It was the only time I didn’t fill the boat,” Gay recalled. “There was an engine problem and we couldn’t take off. A lot of people wanted their money back, so I paid them and they missed Elvis.”

  Still, Gay’s children, daughter Judy and son Jan, remember that their parents and the Parkers were so close that Tom and Marie always stayed at the house when they were anywhere near the area, and the teenagers were told that they would go live with the Parkers if anything ever happened to Connie and Hazel.

  On one such visit, Judy, a huge Elvis fan whom Parker named the honorary president of the national fan club, sat wide-eyed as Marie dug to the end of her lipstick tube with a little brush. From the conversation, Judy got the impression Marie wasn’t allowed to buy more until she’d used every last bit. “Later, Mother said, ‘Well, if you knew Tom, you’d know why.’ ”

  Each time the Parkers came, the Gay children saw their mother wait on Tom hand and foot, cooking the foods he liked and ate in enormous quantities. Hazel timed her banana pudding so it would be warm for his arrival, and the teenagers watched as their father and Tom, whom they remember as “an old, fat, nice guy, always schemin’ with Daddy on how to make a buck with the hillbilly trade,” put away bowls of the stuff, reminiscing about the early years.

  “One reason Tom always stayed with us was so he could save a hotel bill,” says Jan. “This one time, we’d put him up for days, and as he started to leave, he said, ‘Hazel, I’d like to give you a little somethin’ for your hospitality.’ And he handed her a bag of all of the little hotel soaps -he’d collected on his most recent swing. That was her present. Everybody liked Tom,” he adds, laughing, “but he was a moocher, par excellence.”

  Parker’s frugality is a well-known part of the Snowman’s legend, and it was a favorite part of his con. But what only Marie knew was that Parker, fearing another heart attack, was terrified that he might die and leave Marie without means of support.

  When the next heart attack did come, in 1956—Bitsy Mott claims it was brought on by an argument with Elvis, who “was getting a little belligerent and didn’t want to show up on time”—it was mild, and Parker was merely confined to his Texas hotel room for several days.

  In the future, Parker would use his heart condition as a form of manipulation, taking to his bed until Elvis capitulated and fell into line. Nonetheless, the underlying disease was real, and he unsuccessfully tried to sell Elvis’s contract to both Oscar Davis and Connie B. Gay.

  Parker’s brushes with mortality brought all the crushing depression that often attends heart attacks, and triggered a host of old anxieties, most prominently his abnormal fear of death.

  To a man like Andreas van Kuijk, with the dogma of the Catholic church still underpinning his conception of heaven and hell, the possibility of a third and fatal heart attack, coupled with the events of long ago in Holland, may have weighed heavy on his mind. But whether from honest altruism, tax considerations, or the fear of eternal damnation, beginning in the Eddy Arnold years, when he first became wealthy, Parker began making large contributions to charities, up to thirty-one separate organizations by the late ’60s.

  “He was never free and easy when it came to giving away money to his employees, like a bonus at Christmas,” says Byron Raphael. And strangers who wrote in to the office with a hard-luck story and a plea for help received only a terse “I am so sorry” and a picture of Elvis. But although he preferred to do things to help people that didn’t cost him financially—cajoling RCA’s corporate office into donating appliances and television sets to philanthropic organizations and hospitals in his name, for example—at times, he dug deep into his own pocket, especially where children, unwed mothers, or crusty old carnies were concerned.

  When the King’s Daughters Day Home, which catered to low-income families, needed a washer and dryer, Parker told its head, the Madison society matron Louise Draper, to go pick out what she wanted. Later, he contributed a new kitchen to the center, a move that also benefited Marie, who had thrown off her carny past and attempted to reinvent herself as a cultured member of both the International King’s Daughters and Sons, and the Riverside Garden Club.

  While it’s true that Parker often shared the credit (“Elvis and the Colonel”) or insisted that his actions not be publicized (“I didn’t want people comin’ knockin’ on the door, you know”), he often expected a favor in return, even if the arrangement was only implie
d. He declared near the end of his life that through the years he donated more than $500,000 to charities, two thirds of it to organizations in Tennessee, where high-powered lawyers and a succession of governors—including Frank G. Clement, who made Parker an honorary Colonel in 1953, and Lieutenant Governor Frank Gorrell—picked small, deserving groups such as the Nashville Youth Orchestra, and dispersed the monies for him. Such connections, of course, could be invaluable for a man who’d entered the country illegally and feared both discovery and deportation.

  And there were other, more subtle connections. In the ’50s, when Father George Rohling became pastor at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, situated next to Parker’s home on Gallatin Road, the Diskin sisters, who were members of the parish, asked the Colonel if he would consider contributing to the air-conditioning for the church school auditorium.

  Decades later, Parker bragged that he’d put in the whole system, “$20,000 or $30,000 worth.” But the priest, now a monsignor, recalls that the church owed only $2,000 on the units and that Parker generously gave him a check for the whole amount, and followed it up with a modest check each Christmas and a miniature pony to be raffled off at a fund-raiser. The Colonel also gave Father Rohling “a small truckload of Elvis memorabilia,” which the priest admits he burned, thinking anything that had to do with the pelvis-thrusting entertainer might be evil, a decision he now terms “a sad mistake.”

  While Parker occasionally walked over for social events, he never attended mass at St. Joseph’s, nor did he ever accompany Marie to the Gallatin Road Baptist Church on Sundays. Andreas van Kuijk may have spent most of his childhood in service to the Catholic saints, but the man who became Tom Parker did not want to hear any mention of the hereafter, with judgment and retribution for earthly sins.

  As Parker prepared to take Elvis to Hollywood in 1956 and began spending more time in California, his personal contact with Father Rohling diminished, especially as the priest moved on to another church in Nashville. Years later, they met again, when Marie died in 1986. Parker brought her back to Madison for entombment in the mausoleum at Spring Hill Cemetery, where, not wishing to ponder the future, he bought only one crypt.