A huckster. A Svengali. A bully. The public perception of Elvis Presley’s manager Colonel Tom Parker has long positioned him as a byword for duplicitous artist representation, where profitability trumps art and the artist always loses out on the lion’s share.
You can see why. Born Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, even the name Colonel Tom Parker was a confection and an invention. Therefore, the presumption runs, so was he. But in The Colonel and the King, a new biography of Parker, Peter Guralnick dispels many of these presumptions to present a far more nuanced portrait of a highly moral operator.
Guralnick knows the intricacies of this story more than anyone, except perhaps the colonel and Presley themselves, having written two doorstopper biographies of the singer (1994’s Last Train to Memphis and 1999’s Careless Love). His Parker biography is no less hefty, running close to 600 pages.
It is split in two: the first half a biography; the second half a selected republishing of some of the tens of thousands of letters, memos and telegrams Parker produced and archived through his career. Guralnick was given total access to all this correspondence and was able to see the inner workings and strategic thinking of the man behind the public myth.
Researching the book, Guralnick reappraised everything he previously thought about Parker to give him “his rightful place in history”, expressing the tricky balancing act of the biographer. “I intended not to excuse him,” he says, “nor to condemn him.”
Parker was born in Breda in the Netherlands in 1909 and came to America illegally in the 1920s without documentation. Thereafter he rewrote his own history, claiming he was born in Huntington, West Virginia. He enlisted in the US military from 1929 and then worked the carnivals before managing musical acts such as Hank Snow, Gene Austin and Eddy Arnold. His Damascene moment was seeing Presley on the Louisiana Hayride in January 1955, understanding instantly he would be a new type of star and that Parker should steer him there.
He officially took over Presley’s management in March 1956 and represented a new breed of manager who prized art over commerce. His and Presley’s fates, their successes and their tensions became locked together until Presley’s death in 1977.
“This is a completely different person to the one people assume him to be,” says Guralnick, who first met Parker in 1988 and regularly corresponded with him. “He was brilliant and he was funny,” he says of Parker’s playful self-mythologising but wily self-protectionism. “He had the tools either to disarm me or to keep me at arm’s length. He was always five steps ahead.”
Parker fully understood his role was to make who he called “the boy” a star while being the bulwark preventing his record label, his live agents and Hollywood in their ambition to “blandify Elvis”. Presley was his own sole creative arbitrator. Parker rarely offered advice on staging and gave no advice on song choices or recording. “Elvis was his artist. He embraced the music because he embraced the artist.”
Artist management often involves some level of stage management. Brian Epstein put the Beatles in suits. Andrew Loog Oldham ungroomed the Rolling Stones. Malcolm McLaren, in his mind at least, was puppet-master of the Sex Pistols. Parker, however, rarely meddled. “Elvis was somebody Parker observed as capable of infinite growth,” says Guralnick. Parker rarely lost his temper and worked 16-18 hours a day, seven days a week, for Elvis. His devotion was total.
I ask Guralnick if he thinks Parker’s background in the carnival (historically its people were viewed with suspicion as peripatetic outsiders) or as an immigrant was a factor in the public’s prejudicial interpretation of him. He suggests Parker actually leaned into that rather than flinched from it. “Nobody was either more American or more self-created than Tom Parker,” he argues. His entire American life was one of myth-building.
One Las Vegas run for Elvis was renegotiated on a tablecloth in a hotel coffee shop. Parker was asked to consider some “other goodies” (an under-the-table deal) but flatly refused. “Everything is on top of the table or forget it,” insisted Parker. “We don’t do business that way.”
The negative view of Parker really only developed after the death of Elvis. From the mid-1950s to the mid-70s, Parker was “almost universally” admired in the music and film industries, suggests Guralnick. “I talked to a lot of people over the years who did business with Parker and who said you could trust him implicitly,” he says.
Parker believed that all business deals should come with unshakeable morality. “He schooled Hank Saperstein [who handled Presley’s merchandise] on the ethics of business,” says Guralnick, pointing to letters Parker sent instructing Saperstein on how to treat staff and manufacturers fairly.
Parker was able to persuade RCA to pay over the odds to buy Presley out of his Sun Records contract in 1955, shelling out $35,000 (plus thousands more in back royalties) when the more established artist Frankie Laine had been bought out by Columbia for $25,000 in 1951. He also renegotiated Presley’s contract with RCA as soon as the hits started rolling in, significantly improving his terms after just 11 months.
Aware of Presley’s incorrigible spending and monumental tax burden (they both saw paying high taxes as patriotic), Parker set up an emergency bank account with $1m in case Presley spent his way into trouble. He was also a regular “fixer” for friends in Presley’s “Memphis Mafia”, quietly stepping in to clean up their mess so that the star would avoid the blowback.
Parker was, however, a gambling addict, losing as much as $800,000 in one Vegas sitting. Both figures shared a love of spending. “Elvis wasn’t interested in accumulating money – he simply spent it,” insists Guralnick. “And the colonel was no more interested in accumulating money. He lost it at the gaming table.”
Parker remained loyal to Presley long after his death, despite having been removed from his business affairs by the family estate in 1983. He did not manage another act after Presley, although he did offer advice to Celine Dion early in her career. It was not that he felt he was an anachronism, more that he believed he had achieved everything a manger could with the biggest star in the world. To Parker every other act and every other deal would be inferior.
Guralnick says: “The letters gave me a window into what was behind the public statements,” and his book is less an uncritical laundering of Parker’s reputation and more a timely recalibration of it.
Perhaps the biggest myth about Parker was that he trapped Presley into drecky Hollywood films as a proxy for touring internationally because Parker feared being deported. Guralnick, however, suggests he could easily have secured a US passport through his marriage to a US citizen. Plus he was close friends with President Lyndon B Johnson. Why he did not go through the paperwork to do so remains a mystery.
Parker’s letters show that he was seriously considering touring Presley globally up until 1960 and in 1973 was looking into a possible Japanese tour. Guralnick says the real reason Elvis never played outside of the US was not due to Parker but Elvis himself. The star was never that interested, but it was primarily down to his addiction to amphetamines and other drugs, as well as his propensity for carrying guns, making crossing borders impossible for him. Parker expressed concern about getting the right security to protect Presley. “What he was talking about was the security to keep Elvis from being busted. Who was going to carry the drugs, which went with Elvis everywhere? Who was going to carry the guns?”
Presley and the Colonel were complexly woven together, but Guralnick found letters where Parker admitted he was never part of Presley’s social circle, yet seemed at peace with that. They almost separated in 1973 after a falling out in Vegas, yet Parker’s letters from this time calmly outline how they could neatly sever the partnership. “I have no ill feelings,” he wrote, “but I am also not a puppet on a string.”
It did not come to that because their mutual dependency was so great, as was their mutual admiration. A rare telegram from Presley on signing the original RCA deal told Parker: “I love you like a father.” But this was more than a paternal relationship. There was, Guralnick feels, a deeper psychological tethering.
“I came to see the relationship between Parker and Elvis as a kind of shared tragedy,” he says. “Each had their own addictions. [Parker] was somebody who was so vulnerable, not just at the time but vulnerable from his childhood in ways we simply will never know, suffering from some form of trauma, being somebody who really couldn’t stand to be touched by somebody that he didn’t know.”
He was “an introvert who had to learn to act like an extrovert in order to survive”, according to Loanne, his second wife.
Parker died in 1997 and took some of his secrets with him to the grave, but Guralnick’s book offers the most rounded, complex and myth-dispelling understanding of him we are ever likely to get.
• The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership That Rocked the World is published on 14 August by White Rabbit
