What if we got it wrong about Colonel Tom Parker?
That’s the provocative question raised by music historian Peter Guralnick’s latest book, “The Colonel and the King” (Little, Brown, 624 pp., out now), which examines Parker’s reputational arc from visionary to villain.
“His motivations were almost completely misunderstood,” says Guralnick of Elvis Presley’s wheeling and dealing manager, who receives an overdue reassessment in the new biography. “When I call their partnership a partnership of equals, I think it really was.”
For Parker, “it was love at first sight. The colonel was a believer in show business. That was his one article of belief. And Elvis was the greatest entertainer he’d ever seen. He knew it the moment he saw him.”
Guralnick realizes it’s a reappraisal many aren’t willing to undertake, and “I’m not trying to paint the colonel as a saint,” he says. “I would be glad to have him as my manager, but at the same time, I would want to look closely at what I was agreeing to.”
The book, which traces the colonel’s life from his secretive childhood in Holland to his death in 1997, takes a deep dive into their productive partnership. (Elvis fans may be surprised that touchstones like the courting of Priscilla Presley and the making of the ‘68 Comeback Special are mentioned only in passing, but this is, after all, Parker’s story.) In keeping with the characteristic level of detail that the faithful have come to expect from Guralnick’s previous Presley biographies (“Last Train to Memphis,” “Careless Love”), nearly half the book is turned over to Parker’s illuminating letters.
These are among the biography’s biggest revelations:
Colonel Tom Parker ran away from home repeatedly and claimed to have been adopted multiple times.
Parker spun a myth about his upbringing in West Virginia that endured for decades. In reality, he was born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk in Holland and came to America as an underage stowaway. He presented himself as an orphan and would ingratiate himself with families and then disappear, joining circuses, carnivals and the U.S. Army on his way to careers as a Humane Society director and a music promoter.
Guralnick cautions against taking Parker’s explanation of his origins too literally. “He loved to tell that story, and you can judge from that his psychology. But he was someone who in some ways felt so abandoned and alienated from the world in which he grew up. He was abused by his father. But I don’t think that was the real story. Something traumatic happened, and he carried that with him all of his life.”
Elvis’ high-stakes contracts were often handshake deals that Tom Parker didn’t have in writing.
Elvis’ contracts, specifically with RCA, were often verbal agreements.
“One of the things that necessitated everything not being written down was the favored nation clause, which every big star had. Any big employer can understand this,” Guaralnick says. “You say to me, I’ll pay you $1,000 more. But if you have contracts with other people, there may be a dozen other people, so it’s not just my $1,000, it’s going to cost you $12,000 more.”
The colonel worked those backdoor deals to Presley’s advantage, Guralnick notes. In November 1955, Elvis was paying back his RCA advance out of his royalties. Eleven months later, Elvis had a million-dollar contract (the equivalent of $10 million today). “That’s a pretty good turnaround,” Guralnick says.
“(Parker) always articulated the belief that a deal was no good unless it was to the benefit of both parties.”
Elvis never toured internationally, but mostly because he couldn’t cross borders with his drugs and guns.
Presley’s friends in the Memphis Mafia were convinced that Elvis wanted to tour the world and blamed Parker’s fear of deportation. But the colonel worried that security would be an issue.
“Everybody thought he meant you can’t get armed guards to protect Elvis from the crowds,” Guralnick says. “That wasn’t what he meant at all, he meant the security to keep Elvis from getting busted. Who was going to carry the drugs? Who was going to carry the guns?”
Elvis and the colonel both considered parting ways. But their respective addictions kept them together.
In addition to the infamous 1973 incident at the Hilton Hotel in Vegas, in which Elvis lashed out at Parker from the stage, and they (temporarily) fired each other, there were other instances when they attempted to split. But the colonel had developed a gambling addiction to go along with Elvis’ drug dependency.
“Each of them was aware of the other’s addiction, the other’s failures, and neither one of them was going to bring up the other’s failure for fear that the other would then bring up his own. And so they were stuck,” Guralnick says.
“The colonel became in a sense not a tragic figure, because he was a life force overall, so full of vitality and creativity. But I came to see those last years with Elvis as a linked tragedy, in which each of them has their own addiction, and I just didn’t see that before.”
Elvis may have known Tom Parker was an undocumented immigrant − and kept it a secret.
In 1960, Parker’s family in Holland recognized him in a photo with Elvis. He reluctantly agreed to bring his brother Ad to the U.S. for a visit in 1961 and apparently introduced him to Elvis, who might reasonably have wondered why his American manager’s sibling spoke virtually no English.
Many in Elvis’ entourage doubted that the meeting happened, “because Elvis could not keep a secret. He was the worst in the world at keeping a secret, and this was the biggest secret of all,” Guralnick says.
The colonel may have presented Ad simply as someone he knew from the carnival or circus. “But I’d like to think he introduced him as his brother and that Elvis knew.”