{"id":322092,"date":"2025-08-06T09:00:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T09:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/322092\/"},"modified":"2025-08-06T09:00:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T09:00:11","slug":"elvis-story-retold-in-book-on-manager-colonel-tom-parker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/322092\/","title":{"rendered":"Elvis\u2019 story retold in book on manager Colonel Tom Parker"},"content":{"rendered":"

What if we got it wrong about Colonel Tom Parker<\/a>?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the provocative question raised by music historian Peter Guralnick\u2019s latest book<\/a>, \u201cThe Colonel and the King<\/a>\u201d (Little, Brown, 624 pp., out now), which examines Parker\u2019s reputational arc from visionary to villain.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis motivations were almost completely misunderstood,\u201d says Guralnick of Elvis Presley’s<\/a> wheeling and dealing manager, who receives an overdue reassessment in the new biography. \u201cWhen I call their partnership a partnership of equals, I think it really was.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Parker, \u201cit 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\u2019d ever seen. He knew it the moment he saw him.\u201d<\/p>\n

‘Burning Love’: <\/strong>Elvis balked about recording the oversexed song. Then it became his last hit.<\/a><\/p>\n

Guralnick realizes it\u2019s a reappraisal many aren\u2019t willing to undertake, and \u201cI\u2019m not trying to paint the colonel as a saint,\u201d he says. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The book, which traces the colonel\u2019s 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<\/a> and the making of the \u201868 Comeback Special<\/a> are mentioned only in passing, but this is, after all, Parker\u2019s story.) In keeping with the characteristic level of detail that the faithful have come to expect from Guralnick’s previous Presley biographies (\u201cLast Train to Memphis,\u201d \u201cCareless Love\u201d), nearly half the book is turned over to Parker\u2019s illuminating letters.<\/p>\n

These are among the biography\u2019s biggest revelations:<\/p>\n

Colonel\u00a0Tom Parker ran away from home repeatedly and claimed to have been adopted multiple times.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Guralnick cautions against taking Parker\u2019s explanation of his origins too literally. \u201cHe 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\u2019t think that was the real story. Something traumatic happened, and he carried that with him all of his life.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Elvis\u2019 high-stakes contracts were often handshake deals that Tom Parker didn\u2019t have in writing.<\/p>\n

Elvis\u2019 contracts, specifically with RCA, were often verbal agreements.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things that necessitated everything not being written down was the favored nation clause<\/a>, which every big star had. Any big employer can understand this,\u201d Guaralnick says. \u201cYou say to me, I\u2019ll pay you $1,000 more. But if you have contracts with other people, there may be a dozen other people, so it\u2019s not just my $1,000, it\u2019s going to cost you $12,000 more.\u201d<\/p>\n

The colonel worked those backdoor deals to Presley\u2019s 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). \u201cThat\u2019s a pretty good turnaround,\u201d Guralnick says.<\/p>\n

\u201c(Parker) always articulated the belief that a deal was no good unless it was to the benefit of both parties.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elvis never toured internationally, but mostly because he couldn’t cross borders with his drugs and guns.<\/p>\n

Presley\u2019s friends in the Memphis Mafia were convinced that Elvis wanted to tour the world and blamed Parker\u2019s fear of deportation. But the colonel worried that security would be an issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody thought he meant you can\u2019t get armed guards to protect Elvis from the crowds,\u201d Guralnick says. \u201cThat wasn\u2019t 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?\u201d<\/p>\n

Elvis and the colonel both considered parting ways. But their respective addictions kept them together.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 drug dependency.<\/p>\n

\u201cEach of them was aware of the other\u2019s addiction, the other\u2019s failures, and neither one of them was going to bring up the other\u2019s failure for fear that the other would then bring up his own. And so they were stuck,\u201d Guralnick says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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\u2019t see that before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elvis may have known Tom Parker was an undocumented immigrant \u2212 and kept it a secret.<\/p>\n

In 1960, Parker\u2019s 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\u2019s sibling spoke virtually no English.<\/p>\n

Many in Elvis\u2019 entourage doubted that the meeting happened, \u201cbecause 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,\u201d Guralnick says.<\/p>\n

The colonel may have presented Ad simply as someone he knew from the carnival or circus. \u201cBut I\u2019d like to think he introduced him as his brother and that Elvis knew.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What if we got it wrong about Colonel Tom Parker? That\u2019s the provocative question raised by music historian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":322093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[5784,5176,4021,50993,102430,3444,6903,6908,4080,5787,4781,6899,39145,34221,77,5778,3462,5791,269,12,6900,116552,102428,453,2535,5181,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-322092","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-affiliate","9":"tag-and","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-biographies","12":"tag-biographies-u0026-quotations","13":"tag-books","14":"tag-books-and-literature","15":"tag-books-comics-and-other-literature","16":"tag-celebrities","17":"tag-celebrities-u0026-entertainment-news","18":"tag-celebrity","19":"tag-comics","20":"tag-elvis","21":"tag-elvis-presley","22":"tag-entertainment","23":"tag-literature","24":"tag-local","25":"tag-local-affiliate-arts-u0026-entertainment","26":"tag-music","27":"tag-news","28":"tag-other","29":"tag-presley","30":"tag-quotations","31":"tag-rock","32":"tag-rock-music","33":"tag-u0026","34":"tag-uk","35":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114981007157930144","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/322093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}